Around the room were young sons having breakfast with their fathers, and I wondered if they were hearing the same, looking forward to next week: The Hogs are tough. Gonna be a good game. After breakfast, we went for a walk around the Grove as the tents of the night before were dismantled and the green space returned, until the next Friday night at 9:00 when it would happen again.
“I think I started falling in love with football around these Arkansas games,” I told my father. “They always seemed like such a big deal. Those parties you and Mom would have, the hog roasts. I don’t think people have parties like that before baseball games.”
“It was fun,” he said simply. “After the Depression, the war, coming back. I think we liked parties even more. People wanted to be happy. And that was hard sometimes. A lot of us were just glad to be alive after the war. We wanted to have families, get back to normal.”
“So let me ask you something I’ve always wondered,” I said. “We talk about the greatest generation now, but when you were going through all this, did it feel that way?” We walked on for a bit before he answered.
“No, not at all, really. We’d all seen the Depression and how people coped with that disaster, just the day to day to get by. That was so hard. Some people just broke. Families broke. My parents went through that, raised a big family. That was something.”
“But you went to war, came back and”—I shrugged—“started over. That’s amazing.”
“Everybody went to war. And when everybody went to war, it didn’t seem special that you did it. It was just what everybody did.”
“Did you ever regret leaving the FBI and going into the navy? You could have stayed in the FBI.”
After graduating from law school, he had entered the FBI and ended up in New York City, watching mostly German nationals or Americans with ties to Germany as possible spies. When I lived in Manhattan, I could call him for subway advice on how to get to obscure points in the city, and he would usually nail the connections. He lived with a couple of other Mississippians on the Upper West Side, went to plays and sports events at every chance, and fell in love with the city. He still loved it.
He shook his head. “I started having friends who were getting killed or wounded. I couldn’t sit there while they were overseas. And think what I would have felt like when Francis was wounded, if I was still sitting in New York.” His younger brother, Francis, was terribly wounded in Europe and missing in action for months before word came that he was alive and in a German POW hospital. He went on to a great career in civil rights law but never completely recovered from the machine-gun attack, walking a little crookedly the rest of his life. Like many vets, he didn’t like to talk about his experiences, but when I turned twenty-one, he wrote me an extraordinary letter saying that his experiences in war compelled him to pursue civil justice for a career and urged me to follow my passions in life. I still read the letter regularly, never without questioning whether I had followed his advice. He developed early dementia in part from the head wound he received in the war. At his funeral a few years earlier, I wished desperately that I had spent more time with him before he slipped away.
“When Uncle Francis went into civil rights work, did you ever think of leaving the firm and following him?”
“I wanted to build the firm. It was right for him, but I was always really proud of what he did.” He looked away and started to tear up. “He had a really big heart. I miss him a lot.”
“So do I.” He thought for a moment and smiled.
“I miss Aunt Ebby and Aunt White too.” He called them “aunt” because that’s how I knew his two older sisters. They were extraordinary women; both had graduate degrees and taught on university levels. I remembered them as smart and ironic with a great love for their brother, my father, who had doted on them and provided a constant, steady presence in their lives just as he did for everyone. My dad had lost all his siblings now, and I tried to imagine what that was like. Two brothers had died when he was very young, one I was named for. He had lost his hero and older brother at forty not long after he got home from the Pacific. Of that once full house on North Street in Jackson, he was the only one left.
I loved the yearly Stevens Family Reunion held in Richton, the little town in southern Mississippi where my grandfather had been born and many relatives lived. Somewhere along the way, that died out, and though my sister lived not far away in Laurel, Mississippi, those boisterous gatherings of dinner on the grounds on blistering summer days seemed long ago. When I wondered if I should have had children, it was mostly the notion that maybe more of that world, more of my mother and father, would have been passed on and lived a bit longer, if only in memory.
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot and have reached a conclusion,” Dad announced as we turned the corner and the Vaught-Hemingway Stadium loomed in front of us.
“About?” I was still lost in thought about family reunions past.
“Ole Miss will beat Arkansas.”
—
It was sunny and chilly on Saturday, the sort of day that made you start to miss summer. It had been a strange season, but then every season was strange in its own way. My dad and I walked—slowly, as always, a gait I was finally learning to adopt—across the Grove in the sunshine to the Arkansas game, feeling good about the prospects of our life over the next few hours. We’d learned that Ole Miss this year wasn’t that “one in a million” miracle squad that would seize immortality. But they weren’t bad either. They were good enough to make us confident that a sunny afternoon of autumn coolness wouldn’t be ruined by the depression of unexpected defeat.
All of which explained the unease that washed over us when Arkansas took only six plays to score.
It was only a field goal, and the first possession of the game, but it felt terribly unjust and wrong to be denied even a few minutes to relax into the game. Every rational indicator pointed to the insignificance of such an early score: it was only three points and sort of a fluke at that. But this is not how a fan thinks. At least it wasn’t how my father and I thought.
