by Mark Dunn
1955 was ending but 1956 promised to be an even more difficult year for Montgomery, Alabama, in the area of race relations. Harriet Jacobs spent that year driving maids to and from their places of employment, and avoiding contact with almost all of the women she had once considered friends, including the woman who was a friend only by the broadest definition of the word. Patty Sprinkle, without a car, and without the ability to drive one even if she had one, spent the year largely at home berating her maid and yardman, and agreeing with everything her husband said, no matter how racist, no matter how venomous.
Three hundred and eighty-one days after the boycott began, the federal judiciary of the United States agreed with Rosa Parks and the boycotters, and put an end to segregation on all modes of public transportation nationwide.
In April of that year, the singer Nat King Cole, native of Montgomery, was brutally assaulted in the middle of a concert ninety miles up the road in Birmingham by members of the Northern Alabama White Citizens’ Council.
During the boycott, Patty Sprinkle would on occasion go downtown to shop. The bus was almost always either empty or nearly so. She told people that she liked it that way. She told people that it suited her just fine.
1956
DISCREETLY SILENT IN MONTANA
The deputy sheriff and the emergency room physician had been friends since childhood. Their familiarity with one another often placed them into situations of like-minded understanding, obviating the need for long explanations or even drawn-out disagreement. There were occasions, in fact, in which each man knew exactly what his friend was thinking. This was such a time.
The bodies of two dead teenage boys lay on examining tables at one end of a long corridor, its white walls alternately strobed and obumbrated by two flickering, dying overhead fluorescents. At the other end of the corridor were the boys’ families and friends: two fathers and two mothers, one grandmother, five siblings, four friends, and one solicitous neighbor. It was two-fifteen in the morning and several of those who waited anxiously for word on the boys drank from cardboard cups of coffee. The men smoked. The grandmother prayed. The two youngest children slept curled upon the waiting room divans, their heads resting in mirror symmetry upon their mothers’ laps.
Over the fluorescent tube’s importunate hum, the deputy sheriff said, “When are we—?” He finished his question by jerking his head in the direction of the waiting room.
“I thought we should talk first,” replied the doctor. “You’ll tell me what you and your men saw when they reached the scene?”
The deputy nodded. “We should be on the same page, though, about what the families need to know.”
“Yeah, right.” The doctor pulled a package of Salems from the pocket of his scrubs. The mentholated cigarette was new. “I don’t get all the hoopla,” he said, offering one of the smokes to the lawman. “Tastes exactly like Kool.”
The two men started walking together down the corridor. They passed an empty gurney, then an abandoned candy striper’s hospitality cart. The doctor exchanged nods with a bustling night shift intern.
The doctor led the deputy into a small hospital conference room. Sometimes families were brought into this room to discuss options for the care or, in some cases, the termination of care for their sick or dying loved one. The room was spare, more formally arrayed than the waiting room. It was a place where the families, many of them ranchers from isolated parts of Lewis and Clark County, could think more clearly and less emotionally about what needed to be done. Of course, there was no need to bring the families of the two dead teenagers into this room tonight. There was no decision to be made—only information to be conveyed: that the lives of two young Helena men had ended too soon, had ended in a terrible automobile accident on a darkened highway a few miles east of town.
And yet.
And yet, there was also that other matter.
The lanky deputy sheriff settled himself into a chair. The rock-faced doctor half-sat, half-leaned against the edge of the table a few feet away. The deputy ran his hand through his thick, dark brown hair. He was in his late thirties and the gray had only just begun to sprout at the temples. The doctor, who was only a few months older than the deputy, was still blond, but his hair was thinning. Crow’s feet had begun to form in the outer corners of his eyes, squinting now in the room’s bright unnatural light.
“As you know, both boys arrived DOA,” said the doctor. “Though the Findley kid—”
“Died in the ambulance,” said the deputy, his voice solemn. “We’d hoped that…” His voice trailed off. He shook his head.
“So both were in the car when you got there? Neither of them had been thrown?”
The lawman nodded. “The Findley boy was still behind the wheel. Chest staved in. From the steering column?”
The doctor nodded. “Where was the Robinson boy?”
“On the floor.”
“At the time of impact?”
“My guess: half on, half off the seat. When we found him his head was down by the other boy’s feet.”
“What do you think, Gavin?”
“You want me to say it?”
“I need you to confirm it.”
“I didn’t wipe it all off?”
The doctor shook his head. “Not completely. There was still some residue of semen on the right cheek.”
“But that wasn’t the only thing that would have given it away.”
The doctor scooted off the table. He pulled up a chair, turned it backward and sat down next to the deputy.
“The kid’s pants,” the deputy went on, “the Findley kid’s—they were pulled down to his ankles.”
“The BVDs too?”
The deputy nodded. “Merton and I figure that the wreck could have been attributed to any number of things. All related. The booze, obviously. Diminished attention to the road on the part of the teenager getting fellated. Merton thinks it could also be partly due to the Findley boy’s pants getting tangled up with the accelerator pedal. They were both barefoot, you know. They were coming back from their senior class’s big bonfire at the lake. Neither of the boys had apparently bothered to put his shoes back on.”
