Candlemoth

by R.J. Ellory

  Schembri leaned forward, his voice hushed. 'Ku Klux Klan, same shit you got yourself into, kid… they're inside it, all through that stuff.'

  I felt my eyes widen. I attempted to ask a question, to elicit something further from him, but he just went on talking as if I wasn't there.

  'And they hated Kennedy, hated him for speaking to Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, for sending Federal Marshals down to the University of Mississippi back in September of '62. A man called Prescott Bush, Senator from Connecticut, best buddies with National Security Director Gordon Gray, he was straight out of the Order of Skull & Bones at Yale, both of them playing golf with Eisenhower. And Prescott's lawyer, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State, and Dulles' brother Alan was head of the CIA. Gray was made head of the Psychological Strategy Board in 1951, and then he was assistant to Eisenhower for national security affairs. Gray sat between Ike and the CIA and all the U.S. military forces. Gray was charged with protecting Eisenhower from any backlash encountered from CIA covert operations. Nixon's connections to Bush went back to '46.'

  Schembri sighed and shook his head resignedly.

  'Prescott Bush put an ad in a Los Angeles newspaper for the Orange County Republican Party. They wanted a young man to run for Congress. Nixon applied and got the job. He became Vice-President in 1952. In 1960 our friend Nixon was securing funds for his run at the presidency. There beside him was Prescott Bush, Congressman Gerald Ford and Prescott's son, George Bush. When Nixon got in in '68 it was payback time. He made Prescott's son, George, Chairman of the Republican National Committee and ambassador to China.'

  Schembri frowned, leaned forward.

  'And here we are, a handful of years later, and evidently Mr. Richard Milhous Nixon upset someone badly, because they took him out too. Bullshit Watergate, they have always and forever been in each other's pockets. They record everything, they swap tapes at Christmas for Christ's sake, the Intelligence Community is the Intelligence Community…. National Security, CIA, Division Five of the FBI, the Justice Department, the Attorney General's Office, Office of Naval Intelligence, they're all the same goddamned thing. Nixon pissed someone off, they take him out; Gerald Ford steps in and does whatever Nixon wouldn't, and everything comes back to battery.'

  Schembri nodded as if acknowledging himself, and spent a minute or so eating.

  I wanted to ask something… anything. What did he know about the Ku Klux Klan? What had he heard about me and why I was there? Did he know Nathan? Did he understand what had happened? I had so many questions crowding my mind they seemed to bottleneck. I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

  'You remember Kennedy?' he said.

  I nodded.

  'How old were you then?' Schembri asked.

  A moment's mental calculation. 'Seventeen.'

  Schembri smiled. 'Hell, you were just a kid.'

  I nodded.

  'And you remember where you were, what you were doing when you heard?'

  I nodded again. I remembered as if it were yesterday. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard.

  'Helluva thing,' he said quietly. 'Just a helluva thing.'

  He fell silent for a moment.

  I clenched my fists. 'What do you know?' I asked. 'What were you going to say about why I'm here?'

  He winked. 'Same time… same channel,' he whispered, leaning towards me across the table. He started up from his chair. 'See ya tomorrow eh?'

  I watched him go, my mouth open, my eyes wide. I felt awkward and ignorant and insubstantial. He disappeared into the throng heading for the doors and I felt nothing.

  January of '63. The year started with fifty dead as Vietcong guerrillas shot down five helicopters in the Mekong Delta. In February Kennedy warned Cuba off once more as they fired rockets at a U.S. boat. On the upside, the Supreme Court released one hundred and eighty-seven blacks jailed for a protest in South Carolina. Martin Luther King was arrested once more in Alabama. Castro went to see Khrushchev.

  These were important times, times of change and upheaval, but however significant these events may have appeared they would be blown away in a heartbeat compared to what was coming our way.

  In June Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader, was shot, and with Governor George Wallace of Alabama still arguing with Kennedy, still defying the court order to open the university to negroes, it seemed that these wars would continue endlessly, that just as progress was made another event would turn it backwards upon itself and undo whatever good had been done.

  By August of '63 Kennedy was a weary man. He'd lost his second son only thirty-six hours after that son was born. A march of two hundred thousand people came to Washington, and there in the masses were Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland and Bob Dylan. The world was watching and listening, waiting to see what would happen, and Kennedy knew it.

  In September Governor Wallace ordered his State Troopers to seal off Tuskegee High School, and one hundred and eighty-nine negroes were arrested for protesting.

  As the Senate Committee listened to Joseph Valachi deliver the goods on organized crime, as the U.S. officially recognized the South Vietnamese government, discussions about a certain incident that was to occur in Texas occupied the minds of a few men behind closed doors, and the world would change irrevocably.

  Nathan Verney and I, however, were consumed with girls.

  It is difficult now to understand how one single subject could so preoccupy an individual's mind as to exclude almost everything. Yet it did.

