In early September, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black announced that after polling the other members of the court and finding all in agreement, he was voiding the stay and ordering Ole Miss to enroll Meredith immediately. “People couldn’t even focus on football,” Ellis said. “That tells you just how bad it was. All kinds of crazy things happened. Meredith would try to register and be turned away by the governor or the lieutenant governor, and the Justice Department would issue another threat, and that would lead Barnett to make another insane speech. At one point some group out in Orange County—I believe they called themselves something like the First California Volunteers—sent a telegram urging him to hold fast and pray because they were en route.”
One day, when he and Nadine were having lunch at an Italian restaurant over in Leland, she asked what he thought was going to happen.
All around them, farmers on their lunch break were discussing the same topic, making sweeping gestures with their knives and forks, their palms pounding the tables. They inveighed against the Catholic in the White House, though apparently it didn’t bother them that the owners of the restaurant were Catholics, too.
“Nothing much,” he said. “Barnett will rattle his saber some before falling on it in front of the Lyceum.”
“You don’t think folks’ll turn out in force?”
“Folks? What folks?” He waved his hand around the room. “The plantation aristocracy? Not a chance.”
She wound several strands of pasta around the tines of her fork. “There’s been some talk,” she said.
“There’s always talk. What kind are you referring to?”
“People in the Council. Some of them are saying maybe it’s time to take up arms, that what’s worked before may not work now.”
“You mean your husband intends to load his six-shooter, march off to Oxford and take potshots at, say, the National Guard or the federal marshals?” He shook his head. “If you want to make me laugh, you’ll need to tell a better joke.”
She laid down her fork still wrapped in spaghetti. “Look, I’m not telling jokes here. If something happened, it wouldn’t be funny. He doesn’t want to go to Oxford, but he doesn’t want to let his friends down, either. I think he’s scared of getting embarrassed.”
He knew and she did too that the organization had been embarrassing from the outset. But insulting her husband wouldn’t wash, and he could tell from the way she sat there—both elbows on the table, legs spread apart as if she was about to push herself up—that she was an inch from walking out. It was amazing, he thought, how the balance of power could shift. Ten months ago, James Meredith had been just another black man Ole Miss could dismiss, and now he had the federal government doing his bidding. Ten months ago, she was trying to attract his attention in a grocery store and he was stuffing a basketball in her face. “It won’t come to that,” he mumbled, picking up his own fork. “Nobody’s going to Oxford, except Mr. Meredith.”
That seemed to satisfy her. Her shoulders relaxed, and she went back to eating, and before long, Ellis said, it was all forgotten—up until late in the evening on Sunday, September 30, when the phone rang at his office and he picked up the receiver and she told him he was wrong.
Ellis had been there since the afternoon, listening to the radio and talking on the phone with a friend of his in Oxford, a retired professor who’d taught him at Ole Miss. He’d been calling his ex-students around the Mid-South, people who ran little papers like the Weekly Times, pleading with them to do whatever they could to keep their readers calm. “Tell them,” he urged Ellis, “not to come. Please.” He said he’d seen pickups with license plates from all over the state, from Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia, too, even a few from Texas. The U.S. marshals had arrived by plane earlier in the day and when transported into town were pelted with bricks and bottles. Now a National Guard unit was heading onto campus. He’d just seen the trucks through the window, light from streetlamps reflecting off the Guardsmen’s bayonets. Nobody knew Meredith’s exact location, but rumor had it he was inside the Lyceum, hidden in the registrar’s office. Folks were forming up in the Grove, cars were set on fire, the air smelled odd.
Ellis told me that when Nadine called, he was considering a special edition that he’d print himself, a few hundred copies he could distribute around town under cover of darkness so people would see them first thing in the morning. If it kept even one person from jumping in his truck with a shotgun and heading for Oxford tomorrow, at least he would’ve made that small difference. So he was less than eager to pause and have a chat. He didn’t stop to wonder why she was free to call on a Sunday evening. “Listen,” he began, but she cut him off.
“Still want to see my kitchen floor?”
“What?” He could hear her breathing. Normally, she wasn’t a heavy breather. He’d talked to her on the phone countless times and taken naps beside her, but not once could he recall ever having been aware of her breathing. Which seemed odd, if you think about it.
“Arlan’s gone,” she said. “I begged him not to go, but he did it anyway, and now I’m here unguarded.”
He was having a hard time, he told me, processing both the information and the invitation, if that’s what it was. It occurred to him that maybe she’d been drinking. This wasn’t a bad night to be drunk. “Whose idea was this?” he asked.
“Going to Oxford was James May’s idea. He called and said they ought to do it, and Arlan was so worried about losing stature in his buddy’s eyes that he agreed. So he loaded his shotgun and went to pick him up. Now they’ve ridden off to defend states’ rights. Probably both of them’ll get shot.”
After Ellis relayed that conversation, I became aware of my own breathing—or, more truthfully, my failure to breathe. I sat there motionless, feeling as if my face had turned to plastic. For a moment I couldn’t speak. “My dad called Arlan Calloway?” I finally said. “Going to Oxford was his idea?”
