Safe from the Neighbors

by Steve Yarbrough

  ALSO BY STEVE YARBROUGH

  The End of California

  Prisoners of War

  Visible Spirits

  The Oxygen Man

  Veneer

  Mississippi History

  Family Men

  For Ania W

  The perpetual activity of forgetting gives our every act a ghostly, unreal, hazy quality. What did we have for lunch the day before yesterday?

  —Milan Kundera

  The Sixteenth Section

  “JUST LOOK WHAT HAPPENS TO POETS,” I used to tell my honors class on the first day of school. “Half the time they go mad. And you know why I think that happens? Too much truth distilled to its essence, all surrounding evidence ignored or discarded. And I’m not faulting them for that. They’re just doing what poets are supposed to, and they’ve left us some beautiful works of literature, some of which have lasted for hundreds of years.

  “When you pursue truth the way a historian does, though, you’ll find that it seldom travels without escort. There are all kinds of accompanying data. And causation, in particular, is usually a complicated matter. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

  “In 1944, the day after the Allies landed in Normandy, a woman who lived down in Belzoni gave birth prematurely to quintuplets, and all of them died within the hour. The Jackson and Memphis papers had already reported the invasion, and this poor woman had reason to believe her husband was there. Like women all over Mississippi—all over America—she was terrified, scared to death her guy might’ve died on a beach thousands of miles from home. Now what effect do you think her fears could’ve had on her pregnancy?”

  A hand or two always went up. “Maybe it got her so scared it threw her into labor.”

  “It certainly could have. Things like that do happen. And so since there would’ve been no reason for her husband to storm those beaches if the Nazis hadn’t been entrenched there, you might consider accusing Adolf Hitler of having helped cause the deaths of those babies, along with all those other deaths he helped cause, millions upon millions of deaths in hundreds of battles or in concentration camps spread across Europe.

  “But you might look for other ‘causes’ as well. For instance, when I was a student up at Ole Miss, where I learned about these dead babies while working on an oral history project, I discovered this lady’s father had lost his job in 1931 and stayed unemployed until 1942. The whole time she was growing up, she didn’t have enough to eat, so by the time she got married she’d been malnourished for years, just like a lot of other Americans at that time, including my mother and father and quite a few of your grandparents. We’re talking about the Great Depression, and who usually gets blamed for responding inadequately to that?”

  Another hand in the air. “Herbert Hoover?”

  “That’s right. We won’t worry about whether that’s fair or not. We’ll just add his name next to Hitler’s.” I usually started to move around the room at this point, walking over to the window to look out at the athletic fields where the Loring High football and baseball teams held their practices. With my back to the students, I’d say, “Of course, it turns out this woman had smoked all the way through her pregnancy and, according to some, drank hard liquor, too. It was illegal in Mississippi back then, but you could get booze from bootleggers, and more than a few people thought she did, though they weren’t sure how, given that she was poor and broke. These days, knowing a lot more about the effects of smoking and drinking on fetuses in utero, we might want to add her own name to the list of folks ‘responsible’ for this. We might put her mom’s name up there, too, because when she found out her daughter was pregnant, she told this troubled young woman to get out of the house, that she and her husband couldn’t feed any more mouths.”

  I’d always turn around and face them before making the next statement. “Depending on whether or not you subscribe to a religious worldview—and I know most of you do—you might even want to add God’s name to the list we began with Adolf Hitler. Because the temperature in the Delta on June seventh, 1944, was a hundred and four degrees, and nobody had air conditioners then. Women’s bodies are already under plenty of stress during pregnancy, and immediately prior to delivery, this particular young woman displayed the symptoms of heatstroke.”

  The last suggestion never failed to make them uncomfortable: twenty-five bodies changed position, shifting in their seats, shuffling their feet. Nobody cared if you laid a few more deaths on Hitler’s doorstep, and as for the young woman herself, well, she should have known better than to smoke and drink. But most of the kids in my classroom, black and white alike, had been washed in the blood just like I had, and while the blood had long ago washed off me, they were still covered with it.

