White People

by Allan Gurganus

  SHE is guarding the world.

  Only, nobody knows.

  1985

  A Hog Loves Its Life

  Something About My Grandfather

  For Herbert E. Gurganus (1889-1965)

  and W. Ethel Pitt Gurganus (1889-1963)

  1. ONCE …

  Language, like love, starts local.

  My grandfather called me deep into the big house. We hid. While powdered aunts and freckled cousins yammered on his front porch, one old farmer scolded me. I was scared but liked it.

  “Willy? Just heard you lipping-off to your mother—close to tantrum, you were. Keep doing that, you got no future. I won’t have a grandson of mine carrying on like Lancaster’s mule.”

  “Like who?”

  This antique stared at me. (I might’ve asked if Jesus was the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost—if South Carolina didn’t outrank our native North Carolina.)

  “Like Lancaster’s mule.” First Grand doubted my hearing. When I still shrugged, he closed both eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and, sighing hard, motioned me up into his lap. The sigh smelled of medicine, baking soda, and leaf mold, of bread and years.

  “Since wireless came in, seems like nothing on this earth is grounded. My own flesh and blood especially. You sure don’t know much. Where you been, boy?”

  “I guess I’m young yet.” This got me one respectful frown.

  “Seems Lancaster dealt livestock. Boo-coo hogs and horses—that being French for ‘heaps of.’ (With you, son, I’m taking nothing for granted.) A jumbo size of a man, this Lancaster, all jaw was he, hair parted in the middle, the very middle. Animals were gods to us in the eighteen and nineties—and Buck, he sold them. Now, Willy, this I’m trying and tell you, it came previous to autocars, tractors, exhaust, all such mess. Maybe you think you’re lucky being born so recent? Ha. Ha ha. More the fool you. You believe sputniks are worth writing home about? Ha ha. People wanted to get around the country in my time, people either bought something four-legged or else used good old shoe leather. Ever heard of it, you-in-all-the-car-pools? A person needed their field plowed, person either borrowed a hand hoe or got a good mule, one. As for Lancaster, his morals might’ve been the short end of nothing, but the man knew every confidence trick going, was just his nature to.

  “Buck’s been dead since ’31. They all are. Most everybody’s gone except your grandmother, wonderful woman, testy as she sometimes acts toward me. Last person alive knows to call me Little Bobby Grafton. Nowdays in this town, I’m held to be Mr. Grafton or Old-timer or Pops Grafton. But a body needs a few souls who remember he was Little Bobby Grafton. ‘Ears,’ the boy that lived in trouble. But wait, I’m wandering. One evening, closing time at Buck’s stockyard, here comes a young hayseed. One born every minute—plenty to keep Buck busy and his daughters between satin sheets. ‘You’re seeking, don’t tell me’—Lancaster touches one temple—’an exceptional … mule.’ The mouth-breathing farmer blinks, asks how Buck knew. ‘Simple, son,’ Buck says, ‘little something we call genius. Ever hear of it? Follow me.’ Which ends this part.”

  My teller paused, his shoulders jiggling, readied. He talked the way binge drinkers, finally on vacation, drink. Bobby was considered tight-lipped. He saved his lurid best for me. I sat staring at the man.

  Us grandkids called him Grand for short. He was semifamous, the county white man with the record-largest ears. We are talking giant here. In those times in North Carolina, ears grew bigger. Especially farmers’. I studied cartilage sturdy as roofing shingles: Hinge-long, rust-colored—any hound could envy his. And I’d inherited the things. My mother wept about this. Literally wept. You can see how—all these years later—I’ve resisted having mine surgically subdued, a tribute.

  “Buck did not know fear. Buck loved money the most. Buck was not exactly ugly—you can’t call a bag of cement ugly—just there. Flashy dresser he was, though his linen pant cuffs tended to stay the color that a-man-who-owns-a-stockyard-and-wades-everywhere’s pant cuffs will.”

  “Brown?”

  “Now, as a mule salesman, Lancaster was known to fudge a bit. A bit! Did I say a bit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t correct me here, Will. Because I won’t sanction insolence. Not even from my best-looking grandchild. Boo-coo questions cannot be answered. Mine especially. Lancaster didn’t fudge just some, oh no. He was a horse trader. You expected those to try and bilk you. Means ‘cheat,’ Willy. You went ready. I’ve always had a soft spot for the fellows can’t resist but to drive a deal. I’m not so hot at it myself, pushover. Ask your grandmother, Ruth reminds me often enough. But Lancaster? Give such a gent fifteen hundred pounds of surplus steel wool, he’ll knit you a hotel stove. Then he’ll try and sell it to you. And, son, know what?”

