It’s fitting, isn’t it, that this particular evening should end on an image?
We all said our goodbyes, exchanging drunken embraces, the one Maggie gave me punctuated by her fingernails digging into the small of my back. I told Jennifer I’d handle the dishes, and she said okay, she was whipped anyway, and went off to bed. I toted plates and glasses, cups, saucers and silverware into the kitchen, then gave everything a good rinse and stacked it all in the dishwasher. You lose track of time when you’re drunk—I do, anyway—but I’m sure a good fifteen or twenty minutes passed before I punched the button to start the wash and turned out the kitchen light.
The last thing I do every night is check the front door. I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember, all the way back to childhood, even though I knew my dad had already locked up. This night I checked the dead bolt and lock chain and then, for no reason I can name, pressed my eye to the peephole.
The Mercedes was parked on the opposite side of the street, the lights off, with no sound of an idling engine, no exhaust visible from the tailpipe. Gradually my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could make out her silhouette. While I watched, she brought her hands to her face. A flame flickered and disappeared. There was just a single pinpoint of light, the orange glow of a cigarette between the lips of a woman who doesn’t smoke.
“SOMETIMES THINGS JUST HAPPEN.”
My father said that with perfect equanimity, without the slightest trace of anger or exertion, though when he spoke those words he was holding me a couple feet off the ground while I beat the air with my fists and tried to kick him, his right arm wrapped around my chest like a piece of steel.
The muley-headed Jersey my grandfather called Mollie stood some distance away, in front of the pump house, where he’d kept the grain he fed her and the other cows. He’d owned three, and except during the winter, when he drove them into the barn at night, they were always in the pasture behind the house.
This was around the time the USDA declared fresh milk unsanitary and I began drinking it from cartons that my mother bought in town. Grandpa never made the transition, and it wasn’t purely a question of economics. When I asked him why he went to so much trouble—getting up early to milk them, toting the bucket inside, straining the liquid through cloth cut from an old flour sack—he smiled and said, “Fresh cow milk’ll put lead in your pencil.” I couldn’t see the connection between milk and lead pencils, but he just laughed and said that one day I would.
My father had grabbed me because a few moments earlier, he’d returned from the funeral home and caught me shooting Mollie with my BB gun. The first time I hit her, she just stepped to the side, as if she’d barely felt it, and this enraged me. I got a little closer and tried to shoot her in the face but missed three or four times in a row, then went back to shooting her in the flank, where I’d have a broader target. After five or six BBs pinged her, she began to snort and toss her head.
I didn’t hear my dad drive up, didn’t hear the truck door slam, didn’t know why suddenly the BB gun lay on the ground where I’d been standing. “Easy,” he said. “Shooting that poor animal won’t bring your grandpa back.”
“I don’t care,” I hollered. “Somebody’s got to pay.”
“She’s not a somebody. She’s a something. And making her pay won’t do a bit of good.”
A few days earlier, my grandfather had gone out to feed the cows and discovered that Mollie had somehow nosed open the latch on the pump house, dragged a burlap sack out and eaten every last bit of grain. Then, for good measure, she relieved herself on it.
This was undoubtedly what made him mad enough to haul off and kick her. The problem was that she moved and he missed, and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back, all the wind gone from his lungs, his leg turning purple and growing hot. Though he didn’t know it at the time and managed to make it home under his own power and return to the field the following day, he’d dislodged a blood clot that had formed in his leg. It was headed straight for his heart.
When I finally got tired and quit thrashing, my dad let me down but kept pressing my body against his. “Sometimes things just happen,” he said again, as if they’d happened to him over and over. “It may be like the song says—that we’ll understand it all in the sweet bye and bye—but right now there ain’t no point in wondering why. Your grandpa’s dead, and poor old Mollie here’s alive.”
• • •
Sometimes things just happen.
