And All Our Wounds Forgiven (18 page)

““That body has to stay put ’til the coroner comes. And he’s gone fishing. I got one of my men looking for him.’

“I smiled because I was genuinely amused. ‘Sheriff? You know and I know that when the coroner gets here he’s going to say it was death by parties unknown. Personally, I think it’d be a shame to interrupt his fishing for something like that. I hear the catfish are biting pretty good in the Tallahatchie this week.’

“The sheriff’s face turned a dangerous red. ‘You trying to be smart, nigger?’

“I didn’t respond but stared at him with a look that was on the edge of defiance but didn’t cross over, a look that dared the sheriff to stop me but did not challenge him, while my body stance was casual, indifferent, relaxed almost to the point of somnabulance. Sheriff Simpson didn’t know what to do.

“Finally, ‘Get him out of here. Dead niggers draw more flies than live ones.’

“He and his deputies laughed. I picked up the body, carried it down the steps and set it up in the backseat with the two women. Later that week at the funeral, when the preacher came to the lines in the Twenty-third Psalm and read, ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me,’ I leaped up and yelled, ‘Bullshit! Wasn’t nobody on them steps with Mr. Howard. Nobody ‘cepting the flies. The Lord was a shepherd all right, driving his sheep to the slaughter.’

“That night George asked me what we were going to do about Mr. Howard’s murder.

“‘Kill the sheriff and kill Jeb Lincoln.’

“George waited for me to laugh or crack a joke. When none came he said, ‘Feels like you got personal reasons, too.’

“‘I nodded. ‘Jeb Lincoln killed Charlie Montgomery and Ezekiel Whitson. The sheriff knows it and I figure he killed Peter Howard. Even if he didn’t, I got my own reason for wanting to see him dead.’

“‘How do we do it?’

“‘We wait until Sheriff Simpson is out of office, which will be in November. Elections in November and he can’t succeed himself. If a sheriff ends up dead, every cop in America feels threatened. Killing an ex-sheriff will not cause as much of a stir. We’ll do it around Christmas when everybody is thinking about presents and getting drunk and stuffing themselves with turkey. We will fuck Christmas up for every white muthafucka in this town.’

“Then we laughed.”

Silence.

Andrea remembered a night, a Christmas night. She was awakened by the sound of John Calvin on the phone, a shock and anguish in his voice unlike any she’d ever heard.

The next morning she asked John Calvin. They were sitting in the dining room drinking coffee. He didn’t answer at first.

“You look worried.”

He nodded. “I think I know how Jonah felt in the belly of the whale. Political movements attract the idealists and the crazed, and it is not always easy to tell them apart. But I am learning it does not matter which you are if you live, day in and day out, knowing you might die that day. I’m not talking some generalized stuff about any day might be the last day of your life. That’s true but no one really believes that until it happens. I’m talking about being in your early twenties and being shot at. I’m talking about living with the knowledge that there are persons — and you know who they are — who will kill you at the first opportunity. I’m talking about going to bed at night and awakening each morning with surprised relief that you are alive.

“Andrea, what I hate this country for most is that it has forced a generation of Negro young people into an intimacy with death that they do not have the capacity to withstand.”

Why had she forgotten the moments like that one, and there had been many, when they sat in the dining room drinking coffee in the morning, or late at night in the kitchen when she was getting her customary nighttime glass of milk before retiring and he would come in, not because he wanted something but because she was there and they would talk, quietly, easily, and gladness would be on both their faces. She could see the scenes in memory but they evoked no emotions. Why did she remember the pain more easily? Even at the core of their moments of intimacy, had there been a hollow place where the heart should have been?

She envied Lisa the love that remembering released for her. How incredible it must be to remember and to reenter the love, even though the other is no longer present. It did not matter. Relationship did not require fleshly immediacy. Only submission.

“I never told anyone why I cracked. Not Cal. Not even the psychiatrists. George was the only one who ever knew.

