by Janis Owens
The pill straightened him out without medical intervention, but Myra scolded me between services when I carried her boxload of primary paraphernalia to the car.
“He’s eighty-one years old, Gabe. Leave him alone. Welcome’s split six times over the charismatics. Even Candace left. Don’t torment him about it. He’s too old.”
“Not too old for the truth,” I said with a smile, for there was something very satisfying about baiting these old boys, and Myra slammed the trunk.
“Must you always win?”
“Only when I’m right.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, you’re gone apologize during dinner. Bless his heart, he was white as a sheet.”
I told her I would, but felt not one twinge of guilt, for despite their age, I knew these old boys were a wily, tenacious lot who could damn well take care of themselves, and forty minutes later I was proven right when Brother Sloan took the pulpit for the morning sermon and announced his text with glittering eyes: Second Samuel, chapter eleven.
Now, for the uninitiated, this is the Biblical story of adultery extraordinaire, David and Bathsheba, and with great relish, he described David’s lust, his relentless maneuvering to obtain Bathsheba, and how from all appearances, he’d obtained her when poor Uriah was tidily disposed of by the hand of the Philistines. He kept his eyes demurely downcast for the text and introduction, but when he made it to the last line in the chapter, verse twenty-seven, he raised his face for the first time and met mine squarely across the nine-pew gap, his eyes as bright as a hawk’s as his trembly old voice rang out, “But the thang which David haad done displeeased the Lawd.”
Clayton was beside me, busy scribbling out boundaries on the back of the bulletin, not paying the least bit of attention, but my heart was beating hard as an anvil, and I could feel my neck growing very hot. I couldn’t believe he was using the pulpit as a weapon, but he was, going in for the kill, preaching the body of his sermon on the consequences of David’s sin, Tamar and her rape by Almon, then the tragic story of David and his son Absalom.
O my son Absalom, my son, my son,” he cried. “Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.”
The words settled on me like a curse as I watched Clayton’s small excited face, frowning with concentration as he made his first move, and I tell you what, I came close to spitting on the floor and walking out.
“I can’t believe it,” I told Myra that afternoon in the privacy of our bedroom. “He nailed me from the pulpit, the ruthless old son of a bit—”
“Don’t you ever—”
“Oh, cut the shit, Myra. He cursed me was what he did. Didju hear his voice? The thaang thet Daavid haad done displeeased the Laawd.’“
Myra was inexplicably unconcerned. “Gabriel, honey, it’s just your own guilt talking.”
“Guilt, my ass. Everybody knew what he was talking about, and I’ll tell you one thing, that’ll be the last time I ever step foot in Welcome Baptist, me or my checkbook either one, I can grant you that.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, but as the weeks went by, she’d serenade me at breakfast about how much everyone missed me.
“Brother Kin always goes out of his way to ask about you.”
“Brother Kin,” I’d tell her, “is a Nazi.”
She finally let up, and I got a lot of work done on those balmy Sunday mornings, my first spring back, though Sim and Clay whined church wasn’t the same without me.
“Play against each other,” I advised.
“Clay’s not any good. I kill him in two moves.”
“You do not. I beat you once—”
“You cheated—”
“Boys, boys,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve backslid. Give Knute my regards over dinner.” Brother Folger had ceased to worry me as competition for Myra’s affection. He was just too big and dumb. I couldn’t see Myra putting up with him more than two hours at a time.
However, as the month passed, my departure from Welcome did present me with a small, unforseen problem, one that I’d seldom been challenged with before: boredom. I thought the book would keep me busy for at least a year, but once I got started, I found I couldn’t sustain enough drive to keep me at it more than a couple of hours at a time, and after a few weeks of moody speculation, I came to the surprising conclusion that what was lacking was the classroom—the give and take, the questions, the whole noisy propellant of inquiry—and the next morning at breakfast, I announced I was looking for a job.
“Why?” was the general reaction, even from Myra, and I was a little hurt.
