Safe from the Neighbors (32 page)

And then Arlan looks at me and says I wish I’d shot that goddamn deer. You’ve sure made me want to fire this gun tonight
.

Driving back to Loring they kept meeting cars and pickups, hundreds if not thousands of folks bound for Oxford. Arlan had turned the radio down low, but my father could still hear it. Someone else had been killed, and the 108th Cavalry was moving into position to assault the campus. Helicopters hovering near the administration building were constantly being shot at by the rioters. One reporter claimed the marshals had run out of teargas, that the Lyceum couldn’t be held much longer. Nobody seemed to know where Meredith was, even whether or not he was still alive. There was speculation that the marshals might have airlifted him back to Memphis.

This would prove false. In just a few hours, accompanied by the chief U.S. marshal and an assistant attorney general, Meredith entered the rear door of the Lyceum and registered for classes, becoming a junior at the University of Mississippi. On August 18, 1963, he earned the college degree that my father never dreamed of.

None of that would have mattered to Dad had he known it that evening. What mattered, as he and Arlan rode together through a night as dark as any he’d ever seen, was that this time next year he and my mother and I would be right where we’d always been, the three of us eating around the table in a home that belonged to the county. It wasn’t an especially good place to be—most folks, he knew, would consider it pretty awful—but at least it was familiar. We wouldn’t be undergoing any big changes. And, on some level, he was grateful to Arlan for putting him to the test. Now he knew something about himself that he’d never known before, and this could only be a good thing. You need to know yourself. You need to know what you’d be willing to do in the service of those you love.

When Arlan stopped on the main road to let him out, it was a quarter till four on the first of October. He could walk the two hundred yards to our house and maybe get an hour or two of sleep before heading off to the fields to pick the rest of his crop. And the moment his feet hit the ground, he felt strangely buoyant. He looked into the cab at a man who’d been his best friend for as long as he could remember, a little guy with a hard face and tired eyes. He had a lot that my father lacked, and almost anybody assessing their relative merits would say that his future was a whole lot brighter. But my dad wouldn’t have traded places with him even if the opportunity arose. “You take care of yourself, Arlan,” he said.

There was no reply. So my father shut the door and Arlan Calloway drove off down the road, heading home to his kids and his wife.

When Ellis rang the bell that Christmas Eve, I didn’t open the door. He knocked a few times, too, but then had the good sense to leave. It was cold outside, the snow falling heavily now, and he didn’t intend to stand there with that ham and bottle of wine under his arm and freeze. I apologized later on, and of course he understood once I told him I’d been sitting on the laundry room floor with my father’s life spread out across my knees.

In the months since I’ve thought a good bit about what we know and how we know it and have concluded that I know a lot more about some things than I realized and much less about others. Some of what I know involves facts, some of it doesn’t, and even the part that does isn’t as dependent on the facts themselves as it is on my own capacity to believe and accept truths that might be painful. I’ve also spent time thinking about how one event can lead to another and have come to understand that while
cause
might well be, as I’ve long thought, the most frequently
misappropriated term in our language, its properties are nevertheless real and more than a little mysterious.

The day I asked Dad what he meant when he said he’d been out looking after my interests that night in 1962, he replied, “I’ll tell you this: the answer won’t never be found in no book.” But about that, and no small number of other things as well, my father was wrong.