The bright afternoon seemed to grow darker and colder. Arkansas had just lost two games by seventy points, and now they had marched onto our home field and confidently knocked out a score. “I don’t like this,” I said to my dad, staring glumly at the field, as if I could rewind the moment and will the field goal wide left.
“Well, it was a pretty lucky kick,” Dad said of the long Arkansas field goal.
“But what if they’re lucky all afternoon?”
He stared hard at the field, not answering, but there really wasn’t a good answer. Ole Miss had considerably more talent on the field than Arkansas and were playing at home and should have taken control of the game early in the same way Alabama dominated Ole Miss. But instead the two teams slugged it out more or less equally for most of the first half. Because Ole Miss was the better team, they looked the worse of the two, playing under their level while the Razorbacks seemed eager for an upset. Arkansas’s new coach, Bret Bielema, had great success at the University of Wisconsin and was accustomed to winning. Arkansas had gone through a rough stretch, but if their coach had convinced them that this was their game of destiny, the day they would turn it all around, they could be dangerous. Every team in the SEC has the talent, given the right combination of factors, to beat any other team.
With three minutes to go in the half, Ole Miss led by three points, stopped on the one-yard line by a furious Arkansas goal line stand. As if fearing to go into the locker room and face their coach when leading by only three points, Ole Miss scored again. That made it 20–10, which did feel more like what we had expected, at least enough to make the halftime less anxious.
“Let’s walk around a little,” Dad suggested, surprising me. In all the games we’d been to this year, we’d never strayed far during the half.
“You sure?”
“You tired?” he asked, motioning for me to follow him. We made it around to the Arkansas side, a swirl of re
d and variations on the classic hog head. We got a couple of hot dogs and were leaning up against the stadium when a couple of Arkansas undergraduates walked by holding hands. He was a big guy, about six five, in an Arkansas baseball hat, and she was barely five feet under one of the largest hog hats I’d ever seen. My father smiled.
She stopped, pulling on her boyfriend’s hand, cocked her head, and then wagged her finger at my father. “I know you’re just jealous. You wish you had one of these.”
“Absolutely!” Dad said, and it sounded as if he really meant it.
She took it off and held it out to my dad.
“I couldn’t. It looks better on you. And it just doesn’t go with the shirt.” He nodded down to his Ole Miss shirt.
She nodded gravely in agreement.
“You know, I just feel sorry for you guys.”
“Sorry?”
“I mean, you can’t do the Colonel Reb thing anymore. And what in the world are you going to do with a black bear?”
The Black Bear was the mascot that was being suggested as the alternative to Colonel Reb. No one seemed to like it, and no one really understood it. Supposedly, it was a reference to Faulkner’s story “The Bear,” but that seemed only to prove why few mascots are named for stories written by Nobel Prize winners.
“The Bear,” my father said, shaking his head.
“There you go,” she said, smiling, raising her glass in a toast. “Hotty Toddy.”
“Hotty Toddy,” we both said.
“I like the hog heads,” Dad said as they walked off, “but I’d be damned if I’d ever wear one.”
“Humiliating,” I agreed.
“I guess next year this game is at Arkansas?”
I nodded. “Yep. Fayetteville.”
He nodded. “I don’t know how many more of these Hog fests I have left in me.” He smiled wistfully. This was something that had gone unspoken, that maybe these games were our last time together, surrounded by hog heads and Rebels and yelling our hearts out for young men on the field.
“It’s a long drive to Fayetteville,” I said. “And that stadium is always terrible, all those maniacs yelling ‘Pig Sooie!’ ”
“Terrible,” he agreed.
“But I tell you what,” I said, putting my arm around him. “I’d love to go to any game with you anywhere. Anytime.”
“Even Arkansas?”
“You bet.”
“I’d like that,” he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “I’d like that a lot.”
—
We had hoped that Ole Miss would prove quickly in the second half why they were a heavy favorite to win. It would have been typical for a team with less talent, like Arkansas, to play an emotional first half and then, as if honor defended, tank in the last two quarters. But it didn’t seem that’s what Arkansas had in mind.
On the third play of the second half, Arkansas intercepted Bo Wallace on the Ole Miss forty-six-yard line. Four plays later, Arkansas scored. That made it 20–17. As my father and I were trying to convince ourselves that there was still good reason to think the afternoon was not tilting to disaster, Ole Miss scored. The rest of the game wasn’t pretty, but the Rebels managed to win, 34–24. We walked slowly back across campus. The Arkansas fans seemed to be taking defeat in good humor, but then they’d had a lot of practice the past couple of years. It was chilly, with the early sunset of daylight savings still coming as a surprise. “You know there’s a party back at the hotel we’re invited to,” Dad said.
I didn’t, but it wasn’t a surprise. There were always lots of parties at the Inn at Ole Miss on the football weekends. “Hog roast,” he said.
That sounded perfect. “Nothing beats a good hog roast,” I said.
We both walked a little faster.
