Safe from the Neighbors (5 page)

“Jesus.”

“I imagine you’d like to know about my brother?”

By now I was scared to ask. Her dad had shot her mom, then been blown to smithereens, and her husband had died of cancer. And there was still the question of children, which she’d told me not to pose.

“Nothing bad happened to Gene,” she said. “Just lots of
good things. He’s a successful real-estate agent in Fort Worth, and he and his wife have four daughters between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Those girls—well, they’re all gems.” I figured maybe she’d pull some pictures from her purse, but she didn’t. Instead, she ate another spoonful of yogurt and, while continuing to look at me, tipped her chin up ever so slightly. “You’re probably wondering,” she said, “why I’d come back to this particular place. Given what occurred here, I mean.”

You have to understand that Loring, Mississippi, isn’t the kind of town people come back to, for any reason whatsoever. It is, in fact, the kind they leave. Very few of those I grew up with are still here, and most of them own large chunks of land that have belonged to their families forever. New arrivals are almost always drawn by the promise of low-wage jobs, either in the catfish industry or at the Wal-Mart Supercenter or the big Dollar General distributorship that opened a while back. Around here, true wealth comes coated with glue, and it’s always stuck to the same sets of hands. “I guess I am curious about that,” I said. “Though I don’t know how I’d react if something similar happened in my family, because it didn’t.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. A couple of months ago, I sat up in bed one morning and noticed how perfectly gorgeous the day was. I’m not trying to brag, but I own a nice house in the countryside between Durham and Chapel Hill, and I lavished a lot of care, during the last few years, on my garden. My bedroom there has a big window, and I looked out at the sunlight flooding my roses and heard the water trickling from the fountain my husband had built for me and it was all just perfect, except for one thing: I suddenly felt that if I spent one more moment in that house, surrounded by all that beauty, I’d go completely mad. I checked into the Carolina Inn that afternoon, stayed there for two nights while I arranged to have the place looked after, then I packed a couple of bags and started driving.

“I went to Radford and visited the cemetery where my
grandparents are buried, then drove aimlessly across the country, intending to end up in Needles, where I’d turn around and come back. I kept stopping in small towns, and some of them made a big impression on me. Especially one in Kansas. I ate a sandwich in this general store where they sold all kinds of things related to farming, including seed. I listened to what people were saying, but none of it made any sense, and I finally figured out why. It was because they all knew so much about one another that they’d lapsed into a kind of shorthand. It might as well have been a foreign language. And I realized that nobody on the face of the earth knew me well enough to do that.

“I finally did go to Needles, where our gas station had been turned into an espresso stand, a faux Starbucks that was doing booming business—probably because there wasn’t a real Starbucks nearby. And it just fascinated me that my dad’s undoing could be the source of someone else’s success.

“When I started back east, I knew I had to see Loring. So I got here a couple of weeks ago and checked into that motel across from McDonald’s. I guess I expected to stay just a couple of days before going back to North Carolina. I wanted to see the house I used to live in, and to see if I could find out where my mother’s buried. The first morning I went out and bought the
Weekly Times
and spotted an ad for someone who could speak French well enough to teach it. The ad sounded sort of desperate, so I found myself thinking, Why not? I went in and applied for the job, and when Ramsey gave it to me I rented a house.”

In the face of such honesty, I experienced a range of emotions. And as odd as it may sound, given that personal tragedy had provoked her actions, envy was one of them. I couldn’t imagine being able to leave home like that and go wherever whimsy led me. This seemed to me the kind of thing only a young person would do, though I hadn’t done anything of the sort when I was young. So for the second time that day, I made a
grossly inappropriate comment. “Well,” I said, “if you were trying to escape beauty, you’ve come to the right place.”

That afternoon, retrieving a book from my car that I’d promised to loan one of my honor students, I ran into Ellis Buchanan, who’d parked in the space next to mine and was carrying a beaten-up hardcover of
All the President’s Men
. He brought the same book with him at the beginning of each school year, for the first of his regular Tuesday-afternoon lectures to the journalism class.

“Going to make a few points about the freedom of the press?”

“No.” He shut his door. “Making the point that the press has never been less free than it is right now.”

“I admire your sentiments, but for your own personal edification, you might want to refresh yourself on the Alien and Sedition Acts.”

“I’m beyond edification,” he said before going inside. “When you’re as old as I am, you will be, too.”

A
FAIR AMOUNT OF WHAT
I
KNOW
about my father I learned from my maternal grandfather when I was a boy. He’d known Dad all his life, by virtue of having sublet land from my other grandfather, who died long before I was born.

According to Grandpa, for many years, on the first of March, Dad had to wait outside the office of Herman Horton, the president of the Bank of Loring, for the purpose of securing that year’s “furnish”—the money he and others like him needed to borrow each spring in order to plant their crops. The queue that formed there was known as the begging line, and according to my grandfather as the end of February drew near my father’s mood always soured. Nobody could stand to be around him, so great was his fear of being turned down. When he finally made it inside, he was never offered a cigar, as Arlan Calloway and a few select others were, and Mr. Horton didn’t inquire about his family. The sole recognition of his individuality came when Horton intoned, as he did every year, “March again. And here comes May.”

“Yes sir. Here I am.”

“How much do you mean to hit me up for this year? And before you answer, remember that I hate it when a man overreaches.”

