Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman

by Galadrielle Allman

  The Oriental Gardens was a bit of a dive, with multicolored Christmas lights flashing over a long greasy bar, and a shuffleboard table in the back. When their shift on base was over, Bill and Bucky went for a beer and a game, just in time for happy hour. Bill sprinkled sand across the long wooden shuffleboard table and sent his red puck gliding down the edge without tipping off the far end. He twisted his wrist with a flick, saying, “Bucky, you’ve got to put a little English on it!” The disk spun back toward him just in time and Bucky laughed at the easy perfection of the maneuver. He was an easygoing guy, not long back from Europe, and Bill liked how calm he was and how he never tried to talk about the war, even though they both felt the experience between them, like a numbed wound. Bucky rushed through his own turn, his black puck bounding off the side in a blur. Bill smirked and patted Bucky’s shoulder.

  A man walked up and asked to join in, and they welcomed him. A few people had gathered around a tuneless piano by the back door and began to sing. After a few rounds of play, the man walked away before his turn was done, then came back after a half hour or so and asked for a lift to a bar down the road. Bill and Bucky finished their pints and agreed. No one should have to walk alone from bar to bar. The man had been in the service; you could tell by the proud way he walked squared-off and tall. He didn’t say much, just that he could use another drink and maybe another chance to redeem himself at shuffleboard, so on they drove him to the C&C Bar and Grill. They played two quick games and said their goodbyes. It was getting on to nine o’clock, but the man asked again to be taken to one more place, Jimmie’s Drive-In Grill, just a little farther down the road.

  Bill nodded and they walked into the parking lot. Bucky opened the passenger door to the man, but he insisted on riding in the backseat of the car.

  Just as the pink glow of Jimmie’s neon sign came into view, the man leaned between Bucky and Bill and asked a little loudly to be taken home, to a little lane off Sewell’s Point Road, a name he pronounced souls point. As Bucky made the final turn, the man pushed a gun into his ribs and said, “This is a holdup.”

  He ordered them to stop, get out of the car, and remove their shoes. As they slowly raised their arms and edged out into the road, twin beams of light rushed over them, a car approaching from the other end of the lane. The man yelled at them, “Get back in the car!” They crouched quickly back into the front seat for a moment, exchanging a quick glance before the man was leaning between their seats again. He ordered Bucky to roll the car back into the adjacent lane until they faced Sewell’s Point Road again. He shook the gun in a frantic wave and said, “Get out of the car! One at a time!” and they did. By the little light mounted over the license plate, the man looked through their billfolds and took most of their loose change, letting a few coins fall in the dirt. He shoved the four dollars they had together into his pocket with his fist. He made them remove their shoes and marched them along the road’s edge toward a grove of trees. He ordered them to lie facedown on the black ground, at a distance from each other.

  Bucky begged, “Don’t shoot us, buddy.”

  He said, “You know my name, so here is where you get yours.”

  Bill lunged for the man. A loud popping sound made Bucky jerk his head to the side to look behind him. Then he heard a second shot and saw Bill running into the trees. He was calling Bucky’s proper name, “Robert!” and he yelled back to Bill, “Run!”

  The man had disappeared in the darkness, and Bucky leaped to his feet and ran toward a farmhouse at the head of the lane. A light in a single window, a golden bounding square in front of his eyes, led him as he ran. At Bucky’s pounding, an old man opened his front door a crack and said quickly, in a strange, formal way, “I am sorry. I am unable to help.”

  In deepening shock, Bucky ran back to the road, a sick metallic taste in his throat, until he saw his car and called out again, “Bill!” He heard the car door slam and called again, “Bill!” There was no answer but he could hear the car door open again and footsteps moved toward him. He stepped back from the gravel road as silently as he could and saw the silhouette of the man turn and get back in his car. The door slammed and the car sped away, leaving Bucky alone in silence.

  Bucky had no memory of it later, but he must have run down the lane to another house and used a telephone to call the police. He did remember sitting in a kitchen by a blackened oil stove and looking at his watch: It was only nine-thirty. It seemed impossibly early.

