Safe from the Neighbors Page 2

  “If those cottonmouths bit you,” I said, “you wouldn’t be wandering anywhere. You’d be dead.”

  “Mr. History,” he said, using the nickname one of my students coined a few years ago. “Wed to fact like an innocent young bride.”

  Outside, crickets chirped in the velvet air. That afternoon it had rained, and the yard was soggy. Still, you’d never think of warning Ellis to watch his step. It went without saying that he knew right where he was going.

  In high school I’d worked as his intern, helping him do the pasteup and then carrying the sheets down the street to the printer, and before long he was taking me with him to news conferences. Through him, I’d met some major figures in the civil rights movement, like Aaron Henry, as well as the finest governor this state ever had, William Winter. You can find some of the worst people in the world in Mississippi, but also some of the best, and the quickest way to tell them apart is to look where they stand on race. Ellis Buchanan was one of the best. He’d done some good things for me personally, too, helping me win an Ole Miss scholarship so I wouldn’t have to take out loans or depend on my father, who’d been urging me to attend Mississippi State and study agriculture, then come home and help him farm.

  Walking to his house that night, he asked how my parents were doing. My dad didn’t have much use for him and would avoid him if it looked like they might meet on the street. And as for my mother, well, she hadn’t been able to speak to anybody for quite some time. “His blood pressure’s through the roof,” I said, “and he’s having problems with his feet. They’re always swollen. And poor Momma doesn’t know where she is, which I guess may be a good thing.”

  “That isn’t likely.”

  I looked at him. “You’ve never become forgetful, have you?”

  He laughed. “Well, now that’s hard to answer, isn’t it? Because if I had, I wouldn’t know it.”

  “I’m not talking about anything extreme. I mean when you forget somebody’s name, when you know it but just can’t quite dredge it up.”

  “I’m not in the habit of dredging.”

  “You used to be. I seem to recall that when you were a journalist, you did a fair amount of it.”

  “Did I? That must be one of the things I’ve forgotten.”

  A certain portion of Ellis’s emotional capital had always been invested in irony. That probably helped him survive his wife’s death—she’d had lung cancer and suffered badly towards the end—as well as the ’60s and early ’70s, when his politics put him on the outs with almost everybody in the white community. Later on, as the town tried to rehabilitate itself, he became its unofficial spokesperson—the guy who could explain to the outside world that while Loring, Mississippi, had a long way to go, it’d already traveled a great distance.

  “On the subject of forgetting,” I said, “I met someone today I haven’t thought of in years.”

  “Really? And who might that be?”

  “Her last name’s Sorrentino now.”

  “She’s Italian?”

  “No. She was originally named Calloway, Maggie Calloway, She seemed hurt that I didn’t remember her. We were friends when I was small—I’m guessing I was no more than four or five when we met, but I can’t say for sure. The thing was, she moved away. I don’t know exactly when this happened, but you’ll probably remember. Because her father shot and killed her mother.”

  As a young man, Ellis had played basketball at Ole Miss, and he still carried himself with the grace and certainty of an athlete. That night he never broke stride. “October first, 1962,” he said. “Does that date ring a bell, Mr. History?”

  THE HOUSE WHERE I GREW UP burned about twenty years ago. It was situated a few miles north of Loring, near the intersection of two country roads, only one of which was paved when I was a boy. The one we lived on wasn’t, and my dad considered it a major triumph when he managed to embarrass the county board of supervisors into grading it and adding several loads of fresh gravel. Normally, the supervisors didn’t pay much attention to men like him, but he’d been persistent and, in the end, won out.

  The house and the surrounding acreage belonged to the sixteenth section, which was rented out to farmers to support the local schools. In our county this land was put up for auction every five years, which meant that people like my father and my maternal grandfather, who until his death was Dad’s partner, had to enter sealed bids, and when the time to open these bids rolled around a certain number of relationships inevitably got fractured.

