The Last of the Savages (9 page)

Glowing with proud anticipation, Jimmy’s mother proposed “a nice polka.”

“What about some Christmas music?” my mother suggested.

Aunt Colleen observed generously that there was plenty of time for both. My father and I, for once of one mind, exchanged sinking looks, and at that moment I felt almost achingly close to him, my own flesh, and all the more so for knowing that I could not express it. Awkward reticence was part of the nature he had bequeathed to me; neither of us was likely to announce:
No fucking polkas in our house, thanks, and get that nasty box out of here before we smash it to pieces.
For all my adolescent disgust I was as big a coward as he was, and so we sat and listened to “White Christmas,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “The Beer Barrel Polka” and a half-dozen other selections whose names have blessedly faded with time. Colleen led the applause after each number and then called out the next tune. If Jimmy resented any of this, if he had any notion of how ridiculous he appeared to us, he didn’t let on. He rocked back and forth on the ottoman, embracing his squeeze box, impassive. I squirmed on the sofa. Tiny as he was, my cousin seemed at times merely a passive appendage of the respirating instrument, a freakish child attached to a primitive life-support machine, trying to eke out another day on earth. Finally, Mom suggested we ought to be getting ready for Mass.

“Just one more,” said Colleen brightly.

My father was caught standing. With a guilty look, he sank back in his recliner and listened stoically to the final, rousing polka while I blamed him for everything that was weak and yielding in my character.

Mass was another torture. Father Ryan preached at interminable length about the Holy Family while I daydreamed helplessly about sex. In recent years the sight of stained glass, the sound of the liturgy, aroused a perverse stream of carnal reflections. As if sensing my defection, my spiritual mentor Father Ryan had questioned me in the supposed anonymity of the confessional about impure thoughts and impure deeds, assuring me that these were mortal sins. Having no control over my thoughts, at least, I began to question the idea of involuntary sin and other aspects of supposed and actual church doctrine. I stopped going to confession, and would have stopped going to communion except I was afraid of what my parents would say, so that each
Sunday I approached the altar rail, a would-be apostate terrified of the sacrilege of taking communion unshriven. Now, on Christmas Eve, I was faced with a new dilemma; as the ushers moved backward down the aisle toward our pew, I found myself with a painful erection, which persisted as the rows immediately in front of us each emptied, until finally my mother and father and Aunt Colleen were rising and I was forced to a decision.

“Aren’t you coming to communion,” little Jimmy asked loudly, from the aisle.

The next morning, opening presents my parents could barely afford—including the London Fog raincoat I’d requested—I found myself weighed down with shame for all my betrayals and denials, from asking my mother to change her dress as we were about to drive to school that September, to passing my father off as a General Electric executive. And my ears still rang with what my father had said, driving back from church—“Preppies don’t take communion?” I solemnly vowed to be a better son in the coming year.

I was under the influence of this resolution and still miffed at Will when he called to wish me a rockin’ good Christmas and to invite me down to “the farm”—his homey euphemism for Bear Track, the Mississippi plantation where his father had been born. Though I badly wanted to go, I heard myself telling him, with a defiant pride in my station in life, that I was grateful for the kind invitation, but I didn’t have the money for a plane ticket.

I knew my mother would be crushed to lose me again, so soon. Going away to school had been my own idea—and she was clearly delighted to have me in the house again.

Will solved the first problem immediately; he’d pay the fare out of his ill-gotten numbers gains. When I coldly informed him that I didn’t want his money, he claimed he needed my help and explained that I could work off the debt. That, somehow, made all the difference. I didn’t cloud the issue by asking him what it was he needed me to do.

The other obstacle was more difficult to surmount, but over the next
couple of days I managed to imply to my folks that I knew they weren’t the kind of parents who’d want to deny their son the broadening travel and social opportunities that his expensive prep school education had opened up for him—thanks to their generosity and sacrifice—which they themselves could not necessarily afford to provide. I was almost brought short by the look in my mother’s eyes when she told me I could go, a look that indicated she knew she was losing me. My father, too, became misty-eyed as he drove me to the airport. In his relations with me he seemed to lurch between the poles of stern disciplinarian and moist sentimentalist, with no comfortable middle ground. It was all very Irish. I wanted to comfort him in some way, but we had no history of verbal intimacy, and my excitement at escaping the cramped sphere of his influence was only too palpable.

