by Lewis Shiner
Greg, who always sat at Wilmer’s right hand, shook his head. “You shouldn’t antagonize him.”
Anything she said in her own defense Greg would find equally objectionable, she knew. “Are things really that bad?”
“They’re worse. But I would dearly love to see a nigger try anything like that when I was around.”
“Greg,” Ruth’s mother said sharply, “we don’t use that word at table.”
Greg walked out, slamming the screen door.
He was 16 now, finally filling out under the supervision of his basketball coach. The Trojans had won their division that spring. Though he was only a sophomore, Greg had been the second highest scorer for the year. He would doubtless have been first if he hadn’t fouled out so many times or spent so much time on the bench for poor sportsmanship. South Johnston High had finally succumbed to integration, and Greg made no secret of his resentment toward the one black player who’d been allowed on the team, a boy from Greg’s class named Harvey Boyette.
Black players on opposing teams fared even worse. In one of the last games of the season, Ruth had come with her father to watch Greg play. Late in the final period, Greg had run a Negro player from the visiting team into the seats, where the boy had fallen and broken his arm. Greg had said something to him then, inaudible on the far side of the court where Ruth and her father sat. After the game the black boy’s teammates had ambushed Greg and beaten him badly.
Ruth had been the one to bring him home from the emergency room. High on painkillers, ribs taped, one eye blackened and stitched, he swaggered proudly into the house, only to be met by Ruth’s father. They looked each other over briefly, then Ruth’s father beckoned Greg into the study. Whatever her father said to him calmed him for a few days, though it did not change him.
He was like an overloaded electrical outlet, all heat and sparks, waiting to burn the house down.
*
The only good thing in those years was that Robert gave up his mistress, and from the summer of 1966 to the summer of 1967 he was all hers again. If they did not spend a lot of time together, many marriages were like that. Robert had never had any desire to learn bridge, though Ruth had become a highly sought-after partner at the country club. For her part, she had no interest in jitterbugging until all hours at smoky, dangerous nightspots. The important thing was the commitment, and she hoped Robert had learned his lesson.
Robert’s company thrived, and he was finally doing the highway engineering he’d dreamed of. He worked long hours, and beneath his fatigue she thought she could see real satisfaction.
Then came the fall.
Cindy Berkshire, she discovered, had been far from the worst thing that could happen to her marriage. Ruth would have given up all her worldly goods to have Robert back with the Berkshire woman.
Worse yet, it was Greg who delivered the news. It was September 23, and Ruth had volunteered to drive him to a Saturday basketball practice. His rattletrap 1949 pickup, which he’d been driving since Ruth’s father arranged a hardship license for him at 15, was in the shop. She’d tried to make small talk, difficult as that was with him. He took offense at trivial and unpredictable things, sometimes put out by the very idea of conversation.
Even asking about his chances for a Duke scholarship failed to get a rise. To keep away the silence, she’d been talking about Robert’s work on the highway. Greg had slid lower and lower in his seat, head turned to the window like he wasn’t listening. Ruth let her voice trail off. After what seemed forever, and still without looking at her, Greg said, “Your husband’s got a nigger girlfriend.”
In shock, Ruth watched the gray asphalt rush toward her. The late summer sky was pale with clouds, the trees stunted, the grass yellow. There were any number of reasons, she thought, that Greg might say a thing like that. The complicated feelings he held for her shaded all the way into jealousy where Robert was concerned. She’d never told Greg about Cindy Berkshire; she might, however, have said enough that his imagination could fill in the blanks. Certainly from the time of the Berkshire business Greg had grown more antagonistic toward Robert, and more defensive toward her.
“He stays at her house,” Greg said. “One of the brothers saw him there with her. You know who she is? She’s the girlfriend of that big gorilla nigger, Barrett Howard. Him and Robert share her between them.”
Ruth felt a lurch of nausea. She swallowed hard.
“That’s why they saw Robert. They watch that house, to keep an eye on Howard. She’s a real looker, too, they said. High yella gal, could pass for white.”
“That’s enough, Greg,” she managed to say.
“Your daddy didn’t want to tell you, but I thought, that ain’t fair. She ought to know. I mean, him sharing a woman with Howard is practically like having Howard right there in your—”
“Shut up, Greg. Or I’ll tell my father.”
“I know it ain’t nice to hear. You’ll thank me one day.”
He was quiet after that. Ruth could not wait to get to Four Oaks, where the high school was, so she could be alone to let her feelings out. Ten endless, silent minutes later she pulled up in front of the gym. Taking his cheap leatherette bag by the handles, he opened the door and said, “I’ll get a ride home. You don’t have to come back for me.”
By the time she was on the highway again, Ruth had gone cold inside and neither tears nor sickness would come. She drove straight to Durham and called her mother to say she wasn’t feeling well and would miss church the next morning.
Robert didn’t come home that night, and her last hope—that Greg had been lying—slipped away.
Despite her churchgoing, Ruth had been feeling distant from God for some time. Part of it was Robert. He claimed to believe, though he didn’t care for church, and Ruth thought God might not have felt too welcome in their house lately. With Robert gone, in the long hours before sunrise, Ruth found the words to pray for strength and said them over and over.