  “You know what you could do, though?” I’d say, stepping over to the board and picking up a piece of chalk that I started bouncing off the palm of my hand. “You could do what a good historian does. Note all the available facts, create as full a picture as possible, then conclude that on the day after D-Day, between two and three in the afternoon, five babies born to a nineteen-year-old woman named Mary Ethel Benson—whose husband, Charlie, was in France, where he’d win the Medal of Honor—died in Belzoni, Mississippi.”

  From the looks on their faces, you could see I’d sold them my argument, just as I’d sold it to myself.

  In 1860 there were 7.24 slaves for every free person (all of these being white) in Loring County. And even though a lot of African Americans left the Delta in the 1920s and again in the years after the Second World War, the racial balance has remained remarkably stable. In 2006, the county was 70 percent black, while the town of Loring itself was 68 percent.

  You could see this history reflected in the faces, bodies, apparel and accoutrements of the students arrayed in the bleachers for the opening assembly of the fall semester. About 70 percent were black, most of them dressed in standard-issue Wal-Mart clothes. The white kids, on the other hand, wore designer jeans, with the girls favoring what my twin daughters, both at Ole Miss now, had taught me were called “capsleeve T-shirts,” “double-layer tanks” and “peasant skirts.” They carried brand-new JanSport backpacks, and the majority had driven their own cars to school, whereas their black classmates either walked or rode the bus. You could tell that many of the black kids, and a few of the white ones as well, had starch-heavy diets, though our free-lunch program tried to serve healthier fare. Except for a few athletes, who tended to flock together regardless of color, the races didn’t mix much at assemblies. The white kids clustered high up in the bleachers, reversing the order that prevailed in movie theaters when I was a boy.

  Our principal, Ramsey Coleman, walked to the lectern, directly under the basket at the far end of the court. He’s a likable guy who took a lot of flak a few years ago for looking like Johnnie Cochran, folks asking if he’d found any bloody gloves lately. Like me, he’d recently turned fifty and had grown up in Loring.

  While he welcomed everybody back and enumerated the exciting developments that had taken place since the spring semester—“we bought six new HP laptops for the computer lab, got new uniforms for the football team, replaced all the windowpanes y’all shot out and filled the holes in the walls with bulletproof plaster”—I found myself wondering what it would be like coming to school knowing I wouldn’t see either of my daughters in the hallway between classes or eat lunch with them and their boyfriends (when they had any) like I had almost every school day for the last four years. A lot of things had just changed, and though Jennifer and I had known it was coming, I don’t think we really understood how we’d feel when we drove off and left them up at Oxford. Each of us cried coming home, but while you might imagine their absence would draw us closer, if anyth
ing it seemed to push us farther apart. At first that surprised me, but after a few days it was starting to make sense. Up until a certain point, we’d done things together as a family, but then the girls got older, life got busier and we drifted into a kind of unspoken agreement that I’d do some things with them—teaching them to drive, listening to them complain about my colleagues or taking them fishing, back when they still enjoyed that—while she’d do others, like helping them buy clothes, showing them how to cook and reading their English papers. We couldn’t share each other’s loss because for a long time now we hadn’t shared each other’s pleasure.

  “Two teachers left us over the summer,” Ramsey was saying. “Don’t act triumphant, though. Y’all didn’t scare ’em to death—they just got better-paying jobs.” Most of the kids laughed. Ramsey was fond of saying that only 2 percent of the students were really troublemakers, but since he first made that statement the phrase Two Percent Club had begun showing up on walls and in toilet stalls. Last year, somebody had spray-painted it on one of the buses after busting out all the windows, misspelling Percent as Procent.

  “Mr. Pratt,” Ramsey went on, “finished his doctorate and got hired to teach zoology up at Delta State.”