  Several policemen searched for a long time, walking close together in the furrowed field. They parted at the trees, stepping carefully and sweeping the grove with flashlight beams. They found the body of Lieutenant Allman facedown with a bullet in his back.

  Later that night, the police found Bucky’s car parked outside a silent wood-frame house three miles from the crime scene. An elderly couple led the officers to their son’s bedroom, where they found the man asleep in bed, his warm gun under the pillow.

  Robert described the whole scene in an official statement. A copy was given to Jerry, typed on onionskin paper and signed. He told her as much as she could stand to hear before the funeral, and most of the story ended up in the newspaper. Jerry read that Bill wasn’t the only man who carried the war home inside him. His killer was a fellow serviceman, still fighting invisible battles in his mind. He shot Bill without a thought.

  In his confusion and sickness, he took Bill away from his family forever.

  Jerry didn’t have any interest in his trial or punishment, although she attended the proceedings with a soldier appointed to sit by her side in the courtroom. She heard Bill’s killer sentenced to life in prison, but it didn’t matter what happened to that man. Nothing would bring back Bill.

  Sixty years later, Duane’s cousin Brenda gave me an original copy of Robert’s signed police statement. She mailed me the fragile, yellowed pages that describe the day my grandfather was killed. I try to imagine what it felt like for my granny to read the words. The statement gives just enough haunting detail of the crime scene to fire one’s imagination, but my granny doesn’t think that way. She protects herself by staying in the present now, defiant of memory. “I’ve got better things to think about,” she says when I ask her about Bill. “That was a hole I fell in. And my son was another hole, but you can’t live in a hole. You have to heal.” She likes to think of riding her motorcycle, the wind clearing all the ghosts from her mind. She says riding was the joy of her life. She speeds away from the patch of dirt where Bill no longer lies; her body leaning into the curves in the road, she leaves it behind her.

  She is stronger than I am.

  Bill and Jerry had made it safely through the worst danger they would ever face; that was what she had thought when he made it home from World War II. Bill was a survivor and her fears for him were long over. In Normandy, Bill marched through waist-deep water with one hundred pounds of gear on his back and a steel helmet on his head. He crawled through sand with machine-gun fire whistling by him, and saw his friends killed where they stood. He saw ships blanketing the English Channel and fighter planes filling the sky. Sirens screaming, huge engines grinding and howling while thousands of shots deafened him. And then he made it home. But he let his guard down in Virginia, on the night after Christmas. He didn’t see the bullet coming for him.

  Bill’s coffin was draped with the American flag. Soldiers stood in full dress uniform, faces wooden and expressionless. Jerry recognized many of them from the base, from picnics with their families and children’s birthdays on the beach. She had never seen them look so stern. Her sister Janie sat beside her. Bill’s mother and father stood at a distance wrapped around each other in a rare moment of tenderness, their sons beside them—Sam in his uniform and young David in his first suit.

  Duane and Gregg: This was the first time in hours she had let herself think of the boys. The weight of them was resting on her chest like a stone. “Where are the boys?” Jerry asked Janie.

  “Safe with your housekeeper, remember?”
/>   A trumpet played taps, ceremonial shots were fired, and the flag from his casket was folded and presented to his mother, who pressed it to her chest. Soldiers marched in formation and Janie rubbed Jerry’s back in quieting circles. Now Bill’s body would be sent to Tennessee on a train, and buried at the Nashville National Cemetery in a silent sea of identical white headstones.

  Duane’s cousin, Jo Jane, wrote a short story about where she, Duane, and Gregg were while their parents were at Bill’s funeral. Duane was wiggling in his seat wedged between Jo Jane’s little body and the familiar curves of their housekeeper. They’d been in this car forever, circling downtown, winding through the empty streets under garlands of holly, passing the same store window with a mechanical Santa nodding and waving.

  “Where’s Mama?” Duane asked again. Every time he asked, he was told he’d see her soon, but soon wasn’t coming and he was getting mad. “Where’s Mama?” he said a little louder.