Eventually the strength came, along with the words of David’s song to the Lord. “For thou hast girded me with strength to battle: them that rose up against me hast thou subdued under me.” My love is stronger than this other woman’s, she thought. My love will endure and hers will not.
And with that she was finally able to sleep.
*
In April of 1968, Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. That was a Thursday, and the next day Ruth drove out to the farm for the weekend.
She knew her father hated King above all other Negroes, and she understood, objectively, why. Much of the chaos of the last decade had been at his urging, the result of his terrible impatience, his unending pressure, his manipulation of the press. He had all but publicly admitted to being a Communist. And Ruth was personally repelled by the stories of his harlotry.
And yet, watching him on TV, Ruth found herself oddly moved by him. His emotions seemed so close to the surface, and some of them Ruth could not fail to recognize: humor, love, sorrow, loneliness.
And so she entered her father’s house with her feelings already muddled, only to find him buoyant, barely able to restrain his joy. At the supper table he said, “The tide has turned, now. You’ll see.”
Something in his voice alerted Ruth. “Daddy, did you have something to do with this?”
“Directly? No. But if you wish and pray for something long enough, I suppose you can take some credit for it when it happens.”
Ruth’s mother stared down at her plate, loading her fork carefully with one morsel from each of the foods there: pork chop, collards, mashed potatoes, cornbread, redeye gravy. Her insistence on a civil table had worn away to nothing, and she had retreated into her own increasingly strange habits.
“You don’t give yourself credit,” Greg said. He too was grinning uncontrollably.
“Hush, now,” Ruth’s father said. “Mind your tongue.”
Ruth’s appetite withered. She ate what she could and listened to the talk of sports, weather, the tobacco and cotton planting comin
g up at the end of the month. Her mother would not meet her eyes.
Later, as she and Greg did dishes alone in the kitchen, he said, “Your daddy don’t want it to get around, but he did a lot more than pray where King was concerned. The Lord helps those that help themselves.”
Ruth did not point out that this sentiment was not scripture. “What are you saying?”
“I ain’t supposed to talk about it. The brothers don’t completely trust me as is.”
Ordinarily it amused Ruth to hear Greg talk about “the brothers,” the same way black people talked about each other on television; this night she could not get past her unease. The smells of the food scraps and the lemon scent of the detergent were too strong, stomach-turning. She didn’t answer, and after a minute or so Greg couldn’t hold himself back any longer.
“There was a man through here last winter name of Raul. Your father put him up down in the basement. This guy was weird, said he had people all over the south, and one of the places he named was Memphis. Said he had a guy there ran a bar, could hire a guy would take care of King next time he was in town, if the money could be put together for it. I guess he convinced your daddy, because your daddy kicked in.”
Ruth took her hands out of the dishwater and dried them on a towel. “We don’t know that it was this man,” she said. “Do we? I mean, it might have been somebody else.”
“That’s true,” Greg smirked. “Maybe it wasn’t him at all.”
“Can you finish up?” Ruth said. “I need to go sit down.”
Greg suddenly softened. “You all right?”
“Fine,” she said. “Just tired from the drive.”
She sat on the swings in the warm April night. Frogs down at the creek were singing their hearts out, a high-pitched, clattering roar. Ruth thought about her childhood and the way her father had seemed to her then, wise and just and strong and calm. They had both changed, she supposed, though the thought made her terribly sad. He had become the kind of person who would help pay for a murder, and she had become another man’s wife.
The change had been slow, and she hadn’t really seen it until now. Until tonight she had still been divided in her love; now she saw that Robert was all she had. And Robert had gone astray.
*
The summer of 1968 was endless, with riots in ghettos across America and riots at the Democratic convention. White America, her father said, was standing up and making it clear they’d had enough of Black Power, hippie protestors, communists, deserters, and all the other traitors. It was Armageddon, he said, the Final Battle, and the angels were winning.
“Richard Nixon is going to take this election, guaranteed. And once he does, that’s the end of integration in this country. He will turn back the clock to happier times.”
She still drove to the farm every Friday and stayed through Sunday afternoon, though it felt now as if she were only going through the motions. The one weekend she’d spent in the house on Woodrow she had been haunted by Robert’s absence, unable to stop thinking about where he was and what he was doing. It was all out in the open now, had been since the previous fall when he had tried to leave her. Her one consolation was that he had lied to her face, denying the other woman. On that denial she pinned her belief that he would betray his affair in the end.
*
The weekend after Nixon’s “surprise” victory in November, Ruth’s father finally relaxed. “If somebody would only do for Barrett Howard what they did for Martin Luther Coon,” he said at Sunday dinner, “my satisfaction would be complete.”
Ruth looked at her mother, who was listening to another, more ethereal conversation. Greg, of course, had no objection.
“Daddy!” she said.
He held up both hands and smiled as if, like a beloved but clumsy infant, his forgiveness should be taken for granted.
