The Spyglass Tree

by Albert Murray

  I’m not about to be the one to try to dispute that, Giles Cunningham said then. I just don’t want him to get that all mixed up with doing me some kind of personal favor and expecting me to be grateful for it.

  I’ll get right back to you as soon as I find out something, Giles, Gus Strickland said, and Giles Cunningham said, I appreciate that and I’ll be right here at the Pit unless he turns up over at the Dolomite.

  XXV

  When we came through town, the streets around Courthouse Square were as empty as they usually were at that time of night. I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t help wondering if that meant that trouble had already started out at the Pit or at the Dolomite or maybe even at both places. We circled around to the other side of the square and came on out along South Main Street to the city limits marker and through the outskirts and then we were on our way through the open country with the speedometer moving up to 50 mph and then 55 and beyond.

  The bright head beams pushed on through the darkness as the windshield wipers clicked and clacked, swishing and swashing and squigging against the thin, steady, central Alabama early spring drizzle; and with Will Spradley still doubled up on the back seat and with Hortense Hightower handling the Oldsmobile exactly like the expert driver that I was to find out that she had already become all the way back during the earliest days of her apprenticeship in a two-car territory band out on the old southeast vaudeville circuit, the only thing to do was keep on the lookout.

  I was pretty sure that nobody was following us, but I also knew that any lights coming up from the rear could turn out to be a carload of drunken, self-indulgent white hell-raisers on their way back out of town after a showdown at the Pit, and there was also a chance that any traffic you met was on its way in to join the mob.

  At that time, I was only somewhat familiar with the route we were following, so it was only from road maps of that part of Alabama that I could remember that the next town of any size was Junction Springs, which was all the way across the county line. I knew that we didn’t have to go that far and, from the map, I also knew that if you did you could go on south by east to Eufaula and from there you could take the bridge across the Chattahoochee and be in Georgia. Or you could head due south again for the Florida panhandle by way of Dothan, from which you could also go to Jacksonville, by way of Valdosta, Georgia.

  We came zooming on along the damp but unslippery blacktop U.S. federal route and when you are traveling in mostly level farming country like that and there are no sharp curves and no other traffic, a steady sixty-five soon begins to feel like only forty-five, and if you start checking and rechecking your watch, you’re almost certain to get the impression that time itself has slowed down.

  Then there was the weatherworn country crossroads shack that I remember whenever I remember that part of that night, not because it represented any special landmark as such but because when I saw the milepost across from it and realized how far out beyond the town limits we had actually come, that was where and when I suddenly found myself missing the wee hour coziness of my dormitory room and becoming concerned about getting back into the also and also of the campus again.

  Up to that point, I had been so completely caught up in the step-by-step urgency of the situation I had walked into and then also with being on hair-trigger alert for what I knew could happen next that it was as if I had somehow forgotten that I was really only a college boy with assignments in preparation and class sessions to attend the next day, beginning at nine o’clock with a lecture period to be followed by a break and lunch and then a session at two in the afternoon.

  It was also as if I had forgotten that the also and also of the campus had come to include the also and also of the unfinished matter of one Miss Nona Townsend, a sophomore from Tuscumbia County by way of a freshman year at Alabama Normal, whom I had met back during the first week of that third October and to whom I had said what I said because she looked and moved and also sounded so much like the crepe myrtle-cape jasmine beautiful tea-cake perfect tan brown-skin storybook princess that I had always been looking forward to meeting and making myself worthy of some time later on along the way from the spyglass tree to the also and also of whatever wherever.

  You could tell that she was used to having people say ingratiating things to her and as nice-mannered and appropriately modest as her responses always seemed to be, it was also easy enough to see that she was not somebody who really had very much patience with people who were preoccupied with good looks as such or with any of the other superficial values that their flattery suggested. So I didn’t say what I said until I was reasonably sure that I could get away with it, and I did get away with it because by then I had smiled and said hello that many times without making a pass, because I wanted her to become curious enough to find out about me and not think that I was some fast-talking hotshot upperclassman on the prowl for innocent newcomers.

  But I had not followed through. I had not really backed away either. But I had not followed up. Not because I had changed my mind. Not about her. There was nothing disappointing about her. The problem was that I still could not afford to have a steady girlfriend, because I just simply did not have the extra spending change that you had to have for the numerous essentials in the way of treats and favors you were expected to be able to provide when you went steady with somebody on campus in those days, and I had absolutely no intention of giving up any of my free reading time in the library and taking a part-time job in order to finance my social life. That would violate every promise I had ever made to get to college in the first place beginning back with Miss Lexine Metcalf before Mister B. Franklin Fisher and the Early Birds (knights of the ancestral imperative that they expected to be) and not excluding Miss Slick McGinnis.