It’s an unexceptional statement but one that a child has difficulty processing, because it contradicts almost everything else he’s been told by those whose wisdom he depends on. I parroted it back once myself, when I was about twelve years old and had brought home a report card showing that I’d made a D in math. My dad demanded to know how this could possibly have occurred, since until then I’d never made less than an A. The truth was that I’d become fixated on a girl, Audrey, who sat directly in front of me, and I spent most class periods passing her notes. But you can’t tell your dad about anything that foolish, so I said, “Sometimes things just happen.” And he, perhaps recalling that moment near the pump house, said, “Yeah, they do. But it’s my job to make sure they don’t happen to you.” Then he picked up the phone, called my teacher, learned of my distraction, and the next day I was moved to a different desk.
It might be my imagination, but it seems to me now that when Dad first made that observation, I’d already heard it once before, on the morning I learned Nadine Calloway had been killed. But he hadn’t said it then—if, in fact, anyone had.
Certainly somebody said something. Somebody would’ve had to. And it’s reasonable to think it was my mother. Because, after all, it was the first of October, which in 1962 fell on a Monday. In other words, I had to attend school. And there was cotton in the field—not a lot, never enough—so my dad would’ve been out there with my grandfather, who was still alive at the time.
News would have traveled the way it always did. Somebody driving into town would’ve passed the Calloways’ house and seen three cars from the Loring County Sheriff’s Department parked in the yard. These days she’d speed right by, because we now behave like people in most other parts of the country. Misery is all around us, and we’re sophisticated enough to ignore it. But in 1962 curiosity runs unchecked. What’s happening at the neighbors’ house is your business, too. So she parks on the side of the road and walks over to the deputy who’s standing by the mailbox smoking a cigarette and asks him straight up what’s wrong. He glances towards the house, then drops his voice. “Don’t tell nobody I told you. But last night Arlan Calloway shot his wife.”
“Did he kill her?”
“He sure did. He sure by God did.”
She can’t even remember, this neighbor, why she wanted to go to town in the first place. It’s too early anyway, all the stores are still closed, so she turns around and drives home and pounces on the phone. She calls somebody who then calls somebody else. While the rest of the country is discussing Ole Miss, where two people lie dead and the air stinks of teargas, the phone lines in Loring are singing a tragedy of a strictly local nature.
At this point in my life you have to drag me out of bed. So that morning Mother draws the covers off me, grabs my feet and swings them off the mattress, wraps her arms around my shoulders and pulls me upright. She’s still holding me as I sleepwalk to the bathroom, where I sit down on the side of the tub while she fills the sink with warm, soapy water. She soaks a bathcloth in it, then starts washing my face and hands, and that’s when the telephone rings.
“Stay here,” she says. Her footsteps recede down the hall, and I lean towards the pedestal and rest my forehead against the cool porcelain. I’m still in that position when she returns.
“Honey,” she says, “something terrible’s happened, and there’s no point in keeping it from you because you’ll hear about it anyway.”
I assume it’s got to do with the trouble up in Oxford, with the speech the president gave last night,
and I don’t care one bit. Whatever happened there has nothing to do with me. It’s one hundred fifty miles away and might as well be the moon.
“Arlan shot Nadine,” she says, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “And honey, I’m afraid she’s dead.”
Death is something I know about in theory. Dogs and cats die—you see them all the time on the side of the road, stiff limbs splayed away from their bodies—and all the great Civil War heroes are dead, people like Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet. Two of my grandparents are dead, but that’s all right because I never even knew them. The folks out at Loring Memorial Gardens are dead, too. But Nadine has been teaching me to dribble and is going to take me to the gym and show me how to shoot a free throw. And she can’t be dead because you can’t shoot free throws like that.
For a moment I think I’ll cry because she’s way too nice for that to happen to her. But that moment’s soon submerged in a sea of excitement: I know a dead person. She’s dead, and when I get to school I can be the one to tell about it. Because surely Eugene and Maggie won’t be there today. They’ll have to stay at home, so the story belongs to me.
