Safe from the Neighbors Read online

  That afternoon, retrieving a book from my car that I’d promised to loan one of my honor students, I ran into Ellis Buchanan, who’d parked in the space next to mine and was carrying a beaten-up hardcover of All the President’s Men. He brought the same book with him at the beginning of each school year, for the first of his regular Tuesday-afternoon lectures to the journalism class.

  “Going to make a few points about the freedom of the press?”

  “No.” He shut his door. “Making the point that the press has never been less free than it is right now.”

  “I admire your sentiments, but for your own personal edification, you might want to refresh yourself on the Alien and Sedition Acts.”

  “I’m beyond edification,” he said before going inside. “When you’re as old as I am, you will be, too.”

  A FAIR AMOUNT OF WHAT I KNOW about my father I learned from my maternal grandfather when I was a boy. He’d known Dad all his life, by virtue of having sublet land from my other grandfather, who died long before I was born.

  According to Grandpa, for many years, on the first of March, Dad had to wait outside the office of Herman Horton, the president of the Bank of Loring, for the purpose of securing that year’s “furnish”—the money he and others like him needed to borrow each spring in order to plant their crops. The queue that formed there was known as the begging line, and according to my grandfather as the end of February drew near my father’s mood always soured. Nobody could stand to be around him, so great was his fear of being turned down. When he finally made it inside, he was never offered a cigar, as Arlan Calloway and a few select others were, and Mr. Horton didn’t inquire about his family. The sole recognition of his individuality came when Horton intoned, as he did every year, “March again. And here comes May.”

  “Yes sir. Here I am.”

  “How much do you mean to hit me up for this year? And before you answer, remember that I hate it when a man overreaches.”

  At that point, even though Dad had already whittled the figure down to the bare minimum he thought he could survive on, he’d knock off another two or three hundred dollars. After he handed over a list of proposed expenditures, Horton would study it for a few minutes, then shake his head and say, “Looks to me like you plan on buying too much fertilizer. You know what the best fertilizer is, May? Piss in the field before sunrise and piss in it again after sunset. Plain old hard work.”

  Dad always got the furnish, but before he left the banker invariably observed that people who didn’t own any acreage and had to rent sixteenth-section land ought to give up farming and find a job pumping gas and fixing flats. One year, Grandpa said, my father somehow found the courage to respond. “Mr. Horton,” he said, “I like farming.” And old Herman, who frequently performed at the Loring Little Theater, replied, “I like acting. But they tell me Spencer Tracy does it better.”

  To go back even further, I know that my dad’s own father was a hard man who hewed to the notion that people never got tired, unless they had a weak character. Grandpa said he worked all his children like mules, with a predictable result: each of them got out from under his roof just as fast as possible. In the case of my father, World War II provided the escape hatch, and his height served as a passport. One morning in the summer of 1944, a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, he simply disappeared. “The military wasn’t looking too hard right then at things like birth certificates,” Grandpa told me. “Uncle Sam was running short of men. So your daddy talked his way into the United States Navy.”

  Though he saw both Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few months after they were nuked, Dad never told me much about them, just mumbled that they were both a mess and changed the subject. I was already in my thirties when I finally asked, and told myself he probably figured that since I hadn’t been interested enough in his wartime experiences to question him back when I was a student and otherwise eager to interview every veteran I could find, the time for that talk was long past.

  One bit of information he did volunteer, however, was that in December 1944, at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, on a night when the temperature dropped below zero and a fifty-mile-an-hour wind came howling in off Lake Michigan, he was ordered to walk guard duty in front of an empty barracks. As impossible as it might sound, the watch officer found him standing asleep in a doorway around 3:00 a.m., stiff and stunned. His punishment, enacted the following night, was to spend the entire evening shoveling snow in similar weather. The next day he started feeling hot, and by dinnertime was running a fever that soon soared to one hundred four. He ended up in the infirmary with a bad case of pneumonia, the scariest moment of his life occurring when he woke up to find two navy doctors hovering over him. “Good Lord,” he heard one of them say, “looks like we’re going to lose this poor boy from down south.”

  That remark, I think, provided the caption for the remainder of his life: a poor boy from down south.

  His house, a little bungalow with Sheetrock siding, was near the elementary school. He and my mother moved there a couple years after I left for Ole Miss. When he realized I’d never come home to help, he gave up farming altogether—a fortunate decision. Most small farmers in the Delta had already gone under by that time, and virtually all the rest would before long. He took a job maintaining county school buses, though by now he’d been retired for more than fifteen years.

  The place wasn’t much to look at, but one thing that used to catch the eye of passing motorists was his tomatoes. Every February he planted his seed in the mulch bed at the side of the house, and once the threat of frost had passed he transplanted them in the front yard, where they grew big, red and juicy. Quite a few folks knocked on his door wanting to buy a sackful, but he always just gave them away. This year, for the first time, he hadn’t planted any, and as far as I knew nobody except Jennifer and me ever came to the door anymore.

