Safe from the Neighbors Page 9

  Later, after all my students had left, I closed and locked my classroom door, sat down and called her. Her cell rang four or five times, then her voice invited me to leave a message. I said I hoped she was feeling better and offered to bring her food or medicine, if she needed anything, though I also said that Jennifer and I would be visiting our daughters in Oxford that weekend. She never did return the call, and initially I thought maybe she’d packed up and gone back to North Carolina.

  ALL THE BEST-KNOWN images of Oxford date from the fall of 1962. James Meredith sits at a desk filling out his enrollment papers while Robert B. Ellis, the university registrar, looks on in shock. Some three hundred U.S. marshals form a ring around the Lyceum, facing a Rebel flag–waving mob, some of whom have commandeered a bulldozer. The Indianhead Division of the Second Infantry marches through the square while several white male teenagers—presumably Ole Miss students—hurl bottles at them in front of Gathright-Reed Drugstore, where William Faulkner, dead for only a few months, used to sit each morning smoking his pipe.

  Those images accurately convey what Oxford was like forty-four years ago, though not the town today. The pharmacy has become a bookstore, and the weekly alternative newspaper highlights plenty of blues and hip-hop. The Rebel flag is banned from campus activities, and 80 percent of the football team, if only about 15 percent of the student body, is now African American. A statue of Meredith stands near the Lyceum. All may not be joy and love, but the campus and the town that surrounds it have a lot more in common with Boulder, Colorado, than with the place captured in those old photos.

  My own feelings about it are especially warm. The Ole Miss library is the only decent one I ever had access to, and as a student I spent hours roaming through the E185s, where Southern history gets shelved. I met Jennifer there one night. She was taking a literature class taught by Evans Harrington, and he’d assigned Elizabeth Spencer’s The Voice at the Back Door, a novel in which a group of blacks is massacred in the courthouse of a town he said was based on Carrollton, Mississippi. It so happened that Jennifer had spent her summers there visiting her grandparents, and she was astounded to hear that any such event could’ve taken place without her ever once hearing about it. She told me that frankly she didn’t believe it, that Harrington must not know what he was talking about.

  We had this conversation after she saw me hunkered down in an aisle, with about ten books piled up on either side of me. She asked if I was a history major, and when I said yes she wondered if I could help her find a source that would disprove Harrington’s allegation.

  I knew nothing about this novel but had taken my obligatory American literature survey with Harrington the previous year, and I suspected that if he said the town was based on Carrollton and that a massacre had occurred there, he was right twice. Within a few minutes I’d located Vernon Lane Wharton’s The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890, and in the index was a page reference to the Carrollton Massacre.

  We read the account side by side, each of us perched on a stack of books in the poorly lit aisle, Jennifer shaking her head, those frizzy bangs sweeping across her forehead. It wasn’t a pretty story—between ten and twenty black people were slaughtered in the courthouse, in 1886, for daring to attend the trial of a white man—but I had a hard time focusing. Instead I was noticing how the girl beside me held her breath when yet another detail disturbed her, a faint flush appearing on her otherwise pale face. Unlike the vast majority of Ole Miss coeds, who began dressing for class two or three hours ahead of time and wore so much Maybelline that you had to guess what they actually looked like, she wore the plainest of clothes—a pair of faded jeans, a powder-blue T-shirt—and no makeup or eye shadow. The scent she gave off was pleasant and fresh.

  “Well,” she said, closing the book, “I guess Carrollton’s not the nice little town I thought it was.”

  “That was a long time ago. Almost a hundred years.”

  “Yeah. But once you know something so awful happened, you can’t ever feel the same about a place.” It was hot up there on the third floor, but she shivered, and I barely stopped myself from putting my arm around those thin shoulders. “I mean, Jesus,” she said, “my grandfather used to take me to that courthouse all the time. His best friend was some kind of clerk—city clerk, county clerk, I don’t know—and they’d always sit there and chew tobacco and spit juice through a hole in the floor near the old guy’s desk.”

