It was six years ago, at my mother’s funeral, that I had last laid eyes on my father.
It hadn’t gone well. I had just buried the most understanding parent a man could possibly have. When the service was over, I was left with a stern, distant, conservative father who had no use for a lawyer son who leaned the other way. After the funeral luncheon, after all the deviled eggs and potato salad and baked ham had been consumed, after the Baccarat punchbowl had been washed, dried, and put away, my father had an extra glass of whiskey and began to pontificate on the subject of my “Washington shenanigans.”
“And if you don’t mind, what might those terrible shenanigans be?” I asked. “How have I disappointed you?”
“Believe it or not, son, y’all don’t have a lock on every form of human knowledge in that Yankee town you now call home,” he said. “The news does travel down to Mississippi eventually. And everybody I know says you’re the most progressive young lawyer in Washington.” I had never heard that word pronounced with a more audible sneer.
I didn’t answer. All the way down on the train, I had vowed to myself not to react to his temperamental outbursts.
“Your mother enjoyed that about you,” he went on. “Your Yankee free-thinking ways. But she’s gone now, God rest her soul. And I can tell you this, Benjamin. You’re a fool! You’re up to your knees in the sand, and the tide’s approaching. You can keep trying to shovel as hard as you can, but that will not stop the tide from coming in.”
“Thank you for the colorful metaphor,” I said. Then I went upstairs, packed my valise, and went back to Washington.
After that I heard from him only once a year, around Christmas, when a plain white envelope would arrive containing a twenty-dollar bill and the same handwritten note every year:
“Happy Christmas to yourself, Meg, and my granddaughters. Cordially, Judge E. Corbett.”
Cordially.
Chapter 24
NOW HERE I WAS, STANDING at his door again. And as much as it galled me to knock on that door, I could not come home to Eudora without seeing my father. I was sure he already knew that I was back.
Dabney answered the door. He had been my father’s house-man since before I was born.
“Good Lord! Mister Ben! Shoot, I never expected to open this door and find you on the other side of it. The judge is gonna be absolutely de-light-ed to see you.”
“Dabney, it’s good to know you’re still the smoothest liar in Pike County.”
He smiled brightly and gave me a wink. Then I followed him to the dining room, breathing in the old familiar smell of floor wax and accumulated loneliness.
My father sat alone at the long mahogany table, eating a bowl of soup from a fine china bowl. He glanced up, but his face did not change when he saw me – eyes icy blue, his lips thin and unsmiling.
“Why, Benjamin. How nice of you to grace us with your presence. Did somebody die?”
My father’s gift for sarcasm had not diminished. Immediately I found myself wishing I hadn’t come running over to his house my first day in town.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Sound body, sound mind. As far as I can tell. Why? Have you heard otherwise?”
“Not at all. I’m glad to hear you’re well.”
“What wonderful Yankee manners. I trust you are healthy yourself?”
I nodded. The silence between us was almost painful.
“So, Ben, you still busy up there freeing the slaves?”
“I believe it was President Lincoln who did that.”
“Ah, that’s right,” he said, a wisp of a smile coming to his face. “Sometimes I forget my history. Care for some turtle soup?”
Soup? On a ninety-degree night in Mississippi?
“No, thank you.”
“No turtle soup? Yet another in a succession of foolish choices on your part, Benjamin.”
My father did not ask me to take a seat at his table.
He did not ask what brought me to Eudora after six years, and I wondered if it was possible that he knew.
He did not inquire after Meg, or ask why my wife had permitted me to travel all this way by myself. He did not ask about Alice or Amelia.
I thought of Mama, how much she would have loved having two little granddaughters in this house. It was always too quiet in here. I remembered one of her favorite expressions: “The silence in here is so loud, I can hear my own heart rattling around in my ribs.”
Judge Corbett looked me up and down. “Where is your baggage?” he asked.
“I’m not staying here,” I said. “I’ve taken a room down at Maybelle Wilson’s. Actually, I’m here on business for the government. I have to check out some candidates for the federal courts.”
I could have sworn this news made him wince, but he recovered quickly enough.
“Fine,” he said. “Be about your business. Maybelle’s should suit you perfectly. Is there something else?”
I saw no reason to prolong this agony. “Oh, no. Nothing. It was pleasant to see you again.”
He waved for Dabney to ladle more soup into his bowl. He dabbed at his lips with a starched linen napkin. Then he deigned to speak.
“We should arrange another visit sometime,” my father said. “Perhaps in another six years.”
Chapter 25
“YOU NEED SOMETHING for your belly, Mr. Corbett?” Maybelle called in a loud voice from the front parlor of her rooming house.
I had found the Slide Inn Café all closed up for the night, but still I declined Maybelle’s invitation. “No, thank you, ma’am. I’m all taken care of.”
“Just as well. Ain’t nothin’ in there but some old pone.”
Maybelle’s had never been known for luxury. In fact, the only thing the place was ever known for was a string of slightly disreputable boarders through the years. Now, I supposed, I was one of them.
