Thicket

Missing Okra

2007-04-12T14:44:40Z

After four months of coaxing, three okra pods appear on a spindly little stick, barely eight inches tall, in my husband’s vegetable patch. To say okra grows reluctantly in New England soil is a sad understatement: it just doesn’t want to be there. I tell my father about this bumper crop while we stand in his garden, the one built for my wedding, on a warm August afternoon in central Alabama. He sympathizes with my okra. A second-generation farmer, he has the deeply tanned skin of a man who’s worked outside his whole life. He is, as the local widows say, “a good looking man, even at sixty.” He ought to be thinking of retirement. Instead, he’s eyeing an adjoining 200 acres so he can extend his cattle operation. He is looking for investors.

“You got an money?” he asks me.

“No, Daddy. The mortgage company took everything.”

“Hmmm. You better get to writing.”

He sighs, then glances toward the farm that extends as far back as the eye can see. It wants to be wild; it would be wild if he turned his back on it. And he tells a story. Someone new to the area asks: what grows around here besides okra? He says, “More okra.” His blue eyes twinkle at the telling of his story but I know he’s thinking: you can keep that cold weather up there.

My father is mystified that anyone, especially his daughter, can live up North with its unreasonable winters, its faith in taxes and government. When my husband, Brian, and I bought our run-down house in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he said ruefully, “You could have bought a lot of land in Alabama for that kind of money.” He’s amazed we can grow anything so close to the sea and in such a brief growing season. But the message of the okra story is really this: why are you there, not home? And who is going to take over this farm?

Brian and I have chosen to live in a very old seaport where the houses abut the streets, leaving no room for front yards only private backyards hidden by tall fences and pergolas dripping with flowers. Our street, Boardman, has been a street since the 1750s. Our yard has been a yard since 1860, when someone decided to build the tallest house on the street in the most modern of architectural styles—Second Empire. Although the house stands relatively unaltered since then, the yard is a different story.

A concrete foundation, once for a shed, covers most of it—three cars can park on it. A sad strip of grass grows undaunted between concrete and a garden bed. A rotting fence that thankfully belongs to the neighbor wavers on the left. Our own stronger fence stands in back and to the right, providing six-feet of illusory privacy. In the left corner, the best plants have arrived without invitation: the neighbor’s creeping juniper extends its graceful tendrils along our shared fence that her ferns have tunneled beneath. These interlopers overshadow those 40 labeled varieties that the previous owner set out in this crowded little garden. Along each fence is a four-foot wide swath of plantings, but these have been devoured by green goutweed and pineapple mint. Once planted as innocuous ground cover, these two vie like warring factions for control of all the grounds.

The former owners let the yard go wild while their house stagnated on the real estate market for a year. According to the neighbors, they had treated the house with the same indifference for 30 years. The windows open with a hammer’s aid. The drooping soffits allow water to seep into the third floor catwalk, cascade between the walls, and break through the first floor plaster ceiling. Inexorable and expensive construction lies ahead, so we decide to spend the summer avoiding it by working in the yard. This house casts a long shadow.

To have a real garden, the first priority becomes the concrete slab’s removal. And all the neighbors say, “Call Jimmy.” He lives down the street and runs a hot-topping business. We call Jimmy, whose real name is Don, and he sends one of his grandsons to give us an estimate in late April. Jimmy joins us later. He walks slowly up the driveway; his small body looks lost in his heavy coat and work clothes. He wears one diamond stud earring, an unusual accessory for an 87-year-old man. Jimmy is comely, and according to local legend, was quite handsome.

Unlike any other contractor I’ve met, Jimmy gives us a reasonable price, once he realizes we don’t want the driveway repaved. He says they can start soon. Like all contractors, he gets a late start and the project drags. And because the house operates in accordance with the laws of physics, it provides more work for him. While the slab is being removed (an action), the retaining wall in the front of the house collapses (a reaction.) Jimmy, who complains of knee problems and walks with a limp, heaves concrete blocks from the front wall and the back yard into the bobcat’s bucket, which pulls double duty as the braking system. He rescues an evergreen tree and a few shrubs, now bereft of a front retaining wall, and deposits these on the only grassy spot in the yard. At the end of May, the dirt-covered yard begins to look ominously big.

Brian and I aren’t in exact agreement about what the yard should be: a playground? A space for entertaining? Something fancy or practical? Brian really wants a vegetable garden. He’s poured over a how-to book on jardinage, the art of growing things in very small spaces. The book includes exotic looking pictures of trellised cantaloupes hanging precariously from string. Brian is captivated by the idea of this harvest and follows the book’s directions to a tee.

His interest in gardening started quite young and quite unexpectedly. He grew up in Northeast Pennsylvania among Polish-Catholics who worked in mines and factories and grew cabbages and horseradish. As a child he and his cousins would bike past an incongruous herb farm on the way to grandmother’s house. What about this farm caught his ten-year-old imagination I don’t know. But he came by so often, the young couple building it asked if he wanted to work there. Brian started by dragging fieldstone from their creek. With these stones, he helped build a sunken garden full of winding beds and healing herbs. The garden became this magical place—one of the first he took me to see after the introduction to his parents.

