Safe from the Neighbors

by Steve Yarbrough

  While I made love with a woman who’d driven one hundred seventy-five miles in search of better wine than she could find in Loring, my wife was feeling happy because she finally had a few students who’d read the essays she’d assigned and turned their work in on time.

  The next morning, when I thought about that I was so moved that I reached across the breakfast table and laid my hand on Jennifer’s. She flinched. “What?”

  “I love you.”

  “Oh,” she said, “is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s right.”

  “Okay.” She gave my hand a little squeeze.

  She finished her oatmeal, and while I showered she went into the study and was sitting at the computer, staring hard at the screen, when I left the house. I don’t think she even heard me say goodbye.

  THAT AFTERNOON, I went over to stay with Momma so Dad could go see the doctor, who thought they might need to change the dosage on his blood pressure medication. Before leaving, he told me that when election day rolled around he was going to cast his ballot for Bennie Thompson, our seven-term congressman, who happens to be black. He added that he still loathed the Democrats for wanting to take his guns and thinking higher taxes would solve every problem, but he couldn’t forgive the Republicans for the big mess in Iraq.

  Momma was asleep, so I sat there in the recliner thinking about a book I’d read several years ago that had been on my mind, An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962. At the time, I was struck by the fine job William Doyle does of conveying the hysteria that prevailed in the state in the days before Meredith finally flew into Oxford aboard a government plane and was escorted onto campus by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and a team of U.S. marshals.

  About halfway through the book there’s an account of a speech delivered by JFK on the evening of Sunday, September 30. Preempting regular network programming, he issued an appeal for calm, telling the people of Mississippi that “the eyes of the nation and of the world are upon you and upon all of us, and the honor of your university and the state are in the balance.”

  The first response an oral historian usually gets from anybody being interviewed is “I can’t remember much of anything about that.” But if you start providing the subject with details about the times or events that interest you—even the most trivial information, like, say, the absence of sugar in Coca-Cola in 1943, when it was being reserved for troops, or the flimsiness of the paper Sears, Roebuck printed its catalogs on that same year—it’s amazing what else starts to emerge. The brain stores information in a peculiar fashion, and sometimes a momentous recollection is tangled up in the seemingly mundane.

  When I read Doyle’s account of that speech, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years: being hustled off to bed after the president spoke, my mother bending over me and telling me not to worry, though she sounded worried herself. A few moments earlier, right after JFK went off and Ed Sullivan came on, my dad had left the house with the Colt Python tucked under his belt.

  What happened that night at Ole Miss would almost certainly never have occurred but for the groups of armed men, most lacking any connection whatsoever to the university, who drove into Oxford to try to keep the federal government from enrolling a black student. Somewhere, in the part of the mind that most of us learn to shut down, I’d always wondered if my father was among their number. But I never asked him about it. There are plenty of white guys like me in Mississippi who don’t know what their fathers did during the civil rights era, because they don’t want to know. They’ll ask about World War II and feel themselves aggrandized when they hear how their dads stormed Omaha Beach with the First Infantry Division or treaded water for twelve hours in the Leyte Gulf, waiting for Bull Halsey’s flagship to pick them up. Having a father from the Greatest Generation is one thing. Knowing he was a member of the Citizens’ Council is quite another.

  And it’s something else altogether to wonder why he left the house with a gun on the night that a neighbor—who’d been his friend since childhood, though he’d recently announced plans to take his land—killed his own wife.

  When Dad came home from the doctor, he hung his hat on the coatrack in the hallway and walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water. He must have heard me enter the room behind him, but he didn’t turn around.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “He says I’m doing all right for an old coot.”

  “Great,” I said. “By the way, Dad, I read a book a few years ago about James Meredith and Ole Miss, which got me thinking back on what I remember. And I’ve been going over it again in the last few days.”

  He turned the glass up and drained it. It clinked when he set it down.

  “I remember hearing JFK speak, and having to go to bed, and it seems to me that right before Momma tucked me in, you left the house. Is that right? Or did I make it up?”

  He placed both hands flat against the countertop on either side of the sink. He was wearing a light blue long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the back dark from sweat, even though the day was cool. “I was out looking after your interests,” he said.

  “My interests? What would those be?”

  He turned around then, and for once he didn’t stoop, just stood straight and tall, towering over me as he had when I was a boy. “You wouldn’t have understood it then,” he said, “and you won’t understand it now, so I don’t intend to waste my time trying to explain. But I’ll tell you this: the answer won’t never be found in no book.”

  Local History

  ELLIS BUCHANAN had a drink in his hand. He was standing in front of our CD rack, scanning titles, every now and then pulling out a disc. Most of them failed to win his approval. “Now this gentleman,” he said, tapping a jewel case, “has an unusual name. Kaukonen. Rhymes with Salonen.” He peered at me over his wire rims. “And there, I imagine, all resemblance ceases.”

  I didn’t know anybody named Salonen but guessed he was some classical composer. “Jorma Kaukonen founded Hot Tuna and also played with the Jefferson Airplane,” I said. “He was one of my heroes when I was a boy.”

