The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (20 page)

“My uncle killed Stanny’s father?” I said, aghast.

“No,” Clyde said. “He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You just told me he went to prison.”

“He did, but he didn’t kill the old man,” Clyde said, and like all good storytellers he was playing this out.

“Who killed him?”

“His wife, your great-grandmother. Her son took the rap for it. He went to jail for his mama. Every good ol’ boy in the mountains would’ve done the same thing.”

I said, “I wouldn’t do it.”

“You tell me your mama kill your daddy, you wouldn’t take the heat for her?” Clyde said.

In a brief reverie, my childhood passed in review before my eyes. “Yeah, I’d’ve been happy to do it for Mom.”

“You just like us, son,” Clyde said. “You can do all the college you want, but Nolen blood don’t change. You know your uncle Joe, Stanny’s brother?”

“I used to visit him in the Atlanta penitentiary when I first got to the city.”

“He tell you why he was in the big house?”

“Said it had to do with shoplifting,” I said. “Uncle Joe said it was a bad habit.”

Clyde laughed out loud. “He shot and killed one of Stanny’s other brothers.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I think he got pissed off,” Clyde said. “You Nolens got a short fuse.”

“Stanny’s a sweetheart. So are Aunt Faye and Aunt Nellie.”

“Good mountain girls. Strong girls. Course, Stanny’s got quite a reputation up here. You ever hear about her putting on her track shoes during the middle of the Depression and hauling ass to Atlanta? Left her kids and everything.”

“Yeah, I heard that one, Clyde,” I said.

“Didn’t set too well with the people up here.”

“Didn’t set real well with her kids, either,” I answered.

“Your uncle Joe wants to see you,” Clyde said. “He lives in a school bus with twenty-six dogs.”

“Why?”

“He likes dogs, I reckon,” said Clyde, “or school buses.”

On the way back to Atlanta, I tried to engage Stanny in some accurate recounting of her family’s history. Her relationship with truth was scant and fugitive—her talent for subterfuge inventive and slippery by nature. Her parents were people of the finest type, pillars of their church community life. Her brothers were the handsomest boys who ever lived—a little on the wild side, but men of high breeding and quality. When she admitted that her brother had dabbled in moonshining, it was an act of rebellion against the revenuers and federal agents who interfered with the stern code of the hills. Their land was sovereign property, and not even the king of England or the U.S. president could cross their threshold to tell them how to use their God-given land. Besides, the Nolen boys were artists in the moonshine they made in their copper-kettled stills around Piedmont. Stanny had brought a mason jar full of it on a world cruise, and the ship captain himself declared it the equal of French cognac.

“Did Uncle Joe kill his own brother?” I asked Stanny. “Everyone in Piedmont says he did.”

“You’re talking to the Peeks. They’re nothing but religious fanatics,” Stanny said.

“Did Joe do it?”

“He was framed,” Stanny said.

“Who framed him?”

“The Mafia.”

“I didn’t know they had branches in Piedmont, Alabama. There isn’t even a pizza parlor in town.”

“The Peeks love running my family name into the ground.”

“Let’s tell them about the Mafia.”

“That’d only make it worse,” Stanny said. “Then they’d spread the word that the Nolens were associating with Eye-talians and Roman Catholics.”

“Roman Catholics?” I said. “A fate worse than death.”

“They think it is. Those lying, no-’count, mouthy Peeks! They can’t stand it that I’ve always been a good ol’ Southern girl, but one with style and class.”

What I was looking for, Stanny couldn’t tell me. In both my mother and Stanny, Piedmont was a branding iron of shame, a starry-blooded omen, an underbelly of the Deep South, and a place to fly away from. Piedmont lit fires of the deepest shame in their bloodstreams.

Because she was dressed in her funeral best, I took Stanny to dinner at Gene and Gabe’s restaurant when we returned to Atlanta. Gene and Gabe’s was a Northern Italian restaurant that represented the elegance, sophistication, and refinement of the big city to me. Its clientele was urbane and its decor was muted and made larger by an interplay of artwork and long mirrors on its crimson-washed walls. It was the anti-Piedmont to me and the anti-Piedmont to my grandmother.

“It’s like the stateroom on a cruise ship,” Stanny said the first time I brought her there. “You know you’ve made it … just walking in the door.”

