The Colemans were among the last to say goodbye. Ramsey asked if I planned on coming to work the following week, and when I nodded he said, “Well, take your time. But when you do get back in the saddle, come by the office and let’s chat, all right?” So then I knew I had at least two conversations to dread, not just one.
The caterers cleared away their trays, and Jennifer announced that she was going to walk Ellis home, leaving the three of us alone. I asked if they’d like a glass of wine. Trish, who hadn’t cried at the funeral home or the cemetery, said sure, but Candace shook her head, wiped her eyes again and stood there as if she were in the dock, waiting for her sentence to be pronounced.
I poured Trish a glass and another for myself, then said, “Let’s go into the living room and sit down.” Though they weren’t yet aware of it, my daughters were about to become revisionists who’d come to question every fact they thought they knew about the family they’d grown up in. Even the most innocuous actions—the peck on the cheek I’d given their mother after dinner before going back to school to work on lesson plans until midnight—would be reevaluated in the light of what they were about to hear.
So there we sat, the two girls and me, and I didn’t even know where to begin. Should I start with the day school opened, when I saw Maggie for the first time in forty-four years, or should I start on the afternoon I went to her house for the first time? Or should I reach even further back, to when she tripped me off the porch of that store? It’s a lot easier to say when something ended rather than when it began. Most of us can recognize the end from a mile away, but the beginning always slips up on us, lulling us into thinking what we’re living through is yet another moment, in yet another day.
I knew that afternoon I was living through a moment like no other and wanted it to pass in fewer than sixty seconds. There was time neither for providing causal analysis nor for cloaking my failures as husband and father in a golden flowing narrative, in which I’d done this in that setting, entertaining x emotion before finally succumbing to y urge as rain pounded down and lightning flashed and wind shook pecans off the trees. There was nothing to do except reduce the truth to its essence, discarding all the surrounding data that would interest them even less than it did me.
No, there was nothing to do except say it, so I did. “Girls,” I told them, “I’m in trouble.”
LIKE A POLITICIAN who’s been hounded from office, I tried to stay out of the public eye, doing my grocery shopping in Greenville and keeping to myself as much as possible when not in the classroom, mostly just sitting around my parents’ house watching The World at War on the History Channel before falling asleep on the couch. I did drop by the nursing home every afternoon to look in on my mother, and sometimes I could tell Jennifer had been there. There would be a rose in a vase on the bedside table, or her hair would be freshly brushed, or she’d smell faintly of Jennifer’s perfume. I finally had my talk with Ramsey, who began by telling me we’d been friends for a long time and that he felt like he could come to me if he ever needed to, so why hadn’t I felt like I could come to him? Well, I said, I didn’t know I was in trouble until it was way too late for talking about it to do any good. He leaned back, locked his hands behind his head and, instead of issuing me the warning I expected, only said, “I can sure see how it could happen. If you’re going to ruin your life over a woman, you want it to be one like Maggie.”
As for the woman in question, she hadn’t answered any of my e-mails or voice-mails, though I’d left her so many that she could’ve accused me of being a stalker. A couple of times I went by her house and peeked in the window, and the kitchen looked exactly as it had on the day my father died. Then, around the middle of November, a U-Haul truck was parked in the driveway next to a car with a Tishomingo County license plate. Somebody else was moving in. What they did with her stuff, I have no idea.
I kept calling her, though, leaving messages every few days, and finally, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, she answered. I was so shocked that I couldn’t speak.
“If you don’t say something, Luke,” she said, “I’m going to hang up. And I won’t ever answer again.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I told her.
“Then why did you call me?”
“I wanted to hear your voice.”
“I’m not a CD. You can’t just put me on and hit play.”
“I know that.”
“So what was it you wanted to say?”