  He put the CD back on the shelf. “You’re just a boy now. Otherwise your taste would be more refined. A man ages like wine.”

  “Wine doesn’t age well if it’s made from poor grapes.”

  “You come from good grapes. At the moment you’re still too sweet, but you’ll sour in due time.”

  It was Saturday night and we’d asked him over for dinner, along with Ramsey and Selina Coleman and, at the last minute, Maggie.

  Inviting her was my idea. These days, I can’t even begin to imagine what was going through my mind when I told Jennifer I wanted to include the new French teacher. And an act of the imagination would be required, because the man who made that decision, whatever went into it, no longer exists. You could write a biography about him, but the facts would take you only so far.

  By the time she rang the doorbell, the rest of us were sitting in the living room, sipping wine, listening to Louis Armstrong and chatting about the upcoming congressional elections, all of us agreeing that Bennie Thompson was a shoo-in and the Democrats had a shot at controlling both houses. Jennifer got up to let her in and for a moment they stood framed in the doorway, my wife in brown slacks and a beige blouse, a red-and-blue apron cinched at her waist with ole miss mom scrolled across the front, and Maggie in black jeans, a black sweater and high heels, a purple scarf draped around her shoulders.

  “You must be Maggie.”

  “And you’re Jennifer.”

  “Can I take your handbag?”

  “Sure. And this scarf, too, if you don’t mind.”

  I took my time getting up. “Maggie,” I said, “I don’t think you’ve met Selina.”

  “No. I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  Selina used to be beautiful, but she’s put on a good bit of weight in the last few years, and the cushions sighed when she rose off
the couch. “A pleasure’s just what it is,” she said, taking Maggie’s hand. “I’ve got a cousin who teaches at Duke, in early childhood education. Endesha Reedy. I don’t suppose you know her?”

  “I’m afraid not. Most of the people I know there are either in the Sanford Institute or the Department of Romance Studies.”

  When Ellis meets a woman for the first time, he rises so fast you can hear his bones pop. They sure popped that night. “This is Ellis Buchanan,” I told her. “He edited our local newspaper for about thirty years and stirred up lots of trouble. These days he mostly stirs his drink.”

  “As lies go,” Ellis said, “that one’s in the bald-faced category. I don’t drink anything that has to be stirred.”

  He offered her his hand, and she took it and held on to it. “Not even coffee?” she asked.

  “Most certainly not coffee. Dear, do you know what caffeine does to a person’s metabolism?”

  “Speeds it up?”

  “No, though that’s a popular misconception. Research shows that it actually causes it to slow.”

  “Whose research?”

  “Mine.”

  He was looking down at her, and she was looking up at him, right into his eyes, each of them apparently so focused on the other that for a moment it was as if the rest of us had left the room. I was used to seeing Jennifer look at him that way, and back when I was his intern the two high school girls who helped deliver papers gave him the same rapt attention, though he was almost fifty.

  “I’ll bet Luke would pour you a glass of wine if you asked him,” he finally said.

  “I’ll pour you several glasses. As many as you want.”

  She let go of his hand. “One will do,” she said. “I’d hate to show my greed the first time at a new place.”

  The main course was lamb rubbed with mint and basil. Jennifer chose to roast it, rather than trust me to grill it, given how many dinners I’d burned in the past. My lack of zeal for cooking was one of the things that had come between us. She had little tolerance for bad food, and before Candace and Trish became adept in the kitchen, she’d often come home from a long day at work to find frozen French fries stinking up the place while I read in the backyard with weenies burning on the grill.

  Late that afternoon, after popping the lamb in the oven, she’d gone to the mailbox and plopped a wad of stuff, mostly junk mail, on the kitchen counter. A few minutes later, while making myself a cup of coffee, I glanced down and noticed she’d gotten a letter from Tin House, one of the journals she subscribed to, and the envelope had been opened. Her name and address had been typed, so it didn’t look like a renewal notice.

  She was sitting there at the table, drinking a cup of tea and reading the Commercial Appeal, and her cheeks had more color in them than I’d seen for a long time. They were glowing.

  “Did you get a poem accepted?”

  She raised the cup and took a sip, then swallowed and set it back down, her eyes not once leaving the paper. “Actually, they took three.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t know you’d be that interested.”

  “Are you serious? Three poems at once?”

  “Well, it happens like that sometimes. Until now, it just never happened for me.”

  I walked over and put my arm around her and was amazed, once again, at how small and brittle her bones were. She felt breakable. “That’s a great outfit, too, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m afraid so.”

  Now, sitting opposite her at one end of our dining room table, with Maggie and Ellis on one side and Ramsey and Selina on the other, I considered her response. She’d just experienced her greatest success. What was there to be afraid of? The only answer I could come up with was that she probably feared she’d never succeed again.

  I’d recently noticed how poorly I understood her. Having convinced myself that I knew what Maggie wanted—passion and excitement—I still couldn’t fathom what Jennifer’s hopes were, beyond the urge to see her poems in print and get her daughters through college so she could quit that onerous job at Delta State. She was as much a puzzle to me as the poems she wrote, which often were impenetrable.