“The sky’s the limit, Stanny,” I said as the waiter handed us menus.

“First a cocktail,” Stanny said. “I want to make a toast. I’ll never go back to Piedmont again. I don’t care if Jesus Christ dies there.”

I carried Stanny drunk into her boardinghouse and put her to bed that night. I did that on many occasions, but I was young and strong and was one of those boys who had grown up head over heels in love with his grandmother. As a young writer, I was trying to learn what kind of man I was becoming and what I wanted myself to become in the future. I wanted to ripen into a man I could be proud of—one I could present to the altar of God without shame or hesitancy. I was trying to open myself up to the full experiences of life—not to be judgmental or harsh, but to be curious and always on the alert and ready for every encounter, no matter how bizarre or exotic, I found on the road. I was following
the path of the third-grader Margaret Nolen, who married as a young mountain girl, deserted her children when they began to starve, lit out for Atlanta and a new life and found one. Stanny and my mother raised Carol Ann and me to be Southern writers before we knew what one was. We spent our childhoods listening to Stanny describe meeting Masai warriors tending their cattle on the plains of Kenya, watching a school of sharks following the ships she circumnavigated the globe on, visiting a gorilla colony in Rwanda, having an audience with the pope in the Vatican, and always, always her morbid sadness when her ship glided into New York Harbor and her dread of return at the sighting of the Statue of Liberty, proof she would never escape the cloistered margins and limitations of Piedmont. Stanny always had to return and it was always to the same place—just as it is for all the rest of us.

In the late seventies, the forces of Piedmont began a strategic campaign of collusion to draw Stanny back into its adhesive and killing webs. I missed the moment when my mother and her sisters grew tired of me hauling Stanny to one Atlanta party after another. The Peek sisters scolded me for introducing their mother to a Gomorrah-like Atlanta that emphasized sin, happy hour, and ungodly goings-on. After the novelist Terry Kay took me around to various strip shows he covered for the
Atlanta Journal
’s entertainment section, I took Stanny on the same tour the following month. Some of the strippers remembered my name and made a big fuss over Stanny, who was courtly and attentive to them. We ended the night at a huge gay bar on Monroe Drive, where we watched an elaborate dance of the drag queens. Stanny and I danced the night away until we could barely stand. I consider that night among the drag queens as one of the finest nights my grandmother and I spent in our rich and unusual life together. But I will always believe Bernie Schein was the one who provided the catalyst and produced the dangerous chemical reaction that drove Stanny into exile from her Atlanta life.

•   •   •

No matter how hard Stanny tried to guilt-trip or cajole me, I never took her to Greenlawn Cemetery to communicate with the dead again.
I told her I wouldn’t take her back there if every dead person she knew had undergone a resurrection and all were ready to receive Stanny and chant heavenly songs and any daily gossip they might have picked up from their vantage point on Jesus’s knee. Bernie Schein overheard this skirmish with delight and said, “What a no-good white-trash grandson Pat turned out to be, Stanny. What kind of Southern boy is it who won’t even take his beloved grandmother to the cemetery to visit her loved ones? You deserve a much finer grandson. Someone just like Bernie Schein—sensitive, caring, loving, dutiful, and handsome. Not like that Irish lout, that uptight ingrate who doesn’t know how to worship a wonderful woman like you.”

“Shut up, Bernie,” I suggested.

“Will you take me to the cemetery tomorrow, Bernie?” Stanny asked, sealing the deal.

“Of course I will, Stanny. It’ll be an honor. It makes me sick to my stomach that you produced such a sorry grandson. You deserved one just like me … a true hero, a gentleman, a Jew.”

Bernie and Stanny took off the next day with the enthusiasm of big-game hunters setting off to intercept the migrating hordes of the African bush. Their ill-conceived safari among the Southern dead became the stuff of family legend, and both of them would tell their different versions of the story for the rest of their lives. Since Bernie was a small-town boy, I knew that the only cemetery he was familiar with was the diminutive Jewish cemetery on Bladen Street in Beaufort. Later, he admitted that the sheer size of Greenlawn Cemetery had unnerved him as he entered its gates and saw the vast acreage of the tombstones reveal itself to him in all its green, well-ordered silence.

