Anthill

by Edward Osborne Wilson

Marcia was intrigued. After all, he sounded like a nice guy, who was really, truly interested in her. She said, "Oh, no, no, that's all right. A couple of minutes is okay with me."

  Two weekends later, after several telephone calls, each longer and warmer than the last, the ersatz senior of the University of West Florida showed up at the Semmes home for a first date. He was driving a new 1976 Chevrolet, on which he'd made a down payment the day before. He wore his best clothes. His hair was freshly cut and brushed. In his pocket were two tickets to a bull-riding competition in nearby Chickasaw.

  Ainesley was startled by the magnificence of Marybelle, its colonnades, its spacious lawn and circular drive. When he got out of the car and searched for the street number, unaware that great houses do not as a rule display their street numbers, he found instead a bronze plaque installed by the Alabama Historical Society identifying Marybelle as a state historical site.

  While Ainesley waited anxiously in the main hall for Marcia to come down the spiral staircase, her father Jonathan stepped out of the library to speak to him.

  "Isn't bull-riding a rough kind of sport to take a young lady?"

  Ainesley was prepared for this.

  "Well, sir, I see your point, sir. It's been my experience, though, that young ladies among my friends sometimes get tired of going to concerts and stuff like that, and it's a nice change of pace for them. You can learn a lot from bull-riding."

  Jonathan was worried by this response. He opened his mouth to probe some more, then let it pass. He had documents to review, and an important meeting with a committee of state senators in Montgomery the next afternoon.

  Marcia joined them at that point. She was dressed in a vaguely cowgirl outfit of jeans, kerchief, and low boots.

  "Oh, Daddy, I'm so excited! Have you ever been to a real rodeo before?"

  "Yessir," Ainesley said. "Nothing less than the real thing."

  What attracted Marcia to Ainesley was his vitality and self-confidence. Despite his bantam size, he seemed strong, able to address her father as one adult to another. That evening and later, he implied dark deals in his past he wished not to discuss. He told stories, all with a kernel of truth even if they had happened to someone else. All were richly embroidered. To Marcia, Ainesley was a man above the callow youths of her acquaintance, with a deep and significant history relative to her own meager experience. The highway was in his eyes, the airways, the sea lanes. He had destinations, he had plans, and he had connections implied but still undisclosed to Marcia. She tried to imagine, as he intended, how it would feel to be at his side during these adventures.

  This persona of Ainesley was not deliberately false. It was an accretion of stories and poses, at the center of which lived undisturbed his personal sacred code. This much was unalterable: he would always meet his obligations, if at all possible, and he would never tell a lie that could hurt his family or friends. He would never assault another except in self-defense, and in conflict he would never bend to anyone if he knew he was right.

  If all else came apart in Ainesley's life, the code would remain. It was the definition of his manhood and the safety net of his sanity.

  What Marcia could not understand about Ainesley, nor could her parents, was that he was a commonly encountered denizen in the particular stratum of the world he inhabited, and that he was working his way through a biography appropriate to it. He would in good time settle down, but not to the end that he imagined and wished the Semmeses of Mobile to believe. Ainesley was endowed with powerful self-respect, but he lived one day at a time, and sought the pleasures awaiting him in each one. He was not a man to put off rewarding himself. Since his teenage years he had been a heavy smoker, although he could still cut back, as he now did in the presence of Marcia and her parents. He thought sipping hard liquor and holding it well to be a masculine virtue. He had occasional weekend binges, but none Marcia was allowed to see.

  True to his culture, Ainesley was a gun lover. His father and paternal grandfather had gathered collections of firearms as large as the law and household space allowed. In his parents' home at West Pirate Beach hung a photograph of his grandfather with two brothers standing behind a fallen black bear, cradling their rifles in folded arms. The slain animal had been one of the last of the endangered Florida subspecies seen in Escambia County.

  From early boyhood Ainesley enjoyed, along with excursions to hunt and fish, trips with his father to an abandoned farm in Jepson County to try out items from the family armory. On those occasions he was allowed to fire an old army-issue Colt .45 and a rifle used by a distant cousin during the Spanish-American War. Ainesley, then and afterward, was awed by the spectacle of objects bursting into pieces at the pull of a trigger.