  I didn’t want her to get up and leave without giving me her name. And it suddenly seemed that my best chance of getting it would be to tell her something else she didn’t know. After all, Professor Harrington had nabbed her attention with just that kind of info. “Have you ever heard of Theodore Bilbo?”

  She laid the book beside the pile she’d been sitting on, then stood up. “Sure. I’ve lived in Mississippi all my life.”

  I got up too. Sweat had broken out on my face and under my arms and was running down my back. “You know what he once said about Huey P. Long? He said, ‘Half the folks in Louisiana are trying to figure out how to kill Huey. Well, I got the perfect answer for ’em. Just bring him over here to Mississippi, and the bastard’ll kill hisself trying to get out of the state.’” My laughter sounded like the gasps of a terminal emphysemic.

  She glanced past me, looking for the stairs. Later, she told me she’d been thinking about a story in the Daily Mississippian about some guy who’d been flashing himself at coeds. Sometimes in the stacks, or else he followed them outside and displayed his wares there.

  I dredged my memory for another esoteric tidbit. “You know about Ledger Lewis?”

  “Who?”

  “Herbert ‘Ledger’ Lewis. He was state treasurer for fifty-three years, retired in 1959. He was eighty-six when he quit and completely senile. When they were cleaning out his office, they found King Edward cigar boxes that contained over thirty thousand bucks, the bills dating back to the Depression.”

  She stepped by me, headed for the stairs. Though I’d never done anything like this before, I followed her. I didn’t know what had come over me. My life until then hadn’t been abnormal. I’d had two girlfriends in high school and one at Ole Miss, and she and I had slept together several times, once pooling our resources to rent a room at Johnson’s Motel for an entire weekend. After that we were less interested in each other but had managed to remain friends.

  The stairwell was narrow, barely wide enough for two people to pass, so I stayed a couple of steps behind. She only began to breathe easier, she said later, when she saw the circulation desk and a line of students waiting to check out books.

  Back then, at the very rear of the library, a large reading room was sectioned off into individual carrels. It was called the Reserve Room, because back before computers, professors made certain materials accessible to everyone in a class by putting them on reserve, which meant you could sign them out only for a limited period and had to read them there. Like most serious students, I spent a lot of time in there, and it was almost always crowded, especially at night. I was behaving in a really spooky manner, and she said she didn’t want to leave and walk back to her room after dark, so she planned to plop down in one of the carrels and wait until I disappeared. Then she’d call her roommate from the pay phone and ask her to come walk her home.

  The entire back wall of the Reserve Room was glass, and she headed for a carrel in the corner, thinking she could see when I left the building. She’d just pulled out a chair and was sitting down when my eye registered motion, something streaking towards me. A second later there was a tremendous impact, followed by the sound of shattering glass. Something large and brown tumbled into the library.

  Chairs went over, girls shrieking and guys, too.

  The doe probably weighed a hundred pounds or so, though it was hard to tell while she was lying down. There were a couple cuts in her side, but other than that the only thing that appeared to be wrong with her was that she’d been knocked senseless.

  She was about halfway between my future wi
fe and me. Jennifer had backed up as far as she could, pressing her shoulders to the wall, her face drained of all the color I’d noticed upstairs. She put her hand over her mouth, as if to keep herself from screaming.

  I’ve never been a hunter, never killed anything other than an ant or a mosquito and even feel bad about that. Still, I know a fair bit about deer and didn’t have to guess what would happen as soon as she regained consciousness. She’d wreak havoc, jumping all over the place and damaging herself and anybody who got in her way. A deer’s hooves are sharp as razors. I once saw one cut a cottonmouth to shreds.