The original Maybelle had died years ago, about the time the house was last given a fresh coat of paint. But Eudora tradition dictated that any woman who ran the place was referred to as “Maybelle.”
Occasionally a shoe salesman or cotton broker spent a night or two at Maybelle’s. Once or twice a year my father commandeered the place to sequester jurors during a trial. And there were, inevitably, rumors about women of uncertain morality using the rooms for “business.”
A monk would have felt at home in my room: a narrow iron bed, a small oaken desk with a perilous wobble, and an equally wobbly cane-backed chair. On the bureau were an enameled-steel bowl and pitcher. And under the bed, a chamber pot for those times you didn’t want to make the trip to the outhouse.
In the corner of the room was one small window, which somehow managed to admit all the hot air from outside during the day and to hold it inside all night.
I stripped down to my Roxford skivvies and positioned the chair directly in front of that window. I suspected there was no breeze to be had in town that night. Luckily, my room was provided with the latest advance in cooling technology: a squared-off cardboard fan with the inscription “Hargitay’s Mortuary Parlor, The Light of Memphis.”
A lonely man sitting with his bare feet propped up on a windowsill, waving a funeral fan at his face.
Welcome home, Ben.
Chapter 26
IT WAS TOO DAMN HOT for sleeping. I figured I might as well do some detective work in my room.
I had put aside two newspapers from the collection of “lynching reviews” I’d brought from Memphis. Now was as good a time as any for reading.
These particular articles were of special interest. From the pages of the Jackson Courier, they told the stories of lynchings that had taken place right here in Eudora, and within the past three years.
I unfolded the first paper:
Word of an horrific death by strangulation reached our office this morning. By the time this reporter visited the alleged scene, no trace of said hanging was evident, save for a bloodied rope tossed aside in a pile of swamp grass.
The una
nswered questions were obvious. Who told “this reporter” that the death was “horrific”? Why was he so careful to use the word “alleged”?
I picked up the other newspaper.
We learned of the death by lynching of Norbert Washington today. A witness at the lynching site in that area of Eudora called “the Quarters” said that Washington, a tobacco tanner at a plantation in nearby Chatawa, had been heard making rude and suggestive comments to a white lady in the Chatawa Free Library.
Upon investigation it was discovered that the town of Chatawa did not have a library, free or otherwise. That information notwithstanding, the eyewitness stated, “The hanging was most exciting, gruesome and, I must add, satisfying in its vengefulness for the niggerman’s impertinence.”
I was glad that I kept reading, even though I wanted to look away. The final sentences were, for me, the most startling:
When interviewed, Chief of Police Phineas Eversman said that he was unaware of any lynching that previous evening in Eudora. A visitor in Chief Eversman’s office, the respected Eudora Justice Everett Corbett, agreed. “I too know nothing about a lynching in Eudora,” Judge Corbett said.
I let the newspapers fall to the floor. No wonder Roosevelt needed someone to sort out this tangle of contradictions, half-truths, and outright lies.
Loneliness also gives a man time for thinking. It broke my heart to be so far away from my family – and to have left on this trip without a single kind word between Meg and me. From my valise I drew a small pewter picture frame, hinged in the middle. I opened the frame and stared at the joined photographs.
On the left was Meg, her smile so warm, so bright and unforced, that I found myself smiling back at her.
On the right were Alice and Amelia, posed on the sofa in our parlor. Both of them wore stiff expressions, but I knew the girls were seconds away from exploding into laughter.
I studied the images for a few minutes, thinking only good thoughts. I wished there were some way I could blink my eyes and bring the pictures to life so that all three of them could be here with me.
Chapter 27
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I discovered that the current Maybelle, a pleasant and blustery woman, was not much of a cook. I sat at the dining room table, poking at breakfast: a biscuit as tough as old harness leather, grits that were more lumps than grits, and a piece of salt pork that was 100 percent gristle.
“Miss Maybelle, who belongs to that bicycle I saw leaning against the shed out back?” I finally asked. “I need to see a few people around town.”
“I keep that for the boy runs errands for me after school,” she said. “You welcome to borry it, if you like.”
Five minutes later I was rolling up my pant legs to protect them from bicycle chain grease. Two minutes after that I was sailing down Commerce Street. I felt like a nine-year-old boy again, keeping my balance with my knees while extending my arms sideways in a respectable display of balancing skills.
I was nine again, but everything I saw was filtered through the eyes of a thirty-year-old man.
I rode the bicycle two circuits around the tiny park in front of the Methodist church, took a left at the minister’s house and another left at the scuppernong arbor. At the end of the vine-covered trellis stood a simple white wooden structure that was unsupervised by anyone’s eyes and universally known among the young people of Eudora as the Catch-a-Kiss Gazebo.
It was here that I came with Elizabeth the summer I was fifteen. It was here, on that same wooden bench, that I leaned in to kiss Elizabeth and was startled down to my toes by an open-mouthed kiss in return, full of passion and tongue and spit. At the same moment I felt her hand running smoothly up the side of my thigh. I felt the pressure of her nails. My own hand moved from her waist to her small, rounded bosom.
