Sons (13 page)

And he said, “Yes, Bert.”

“I didn’t feel anything,” I said.

We looked at each other. We were eating horsemeat goulash in a trench stinking of pulp and gristle; overhead, four Spads were engaged with a flight of red-nosed Fokkers. We looked at each other and were silent. I studied Timothy Bear, his face, his eyes, and knew I would never again see the Indiana farmboy who had cajoled us through sixteen weeks of training at Camp Greene. In his place, there was someone as alien to me as my German victim had been, and I realized as he stared back at me, that he too was seeing someone other than the Bertram Tyler he once had known.

Friendly strangers, we sat and chewed on horsemeat and watched the aerial acrobatics overhead, and in a little while we were telling stories about what had happened to us separately that night, and a short time later we were laughing together.

We had come all the way from the campus of the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, following the same route the three slain civil rights workers had taken at the end of June, stopping in Meridian, Mississippi, and then going on to visit the charred ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, the heat a sentient adversary, dust add mimosa mingled, the taste of death and the scent of fuzzy pink, the insects rattling in the scrub pine, the scorched iron bell lying mute in unforgiving ashes. We had then gone through Philadelphia, namesake of another town in another place where another bell had once sounded for liberty, and driven twelve miles northeast on State Highway 21 to the Bogue Chitto Swamp where the charred remains of the Ford station wagon had been found, three of its hubcaps already stolen by Choctaw Indians from the reservation, a final piece of irony. And then we had traveled in shimmering Mississippi heat, our pilgrimage taking us in the opposite direction to the Old Jolly Farm where the three men had been found six weeks after they’d disappeared, buried twenty feet deep in red clay, each of them shot to death. Chaney, the Negro, had first been viciously beaten. The New York pathologist who examined his body said later, “I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered.”

Now we rode westward toward the Louisiana border and a town called Clayton, where we hoped to continue our voter registration work. The man driving the car was a twenty-three-year-old named

Luke (no relation to the saint, but a divinity student nonetheless) Foulds from Brewster, New York, who had been one of the eight hundred students indoctrinated at Oxford during the week Chancy, Schwerner, and Goodman were there. He wore rimless eyeglasses, and he had a pale pinched face, a rather sharp nose, thin unsmiling lips. A humorless man by nature, he had become positively dour after learning that the three workers — he had known Schwerner casually — had indeed been killed. A rumor had circulated in the beginning, you sec, that the disappearance of the trio was a hoax, a stunt concocted by CORE to call attention to the voter registration drive. I knew right away they were dead, however, and I told my father that their murders only strengthened my resolve to go south with Larry Peters.

I was sitting alongside Luke on the front seat of his old Chevy, and Larry was in back with a girl named Jennifer Stott, who was a sophomore at Vassar, and who never let anyone forget it. Blond hair cut close to her head, busty in a white peasant blouse, thick-hipped in a pale denim skirt, meaty thighs flashing whenever she crossed her legs, she sat barefoot beside Larry and tried to convince him she had not been frightened when a gang of kids in Philadelphia had yelled “Nigger lover!” at the car. I knew she was lying because I myself had been scared half out of my wits. The only one of us, in fact, who had maintained his cool against the approach of what looked like impending disaster was old dour Luke. Which was perhaps proper and fitting, since Luke was our mentor and our boss, and the three of us were here only to serve as his assistants, having symbolically joined him on the Fourteenth of July, Bastille Day.

It had been some July.

I was willing to bet there had never been a July like it in the history of the United States.

