Safe from the Neighbors Read online

  “That Arlan,” my father concluded, “he’s resourceful. And that turns him into a resource.”

  More than forty years later, sitting there on the couch beside Arlan Calloway’s daughter, whose bare calves were drawn up onto the cushions just inches away from my hand, which I could suddenly find no use for, I said, “My father? Your mother? What are you talking about?”

  So she told me, and I have to admit that she evoked the scene well.

  It’s early summer, and she’s been in bed with Nancy Drew when she hears her father’s truck pull into the driveway. She lays her book aside and bounces out of bed, like she always does when her daddy comes home. He’s usually got something for her, a piece of candy or a hug, and either one’s as good as the other.

  That night, for some reason, he doesn’t cut his engine, just sits there in the driveway, the motor idling while the passenger door opens and my father gets out. He’s left his own truck parked there and heads over to it. Then her dad puts his pickup in reverse and backs into the road. Later on, she’ll hear him say that somebody had been siphoning gas from his tractors and he was going to check on things.

  She presses her face against the window screen, not understanding why her father’s leaving. It’s a small thing, but of the sort that could puzzle a girl her age. While she watches my father open the door on his truck, she hears another door open and the porch light comes on.

  Her mother steps into the yard, into that circle of light. She’s wearing a pair of white shorts and a long-sleeved blouse with the sleeves rolled up, and there’s a drink in her hand, as there so often is at this time in her life. She takes a couple of steps towards my father, who’s standing there with his hand on the truck door.

  “Hey, James,” she says. “Y’all been out stirring up trouble?” She’s against those meetings, as she’s told her husband many times. She’s told her kids the same thing, arguing that change is going to come whether people like it or not, so they might as well welcome it with open arms. And she’s got her own arms wide open now. “Come here,” she says, “and give me a hug.”

  So my dad meets her halfway between the truck and the porch, and they wrap their arms around each other, and the girl with her face pressed to the window hears my father say, “Lord, if you ain’t something.”

  “THE FIRST HUMANS were whittled out of driftwood,” the man who used to run our Western Auto liked to say. He’d pause, then slyly add, “According to Norse legend, anyway.”

  Considered an educational resource, Mr. Coldfield made those comments every year as the first graders from Loring Elementary were herded through his home. A tall, scholarly looking man who wore black-rimmed glasses, he spent Sunday afternoons walking the banks of the Sunflower River or wading around in Choctaw Creek, hoping to find another odd-shaped piece.

  Driftwood was his passion. Though perfectly pleasant, he had neither wife nor child and enjoyed only the most perfunctory relations with his neighbors, pretty much confining himself to “Hello, how are you?” and “Nice day today, isn’t it?” About half the folks in Loring had been inside his house but nobody—except first-grade teachers, as far as I know—ever entered it more than once.

  To Mr. Coldfield, these weren’t simply pieces of wood. I recall standing in his living room, sweat trickling down my back and a fly buzzing in my ear, while he gestured at one of the many items on display, a cypress knee he’d pulled out of Lake Washington. Smooth surfaced and about three feet high at its tallest point, it was really two distinct masses that curled together near the top of the growth. He asked us what it looked like.

  It looked like a cypress knee to me, and because that fly was driving me crazy and I was bored and eager to get back outside and roughhouse with Eugene Calloway, I piped up and said so.

  Shaking his head with what may have been pity, Mr. Coldfield said, “That’s not a cypress knee, Luke. There on the left? That’s the hand of a young woman. And on the right? The hand of her sweetheart. Could be they’re joining hands for the first time, or maybe the last. Or it could just be a regular day in their lives and they’re out for a walk in the pasture, where the only eyes watching belong to a Black Angus. Nobody knows their circumstances but the wood itself, and you know what I love about wood?”

  Until then, neither Eugene nor I figured he was crazy. He acted normal enough when he was selling you a baseball bat or a fishing pole.