The doctor leaned forward in his tipping chair. He rubbed his knuckles absently against the two-a.m. stubble on this chin. He drew in a deep breath as he thought. His lips rounded to blow out the air in slow, measured release. “So what do we say?”
The deputy looked down at the floor. “Whatever we decide, it needs to be the same thing coming from both of us, okay?”
“And Merton too?”
The deputy nodded. “Merton knows what’s going on here.” The deputy closed his eyes. “The families—they don’t have to know. It just adds shit to all their grief.”
“I agree.”
The deputy continued: “The boys had had too much to drink. Two pals went for a drunken joyride and didn’t make it home.”
“So nobody had any idea that they were…?”
“Merton knows Findley—knows him pretty well. He’d never mentioned any suspicions about his son.” The deputy sighed. “Of course, that’s not the kind of thing a father would be all that eager to talk about.”
“You’re right.” The doctor scratched the top of his head. “We’ll never know what the parents know. We’re just going to have to assume that they don’t know anything. That’s usually the way it is, right?”
The two men sat for a moment in the quiet, brightly lit conference room, each processing his own thoughts while waiting for the other to say something that would put the whole matter in a more personal light.
“Some boys grow out of it,” said the deputy, finally.
“Some boys have to,” said the doctor. The doctor came very close to touching the deputy’s hand. The deputy moved his head as if he would shake it, as if he would negate that impulse that the doctor suddenly wished to act upon.
Obligingly, the doctor retracted his hand. The deputy slipped two fingers of his own hand into his jacket pock
et and pulled out a small, colorful rectangle of paper. “Merton and I went through the boys’ pockets and their wallets. Didn’t find anything on the Findley kid. But this was on the Robinson boy. In his wallet.”
It was a photograph of Sal Mineo, the actor. It had been carefully cut from a magazine. The size was a perfect fit for a wallet.
“For what it’s worth—” said the deputy.
“Huh?” The doctor was studying the picture.
“For what it’s worth, the car—the Findley boy’s car. Well, it was a ’49 Mercury coupe. Just like the one James Dean’s character drove around in that movie last year.”
“The boys—they were playing something out?”
The deputy sheriff shrugged. “Looked pretty real to me.”
The doctor got up. “I don’t like to put this sort of thing off. Worst part of my job. Yours too, I’m guessing. We shouldn’t keep the families waiting any longer.”
The deputy nodded. “Merton’s been staying tight-lipped on my instructions.”
Both men left the room, the doctor switching off the light on his way out. The corridor was empty—the bright illumination was again broken by the pop and flash of another fluorescent rod in its death throes above their heads.
The deputy reached over and touched the top of the doctor’s hand. The doctor turned his hand around, hungrily grasping the deputy’s hand, palm to palm.
After a couple of seconds, still alone in the corridor, the men broke their clasp. The doctor squared his shoulders. The deputy cleared his throat a couple of times.
Each man prepared himself to deliver the sad fact of the teenage boys’ deaths and then the lie that went along with it. It was the same lie that the doctor and deputy sheriff would have wanted told if they had found themselves in the same situation.
It was the lie that permitted the boys to take their secrets to the grave.
1957
LOYAL IN UTAH
Sanpitch Academy was founded in 1875. Located one hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, it sat in the dead-eye center of the state. Its twenty-five-acre, sixteen-building campus lay in the scenic Sanpete Valley, where alfalfa grew in abundance, sheep grazed in fat, fleecy flocks, and thousands of farm turkeys, it was said, tried very hard not to think about Thanksgiving. A boarding school, it was built by Mormons in the largely Mormon town of Mount Pleasant. In 1957, most of its day employees (that is, locals who didn’t live on campus) were Mormons. Most everyone else—its administrators, its teachers and students—were Gentiles (as western Mormons in 1957 referred to non-Mormons, that latter group even including the school’s music teacher, Julius Lafer, who was, in fact, Jewish). The school was affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, and a good many of its teachers and students were more than just non-Mormon; they were Protestants, and more specifically, Presbyterians.
This is somewhat important when one considers the political leanings of Sanpitch. The eighty-seven-year-old boarding school had a racially integrated student body (remarkable for the time). It boasted a student organization devoted to debating issues of international import (this in an era of monochromatic Cold War politics). Even more controversially, it used the recently published Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible in its religion classes—a bold move that generated no small protest from parental proponents of the King James (penned, it has been said, by God’s own hand). While Boston was banning the Everly Brothers’ Top 100 single that autumn, “Wake Up, Little Susie,” it was played with defiance and impunity in Sanpitch’s Tiger Den snack bar, the kids agreeing with most of their contemporaries that “Susie” wasn’t about teenage fornication at all, but told the rather benign story of a teenage couple who happen to fall asleep at the drive-in because the movie was so boring.