  And yet there she was as if custom-made, and the next moves were up to me. So I decided to take my chances, and hope that I would be lucky enough to get by with inviting her to go to only those on-campus entertainment events that were covered by the Student Privilege card. The idea was to make it through the rest of the term. Then I would have that last summer to pick up some extra cash for the social obligations of my senior year, and so far I had been able to get by because as a second-year transfer student concerned with making the smoothest possible academic transition from one campus to another, she had already restricted her availability for dates anyway.

  You couldn’t have asked for a better deal. It was indeed almost as if she herself had suggested that she would be busy doing whatever fairy-tale princesses always do in the castle while the as-yet untried and unproven apprentice knight-errant scoots hithering and thithering about, trying to forge his magic wandlike sword and get himself together to fulfill the mission that he had inherited because he is who he is and that will qualify him for an invitation to the castle.

  But now as the Oldsmobile came zooming on further and further beyond the milepost at the crossroads shack, it was as if the main purpose of getting through the night and back onto the campus was to see her the next morning after my first class, when she would be coming down the stairway from room 201 where English Literature Survey Course 203 Section I was held. I wanted to be waiting at the drinking fountain just to say hello and be that close again and walk across the quadrangle with her to the library again.

  Meanwhile, Hortense Hightower drove on, cruising between 55 and 60, and without taking her eyes from the road she winked and smiled every now and then to let you know that she was satisfied with the way things were going, but she had not said anything since she pulled out of her neighborhood, and she still didn’t say anything until she began slowing down because we were coming to the turnoff. Then all she said was, Here we go, Will Spradley. You all right back there, Will Spradley? and Will Spradley said, I’ll just say I’m still here, Boss Lady. I’ll just say I’m still here.

  She turned off and we came on into the woods and along a narrow winding downhill road to a clearing that was the parking area for the Club, and the first thing we saw was Flea Mosley
waiting for us outside under the canopy to the main entrance, and when we pulled up, he said, You sure did get yourself on out here Boss Lady, but don’t get out, don’t even cut the motor. Giles wants y’all just to turn right on around and come right straight on back into town, and he say ain’t nothing happening so don’t worry about a thing. Ain’t going to be no showdown because the peckerwoods ain’t going to show up. Giles say just zip right on back in and drop the college boy on the campus and take Will Spradley on over to the school hospital and he also said find out what time the college boy can be down at the barbershop so Wiley or somebody can pick him up and bring him out to the Pit for lunch tomorrow and he will fill him in then. That’s what the man said, Boss Lady, so don’t let me hold y’all up no longer.

  XXVI

  So I didn’t find out what had happened to make it all turn out the way it did until I heard about it directly from Giles Cunningham himself during lunchtime out at the Pit that next day. And that was also when he went on to say what he said about me and about a part-time summer job beginning the week after school was out at the end of May and lasting through the Labor Day weekend.

  Dud Philpot had not carried out his threat, because within probably less than twenty minutes after Will Spradley had moved out of his reach and escaped through the back door and delivery alleyway, he himself had been taken to the emergency ward of the county hospital, where he was still in the intensive care unit under an oxygen tent (that I was to find out later, incidentally, could always count on emergency backup equipment and supplies from the infirmary on the campus).

  To tell you the goddamn truth, Giles Cunningham said as he and Hortense Hightower and Wiley Peyton and I ate our soup and sandwiches, I never could see that many of the kind of white people we have around here letting themselves be rounded up and led anywhere by some baggy-britches redneck like Dud Philpot. But you never can tell. So when the Boss Lady called me and told me about Will Spradley turning up over there all beat up like that and worrying about me because I was the one Old Dud was really mad at, I figured I best not take no chances because even if he came back out here with just a couple of them old dirt-poor razorbacks from somewhere out there in that neck of the woods he come out of, ain’t no telling what it could lead to before these people around here find out what it all started about. Because now let me tell you something. Don’t ever forget how little it takes to set thousands of normal-seeming white people back not just to all of the old nightmares their foreparents on the plantation used to have about the slaves killing everybody in their sleep but on past that and all the way back to all of the panic the goddamn Indians used to cause among the early settlers. Man, you don’t ever want to do anything that’s going to make somebody realize how scared they are of you, especially when they happened to be the ones with most of the goddamn guns and know how to use them and don’t mind using them. Look, you don’t have to let nobody mess over you. But the minute you start going around trying to prove just on some kind of general principle that you ain’t scared of them, you can get a lot of folks maimed and killed just because you got it all backward.