  Somebody hollered, “He never were nothin’ but a old giraffe.”

  Ramsey jotted a note on his legal pad. Once assembly ended, whoever had made the remark would be hauled into the office. Ramsey laughed a lot and told jokes, but there were better people around to have mad at you.

  “Fortunately, we’ve secured the services of Mr. Marcus Billings, a graduate of this very school whom Dr. Pratt personally recommended. Stand up, Mr. Billings.”

  Mark Billings stood and waved. He’d been my student seven or eight years earlier, and I distinctly remembered having called on him to answer the question of how many U.S. senators each state has. Looking stricken, he finally ventured, “Ten?” Ramsey had told me he’d hire him despite, as he put it, “certain deficits” in his Delta State transcript. Mark’s main qualification seemed to be his willingness to accept the job.

  The other vacancy had occurred the previous week, when we were up moving the girls into their dorm at Ole Miss. Our French teacher learned that her husband, an executive at one of the ConAgra catfish plants, was being promoted to the company’s Omaha headquarters, and Ramsey left a panicked message on my cell phone, wondering if I had any suggestions. But before I could call him back, I received another one saying he’d found the solution.

  Which, as it turned out, was “Mrs. Maggie Sorrentino,” a trim, dark-haired woman in her early fifties. She wore a pair of white slacks and a purple silk blouse, gold bracelets on each of her wrists and a thick gold necklace. Earlier, pulling into the teachers’ parking lot, I’d noticed a recent-model Mercedes, one of those sporty jobs that probably cost more than my house. It had North Carolina license plates, so I figured a rich relative must have paid one of my colleagues a visit and let whoever it was drive the car to work.

  “Mrs. Sorrentino,” Ramsey continued, “studied French at a very special institution named Duke University. I imagine y’all have heard of it? They do amazing things there with basketballs. Unlike one or two of our players, they can even write their names on ’em.”

  When the assembly was over and everybody began to file out, I found myself walking down the hall beside the new French teacher, whose classroom was in the same wing as mine. Up close, I could see she wore a lot of eyeliner and that her lipstick matched her blouse. She must have doused herself in perfume—the odor was that strong, but I liked it. “I wanted to introduce myself,” I said. “I’m Luke May. I teach American history and a special honors class in local history.”

  “Local history?” she said, as if she doubted any such thing existed.

  We stopped outside my classroom. “We focus on the history of Loring County and the Delta, though we also talk about the rest of the state. Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the Depression, civil rights and so on. A lot of things happened here. You might be surprised.”

  For an awkward moment, as she started to shake her head, I thought she was going to walk away without saying anything more, though nobody in her right mind would behave like that towards a colleague trying to welcome her to a new job.

  “Luke,” she finally said, “you don’t remember me at all, do you?”

  While we stood there, the eyeliner and the purple lipstick faded away, and a little girl’s face took shape.

  I’VE NEVER READ MUCH FICTION. What bothers me about most novels is how much of the world they exclude by focusing on the inner lives of one or two characters. I’m also troubled by the whole notion of a “plot,” in which one event leads to another in a manner that, more often than not, seems overly simplistic. Nevertheless, shortly after my daughters graduated from high school, I retreated from reality and embarked on a novel-reading binge.

  Many of the books I read that summer had been recommended by Ellis Buchanan, whom Jennifer had invited for dinner that Monday evening. A native of the east Mississippi hill country, he’d moved to Loring and bought the local paper in the fall of 1960. In other words, he arrived in the Delta in time to witness the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement, and then managed to cause a lot of trouble for himself and his family by advocating voting rights for blacks and suggesting that segregation was both immoral and economically unsound. He constantly received threatening phone calls, and somebody eventually hurled a firebomb into the building where the Weekly Times was published, though it happened on a Friday night, when no one was around. At Loring Elementary, it was understood that his son and daughter shouldn’t be invited to join activities on the playground. You’d see them sitting there in the sandbox together or bouncing up and down on the seesaw.

