Safe from the Neighbors (2 page)

When the assembly was over and everybody began to file out, I found myself walking down the hall beside the new French teacher, whose classroom was in the same wing as mine. Up close, I could see she wore a lot of eyeliner and that her lipstick matched her blouse. She must have doused herself in perfume—the odor was that strong, but I liked it. “I wanted to introduce myself,” I said. “I’m Luke May. I teach American history and a special honors class in local history.”

“Local history?” she said, as if she doubted any such thing existed.

We stopped outside my classroom. “We focus on the history of Loring County and the Delta, though we also talk about the rest of the state. Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the Depression, civil rights and so on. A lot of things happened here. You might be surprised.”

For an awkward moment, as she started to shake her head, I thought she was going to walk away without saying anything more, though nobody in her right mind would behave like that towards a colleague trying to welcome her to a new job.

“Luke,” she finally said, “you don’t remember me at all, do you?”

While we stood there, the eyeliner and the purple lipstick faded away, and a little girl’s face took shape.

I
’VE NEVER READ MUCH FICTION.
What bothers me about most novels is how much of the world they exclude by focusing on the inner lives of one or two characters. I’m also troubled by the whole notion of a “plot,” in which one event leads to another in a manner that, more often than not, seems overly simplistic. Nevertheless, shortly after my daughters graduated from high school, I retreated from reality and embarked on a novel-reading binge.

Many of the books I read that summer had been recommended by Ellis Buchanan, whom Jennifer had invited for dinner that Monday evening. A native of the east Mississippi hill country, he’d moved to Loring and bought the local paper in the fall of 1960. In other words, he arrived in the Delta in time to witness the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement, and then managed to cause a lot of trouble for himself and his family by advocating voting rights for blacks and suggesting that segregation was both immoral and economically unsound. He constantly received threatening phone calls, and somebody eventually hurled a firebomb into the building where the
Weekly Times
was published, though it happened on a Friday night, when no one was around. At Loring Elementary, it was understood that his son and daughter shouldn’t be invited to join
activities on the playground. You’d see them sitting there in the sandbox together or bouncing up and down on the seesaw.

Ellis was almost eighty now. His wife had been dead for twenty years, his children never came back after they graduated from college, and he’d sold the paper in 1990. Mostly what he did these days was read, listen to classical music and tend to his roses, and once a week he came to the high school and spoke to the journalism class. He was still handsome, as Jennifer frequently said. Tall and silver haired, he rarely appeared in public without a tie and was wearing one that evening. “So what did you think, dear,” he asked her as I poured him a second glass of the Oregon Pinot Noir he’d brought along, “of the Brodsky collection?”

Jennifer teaches freshman English up at Delta State, but her passion is poetry. She writes every day, and once or twice a year somebody, usually a small journal, will accept a poem. Back in the early ’90s, the
Southern Review
published one—the biggest splash she’d ever made.

Ellis was always pushing collections at her, but his taste ran towards work a lot more restrained than what she was drawn to. He loved Frost and Robert Penn Warren, while she preferred Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and a lot of younger poets whose names I’d never heard until she mentioned them. And once she did, I usually forgot them.

“I don’t know what to think about Brodsky,” she said. “But I’ve got a feeling he’s been badly translated.”

“The translations seemed just fine to me.”

She tossed her long curly blonde hair, revealing sharp cheekbones. At a time when most of our women friends were growing bigger and bigger, she kept getting thinner. I couldn’t figure out why, since her diet hadn’t changed. “You’re entitled to your opinion,” she said, “though I have trouble when
cheese
is forced to rhyme with
energies.”

Ellis feigned outrage. “I don’t remember any rhyme like that.”

She lifted her wineglass and sipped from it, soaking in every second of his attention. Sometimes, when they were sitting there like that, I almost felt as if my presence were indecent, that I should have got up and left them alone together. “Listen to this stanza,” she said, “from ‘The Funeral of Bobò.’” She stepped over to the sideboard and picked up a large red-and-gold hardcover.

She closed the book—the halves thudding together—and laid it triumphantly before him.

He eyed it for a moment, then crossed his arms over his stomach. Smiling, he said, “Yes, that’s definitely a bad translation. Brodsky wrote in Russian, where there’s no word for cheese because they lack the energy to produce it.”

Several hours and three bottles of wine later, the evening reached its conclusion, as so many of these evenings had, with Ellis glancing at his watch and expressing shock. “My Lord—can you believe it’s almost midnight?”

Under ordinary circumstances, Jennifer, who usually has to grade around one hundred twenty papers each week, is rarely able to remain awake after 10:00 p.m. But a visit by Ellis Buchanan, no matter how often one occurred, was nothing ordinary. “It’s early,” she said. “Let’s drink one more glass of wine. It’s good for your heart.”

“I have no heart. That’s how I’ve managed to live so long. If you don’t have one, it can’t wear out. You should get rid of yours before it’s too late.”

My wife was drunk. “That’s why I write poetry,” she said. “I’m trying to lose it on the page.”

Our guest rose. Unlike my father, a tall man who’d become stooped at a certain point in his life, Ellis had retained his full height and, except for a few wrinkles, didn’t look much different than he had twenty years ago. “I’m going to get out of here,” he told me, “before this young lady suggests I’m a man of virtue. I’d hate to be reduced to a set of good impulses.”