I was standing in the kitchen, where a layer of grime coated everything. A lot of the stuff in the refrigerator was already out-of-date. I couldn’t remember if I’d taken a shower today, or even the day before. I’d be spending Thanksgiving with Ellis—at least he’d said I could. The girls would be at their mom’s. Candace, I knew, would have her boyfriend with her, the football player who’d gotten hurt, and I suddenly wanted more than anything in the world to be there with all of them. “Why did you leave?” I said, choking on my own words. “You come in here and stir everything up, then take off at the first sign of trouble.”
“I took off?” she said, her voice rising. “Yes, of course I did—out the back door, like some petty criminal. And you did what? Did you come looking for me? No, you sat there in your house all night. Watching a fucking ball game on TV.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“How do you think? I drove up and down your street. For hours. I could see you sitting there. You put me out of your mind, just like some inconvenient fact.”
“I tried calling you. Didn’t you have your cell?”
“I didn’t want to be called. I wanted to be sought. You made your choice that day, and I wasn’t it.”
I sat down, propping my elbow on the kitchen table and resting my jaw against my knuckles. I couldn’t quibble with her interpretation. Things were pretty much as she said. I’d made my choice, and it hadn’t been her. And like Jennifer she wasn’t the kind of woman who’d let you backtrack.
I knew we were speaking for the last time. She wouldn’t want to talk to me again, and I no longer had anything to say to her, having already said it with the actions she’d described. There was, however, one last question I needed to ask: “The night your mom got killed,” I said, “your dad and mine went to Oxford together. Did you know that?”
I thought at first that she was about to end the call. But finally her voice broke the silence. “Yes,” she said. “I’m the one who answered the phone when your father called.”
“Can you remember what he said?”
The distance between us could no longer be measured in the miles that stretched out between Mississippi and North Carolina or wherever she happened to be. “Yes,” she said, “I do. That and a whole lot more.”
While I sat there at my parents’ kitchen table, she told me exactly what she recalled about that night, her voice as coldly matter-of-fact as if she were repeating a speech she’d delivered a hundred times before. And when she finished, she said, “See who you got tangled up with? I bet you wouldn’t have, if you’d known.” She paused—giving me a chance to disagree, I supposed, and when I didn’t the connection got broken without her goodbye.
And I thought that, finally, there could be nothing left to find out about October 1, 1962. This was a notion I clung to for just over a month.
On Christmas Eve it snowed, something I’d seen in Loring only once before, the year I was seven. I recalled my father hustling me out of bed the next morning, telling me to hurry up and get dressed, there was something outside he wanted to show me. He wouldn’t let me go into the living room, where I knew Santa had left my toys. Instead, he marched me through the kitchen and out the back door. He was carrying the Kodak he’d given my mother a couple of years earlier for her birthday.
When we got outside our house, the bright sunlight glaring off all that white blinded me. My dad told me to shield my eyes with the back of my hand, and that’s what I did as I followed him through the yard, our shoes crunching the crust with every step. A
t the north end of the house, near the chimney, there were two parallel grooves in the white powder on the ground, maybe four feet apart, and in between them a bunch of heart-shaped indentations. These started right at the base of the chimney and ran across the entire yard before evaporating near a pine thicket that separated our house from the field beyond.
“See?” my father said. “He must’ve landed the sleigh right by the chimney, and after he jumped down off the roof he needed a little bit of runway to take off. Looks to me like they just barely cleared them trees. That would’ve been a mighty mess, wouldn’t it—if he’d crash-landed over there and hadn’t nobody but you got their presents?”
While I stood there staring at the ground, reveling in the thought that something so mysterious could also be so demonstrably factual, my father backed up a few steps and took my picture.
I knew that photo had to be around here somewhere, and on Christmas Eve—sitting alone in the house and watching the big wet flakes float down while waiting for Ellis to arrive with the ham he’d baked and the bottle of wine he’d promised to bring—I badly wanted to see it.