  “The thing I love about wood,” Mr. Coldfield said, removing his glasses and polishing them on the front of his shirt, “is that it never talks. But if you sit and watch and wait long enough, it may show you a thing or two.”

  I’ve thought a lot lately about the various ways in which we reveal ourselves to others. Ramsey Coleman does it with jokes. If he’s mad at you, his sense of humor, which is always sharp, can turn into an ice pick. He got angry at me once, years ago, for signing a petition against his requirement that each faculty member work the ticket booth at one sporting event per year. I’d just started teaching my Local History honors course, and when I mentioned at lunch one day that I was disappointed by my enrollment, he said, in front of another teacher, “I don’t know why I ever agreed to let you offer that class. It probably won’t fill up unless we retitle it Fuck Films.” Jennifer’s deepest feelings emerge only in her poems, which can make Emily Dickinson’s seem lighthearted. My daughter Candace, on the other hand, will sometimes phone and say, “I’m lonely, Dad,” or “I’m bored,” or “I’m worried because I don’t know what I want to be.” Her direct approach seems to me, on the whole, the most healthy, if the least inventive.

  Maggie fell somewhere in between Candace and Jennifer. She said a number of things in a straightforward manner. Other things she never said at all. This made reading her difficult, like trying to parse The Decline of the West.

  That first time I went to her house, I left before seven but was about as drunk as I’d been since college. Though I thought about dropping in on Ellis, my tongue was pretty loose and there was no telling what I might say. So instead I drove on home, pulled a can of Bud Light out of the fridge and had started to chug it when the jingle a friend’s dad had sung for us the night we graduated from high school rang in my ears:

  Never fear

  Whiskey on beer.

  But beer on whiskey’s

  Pretty risky.

  I poured out the Bud and stood the can on the counter, then ransacked the fridge for something to eat, removing the lids from all the pots I found in there—some cream of broccoli soup, a little beef bourguignonne left over from the previous evening, a big clot of mashed potatoes—before deciding I wasn’t even hungry. So I brewed a pot of coffee, filled a large mug and went back to the living room, where I made myself sit down in my leather armchair and pick up a book, the title of which I don’t remember. It might have been a good one—probably was, because I don’t have a lot of money to spend on books and read countless reviews online before buying—but it quickly lost the battle for my attention.

  Earlier, when I asked Maggie what she was telling me about my dad, she said, “I’m just telling you that on one specific evening forty-four years ago, he expressed the opinion that my mother was really something.”

  “And then?”

  “He got in his truck and drove off.”

  “And after that?”

  “I went back and finished reading about Nancy Drew.”

  “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.” She took a sip of wine. “Please don’t view this as criticism, Luke, but you have a tendency to want answers when there might not be any.”

  “You intend that as praise?”

  She had a nice smile—very tight, controlled, whereas lots of smiles dissipate by spreading across a face. “I intend it,” she said, “as an observation.”

  I turned up my VO and took a good slug. I almost never drink whiskey and couldn’t imagine why I’d asked for this instead of beer or wine. “There’s always an answer,” I said.

  “Really?”
/>   Nothing creates obstinacy like being forced to maintain an indefensible position. Just look at the career of Robert E. Lee. “Always.”

  “And you teach history? Sounds like math to me.”

  Neither of us said much of anything for a while then, just sat there drinking. When I think about that afternoon—as I do all the time—I see her living room as an almost empty stage. And it occurs to me that if the setting is stripped of props, people can’t help but behave differently than they otherwise might. With no magazine to pick up and peruse, no music to hum along to, no painting on the wall you can talk about to prove you made it through art appreciation, there’s nothing you can do except face what you’re feeling about the person sitting there beside you.

  At some point I got up, carried both our glasses into the kitchen and refilled them, as though the house were mine instead of hers, and when we’d drained those I made another run. And then I put them on the coffee table, sat down on the couch and urged myself not to do what I’d just about decided to.

