Candlemoth

by R.J. Ellory

  'Wait,' I said. 'Sit down, Nathan. Talk to me…'

  Nathan shook his head. 'I don't want to talk any more, Danny. We've done all the talking we need to. I've made a decision, and the decision stands whether you come or not.'

  'I'm coming,' I blurted out, and even as the words left my lips I realized that once again there had been no self- determined decision.

  My response was involuntary.

  I was running on automatic.

  'You're coming?' Nathan asked.

  I started to nod my head. I felt as if someone was moving my neck from behind.

  'I'm coming,' I said. 'I'm definitely coming.'

  Nathan nodded. He did not smile. He didn't hug me or shake my hand, he didn't clap me on the shoulder or anything else.

  He just nodded.

  I felt my insides turn cold and loose.

  'So get ready,' Nathan said matter-of-factly.

  'Yes… get ready,' I mumbled.

  I made for the door, my legs like lead, my feet like large wooden blocks tenuously attached. I could see my father's face, that expression of admonishment he wore when the Daniel he'd raised was not being the Daniel he wished for.

  I saw my mother, her expression of quiet patience as my father scolded me, and then her comfort afterwards, the way she would make me believe it was all for my own good.

  And I had believed her, believed her so well I could never doubt her.

  I started upstairs towards my room. I felt the weight of the entire universe slowing me down, and with each footfall on each riser the sound of my narrow heart came in unison.

  I felt Nathan waiting downstairs.

  I felt pulled in all directions, and how much of that I could stand I had no idea.

  I believed - perhaps for the first time in my life - that the real world had arrived.

  And with it came all these things, and they weighed so much, and they bore down upon me like a mountain and an ocean and a thousand fallen trees.

  But the greatest weight was the lie.

  That it had been my decision.

  It had not, and I knew it, and I believed Nathan did too.

  I closed the bedroom door behind me and started to pack.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirteen

  Clarence Timmons came down to speak with me today. I asked after his wife. He seemed pleased that I remembered. He said she was doing a little better, that some physiotherapy had been recommended and he would help her with that.

  And then he said: 'But I didn't come down to talk to you about my wife.'

  He said it as though I would have been surprised.

  'They're coming down to weigh you,' he said.

  Clarence Timmons nodded in an almost avuncular fashion.

  'They're going to weigh you every week from now on… they're also going to do a medical check every month to make sure you're…'

  'Healthy enough to die,' I said, which was unfair, because Clarence Timmons was a good man and he had difficulty dealing with this.

  I had learned that there were those who chose to work on D-Block and there were those who were posted without choice. Such a man was Mr. Timmons. Perhaps he had believed he could help, make some reforms, assist some convicts to recover a sense of self-esteem and personal worth. Perhaps he even believed he could return to the world some men who had been truly rehabilitated. Instead, he had been charged with looking after them until they were killed by the State.

  'I'm sorry, Mister Timmons,' I said.

  Mr. Timmons waved his hand, brushed the comment aside.

  'So they will come down and weigh you today,' he repeated.

  I nodded, thanked him for telling me, and when he left I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  Perhaps my weight determined the voltage.

  That's all I could think of.

  Back while I was in Charleston - the first year or so after Nathan's death, the trial, all those things - America wrestled with its collective conscience.

  At the tail-end of 1960 they had given Jack Kennedy their vote over Richard Nixon. In November 1968, only after Johnson said he wouldn't run again, only after the death of Robert Kennedy, did they give Nixon his chance.

  By the time Nixon was inaugurated Nathan Verney and I were long gone, and in the months following our departure from Greenleaf events took place that we only caught on the hop. Nixon won the Republican nomination for President with Spiro Agnew beside him, the August riots broke out in Watts, and then in October Johnson said he had ordered a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.

  But the most important thing was Nixon's victory.

  Nixon had promised that he would end the war, but Nixon was a crazy man. Nathan knew that. I knew that. But at the same time we believed that his craziness might make things different, that perhaps the law would change, that perhaps he wouldn't be so harsh on those who'd refused to fulfill their apparent national obligation to die in South- East Asia.

  It wasn't long before we realized that this was not to be the case.

  In September Nixon ordered the B52s to keep on bombing those gook motherfuckers for as long as it took. Not in those words exactly, but the sentiment was there.

  In November, Lieutenant William Calley, U.S. Armed Forces, would be tried by court martial for the massacre at My Lai. An Army photographer called Ron Haeberle, a witness to the killing of one hundred and nine people, the youngest of whom was only two years old, said the bones were flying in the air, chip by chip.

  America heard these words, asked itself what was happening in Vietnam, asked itself what had become of its sons.

  But America did not act.

