“What do they do to you in Mississippi,” she said as I pulled back onto the highway, “if they catch you with an open container?”
“Confiscate it and drink it themselves.” This reminded me of a story I hadn’t yet told her. “An uncle of mine was sheriff up in Lee County,” I said, “back in the Fifties when the whole state was still dry. And he had a deal with the local bootleggers. He’d raid them once a month, take half of whatever they had on hand, then he and his deputies’d have a big party out behind the jail. Well, one year he decides to take my aunt and cousins to the Smokies on vacation, and because he’d miss his regular raiding day he hits all the bootleggers a couple days early.
“He heads off down into a holler where there’s this one old guy he’s been dealing with for a good fifteen years, and when the bootlegger sees him he whips out a shotgun and fills my uncle’s chest full of buckshot. Once he’s out of danger, my dad goes to visit him in the hospital and asks what happened. And he shakes his head and says, ‘Aw, hell, James, it was my fault. I should’ve just waited till we got back off vacation.’”
I tell the story often. It’s almost always good for a laugh, especially if I’m giving it to an outsider who likes seeing Southern stereotypes confirmed. All I got from Maggie, though, was a faint smile, and that froze me in my seat. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just realized how insensitive it was, that particular story.”
“I’m sorry. You wanted me to laugh, but I’ve got my mind on something else.”
“I know, thinking about what happened to your mom.”
We were coming into Leland, just passing Barsotti’s, for sixty years a good place for a cheap plate of pasta, when she let me have the laugh I’d been trolling for. She laughed so hard, and so long, that most of the champagne sloshed out of her cup. Some of it even got on me. I felt a damp spot near my right knee.
“You think that’s what I’m thinking about?” she said. “Tonight?”
I pulled up to the stoplight at the intersection of 82 and old Highway 61. “Okay,” I said. “So you’re not thinking about your mom, then why don’t you tell me what’s so funny?”
“The evening I came to your house for dinner?”
“Yeah?”
“You remember I left the table and went to the bathroom?”
I did remember because for one brief moment I’d thought about following her, under the guise of showing her where it was, hoping to take her in my arms and kiss her there in my own house. But for once sanity prevailed and I stayed in my chair. “Vaguely,” I said. “I’d had a lot to drink.”
“Well, I’m laughing because on my way back I decided to open the door to your bedroom. I couldn’t stop myself—I just wanted to see inside. But do you know what?”
The chill I felt had nothing to do with the champagne she’d dumped on my knee. “What?”
“It was locked,” she said. “Now, don’t you think that’s funny?”
SHE’D CHOSEN MY SIDE of the bed, which is where I found her when I stepped out of the bathroom. Her clothes lay neatly folded on the wicker chair, her flashy turquoise boots standing side by side on the floor in front of our closet. Her eyes were shut. At first I thought she was teasing me, pretending to be asleep, but then realized I was wrong. She barely stirred when I crawled in beside her.
I reached over and switched off the light, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there listening and, every time a car went by, had to fight off a surge of panic. Jennifer hadn’t called or left a message, and that seemed odd since she always had before. When she’d gone to the conference in the past, of course, the girls were still home, and she couldn’t let an evening pass without speaking to them.
Earlier, while we sat on the living room couch and drained both bottles of Freixenet, still using those paper cups, I’d tried to stall the conversation, in hopes that before long she would say she wanted me to take her home. I might even have talked about the weather, which was unseasonably warm. The truth is I don’t remember what I said. This is not a game, is what I remember thinking, this is her life.
Lying there in bed I considered, for the first time in many weeks, just how difficult it is to keep a love affair secret in a place as small as Loring. People know before you know they know, in the way we all know things without having any information. There’s a feeling in the air around two people who are focused on each other. Even if they don’t touch, even if they studiously ignore each other in public, folks pick up on it.