That fall was the start of Greg’s senior year. In mid-December, a scout from Duke came to several of the practices. Everyone knew. Greg had been on his best behavior, he assured the family. Passing off the ball, working close to the net on defense, hitting over 80 percent of his free throws.
At the next Friday’s game against Smithfield-Selma, Ruth drove up from Durham to watch the Trojans overpower the Spartans 85 to 66, with the Duke scout in the audience. Greg was the game’s top scorer. He handled himself well, except for one play early in the second half when a black player for the Spartans elbowed him in the kidney as he went up for a shot. Greg turned in the air and landed with his fist pulled back, inches away from gut-punching the black boy. Then he remembered where he was and stepped away and let his hand drop to his side. He was so rattled that he missed his free throws, but surely, Ruth thought, that was a small thing, not even to be noticed.
Afterward, in the parking lot, Ruth and her father watched Greg get into a brand new Cadillac Seville with the Duke scout and Harvey Boyette, the black boy from Greg’s class.
“This is a happy, happy night for me,” Ruth’s father said. He showed it less in his smile than in the relaxation of his shoulders, the broad gestures of his hands. “That boy has made me very proud.”
“He loves you very much,” Ruth said.
Her own life was no source of pride for anyone. As winter turned into the spring of 1969, Robert was more or less openly living with his black harlot, only coming home to Woodrow Street on the one night a week she demanded. Then, just as she believed things could get no worse, they did.
After dinner one Friday night her father called her into his office the way he’d summoned Greg and so many others, the way he’d called her in as a child to receive punishment. As the gloom and foreboding settled over her, she thought about the way those childhood feelings were always with you, waiting to ambush you when you least expected them. At that moment she found herself suddenly thinking of Orpha, and the memory was so painful she pushed it away and concentrated on the physicality of closing the office door and sitting in the wooden visitor’s chair across from her father’s desk.
“Does the name Mercy Richards mean anything to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know the name.”
“Robert’s mistress,” her father said.
“I’ve heard that. Never from him.”
“Robert’s black mistress.”
She didn’t answer.
“Well, now it seems Robert has got his black mistress pregnant. Did you know that?”
A few seconds later, in a gentler tone, he said, “It appears that you did not. Stop that crying, now. I didn’t raise my girls to be weak.”
Ruth put her hands to her cheeks and found, to her surprise, that they were wet. She patted at them with a tissue from her purse.
“I take some responsibility for this,” her father said. “I gave my approval to this man, despite some misgivings.”
What misgivings? Ruth wondered. He had said nothing at the time.
“I apologize for that,” he went on. “And I want you to know that I’ll back you up in whatever you decide to do about this.”
“What I decide to do?”
“Being the faithful, long-suffering type is well and good, but if this gets any more public, if the family name starts getting dragged through the mud, that may not be acceptable.”
“Acceptable?” She was puzzled that her father would mock her fidelity after what he’d put her mother through for so many years.
“I mean you may need to divorce him, to distance yourself from him publicly.”
“I would need that? Or you would?” She had never spoken that way to her father before. She was disoriented, aware of torrential emotions spinning around her, yet not able to connect to them.
“I know this is sudden,” her father said. He didn’t acknowledge her questions. “Take your time, do some thinking. Pray for guidance.”
She looked at her shoes. “Is that all?”
“Yes, that’s all for now.”
She wandered out to the swings. In a crisis they drew her irresistibly with their memories of happie
r times. Greg knew that, so it was hardly coincidence that he came looking for her there.
“I could kill her for you, you know.” He slouched against the wood frame that supported the swing set, watching her from the corners of his eyes. It was twilight. Pine pollen fogged the air; by morning the porch and the cars would be coated in a fresh layer of yellow-green dust.
“What?” Ruth asked, shocked to attention.
“Robert’s whore. Something could happen to her. If you wanted.”
Ruth planted her feet to stop the swing. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t you ever talk like that.”
“She’s carrying a half-breed bastard child.”
“She’s carrying Robert’s child. Which is something I’ll never be able to do. Nothing is to harm that child. Do you understand me?”
She had refused his love offering, she saw, and hurt him deeply. She thought of Cain’s rejected sacrifice and wished she hadn’t been so harsh.
“I understand,” Greg said bitterly. “I understand, well enough.” He started to walk away.
“Greg, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like all this talk of killing. It’s not right.”
Greg kept walking. “You don’t have to explain. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
*
At the end of March, Harvey Boyette got a registered letter offering him a basketball scholarship to Duke. The next week he signed a letter of intent with his parents, new Duke Basketball Head Coach Bucky Waters, and every reporter in Johnston County present. On the TV news that night Boyette, close to tears, thanked God and his coach and his teammates. Greg walked out of the room, and Ruth’s father said, “Turn it off.” Ruth switched off the set and thought about going after Greg. Her goodwill, she knew, would be no match for the darkness of his despair, would only make things worse.
After another week with no letter for Greg, Ruth’s father got on the phone. No, there was no mistake, they told him. Impressed as they were with Greg’s ability, there were only so many places on the team. He would be welcome to enroll at Duke as a regular student and try out. He might work on his temper a bit, they suggested.