  Some of my earliest memories involve the barbershop owned by Mr. Parker Sturdivant, a cotton farmer who cut hair only on Saturdays, and I was always terrified that my turn might come when his chair was empty. Bald himself, he showed no respect for anybody else’s hair and would keep the clippers whirring until he got through with whatever story he’d started telling when you sat down. More than once I climbed out of his chair in tears, and I wasn’t the only boy who did. Like most of my friends, I preferred Mr. Sturdivant’s employee, a guy named Andy Owens, who had wavy red hair and supplemented his barber’s salary by delivering the Memphis paper. Though the papers were dropped off at the local bus station by a southbound Greyhound around 2:00 a.m., people usually got them late on Sundays because Andy always drank the night away and frequently stopped for naps on his route the next morning. You often saw his truck parked at the edge of a country road, papers piled high in the passenger seat, Andy’s head resting on the steering wheel. It was understood that if you were on your way to church and still didn’t have your Commercial Appeal, it was okay to open the door and slip one out.

  Sturdivant’s was the spot where men gathered to swap lies, sometimes stopping by even when they didn’t need a haircut. They talked about the fortunes of the Loring Leopards or the Ole Miss Rebels, chewed tobacco and shot brown streams of juice into tin cans and Dixie cups, moaned about rain or the lack of it. Cross words were never exchanged. My own tears notwithstanding, I associated the place with laughter.

  They were laughing in there one morning about the uses to which the word public had lately been put. My friend Eugene Calloway and his father were under the clippers, Eugene a heavily freckled boy of five or six, Arlan a slim, prematurely gray man in his midthirties, who swept his hair upward in the style of such country singers as Porter Wagoner and Faron Young. Eugene, perched on the vinyl-covered board Andy placed across the arms of the barber’s chair for boys like us, cast an eye at his father, probably wondering if Mr. Sturdivant was going to mess up and cut off too much. His dad, as everybody knew, was particular about two things, his clothes and his hair.

  “Heard one of ’em the other day standing in front of Western Auto saying the town needed more ‘public’ parking spaces,” Mr. Sturdivant was saying. “And then another one, that big old horse-faced fool they call McCarthy—”

  “McCarty,” my father said.

  “Who cares?” said Mr. Sturdivant, who didn’t like his stories interrupted. “He’s just McNigger to me.”

  That drew a laugh from most of those assembled: my father, Eugene and his dad, Andy, three or four other men. I probably wanted to laugh, too, but I doubt I would’ve. My mother had grabbed me by the ear when I called the man who sacked our groceries at Piggly Wiggly “a nigger.” So I asked why she didn’t pull my father’s ear for saying it, since he said it all the time, or Grandpa’s, since he did, too, and she told me that what they said was their business but what I said was hers.

  “Anyway, McWhatever looks back at the other one and says, ‘Yes sir, deed we do. Deed we do. And we be needing more public park space too.’

  Everybody laughed again. One of the other men said, “They think if you call something public, that means it’s theirs. They don’t know it’s still ours.”

  Eugene’s dad said, “It’s not ours, either. It’s the government’s.”

  “You got that right. Get right down to it, there’s not much the government don’t own, is there?”

  “Not much,” Eugene’s dad said, shaki
ng his head.

  “Hold still, Arlan,” Mr. Sturdivant ordered. “I can’t style hair on a moving target.”

  “You’re not styling it, Parker. You’re just mowing it.” He looked at the mirror mounted on the opposite wall. “And I do believe you’re about to leave me a tad bereft.”

  Mr. Calloway, I’d noticed, loved words that started with be-. Bereft, bedazzled, befuddled, beguiled. I’d heard him say all those and more. Because I was so taken with the way he talked, I’d asked Dad one time if my friend’s father had gone to college. He said, “Arlan Calloway went to the college of tough luck.” Mr. Calloway grew up poor, he told me, and everything he had he’d gotten by actually going out and working for it. That impressed me at the time because the Calloways had a lot more than we did. They lived in a modern brick house with a small pool in the backyard, and had two television sets and a stereo. Mr. Calloway drove a new truck and his wife a new car.