“Why? Because I’m the Big Man, the Breadwinner, the Daddy; I work. Bring home the bacon.”
The boys accepted this explanation easily enough, though it prompted one solitary question from Missy, not addressed to me, but to her mother: “We don’t have to actually live off it, do we?” she asked, no sarcasm intended, and after advising her to quit spending so much of her discretionary time in the company of her grandmother, I put on my wedding suit and my Rolex and quietly went about the business of finding a job.
In what I considered an act of loyalty, I offered my services to FSU first, but like most Florida universities, found them particularly uninterested in their own history, content to hang on to Europe and suck up to Ivy League rejects, a category I might have fit into if not for a reputation I seemed to have garnered for departing on short notice. So I shook the Tallahassee dust from my shoes and hit a few community colleges, but found them, if possible, less obliging than FSU. Most of them were small vocational/academic institutions run by xenophobic locals, and the sight of my Volvo with its New York license plates sent me down for the count before I could even open my mouth.
Then, to add insult to injury, some mailing list hooked onto my new financial status and I was suddenly barraged by FSU and UNC and Harvard, all intensely interested in my assuming my position as a proud alumnus. First, there were little cards asking for my $1000___,$5000___, or $___ donation; then there were personal letters from their representatives, kindly offering to fly down at their own expense to discussendowment opportunities with me. I found the FSU one particularly irritating in light of the cavalier way they’d treated my resumé, and on the little prepaid RSVP card, scribbled a profane variation on: In your dreams, bud.
However, this small revenge in no way resolved the problem at hand, namely my lack of employability, and I was desperate enough to consider putting in an application at the bank when Clayton, of all people, came to my rescue, bursting in on me one afternoon while I was writing upstairs, his best friend Kenneth in his wake. They had run all the way from the bus stop and were too breathless to speak for a moment, Clay pointing at Kenneth, gasping, “Tell ’im. Tell ’im.”
“What?” I asked, but Kenneth could only pant.
Clayton finally managed, “Mister Nair. Got in a wreck.”
“Who?”
“Mister Nair. Teacher. Hurt bad. Won’t be back.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m sorry. Kenneth, was he some kin of yours?”
“No,” Clayton gasped. “He teaches history,” he pointed at me, “like you.”
“Oh,” I said, sitting back.
Kenneth finally added his contribution. “Kemp had the sub. She’s a jerk.”
“That’s right,” Clayton said, pulling my arm. “And Mr. Nair’ll be out all year. Come on, Gabe; they’ll give it to somebody else. History’s the only thing I get A’s in. I need you.”
Spoken like that, he could have talked me into robbing a convenience store, and within the hour I was back in my suit and Rolex and at long last succeeded in impressing someone, the personnel secretary at the school board office. She sent me to the principal for an interview, a very nice man, a little in awe of me, not because of the suit or the watch or even the Volvo, but because I was a Catts, and by Michael’s labors it was a name that had come to be locally synonymous with supreme wealth.
He hired me on the spot, and when I got home, I swore a highfiving Clayton and Ke
nneth to secrecy and invited everyone, including Mama, to supper at the Steakhouse. When the food was finished, I stood very grandly with my tea glass in hand and announced that after careful examination of career options in North Florida, I had accepted a position of enormous responsibility shaping young minds at Lincoln Park Middle School. Everyone seemed to take it at face value, and they were pathetically eager to congratulate me.
Myra kissed me, and Mama, poor Mama, wept tears of sheer relief, for her excuses on my behalf were beginning to edge her close to the lake of fire and brimstone, and now she had something to brag on, her son Gabe, the professional. And while I might downplay it all, she was perfectly sincere when she proudly announced my occupation to all and sundry, for to her, a teacher was as good as a lawyer who was as good as a doctor who was as good as the President. They wore ties, and they didn’t get grease under their nails, and for the first time in twenty years, even Harvard was eclipsed by it.
“I’ll start at eighteen thousand dollars a year,” I proclaimed. “Missy will have to shop at Wal-Mart.”