In the same way in which its teachers and students lived a soundly insular and familial existence (weekends as observed at Sanpitch were Sunday and Monday, so that its male students would have less opportunity to interact with roughneck townie youths), the school was allowed to go its own way in terms of policymaking and day-to-day operations. There was a governing board that oversaw things from a distance, but the board rarely involved itself in matters that onsite school officials—the superintendent, the director of academics, the separate deans of boys and girls, and the pastor and director of Christian education—could handle.
On Monday, December 16, shortly before the Christmas break, that changed. As it did twice a year, the Board of Oversight met in the conference room of the school’s administration building to review the first few months of the school year and to be apprised of what to expect in the months that lay ahead. It was also time to gather up signed contracts for the next semester.
Three new members had joined the board since its last convocation—members not so willing to remain hands-off, members far more conservative in their political ideology. What came out of the meeting was a dictate that was perceived as both intrusive and, well, apocalyptic.
“There have been mumblings and grumblings,” said Vince Sprawley, the youngest and most vocal of the new troika, “about your decision this year to replace the King James with the Revised Standard. Though most of us have had misgivings about it, we—the board—have done, I think, a rather good job of mustering support for your decision, Tim.”
“And I thank you for that, Vince,” replied the superintendent, who was sitting next to the school’s pastor, Howard Claxton, both men tensely clinching their shoulders with mention of this potentially contentious matter and then instantly relaxing them when the matter was defused in a single breath.
“This board continues to believe,” Sprawley went on, “in the importance of preserving Sanpitch’s autonomy in all matters of religious instruction and identity, especially given the minority status of Presbyterianism in this state. Good citizenship, however—now that’s a cat of a different breed.”
Superintendent Timothy Grimm cocked his head. “I don’t quite get your meaning, Vince.”
“I think he means rendering unto Caesar and so forth,” interposed the Reverend.
“Not exactly.” Sprawley casually leaned back, intertwining his fingers behind his neck. “This country being a democracy and not an empery. As you’ve no doubt noticed, these are difficult times. Communism is on the rise, sirs, both outside our borders and within. Senator McCarthy’s committee demonstrated that—”
The only woman at the table, Wanda Showalter, an outspoken member of the board for nearly twenty years and one easily annoyed by such things as being negligently designated a “sir,” interrupted: “Mr. Sprawley, I must caution you against invoking the name of the late senator to make any sort of point regarding national fealty.”
“My point, good lady, and I will gladly detach Senator McCarthy from it, is that institutions and organizations throughout the U.S., from the federal government all the way down to your local PTA, are asking their employees and constituent members to sign loyalty oaths these days—oaths that affirm one’s allegiance to this nation by taking a pledge to protect and defend it.”
“You mean a pledge not to overthrow it,” explicated Mrs. Showalter with an attendant groan. “The board has drafted the oath and we’ve voted on it. Please be honest with Superintendent Grimm and the others as to its meaning and intent.”
“May I see it?” asked Grimm. “You say the oath has already been approved?”
Sprawley nodded. “As a condition for renewal of your employee contracts for the spring. It will be incorporated into the language of Sanpitch’s biannual employee agreement. By signing the contract, your teachers, and all of your non-teaching staff, as well, will be agreeing to uphold the tenets of the oath.”
“Or affirmation,” added the Reverend Claxton. “Some of our teachers do not ‘swear.’”
Sprawley nodded again as he handed a copy of the oath/affirmation to Grimm. Claxton peered over Grimm’s left shoulder to read along with him. Director of Academics Roger Rainwater looked over his right.
Nonetheless, Grimm read
the pertinent paragraph aloud. “By affixing my name to this contract, I promise that I will not advise, advocate, or teach the overthrow by force, violence, or other unlawful means of the Government of the United States of America. I further promise that while I am in the employ of Sanpitch Academy, Mount Pleasant, Utah, I will not become a member or become in any other way affiliated with any group, society, association, organization, or party that does not uphold and respect the laws of the United States and all of its constituent governmental units.”
Grimm looked up. Mrs. Showalter was poised to speak; she waited until his eyes met hers before saying, “What I continue to find incredibly troubling, and the reason that I didn’t vote for this oath in the first place regards the wording ‘which does not uphold and respect the laws of the United States’ and so forth. That’s all well and good for keeping any of our male employees who happen to be members of the LDS Church from taking a second or third wife, for old times’ sake…”
“Don’t be disrespectful of our Mormon brethren, Wanda,” said one of the other board members, a former Presbyterian minister named Dorrell.
“I apologize, Gordon, to all of our Mormon brethren who may have been within hail and taken offense. Now let me make my point. There are some of us here who don’t believe every law in this country to be sacrosanct and inviolable. Witness what is happening in the American South right now—massive protests against unjust laws that discriminate against our colored citizens—laws that no good Christian in his right mind should ever ‘uphold and respect.’ The wording in your oath is problematic and unrealistic, especially for those of us who happen to care about effecting positive change in this country.”
“So I take it, Wanda,” said Sprawley, narrowing his gaze on the long-opinionated former schoolteacher (ten years at Sanpitch), “that you would be fully supportive of the oath were we to strike that offending second sentence.”