On a Sunday afternoon in May, Brian mixes with a scientist’s care the vermiculite and peat moss into the soil. He builds a trellis for the climbing vegetables. He constructs a four by four grid and begins planting his garden. Arugula and radishes. Nasturtiums—a natural insect repellent, he reads. Habanero peppers—his favorite. Cucumber and green beans, Early Girl and Rutgers tomatoes. But the okra he plants for me, an homage to Alabama.

Okra is a southern food, and tender okra pods are rare in New England grocery stores. Sometimes, old, tough, and blackening pods can be acquired for exorbitant rates at the organic superstores. But their product is inedible. In Alabama, an okra stalk will grow eight feet tall. The pods shoot off from the stalk, poised like fireworks waiting to be light. The spines on its heart-shaped leaf cause skin rashes. It’s one tough plant: it makes its eight-inch tall Yankee cousin look wimpy.

Though I grew up on a farm, I never had a vegetable garden of my own. My mother, who taught first grade for thirty years, always said that getting out report cards conflicted with spring planting. But her mother had the most bountiful vegetable garden. I remember spending a summer picking through an acre of purple-hulled peas. The harvest brought all of her nine children together for what seemed like a grand adventure to me, the first grandchild, but was really just hard work. The men worked in the yard stirring corn with a long wooden paddle as it cooked over a fire in a black iron cauldron. Inside the women canned everything. Fig preserves were a house specialty. My grandmother labeled them with the care a winemaker bestows on each new vintage. She froze copious amounts of her vegetable soup, viscous with okra that grew abundantly in her garden. I still crave her soup.

My grandmother knew plants. She had a gift for growing things. She knew when to pick pokeroot when it wasn’t poisonous and could be eaten as salad greens. Even the slim wooded areas surrounding her house in rural Alabama were full of small wonders that her keen eye would find: wild sassafras, huckleberry bushes. She loved her annuals and perennials, too. Cuttings could always be found in Mason jar vases in her windows. Her hydrangea would flower in both pink and blue. But the plant I remember the most is one I never saw—a night blooming cereus.

Somehow, in her fifties, she came to own a rare plant that bloomed only at midnight and after a light drizzle. This cactus-like plant, which she kept at her back door, looked innocuous at best until it bloomed. Then, a white globe appeared, its petals shooting out like moonbeams. Unfurled, the blossom reached eight inches in diameter and died before dawn. When it bloomed, my grandmother woke everyone in the house. My aunt still remembers the event, even now, with a child’s petulance of being awoken for no reason.

New England summers are nothing like the languid, long summers of my childhood. They are brief, but dramatic. Some plants grow as if they are aware they have four months to thrive and want to savor every moment. I’ve lived in New England for ten years and never appreciated its operatic growing season.

Jimmy finishes his work in mid-May, the beginning of the explosive growth period in New England gardens. In moving plants around, I find hostas that look rocket-like beneath the dirt, ready to grow. I am an indelicate gardener and even my most careless handling leaves the plant undaunted. Thrown haphazardly in a pit, they grow. So do other things that I think are geraniums. Then they flower and I see columbine, in pink and blue, proffering little jester hats like those the fairies wear in Tasha Tudor books. Bleeding hearts drop stems full of heart shaped flowers, each with a blood red stamen.

Lots of mysterious green leaves appear everywhere. Our more experienced neighbor-gardeners try to categorize them: “Weeds,” they say. Sometimes they are right, but I develop patience with my weeds. They occasionally become interesting plants—Chinese lanterns and African daisies. The strip of grass, bearing the shrubs Jimmy deposited there, becomes a breeding ground for Johnny jump-ups, blue bachelor buttons, and a kind of white daisy that makes me want to pluck its petals and count, “He loves me; he loves me not.”

Ours is a packrat’s garden: miniature roses and sea thrift are crammed between a towering hibiscus and the ever-rampant day lily. We have ten varieties of day lily; Their brief flower, vibrant for two weeks, hardly merits the space they usurp. These are the kinds of considerations that serious gardeners, with tiny yards as their palette, bring to their artful gardens. Last summer, I got my first introduction to gardening as high art when I crashed the Old Newbury Historical Society’s annual garden tour. Brian and I had learned through the grapevine that a neighbor would be in the show. On a rainy June day, just days after moving in, we went visiting. At the garden gate, we encountered ticket takers, not the owners of the home. Wallet-less, and frankly, penniless, I blurted out, “but we’re the new neighbors.” That this would be a fund-raiser had never occurred to us. They let us in, out of pity.