Until then, I hadn’t gone through my father’s things. His desk drawers were full of stuff that at other times in my life had seemed fascinating: old checkbooks, farm ledgers, letters from former shipmates, newspaper clippings announcing that his granddaughters had made the honor roll, expired driver’s licenses, medical bills and so on. He’d never been any good with a camera—tending to behead his subjects—and I’d never known him to put photos into albums, but my mother had, up until her illness.
I turned on his desk lamp and went through the three drawers quickly, not turning up much that captured my attention except his Citizens’ Council card—frayed at the edges, as though it had been carried in his wallet and sat on for a good many years—and a handful of black-and-white photos: him and my mother waving from their seats on a Ferris wheel, me wearing a black cowboy suit and pointing a silver pistol at the photographer, my grandfather perched on our old Allis-Chalmers.
Just off the den is a long, narrow space dominated by the washer and dryer where I knew he’d been stockpiling junk for years, so I moved in there and pulled the string dangling from the single overhead bulb.
I seemed to remember seeing some fake leather-bound albums on the floor beneath shelves that held a couple hundred paperback westerns and fishing tackle he hadn’t used in forty years. I got down on my knees and looked, but all I saw were several rows of American Rifleman, the NRA magazine. I pulled one stack back, though, and behind it were several of those albums, and I dragged them out.
They were full of pictures that had to date into the late ’40s. There were several shots of my mother at about the same age as my daughters were now, her hair long and blowsy, her face unlined, and there was one of my dad standing behind her and helping her aim a shotgun, both of his hands bracing her right elbow. I laid the albums aside and, hoping there might be more of them, reached behind the other copies of American Rifleman to see if anything else was back there, up against the baseboard.
My hand touched something that felt like a spiral ring, and I withdrew a stack of notebooks, some of which were obviously quite old. The one on top, however, looked new. I realized it was the green one I’d spotted back in September on the floor by his chair. I flipped it open and read a few lines, written in my father’s surprisingly small script:
He was sitting on the living room floor eating popcorn. He wasn’t worried about nothing and I remember thinking that’s how it should be, a boy ought not have to worry while he was only a boy.
Safe from the Neighbors
“IF THIS COUNTRY should ever reach the point,” the president was saying, while I sat on the floor with that bowl of popcorn between my legs, “where any man or group of men, by force or threat of force, could long defy the commands of our courts and Constitution, no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.”
All over the South, in living rooms like ours, people were jeering at the image on their TV sets, and my father knew it. But he himself felt no such urge. And it wasn’t because my mother, sitting beside him on the couch and culling pecans, thought JFK was right. It was because he’d just recently come to understand something he never would’ve wanted to admit: he was hardly safe from his own neighbors.
Certainly not from Herman Horton. From 1948, when he began farming with my grandfather, until I left for Ole Miss and he gave up and quit, he had to trudge into the bank and face that old man or another just like him, and even though he always got his furnish, he’d walk out feeling poorer. Nor was he safe from the guy who ginned his cotton, though they attended the same church—if his trailers were standing out in the yard full of cotton as a storm front approached, they’d stay right there while those belonging to people who owned land and had money got pulled under the shed and onto the scales. It was the same with Feed and Seed, Delta Lumber and Allis-Chalmers.
But most of all, he wasn’t even safe from Arlan Calloway. They used to ride the same bus into Loring after the one-room schoolhouse at Fairway Crossroads closed down, and when they reached their destination they were given the same treatment. Town kids said they smelled bad and made fun of their clothes, their long country vowels, so they ran off together more times than my father could count and, when caught, took their floggings from the principal in tandem. Later on, they joined different branches of the service two days apart, which was the first time they ever disagreed about anything: my dad said he’d rather drown than get shot, while Arlan, who could barely swim, preferred to face bullets and land mines. They wrote each other throughout the war, letters that surely must have stumped the censors:
I been thinking what we used to do with Ex-Lax.
What about Miss Waters and that old pitcher pump on the Pool place?
Remember that cake on the roof at Western Auto?