  “You’ll buy it?” Grand squinted down at me, impressed with my quickness, bored by my character. “Willy? What’d I just tell you? Just?”

  “Quiet?”

  “Quiet. No wonder you know jack-nothing—way you keep busting in on a person. Look, do you want this or not? Ask me for it.”

  “I do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Want. I’ll keep still. I promise. It’s just … I …”

  “You’re goddamn right you will. Should’ve seen me back then. One thing sure, could’ve beat you up, both hands tied behind me. Scrappy. We had to be.”

  “But, Grand, know what? I bet I’m probably smarter.” Inner corners of forty wrinkles tightened, that ashamed: a boy had admitted that another boy might trounce him.

  “Smarter’n me? I didn’t hear that. Buck Lancaster owned a fine three-story house, had four overly average-looking daughters. Sundays you’d ride by, Buck’s girls’d be lined up along his porch, one softer than her baby sister. Did I say, ‘You’d ride by …’?”

  (This time, a quick study, I knew to say nothing.)

  “More like walk by. Our farm was five miles out, and I oftimes hiked to town wearing my one Sunday suit. Faked errands all over a neighborhood where not a soul knew me, was studying Lancaster’s beauty girls in pastel dresses. ‘Ears’ was all eyes then, boy. To and fro went Little Bobby Grafton, the boy that lived in trouble, hoping to get into a better class of Bobby trouble than Bobby’s usual. You think those girls couldn’t guess who I was staring at! Ha. I might not’ve been as quick as you in a book way—with Poppa snatching me out of Lower Normal every time something got ripe enough to pick or cut—but I could’ve told you to Shut Up and you would’ve.

  “Lancaster’s girls had a parrot on the porch with them. A parrot in this town then, it really meant something. Showed sparrows weren’t the half of it. And not one Lancaster girl ever married is how hard a bargain Buck drove. No governor was fat, rosy, or rich enough to get in good with Buck’s girls.

  “So anyhow, the mule of it—along around closing time, near sunset on a slow week night, barn swallows probably went skimming over tin roofs (though I couldn’t swear to it), and into Buck’s dragged that same slow-moving young farmer from out Pitt County way. (Your grandmother was a Pitt and she will tell you in a minute if you don’t stop her. Pretty much a snob, but she sometimes seems to fancy me—so I can’t find total fault with her.) Young fellow craved a serious working mule. Buck happened to have one. Office was already padlocked, but Buck could smell a pocketful of bills, damp from this plowboy’s clutching them clear to town. So Buck swings into his friendliest style, hands our dirt farmer one fine cigar—the first that boy’d ever had, I bet you. Just to get a fellow’s confidence, don’t you know. Leads our boy around back where not one street lamp burns. And here in a dark corral stands the matted-eyed knock-kneed mule, all by its lonesome and acting real homesick for something.

  “Lancaster might have said, ‘Stranger, you are doubtless wondering—clever operator such as yourself—why I chose to separate this creature from its own born kind.’ Buck talked like that, only way worse. Trust me to talk like they talked. To try. Now we’re getting near the real part, part where I come
in. Now we’re near knee-deep in it.” And gazing before him, Grand literally rubbed his leather palms together.

  The rest of our family still jabbered on the bright porch. Jaw jaw jaw, gas gas gas. A waste. Out front, my grandmother’s clear tone straddled three conversations, governing them. Family talk sounded like one church organ’s many pipes and tubes—flute-to chimney-sized—all alive with a single feeding breath.

  I worried: my weight might be hurting Grand’s arthritis. But in Falls, N.C., then—if you were ten years old, grandfathers invited you up onto their laps, even if it really pained them. They practically had to, some grandfatherly union regulation. Grand’s easy chair was a huge orange leatherette slab. He’d bought it at some cut-rate store; its ugliness daily grieved my grandmother. The matching footstool steadily leaked sawdust onto her inherited Aubusson carpet. “It molts,” she said.