Here, I saw a garden that would appear in the kind of magazine that helps readers “see like a designer, visualize like an architect, plan like a landscaper and shop like a decorator.” Here was an idyll. Their lawn furniture—French art deco; their wisteria—espaliered horizontally along the fence; the ajuga—pink, triangular, a perfect complement to its neighboring lavender bush; their blue fescue—festooned with its brown sheaths and swaying gracefully. It was the kind of place that made you think God and not the devil was in the detail. The water feature whispered sweet nothings as the pea stone path crunched beneath our feet. Not a leaf, plant, or flower was out of place. We left full of a wonder, much like Dorothy experienced when she found herself in Oz.

I visit the neighbor’s garden as often as is seemly. And when I return, Brian always says, we’re not building a garden like that. We do agree, however, to a patio of fieldstone, the same material Brian once dragged from a Pennsylvania creek bed. Neighbors provide a steady stream of commentary on our progress, proving that gardening in Newburyport is also a spectator sport. “Those rocks are placed too far apart,” they comment. Or, “what you need is…” and sometimes, “looks good, looks good.”

When we’re finally done, we have so much rock left scattered through the yard that Brian builds a retaining wall around the patio’s edge. He builds rock wall quickly, stacking the broken fieldstone without much thought. It gives the garden a tumbled-down look, which is beautiful.

Without an exact plan in mind, we begin adding plants around the new patio that seem like they should be ours: white mugwart, bugbane, and dragon’s blood. All uncommon plants prized for some unusual characteristic—silver mounds, black-purple leaves, or thick waxy burgundy ones. The day lilies are replaced with cardinal flowers, bee balm, hyssop and betany, and Indian heather—a native wildflower with butterfly-like flowers at the tips of thin, swaying stems that dance in the wind. By mid-summer, the vegetable garden also begins to yield a few radishes and lettuces. The climbing plants wind their way to the top of the trellis. Green globes of tomatoes hang patiently.

Brian picks nasturtiums for me to wear. He picks a flower one day to match my shirt, even though it’s worn and paint stained. He picks flowers for me even though I’m worn, and we’ve known each other for many years. We’ve argued in the garden, in the shadow of the house, about mortgages and money all summer.

In July the question comes up of some purchase that he’s put off. We argue in muted tones. Brian is tall and strong, but as he kneels to pluck cherry tomatoes, all I see is a mop of straw-colored hair and eyes an eggshell blue. And my heart breaks. The strangest things dissolve our fights: the appearance of a hummingbird or the surprise of finding a flower in what we thought was just a weed.

***

By August, the zucchini threatens to take over the yard. The bee balm and dwarf dahlias bloom while the cosmos sashay in the slightest breeze. We leave the garden for ten days and drive to Alabama so we can celebrate my father’s 60^th birthday. Brian thinks the drive will be a grand adventure. I’m excited to go home and see my parent’s garden in its summer glory. I’ve made the car trip before and have little good to say about it.

I first drove from Alabama to Boston the summer of 1990 to drop my sister off at summer school. My mother couldn’t bear the thought of letting her 16-year-old daughter attend a strange school in a strange city. It was Harvard College, and it fit the billing. None of us had driven farther north than Knoxville, TN. Boston traffic so terrified my mother that we spent only an hour in Cambridge after a two-day, 24 drive before heading straight home. In Kentucky, she did stop for gas and picked up a ninety-year-old hitchhiker and her two male traveling companions. (I think she was sick of my company.) They were holding their possessions in paper bags, standing by a broken down Volkswagen van. My mother, thinking what if this were Jesus on the side of the road, took them in.

Our traveling companions had been on a retreat in upstate New York to hear a self-proclaimed prophet say that the next John the Baptist would be coming soon. The men, we then learned, had folk danced behind the Iron Curtain in the ‘80s. The woman had been married to a “young, idealistic Hungarian” and they’d live in Romania after WWII. When he died, she returned stateside and married a college sweetheart, the son of the first director of the Tennessee Valley Authority. She asked us to stay the night with her family in western North Carolina. My mother turned down this kindness. Later, she received a thank you note from the lady and a book in its sixth edition that she’d written—a how-to guide to home burials.

Brian has no such memories and therefore no trepidations. He’s excited by the challenge of driving straight through the night. He can’t wait to arrive in Birmingham and eat barbequed ribs. We barrel down an unchanging landscape along interstate 81. He takes the night shift. When I wake at 4:00 am, he’s humming along to obscure ‘80s punk tunes. With Brian, this trip home is a very different journey.

***

We arrive on an August afternoon in Marion Junction, Alabama—a pinprick on the map that sits at railroad crossties that once connected Marion and Selma. A complete inventory of the town includes: a post office, Frankie Roger’s Country Store and Wash House, Dick Roger’s Garage, The Farmer’s Co-Op, an agricultural research station, maybe seventy-five residents, dozens of surrounding farms, a community swimming pool, and four functioning churches—all Protestant. It was once a bustling little town with two hotels before the boll weevil wiped out cotton farming in the South. The big cotton plantations shipped their harvest by its rail depot. A towering dry goods store supplied the region with wares, and its owner with an elegant Greek revival mansion by the railroad tracks. In the 1970s, when I was very young, the book mobile came from Selma once a week and parked in front of that same store, then called Mr. Smith’s. My sister and I would check out the maximum six books allowed per week, then head inside for a glass-bottled Coca-Cola. Our bare feet would be black by the time we exited its old dirt-trodden, wood-floor and headed to the swimming pool. Today, the store is a pile of debris, the plantations more modest farms of soybeans, cotton, beef and dairy cattle.