Mother’s little man takes a stand before the sink, wide awake now. “Why did Mr. Calloway shoot her?”
“What?” Wiping her eyes didn’t accomplish much. They’re red and her face is wet.
“I said why did Mr. Calloway shoot her?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know.”
“When will we find out?”
“We might not. Sometimes things just happen and you never get to know why.”
This is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard. What do we study in school if not why? There’s a reason why one and one make two, and why the rain falls, and why we call this color green and that one blue. Sometimes things just happen? That just won’t do.
“He had to have a reason,” the six-year-old sage replies, with what he hopes is a tone of derision. “You don’t shoot a person just for fun.”
Sometimes things just happen.
Sometimes you step out the front door, as you have countless times before, but for some reason the world looks different. And because of that, you see everything in a new light and notice what might otherwise have escaped your attention.
For instance: directly across the street from your house, in the very spot where the previous evening a red Mercedes was parked for God knows how long, you see a single cigarette butt. For all you know, cigarette butts might’ve been lying there every morning for the past month. There’s a drain nearby, so when it rains anything on the pavement’s going to be washed away, just like this butt will in a day or so, when the next big cold front blows through.
Wondering what she saw when she sat there, you assume she was looking at your house, waiting for the lights to go out, and you try to fathom what her feelings would’ve been when the last window went dark. That’s what’s on your mind when you bend over in your driveway, as you do every Sunday morning, to pick up the Commercial Appeal.
And that’s when you think, once again, about the man who used to deliver that paper in the middle of the night before going in to Parker Sturdivant’s barbershop to cut hair. He might get drunk on Saturday evening and bring the Sunday paper late, but the last thing he’d want on Sunday night was a drink, and the Monday paper was always there long before the first farmer got up to eat breakfast.
LIKE ALL THE OTHER public schools in Mississippi, Loring High designates two dates—one in the fall, one in the spring—for staff training in behavior management techniques. We call these staff-development days, or SDDs. Students get to stay home while we have to listen to a lecture from a police officer about what to do if somebody opens fire in the classroom. “Should that come to pass, y’all need to duck.” After that we watch a video collage gleaned from Ramsey’s surveillance cameras, with cuts and additions from one semester to the next, showing various drug transactions, a couple of slow-motion knife fights and—the concluding scene now for more than five years—a kid called Bobby Street, nicknamed Main, unzipping and shooting a stream of urine into a rival gang member’s locker. This event led to a full-scale lockdown and the arrest of more than fifteen students, and as the episode plays out on-screen Ramsey always intones, “Some actions are best performed in the restroom.” Then everybody can go home.
It’s a colossal waste of time, of course, but you can get on Ramsey’s bad side by calling in sick on an SDD. Nevertheless, the Monday after we’d celebrated Jennifer’s success over dinner, I left the house while she was still in the study and phoned the school as I drove down our street and told the secretary I had a bad cold. A few minutes after eight, by which time I knew Maggie would be at the police lecture, I left her a voice-mail saying the same thing and that I’d gone to the drugstore and picked up some NyQuil and was going back to bed.
The previous afternoon, while sitting in the car outside Wal-Mart, I’d placed a call to a number over in Arkansas. The man who answered had one of those raspy voices that only a lifetime of smoking and drinking earns you. I told him who I was and waited to see if my name meant anything to him, but it didn’t seem to. So I asked if he was the same Andy Owens who used to cut hair at Sturdivant’s Barbershop in Loring, Mississippi, back in the early ’60s. And when he said he was, I served up my lie.
Andrew Owens, no middle initial, aged seventy-seven, lived about five miles south of Pine Bluff, some distance west of U.S. 65. He’d told me on the phone there were several other mobile homes on his road and that few of the mailboxes had numbers on them. But I’d be at the right place, he said, when I saw a trailer with a rusty garbage barrel near the front steps.
I finally found it, got out and rapped on the door.