  Ainesley was a patriot. As a boy, he had a fantasy of wiping out pillboxes with a machine gun and grenades and marching in a victory parade down Government Street with a chest full of medals. During the Vietnam War he tried as a seventeen-year-old to join the Marine Corps, but was turned away for reasons he preferred thereafter to keep to himself.

  Finally, Ainesley was a racist. But he had a way of squaring that with his code. He was a separatist, he said. He had a formula to recite when in polite company: "I got nothing against colored people; I just want to be with my own kind." Otherwise, he stayed muted and ambivalent on the subject--except when drinking in bars and on fishing trips with like-minded white male citizens.

  Ainesley did, at least, have a boast-worthy pedigree. He and his close relatives claimed that there had been a Cody in every American war since the Revolution, and that might well have been true. Several of his forebears were Hodgeses, one of the clans that settled Blakeley and the fertile land of what was later to become Baldwin County across the bay from Mobile, when that city was still a mud village. Another ancestor, John Tom Cody, along with his brother Lee, were among the Mobile hotheads who joined the Alabama Artillery as soon as they heard news of the attack on Fort Sumter. Buck privates to the end, they helped lay the "hornets' nest" of concentrated cannon fire that drove back the Union forces at Shiloh. Lee was captured at Murfreesboro, but John Tom fought on despite an injured right leg. He was captured at the last battle of the Civil War, fought the day after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox and before the news reached the gathering battalions. The battle site was providentially Fort Blakeley, in South Alabama, so that John Tom had only to shoulder his rifle and other belongings and walk home in a single day. Settled back in Mobile, he married and fathered a large family.

  Ainesley and Marcia's courtship proceeded uneasily under the noses of the elder Semmeses. Her parents were as beguiled as Marcia by Ainesley's charm and unfailing good manners. He returned her home on time, every time. He told her parents he was a junior executive in his father's business, and a sometime student at the University of West Florida.

  Their surveillance of Ainesley was cursory. They saw the image he projected, not the real young man remaining hidden. They asked the mandatory questions, and were satisfied with the answers they got and the easy assumptions they made.

  "Who are his people? The Baldwin County Codys? That's a good family," Jonathan Semmes said to Elizabeth.

  He was thinking of the Codys of relatively posh Fairhope, not the Codys who inhabited West Pirate Beach on Perdido Bay a short distance away.

  To the Semmeses, Ainesley relentlessly displayed what he himself considered to be his three most genuine and impressive qualities. He believed in himself, in what he said, and he was passionate about it all. Truth was whatever Ainesley thought for the moment to be factually true--that is, true for sure or mostly true, or at least very possibly true. His cocky self-confidence cut through the exaggerated good manners and foggy urbanities of Marcia's own class. Ainesley focused his energies on Marcia solely as a desirable woman. He was sexually passionate but never forced himself on her. He showed no desire to use her or her family to climb the social ladder, and, while polite to her parents, was otherwise indifferent to them. He just didn't care about anything but h
er, and that endeared him still more to Marcia Semmes.

  Jonathan Semmes saw Ainesley's intentions the same way. He thought the young man rough cut but "up and coming." Marcia's mother Elizabeth alone remained suspicious. She called him a "zircon in the rough."

  No matter. Marcia fell in love with this earnest man.

  Marcia's parents learned of the depth of her feelings too late. They were uneasy about the match, but not enough to be openly hostile to so intense a romantic attachment. In any case, most of their ambitions were invested in their son, Cyrus, ten years older than Marcia, and already a vice president of the family firm. They hoped--in fact, they expected--that Marcia herself would soon end the affair and regain her freedom to meet other young men, this time of her own class.

  They were therefore stunned when she announced upon returning from an evening date that she and Ainesley were engaged to be married. She found them in Jonathan's study and held up her left hand to display a diamond ring just given her by Ainesley.

  "We've decided to have the wedding as soon as possible," she said.