In 1860, when someone was building my Second-Empire house in Newburyport, my family’s farm was most likely part of the Harrell Plantation. Its owner was a major slaveholder in Dallas County, which at the time had the largest proportion of slaves in the country. In the back corner of our farm, there sits a small cemetery where some of these men and women are buried. Most graves are marked only by the anonymous, shallow depression that forms over time, over an untended grave. One marker is a cement slab crudely lettered by hand. A second marker, for a man born in 1859, is beautifully carved stone, surrounded by a wrought iron fence. The inscription reads, “gone but not forgotten,” and through his grave grows a young pine tree.

The Black Belt holds many such places. Though sociologists use the term to describe the area where the slave-plantation system once thrived, the name comes originally from geology. The polar ice caps, having scrapped across North American, melted here and left a continent’s worth of rich black topsoil across a narrow swath of central Alabama and Mississippi. In the beltway, 30 miles wide and 300 miles long, cotton, the slave trade, and the okra slaves brought with them from Northern Africa, thrived.

In the Black Belt, everything grows with abandon. This is why a pine tree stand can hide a cemetery in the blink of an eye. The farm my parents named Stillmeadow when they bought it as newlyweds in 1970 is anything but. My father carved a space out of thick underbrush for a house. It sits on a limestone hill that overlooks rolling green pastures where cows graze. The view is more pastoral now than it once was: for decades, the cattle trough sat at the bottom of the hill. The combination of water and cow made mud. Ancient, tall trees surround the hill but semi-wild dogs, poisonous snakes, and thick underbrush inhabited the space beneath them. And the driveway, which the neighbors used to refer to as a pig path, was a half-mile long, unmarked, twisting gravel path that looked as if it led nowhere. My parents could see past these blemishes. They saw a beloved and prized possession — land.

Being able to see and walk on assets has an importance in rural areas that makes stocks and bonds look like baseball trading cards. Stock markets are distant, uncontrollable, and insubstantial compared to land. Steven Ambrose describes in his book Lewis and Clark that the Virginia plantation owners during Jefferson’s time were “land rich and cash poor.” The description remains apt for my father. More than an investment, land is patrimony. Once, my father said with quite a straight face that he’d haunt me and my sister to our graves if we ever sold the farm. I can’t say I know anyone who’s been threatened with a haunting over the sale of IBM shares, common or preferred.

When my parents suggested that Brian and I get married at Stillmeadow, they envisioned a setting that my feeble imagination could not. (This discrepancy made for a trying engagement.) Being Baptist, they refused to spend a dime on alcohol for the wedding, but they were lavish with their garden. They carved out an English-style garden from the side of a hill. From the porch, they built a path of broken fieldstone that wound between Japanese maples and terraced beds full of azaleas and boxwood, hostas and ferns, and colorful caladiums. It ended at a stone and grass patio that’s only purpose was to stage a wedding.

When Brian and I arrive at the house, it’s the first time in two years we’ve seen the garden at its summer peak. My father has been cutting back drooping tree limbs that were blocking the driveway. A beat-up farm truck can handle these obstacles: but seventy friends and family members are coming for a birthday party. The driveway has to be fixed. For that matter, lots of things need fixing.

My mother’s list of pre-party chores is long. Our arrival interrupts the work, but only for a second. She’s always had the energetic air of someone more accustomed to the company of children than adults. Tired and sweaty in her tiny overalls and long sleeved shirt, she is still laughing and smiling at something even though she’s pulling at something poisonous and it’s over 90 degrees.

My father had already decided that this is his event, not my mother’s and he sold cattle at the stockyard to pay for a caterer and a Dixieland jazz band. He’s looking forward to his first birthday party since his childhood; but he’s really looking forward to resting, not working under her supervision. While conversing quietly in the kitchen with Brian, he runs through the list of things he said he would do and he’s done. Clearly, he’s just about done in when my mother reappears: “They’re tired. Leave them alone,” she quips. He disappears to tend to other concerns, a side benefit of owning 1500 acres of land.

My mother, who picks up elderly hitchhikers because it’s her Christian duty, can’t bear to hurt a single living creature, including a weed. Her garden is as vigorous as she is. Everything has grown so big, so quickly, it looks like a little jungle. She’s allowed an interloping elephant ear to take over much of it. They tower over all of us with their deeply veined and emerald leaves. She’s also let a skunk cabbage flourish because, she says, it’s erect and beautiful. This garden is green and lush: it has none of the sublime juxtapositions I’ve seen in Newburyport. There’s no consideration of leaf texture; there’s no winter interest; there aren’t even many flowering plants. Her garden blends into the verdant landscape of the Black Belt, threatening to go wild. And if it does, my mother will love it then, just the same.