Ellis lifted his glass of whiskey and sloshed it around a little, as if it contained ice cubes and he wanted them to melt. “You came here to find out what happened, didn’t you?”
“I came here to find out why you bought Andy Owens a barbershop.”
“I bought him a barbershop,” Ellis said, “in part because your father made that phone call. If you look at it in a certain light, James and I were coinvestors.”
When he realized Nadine’s husband was gone, he dismissed his plans for a special edition. The thought of being with her at night, in her own house, possessed a strange allure. “What about your kids?” he asked.
“Sound asleep. Tomorrow’s a school day. Reading, writing and arithmetic.”
He wasn’t worried about his wife. It went without saying that his job required him to visit odd places, at odd hours. Tonight, of all nights, he needed no excuse.
Crazy, yes, and dangerous, too. But doable.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” he told her. When she started to give him directions, he said, “I know where you live.” What he didn’t tell her was how many nights he’d driven by there, looking at the lights along the front of the house and trying to figure out which room was hers.
“Park down the road a little ways,” she said, and he told her not to worry, he had no intention of leaving his car in her driveway where every redneck headed for Oxford could see it.
“Actually getting there took me a lot longer,” Ellis said. “I discovered that hiding a car in the Delta’s no simple matter. I finally drove into somebody’s cotton field and parked on the turnrow, figuring that as long as I got back before the pickers showed up I ought to be okay. And I fully intended to return before then, because I had no guarantee that Arlan and your father would go all the way to Oxford or, if they did, that they’d stay any length of time. Of course, as she said, there was always a chance they’d both get shot.
“I remember that while I was slinking up the road to her place, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if they really did get shot. I imagined Nadine remaining my mistre
ss, living several miles out of town where most of the people who saw me visiting her would be field hands. Her kids didn’t even figure into my calculations.”
Gravel crunched when he stepped into her driveway. The house was dark—so dark that for a moment, Ellis said, he wondered if she’d changed her mind, if she’d turned everything off and gone to bed. Just then, the porch light popped on.
She opened the door. She was wearing a bathrobe, a pink one that looked surprisingly threadbare, with ragged strands dangling from both cuffs. It was too short, having been made for a much smaller woman. “You look scared,” she said.
It bothered him that she spoke in a normal voice, and what she said bothered him, too. He was scared, all of a sudden, but it seemed wrong for her to point it out. Who wouldn’t be scared going to the home of another man’s wife? Especially if he knew that when the other man left, he had a loaded shotgun? “Well,” he said, “then maybe I am. Aren’t you?”
“Do I look scared?”
“Not especially.”
“Well, then, that’s a good indication I’m not. With me, what you see’s what you get. You ought to know that by now.”
She turned and walked off down a dimly lit hallway, and he couldn’t think of anything to do but step inside. Once past the threshold, he closed the door and then groped around until he found a dead bolt and threw it. This made him feel secure until he realized that, since there was also a back door, if he needed to leave through the front in a hurry that dead bolt might be his undoing.
“Take a look,” he heard her say from somewhere down the hall. “Here’s my kitchen floor.”
He followed the sound of her voice. The floor, when he saw it, was just black-and-white linoleum that held the scent of Lysol. There was a Frigidaire in one corner, a gas range in the other, in the middle a table with four chairs arranged around it, on top of the table a bowl of wax fruit and, above that, dangling from the ceiling, a lamp with a white bell shade. The journalist in him logged details, looking for one that stood out from all the others and, if aptly placed in an article, would make the reader sit up and take note, but he couldn’t spot it. The scene was unbrokenly familiar.
“So what do you want to do?” she asked, her hands hidden in the pink robe’s pockets. “Complete a little home-inspection tour? Want to check my pipes and make sure they’re not obstructed?”
He suddenly wanted to be anywhere else. He’d never in his life changed his mind so fast before. Usually there was a kind of bridge between one mind-set and another, when you knew you were taking corrective steps, going from over here to over there, though on that night it was instantaneous. He wanted not only to get out of her house but also to get away from her and stay away. He thought of his wife sleeping at home alone and wondered if he’d been lying to himself about her, that maybe she did know or—even worse—suspect that what used to be hers had been spread around from town to town, in one rented bed after another. The Delta wasn’t that big a place. God only knew who might’ve seen them together. How, he asked himself, could he possibly have been so foolish?
While he stood there trying to compose the speech he intended to deliver, he heard a noise come from down the hall, and it sounded like a footfall, like somebody’s bare heel hitting the floor. “What the hell was that?” he said.
Later, he’d wonder how much it cost her to say what she said next, or even if you could ever put a price on the kind of courage it must have taken. He’d become convinced she always knew exactly what he was thinking, which meant she must have known what his answer would ultimately be.
“I’d leave with you,” she said, “if you asked me to. I thought I wouldn’t, but now I know I would.”
He’d never felt so stupid in his entire life. How could he have failed to see this coming? It was there that day in the grocery store. He should’ve seen it on her face, in her eyes. She wanted more from life, and who wouldn’t? “That noise,” he said. “Did you hear it?”