  Jo Jane put her arm around him and told him to hush and they would get ice cream. Gregg was in the front seat on a strange woman’s lap, his white blond head resting on her dark brown shoulder. Gregg furrowed his brow and whispered, “Where’s Mama?” in his lispy baby way. Duane didn’t know who that skinny lady was, holding his baby brother, or who the man next to Jo Jane was, either. That man had dark skin and black hair plastered flat against his head. One shiny gold tooth peeked out from his mouth and Duane couldn’t stop staring at it. He wanted to ask how he got it, but he didn’t.

  Their housekeeper’s husband was driving all over town, even though it was cold and crowded in the car. Duane knew him all right. He had watched him help his daddy change a tire on their car. He was a soldier like daddy, even though he was colored. There were colored soldiers, too, his daddy said. Duane kicked the back of the front seat as hard as he could and Gregg’s eyes opened so wide they looked like they might pop out.

  “Take me home!”

  “Duane, you been told, now. We are going to get ice cream, baby.”

  She squeezed him against her bosom and rested her warm hand on his head and he settled for a minute. No one would really talk to him, or look him in the eye. No one but Jo Jane, but she was just a kid, too. She treated him like a baby, but he wasn’t a baby. He wrapped his finger around one of Jo Jane’s long brown ringlets and watched it tunnel into the shining softness. She turned her pretty face toward him, her blue eyes serious.

  “Your mama’s at the funeral,” Jo Jane said. “For your daddy, remember?”

  “Look at that Santa, baby! Isn’t he pretty?” the woman he didn’t know in the front seat shouted out.

  “I ain’t no baby!” Duane yelled back.

  Duane felt the horrible thing that happened in the night lingering into the day. People he didn’t recognize came and filled up his house and now he wasn’t supposed to go home, and his daddy was gone. His mama had told him. His daddy had gone to heaven to sing with the angels. Nothing made any sense.

  The car stopped in front of a small whitewashed building with a hand-painted sign over a sliding window and a few picnic tables tilting in the sand. They were far away from home, on the other side of town.

  “This ain’t the ice cream place,” Duane said.

  “Baby, this is where we get ice cream, and it’s just the same.”

  “I want vanilla!” Gregg shouted.

  “I don’t want any,” Duane said.

  “Oh, come on now, honey. Don’t be that way.”

  “Just get him chocolate,” Jo Jane said. “He’ll eat it. Can I have a Coke instead of ice cream?”

  By the time they got back to the base, night had fallen on Jerry like a heavy thing and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She lay in her wide bed and turned away from the space beside her. She couldn’t feel him here. Shouldn’t she still be able to feel Bill close to her? She couldn’t stay with the thought of Bill, or his spirit and where it resided now. The emptiness beside her yawned and sank in like a hole. She grabbed on to the one golden image in her mind—their boys. Her boys. They belonged to her alone now. Their sturdy little bodies, their pale and perfect skin, and sweet smells: She would think only of Duane and Gregg and all it would take to protect them. They would be her strength tonight and every night to come.

  The next evening, Jerry dressed her sons in matching corduroy coats and brim hats with earflaps snapped under their chins. She kissed their fat cheeks and didn’t let herself cry. They would return to Rocky Mount with Joe and Janie until Jerry could get her mind straight and decide what was next. She had been told she would have to leave the base in less than a week. When she saw Duane and Gregg again, somehow they would have a new home in a new town, the three of them alone.

  On the night drive back to North Carolina, a ripple of panic passed through the children. Gregg began to cry that he was thirsty. The sodas and bottle of milk Janie had brought for the ride were finished and they were at least an hour away from any town. Duane and Jo Jane sat in grim silence listening to Gregg’s steady whining. By the light of the moon, Janie spotted water flowing over rock, a small waterfall by the road. Joe pulled over onto the soft shoulder and took three empty soda bottles and Gregg’s baby bottle to fill them with the icy runoff. The kids wiggled out of the car and into the night, Janie yelling after them to get back in the car, or at least button their coats. They lined up like three little frogs squatting next to Joe, and watched him dip the mouths of the bottles into the flow. They huddled together in the total darkness and tasted the sweet water, colder than the winter air, each holding their bottles for themselves. “You see?” Janie said. “The Lord will provide. Now get back in this car.”