Back then, according to what my father wrote in the green notebook I found in the laundry room, Arlan wasn’t the kind of person who took. He was the giving sort. He gave the answers to homework if he knew them and you didn’t, and he gave you a bite of his sandwich if he knew his was better than yours. During the war, if you confessed to being scared, he gave you to understand that he was, too, probably even more than you. When I finally found a few of his letters, in a shoe box my dad had stashed in the attic, he came across as an affable young man. I bet I’m going to die before I can get home, he wrote in one that had several passages blacked out. If I do I sure am sorry if I ever did anything nasty to you. If I don’t then I’m not!
After he came back in one piece and went to work down in south Mississippi, Arlan still wrote my father occasionally, but over time his letters started sounding different. He began to use unusual words and phrases. Today leaves me bemired in a situation with which I was previously unfamiliar but I don’t mean to bemoan my fate for fact is I have found my beloved and she’s half a foot taller than me. Kissing her’s like climbing that old slash pine at the edge of Daddy’s porch.
In 1962, by which time he’d been back in the Delta for just over three years, Arlan Calloway owned a good car and a good truck and a new house with a swimming pool, not to mention several hundred acres. He had the respect of the same people who used to say he smelled bad and talked funny. And he also had the best-looking wife anybody around town had ever seen. But before long he didn’t have her all to himself anymore, and a couple of times—after learning that his friend had placed a bid on our land—my father nearly let him in on the secret. I figured if I told him, he wrote in the green notebook, he’d be so ashamed he’d pack up and leave town. But I couldn’t stand the thought of the expression I knew I’d see on his face, it would just about kill him, he loved that woman so much.
I once heard Dad tell my uncle about riding a train home from California at the end of World War II. He didn’t have a seat when it left Oakland, so he stood at the counter in the dining car, treating hims
elf to several cups of coffee and two different kinds of pie while looking out the window and watching the great San Joaquin Valley slide by. Then the train stopped in Fresno and a lot of people got off, and after it pulled out again he paid up and went to find himself a seat.
He was walking down the aisle, looking for an empty row, thinking maybe he’d stretch out and grab a few hours’ sleep, when a man reading a newspaper glanced up and broke into a broad-faced grin. “Say, mate. You just got off a ship, didn’t you?” he asked.
My father told my uncle he was wearing civvies he’d bought in a shop on Market Street, that the blues he’d been discharged in were packed away in his duffel bag and stowed in the baggage car. He didn’t know how the man could tell he’d been in the navy, and didn’t want to be badgered with a bunch of questions about where he’d been and what he’d seen, but it wasn’t in his nature to be impolite. So he just said, “Well, sir, what makes you ask?”
The man laughed. “Everybody else that comes down the aisle hangs on to the seat backs for dear life. But you, you’re at home on your feet.”
I didn’t know why that story pleased me so much when I was nine or ten, but it did. And it still does.
On the evening of September 30, 1962, as JFK neared the end of his speech to the nation, my father was decidedly not on his feet. He was sitting there on the couch beside my mother in a house that wasn’t his on land he didn’t own. Across the room, cross-legged on the floor, I was munching away on the popcorn. I can almost see myself as he must have seen me then, a snaggle-toothed kid with a cowlick, fingernails bitten to the quick. I’m staring at a book that lies beside the bowl, the standard first-grade reader, Fun with Dick and Jane.
That’s what my father believed I expected from life: fun. Which is what I was supposed to expect, as he saw it, because I was still a boy and was right to think life ought to be fun, that it was a game, and if today you happened to lose, you’d start over again tomorrow with the score tied at zero. My father and Arlan Calloway were having fun when they ran off from school, slipped into the bakery through the back door, stole an angel food cake and ate it on the roof of Western Auto, and they never once regretted it, not even when they got a good whipping. But as for the fun itself, that night my father hardly recalled what it felt like. He hadn’t had any in years.
Safe from the Neighbors Page 21