“Mama,” she cried, and Myra, her arm around me, was annoyed.
“You better watch yourself, Melissa Anne. There ain’t nothing wrong with Wal-Mart. Don’t you start playing the snob with me.”
A small display of loyalty for my benefit, I am sure, and nothing for Missy to take seriously, for my salary wouldn’t keep this household in underwear, Wal-Mart or otherwise, but something in their support made me begin to get a little excited.
“I’ll show these yokels how to teach history,” I said more than once, and when I read over the state-approved text in bed that night, I made so many exclamations of outrage that Myra began to have second thoughts.
“You’re not gone do these children like you done Brother Sloan, are you?”
“No, no,” I murmured, but when I’d come across another absurdity, I’d let out another yell, and the next morning, Myra warned me to go easy on them.
“Clayton’ll catch it if you get anybody mad.”
I assured her that I knew how to comport myself in a classroom, that what did she think I’d been doing up North all these years?
“Those were Yankees,” she said. “These people know your phone number.”
I promised to be the picture of passivity, and I truly meant it, for I was beginning to see that the marriage of an alcoholic mama’s boy and a schizoaffective babygirl would be one that required a certain measure of insincerity to succeed, and dear God in heaven, I wanted it to succeed.
So I behaved with impeccable manners, keeping my utter disgust with the school system to myself and relying on the guerrilla tactics taught me on my dear mother’s knee to get my way without causing so much as a ripple of unrest on the calm pond of public education. Only rarely was I ever challenged, and then it was usually at my own table.
“Why do you teach slavery so long?” Simon asked one morning at breakfast. “Mr. Nair didn’t.”
“Because LP Middle is eighty percent black and one hundred percent ignorant of black history,” I said.
He chewed reflectively. “Well, where does that leave Clay? And Kenneth? Black history ain’t their history.”
I gladly rose to the point. “History is not the memorization of facts and dates, but the science of interpreting events in a reasonable and informative manner that enables us to better understand our motivation as a people and deal with current events and plot future goals. So whether Clayton studies white history or black history or junebug history is immaterial as long as he is being trained to establish facts and interpret them in an intelligent fashion.”
Simon looked at me a moment. “Then why not train his mind with white history?”
“Because teaching white history wouldn’t make anyone mad.” This contribution was from Myra, as she hurried us out the door, and not an entirely accurate assessment, for I was not being merely contrary here, but trying to make these children aware of their heritage. I mean, these children were from poor black-belt families who had a tremendous sense of place among themselves, a whole thriving subculture in their churches and oral history, but you’d never know it to read the state-approved texts. So in a fit of desperation, finding the school board completely apathetic to anything I cared to try at the black middle school, I organized a living history project, with truly fascinating results.
My work in Indiana had been interesting, but this was raw, fallow ground, and I was truly astounded with my students’ dedication and their families’ cooperation. We worked on it two months, and by May had collected taped recollections of life in the turpentine camps, worn remnants of old slave quilts, first-hand accounts of lynchings and trials and murders, superstitions and tall tales and magic spells, most of which I’d never seen documented anywhere, even in Washington. When the physical evidence (including a mojo hand and a lyestained washboard) began to pile up in our classroom, I talked the librarian into giving us the little room behind the periodicals and went about the task of showing the students how to meticulously order and preserve everything, assuring them this history was as vital as anything they’d ever heard about Columbus and fourteen hundred and ninety two.
So we were on a roll there at LP Middle, starting our final projects, and I found myself looking forward to Mondays, a sure sign of occupational satisfaction, when Clayton and I would ride to school together and discuss school issues, who was stupid, who was smart, who was pregnant (a fairly common occurrence, especially in the eighth grade), why algebra was so incomprehensible, why girls liked jocks. And between and around all this, I’d tell him about Michael, for he’d once confided to me that he could hardly remember his father anymore, and it had only been a year and a half, how could that be?
“You were young when he died,” I told him. Then, on sudden inspiration, “Why don’t you make him your final project?”