  Father John Rousseau would speak of these things, I would tell him what I remembered, but what remains in my memory of those times is neither politics nor protest, nor the growing awareness of just how many millions really believed that the Vietnam War was a complete fiasco, but Nathan Verney standing at the end of Nine Mile Road looking back towards Greenleaf.

  To describe how I felt at that time seems impossible now. Greenleaf had been my home for my entire life. Everything I had ever been had been born in that town. Everything I knew, everyone I knew, was a part of that place just as much as I.

  I did not know where we were going, and in my hurry to gather some things together and leave the house I had almost forgotten why, but every article of clothing, each postcard and picture and letter I sorted through… all bore some memory of who I had become in this place. My childhood years, each of them encapsulated within a thought, and within each thought an image, and within each image an emotion that unfolded itself silently around me and reminded me who I was. This place was who I was. And I was leaving. Forever? I did not know.

  I wanted to speak, I wanted to ask Nathan if there was any other way this could be done, but I knew such questions were pointless. Nathan would look at me - not with the eyes of the child he was, but with the eyes of the man he had become, and in becoming that man he had worked through all of his own fears and doubts and reservations about where he was going and why.

  I had not. I felt empty and insubstantial. I felt… nothing.

  Coming down the stairs, my bag in my hand, I could feel the weight and pressure of everything I was leaving behind. Here was my family, my mother and father, and here also were Eve and Caroline and all that they had shared with me. I was leaving this behind, and in doing so would leave behind a part of myself. Always and forever beyond this point I would be missing something. It was wrenched out of me and cast aside. I would look back and see the boy I was standing at the side of the road, and in his eyes were loss and pain and a strange sense of failure. You are not who I wanted you to be, that small child would say, and I would know he told the truth.

  I wrote a note for my mother. I left it on the kitchen table, and looking back at it from the doorway I saw it for what it was: a lie.

  We left together, Nathan and I, silently, hopelessly it seemed, and looking back from the road my own house seemed so small and frail. We wa
lked on in silence, and though I tried to catch Nathan's eyes, tried to glean some sense of compassion and empathy for what I was feeling, he looked straight ahead, never flinching, neither erring nor wavering in his intent. We reached Nine Mile Road, the scene of so many significant moments, and it seemed a thousand years since I'd stood in almost the exact same place and watched that small negro girl bear the grief of Kennedy's death until she fell beneath its weight.

  I remembered the universal family - myself and Nathan and Reverend Verney and Eve Chantry - and I asked myself how I could ever have believed that things could stay the same.

  Nathan had walked ahead of me with a determined and forthright stride, and I had caught his coat-tails - or that's how it felt. Swept along once again in the fury and passion of the moment.

  I thought of the note I'd left my ma, the lack of anything specific I had said, only that I had gone with Nathan, we were going to find work, that I would call her soon.

  That was all.

  I had left $100 behind, and in my pocket I carried a little more than $300, all the money I'd earned at Karl Winter- son's Radio Store.

  I knew people would talk of us. I kind of knew that there would be no coming back to Greenleaf, at least until the war was over, and I also believed that the general opinion of me would be that it was Nathan Verney's influence.

  Why?

  Simple: because he was black.

  Nice white Anglo-Saxon Protestant boys didn't do things like this.

  And so I watched Nathan walk on ahead, and had he walked to the edge of the world I would have followed him.

  I believed in his belief.

  That was all.

  For now, at least for now, that had to be enough.

  Sometimes I get a little confused. I lose the sequence of things, dates become muddled.

  It is only when Father John comes down and asks me about all these things that the patchwork seems to mend. Things come back, things I haven't thought of for years, and as they return there is a growing sense of realization about what is going to happen to me.

  America, the same America I turned my back on and betrayed, was now returning that favor in kind.

  Father John told me that a final date of execution would be confirmed within the week.

  I thought of the cigarettes wrapped in paper and wedged down the side of the sink.

  Soon, Nathan, I thought.

  Soon.

  They did come down and weigh me. One hundred and fifty-two pounds. I had lost weight and never noticed.

  I made a joke, something like Seems to me you'd only have to plug me into the wall to finish me off with a body weight like that, but the guy in the white tunic didn't smile, didn't even look at me. He was either deaf, or just numb to such things, going through the routine without ever connecting with whoever was there ahead of him. Maybe he thought like Mr. West. Dead meat.

  I watched him leave. He didn't look at me. He walked with his head down, like he was ashamed.

  There were times when I believed I wished for nothing less than to talk with Father John. Other times I looked forward to his visits as if they were the only reason for staying alive. His job was to draw me out of myself, to have me speak, to remember, to recount the other details, the things that were never said in the myriad court appearances I made back then. Here was my opportunity to understand myself, to gain awareness of why I was here.