“On Christmas Eve the sheriff and Jeb Lincoln would have a little party at the jail for anyone that wanted to drop by. They’d drink a little moonshine and everybody would get a nice buzz on. Nothing heavy because they had to look halfway straight to go to church the next morning and for dinner at their momma’s houses. The sheriff and Jeb Lincoln lived on adjoining pieces of property and I guessed they would drive home together in Jeb Lincoln’s car. They lived on a dirt road off the main highway. About a half mile after you turned onto the road, it went down a little hill. At the bottom of that hill was a huge oak tree that sat back. It was the perfect place for an ambush. We could park the car in the shadows of the tree and no one would ever see us. When we heard them coming, I was to pull our car out into the road and block it. Before the sheriff and Jeb Lincoln knew what was happening we would jump out of our car, shoot them, get back in our car and be on our way.

“Well, ’long about ten-thirty we heard the car coming. You live in a small town you learn to identify people by the sound of their cars. That’s true! Mr. Montgomery taught me that. Wasn’t a car in the county sounded like Jeb Lincoln’s. It was a Buick and he kept that baby in mint condition. It was the one car that you almost couldn’t hear.

“‘They’re coming,’ George said.

“‘I hear ‘em,’ I answered. I was supposed to turn the key and start the engine. My fingers were on the key, but I didn’t turn it.

“The car was closer.

“‘Start the engine!’

“I couldn’t turn the key. I could feel the lights of Jeb Lincoln’s car coming down the hill. George reached over and tried to turn the key. I grabbed his wrist. I’m still not sure why.

“‘Goddammit, nigger! Start the fucking engine. Turn the goddam key!’

“I held his wrist so tight I was afraid I was going to cut off the circulation to his hand.

“‘Fuck you, muthafucka! Fuck you!’

“The car drove slowly past us. I watched the red eyes of its taillights recede into the distance. When I couldn’t see them anymore, I turned the key. The engine started. Slowly I turned the wheel and made a U-turn and headed for the main highway. I didn’t know I was crying until George asked me if I was OK. Then I became aware of the wetness on my face. I heard a low-pitched moaning and knew it was me.

“‘You OK?’ I could hear concern in his voice. ‘I’m sorry I said what I said to you. Hell, them crackers ain’t worth killing.’

“‘But they are,’ I said, my voice cracking with tears. They are! I froze, man. I froze! I was scared to kill a white man. I was scared, man!’

“‘Don’t worry about it, homes.’

“We were at the main highway now. I turned left and headed back toward town. Tell me the truth. You weren’t scared, were you?’

“There was a long silence. Finally George said, ‘I ain’t been through what you been through down here. Maybe I didn’t know enough to be scared.’

“I knew otherwise. I had failed. How the hell could I be free until I could do to a white man what white men had no problem doing to us? How could Negroes be free until we made white people as afraid of us as we were of them?”

Andrea stopped listening. Here, waiting patiently and eagerly in Death’s vestibule she understood — too late — that until we knew the pain of another, our relationships were no more than exercises in an acting class. Until we knew the sizes and shapes of our own pains, and more, allowed someone else to glide their fingers over their misshapen contours, we were no more than shadows on the wall of a cave. But there was something more, it occurred to her as Robert’s voice was breaking through again. You had to love the pain with all the fervor of teenage lust. And when you did that, you ceased judging others; morality was no longer a simplistic good against a one-dimensional evil. Instead it became labyrinthine and twisted and turned back on itself and good changed into evil and back again until each ceased being distinct and separate and became instead a new kind of whole constantly shifting and rearranging its parts. To be moral was to live one’s singular and unique truth, regardless of the price, and there was always a price, she suspected.

“I had dropped out of Fisk at the end of my freshman year to follow Cal. I was 18 years old. Eighteen! Can you believe that? Eighteen years old and I go to Shiloh, Mississippi by myself to face down death. I am 19 when I sit there in the dust trying to put Mr. Montgomery’s brains back in his head and six months later, Ezekiel Whitson is murdered.

“I was too young, Cal. You took my love for you, my eagerness, my naivete, my idealism. You took everything about me that I loved and I’m sorry, Cal, but youth and love and eagerness and idealism are no match for evil and hatred and violence. Yes, we won. Would you believe that the sheriff in Shiloh is a black man now? But, dammit, I think Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Whitson and Mr. Howard and me and George were too high a price.”