  The meal she’d prepared was her second great success of the day, drawing compliments from everybody and a request from Selina for the recipe. Jennifer promised to e-mail it, and Maggie asked if she could send it to her as well. While I watched, she wrote her address on the back of a business card Jennifer handed her, then said they should go out for coffee one of these days. Rather than get sick at that prospect, I actually felt the warm glow of pride.

  We’d finished the lamb and started on our salads when Ramsey thought of something he said he’d meant to ask earlier: “That institute you mentioned up at Duke, Maggie? Was it named for Terry Sanford?”

  She nodded. “The full title is the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy.”

  “He was one fine man,” Ramsey said. “Ask me, he was about as good a person as you could find in the South at that time. I bet you’d agree with that assessment, wouldn’t you, Ellis?”

  I was sure Ellis admired Sanford. He admired all the great Southern liberals—folks like Hugo Black, Lister Hill and Maury Maverick—so it surprised me when he frowned and said, “Not entirely.”

  It surprised Ramsey, too. “No?”

  “He could afford the positions he took on race, Ramsey,” Ellis said, “because he knew the tobacco industry would do everything in its power to keep him in office—and in North Carolina, if you had Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds behind you, that was about all that really mattered. My wife died of lung cancer, and Sanford moved heaven and earth to keep the surgeon general’s warning off cigarette packs. The line of his I’ll always remember is, ‘We don’t label automobiles dangerous, though they’re one of the greatest killers.’ I wouldn’t be too quick to grant him sainthood.”

  Maggie speared a shred of lettuce. “Who would you grant sainthood?”

  “Well,” I interrupted, “I’d nominate Ellis himself.”

  “Oh, I’m far from saintly,” he said.

  I laughed. “Bullshit. Saints are associated with miracles, and it’s miraculous you managed to survive the Sixties. Any number of people in this town would’ve liked to kill you.” I assumed everybody could tell I was joking.

  And everybody could, except him. “I never performed any miracles,” he said.

  “Tell us something you did,” Maggie said, “that wasn’t saintly. What was your Philip Morris moment?”

  Ellis has never been at a loss for words. He’d fired fusillades of them at Ross Barnett, Byron de la Beckwith, Clinton Finley and the Citizens’ Council, even though it was not unreasonable to fear they might fire back with something more than rhetoric. But that night he just sat there stiffly, staring at a spot somewhere to the left of Selina’s head.

  To fill the uncomfortable silence, I said, “Speaking of unique moments, here’s one. This afternoon, Jennifer had not one but three poems accepted by Tin House, one of the best magazines in the country.”

  That lifted Ellis out of whatever dark mood he’d lapsed into. “My God, child,” he said. “And you managed to keep quiet about this all evening?”

  “I was going to give you a copy when it comes out. They said I’ll be in the spring issue, right around your birthday.”

  He lifted his wineglass and proposed a toast, and after we’d all had a sip he said, “You need to bear in mind that I’m nearly eighty. When spring comes, you might well be composing my epitaph. So why don’t you go get those poems and read them for us right now?”

  Her cheeks were about the color of the Cabernet we’d been drinking, and she shook her head, but by then a chorus was demanding that she read to us before dessert. Finally, she got up, went into the study and came back with a single sheet of paper. “All right,” she said, “here’s one of them.” She sat down, took another swallow of wine, then began reading.

  The sea of sleep has cast me out
again

  With a stone around my neck

  The pale dawn seeps through the blinds

  Raindrops slice at the window panes

  Light hurts, sound hurts, silence hurts

  I have wrapped myself in pain

  Each day an open wound

  Words won’t disentangle from my brain

  My scream stays stuck in my throat

  I must wean myself from this body

  Let it turn to stone, let it drown

  I’ll be weightless, echoless

  Thin smoke drifting over sand

  For a moment, nobody said anything. I, for one, didn’t know what to say, but then I’ve never felt comfortable commenting on her work. And this poem seemed so relentlessly dark I was stunned.

  “Goddamn, Jennifer,” Ramsey said. “You got a lot of pain packed into that thing. Must’ve used the word hurt at least three or four times.”

  Selina just sat there looking embarrassed.

  Ellis said it seemed fragmented to him, like a lot of contemporary poetry, but he liked the imagery and thought the poem as a whole was very well executed.

  As for Maggie, she reached across the table, touched Jennifer on the wrist and said, “I’ve felt like that myself. Though I could never express it so beautifully.”

  “Well, it’s a persona poem,” Jennifer said, as if to preempt the suggestion that those emotions were actually hers.

  “I know it is,” Maggie said, still touching her wrist. “And there have been a great many days when that persona was mine.”

  “Mine, too,” Ramsey said. “Last summer, when my French teacher drifted off like gin smoke over tall cotton—man, I felt like I had a stone around my own neck. And then here comes Maggie to save my worried ass.”

  Everybody laughed, and before long we were toasting Jennifer once more, then raising our glasses to Tin House, Ole Miss, Duke University, Walt Whitman, Bennie Thompson, Thurgood Marshall and Maury Maverick.