  She paused to examine their faces, her face screwed tight in anxiety. She was torn in loyalty between the two forces she was pitting in opposition.

  Jonathan stood up, his mouth curling down, and started to speak. "Are you--"

  Marcia interrupted quickly, "Oh, no, no. Nothing like that, Daddy. I'm not pregnant or anything like that. It's just that we love each other and want to start our life together."

  She forgot to bring her left hand down, and left the ring posed in the air like a flag.

  Elizabeth grabbed the arm of a chair to sit down. Jonathan tried to speak again. "Let me get this straight--"

  But Marcia interrupted. "We want to keep it simple, nothing too fancy. I hope I haven't upset you too much. I'm real tired right now. Can we talk about this tomorrow?"

  The necessary act had been performed, and now she could escape. She lowered her hand and busied herself with something in her handbag, then turned and rushed upstairs to her room.

  Jonathan picked up the nearest telephone and summoned Cyrus, who with his wife, Anne, and their little daughters lived in the west apartment of Marybelle.

  "Cy, we've got a family emergency. I need you over here in the library right away."

  Cyrus arrived three minutes later, wrapped in his favorite green Chinese bathrobe, and sat. Jonathan explained what had just happened.

  "The son of a bitch didn't say a thing to you, did he?" Cyrus said. "Of course he wouldn't ask permission."

  "I want you to take charge of this problem, Cy. First thing in the morning, I want you to hire a private detective. You might try that outfit over on Oak Street, I think it is. Jim Holden's their attorney and they've got a solid reputation. I want a report about this guy and his family, and I want to know everything about all his people, and I want it yesterday. I think they all live over in Baldwin County, but dammit, to tell you the truth, I'm not even sure about that."

  One of the rich elite of Mobile had issued a command. At the end of the day one week later, Cyrus laid a seventy-page report on Jonathan's desk.

  It was not as bad as Jonathan and an increasingly distraught Elizabeth had feared. At least the Codys of West Pirate Beach were respectable. Ainesley's father, George Cody, was a certified public accountant who worked contracts along the Emerald Coast as far east as Fort Walton Beach. He had been divorced ten years. His ex-wife had remarried and now lived in Jacksonville. George had a girlfriend, a pleasant, fortyish divorcee who waited tables at a Gulf Shores restaurant and had a son of her own. Ainesley had two older brothers, both married and working in construction jobs, mostly on the Florida Panhandle. All three of the Cody brothers were solid citizens, paid their taxes, stayed out of trouble. One of Ainesley's brothers had been charged with criminal assault following a bar fight, but the charge was dropped. Ainesley was the wild card of the bunch. He'd been in some scrapes involving property damage and petty theft as a teenager, but now, at twenty-five, still had no felony record. He was known as something of a confidence man. But as far as the investigation could uncover he had not parlayed his talents into any potentially criminal scam. Basically, he was just a "bullshit artist" who liked to brag on himself to impress girls and his male companions. Otherwise Ainesley seemed passable. No wives, no girlfriends abandoned in pregnancy. He was generally regarded by the redneck circle around him as "real smart." He loved cars, was especially knowledgeable about auto parts. He'd changed jobs a lot, but not enough to be of concern, and was judged to be reliable when on a job. He had graduated from high school but showed no interest in going further.

  "Well," Jonathan said to Cyrus, "let's think worst-case scenario here. Maybe if we send some breaks Cody's way, he might work out at least reasonably okay. At least it seems he won't be a disgrace to the family. I don't think! But before we go any further, let me first try to get Marcia to hold off awhile, say six months, before the wedding. You know, have a decent engagement period for the family's sake. Maybe, if she's got time to think a little more, she'll change her mind."

  But Marcia would have none of it. When Jonathan suggested the delay, "for decency's sake," she gave the response he both feared and expected.

  "No, Daddy. We love each other. We've got our life together all planned. We're not going to wait. Did you and Mom wait?"

  Jonathan was forced to admit they hadn't. In any case, he'd already chosen not to alienate his daughter. He had decided to accept Marcia's decision and make the best of it. After all, it wasn't as though he'd been grooming Marcia or her husband, whoever that would turn out to be, to take over the business.