  The deer that did that had been brought home by my dad when I was seven or eight years old. She was just a fawn, and he’d found her tangled up in a barbed-wire fence. He bandaged her cuts and tied her to a stake in the backyard during daytime, locking her in the barn at night to keep her safe from predators. After a while he turned her loose, but she wouldn’t leave. She’d hang around in the yard and, for the first couple months, let me pet her. After that, she started getting wild again and finally ran off. He’d brought her home in a cotton sack because, he said, even a little fawn could be trouble if she got scared.

  I was thinking about that when I noticed the big quilt hanging on the wall behind Jennifer. Like the others on display, it was mounted on a wooden frame and must have measured about ten feet by twelve. I didn’t know how it was attached, or whether I’d be strong enough to pull it down or do anything with it if I did, but I had to try. Over at the desk, a frightened attendant held the phone to her ear, and I figured she’d called the university police. The station was just a block away, and they weren’t known for taking the subtle approach.

  I stepped around the animal, going behind her body rather than moving past her glassy eyes. When I grabbed the quilt with both hands, Jennifer said, “What are you doing?”

  “Help me. I don’t want the cops to shoot her. We need to roll her up.”

  Together we jerked and, stitches ripping, the fabric came loose from the frame.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw the deer lift her head. “Quick,” I said, and we hurled the quilt over her.

  As Jennifer described it later, I fell to my knees and butted the deer backwards, so I could get part of the blanket under her. After that, another guy helped me roll her up in it, though she put up a pretty good struggle, one of her hooves barely missing my left leg. By the time two cops came running down the street with short-barreled shotguns, we’d dragged her out the door.

  “It’s all right,” I hollered.

  The other guy and I jumped away from her, and within a couple of seconds she’d freed herself. She looked around wildly, head swiveling, front legs rising into one of those beautiful leaps.

  The slug blew her into a metal garbage can—blue, with Ole Miss scripted in red—and it tipped over, spilling out the contents. Amid Coke cups and Wendy’s wrappers, the doe lay in a heap, much smaller than she’d been a moment ago. I remembered that when my grandfather died and I saw him in his coffin, he also seemed greatly reduced.

  The deer was still breathing. Her eyes were open too but no longer looked glassy. Unfortunately, she was very much aware.

  “They come out of them fuckin’ woods at the edge of campus,” the cop who’d shot her said. “Put me in charge, we’d cut every one of them trees down.”

  The other cop looked at me, then at the guy who’d helped me drag her out the door, then at the group of students who’d emerged from the library. Jennifer wasn’t with them. I could see her standing inside, staring at the doe through the shattered plate glass. She wasn’t crying, but her shoulders were starting to shake. “We can’t let these deer roam around campus,” I heard the cop say. “They’re a danger. Y’all were nuts to touch her.”

  I didn’t reply, just walked towards the door. As I passed through the crowd, a male voice observed, “Be a shame to waste good meat.”

  I don’t know what I intended to tell Jennifer. I think maybe I meant to apologize for what the cop had done, or to apologize for masculine behavior in general. I probably hazily understood that she had briefly become my prey, even if all I wanted was to know her name.

  But all I ended up telling her was yes when she looked up at me and asked, “Would you please walk me home?”

  Lots of people have said they get extremely emotional when they see their children for the first time after sending them off to college. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the kids go two thousand miles away or, like our daughters, only a hundred and fifty: they just look different. It’s as if something has been altered in their DNA. But the question is whether the change is really in them or in you.

  In my case, I think, the answer was both. Trish emerged from Stewart Hall—the same dorm I’d walked her mother home to that night twenty-nine years ago—in frayed jeans, a ragged purple T-shirt I’d never seen before and a pair of Wal-Mart flip-flops. In high school she was fashion conscious, spending every cent she had in the Greenville mall or, when we agreed to drive her, in one of the bigger stores up in Memphis. Candace, on the other hand, never seemed to care much about her appearance. Now she was heavily made-up, with lots of blush on her cheeks, wearing a new skirt and a pair of high heels she still didn’t know how to walk in, looking like she might tip over at any moment. I suspected she’d gotten interested in a boy, whose height I would’ve pegged at six-foot-three.