Then Elizabeth pulled away and shook her head, spilling blond curls onto her shoulders. “Oh, Ben, I want to kiss you and kiss you. And more. I want to do everything, Ben. But I can’t. You know we can’t.”
I had never heard a girl talk like that. Most boys my age were hopeless when it came to discussing such matters – at least, in Eudora they were.
There were tears in Elizabeth’s eyes. “It’s all right,” I said, but then I grinned. “But we could kiss some more. No harm in that.” So Elizabeth and I kissed, and sometimes we touched each other, but it never went any farther than that, and eventually I went away to Harvard, where I met Meg.
Now I rode that bicycle fast down the lane, leaning into the curve, rounding the corner at the preacher’s house, faster and faster, remembering Elizabeth Begley and the first taste of sex that had ever happened to me anywhere but in my own head.
Chapter 28
I PEDALED THAT BICYCLE all the way from my growing-up years to the present day. And I began to see people I knew, shopkeepers, old neighbors, and I waved and called out “Hi.” A couple of times I stopped and talked with somebody from my school days, and that was fine.
I rode over to Commerce Street, past the Slide Inn Café, past the icehouse where a bucket came flying out of the darkness just in time to trip up poor George Pearson and send him to his death by hanging.
The exhilaration of my first ride through town was fading under the glare of a morning sun that was beating down hard. I was out of training for Mississippi summers. My thirst was demanding attention, and I remembered a pump at the end of the cotton-loading dock at the gin, just down from the depot.
I pedaled down Myrtle Street to the end of the platform that ran from the cotton gin beside the tracks of the Jackson & Northern line. I leaned my machine against the retaining wall and turned to the pump.
As I worked the handle and reveled in the water – half drinking, half splashing my face – I heard a loud voice behind me, an angry voice.
“What the hell makes you nigger boys think you can come high-walkin’ into our town looking for a job? All our jobs belong to white men.”
At the other end of the platform were two large and burly men I recognized as the Purneau brothers, Jocko and Leander, an unpleasant pair of backwoods louts who had been running the cotton gin for Old Man Furnish as long as I could remember. The two of them towered over three scrawny black boys who looked to be fifteen years old, maybe even younger.
“Well, suh, we just thinking with the crop coming you might be needin’ some mo’ help round the gin,” said one of the boys.
“That’s the trouble with you niggers, is when you set in to tryin’ to think,” said Leander Purneau. He spoke in a friendly, jokey voice, which put me, and the boy, off guard. But then he popped him a solid punch on the side of his face and sent the boy down onto his knees.
The other boys skittered away like bugs from a kicked-over log. Suddenly I really was back in the past, and the boy on the ground was in serious trouble, like poor George Pearson had been.
There was one difference now – I was not a timid little boy. I was a grown man. As I wiped my wet hands on my shirt, I considered what I was about to do.
If I caused a commotion, made a scene, called attention to myself, I might endanger my mission even before it started.
But if I did nothing?
Fortunately, the boy on the ground rolled over and jumped up. He sprinted off down the platform, holding his jaw, but at least he was getting away.
And at that very moment, I felt something cold and hard jammed against the side of my neck.
It felt an awful lot like the barrel of a gun.
A deep voice behind me: “Just put your hands in the air. Nice and slow, high, that’s the way to do it.”
Chapter 29
“NOW, I WANT you to turn around real slow, partner. Don’t make any fast moves.”
I did exactly as I was told. Real slow.
And found myself looking straight into the face of Jacob Gill. Jacob and I had been inseparable from as far back as I could remember, until the day I left Eudora for college.
“You son of a bitch!” I shouted at him.
Jacob was lau
ghing so hard he actually held his stomach and doubled over. His laughter made him do a little jig of delight.
“You nearly gave me a goddamn heart attack,” I said. “You’re a jackass.”
“I know,” Jacob said, howling some more.
Then we hugged, seizing each other by the shoulders, stepping back to get a good look.
“How’d you even know it was me?” I asked.
“We don’t have too many yellow-haired fellows ten feet tall hanging around,” said Jacob. Then he added, “I saw you decide not to mix it up with Jocko and Leander. That was smart thinking on your part.”
“I guess so,” I said. I remembered the time Jacob left me in the swamp to watch what happened to George Pearson. I wished I could tell him why I’d held back this time.
“Hey, it’s near dinnertime,” Jacob said and lightly punched my shoulder. “Let’s go get some catfish.”
“That sounds good. Where we going?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve turned into such a big-city boy you forgot Friday is catfish day at the Slide Inn?”
Chapter 30
I PUSHED THE BICYCLE between us down Myrtle Street, toward the town square. Jacob stopped twice along the way to take a nip of whiskey from a pint he kept in his worn leather toolbox, and I said hello to a couple more people I recognized, or who remembered me.
The Slide Inn was alive with the hum of conversation, the smell of frying fish, the smoke from the cigars of the old fellows who always occupied the front table, solving the world’s problems on a daily basis.
“Why aren’t you staying at your daddy’s?” Jacob asked as soon as we sat down at a corner table.
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