W
e left Memphis behind us on the high ground and suddenly I was confronted by the vast bottomland of the Mississippi Delta. In its dusty brown winter cloak it seemed almost featureless, but under the irrigation of Will’s rambling commentary fabulous growth sprang forth on the fruitless plain: a lost jungle of cypress, tupelo, sycamore and sweet gum flowered again out of a rich stew of flood-water, alluvial sediments and decomposing vegetation, stitched together by a chaos of vines and cane, trafficked by deer, bears, panthers, water moccasins, alligators and black clouds of disease-bearing mosquitoes. The Choctaw camped on the sedimented high ground near the banks of the river, but the fecund interior languished well into the last century until white men from Tennessee and the Carolinas arrived in flatboats from the river, having worn out the cotton lands to the north and the east, lured by the rumor of the richest soil on the planet. No yeoman farmers, these—the clearing and farming of this jungle required capital and slaves. “The Negroes die off every few years” noted one early visitor, whom I later quoted in my Yale senior thesis, “though it is said in time each hand makes enough to buy two more in his place.”

All I could see now across the flat plain of the Delta was the long
ridge of the levee, off to our right, like the edge of the world. The leading roadside industry seemed to involve the slaking of thirst and the recent advent of refrigeration, judging from the hand-painted signs advertising
COLD BEER
and
COLD COKES
. The bare cotton fields were studded with shotgun shacks, some swarming with black children, others abandoned and overgrown, tin roofs seemingly held up by bowers of kudzu vines. As we drove through a tiny settlement, Will pointed to the spot where a freedom rider had been gunned down the year before. “This is the south of the South,” he warned, spraying potato chip debris on the dashboard. “Last unreconstructed spot in America.”

Will had been almost two hours late picking me up at the airport. Cooling my heels outside the baggage claim in Memphis, I saw the Cadillac rocket up the arrival ramp and shoot past me before dodging a taxi and screeching to a halt several feet from the curb. When I ran up, the passenger window slid down. “I’m wasted,” Will said. “You better drive.” He briefly lifted his dark shades to reveal the pink filigree in his eyes.

I told him my learner’s permit was only valid with an adult copilot.

“They don’t care about that down here,” he said. So I took the keys and followed his instructions, nosing the big, cushiony-riding Caddy down the ramp and out to Highway 51.

Will lit a cigarette and debriefed me as we drove south. “Got the house nearly to ourselves. Dad’s in New Orleans and Elbridge has gone down to Destin with his buds. The beauteous Cheryl spent Christmas with us. At one point she tells us she forgot her baton. To which my old man says he’s got a baton she can use, which sends Mom off to her room for two days. Then Dad gets in a swivet about L.B.’s draft status. He wants to use his connections to get Elbridge in the reserves so he can dodge Vietnam after he graduates, and Elbridge says that’s cheating and Dad says that’s just smart. Got pretty hot there at the old dinner table.”

Once we were in the Delta, the highway was so flat that we seemed, curiously, to be driving uphill. The distance between objects—houses, cars, a stand of trees—seemed enormous, and I sensed a pervasive lassitude. In the harvested cotton fields ragged bits of white fluff clung to the cut stubble, like millions of tiny, tattered flags of surrender. The
black man who filled our gas tank in Tunica seemed to make an epic meandering journey out of the simple trip from his seat inside the door to our car. The door itself was dangling on one hinge, rather like his overalls, which hung on a single raggedy strap from his shoulder, the other having frayed away. The RC Cola ice chest standing out front was full of trash, the lid long gone. Encrusted with vegetation, several automobiles were rapidly becoming part of the landscape.