  I was in 11th grade, and when I should have been working for my high school diploma I was actually working on my strategies to catch the attention of Caroline Lanafeuille or Linny Goldbourne. Perhaps Linny had in some way replaced Sheryl Rose Bogazzi in my dreams. Linny was all light and life and laughter. No-one really knew a great deal about her, 'cept that her father was some heavy political guy. She was always there at the center of things, always the one with the wildest stories and the funniest jokes, and if Caroline represented all the things I would want in a girl, then Linny represented all that I could want, but never have. She was dark-haired, hazel-eyed, her mouth full and passionate, and when she laughed a sound came from those lips that could have driven sailors to the rocks. She was as much a part of the world I wanted to belong to as Sheryl Rose had been, but Linny possessed substance, something tangible I suppose, yet something somehow unreachable. Had I known then that both she and Caroline would play such a significant part in my future, perhaps I would have forced myself to look away. But I didn't know. And thus I looked. I was enchanted and entranced and mystified. I was old enough to believe that everything one could ever wish for came with hips and thighs and breasts, and young enough not to push my luck. They existed at the edges of my universe, and though I imagined that perhaps one day I could reach Caroline, I also believed that my fingers would forever stretch towards Linny.

  For a brief while I even believed they became friends. Perhaps not friends exactly, more acquaintances, for they were so different. I recall a day at Benny's when I saw them there together. The moment was unnerving beyond belief, for here I was presented with the possibility that they would become close, that they would share everything together, and this terrified me. I sat at a corner table, they were seated at the counter, Linny vivacious, bold, full of herself, and Caroline quiet, perhaps a little pensive. Each of them beautiful and entrancing in their own way, and yet somehow opposites. It would only be years later - when I had more than ample time to turn the significance of these events over in my mind - that I would conjure up that image and see something I found both haunting and somehow ironic. The butterfly and the moth. That's how I would see them - the butterfly and the moth.

  Nathan had a different world. Nathan Verney was a handsome guy. Long gone were the jug-handle ears and traffic-light eyes. His face was strong and well-defined, full of character even at that early age it seemed, and the black girls that lived over his side of Greenleaf spent their time working
their strategies to interest Nathan in what they might have to offer. Nathan, strangely enough, did not see this. He saw the wrath of his father, the shrieks and hysterics of his mother, for if Nathan had so much as touched a girl it would have been evidence of Lucifer's presence in the bosom of the Verney family.

  Perhaps this was the reason he seemed blind to those girls. And they were pretty girls. Beautiful girls. Girls who could possess a heart with a glance and a soul with a kiss.

  My scene was not so clear-cut. I was not an ugly kid, more sort of nondescript, neither one thing nor the other. I was neither too tall nor too short, too wide or too narrow, too fat or too skinny. My hair was a medium brown, my eyes blue-gray, and I seemed to excel at nothing in particular that would attract attention. I figured that out early. It was not sex appeal, it wasn't even how good-looking someone might be. It was attention. If you could garner attention you became interesting, and if you were interesting then others were interested in you.

  Hence the game: seeking attention.

  And thus - believing that Linny Goldbourne was somehow destined to be forever beyond my grasp - I was consumed by Caroline Lanafeuille. Caroline seemed quiet upon first impressions, but beneath that gentle exterior was a girl who possessed a strength and self-belief that belied all I imagined her to be. She was pretty: pretty beyond taste or preference. She would have been pretty despite anyone's belief that brunettes or redheads or blondes were best. Her hair was fair, multi-hued between amber and ochre and straw, and her slim figure, her delicate fingers and hands, the way she would tilt her head and sort of half-smile at me, were all indicative of deep currents flowing beneath a still surface.

  And yet Caroline was an enigma to me, a distant star, a universe all by herself. She wore short skirts and tight tops, a tiny gold bracelet on her left wrist, and when I sat near her in class I could smell something like that breeze around Lake Marion - pecan pie and vanilla soda all rolled up in a basket of new-mown grass. But there was something else, something that would have been hormones or passion or love. Something that could never be described in a language anyone but me would understand. When Caroline approached me my pulse increased, my strong heart beat stronger, and when she opened her mouth to speak I would hold my breath for fear of my own lungs obscuring the sound that came forth.

  Hi Daniel, she would say, and I would smile, and feel something warm around my face, and I would nod and say Hi back. And then she might say How's it going?, and I might say Just fine there, Caroline, how's it going with you?, and she would make some small pleasantry and then be gone. Incidents such as these occurred once, perhaps twice, a month, and the days in between would be spent waiting.

  Nothing else.

  Just waiting.

  Despite her seeming unwillingness to share little more than a Hi or a How's it going? with me, my teenage heart, big and red and as strong as a stirrup pump, was for some time owned exclusively, and with no right of return, by Caroline Lanafeuille.