  I watched narrow lips move, silent, as Grand carpentered our next part. He studied air directly before his face. He was one of those people that, like a dog or mule, lets you stare. They hardly notice till, with you an inch away, your saying “Hey” can make them jump like something shot. This man owned four stores, ten rental homes, and the most broken-down dirt farm you ever saw. I admired how much property he’d piled up from total scratch. Little Bobby Grafton’s folks had mostly worked as sharecroppers, their lives spent improving others’ fields. As a day-labor kid, Grand got sun-cooked across his neck and over both hands’ leathery backs (roofs of his hands, I considered them). His skin seemed lidded like the old-timey thick-topped butterscotch pudding my grandmother served. She called this favorite dessert “commonplace but comforting.” His was the face of a small-time landowner, accustomed to squinting with slit-eyed pride at mortgaged horizons. During summer, when he gimped in from a burning day outdoors, his stately wife met him on the porch. She held a jar of Nivea, as blue as the future. “Sun seems to consider these poor ears perfect targets.” Ruth stationed herself behind his chair; she removed her ruby ring, slathered up either hand and, focusing on the mammoth flanges, started daubing.

  (Whenever my first wife feared losing one of our arguments, she hinted I should go and have my ears surgically “pinned.” Hideous word, “pinned”—especially when the features are yours and visibly inherited. I had confided Grand’s early nickname: “Bi-plane Grafton.” And do you know she used this against me, in front of two other couples and in a good New York restaurant? She did. She hinted we were presently getting such poor service because of a certain rustic somebody’s ear size. “Obscene,” she once called these units you’ve occasionally glanced at. Go ahead—hey, no offense, really. My first wife’s inappropriateness finally stuck out even more than do these Willy flaps. They’re still with me, she is not.)

  “Now—buddy-ro for which I’m trying to spell what ‘like Lancaster’s mule’ means, young as you are, and as lost in the modern world as everybody seems now, do you figure it’s too good of an idea, buying yourself a mule—or, for that matter, a little runabout motorcar—at nighttime? Huh, Willy? I’m asking this one straight out, so go ahead and answer if you can.”

  I stalled. With Grand, I kept my favored standing by avoiding the porch (its gossip was considered beaucoup more entertaining than his). He loved my admitting what I didn’t know, he loved the way I pleaded for his Sunday installments. He let me take out his pocket-watch and fidget with its chain’s three toy brass horseshoes (they came with penny candy in the 1890s, when animals were still the gauge of distances and dollars). But if Grand offered me direct questions, I could not be wrong twice in a single visit. My mother explained I need not humor the old man. She considered her father-in-law sweet, well-meaning, reasonably pathetic. While I sat indoors with him, I missed some good porch rumors, ones my folks and kid brother would mention in our station wagon bound home to the suburbs. But I was hooked on his fierce attention, on weekly news from one gent literally rednecked. Sundays I rushed toward his chair. “Okay, start me off with ‘Carlton’s Wren,’ then do ‘Lessie Poland’s Boot’ the long way. I mean, please, sir, please do those ones first.”

  Mention any creek from Pitt to Nash counties, you’d siphon a tale. The awful flood of ’89; the beautiful sisters who left a note, then drowned on purpose; the fellow who swapped Indian Creek for a diamond brooch, then lost it to his wife at poker. When our station wagon zoomed home from Grand’s and over a bridge, I looked down on Legend. My loved ones saw just weeds and bilge.

  Our Compton’s Encyclopedia showed Egyptian murals: Pharaohs were giant athletes—their helpful midget commoners came knee-high. For Grand, the dead of Falls were royally huge. They towered over all us present pygmies of the 1950s. (Ours was an age of sleekest tail fins. A big war had just been won—by my father; Falls’s stores sold smooth, good, streamlined things. Each year at the State Fair, we saw U.S. Army rockets displayed, but mules? They were already scarce in suburban Falls. If some hold-out farmer led one down our street, people swarmed outdoors, smiling, aiming Kodaks, calling, “You kids? Unglue yourself from that TV set. Come look for once. You’ll thank me later. It’s historical.”)

  My own secret interest in the future changed the way I heard Grand’s yarns. He weekly binged forth a gallery of good-sized hucksters, men brilliant as my Superman comics’ space masterminds. At ten, I was a glum little comic-book pedant (such kids are now computer whizzes). I listened to the muddy landscape Grand described, but sent it light-years forward into chilly mineral space. I pictured crystal tower residences so tall, spotlights shone up top warning away rocket ships. Grand often mentioned hogs; I reshaped even these: rooting carnivorous robot units, stainless steel as Mother’s weekday flatware. Here and now, alive and in secret in modern life, I’d found a talking map. He stayed hushed around others, semidignified; but with me in lap, Grand sketched a space frontier: vigilantes, potent animals, robberies, feuds. His past unrolled a fresh (free) Marvel Comics. Soon, our own Indian Creek—wagered for diamonds, lost at cards—seemed mythic as some Mars canal traded for hunks of white-hot Kryptonite.