  I was a teenager when my mother first told me about Bill. She told me a hitchhiker had killed Duane’s father. That is how she described him: Duane’s father. She did not say “your grandfather.” I was well into my thirties before I saw my first photograph of Bill. I was clearing a box of magazines out of Granny’s garage when I found an old folder of photographs. One of them was a formal portrait of a soldier in a baggy uniform and lace-up boots, sitting with his legs crossed. I knew who he was without asking. He had my father’s eyes, and mine. I saw in an instant that Duane and I shared something far deeper than our features. I knew something true, something no one else could ever tell me. Duane and I both knew, from the most fragile age, that death is real and sudden and the loss never ends.

  When you lose your father, everything he could have given you is lost. With Bill’s picture in my hand, standing in the dusty garage of my father’s childhood home, I knew what my father had felt; the pain I had always suffered and hidden, he’d shared. The deepest hole I ever fell in, he had fallen in, too. We were together in all the things we could never know about one of the people we could have loved the most. I felt my father close to me, looking over my shoulder at Bill’s face.

  After Bill’s death, Jerry’s first husband, Roy, showed up in Janie’s living room and asked Jerry to marry him again. He said he would help her raise the boys. Roy was still handsome but his forehead was creased with worry. Without hesitating for a moment, Jerry said no. There may have been a time when she had wanted nothing more than to hear Roy admit he missed her, but those days were gone. She knew she would never let another man raise her sons. If she ever saw any man raise a hand to her children in anger, he’d better never fall asleep near her again, or he’d wake up without that hand.

  Jerry decided to return to Nashville and stayed with Bill’s mother, Myrtle, while she looked for a job. She found a bookkeeping position at a NAPA auto parts warehouse and, after two long months apart, brought the boys home from Janie and Joe’s to join her. They lived together under Grandma Myrtle’s watchful eye for a couple of difficult years. It seemed there weren’t many things she and Myrtle could agree on. Myrtle was a country music fan and Jerry preferred big-band dance music and crooners like Perry Como. Myrtle was critical of Jerry going out for drinks. Myrtle thought Jerry spoiled the boys. She dressed them up in suits and ties and took th
em to the symphony, shaking them awake when the swelling music subdued them into sleep. She bought them a record player with a lid like a little suitcase and a pile of picture books with 45 records included. She wanted Duane and Gregg to get used to having nice things. She told Myrtle, “If I put them in silk sheets now, they’ll figure out how to get themselves silk sheets later.”

  When she was finally able, Jerry moved to her own home on Scotland Place, in a neighborhood that bordered the sprawling Belle Meade Plantation. Most of the green land had been transformed into rolling golf courses, but abandoned slave quarters still stocked with iron cooking pots and wooden beds nested in the trees behind fancy horse stables where wealthy whites learned to ride. The boys were forbidden to play there, but of course they did. Carrying their fishing poles, they scooted under the fence and found a pond that was stocked with tiny fish. They rolled their blue jeans over their ankles and rolled the sleeves of their T-shirts above their shoulders like the greasers they saw hanging out at the drugstore. They spent whole afternoons sitting on the trim turf in the sun, their sunken hooks baited with bacon. The little fish were full of bones, but they picked around them and ate their catches for dinner proudly.

  Their new house was on a corner lot with a big backyard, across the road from Parmer Elementary School, where Duane could start first grade in the fall. Jerry found a housekeeper they all came to love. Duane and Gregg would watch in the mornings as Betty walked up the hill from the city bus stop with her pocketbook in the crook of her arm, chatting with the other black ladies coming to work in the white suburbs. She was a patient person and a wonderful cook—best of all, she didn’t miss a trick. When Betty called the boys in to wash their hands before lunch, she’d watch Duane running the faucet without putting his hands underwater, trying to fool her. “You think I can’t see what you’re up to, Duaney?” Jerry was gone all day, but she told herself the boys really wanted for nothing as long as she had Betty.