10
There were three games left in the season, but there was no pretending to value the games equally. First was Troy, which would be significant only if Ole Miss lost, and then it would rank as a great embarrassment. Next was Missouri, which was having one of those miracle seasons, losing only one game to South Carolina in a double overtime. They were ranked number eight in the country. And to beat them would signal that Ole Miss might have moved closer to the rarefied elite category, but there was no long history to an Ole Miss versus Missouri rivalry, and the game had little emotional resonance.
The season, like so many before, really came down to the last game, the one that really mattered, against Mississippi State: the Egg Bowl. Ole Miss and State had played 108 times since 1901. When I was growing up in Jackson, it was traditional to play the game on neutral turf at Memorial Stadium, and we never missed a game.
We spent those three weeks on campus, at the Alumni House. We had big rooms next to each other and continued the comfortable routine we’d fallen into over the fall. I’d get up early, go for a run, then come back and knock on my parents’ door. We’d sit around and drink coffee and talk, mostly about what news there was in the family. My sister’s kids were living in New York now and dealing with the ups and downs of life after college. A nephew of my dad’s, one of my favorite cousins, was going through a rough health patch. And we talked about my parents moving full-time to New Orleans, instead of dividing their time between Asheville and New Orleans. My mother always loved to “just explore options” on pretty much anything, from vacations to college courses she was thinking of auditing to where they should live. I suspect it came from years in Jackson in a world where options were limited and it was a mental escape to consider all the possibilities of various changes. My father was much more linear: let’s decide what to do and do it, and he tended to be comfortable with whatever road was taken. He was not one to second-guess.
Once these options had been, in theory at least, pretty much limitless: What about studying Spanish in Mexico or renting an apartment in New York or volunteering to teach for a year in a school? My mother had a deep interest in the world and passed the Gore Vidal test that to be interesting you had to be interested. She was interested in anything and everything.
The choices my mother mused about were more limited now that time no longer stretched without visible horizons. I had thought it made sense for her and Dad to stay at the Methodist retirement center in Asheville, which was a good and decent place with a built-in infrastructure for anticipated needs. But my mother had let slip something in passing that stopped me cold. “I don’t want to die here,” she said, and after that I just shut up and stayed out of the decision. It made the choice so basic and primal that I felt I had no standing to voice an opinion. It was about not convenience or odds but something very basic and stark and private.
All along, the football season had been just an excuse to spend time together, and now that we were toward the end of the season, it seemed less important to pretend the games were really the best moments. It had been a good season if not a magical one, but a reminder that while it was inevitable to long for perfect seasons, they grace us rarely, if ever, and that was okay.
The two rooms where we gathered in the mornings seemed to reflect how our lives had changed. My parents had built a house on a dead-end street to raise my sister and me, a world that had seemed as a child to be sprawling and filled with hidden spaces where I could slip away and lose myself in dreams of life’s adventures waiting to be seized. I’d climb up into the attic or down in the basement or even duck behind a big couch in the living room and read for hours. One of my favorite discoveries, passed down from my father, was the Memphis writer Richard Haliburton. His Royal Road to Romance was the story of traveling around the world, climbing the Matterhorn, swimming in the Taj Mahal reflecting pool, drinking from life like a big, overflowing cup. I’d wanted all those sorts of adventures so much that I would stay up all night willing myself to grow up faster so I could begin to live that life. Over the years, I had found ways to do many of those things, and now that big house of my youth, which was really never that big, was gone, and it was just me and my parents in a couple of rooms at the Ole Miss Alum
ni House. But the chance to be together seemed as important as any Swiss climb or African adventure.
Every morning after we sat around and drank coffee, Dad would eventually ask, “What do you think about breakfast?” as if it were really a question. We always ate breakfast. Then we’d go for a walk around campus, not very far, and back to the hotel. And so the days unwound.
At some point in almost every day, I’d find myself thinking about what life had been like a year earlier, when the campaign had been so crazy. The one-year anniversary of the election came, and I celebrated it with my longest run of the fall, about twenty slow miles. I still felt a deep sense of personal failure that I was beginning to understand might never disappear. The goal was to elect a president, and I had failed. I’d discovered it was almost impossible to discuss the campaign with anyone who hadn’t been part of it or another presidential. What side someone had been on mattered less than the shared experience, and I imagined, without really knowing, that it might be close to what cops or firefighters or those in the military experienced. It was such an intense, pressured, chaotic process that demanded so much it was inevitable that one began and ended a different person. I no longer woke up in the middle of the night worried about the race, but there were still long periods when I’d lie in bed reading and trying, never very successfully, not to relive the campaign. By now, much had been written about the race, and inevitably much was wrong or half-right, and there were moments when I resolved to correct this inaccuracy or set the record straight about what really happened. But I knew at the end of the day, whatever I wrote, nothing would change the basic fact: we had lost. And that loss would never change.
I was jealous of the athletes we’d spent the autumn watching who could lose one weekend and go out and redeem themselves with a victory the next. It wasn’t like that in presidential politics. I hadn’t expected this, but being with my parents and watching them adjust to the changes that life brought was helping me understand the need to go forward. I couldn’t change what had happened, but I could push ahead just as they were doing each day.
The Last Season Page 16