  We parked in his driveway that night, and I grabbed the picnic basket from the trunk. She’d baked a hen, then painstakingly pulled all the meat off the bones and cut up the bigger pieces, making them easier to feed to my mother and easier for Dad to chew and swallow. He’d lost a lot of his teeth and was having trouble with most of the ones that remained.

  We found them in the den, where they almost always were, no matter what time of the day or night we came over, the TV tuned to the Weather Channel with the volume turned all the way down, Dad on the couch with his bare, swollen feet propped up on the coffee table, my mother at his elbow in her wheelchair, a padded restraining device called a Lap Buddy holding her in place. A few months before, after my father fell asleep from exhaustion, she’d gotten out of the chair and taken a couple of steps before falling and breaking her hip. That led to three months in Loring Rehab, and for a while it looked as if she’d never leave. Now she was back home, staring at the floor with a puzzled expression on her face.

  “Look who’s here, Momma,” Dad said. Her head didn’t move, so he reached over and cupped her chin and raised it, forcing her to look at us. “She knows who y’all are,” he assured us, as he did every time we showed up. “She just can’t say it.”

  I believed I saw something in her eyes, but it wasn’t recognition. It seemed to me more like embarrassment. We spend most of our lives writing our own personal histories, and my mother’s stood out from those of the people she’d grown up with. To the best of my knowledge, the word nigger had never slipped from her lips, and I was fairly certain she’d voted for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Unlike my friends’ mothers, who instilled in them the belief that honesty was the highest of virtues, she taught me, at an early age, that it was sometimes all right, even necessary, to lie as she did, in the context of explaining why, after a shopping trip to Memphis, we weren’t going to tell my father that we’d spent the afternoon outside the gate at Graceland, hoping for a glimpse of Elvis. She loved rock and roll, even in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when it was associated with drugs and antiwar protests, and she’d listen to it on the radio whenever my dad left
the house. In this meat-eating culture, she lived off vegetables, and nothing made her madder than Dad’s attempts to make her eat something she didn’t want. At breakfast he often stabbed a slice of bacon and laid it on her plate, and she’d pick it up with thumb and forefinger and fling it on his.

  Now she chewed whatever he managed to put in her mouth, and hearing any kind of music at all made her moan, unless it was the sound of her own voice humming something Dad claimed to recognize as an old folk song. She couldn’t recall how to walk and would eventually forget how to swallow and, if she didn’t die of pneumonia, would finally starve to death.

  Of course, I could’ve been just as wrong in my assessment as I thought Dad was in his. There might in fact have been nothing at all in her expression, and that possibility was what made it so hard for me to see my mother. She looked just like any number of other old people who’d lost themselves completely.

  “I smell something good,” he said. “What’d you bring us, Jenny?”

  Jennifer hates being called Jenny and has never let anybody else do it. “I baked you a chicken, and there’s some green beans and mashed potatoes and some corn bread, too, though it may be a little too sweet.”

  “I doubt that. I could use a little sweetness along about now, and I believe Momma can, too.” When he let go of her chin to push himself up off the couch, her head dropped again and she began humming and kept it up as I wheeled her into the kitchen.

  • • •

  People in the Delta, whether black or white, educated or ignorant, almost always pronounce ruined as rurnt. I’m no linguist, so I don’t know if this results from our well-known reluctance to employ two syllables when one will suffice or simply the desire to find a harder sound that more accurately reflects the verb’s meaning. Regardless, that’s how we say it, and my mother said it that night.

  In the kitchen, having rolled the wheelchair up close to the table, I watched Jennifer tie a bib around her neck and dish out some food. She passed the plate to Dad, and he scooped up a lump of mashed potatoes and raised the spoon slowly towards my mother’s mouth. “Open up now,” he said. “Come on.”

  She looked at Jennifer, who’d sat down directly across the table from her, and the trace of a smile crossed her face. Then she laughed and said something unintelligible, and while her mouth was still open Dad stuck the spoon in there, leaving the white lump on her tongue. For a second, before her jaws began to work, I thought she’d spit it out, and again I recalled my desperate hope, when the girls were babies, that their applesauce or green peas wouldn’t end up oozing out before they swallowed.

  While my wife watched my father feed my mother and offered encouragement, I took the top off the garbage can in the corner, lifted the bag up and pulled the drawstring tight, then carried it out to the street and put it in the container for pickup. I stayed out there as long as I could, bending over and pretending to police the driveway, in case the neighbors looked out the window and wondered what I was up to. I finally went back inside, grabbed another garbage bag from the utility room, and walked into the kitchen.

  Gobs of mashed potatoes lay all over the floor, alongside a spoon and shards of glass. If a person with Alzheimer’s sees an object or a hand coming towards his or her face, what’s left of the reflexes will sometimes take over, and for that reason my father always tried to sit beside my mother and feed her from an oblique angle. This was easier if something in front of her could hold her attention, which was why Jennifer sat directly in her line of vision.

  Today, apparently, it hadn’t worked. Dad was standing at the sink soaking a towel to wipe his pants off, and Jennifer was scrounging through the cabinets looking for a dustpan.