Our house was built in 1927. It’s one of those old Delta houses where there’s a skeleton key that fits all the interior doors. We used to use it to lock our bedroom door from the inside, but quit doing that after the girls got older because, as Jennifer noted, you can hear the lock turning from a mile away. I hadn’t even seen the key for years. So either Maggie was lying about the door being locked that night, or Jennifer had gone to considerable trouble in order to do so. If I’d had to wager, I would’ve bet Maggie was telling the truth.
All the stuff I’d just put down my throat—steak, fries, beer, champagne—threatened to come back up, and my stomach acid was churning. Every time I thought about Jennifer coming home unannounced—pulling into the driveway, slowly walking across the yard, climbing the steps and unlocking the front door—I wished that my existence could somehow be erased. That scenario, of course, didn’t account for Maggie at all, and for the first time I felt a great pity for her. I saw how much had been taken away from her, and knew that I’d soon become yet another mark in the loss column of her life. Anyway, I hoped that was all I’d be, that she’d go back to her big house in North Carolina, find someone else and forget about me.
In other words, I wanted to emerge from our entanglement guilt free. Doesn’t everybody? People want it up until the very moment their wish is granted, and then they really hate it that they meant so little to the other person, that he or she actually managed to get over the pain rather than die of disappointment. Illicit lovers are like ravenous nations, eager to retain the ground they gained at somebody else’s expense.
I lay there listening, determined to stay awake until the sun came up, at which point I planned to get out of bed, go into the living room and hold a loud, fake conversation on the phone with one of the girls, then tell Maggie that they’d been involved in an accident in Oxford and I needed to run up there and check on them. I’d offer to drop her off at her place on my way out of town. Fortunately, I’d parked the car in the garage, so none of the neighbors would see me walking out the front door first thing in the morning with a woman most people in town would probably recognize by now.
I never experienced that misty moment when you know you’re about to fall asleep. If I had, I would’ve popped out of bed and gone out back to do calisthenics, whatever it took. I must have dropped off around 4:00, though, because I remember looking at the bedside clock at 3:47.
That’s what I thought when I woke up—that somehow I’d dozed off for a moment, that it was now maybe 4:00 a.m. But then why was it light outside? Why were birds singing? And whose voices were those that sounded like they were coming from the living room? I’d made damn certain to chain the front door.
My feet hit the floor like two sacks of concrete. Wildly, I looked around the room for my clothes, then realized I’d left them in the bathroom. I grabbed my robe off a hanger in the closet and pulled it on. Jennifer must have washed it recently, because the belt was missing, so I drew both halves of it together with one hand and swiped the other at Maggie’s foot, protruding from the covers.
Eyes still closed, she stretched luxuriously, her palms reaching up as if to touch the ceiling. In that instant, I think, I must have hated her. “Goddamn it. Wake up.”
She opened her eyes then, and whereas I still didn’t know exactly what was happening and why some young guy was saying, “Hey, this is a cool-looking house y’all got,” she sized up the predicament immediately. “It’s your daughters,” she said quietly, sitting up in bed, then swinging her legs over the side and placin
g her feet silently on the floor. “Get out there and talk to them. And Luke? Try not to look like you just robbed a bank.”
“What about you?”
“I did rob the bank,” she said. “Just get out there and talk. Act happy to see them.”
In the hallway I tripped on a throw rug that had been in the same place for about twenty years. When I walked into the living room, the front door was open and Trish was there along with not one, not two, but three guys. One of them was about six-three and must have weighed damn near three hundred pounds. He had on faded jeans and an Ole Miss football jersey—number 92. The other two guys were carbon copies, standard-issue Ole Miss frat boys: khaki slacks, knit pullovers, scuffed loafers.
“Hi, Daddy,” Trish said. She’d arrayed herself on the couch in what Jennifer called her Jean Harlow pose: one long leg on the cushions, the other off, her chin propped up on an elbow. “Looks like you had some fun here last night,” she observed, eyeing the Freixenet bottles and empty cups on the coffee table.