  And I carried a secret.

  And the secret I carried was a picture.

  Greenleaf Senior High published a monthly Journal. The Journal of Endeavor. In the Journal were words and pictures demonstrating the attainments of students. In the Journal of August 1962 there was a picture of Caroline standing on the football field in her short-skirted cheerleader outfit, a pom-pom in her outstretched right arm, her legs slightly apart, her head tilted a little to the right, her long neck exposed. I cut out the picture. I covered it with Scotch tape so it wouldn't spoil or crease irretrievably. I carried it well. Like a professional.

  The outstretched arm was an invitation into the gates of Heaven. The long graceful neck was a stairway to Paradise and all the gold of Eldorado. The skirt was the work of the Devil.

  I yearned for Caroline. I pined for Caroline. I would have walked a thousand miles to Hades with her schoolbooks if I could have held the same hand that held that pom-pom.

  For a while she was my life.

  Perhaps I would never recover, I thought. Perhaps I would never love like that again. For even now, these many years later, I can remember times I spent with beautiful girls, passionate girls, girls another man might have loved the way I loved Caroline, and yet to me they never quite reached that same Olympic height of perfection that so effortlessly permeated everything she was.

  And then November came, Thanksgiving Day, the promise of Christmas, and where my thoughts turned to some vain belief that Caroline Lanafeuille would find it in her heart to look my way with more than just a passing glance, the nation turned its eyes to Dallas and the passage of the King.

  I was upstairs lying on my bed beneath the window, which was open just a fraction. Beside me, a small wireless carried sounds from KLMU in Augusta, Georgia, and I was thinking of Caroline. I know I was thinking of her because it was during that time that I thought of little else.

  I knew something was wrong, very wrong, when my father appeared in the doorway. It was not how he looked. It was not the drawn expression, the bloodshot eyes, it was that he was there at all. My father had never missed a day's work in his life. Through influenza, a broken wrist, through colds and coughs and an eye infection that blinded his right side for a week, he was ever present, ever correct, to carry the folks of North Carolina on the railroads.

  'They've killed him,' he said.

  I sat up. For a heartbeat I believed he was speaking of Nathan.

  'Who?' I said. 'Killed who?'

  'Mister Kennedy,' he replied, and I heard the knot of emotion in his throat unravel.

  He reached up and placed his hand against the frame of the door, and then he rested his face against his outstretched upper arm. His body seemed to tighten and then slacken, and not a sound issued from him, and it was all I could do to stand and walk towards him, a long walk, a walk of kings and queens and princes, and I realized only then that I was an inch or more taller than he. He seemed tiny, fragile, mere skin and bones, and as I neared him he turned towards me.

  He held me then. I couldn't remember the last time my father had held me, and I started to cry. I felt closer to him then than I ever had, or ever would again.

  My mother was there then. She paused at the top of the stairwell as if she wished not to interrupt this moment.

  Tears streaked her face, her eyes were round and swollen and dark beneath. She looked like a ghost.

  She came towards us, seemed to envelop us both. I could smell her, the hair lacquer, and beneath that the haunt of washing soda and detergent.

  We stayed there for an eternity.

  No-one said a word.

  There was nothing to say.

  I think for a day, perhaps two, I didn't think of Caroline once.

  Some time later I left the house. People walked the streets aimlessly, broken like straw dolls. I don't think I had ever appreciated the division that existed there in Greenleaf. The path that I had so often taken with Nathan Verney down to the Lake was actually a demarcation between the whites and the coloreds. They had taken one side of Greenleaf, we had taken the other. But on that day it was different.

  Kennedy had once said There are no white or colored signs on the graveyards of battle.

  So it seemed on November 22nd. No white or colored division in our grief.

  I saw Mrs. Chantry there. She stood beside Reverend Verney. And when a small boy came running towards them they both held him, comforted him, watched and waited for his mother who came running after him down the sidewalk.

  And even now I recall an image from that day; a single, clear image that stands above all else.

  Amidst the confusion and grief, the crowds gathered outside the radio store on Hyland, Benny Amundsen kneeling on the sidewalk outside his soda store as if in prayer, there was a moment so bold it stands like a color snapshot amidst a wash of monochrome: my Kodak moment.

  A small colored girl, no more than five or six, her hair tied up in wiry pigtails with bright bows at the ends, as if she wore some strange exotic flowers with sunshine yell
ow petals and black stems. Along Nine Mile Road she went, tears running down her face, her eyes wide and hopeless. In her arms she clutched a pile of newspapers too heavy for her frame, and as I watched she lost her balance and tripped. She skidded sideways, newspapers spilling out ahead of her, and then she just sat there, her knee grazed and bloody, and she looked up at the sky, as if to God, and those tears came like a river in spring. Too young even to understand the import of what had happened, she was caught in the flood of anguish that tore America apart.