Days after the birthday party, which was a fine success, Brian and I are ready to leave. In the garden, Brian poses for a picture by the elephant ears, as if they are a sideshow at a carnival. He asks my father if these are typical. Hand on chin, he appraises the behemoths and comments on my mother’s gardening. Brian hears him mutter, “She waters them too damn much.” But overall, I think he’s pleased with her results.

As we leave, my parents stand at the top of the garden as we descend down the path, to the patio where we married, through the gated arbor covered in confederate jasmine, to the pasture, and to the car. It will carry us back to our precious Newburyport garden with its knee-high weeds and a state-fair sized zucchini. As we leave Stillmeadow, my parents ask the same question: when are you coming home again? They both mean: when are you going to stay?

A Comparative Text

2007-04-02T16:37:38Z

a selection from Stars Fell on Alabama (1934)

We heard them coming long before we saw them — three distant high blasts of a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note.

“It’s the Ku Klux,” said Knox. “They’re havin’ a parade tonight. Goin’ to burn a cross out at Riverside.” He settled back in his porch chair and sipped his julep.

“I want to go,” I said, teetering dangerously on the porch rail. “Can anybody go — even Yankees?”

“Anybody can go. But why anybody would want to—“

“I’m surprised you ain’t out there with ‘em,” said the judge chuckling, his white head bobbing up and down. “Didn’t they get your sheets washed in time?”

“You know damn well why I’m not with ‘em, judge.” The ice in Knox’s glass tinkled violently. “When they came to me I said: ‘My grandfather was the boss of the real Ku Klux in this section when there was some reason for it. This club you’ve got here hasn’t got as much relation to it as the Boy Scouts. Besides I may get mad enough some day to want to hurt somebody and if I do I want to do it like a man and not with my face hid behind a mask.’ I haven’t heard from ‘em since.”

“Better watch your step,” said the judge. “They may catch you out tryin’ to kiss a pretty co-ed some night.”

“I’d try to kill some of ‘em before I’d let ‘em touch me. The sight of those white sheets does somethin’ to me — gets my blood boilin’.” Knox stood up and walked to the end of the gallery. “Look at the bastards,” he said.

Beneath the tall elms on Queen City Avenue rode three horsemen robed in white. As they passed the black background of the big tree trunks the moonlight picked them out distinctly. One of them raised a bugle and again the minor four-note call sounded. Behind the mounted trio stretched a long column of marching white figures, two and two, like an army of coupled ghosts, their shapeless flopping garments tossing up and down in the still night air.

An automobile drove up and backed into the drive, throwing its headlights on the rhythmically swaying lines.

“Come along to the street,” said Knox, “I want to show you something.” We went down the steps and out the walk.

“Look,” he said, “can you see their shoes? They tell a lot.”

Moving under the edges of the white robes were pants-leg ends and shoes, hundreds of them. A pair that buttoned and had cloth tops, a heavy laced pair splashed with mud, canvas sneakers, congress gaiters — a yellow pair with knobby toes swung past. At the very end a long figure in sturdy grained oxfords, his sheet twisted awry, stepped gingerly — a little uncertainly. Knox laughed.

“I reckon I know who that is,” he said, “poor devil. Let’s go finish our drinks and then, if you’re still insistin’, we’ll have a look at their damned cross.”

An hour later we drove out past the university, turned left at the insane asylum — and right again toward a glow that was growing in the sky to the north of us. Then through a woods-lined road and suddenly we were in a wide cleared area beside the river. Down on the bank a huge willow bend over into the stream. A mount of earth had been thrown up in front of it and from that mound the tall cross streamed upwards in orange flame. Before the cross and a few yards from it was a small platform which bore a single hooded figure. And in a great arc, closed by the plaform, stood the white-robed men who called themselves “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” Hundreds of cars had already been parked in the rear of the clearing and their occupants, crowded down close to the arc of sheeted figures, were black silhouettes against the white cloth and the orange light. Before we turned off our engine we could hear the steady booming of the speaker’s voice, rich powerful, bass. We could have understood every word from where we sat but we moved near to the figures with the grotesque deep black holes for eyes. I was spellbound by the scene — hooded army, white-robed central figure, burning cross, dark crowd — all against the soft green of the drooping willow branches or the black cavern beyond it where the yellow water of the river fitfully caught light from the flames.

Suddenly the speaker lifted an arm, throwing his robe into sharp oblique lines.

“Why?” he shouted, and the woods before him and the river behind answered with plaintive distant echoes. “Why? Why?”

“Because the Pope believes himself to be all-powerful. Because he and his minions here, right here in these United States, are at this minute planning the overthrow of our democratic government. Do you want to wake up one morning and find a dago priest in the White House a-givin’ orders to white folks? Do you know what he plans to do right here in Alabama — he’s got it all worked out — he’s goin’ to give Alabama over to be ruled by a nigger cardinal!”

There was a low growling murmur from under the white masks.