  My mother looked at me and smiled shyly, as certain female students will when they haven’t read their assignments and don’t have a clue what’s going on but are pretty sure it won’t be held against them. “Rurnt,” she said. “All rurnt.”

  Did my father hear her? The water was running in the sink, so it’s possible he didn’t, though he was closer to her than I was and his hearing had always been acute. He turned the tap off and vigorously rubbed his pants leg while I lined the garbage can and squatted down with the dustpan so Jennifer could sweep up the mess.

  Dad made another attempt—more successful than the last—to feed my mother, so I mopped the floor, wrung out the mop and put it back in the utility room, then returned to the kitchen. It looked as if Momma had eaten all she was going to, so Jennifer glanced at her watch, said she needed to get ready for tomorrow’s classes and stood up to leave.

  While Dad was rising out of his chair, probably hoping for a peck on the cheek, I mentioned that Nadine Calloway’s daughter had just returned to Loring from North Carolina and asked if he recalled what had happened to her mother. And it was as if an unseen hand had settled onto his head, pushing him right back down.

  Driftwood

  SHE WAS NEVER MRS. CALLOWAY TO ME. Just Nadine. Several inches taller than her husband, she had auburn hair and in my recollections is often wearing jeans, though I’ll admit you almost never saw those on women in the Delta back then and she’s got on a dress in all three of the pictures I would eventually be shown of her. Nevertheless, as we proceed beyond my comfort zone—into something that might be more, or maybe less, than strict history—she sports a pair of stiff blue Wranglers, the kind you wouldn’t be caught dead in today until you washed them several times, and a long-sleeved white blouse in the cowgirl style, with fake pearl buttons down the front and on the cuffs. Boots would go with this outfit, but instead she wears red Keds.

  The sneakers are the only element that makes sense. In 1949, as a senior, she led the girls’ team from Hard Cash High to the Mississippi state basketball championship. By the time she enters the life of my family, the town of Hard Cash no longer exists, having voted itself into oblivion to avoid taxation. In other words, a certain part of her past had already been wiped out before I knew her.

  She’s not the type of person you expect to forget. This is partly due to her imposing height—taller than any other woman in town, she’s sometimes referred to as the “Jolly Green Giant”—but also to her tendency to hug every man, woman and child, not to mention her ability to shake her head and say “shit” without making you think she’s just done something awful. There aren’t a lot of people around here who can get away with that kind of talk, and most of those who can are men like Mr. Sturdivant and the crowd that assembles in his barbershop.

  The first time I become aware of her, she’s standing on the front porch of a country store where my mother often stops to buy me an Orange Crush. She’s hugging a girl with one arm and a boy with the other. I’ve never seen any of them before, and the kids capture my attention to a degree that Nadine can’t, not in this initial encounter. The girl’s older than the boy and a little taller. His hair’s the same color as his mother’s, but hers is “cold black,” as I would have phrased it then. Superman’s hair is cold black, Batman’s too.

  The boy and I start sizing each other up, as boys always will, each looking to gain an advantage over the other. If his mother let go of him, maybe I could lure him over to the edge of the porch and trip him off it. I did that one day to my cousin, who was visiting from Jackson, and he fell right into a mudhole, got it all over himself and was headed for a whipping from my aunt until he pointed a finger and hollered, “He twip me! He twip me!” So I got the whipping, from Momma, but the pain and embarrassment were hardly commensurate with my pleasure in seeing my citified cousin covered head to toe in country mud.

  The problem with trying to trip Eugene, however, is that his mother won’t let him go, and even if she does, his sister will keep an eye on him and on me as well. I can tell she’s a tattler.

  “Arlan’s going to take over from Buck,” Nadine is telling Momma, who’s sitting in a rocking chair underneath a big thermometer shaped like a bottle of Barq’s root beer. That’s where she always sits while waiting for me to finish my drink so we won’t ha
ve to pay a deposit on the bottle. Lots of women sit there, though men never do. “Buck’s heart’s been acting up, and the doctor’s told him that if he keeps getting out on that tractor in the hot sun, he’s going to keel over and die. So this just seems like the time for Arlan to come home. He’s been wanting to go back to farming. He thinks the world of James and is glad to be your neighbor again. As for me, I’ve heard a lot about Loring. Of course we used to play y’all in basketball.”

  “Used to beat us, too,” Momma says. “But then it seems like us Loring girls have always been puny.”

  “Who’s this young man here?” Nadine asks, nodding at me. “He wouldn’t be y’all’s son, would he?”

  “I’m afraid so. He’s got a little meanness in him, like his daddy, but I expect most of it’ll be drained off in another thirty or forty years. That’s generally how long it takes with men in the May family.”

  Before I know it, the tall woman is hugging me, too, pulling my face into her stomach, my nose grazing one of those imitation pearl buttons. I can neither see nor free myself, not with that Orange Crush in my hand, but I know she had to let go of her own kids to grab me and I’d bet they’ve both moved some distance away.

  “Hello, Mr. May,” she says. “My name’s Nadine. And these two ruffians with me are Maggie and Eugene.” Then she lets go and is squatting down in front of me, eye to eye on my level. “You like basketball?” she says.