  And as for me, something was different, too. For eighteen years, every time I saw them, the word that entered my mind was daddy. Their presence defined me. In their absence I’d lost my prevailing sense of self. Simply laying eyes on them again couldn’t quite give it back.

  Trish had never been as warm as her sister, always a little bit stiff, and that hadn’t changed. Rather than hug me, she leaned forward a little bit, guardedly preventing me from achieving much contact. But my nose brushed the top of her head, and her hair smelled of pot. I sniffed once or twice.

  She laughed and said, “Relax, Daddy. It’s not the big deal it used to be. It’s actually kind of retro, like you listening to Chuck Berry.”

  I glanced over at Jennifer, who was hugging Candace, both of them swaying, close to tears, Candace taller now than her mom because of those stilts. “What’s an ounce go for?” I asked.

  I was trying to play the cool dad like I always had, but she shook her head as if at a kid who refused to grow up. She exchanged places with her sister and I threw my arms around Candace, noticing that her eye shadow was clumsily applied. “Who’s the guy?” I said.

  She quickly pulled away. “There’s not one.”

  To my surprise, Jennifer took mercy on me. “Be nice to your dad,” she told them. “He’s envious.” She paused, then added, “Your lives are just starting. His is starting to be over.”

  I have to say, the day was by no means unpleasant. We decided to go to the square on foot and have lunch at Ajax Diner. While we walked, Trish’s mouth ran. She’s majoring in history—planning on law school one day—and was enjoying most of her courses, though she voiced strong dislike for the guy teaching her American survey. When I asked what was wrong with him, she said, “First of all, he’s from Indiana.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Indiana’s the cradle of Main Street conservatism—you’re the one who told me that, Daddy—and he’s always putting his own spin on things.”

  If she’d found a conservative history professor, I figured she ought to at least appreciate the oddity. He was probably the only one she’d ever encounter. The last program I’d seen for the OAH’s annual meeting featured such session topics as Rewriting the History of Rape and Historical Perspectives on Masculinity and Empire Building. “What kinds of things?”

  “Well, for instance, he brings in stuff about the war, which doesn’t have anything at all to do with what we’re studying, and keeps trying to draw these really tenuous links between figures he thinks we’ll admire, like Abraham Lincoln or FDR, and George Bush. He said the other day that when people rag Bush for
what’s happening at Guantánamo Bay, they forget that Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus.”

  “Well, that’s the truth.”

  “You can’t separate a truth from the context in which it’s spoken. And you know who said that?”

  We were walking east on University Avenue, Jennifer and Candace in front, their arms around each other as they discussed an intro to lit class. It may sound too neat, but we’ve got an English major, too.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “But I didn’t say a truth, I said the truth. And I never argued that the context made it any less true. I was just pointing out that when you evaluate what purports to be a fact, you have to consider the environment that exists when you hear it. Schools of history come and go, and all of them reflect current biases. Every historian shades meaning to one degree or another.”

  “Well, I don’t like the shades in this guy’s palette and hope he doesn’t get tenure. He needs to go teach at Bob Jones.”

  The square was largely deserted, as it always is on a fall Saturday when the football team’s on the road. We took a booth at the diner, and I ordered myself a beer, Jennifer a glass of white wine. Hearing the girls talk about their classes, I think we both were pleasantly surprised that college seemed to be having the desired effect, increasing their interest rather than slowly draining it out of them, as it so often does. There at Ajax, I believe we felt—for lack of a better word—successful. Our kids were all right. They’d probably stumble at some point, but as long as they knew where they were headed, it looked like they’d most likely reach their destination.

  As we waited for our food, I ordered a second beer and lapsed into an expansive, nostalgic mood. I waved my hand around the room, which was decorated with posters advertising blues performances from forty or fifty years ago, a bunch of old license plates, two or three big bottle-cap thermometers like you used to see hanging on country stores. “You wouldn’t believe what this place used to look like,” I said.