Safe from the Neighbors (16 page)

Maggie saved me the trouble. “As you can see,” she said, “I don’t look anything like her. If I thought I did, we wouldn’t be where we are. I don’t want to be a substitute for someone else. Not even my mother.”

My voice was actually more like a squeak.
“What?”

“You always had such a crush on her,” she said. “It was worse than most little-boy crushes, and I sometimes wondered how it made your mother feel. I guess it didn’t bother her, though, because she adored my mom. Everybody did.”

“You aren’t a substitute for anybody,” I said, “and nobody could take your place.” I spoke without thinking, saying what I believed the moment called for, and it wasn’t until later that I realized I’d inadvertently told the truth. She’d created a desire nobody else would ever satisfy. When she went back to North Carolina—and I reminded myself every day that she eventually would—she wouldn’t leave behind a hole. She’d leave a bloody wound.

She pulled off the top snapshot and quickly showed me the two underneath. In the first, her mother had stepped away from the horse but was still looking at it, her head cocked slightly to the side, her right hand shading her eyes. In the second, they’d turned away from each other, the horse’s left foreleg a foot or so off the ground, beginning to bend, and her mother’s right hand
was raised, thumb in the air, seemingly gesturing backwards at the horse. It looked as if she was speaking to the photographer, since she was staring right at the camera and her lips had formed a word. Whoever was taking the pictures had stepped farther back before snapping the last one. You could see a wooden post and a couple strands of wire between the lens and Nadine.

“That’s an electric fence,” I said. “See this little white thing there?” I pointed with my fingertip. “That’s a porcelain insulator.”

“A little electricity never scared her. I remember that she crawled under it, dress and all.”

“What was the occasion?”

“She wanted my father to buy that horse.”

“I don’t recall your having one.”

“We didn’t. He said no. Then he laughed and offered to get her a riding mower instead.”

“Whose horse was it?”

“Just one she saw beside the road. Somewhere nearby. I’ve thought several times in the last few weeks that I recognized the spot. But lots of things look different now with all these fish ponds where the cotton used to be.”

She put the snapshots back in the same order, then closed the folder. When she looked at me, there was no missing the moisture in her eyes. “Satisfied?”

“Sure. Thanks for letting me see them. I guess I overstepped a boundary by asking.”

“Well, we’re stepping over every boundary we can find. What’s the harm in one more?”

She carried the file back down the hallway, and left it wherever she kept such things, and when she came back we grilled a couple of steaks and ate dinner in her kitchen, drinking a bottle of the best French wine I’d ever tasted. I asked her where she’d gotten it, and she said she’d gone to Memphis on Saturday and
bought it at Wild Oats. When we finished, we dumped the dishes in the sink and then she said, “Would you like to go upstairs?”

While I made love with a woman who’d driven one hundred seventy-five miles in search of better wine than she could find in Loring, my wife was feeling happy because she finally had a few students who’d read the essays she’d assigned and turned their work in on time.

The next morning, when I thought about that I was so moved that I reached across the breakfast table and laid my hand on Jennifer’s. She flinched. “What?”

“I love you.”

“Oh,” she said, “is that right?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s right.”

“Okay.” She gave my hand a little squeeze.

She finished her oatmeal, and while I showered she went into the study and was sitting at the computer, staring hard at the screen, when I left the house. I don’t think she even heard me say goodbye.

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, I went over to stay with Momma so Dad could go see the doctor, who thought they might need to change the dosage on his blood pressure medication. Before leaving, he told me that when election day rolled around he was going to cast his ballot for Bennie Thompson, our seven-term congressman, who happens to be black. He added that he still loathed the Democrats for wanting to take his guns and thinking higher taxes would solve every problem, but he couldn’t forgive the Republicans for the big mess in Iraq.

Momma was asleep, so I sat there in the recliner thinking about a book I’d read several years ago that had been on my mind,
An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962
. At the time, I was struck by the fine job William Doyle does of conveying the hysteria that prevailed in the state in the days before Meredith finally flew into Oxford aboard a government plane and was escorted onto campus by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and a team of U.S. marshals.

About halfway through the book there’s an account of a speech delivered by JFK on the evening of Sunday, September 30. Preempting regular network programming, he issued an appeal for calm, telling the people of Mississippi that “the eyes of the nation and of the world are upon you and upon all of us, and the honor of your university and the state are in the balance.”

The first response an oral historian usually gets from anybody being interviewed is “I can’t remember much of anything about that.” But if you start providing the subject with details about the times or events that interest you—even the most trivial information, like, say, the absence of sugar in Coca-Cola in 1943, when it was being reserved for troops, or the flimsiness of the paper Sears, Roebuck printed its catalogs on that same year—it’s amazing what else starts to emerge. The brain stores information in a peculiar fashion, and sometimes a momentous recollection is tangled up in the seemingly mundane.

When I read Doyle’s account of that speech, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years: being hustled off to bed after the president spoke, my mother bending over me and telling me not to worry, though she sounded worried herself. A few moments earlier, right after JFK went off and Ed Sullivan came on, my dad had left the house with the Colt Python tucked under his belt.