He was crying, and grief swelled in her, unwelcome and unwanted. Grief was not deterred, however. It had waited so long for her to acknowledge its being. It would wait beyond death if it needed to.

“George,” his voice said dully after the choked sobbing ended and silence calmed them both. “That’s who I wanted to tell you about. Don’t ask me why. It’s like Lisa says: you do what you feel like you need to do; you do what you think is right. Maybe you understand why. Maybe you don’t.

“I couldn’t stay any longer. That same night I called Cal and he knew I had lost it. He sent Lisa down that night and she drove me from Shiloh straight to a psychiatric hospital in New York. George stayed. He married a local girl. Mamie. Her skin was so black it shone as if it had been polished. She was extraordinarily beautiful. I ended up living with a white girl. Amy. She was beautiful, too. She loved me, which wasn’t easy to do. I have only vague memories of many of those years. If I wasn’t drunk, I was on pills to control my depressions or on pills to control my highs, and when the alcohol and the marijuana and the pills wouldn’t work, I was in the hospital strapped to a bed.

“During the few times of something resembling lucidity I would leave and come here to Nashville and somewhere in there Kathy and I got together and suddenly, I had a child. Kathy wanted me to be a husband and a father. I could have more easily become white.

“It was 1973. Clarity. When you can remember the year something happened, you are paying attention to your life. 1973. I was living with Amy again. It was the best time we had together. I wasn’t drinking nonstop. Nothing helps a relationship more than being conscious of what you’re doing and saying.

“It was spring. George showed up one afternoon at our apartment. Whenever he was in New York raising money for the farmer’s cooperative he had organized, he stayed with us. In New York it was easier for him and me to be together. He still respected my organizing skills and we would talk over problems he might be having in the community. He always made me feel good by telling me that people still remembered when I did this, that or the other. He always seemed to arrive an hour or two before Amy was due home from work, and sometimes he would cook and sometimes she would and we would spend the evening laughing and talking and sharing that incredible intimacy that comes when people know the worst about each other and love survives.

“This day, however, George called first and wanted to know if Amy was there. When I told him she was at work, he asked if he could come over. When he walked in, he was quieter than usual and his quietness was tight. I wondered who had died or been killed in Shiloh.

“We sat down at the round oak table in the dining area off the kitchen. I poured him a cup of coffee from the always plugged in percolator. We chit-chatted aimlessly for a few minutes and I waited.

“Finally, without prelude, he said, ‘I can’t keep quiet about it any longer, Card. It ain’t right. It just ain’t right you being with a white woman. It ain’t right.’

“But before I could say anything, and I was too stunned to know what to say, he continued. ‘But I guess you say that’s my problem.’

“’You’re right,’ I said flatly.

“There was a long heavy silence. Finally, he stood up. ‘Got to be moving on down the road. You take care of yourself, Bobby.’

“’Yeah, you, too.’ I don’t know if he was waiting for me to offer my hand, or if I was waiting for him to offer his, but we stood there facing each other for a long moment, not moving, not speaking, just waiting. But there was nothing to say. There was nothing to do. He turned and went toward the door. I followed, held it open and closed it softly behind him.

“That was the last time we saw each other. I was hurt and angry that he had sat there so many times, had eaten Amy’s cooking, had hugged her like an old friend, had laughed and joked with us. I thought he was a total hypocrite. Five years later, after he was dead, I had a new thought. All the time George had spent with me and Amy hadn’t been a lie. It had been love. He had tried to accept what for him was unacceptable. He had tried and it was not that he failed but there came a moment when he did not have the energy or simply could not continue. I, in my self-centeredness, had perceived what I deemed his failure and ignored all the times he had succeeded.

“Kathy called me when he died. Suicide. I couldn’t believe it. George? Kill himself? I didn’t know what to do. Even though I hadn’t seen or heard from him since that last time at the apartment, I suppose I had counted on him being in the world, being down there in Shiloh carrying on our work.

“I went to the funeral. It had been fourteen years since I had left Shiloh. The funeral was long and sad as black funerals can be, especially in the South. And someone like George had to have a good send-off and they gave him that. That church rocked with music and words.