“Mr. Buchanan came by,” I said. It amazed me how easily the lie rolled off my lips, especially since I had no idea I was going to say that. “He and I started talking about Hodding Carter and the Delta Democrat, and I opened a bottle.”
“This is what our dad does when he wants to be wild,” Trish told the guys. “He kicks back and talks about dead people.”
The guy in the jersey laughed. The other two just grinned like they were embarrassed, though it was unclear whether it was about me or themselves.
Candace strolled through the front door carrying one of those thirty-two-ounce sodas they sell at 7-Eleven. “Forgot this,” she said. The moment the big kid saw her, I knew what she meant to him. His whole face changed, and he looked astonished, though she couldn’t have been out of his sight for more than a minute or two. His right hand rose, then fluttered helplessly in the air. You could tell he wanted to reach out and touch her, but not with her father in the room.
“Daddy,” she said, “this is Rick Bailey.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. May.” He offered that dangling hand and I was happy to take it, just to give him something to do with it. Such a big hand, and so helpless and sweaty.
“Rick’s on the team,” Candace said, “but he’s injured.”
“Just got my feelings hurt a little bit,” he told me. “But I’ll be playing again next season.”
“We decided to drive to Fayetteville,” Candace said, “for the game tonight.”
“We’re playing the Razorbacks. Sooey, pig!” Trish squealed. Her eyes, I noticed now, were red rimmed. She’d definitely been toking.
“And this,” Candace said, nodding at the other two guys, “is our friend Billy Kershaw and his brother Bobby.”
Still holding my robe closed, I shook hands with each of them.
“We just took a notion to do this about three or four this morning,” Rick said. “I feel bad about waking you up, Mr. May, but Trish said you never slept past seven.”
“What time is it, anyway?”
“A quarter past eight,” Trish said.
“How’d you get in?”
“When we saw the front door was still chained, Rick lifted the garage door high enough for me to crawl inside, so I came through the laundry room.”
“Well, I’m glad to see you guys,” I lied, “but isn’t this a little bit of a detour?”
“Rick’s from Arcola,” Candace said. “We’ll stop at his place and pick up his sister.”
“To kind of balance things out,” Trish said.
And then, I figured, everybody would go one on one. I wondered which of the Kershaw twins would get down in the trenches with her.
“People say it gets cold over in Arkansas,” Candace told me, “so we decided to pick up our down jackets.” She turned and started down the hall.
“Get mine too, okay?” Trish called.
At that moment it occurred to me to wonder whether I’d shut the bedroom door when I’d bounded through it. Surely to God I had, hadn’t I? I took off down the hall after her, but I was too late. The door was wide open, and my daughter had paused to look inside. I stood there shaking, an icy sweat flowing out of every pore. I could feel it trickling down my back and legs.
The bed was partially made, the covers thrown back at an angle on my side, exposing a triangular stretch of fitted sheet. The closet yawned open, as did the bathroom. Maggie was nowhere in sight.
“Want me to make you guys some coffee?” I asked, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. I hoped that when I went into the kitchen, I’d see the chain dangling from the back door, and in the end I found just that, proving she’d mapped her exit strategy before getting into bed.
“Sure,” Candace said, “some coffee would be nice.”
But for some reason, she continued to stand there rather than move on down the hall.
When I was a boy, my grandfather had an annoying little dog named Johnson. He could have been named for LBJ, though that seems unlikely, or—more plausibly—for Paul B. Johnson, Jr., who succeeded Ross Barnett as governor. I don’t remember and am not sure I ever knew.
Johnson, who I guess was a rat terrier, stayed busy from morning till night, causing as much trouble as he could, gnawing on people’s shoes while they tried to eat, chewing the Memphis paper to bits if you didn’t get it first thing in the morning, before Grandpa turned him loose. He’d pick up virtually any small object with his mean little teeth and carry it off to places none of us ever discovered. And unlike most Delta dogs, he was nonracial. Usually, dogs belonging to black people would only bark at whites, or vice versa, but Johnson barked at every living creature who entered his sphere of existence.