  She warned me off, holding out her hand. “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, not now.”

  We’re all surrounded by the borders we’ve drawn for ourselves, and crossing them is a major event, akin to a foreign excursion: you have to acquire travel documents, pay exorbitant ticket prices and, unless you’re exceedingly lucky, probably find yourself stranded for an indeterminate period in a place where you can’t communicate with another living soul. The question I put to Maggie that afternoon, as I see it now, constituted a passport application. “When?”

  “Maybe later,” she said, pulling on her sandals and standing up, leaving me no choice but to stand up myself. “But then again, Luke? Probably not. Okay?” Before pushing me towards the door, she stood on tiptoes and gave me a quick kiss.

  I’ve traveled vast distances while sitting in my armchair. But I’ve never covered more ground than I did that night, with a forgotten book in my lap and a cup of cold coffee on my knee.

  Maggie said she never had children because she was afraid she might let them down. A reasonable person would probably conclude that somebody had let her down, and the obvious choice was her dad. But I wasn’t so sure that’s how she saw it.

  I didn’t know why her mother once spent the night at our house, but she had, and for the last couple weeks I’d been thinking about the night I woke up and went into the living room to find Nadine asleep on the couch. And how, once she finally realized I was staring at her, she’d slowly pulled that quilt up to conceal her breast.

  I didn’t know if the next recollection associated with that one was accurate or not. I’m sitting at the breakfast table, in the house we lived in then, on the sixteenth section, a few miles north of Loring. My father, sitting next to me, is eating like he always does, his jaw making that familiar clicking noise. There’s still some food on his plate, a piece of bacon, maybe, or a biscuit, or an egg fried stiff, just the way he likes them. He eats the same thing every day, and so does everybody else who lives on a farm in the Delta in 1962. We don’t experiment with chocolate-chip pancakes, and Pop-Tarts won’t be invented until the following year. Granola bars do exist, just not in Mississippi.

  Nadine steps into the picture. She’s wrapped in a man’s bathrobe, a beige terry-cloth thing that Dad won’t wear because he says it makes him feel like a sissy. Momma, who gave it to him, should’ve known better. The only time he’s not dressed in regular clothes is when he takes a bath or gets in bed.

  Nadine’s hair has been carefully brushed, so it’s not frizzy like it was at night, and she’s holding the big yellow bowl my mother serves grits from. That’s what’s in it now, and she’s troubled that we haven’t eaten every last bite. Hovering over me, she says, “You want a little more, hon? So you can grow up tall like your daddy?”

  I don’t want to displease her, because by now I like her better than anybody I know, including Eugene. I’ve thought about her a lot, and because of what I saw when she was lying on the couch and her lack of haste in concealing herself, I’ll think about her even more. But I’m full as a tick, so I smile and say, “No thanks, ma’am.”

  “What about you, James? You got any room left?”

  My dad chews away and finally swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. When he says yes, he’s not looking at her but at me. I’m the one he winks at.

  OVER THE YEARS, Dad and I disagreed about a number of things. He hated it when my hair got long and was mortified that I briefly sported a beard. Though he hardly ever attended church, he was bothered that we didn’t make our daughters go, and when he found out that a kid from Indianola got Trish drunk one night her junior year and left her on a turnrow ten miles out of town, he said that if he were her father he would’ve shot the boy. “Of course,” he said, “I guess that’d be difficult for you, since you don’t have no gun.”

  Gun ownership was one subject we rarely ventured near. On my eighteenth birthday, he’d walked into my bedroom and handed me, butt first, his Colt Python, a double-action .357 Magnum that for many years had been concealed between his mattress and box spring. It wasn’t the only weapon he had—there was even another handgun, a nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson—but I knew it was his favorite. “This is yours now,” he said. “I hope you don’t ever have to use it. But you better be ready, if the time ever comes.”