  Grand’s mission? Explaining Falls’s deceased to Falls’s more newly born. Who new cared except his single scrawny disciple, the one kid willing to stay indoors, to shut up for a change, and just sit here big-eyed, positively floppy with hearing equipment? The old man told and told—unaware of giving me a future, not a past.

  I FINALLY RISKED: “No, sir. It’s not really all that good of an idea, buying stuff at night and everything. Because, see? it’s dark and they could … put something over on you.”

  Which got me one raw assessing look. Praise might be hid in it; I couldn’t yet decide. So, taking a chance, I added, “Lancaster especially.”

  A shudder ran through runty knobbled shoulders. Grand stared. For a second I feared I needed to blow my nose, so rarely did he gape right at a person’s face. Then hard hands slipped under my arms, he turned me (roughly) toward window light, he checked my freckles, coded like star charts or our genes. “I know whose grandchild this one is. Folks, how about our Willy here?” But looking around the parlor, Grand found everybody’d wandered to the airier front porch. Even so, he held me inches up in air, showing me off to absolutely nothing. “‘Lancaster especially,’ says this one, like he was there. I like that. ‘Lancaster especially.’ “He set me down harder and sooner than I wanted.

  “So Buck says to our farmer, says, ‘Sir, what you’re studying is the smartest single mule currently alive in our continental America, meaning, fellow patriot, the world generally. Please greet the Mule of Your Dreams, why, the mule of anybody’s. But first tell me how you heard about him. You waited till closing time when all the earlier bidders got dragged away, right, you dog, you?’ Buck was not above nudging a fellow’s ribs. Whatever works. The poor farmer grinned—sucker was slow, Willy. I’ve heard your mother talk about somebody’s children having reading problems and all like that. There is—your present-day liberal hates admitting—such a thing as plain D-U-M. And this clodhopper was it. What can you do?

&n
bsp; “Goes Buck, ‘Certain mules kept torturing this paragon, actually biting him. I’m ashamed to admit: some kicking was involved. So we hid our rarity. Reason? I caught him trying to plow, sir. Kept digging ruts, using nothing but his hoof. At the time, it was all he had on him. Pulling said hoof back and forth, making little furrows, steady as a Singer. By noon, my front paddock could have been the start of a decent truck garden. Of course, the other mules hate this one for being so work-loving. Makes them look bad. So here it is, banished from its shiftless kind, the workingest damn animule I have laid eyes on in my fifty years of community service from one single convenient location.’ Buck adds that if all this is not true, may his lovely daughters suffer chilblains, gout, and facial warts right … this … second. He stands still, like listening. One slow grin proves honesty’s won out again, his girls are yet smooth as satin sheets. Buck tells the customer to go freely peruse yonder mule. But our farmer cannot get a real clear look-see, and why, Willy?”

  “It’s still night.”

  “You’re goddamn right, it’s still night. And by now it’s pitch-black coal-bin midnight dark. Lancaster’s moving faster. ‘Young sir, I love dealing with gents who so know mulekind. Heck, let those other bidders duke it out come morning. For a price our dream mule is yours alone.’ Now, say the beast cost eighty dollars. Might sound cheap to a pip with an allowance big as yours (your daddy told me what he pays you for doing nothing). But back then, money was still a law unto itself. Why, you could get you a whole motorcar for under three hundred dollars, new.”

  “Naw.” I slapped the leather roof of his hand. “Naw. New?” (I pictured a rocket ship, all my own and as silver as Reynolds Wrap.)

  “Truth. Sure. Brand-new. Tires inclusive. (Means: it comes with, Will.) So that farmer’d shelled out his whole life savings. Boo-coo bucks. And don’t you know, his wife and kids were waiting up by lantern light to see what hero-animal they’d got. Maybe they patted it, probably they named it. We named everything back then. My daddy’s favorite plow was called Atlas … be one example. I still know the names of certain hogs I personally ate most of. I’m saying this to feed the fire of our story till I tiptoe in with what I eyewitness-saw. Plus I’m hoping to put off going out on the porch, having your grandmother tell me in front of everybody that I’m wearing one too many plaids again—how do people know? Come dawn, our poor farmer was probably up before the larks—if we had any round these parts, well, meadowlarks, I guess we do—he hit a snag once the harness was oiled, plow-sharpened, ready to start life over behind the Mule of His Dreams—behind the mule of anybody’s, Willy o’ mine …”