What happened that night at Ole Miss would almost certainly never have occurred but for the groups of armed men, most lacking any connection whatsoever to the university, who drove into Oxford to try to keep the federal government from enrolling a black student. Somewhere, in the part of the mind that most of us learn to shut down, I’d always wondered if my father was among their number. But I never asked him about it. There are plenty of white guys like me in Mississippi who don’t know what their fathers did during the civil rights era, because they don’t want to know. They’ll ask about World War II and feel themselves aggrandized when they hear how their dads stormed Omaha Beach with the First Infantry Division or treaded water for twelve hours in the Leyte Gulf, waiting for Bull Halsey’s flagship to pick them up. Having a father from the Greatest Generation is one thing. Knowing he was a member of the Citizens’ Council is quite another.

And it’s something else altogether to wonder why he left the
house with a gun on the night that a neighbor—who’d been his friend since childhood, though he’d recently announced plans to take his land—killed his own wife.

When Dad came home from the doctor, he hung his hat on the coatrack in the hallway and walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water. He must have heard me enter the room behind him, but he didn’t turn around.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“He says I’m doing all right for an old coot.”

“Great,” I said. “By the way, Dad, I read a book a few years ago about James Meredith and Ole Miss, which got me thinking back on what I remember. And I’ve been going over it again in the last few days.”

He turned the glass up and drained it. It clinked when he set it down.

“I remember hearing JFK speak, and having to go to bed, and it seems to me that right before Momma tucked me in, you left the house. Is that right? Or did I make it up?”

He placed both hands flat against the countertop on either side of the sink. He was wearing a light blue long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the back dark from sweat, even though the day was cool. “I was out looking after your interests,” he said.

“My
interests? What would those be?”

He turned around then, and for once he didn’t stoop, just stood straight and tall, towering over me as he had when I was a boy. “You wouldn’t have understood it then,” he said, “and you won’t understand it now, so I don’t intend to waste my time trying to explain. But I’ll tell you this: the answer won’t never be found in no book.”

E
LLIS
B
UCHANAN
had a drink in his hand. He was standing in front of our CD rack, scanning titles, every now and then pulling out a disc. Most of them failed to win his approval. “Now this gentleman,” he said, tapping a jewel case, “has an unusual name.
Kaukonen
. Rhymes with
Salonen.”
He peered at me over his wire rims. “And there, I imagine, all resemblance ceases.”

I didn’t know anybody named Salonen but guessed he was some classical composer. “Jorma Kaukonen founded Hot Tuna and also played with the Jefferson Airplane,” I said. “He was one of my heroes when I was a boy.”

He put the CD back on the shelf. “You’re just a boy now. Otherwise your taste would be more refined. A man ages like wine.”

“Wine doesn’t age well if it’s made from poor grapes.”

“You come from good grapes. At the moment you’re still too sweet, but you’ll sour in due time.”

It was Saturday night and we’d asked him over for dinner, along with Ramsey and Selina Coleman and, at the last minute, Maggie.

Inviting her was my idea. These days, I can’t even begin to imagine what was going through my mind when I told Jennifer I
wanted to include the new French teacher. And an act of the imagination would be required, because the man who made that decision, whatever went into it, no longer exists. You could write a biography about him, but the facts would take you only so far.

By the time she rang the doorbell, the rest of us were sitting in the living room, sipping wine, listening to Louis Armstrong and chatting about the upcoming congressional elections, all of us agreeing that Bennie Thompson was a shoo-in and the Democrats had a shot at controlling both houses. Jennifer got up to let her in and for a moment they stood framed in the doorway, my wife in brown slacks and a beige blouse, a red-and-blue apron cinched at her waist with ole miss mom scrolled across the front, and Maggie in black jeans, a black sweater and high heels, a purple scarf draped around her shoulders.

“You must be Maggie.”

“And you’re Jennifer.”

“Can I take your handbag?”

“Sure. And this scarf, too, if you don’t mind.”

I took my time getting up. “Maggie,” I said, “I don’t think you’ve met Selina.”

“No. I haven’t had the pleasure.”

Selina used to be beautiful, but she’s put on a good bit of weight in the last few years, and the cushions sighed when she rose off the couch. “A pleasure’s just what it is,” she said, taking Maggie’s hand. “I’ve got a cousin who teaches at Duke, in early childhood education. Endesha Reedy. I don’t suppose you know her?”

“I’m afraid not. Most of the people I know there are either in the Sanford Institute or the Department of Romance Studies.”

When Ellis meets a woman for the first time, he rises so fast you can hear his bones pop. They sure popped that night. “This is Ellis Buchanan,” I told her. “He edited our local newspaper for
about thirty years and stirred up lots of trouble. These days he mostly stirs his drink.”

“As lies go,” Ellis said, “that one’s in the bald-faced category. I don’t drink anything that has to be stirred.”

He offered her his hand, and she took it and held on to it. “Not even coffee?” she asked.

“Most certainly not coffee. Dear, do you know what caffeine does to a person’s metabolism?”