Within seconds it swung open. “Come on in,” that raspy voice said.
He was bald and bent, with a hugely wrinkled face and a bulbous nose, and he wore a pair of glasses with black plastic frames and thick lenses. The front of his shirt was soiled, most likely by tobacco spit. “Say I used to cut your hair?” he asked, squinting at me.
He looked only vaguely like the man I remembered. That Andy, even if you saw him slumped over the wheel of his truck after spending the night with Jim Beam, had a thick growth of hair and always wore a clean, fresh-smelling shirt. He was well built, too, with prominent shoulders that suggested he once might have been a good football player. “Yes sir,” I said. “You sure did.”
“I do a good job?”
“The best.”
“Looks like you might could use a trim right now.”
“Yes sir, I guess that’s a fair assessment.”
“Parker never could cut hair worth a shit. He only did it so’s he’d have somebody to run his mouth to. Said your name’s Mark?”
“Luke.”
“Knew it was one of the disciples. Woke up thinkin’ if it wasn’t Mark, it might’ve been John. Knew it wasn’t Philip nor Andrew, neither, me being an Andrew myself. Didn’t reckon it could’ve been Judas. Folks generally don’t name their kids that.” He gestured at the counter separating the living room from the kitchen. It was covered by whiskey bottles—Evan Williams, Ancient Age, Black Velvet. All of them were the 1.75 liter size, and most looked empty. “Like a drink?”
At ten a.m.? “I better decline,” I said, “since I’ve got to drive back.”
“Don’t reckon you’d mind if I was to have one.”
“No sir. Go ahead and help yourself.”
“You can sit over yonder,” he said, nodding at a lumpy sofa, above which a framed newspaper article hung askew. “Get yourself comfortable, if you can.”
I walked over to the couch and scanned the article. In 1967, the Pine Bluff Chamber of Commerce had named the best service providers in various categories, listing Andrew Owens as “Top Barber.” The article said he owned the Lake Side Barbershop. As I sat down, I heard him splash whiskey into a cup. It was what bartenders call a long pour.
He dragged a chair away from the kitchen table that had plastic decals plaste
red all over the top of the backrest. I noticed that they were everywhere: on his walls, on the kitchen cabinets, even on the coffee table. SUNOCO RACE FUELS, BASS PRO SHOPS, PERMA-COOL, RED LINE. “Like my decals?” he asked.
“Impressive,” I said. “Looks like you’ve got a few hundred.”
“That’s my hobby. There’s folks tells me you can buy ’em by the pack on the computer, but I never fooled with nothin’ like that. I come by mine honest. I see one I like, I buy it. I don’t want nobody else choosin’ for me. Understand, my sister’ll send me one from time to time. But she’s got a handle on my taste.” He took a big swig, then wiped his mouth on his forearm. “I drink too much,” he said. “Always have. If I cut your hair back at Parker’s, I don’t reckon that’ll surprise you.”
“Actually,” I said, “the main thing I remember is that us kids fell all over ourselves trying to jump in your chair and stay out of Mr. Sturdivant’s. That’s what made me think of you. This project of mine that I mentioned, it’ll be looking at how businesses developed in the Delta, roughly from the end of World War Two until the beginning of the twenty-first century. And if I’m right about it, you had two jobs, so I thought you could tell me a little bit about both. You used to deliver the Commercial Appeal, didn’t you?”
The look that came over his face was one I’d seen a lot of back when I was doing interviews for my Depression-era oral history project. It would appear on the faces of people who’d accepted their own insignificance as a given and were startled to learn that anybody else thought otherwise. “I sure enough did,” he said. “Started deliverin’ it just before Christmas of Fifty-eight and kept at it till I moved over here.”
“And when exactly was that?”
“December of Sixty-two.”
I pulled out a pen and the small notebook I’d bought at a convenience store in Dumas. “December of Sixty-two?”
“Yessiree.”
Safe from the Neighbors Page 13