At that point, even though Dad had already whittled the figure down to the bare minimum he thought he could survive on, he’d knock off another two or three hundred dollars. After he handed over a list of proposed expenditures, Horton would study it for a few minutes, then shake his head and say, “Looks to me like you plan on buying too much fertilizer. You know what the best fertilizer is, May? Piss in the field before sunrise and piss in it again after sunset. Plain old hard work.”

Dad always got the furnish, but before he left the banker invariably observed that people who didn’t own any acreage and had to rent sixteenth-section land ought to give up farming and find a job pumping gas and fixing flats. One year, Grandpa said, my father somehow found the courage to respond. “Mr. Horton,” he said, “I like farming.” And old Herman, who frequently performed at the Loring Little Theater, replied, “I like acting. But they tell me Spencer Tracy does it better.”

To go back even further, I know that my dad’s own father was a hard man who hewed to the notion that people never got tired, unless they had a weak character. Grandpa said he worked all his children like mules, with a predictable result: each of them got out from under his roof just as fast as possible. In the case of my father, World War II provided the escape hatch, and his height served as a passport. One morning in the summer of 1944, a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, he simply disappeared. “The military wasn’t looking too hard right then at things like birth certificates,” Grandpa told me. “Uncle Sam was running short of men. So your daddy talked his way into the United States Navy.”

Though he saw both Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few months after they were nuked, Dad never told me much about them, just mumbled that they were both a mess and changed the subject. I was already in my thirties when I finally asked, and told myself he probably figured that since I hadn’t been interested
enough in his wartime experiences to question him back when I was a student and otherwise eager to interview every veteran I could find, the time for that talk was long past.

One bit of information he did volunteer, however, was that in December 1944, at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, on a night when the temperature dropped below zero and a fifty-mile-an-hour wind came howling in off Lake Michigan, he was ordered to walk guard duty in front of an empty barracks. As impossible as it might sound, the watch officer found him standing asleep in a doorway around 3:00 a.m., stiff and stunned. His punishment, enacted the following night, was to spend the entire evening shoveling snow in similar weather. The next day he started feeling hot, and by dinnertime was running a fever that soon soared to one hundred four. He ended up in the infirmary with a bad case of pneumonia, the scariest moment of his life occurring when he woke up to find two navy doctors hovering over him. “Good Lord,” he heard one of them say, “looks like we’re going to lose this poor boy from down south.”

That remark, I think, provided the caption for the remainder of his life: a poor boy from down south.

His house, a little bungalow with Sheetrock siding, was near the elementary school. He and my mother moved there a couple years after I left for Ole Miss. When he realized I’d never come home to help, he gave up farming altogether—a fortunate decision. Most small farmers in the Delta had already gone under by that time, and virtually all the rest would before long. He took a job maintaining county school buses, though by now he’d been retired for more than fifteen years.

The place wasn’t much to look at, but one thing that used to catch the eye of passing motorists was his tomatoes. Every February he planted his seed in the mulch bed at the side of the house, and once the threat of frost had passed he transplanted
them in the front yard, where they grew big, red and juicy. Quite a few folks knocked on his door wanting to buy a sackful, but he always just gave them away. This year, for the first time, he hadn’t planted any, and as far as I knew nobody except Jennifer and me ever came to the door anymore.

We parked in his driveway that night, and I grabbed the picnic basket from the trunk. She’d baked a hen, then painstakingly pulled all the meat off the bones and cut up the bigger pieces, making them easier to feed to my mother and easier for Dad to chew and swallow. He’d lost a lot of his teeth and was having trouble with most of the ones that remained.

We found them in the den, where they almost always were, no matter what time of the day or night we came over, the TV tuned to the Weather Channel with the volume turned all the way down, Dad on the couch with his bare, swollen feet propped up on the coffee table, my mother at his elbow in her wheelchair, a padded restraining device called a Lap Buddy holding her in place. A few months before, after my father fell asleep from exhaustion, she’d gotten out of the chair and taken a couple of steps before falling and breaking her hip. That led to three months in Loring Rehab, and for a while it looked as if she’d never leave. Now she was back home, staring at the floor with a puzzled expression on her face.

“Look who’s here, Momma,” Dad said. Her head didn’t move, so he reached over and cupped her chin and raised it, forcing her to look at us. “She knows who y’all are,” he assured us, as he did every time we showed up. “She just can’t say it.”

I believed I saw something in her eyes, but it wasn’t recognition. It seemed to me more like embarrassment. We spend most of our lives writing our own personal histories, and my mother’s stood out from those of the people she’d grown up with. To the best of my knowledge, the word
nigger
had never slipped from her lips, and I was fairly certain she’d voted for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Unlike my friends’ mothers, who instilled in
them the belief that honesty was the highest of virtues, she taught me, at an early age, that it was sometimes all right, even necessary, to lie as she did, in the context of explaining why, after a shopping trip to Memphis, we weren’t going to tell my father that we’d spent the afternoon outside the gate at Graceland, hoping for a glimpse of Elvis. She loved rock and roll, even in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when it was associated with drugs and antiwar protests, and she’d listen to it on the radio whenever my dad left the house. In this meat-eating culture, she lived off vegetables, and nothing made her madder than Dad’s attempts to make her eat something she didn’t want. At breakfast he often stabbed a slice of bacon and laid it on her plate, and she’d pick it up with thumb and forefinger and fling it on his.

Now she chewed whatever he managed to put in her mouth, and hearing any kind of music at all made her moan, unless it was the sound of her own voice humming something Dad claimed to recognize as an old folk song. She couldn’t recall how to walk and would eventually forget how to swallow and, if she didn’t die of pneumonia, would finally starve to death.