As far as anyone could tell, he was completely useless—up until you put him in a boat and paddled out on a lake, at which point he finally fell silent. Then, when you passed over a bream bed where the bluegills were spawning, he’d stick his nose into the air and sniff, letting you know it was time to drop your hook.
Standing there in the hallway, Candace did the same thing. She sniffed once, then twice. And though she never said a word, just trudged at last down the hall to get those down jackets so they wouldn’t freeze to death up in Fayetteville, I knew exactly what she was thinking: That’s not Momma’s fragrance.
BEING SOMEONE’S CHILD, it seems to me now, is a maddening state of affairs. You can always sense when something’s wrong in your parents’ lives, but you generally don’t know what it is, and they aren’t about to tell you, even if you’re already an adult yourself. They have—or believe they do—a vested interest in preserving your ignorance. There are questions they don’t want you to ask, and if by some accident you happen to pose them, they’ll either refuse to answer or just lie.
From an early age I understood that my father was a man of few words. In Parker Sturdivant’s barbershop he seldom spoke. In the rare instances when he did, it was usually to say something about the weather or to comment on how the fish were biting or not in Lake Lee. He never complained about his wife like the other men did, nor did he join in when they talked about football. His father hadn’t let him go out for the team when he was in school, since practice would’ve interfered with his cotton picking. Never having played—in a society where tall, athletic-looking boys were duty-bound to uphold their town’s honor on Friday nights by catching passes, leveling runners or scoring touchdowns—was something I don’t think he ever lived down. It just gave him one more reason to hate the fall—which, as I once heard him say, was the season when his fortunes always fell.
Oddly enough, given his membership in an organization openly dedicated to preventing the advancement of blacks, he spoke far more freely in their presence than around the men in the barbershop. One day I heard him tell a black man named Tea Burns, as they crawled around in the dirt beneath our old Allis-Chalmers, that there were times when he wished the Sunflower River bridge would collapse while his mother-in-law was driving across it, then went on to say that he also sometimes ho
ped she’d contract a deadly disease, though he never explained why. I heard him tell another black man, whose name I don’t remember, how much he hated having to go and beg Herman Horton for money every March, that he’d rather drop his drawers in the middle of Front Street and take a crap while the whole town watched. Nodding sympathetically, that man, whoever he was, said, “Yes sir, I know just what you mean. There’s days when I’d like to shit downtown myself.”
While I couldn’t imagine why my father wanted bad things to happen to my grandmother, what he said about turning Front Street into a bathroom made me giggle. But later on, when I imagined having to face Eugene and my other friends if he ever did anything like that, I became deeply unsettled. Something was wrong in my dad’s life, I could see that, though I didn’t know what it was or how I could help fix it. I just figured it wasn’t anything he and I would ever discuss, and that assumption, I’m sorry to say, was correct.
On that September day in 1962, when Arlan Calloway made his remarks about the land we lived on being “public” and then clapped my father on the back, it was unusually quiet in the pickup going home. Normally, Dad would gaze out at whatever cotton field we were passing and offer some bit of information he thought would prove useful when I started farming myself, and it was a given that I would. “Time’s coming,” he might say, “when most folks’ll be growing those high spindling stalks like’s in that field out there. That stuff slides into a mechanical picker nice and easy. But those old breeds with lots of heavy branches down low, that’s where the real yield is. Pick by hand just as long as you can.” Or “Been me, I would’ve rotated soybeans or peanuts into that patch this year. That land’s tired, and soybeans and peanuts are a source of free nitrogen.” That day he didn’t say a thing. He didn’t even look out the window, just trained his eyes on the ridge of gravel in the middle of the road, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
Safe from the Neighbors Page 18