  Mr. Sturdivant stuck the clippers into the holster on the side of the chair, then combed Mr. Calloway’s hair straight up into the air until it resembled pictures I’d seen of the Matterhorn. After turning him loose, he motioned to me. “Guess it’s your lucky day, Luke. Time I get through with you, you’ll look just like Yul Brynner.”

  On the booster board I closed my eyes, unwilling to look at my image in the mirror. I heard Eugene hop out of Andy’s chair and my father settling in there. As always, rather than leave immediately, the Calloways would sit and watch us get our hair cut, then Eugene’s father and mine would walk out into the parking lot together. Besides having been friends when they were kids, they were both members of an organization called the Citizens’ Council.

  “How about that Meredith boy?” one of the men said while I sat there with my eyes closed.

  Mr. Sturdivant was running the clippers dangerously close to my ear. “He’s something, ain’t he?”

  “That boy better learn to sing ‘Dixie.’”

  “He ain’t gone go to Ole Miss. Ever comes to it, I’ll be standing right beside Ross with my shotgun.”

  I recognized Mr. Calloway’s rich baritone: “Ross Barnett is nothing but a fake. I wouldn’t be surprised if him and JFK are in cahoots.”

  I waited to hear what the others would say. I knew they were talking about our governor and the president, whom my father had voted for even though he was a Catholic. At that point in Southern history the Republican Party had three strikes against it: the Civil War, the Great Depression and Little Rock Central.

  My father was the first to raise an objection: “Arlan, I think Ross knows what he’s doing.”

  Mr. Calloway laughed. “I never said he didn’t, James. I’ll wager he knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s you and me and the rest of this beleaguered assembly that’s in the dark.”

  This comment seemed to forestall further debate—in the barbershop, he wielded that kind of authority. For a while nobody said anything, then one of the men cleared his throat and asked, “Y’all think the Leopards got a bat’s chance against them boys from Leland?”

  By the time I escaped the chair, my head felt about ten or fifteen degrees cooler. I knew I shouldn’t look at the mirror but couldn’t stop myself. Mr. Sturdivant had given me a pair of white sidewalls.

  Though the barbershop would later move downtown, it was out on Highway 47 in those days, sandwiched between Delta Electric and Loring Auto Parts. On Saturdays the parking lot filled up. People cut their engines wherever space existed, which in practice meant that you’d often emerge to find another truck parked behind your own. As odd as this may sound today—when life in small Southern towns has picked up speed, everyone eager to rush home and access the world by clicking the Explorer icon—if somebody blocked you in back then, you’d stand around and wait, talking to whoever else was out there, until the owner of the truck behind yours stepped out of whichever business he’d been in. Then you stood around a little longer and talked to him, too. To do otherwise would’ve been unneighborly.

  Somebody had parked behind our truck that day. Over the last year or so, since I began piecing these events together, I’ve often wondered whether things might have developed differently if Dad had simply said goodbye to the Calloways, climbed into the truck and driven away. I say this because I’ve learned that in Loring County in 1962, you only found out who was bidding against you for a piece of sixteenth-section land if his bid was higher than yours, or if, prior to the announcement of the results, he took it upon himself to inform you, which most people were understandably reluctant to do.

  Since we couldn’t leave, the Calloways didn’t either. While our fathers talked about the fishing over in Lake Lee, Eugene and I drew a ring in the gravel, then squared off back-to-back and began to grunt and push, each trying to drive the other outside the circle. Eugene was a good bit heavier, so it’s reasonable to think he prevailed, though in fact I don’t remember. What I do recall precisely is the moment when I once again heard that word.

  “It’s public land, James, and I’ve got to do this for me and my family. If I can’t expand, I can’t borrow. Banks lend on the basis of how many acres you’re farming. Benighted as that kind of thinking may be, that’s how they are. You know that just as well as I do. In the end, what’s going to ruin us all is labor costs. Time’s coming when we’ll be paying folks six dollars a day to chop cotton. Only answer I see’s increased mechanization, but who’s got the money to buy new equipment?”