  So anyway, that’s why I also got in touch with Gus Strickland, he said, and I also knew that he would be the best one to find Cat Rogers and get him on the ball; and he called me inside of about ten minutes and told me what happened. Cat Rogers had just had the ambulance come to pick Dud Philpot up from the sidewalk where he had crumpled on the way from his store to the curb where his car was parked, and that’s just about the story of how come the trouble didn’t go any further than what he did to Will Spradley.

  By the way, what about Will Spradley, Boss Lady? I said, and she said, I just circled back over by the campus hospital on my way over here and he’s doing all right. They had to put in a few stitches but the way he’s carrying on, when the time comes to take them out he intends to be somewhere up north with one of his cousins.

  Hey, look my man, Giles Cunningham said reaching over and touching my arm, I really want you to know how much I appreciate what you did last night and when I said, But I didn’t really do anything, he said, Don’t play yourself cheap. You did plenty. Just falling in with us like that said a lot and the Boss Lady was telling me about how much confidence it gave her to have somebody out there with her acting like he knew what he might have to do. Man, she made you sound like somebody with the makings of just the kind of real pro that I’m always on the lookout for and she already been telling me about how much you like music.

  Then he said if I needed a part-time summer job so that I could buy a couple of new outfits and also have some extra spending money for my senior year, all I had to do was let him know by the middle of May and by June we could work out something that I could take care of along with my own campus obligations to the Scholarship Award Program; and I said, I certainly would, and I also said, Absolutely, no doubt about it.

  They were all smiling at me then, and when I said, I can’t even begin to tell you how much this means, especially at this particular time, he said, You don’t have to, and when I tried to thank him he said, Hey, I’m the one doing the thanking my man, and the thing about it is that it is really my privilege because I know damn well that what I’m offering you is just a little two-bit bonus that I know you can get along without, and I said, Yes but that’s also what makes it so special.

  As we went on talking, he wanted to hear about Mobile, and it turned out that I knew something about some of the downtown people he asked about and that he had also had business dealings with some that I had only heard about. Then while we were finishing our coffee, he lit a cigar and said, So here’s my hand. The Boss Lady will get you back on the campus for your next class.

  But when she and I came outside, I found that I had another surprise coming. Because when I saw the Oldsmobile there was the head of a bass fiddle case sticking out from the back seat, and she said that I was looking at what the proposition that we hadn’t had time to get to last night was all about. She said, I changed my mind about something.

  She said, This thing has been downstairs in the closet since I don’t know when. Then one day not long ago when I got to thinking about how much more you always seem to hear on all those records we been spinning than most professional musicians I know, I said to myself, I bet you I already know exactly what would happen if he had this thing to play around with. Just for fun. So I said, I’m going to see, and so I had it fixed up for you. So you take it and you got the rest of this term and the whole summer and all of next term.

  So that’s my proposition, she said, and she said, All you got to do is get somebody in the string section of the Chapel Orchestra to give you a little start with a few rudiments and you’ll be fingering and reading and figuring all kinds of stuff out for yourself in no time at all. Because you see, I already know how you whistle and hum along and how you don’t just keep the time but also have to play around with it.

  Which, she said, is exactly what made me change my mind. Because at first I was glad that you were not tied down to one instrument because you always listened to the whole band and not just for the place where your instrument comes in. But in this way I’m going to be able to hear you listening to everything all the time just like the drummer and like when the piano player is the one in charge like Duke and Count.

  So what about it? she said as we came on by the old Strickland place and up the slope to that end of the budding green campus, and I said that I had never thought about it like that, and then I said, Never is to be one to not try, Boss Lady, never no days like that.

  We were there then, and she let me out on the empty ramp to the front entrance to the dormitory, and I stood with my arms around the neck and shoulders of the bass fiddle and waved and watched as she pulled on off along the campus mainline and went on out of sight around the knoll across from the promenade lawn and then to the turn-off that passed the dormitory where the clock tower was.

  Then before going to my afternoon seminar, I had to take the bass fiddle upstairs to 35
9, which since the beginning of June almost nine months ago I had been lucky enough to have all to myself as my own turret-tall spyglass tree above but never apart from the also and also of either the briar patch itself or any of the blue steel and rawhide routes hithering and thithering toward the possibility, however remote, of patent leather avenues in beanstalk castle town destinations yet to come.