  Upon arriving at the Loding Building an hour after the meeting with Marcia, he called Cyrus back into his office.

  "Cy, we've got another crisis on our hands here. Marcie is not going to delay the wedding, and I can't force her to. She wants the wedding as soon as possible. Since your mother has to make the arrangements, we can delay the whole thing a little while, but I doubt if it can be more than two months."

  "So what's the crisis?" Cyrus asked.

  "Cy, surely you are joking to ask me that. I will not have my daughter living in some squalid little apartment in West Pirate Beach, and with a part-time automobile mechanic, for God's sake!"

  "Well, what can we do about it?" Cyrus was still puzzled. "At least he's not some other race, or worse."

  "I want you, and whatever staff around here you need, to drop what you're doing--just pass it on to someone else on the staff, if necessary--and find Cody a better job. Set him up in a little auto-repair business of his own, if that's absolutely necessary, and I want you to find an affordable small house close by that business we might buy for them, and I want the job and the house to be not too far from here, right in Mobile or a suburb close by. Do you think you can do that?"

  He was standing up as he said this, and pressing the buzzer on his desk to summon his secretary.

  "Yessir," Cyrus said. "I think we might manage that. I'll get started on it right away."

  "Eileen," Jonathan said to the gray-haired woman entering the office, "I want you to go with Cyrus for a while and help him get started on the job I just gave him. This is top priority, and top privacy too, you understand?"

  Eight days later Ainesley Cody sat in the chair across from Jonathan Semmes's desk. He had not yet graduated in status enough to cross the room and be seated with Jonathan on the sofa next to the fireplace.

  "Ainesley," Jonathan began, "thank you so much for coming by." Then he paused for an answer.

  "Yessir, thank you, Mr. Semmes, I appreciate it."

  "First of all, I asked you to come here today to welcome you into our family."

  "Yessir, thank you. I consider it a kind of an honor to be a member of the Semmes family."

  "Ainesley, I believe you can understand I want the best for my daughter. Any father would. And for you too, of course."

  Ainesley nodded vigorously. "Yessir." He smoothed his hair and straightened his tie
.

  Jonathan continued, "They tell me you're an expert on automobiles and into parts and things like that."

  Ainesley continued nodding. He licked his lips nervously. "Yessir, I think I'm pretty good. I've had a lot of practice."

  Jonathan smiled and nodded back. "Well, here's what we're going to do. Our company owns a nice hardware and auto parts store in Clayville, and they need an assistant manager. The pay will be pretty good, at least not bad for a young couple, and it's a steady job, with a real future. I've been speaking with Jesse Nichols, the manager, and he'd be glad to take you on. When you start up, you could get on-the-job training in marketing and such, so you'd be in a position to run a little business for starters, if everything works out."

  Ainesley started to raise his hand. "Yessir, but--"

  "Now, here's another thing. Jesse Nichols is close to retirement age. The job as manager will be open in a year or two, and you'd be the logical person to fill it. You might even find yourself in a position to purchase the business, given time, and maybe down the line you might want to expand some."

  "Mr. Semmes--" His hand dropped back down.

  "Now, here's one more thing. Elizabeth and I have been thinking about the right kind of wedding present for Marcie, and we've decided to do the following. We've found a real nice little starter house in Clayville that would be ideal for you and Marcie. Just blocks from the store. Nothing fancy, you know, but real nice. We've put down a binder fee on it, and if the job part looks okay to you, we're going to buy it for her and help give you both a really decent start in your marriage."

  Jonathan Semmes paused. Ainesley remained quiet now, rendered speechless by all the largesse. New possibilities began to flow through his fertile imagination. The good life had just come within his grasp. Money, status, prestige among the other Codys and his friends.

  Jonathan smiled brightly and lifted his hands, as though pleasantly surprised by his own offer. It was his favorite way of closing a deal.

  "Well, what do you say? Is that okay with you? I know it will be with Marcie." In fact, he hadn't spoken to Marcie. He wanted Ainesley on his side first.