  Of the things I wanted for my birthday, the Python wouldn’t have made the list. Nevertheless, I accepted it with the solemn demeanor that the occasion seemed to demand, and when I left for Ole Miss the gun went with me. For a while I kept it under my mattress, just like he had. But when Jennifer and I decided to live together, she said she didn’t want a gun on the premises. So without thinking twice, I went to the pawnshop out on East University and sold it for fifty dollars.

  He didn’t find out that I no longer had it until after we got married and moved to Loring. One night, when my mother was in Jackson visiting her sister, he asked over dinner if I was keeping it oiled and shooting it from time to time, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of my wife. “I don’t have it anymore,” I said.

  Like a baby who’s been bumped on the head, he failed to react for such a long time that I almost thought this might not have registered. But I should’ve known better than that. I did know him better than that.

  He laid his fork down and, a few seconds later, his knife. “What do you mean, you don’t have it? Did you let somebody steal the damn thing?”

  “No, I sold it.”

  “For what?”

  “Fifty bucks.”

  “That’s not it. I mean why.”

  I’d gone through college with little or no help from him and I had a job, was married and one day expected to start my own family. I remember puffing my chest out before announcing, “I believe in gun control.”

  “You’re a fucking idiot.” Then he turned to Jennifer: “I’m sorry I used that word in your presence. I should’ve taken him outside and told him there.”

  “You can’t take me anywhere,” I said. “I’m twenty-three years old. And the fact is, I do believe in gun control. There ought to be a mandatory one-week waiting period before anybody can buy a handgun, so the feds have time to make sure the purchaser isn’t a criminal. Most folks that go out looking for a weapon when they’re pissed off will change their minds if you give ’em a few days to cool down.”

  “Let me tell you something,” he said. “If people want to do wrong bad enough, they’ll do it. And if then they decide not to, it won’t be because somebody made ’em wait. It’ll be because a little voice inside them said, Don’t. And that voice don’t need a week to say something.” He laid his napkin on the table, got up and left. He didn’t talk to me again for at least a month, just tipping his hat and walking right by when we met on the street downtown, more or less how he did towards Ellis.

  Maggie didn’t come to school the day after we had drinks at her house or the next day either, so I risked asking Ramsey if he kn
ew why she was absent.

  We were finishing lunch, and a couple of other teachers had just gotten up and left the table. He wadded up his trash and stuck half a bag of potato chips back into that ridiculous mailbox, then told me she’d called in sick.

  “Got a cold?” I asked, trying not to sound too interested.

  “Could be. Or maybe she’s allergic to defoliant, like me. Every year when they start spraying that shit, my head hurts twenty-four hours a day. It’s like I’ve got fever, even though I don’t.”

  “You ought to be immune by now.”

  “She should too. You know she lived here when she was a little girl?”

  “Yeah. I even knew her back then.”

  “That right? Then you probably know what happened to her momma.”

  I was surprised she’d told him about that, and I said so.

  “Yeah, I guess I would’ve been surprised, too, but she didn’t tell me. Selina remembered it.”

  His wife grew up on various farms in and around Loring. “What’d she say about it?” I asked.

  Ramsey shrugged. “Just said Maggie’s daddy killed her momma for sleeping with another man.”

  I have a mild form of tachycardia that never manifests itself in the classroom, though I sometimes feel it if I have to get up and speak at an assembly with the whole student body and all the other teachers present. When it kicked in that afternoon, it felt like Mike Tyson was inside my chest and trying to punch his way out. “I heard it was self-defense.”

  “That’s white folks’ history. Black folks would say he was defending his terrain.”

  “Did Selina ever hear who the other guy was?”

  “If she did, she doesn’t remember it. You know how things were back then, man. If you were black, you didn’t know white folks’ names unless you had some business with them, and vice versa. Y’all had your world, we had ours.” He got up and tucked the mailbox under his arm. Grinning, he chucked my shoulder. “Y’all’s world had running water. But ours had rhythm.”