  Ellis was almost eighty now. His wife had been dead for twenty years, his children never came back after they graduated from college, and he’d sold the paper in 1990. Mostly what he did these days was read, listen to classical music and tend to his roses, and once a week he came to the high school and spoke to the journalism class. He was still handsome, as Jennifer frequently said. Tall and silver haired, he rarely appeared in public without a tie and was wearing one that evening. “So what did you think, dear,” he asked her as I poured him a second glass of the Oregon Pinot Noir he’d brought along, “of the Brodsky collection?”

  Jennifer teaches freshman English up at Delta State, but her passion is poetry. She writes every day, and once or twice a year somebody, usually a small journal, will accept a poem. Back in the early ’90s, the Southern Review published one—the biggest splash she’d ever made.

  Ellis was always pushing collections at her, but his taste ran towards work a lot more restrained than what she was drawn to. He loved Frost and Robert Penn Warren, while she preferred Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and a lot of younger poets whose names I’d never heard until she mentioned them. And once she did, I usually forgot them.

  “I don’t know what to think about Brodsky,” she said. “But I’ve got a feeling he’s been badly translated.”

  “The translations seemed just fine to me.”

  She tossed her long curly blonde hair, revealing sharp cheekbones. At a time when most of our women friends were growing bigger and bigger, she kept getting thinner. I couldn’t figure out why, since her diet hadn’t changed. “You’re entitled to your opinion,” she said, “though I have trouble when cheese is forced to rhyme with energies.”

  Ellis feigned outrage. “I don’t remember any rhyme like that.”

  She lifted her wineglass and sipped from it, soaking in every second of his attention. Sometimes, when they were sitting there like that, I almost felt as if my presence were indecent, that I should have got up and left them alone together. “Listen to this stanza,” she said, “from ‘The Funeral of Bobò.’” She stepped over to the sideboard and picked up a large red-and-gold hardcover.

  Farewell, Bobò, my beautiful and sweet.

  These tear-drops dot the page like
holes in cheese.

  We are too weak to follow you, and yet

  to take a stand exceeds our energies.

  She closed the book—the halves thudding together—and laid it triumphantly before him.

  He eyed it for a moment, then crossed his arms over his stomach. Smiling, he said, “Yes, that’s definitely a bad translation. Brodsky wrote in Russian, where there’s no word for cheese because they lack the energy to produce it.”

  Several hours and three bottles of wine later, the evening reached its conclusion, as so many of these evenings had, with Ellis glancing at his watch and expressing shock. “My Lord—can you believe it’s almost midnight?”

  Under ordinary circumstances, Jennifer, who usually has to grade around one hundred twenty papers each week, is rarely able to remain awake after 10:00 p.m. But a visit by Ellis Buchanan, no matter how often one occurred, was nothing ordinary. “It’s early,” she said. “Let’s drink one more glass of wine. It’s good for your heart.”

  “I have no heart. That’s how I’ve managed to live so long. If you don’t have one, it can’t wear out. You should get rid of yours before it’s too late.”

  My wife was drunk. “That’s why I write poetry,” she said. “I’m trying to lose it on the page.”

  Our guest rose. Unlike my father, a tall man who’d become stooped at a certain point in his life, Ellis had retained his full height and, except for a few wrinkles, didn’t look much different than he had twenty years ago. “I’m going to get out of here,” he told me, “before this young lady suggests I’m a man of virtue. I’d hate to be reduced to a set of good impulses.”

  “I’ll walk you home,” I said.

  He laughed. “Afraid that in my doddering senility I’ll lose my way?”

  “After all we’ve had to eat and drink, I need some exercise bad.”

  “I think he’s lying,” he told Jennifer, then bent to kiss her cheek. “He’s scared I’ll be found wandering around somebody’s catfish pond in the morning with a dazed expression and two or three cottonmouth bites.”