“Daddy?” he asked doubtfully “Won’t it be silly? Doing your own father?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Michael lived and died. He moved in time. He has just as valid a claim to historical preservation as Ronald Reagan, for God’s sake.”
“Oh,” Clayton said, and with no more ado, he quietly went about it as I’d taught him, carrying around a tape player for a week or two, getting Myra to describe how they’d met (she gave the uncut version, which the children found mighty amusing), where they lived, and why. Then he went to Mama, who cried through most of it, but donated memorabilia, baseballs and pictures and his first pay stub from Sanger (sixty-nine stinking dollars for forty-seven hours’ work), then hit the secondary rounds, Candace and Sam and Benny and Brother Sloan; then, last of all, he came to me.
We talked out by the pool on a balmy spring evening, the mimosa in bloom again, the air sweet and clear and almost achingly reminiscent of the fence line on Magnolia Hill, but once the tape was rolling, I had a hard time discussing Michael, for there were so many doors I could not open. I think my viewpoint was the weakest in the bunch, nothing more than a patchwork of anecdotes and wistfulness, lacking Myra’s detail or Mama’s grief or Sam McRae’s powerful, moving words that Clayton said made him cry.
“Like a baby,” he said. “I was ashamed.”
I assured him it was not an unknown phenomenon around the Catts household and, let me tell you, when I came upon his project, a simple three-sided display with two tapes and a written report, I didn’t get past the title page before I was going strong. Hand-written in his fat, child’s script, it was simply entitled: “My Father, Michael Catts” and in the white space below, he’d been cocky enough to include a dedication: “To Gabe, with love.” I tell you what, if I hadn’t been crying so hard, I would have laughed, for it was a classic piece of Catts family irony, but I would have given him an A even if he’d dedicated it to Carlym Folger, for somehow, by some talent (nothing he’d inherited from me, that was for sure) he’d reported on Michael unemotionally, with no trace of sentimentality, letting the facts speak for themselves. He included the baseball, he included Sanger, he
even picked up on the social stigma of living on Magnolia Hill in the forties and fifties. From Sam he’d learned of the Klan attacks and chronicled them with details I’d never heard before—how they’d hung him in effigy from the rafters at Sanger, how they’d burned a cross in Sam’s front yard three weekends in a row, how very close they’d come to shutting the plant down for good.
It was an accumulation of hard, raw facts that made for compelling history, and if he left out a few essential ingredients that had in some ways shaped it all—Myra’s insanity, my infidelity—it wasn’t his fault, for they still resided in the realm of the unspoken. And as any good historian will tell you, no history is history until it is recorded; but at that point, the words were just not there.
Chapter
18
Iguess you could call it a spring of promise, and when the school board included a continuing contract in the envelope with my last check, we celebrated lavishly, as if I’d been appointed an eminent scholar at Oxford, throwing a big fish fry, inviting all the old boys from the men’s class, even Brother Sloan, whom I hadn’t spoken to since his public accusation. He didn’t seem the least bit repentant; in fact, there was still a smile of victory playing around his mouth whenever I looked at him, but I let it pass, for the other old men seemed pathetically eager to make amends. Myra told me Brother Folger had taken the class in my absence, and I think sitting under his teaching two hours a week was making them fear dementia had set in.
They all showed up hours early, dressed in their best leisure clothes, ancient khakis and cotton shirts, their hearing aids affixed with new batteries, their wives in tow bearing indescribably good dishes like cheese grits and banana pudding. Before the oil was fairly hot, one or two had cast out a bit of bait (“Now thet Dukakis’ wife, hear she’s an alcoholic—”), hoping I’d hit, but Myra had made me promise to be agreeable, so I could make nothing but the most disinterested replies, and had a feeling they left full, but intellectually starved. So I took pity on them and called Brother Sloan aside and agreed to take the class back and the next morning, the first of June, gave them their money’s worth, standing at the podium with my Quarterly open in case the Sunday school superintendent happened by, addressing their eager old faces with narrowed eyes.