She studied him as if she were breaking him down into his various components with an eye towards reassembling them into a more coherent whole. “What noise?”
“A moment ago.”
She laughed. “You’re trying to buy time,” she said. Her hands came out of her pockets, her arms crossed over her chest. As if performing in a Christmas cantata, she broke into song. “Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains.”
“Jesus,” he hissed. “Are you out of your mind?”
“And the mountains in reply echoing their joyous strains.”
He stepped over, grabbed her and gave her a good shake. Her breath smelled like whiskey.
“Gloria, in excelsis Deo!”
“Stop it!”
“Gloria, in excelsis Deo!”
After that she subsided, insofar as a woman her size could be said to. Another minute or two passed while they stood face-to-face, his hands still gripping her forearms. Eventually she said, “I’m sorry.”
He let go of her. “You don’t need to be. I’m the one that’s in the wrong.”
“You give yourself far too much credit. In case you didn’t notice, you had a partner in all of this.”
“I noticed,” he said, “and I was grateful.”
Just like that, Ellis told me, they had consigned it to the past. And just as she had in so many motel rooms and lunchrooms, she began to speak of things that didn’t matter—or of things that might matter a lot to others and even to both of them if they hadn’t been where they were right then. “What do you reckon’s happening up at Ole Miss?”
“I imagine all the actors are putting on quite a show.”
“Think Meredith’s still alive?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s very much alive. By now he might have been named chancellor.”
“Speaking of now,” she said, glancing over his shoulder at something on the wall behind him, “I think maybe you better be going.”
He turned around to see what she saw, and there it was, the detail he would’ve seized upon if he’d been writing a story about what had taken place in that room, in these last few minutes: a burnt-orange wall clock designed to look like a basketball, with black script across the top that read 1949 mississippi state girls champions.
The hands told him it was 2:05 a.m.
Did he kiss her before leaving? He told me he liked to think he had, but that in truth he couldn’t remember. They might have shaken hands. Or simply nodded at each other and said good night. He did know, though, that the moment he stepped out of the house his heart was full of promises—that he would never again cheat on his wife, that she’d always know where he was and when he was coming home, that he’d take a greater interest in their children, that he’d moderate his tone when stating opinions while continuing to stand up for the ideals he believed in. He would work hard to make friends of his enemies.
These were the things he was telling himself as he walked down her driveway. And because he was so thoroughly focused on those thoughts, he didn’t notice the sound of the engine until he was halfway between her house and the road. Too far to turn back. Not a bush within thirty feet, not a tree within forty.
He assumed it was Arlan returning, that he’d realized it was fruitless to take up arms for a cause that was lost nearly a hundred years ago, that the more he considered it, the less he relished facing off against professionally trained soldiers armed with the best modern weaponry. He could’ve come to all those realizations, though, and still blow several holes in a man walking away from his house in the middle of the night. Nobody would have blamed him if he did, not even Ellis.
But the truck that braked at the foot of the driveway was old, and Arlan Calloway’s was new.
The driver rolled down his window, grabbed something white and pitched it towards the driveway. Like any good deliveryman, he followed its arc, to make sure it didn’t land to one side or the other, where the morning dew might render the newsprint blurry.
It hit just a foot or two away. In the few secon
ds it took the driver’s gaze to meet his own, a memorandum of understanding was drafted. On the other side of the Mississippi River, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, stood a small brick building with a for sale sign in front. It wouldn’t remain empty much longer.
“Hey, Mr. Buchanan,” Andy Owens said. “What you doing way off out here?”
Ellis leaned over and poured himself another shot of Knob Creek. “So that’s what I can tell you,” he said. “That and nothing more. I got the news the next morning along with the rest of the town. Heard it from Elnora Napier when I walked into the office. You can probably imagine the emotional cocktail I drank that day—grief, shock, shame, fear, big slugs of self-disgust. I told myself that morning that I’d never get over it—that I couldn’t and shouldn’t allow myself to—and I can see that on some level I was right. Everything comes back at you one day. But since I don’t ever want to discuss this again, in however much time I have left, I’m going to ask you a question now, if that’s all right.”
There wasn’t much I could do except nod. I thought his question would be about Maggie and me, and I didn’t know how I would answer it. But I was wrong. Because all he asked was “Is there anything at all, Luke, that you’d like to tell me?”
I picked up my glass and drank down the last of that burning whiskey, then set the glass on the table. “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to tell you how sorry I am that I came here today.”
Sunset
ONCE OR TWICE A YEAR throughout my childhood, we went to visit my cousin—the same one I’d tripped off that country store’s porch into the mudhole.
His family was much worse off than mine. They lived in south Jackson, in a depressing little house on a potholed street. He had few toys and often left them lying out on the ragged lawn all night, where they were damaged by the elements or stolen by the neighbors. When I went to visit, I always brought a few things for us to play with—a football, say, or a bat, ball and glove.
Safe from the Neighbors Page 16