“This July started in June,” my mother had said, and I think she was right, but I also think she was referring only to the temperature, which was the highest ever recorded in Talmadge for that month. Lake Abundance (ha!) fell a good four feet (which wasn’t very comical to the people who owned summer homes around it) and there were more brush fires in town than ever before, the siren on the firehouse roof erupting some two or three times a clay, volunteers popping into their cars and rushing all over the countryside, invariably arriving too late to save anything but the plumbing. Elsewhere, though, July had also started in June with the resignation of Ambassador Lodge in Saigon, and the disappearance of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner in Mississippi. Of the two events, the one unquestionably most important was the disappearance of the rights workers. Immediately following the passing of a massive civil rights bill by the Senate, the scent of violence rising from that snake-infested southern swamp caused most thinking citizens to wonder what would happen when the bill passed the House and became the law of the land. The war, or whatever the hell it was, in Vietnam had been meandering along through four administrations now, and there seemed little danger of it changing its course for the worse, even with the appointment of an Army general as the new ambassador. In fact, President Johnson had told the press that Taylor’s appointment in no way indicated a change of policy in Vietnam. “The United States intends no rashness,” he said, “and seeks no wider war,” and there was every reason to believe him. We had our hands full right here at home without worrying about a limited commitment eleven thousand miles away. In fact, by the time the civil rights bill became law in July, we had lost only a hundred and forty-nine American advisers in Vietnam, which was not a bad average considering the fact that we’d been actively involved there since December 1961, when our first helicopter company went over to assist the Vietnamese army.

In Mississippi — where for the first time in history Negroes were protected by law when entering such heretofore exclusive places as polling booths, classrooms (though I had thought they’d settled
that
one back in 1954), factories, hotels, restaurants, movie theaters and even barber shops — they were dragging the Pearl River and trying to find the body of a Negro named James Chancy, who together with the two white men Schwerner and Goodman (“Are they Jewish?” my father asked) had disappeared on June 21. It made for confusion.

It even made for confusion in a place like Talmadge, which in all modesty had more than its proportionate share of intellectuals and influentials: professors, writers, editors, art directors, critics, performers, publishers, all of them eager and willing to tell the rest of the nation what to read, cat, wear, watch, enjoy, drink, feel, and think. Even the Talmadge brain trust, as exemplified by such sterling exhibits as Professor Robert Fitzhugh who taught film and film techniques at the university and who only the week before had reviewed
Harlow
for
The New York Times Book Review,
and who had written oh just
countless
critiques of other books for
The New York Review of Books
and anonymously for
Time;
or Leon Coopersmith, he of battle-of-bands fame, not to mention fortune in radio broadcasting earned through the popularity of his most ambitious show, a gem titled
Hello, Mrs. America,
which was beamed daily from a restaurant somewhere in downtown Pasadena, nor even the television producer David Regan, who had created a half-hour teen-age comedy show entitled
Wing It!
doubtless inspired by his beauteous wife Katherine Bridges Regan, acquired not four years ago, he being almost forty at the time, and she having practically gone through elementary school with me (I had, in fact, once had a terrifying crush on her); even
those
towering intellectuals — but no, seriously, even the
really
intelligent and creative people in Talmadge didn’t know quite what to make of that July.

Goldwater did nothing to help the confusion. Talmadge was a Republican town but essentially sensible, anyway, except for the Lake Abundance crowd and the four faggots on Javelin Road and the wife-swappers who had lived in brief discreet bliss on Caramoor Way. So now the Party in conclave high and solemn had nominated for its presidential candidate a man who had: 1- Voted
against
the civil rights bill (there were only three Negro families in all Talmadge and perhaps a bushelful of Jews, but everyone in town nonetheless liked to think of himself as highly democratic, small d), and 2- Advocated the defoliation of Vietnam (the people in Talmadge, tree-worshipers all, visualized a vast unsightly parking lot in Southeast Asia, probably in a two-acre residential zone) and 3- Promised to give his commanders in the field all the support they needed, even if it meant the tactical use of nuclear weapons (that giant mushroom specter rose over the twin steeples of the First Congregational Church — wherein David Regan had taken for his bride the young and doubtless giggling Katherine Bridges — and scared the population witless).