“Are the people of Alabama — in whom flows the purest Anglo-Saxon blood of any state in this great and glorious Union — goin’ to stand for that? The curse of Roman Catholicism has threatened white supremacy and how are we goin’ to meet that challenge? By organization, ladies and gentlemen, by banding together in such noble communion as we have here to fight to the last drop if need be for the rights of Protestant white folks, for the honor and virtue of all Southern womanhood, for freedom from oppression — all of which are endangered by the devilish plots of a foreign potentate.”

I looked at Knox.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“About the Pope?”

“You know what I mean. And you’d better get me out of here.”

“You wanted to come. Listen to some more of it.”

“Stamp it out!” roared the speaker. “Stamp out the worship of graven images just like we have stamped out immorality and licentiousness in parked automobiles along our country roads, and shameless nude bathing in this lovely spot and at the country club pool.”

“I think I’m getting a little sick,” I said, “please let’s go home.”

“All right,” said Knox. “I just thought you might like to wait until he starts on teachin’ biology at the university.”

On the road back I said:

“Aren’t there any Roman Catholics in Tuscaloosa?”

“Sure. A hundred or so. They have a church.”

“And they don’t suffer mobs like these?”

“Never heard of it. Come to think I don’t believe these fellows ever connect ‘em up with the Pope.”

“But what’s it all about then?”

“Well, they’re jealous of the young folks having their fun in the parked automobiles. And they like to scare niggers — it gives ‘em a sense of power and they think a scared nigger is funny. As for the Catholics — that’s just a way to get votes; it’s like Wall Street tryin’ to lower the price of cotton. The only obstacle in the way of the Pope and Wall Street is the politician. You’d be surprised — if you don’t know already — who that speaker was tonight. He was no small-time vote-grabber.”

“But are people really as ignorant as that around here? I don’t see how he dar talk such damned nonsense in a university town and with lots of people around who know he’s lying.”

“Get away with it in Tuscaloosa?” said Knox. “I guess you aren’t acquainted with the back files of an amusing journal published in the capital of these United States and entitled The Congressional Record.”

We rode on in silence. The lights of town seemed friendlier than the flames we had left behind on the river bank….

And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note. It sounded like an English foxhunt. We heard them coming a long time before we saw them.

“It’s the Ku Kluxers,” said Pinion, fanning himself with a ragged edition of the Atlanta Constitution. “They’re having a parade tonight. Going to burn a cross out at River Road.” He leaned back in his wicker plantation chair, holding his highball glass next to his ear at an angle, as if the whiskey were whispering to him.

It was September, and it seemed to me that I had spent the better part of the long hot summer here, drunk on Pinion’s porch, waiting for my husband John to come back from Switzerland. John was the newest physician at Bryce, Tuscaloosa’s antebellum insane asylum, and Pinion had helped John tap into a hidden stash of state money to finish writing his book on suicide. It was five years since the stock market crash when scores of respectable bankers and businessmen had jumped from Wallstreet windows to their death, and there was a renewed interest in the treatment of self-destructive impulses. When John received his under-the-table funds, he decided he needed to visit a famous sanitarium in Zurich to do the last chapters properly. Of course, I wanted to go, having studied German at school, but he said the stipend was too small. I was pretty upset that my husband planned to abandon me here in this dinky town with nothing to do while he pranced across Europe.

So John asked Pinion to entertain me in his absence. John and Pinion were golfing partners at the Riverside Country Club, where the small town Brahmin gathered to socialize. I used to go too and swim in the pool, but after a while the gossip about who was running around on who got to be too much for me, so now I spent most of my days bored, reading magazines, smoking cigarettes in bed, and occasionally scribbling notes for a tawdry novel I was writing to amuse myself, something that would out-scarlet Gone with the Wind. Somehow I felt lonelier with all those vapid, chattering women at the club than when I was really alone. Scribbling away in my bedroom, I looked forward to sunset when I knew I could visit Pinion on his porch and have a taste of something strong. Most weekends he was kind enough to break up the monotony and escort me to one of the University of Alabama football games, only there wasn’t a home game tonight, so I guessed the Klan was providing the town’s Saturday night entertainment.

“Can anybody go?” I asked, leaning over the rail, trying to spot them. “Even a Yankee carpetbagger like me?” I took a long sip of my sugared bourbon and then pressed the cool glass to my throat. The evening sun had dipped under the horizon, and the clouds were verging from a deep mercurochrome pink to black. The old gaslights, now filled with filament bulbs, came alive and lit up the street.

“Sure, Marla. Question is, why would anybody want to? Trust me, it’s no Rose Bowl.” A drop of sweat trickled out of Pinion’s thick black hair and down his cheek. He set down his glass beside the serving tray the housekeeper, Odetta, had brought out to us. Then Pinion wiped his face with the back of his hand and dried his fingers on the leg of his tailored trousers.