Located some twenty miles north of Greenville, Bear Track had been in Will’s family since the land was cleared in the 1850s—one of the first plantations in the region, three thousand acres of sandy loam planted in cotton. We drove through the naked fields up a long red drive. I was disappointed at first sight of the house itself, a yellow-brick ranch which, except for the surrounding pecan and magnolia trees, hardly answered my notions of an antebellum plantation.

“You were expecting columns and verandas?” Will said slyly as we parked out front. “The old house got torched by Yankees. Its replacement fell down after the flood of 1927, and that house burned to the ground after a drunken overseer fell asleep smoking in his bed. Which is actually pretty typical Delta history. You hear these fucking people round here carrying on about the glories of Dixie—shit, this was one big swamp. They weren’t even fucking
here.
Forget that
Gone with the Wind
shit. Best thing ever happened to the South was getting beat so we could piss and moan for the next hundred years about our mythical lost glory.”

We stopped in the kitchen to greet Eula and to steal two Schlitz out of the refrigerator.

“Breakfast of champions,” said Will.

“You’re gonna get me throwed out of the house,” Eula complained. “Your mama, she think
we
be drinking all the beer.”

“My mama hasn’t set foot in the kitchen in twenty years.”

“Maybe not, but your daddy, he measures the liquor every time he comes down here. I seen him do it. Turn the bottles upside down and make a mark with a pencil.”

“When are you going to stop pandering to the oppressors,” Will asked. “Don’t you know the revolution is coming?”

It took me a moment to see he was teasing her. Eula had heard it before, and clearly didn’t want to hear it again. Putting her hands to her ears, she said, “Onliest thing coming here is trouble if you don’t leave me be.”

If we had been a few years younger I suppose we would have rushed out to explore the land in the remaining daylight; instead we closed ourselves in Will’s room listening to the Stones. Will showed me the collection of Indian artifacts—arrowheads and beads and shards of pottery—that he scavenged around Bear Track.

When his mother knocked on the door we scrambled to hide the beers before she came in. Dressed in a flowing kimono, she inquired minutely about the weather and apologized to me for the dearth of social activity.

“You boys should go riding,” she said.

“We don’t want to ride,” Will said.

“Well, it seems like a terrible waste,” she said, wandering around the room and frowning at the posters that adorned the walls. “All those perfectly wonderful horses out there. Somebody ought to ride them. You do ride, don’t you, Patrick? Or don’t they ride in your part of the country?”

“We just don’t
feel
like it,” Will said.

“Well, I think it’s a shame,” she said dreamily, pulling the door shut behind her.

“She wasn’t always like this,” Will said softly.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Like a ghost. Cordell met her after his own father had pissed away most of the Savage loot and he was struggling to make it back. Mama was one of the richest and prettiest and funniest girls in Memphis, and the most generous by a long ways. She was twenty-one when she came into her first trust fund and she spent most of it on a Negro orphanage. Nobody’d ever done anything like that before. Everybody would’ve thought she was crazy, but because it was my mother they thought it was wonderfully eccentric and Christian of her.”

Will reached in his bedside drawer, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“Dad went after her like I don’t know what. Borrowed money to follow
her to Europe—this place was mortgaged to the hilt—and sent her a poem every day for two years; finally she canceled her wedding to this guy from Chattanooga and eloped with my old man. He’s been trying to drag her down ever since—like he had to spoil what he loved so he wouldn’t need it so much. He started sleeping with her friends before long and made damn sure she stopped giving her money away. Just slowly wearing her down. And then, when A.J. died it was kind of the last straw.”

This was the first time I’d heard Will speak of his mother. He was always dutiful, and later he would draw closer to her, almost by default, as he pulled farther away from his father; gradually I came to understand that he loved her for what she had once been even as he hated her for letting herself be defeated by Cordell, and for remaining in love with him to the end. But I remind myself, too, that this was
Will’s
version of the marriage, and that it could hardly be unbiased.

“Let’s drive,” Will said, suddenly intent on some mission.

I waited for him in the driveway, and after a few minutes he jumped into the shotgun seat clutching two beers. I sailed out to the open road, the headlights conjuring up the faded white line out of the blackness.