The British publisher who was bringing out my father’s De Gaulle book in London, visiting our house at the end of June, solemnly asked, “You people aren’t serious about this Goldwater person, are you?” and my father had pooh-poohed the Arizonan’s chances, figuring even then that Scranton would surely get the nomination, especially now that Lodge was coming home to help him campaign. But in July, there was Goldwater, boasting — as the current joke had it — that come November he would ride triumphantly into Washington in his coach and four. And nobody in Talmadge knew
what
the fuck to think.

My mother’s daily letters to me in Mississippi were a form of cursive whistling in the dark. She had told my father that he owed it to me to grant me my manhood, but now that I was actually in the South and violence was breaking out everywhere around me, her courage was beginning to falter and she filled page after page with Talmadge’s reactions to the nomination, gossipy, endearing, her tiny precise handwriting only inadvertently betraying the fears she later confided to me. The situation was not helped when she received a letter from the very organization I was serving, warning of the dangers I might encounter, and announcing that because of the “tense situation,” they were not accepting any further volunteers for their program. Then, to put the maraschino cherry on it, a New York detective shot and killed a fifteen-year-old Negro boy, and a cry of police brutality roared all the way from Yorkville into black Harlem where full-scale rioting erupted on the loneliest night of the week, which also happened to be hot and sticky like most July nights in New York, there
has
to be a connection between heat and violence.

In July, Talmadge pondered the Republican platform promising “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” while brick-throwing, looting, burning Negroes in Harlem were passing out leaflets that proclaimed: “We don’t have to go to Mississippi because Mississippi is here in New York.”

And in August, I was
in
Mississippi in a moving car on a deserted highway as dusk deepened the sky and birds chattered wildly in the treetops.

(Wat Tyler, nattily dressed for travel in southern climes, rests his weary head against the back of the seat. In black and white, the sun glancing through the trees casts a leafy filigree upon the windshield.)

The automobile was parked at the side of the road ahead, the headlights on even though it was not yet dark. A man stood casually leaning against the side of the car as we approached. Seeing us, he stepped into the middle of the road and held up his hand. He was wearing gray trousers and a white shirt open at the throat. A gun was slung in a holster on his hip, and there was a deputy sheriff’s star pinned to his shirt pocket. Luke stopped the car. The man walked over. His hair and mustache were the color of his dusty boots. His eyes were a bright blue.

“Evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” Luke said.

“Mind if I have a look at your license and registration?”

“Is something wrong?” Luke asked.

“Nothing at all,” the deputy answered, and glanced into the back seat. “You coming from Philadelphia?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Luke said.

The deputy accepted Luke’s license and registration. In the beam of his own headlights, he studied both and then walked back to our car. “This’s a New York driver’s license,” he said.

“That’s right,” Luke said again.

“You from New York?”

“Brewster,” Luke said.

“That in New York?”

“Upstate New York.”

“Guess that’s how come you ain’t familiar with the law here in Miss’ippi.”

“What law is that?” Luke said.

“Lights on at dusk,” the deputy said.

Immediately, Luke readied for the dashboard switch and turned on the headlights.

“Well, it’s a little late now,” the deputy said. He glanced at his watch. “Close to seven o’clock,” he said, “that’s a long way past dusk.”

(Wat Tyler, sitting beside Luke on the front seat of the silent automobile, feels a sudden lurch of fear. He wets his lips. The deputy stands motionless outside the car. In the woods lining the road, an owl hoots and falls silent.)

“Want to come along with us?” the deputy asked.

“What for?”

“I jus’ tole you. Lights on at dusk.” The deputy smiled pleasantly. “Yours were off.”

“Well, they’re on now,” Luke said.

“But too late.”

“Look, officer...”

“I jus’ think y’all better come along with us, huh?” the deputy said, still smiling. “For your own p’tection, huh?”

“We’re supposed to be in Clayton by...”

“Oh, were you heading for Clayton?”

Luke was silent for a moment. Then he merely nodded.