“I’ll walk you home,” I said.

He laughed. “Afraid that in my doddering senility I’ll lose my way?”

“After all we’ve had to eat and drink, I need some exercise bad.”

“I think he’s lying,” he told Jennifer, then bent to kiss her cheek. “He’s scared I’ll be found wandering around somebody’s catfish pond in the morning with a dazed expression and two or three cottonmouth bites.”

“If those cottonmouths bit you,” I said, “you wouldn’t be wandering anywhere. You’d be dead.”

“Mr. History,” he said, using the nickname one of my students coined a few years ago. “Wed to fact like an innocent young bride.”

Outside, crickets chirped in the velvet air. That afternoon it had rained, and the yard was soggy. Still, you’d never think of warning Ellis to watch his step. It went without saying that he knew right where he was going.

In high school I’d worked as his intern, helping him do the pasteup and then carrying the sheets down the street to the printer, and before long he was taking me with him to news conferences. Through him, I’d met some major figures in the civil rights movement, like Aaron Henry, as well as the finest governor this state ever had, William Winter. You can find some of the worst people in the world in Mississippi, but also some of the
best, and the quickest way to tell them apart is to look where they stand on race. Ellis Buchanan was one of the best. He’d done some good things for me personally, too, helping me win an Ole Miss scholarship so I wouldn’t have to take out loans or depend on my father, who’d been urging me to attend Mississippi State and study agriculture, then come home and help him farm.

Walking to his house that night, he asked how my parents were doing. My dad didn’t have much use for him and would avoid him if it looked like they might meet on the street. And as for my mother, well, she hadn’t been able to speak to anybody for quite some time. “His blood pressure’s through the roof,” I said, “and he’s having problems with his feet. They’re always swollen. And poor Momma doesn’t know where she is, which I guess may be a good thing.”

“That isn’t likely.”

I looked at him. “You’ve never become forgetful, have you?”

He laughed. “Well, now that’s hard to answer, isn’t it? Because if I had, I wouldn’t know it.”

“I’m not talking about anything extreme. I mean when you forget somebody’s name, when you know it but just can’t quite dredge it up.”

“I’m not in the habit of dredging.”

“You used to be. I seem to recall that when you were a journalist, you did a fair amount of it.”

“Did I? That must be one of the things I’ve forgotten.”

A certain portion of Ellis’s emotional capital had always been invested in irony. That probably helped him survive his wife’s death—she’d had lung cancer and suffered badly towards the end—as well as the ’60s and early ’70s, when his politics put him on the outs with almost everybody in the white community. Later on, as the town tried to rehabilitate itself, he became its unofficial spokesperson—the guy who could explain to the outside world that while Loring, Mississippi, had a long way to go, it’d already traveled a great distance.

“On the subject of forgetting,” I said, “I met someone today I haven’t thought of in years.”

“Really? And who might that be?”

“Her last name’s Sorrentino now.”

“She’s Italian?”

“No. She was originally named Calloway, Maggie Calloway, She seemed hurt that I didn’t remember her. We were friends when I was small—I’m guessing I was no more than four or five when we met, but I can’t say for sure. The thing was, she moved away. I don’t know exactly when this happened, but you’ll probably remember. Because her father shot and killed her mother.”

As a young man, Ellis had played basketball at Ole Miss, and he still carried himself with the grace and certainty of an athlete. That night he never broke stride. “October first, 1962,” he said. “Does that date ring a bell, Mr. History?”

T
HE HOUSE WHERE
I
GREW UP
burned about twenty years ago. It was situated a few miles north of Loring, near the intersection of two country roads, only one of which was paved when I was a boy. The one we lived on wasn’t, and my dad considered it a major triumph when he managed to embarrass the county board of supervisors into grading it and adding several loads of fresh gravel. Normally, the supervisors didn’t pay much attention to men like him, but he’d been persistent and, in the end, won out.

The house and the surrounding acreage belonged to the sixteenth section, which was rented out to farmers to support the local schools. In our county this land was put up for auction every five years, which meant that people like my father and my maternal grandfather, who until his death was Dad’s partner, had to enter sealed bids, and when the time to open these bids rolled around a certain number of relationships inevitably got fractured.

Some of my earliest memories involve the barbershop owned by Mr. Parker Sturdivant, a cotton farmer who cut hair only on Saturdays, and I was always terrified that my turn might come when his chair was empty. Bald himself, he showed no respect
for anybody else’s hair and would keep the clippers whirring until he got through with whatever story he’d started telling when you sat down. More than once I climbed out of his chair in tears, and I wasn’t the only boy who did. Like most of my friends, I preferred Mr. Sturdivant’s employee, a guy named Andy Owens, who had wavy red hair and supplemented his barber’s salary by delivering the Memphis paper. Though the papers were dropped off at the local bus station by a southbound Greyhound around 2:00 a.m., people usually got them late on Sundays because Andy always drank the night away and frequently stopped for naps on his route the next morning. You often saw his truck parked at the edge of a country road, papers piled high in the passenger seat, Andy’s head resting on the steering wheel. It was understood that if you were on your way to church and still didn’t have your
Commercial Appeal
, it was okay to open the door and slip one out.