I hadn’t liked Pinion much when John first introduced us. Pinion Knox was loud and blunt to the point of being vulgar. As the state legislator representing North Alabama, Pinion was in charge of institutional funding for Bryce and the university, and considering his manners I always secretly thought John only befriended him in order to advance his career. When I started my book, I even came to think of Pinion as the villain, a dark-haired, blue-eyed lawyer with a thirst for booze and women. But eventually I grew to like Pinion’s loud laugh and I figured that his bluntness was really a sign of affection, maybe because his job obliged him to tell so many polite lies. Most days since John left I’d try to work on a chapter for a few hours after lunch. I’d write another seven or eight pages that would end with the fictional Pinion cheating at cards or deflowering a virgin. When I was done, I’d take a walk down Queen City Avenue and find the real Pinion drinking on his front porch.

“I’m surprised you’re not out there marching with them. What, did your washer woman forget to starch your sheets for you?” I turned and shook my empty highball glass, letting the ice chips jingle. Pinion reached for the crystal decanter standing between the twelve-inch block of ice and the bone china sugar bowl. “I thought you told me your grandfather was a big muckety-muck, a grand titan or poobah or something. I thought you said he was with General Forrest in Tennessee when he started the whole thing up.”

Pinion filled my glass. “I did. My granddaddy was boss of the real Klan in North Alabama when there was a reason for it. This club you got here now hasn’t got any more to do with the real Klan than the Boy Scouts.”

“I guess we’d better watch out,” I said, pinching his knee. “Didn’t I hear that last year they beat up some poor college boy for being alone with a girl in the backseat of a car?” As the guardians of white purity, the Klan not only hanged uppity Negroes, they terrorized anybody they deemed licentious—drunks, wife beaters, excited college boys fumbling under the petticoats of coeds. I’d even heard a story about a pair of careless adulterers who had been dragged out of bed naked and horsewhipped.

Pinion raised his fists in mock combat. “I’d kill a few of them sum’bitches before they even touched me with one of their ropes, by God. The sight of all that white trash under the sheets gets me hot enough to shit fire.”

Seeing Pinion get all worked up tickled me. I covered my mouth with my hand. That was one of the things that was attractive about Pinion, he didn’t sugar anything for me except my drinks. Pinion came from a long line of handsome politicians, all of them with a reputation for getting into scrapes. Like his congressman father, Pinion was a legendary brawler. Club gossip had it that when he was twenty, he suffered a year-long suspension from the university for being the first student in two decades to break the rule against dueling. It was said that he put a rival SGA member in the hospital when he shot him in the knee with an antique pistol. Others said that when he was in Montgomery, Pinion frequently challenged other state senators to “step outside” if they voted against him, as if the rotunda were just another roadhouse tavern where men gathered to drink and smoke.

“Look at those bastards.” Pinion stood up and pointed out over the holly hedge. Underneath the towering elms, three horsemen robed in white rode down the middle of Queen City Avenue. As they passed under a magnolia tree, lamplight glistened off its waxy leaves, surrounding the riders in a misty halo. One of the horsemen raised his hood and blasted the same four mighty notes on the bugle. Behind the troika stretched a long watery line of white figures marching side by side like an army of ghosts, their shapeless garments shimmering in the night.

Pinion stood up and took my hand. “Come along to the street,” he said. “I want to show you something.” Pinion had never touched me in a familiar way before, and I felt my face grow flush as he led me down the steps of the porch and onto the cobblestone walk. “Look.” Pinion pointed at the Klansmen. “You see their shoes? Invisible empire, my ass. I know everyone of them sum’bitches. Every one.”

Moving at the hem of the white robes were pant legs and shoes, dozens and dozens of shoes. One pair of button-ups with terrycloth tops, another heavy-laced pair splashed with mud, brown work boots, canvas sneakers, congress gaiters—even a green pair with knobby toes swung past. Pinion chortled. Only the thick holly hedge separated us from the street and the long line of marching shoes.

“What’s so funny?”

“Only Bobby Pate would have bad taste enough to wear green shoes.”

I laughed because he was laughing. “Who’s Bobby Pate?”

“Just some fool that clerks down at the county courthouse. And there goes his boss”—Pinion raised his voice—“the honorable Judge Harris.”

A hooded figure with shiny black loafers turned to stare at Pinion and me still holding hands. It made my spine tingle, but fear only fueled the giggles.

“That one over there will be teaching Sunday school in the morning.”

That did it. I doubled over. I laughed so hard my bladder hurt. It was like laughing in class. You knew you weren’t supposed to, and once you got started there was no hope of stopping.

A few more of the hooded figures turned our way, glaring at us through the hollow eyeholes of their masks. At the very edge of the long narrow row of shoes, there was a worn pair of saddle oxfords. Above them the sheets were twisted and out of whack. The left shoe stepped forward gingerly; the uncertain right shoe dragged behind in a dead limp. All of a sudden Pinion quit laughing. “I don’t think I know that one. I wonder— ”

“Wonder what?” I was still laughing, knees together, both hands on my sides. My bare toes curled in the lush zoysia.