  My father, as I have said, was a tall man, a shade under six-foot-four. He eventually put on a lot of weight, his belly began to pull his back and shoulders forward, and when he walked he always looked as if he were just about to step through a low doorway. But at this point in his life he was still thin. Lanky, people said.

  Though a couple inches shorter, I’m no midget. So I can tell you that when a tall man’s unwilling to meet a shorter man’s gaze, he’s got three options. He can look past the crown of the other guy’s head, as if he were studying the horizon. Or he can glance from side to side, like he was on the witness stand and trying to avoid the eyes of the DA. Or else he can stare at the ground—knowing just how pitiful it looks when somebody his height does that.

  My father availed himself of all three, first pondering a distant Texaco sign. Then cutting his gaze from left to right and back. Finally hanging his head, his cheeks turning from pink to red to purple while Eugene and I stood silently by, aware that something had just changed between our fathers but not fully understanding what it was.

  “No hard feelings, I hope,” Mr. Calloway said. “I sure won’t have any, regardless how it all plays out.” Then he offered his hand.

  For a moment I thought my dad would refuse to shake it. There was plenty I didn’t know, but I intuited that refusing to grasp a man’s extended hand was a decision of enormous import, one with the power to alter lives—of the four of us standing there, and of my mom, Eugene’s mom and his sister, Maggie.

  What I couldn’t imagine was the degree to which certain gestures—shaking hands, smiling and saying good morning, opening a door for another person, slapping somebody on the back or throwing your arm around his shoulder—could hide, for a time, the riot that raged inside.

  It was almost as if my father willed the blood to flow out of his cheeks, his color returning to something near normal. He raised his head, reached out and shook Mr. Calloway’s hand. There in the lot outside Sturdivant’s Barbershop, on a sunny September morning in 1962, he said, “Arlan, we just won’t let it come between us.”

  And at that Mr. Calloway grinned and slapped Dad’s back.

  BY A CERTAIN POINT, sex between Jennifer and me had become—to risk a pun—grindingly predictable. This development coincided with the growth of our daughters, whose bedrooms were across the hall from ours. When they were small, they fell asleep early. We still had our evenings left, and usually made the most of them, having a drink or two on the couch while watching a movie, then heading off to bed, where things progressed pretty much as they had in the bac
kseat of my old Galaxy on various back roads in the vicinity of Oxford. But as the girls grew older, they were the ones who stayed up, listening to music, talking on their cell phones or banging around in the bathroom, and this made Jennifer reticent. If I touched her suggestively in bed, she’d usually whisper, “Let’s wait till morning.” But when morning came we’d be in a hurry, and if we did make love it was often rushed. After a while it turned into more of a duty, and I think both of us stopped looking forward to it. Finally, we more or less quit.

  I imagine similar circumstances prevail for many married couples, though it’s hard to say because people don’t talk about this subject unless sitting across a desk from somebody getting paid one hundred seventy-five dollars an hour to listen sympathetically and nod every thirty seconds. What I can say for certain is that one afternoon when I was about twelve, I discovered the key to my father’s closet, where he kept most of his guns, and when I opened it, intending to mess around with a Japanese rifle he’d brought home from the war, I came across a box of Trojans. He had eight of them, all wrapped in red cellophane. The next time I saw the inside of that closet—a couple of years later, when he handed me the key and told me to bring him his shotgun because a cottonmouth in the backyard needed killing—the box was still there, its contents providing evidence that my parents hardly had a sex life.

  I laughed at the time and told myself he must be really clumsy if his wife wouldn’t let him touch her. I never stopped to wonder if maybe they weren’t both just tired—not only of each other, or of working hard for next to nothing, but of life in general.

  Were it not for her writing, I might have wondered the same thing about Jennifer. No matter how worn out she might seem when she came home from school, she’d spend an hour or two at her desk before dinner. The study is just off the kitchen, behind a set of French doors. These were always closed when she was working on a poem, but I could still see her in there when I walked by. Most of the time she was just staring at the computer screen, her elbow occasionally propped on the desk, her chin resting in her palm, her eyes closed, her lips moving silently. I assumed she was trying out a line, seeing how it sounded before writing it down.