“I didn’t know there were that many dead people in the world,” Bernie declared. “It never occurred to me that more people have died in Atlanta than at Auschwitz.”

From past experience, I knew that Bernie’s problems were only in the beginning stages. Stanny’s eyesight had deteriorated in recent years so that her eyes bulged in geckolike protrusions. She had a heroic incapacity for navigation and as little sense of direction as anyone I ever met. Like most men I know, she would never admit that she was lost or
had no idea where she was going. Twice, Bernie had circumnavigated the cemetery, waiting for Stanny to tell him where to park the car.

“Stop right here, Bernie,” Stanny said, pointing to a hill covered with marble stones.

“Is this where your folks are buried?”

“Yes,” Stanny said, “I can feel it, and I can hear my son, James, calling out to me.”

“What’s he saying?”

“He’s not saying nothing, Bernie,” she explained. “He’s just telling me he’s right over there.”

For the first hour they wandered about in a fruitless search for some poor lost Nolen or Peek. Bernie read the names of a hundred tombstones as Stanny moved in her tortoiselike gait to other pastures of stone. Then Stanny announced she could not walk another inch. When Bernie observed that they were half a mile from his car, Stanny shrugged her shoulders with indifference and said, “Just call Pat and tell him where you deserted me and he’ll come pick me up.”

“That son of a bitch would never let me forget it,” Bernie said. “Get on my back, Stanny. I’ll carry you up that hill. Just like Jesus carried that cross up the hill. Holy God, you’re heavier than that cross. You feel like you weigh a thousand pounds.”

“I’ve always been considered petite, Bernie. You make me feel like a pig.”

When Bernie filed his report on the afternoon, he spent the next hour as a pack animal bearing Stanny’s weight from grassy hill to grassy hill. She would issue orders to bear right or left as she kept hearing her son calling out to her again and again. She kept telling Bernie they were getting closer and she had started hearing her dead relatives cheering on their efforts to find them in the great jigsaw puzzle that had enclosed them in a dazzle of names. Coming to the point of breakdown himself, Bernie finally had an idea to extricate himself from his excruciating ordeal.

“We found it, Stanny. We finally found it. James Peek. How wonderful,” Bernie lied.

Stanny mentioned the names of five relatives buried near James,
and Bernie shrieked, “Hallelujah, we found them all, Stanny. It’s the prettiest spot in the cemetery, and goddamn, darling, we’ve seen every one of them. Now, you pray your ass off to James right here; then we’ll make like horseshit and hit the trail.”

Stanny dismounted and Bernie claims he fell face-forward into the grass and lay there for several minutes, his body cramping in muscles he wasn’t aware of having.

The light was too bright for Stanny and sweat was pouring down her face as she began her long soliloquy with her son, James. I had endured a few of these long-winded conversations with the lost soul of my uncle and had memorized every portion of the drill.

Stanny began, “Hey, James, it’s me again, your mother. But you know that. You’re in heaven now and I guess know everything. I talked to your wife, Chris, the other day and she told me what your boys were all doing. Steve’s got a good job for himself and Paul got himself married the other day. She seemed like a nice girl, but the marriage was annulled after twenty hours, so I’m guessing they didn’t get along that well. Don Conroy took me to a Braves game the other night, but the other team won. It was a pretty night, and the stars were all out. You forget that stars still shine on Atlanta.”

Bernie raised his head from the grass, curious about this strange aspect of Christian faith that he had never imagined. He listened as Stanny went over each and every family member who would hold interest for Uncle James, then took it to higher and more personal realms.

“Enough about me and the family. I hope you are doing well, James, and that Jesus is taking good care of you and that the angels are serving you breakfast in bed every morning.”

“Jesus is the nicest guy I ever met, Mother,” said Bernie, answering for my uncle James. “In fact, he reminds me of that great, great American Bernie Schein.”

This interference in her train of prayer stopped Stanny in her tracks for a few seconds; then she continued her conversation with her son. “Do you get to see Jesus very often? Do you have long talks? Do you tell him about the family? Does he know about me?”

“Mother, I talk to Jesus all the time. Hell, to tell you the truth I
get sick of him every once in a while. That boy runs his mouth way too much. I think he got the big head, you know, being God and all that stuff. But he tells good stories. I’ve got to hand him that.”