  Father John told me that we created our own destinies. He did not believe in the ever-present hand of God. He told me he didn't believe our lives and fates were bound by some ethereal and omniscient force. He said he wanted me to look, to soul-search, to try and understand why I was here. He basically said that if we were in the shit, then we got ourselves there.

  That was something I didn't want to believe. For so long I had carried the certainty that it was all because of someone else, that it was political, that there were people who really believed that what happened was what should have happened, and there was nothing I could have done about it. I believed I could have been anyone, that purposes would have been served any which way. I believed in bad luck. I wanted to believe in bad luck. If I could believe in that then I did not have to take any responsibility at all.

  Father John Rousseau knew how I felt, and he started to take it all away. For a while I hated him for that, despised him for challenging all that I had held so close. This was my belief system. He had his. I had mine. What right did he have to challenge that?

  But he did. Challenged it with ferocity. And as I watched that Jericho crumble beneath the onslaught of questions and memories and recognition, I began to remember more; details that had slipped away soundlessly, things that I never believed it would be possible to remember. It seemed that everything was there, every second, every heartbeat, every thought, and as I spoke of those things, as Father John listened, I imagined that Nathan was there beside me, perhaps seated at a third plain deal chair in God's Lounge, sharing Luckys and shooting the breeze, smiling like he once had in Ma's kitchen, looking like he had when he came with the burden, looking like the kid with jug-handle ears, traffic-light eyes, and a mouth that ran from ear to ear with no rest in between.

  Perhaps that was the only reason I went on talking, for as long as I talked I was still alive, and as long as I was alive I could still remember Nathan Verney.

  And as long as I remembered Nathan then perhaps I could believe there was some sense to it all.

  There wasn't, I knew that, but like Father John kept on telling me: You have to keep on believing… you just have to keep on believing.

  'South?' I had asked Nathan. 'Are you fucking crazy?'

  Nathan was seated. He didn't flinch, didn't move a muscle, almost as if he'd predicted my exact reaction.

  'You understand what's going on down there?' I asked, my voice incredulous. 'Hey! Wake up, man! Smell the coffee for Christ's sake.'

  Nathan glanced at me, his expression cold. Nothing justified blasphemy.

  'You're a black man,' I said, 'a negro, an African-American… you don't go south.'

  'Which is exactly why we go south,' Nathan said quietly.

  'We go south we get killed,' I said matter-of-factly.

  Nathan nodded. 'We go south because that's the last place anyone will think we're gonna go for exactly the reason you're saying. We go south because any kinda nigger with half a brain would never go south, and that's exactly why they'll look for us north.'

  'But hell, Nathan, you gotta understand that with what's going on right now there is no reason in the world you ain't gonna get yourself killed and dumped in some swamp.'

  Nathan looked up at me and smiled.

  'A swamp here is better than a swamp in some country I never even heard of until a few months ago.'

  I sat down.

  There was method in his madness.

  'Look,' he said. 'You gotta take everything into consideration. We go north then there's a greater chance we'll be identified. I don't know what kinda arrangement they have for dealing with this kinda thing, people who just disappear when their Draft Notice comes, but sure as hell they're gonna have something. They'll think we're going north because it would be crazier than shit to go south, and so we go south, make sense?'

  I shrugged. It was too much. Too overwhelming for me to take everything on board.

  'Let me make the decisions, okay?' he said calmly.

  Have already, I thought. Hell, Nathan, you have already.

  I gave Nathan Verney control of my life at that time. I let him lead the way, I let him direct us both, almost as if there was one spirit and two bodies. I had cheated him, I knew that. Cheated him into thinking that going with him had really been my decision too. I felt guilty for that, for lying, for all my slight deceptions, and yet now I was here there was little I could do. I could not turn back, that would have been worse, and so I followed… quietly, obediently, I followed.

  We took a bus out of Greenleaf and headed first for Augusta and Macon, and then down through Cordele
and Albany towards the Florida state line.

  I remember that journey, the hours we spent with our knees up against the backs of the seats in front, the endless road ahead, the fields and trees, the sky like a roof on the world. It rained at one point, rained for maybe ten, fifteen minutes, and through the rain-spattered window the world was distorted enough for it to be a new place. If only, I had thought, if only the world had changed its face that day and become something else entirely.

  At first Nathan said little, he was subdued and internal, and I wished so hard I could have read what he was thinking. Every once in a while he'd turn and smile, almost as if reassuring me that everything would be alright. I didn't believe that for a minute. And then he seemed to ease somewhat, to relax a little, and for a while he talked of things that had happened when we were kids.