Pinion shook his head and turned back up the walk toward the porch. “Nothing. Come on, let’s go finish our drinks. And then if you still have a mind, we’ll have a look at their damn cross.”

In Pinion’s bathroom, I tried to fix myself up a little in the mirror over the sink. I pulled a brush out of my purse and frowned as I raked it through my freshly bobbed hair. I’d had it cut last week because of the heat. On a lark, I asked the lady at the beauty parlor to dye it ink black, the way I used to keep it in my old Vassar days. The lady at the parlor didn’t want to do it. You have such a purty color brown as it is, she said. I told her it was my birthday and that I was twenty-seven and needed a change. Finally I coaxed her into doing what I wanted but left angry because when I looked in the mirror I didn’t find my old schoolgirl self, just an old-fashioned flapper. For a while I told myself I was irritated at the beautician and the way she had made me work so hard to get what I was paying for. In New Haven or Poughkeepsie, if you had money to pay people did what you asked—no hassles, quick, efficient. In Tuscaloosa everything was an ordeal. You couldn’t go into the drugstore for a pack of cigarettes without getting into a twenty- minute conversation about the football team or the weather, or worse, a lecture—once, right before John left for his trip, an elderly lady minding the register simply refused to sell me a pack of Viceroys because she said it wasn’t righteous for women to smoke. I was so angry, I went home and threw myself on the bed and had a conniption fit in front of John. He was sorting through his closet and he didn’t even look at me as I screamed and cried, he just kept picking through his long thin suits, trying to decide which one would make the best impression on his colleagues in Zurich.

“You’re being a baby about all this, Marla,” John had said, pinching lint off the sleeve of a pinstripe jacket. “Be grateful I have work here. The people are not so bad. Besides, we could still be living with your father.” My father had been one of John’s professors at Yale. Even when we were courting, it had occurred to me that John’s interest in me wasn’t purely romantic, but in those days John had been gay and full of fun. We went to parties and danced around champagne fountains and shared bootleg gin with good-natured strangers. I stared at my own strange reflection in the bathroom mirror. When I’d given my hair thirty strokes, I put the brush back in my purse and gave myself a hard look. What do you think you’re doing, Marla? I asked. Just what in the hell do you think you are doing?

When I returned to the porch, I found Pinion in his wicker chair reading the week-old-newspaper he’d been using as a fan. “Look at this,” he said. On the front page there was an x-ray, a black and white photograph of a fibula with a hairline fracture. The previous Saturday, our team, the Crimson Tide, had played Tennessee. During the game, word spread through the stadium that one of the Tide’s injured players, a tight end from Arkansas, had asked to be cut out of his cast so he could take the field. The tight end scored two touched downs and we bested Tennessee twenty-five to nothing. No one really believed the story about the kid having a broken leg at the time, but then on Sunday the Constitution did an entire article him. The headline read: “Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant—First Place in Courage.” Bryant was the “other end” opposite Don Hutson, Bama’s star receiver. Hutson and the quarterback Dixie Howell, “the human howitzer from Hartsford” made a powerful combination, and since I’d moved to Tuscaloosa, the duo had become the princes of the South. But right now, for a brief moment, all of Tuscaloosa’s attention was focused on the superhuman Bryant. Pinion had spent the last five days unfolding the newspaper like a map and telling anyone who would listen, If this Bryant kid heals, we’re SEC champs for sure.

Pinion reached into the pocket of his trousers and produced a coin. “I’ll bet you this silver dollar that our lame Klansmen there is this Bryant fellow. It’s just the kind of stunt those muck-rakers would pull, pandering to the fans. They’re trying to run me out of office, you know.”

I looked at the headline again: “Paul ‘Bear’Bryant: First Place in Courage.” “No way,” I said. “I don’t think he’d do it.”

“You’d be surprised what a poor college student will do if you wave a little money or tail in his face.” Pinion spoke as if he had had plenty of experience in such matters.

I reached over Pinion’s lap and pilfered a cigarette from his pack of Picayunes lying next to the serving tray. “Well, only way to settle the bet is to go to the rally.”

“I aim to.” Pinion fished out his lighter. I bent down to the flame in his cupped hands. “All we have to do his wait for Puddin to get back with the car.”

Puddin was Pinion’s driver and had been his father’s driver before him.

“Where is Puddin, anyway? You don’t think he’s in any kind of trouble, do you?”

“No. He’s picking up groceries for Odetta. I sent him out over an hour ago. He can’t be much longer. Maybe he’ll come back with some mint for the bourbon.”

Pinion prepared another glass for me. He swirled a teaspoon full of sugar into the ice chips as I smoked. Picayunes are for people looking for a real smoke. Every drag felt like shards of glass settling into my lungs. By the time I had stubbed out the butt I was into a nice hazy buzz. Pinion handed me my glass and then I decided I’d better have a seat on the porch swing a few feet from the wicker chairs.

I felt rather loopy by the time Puddin pulled up to the house in Pinion’s black convertible. Puddin was breathing hard and shaking when he pulled up into the drive, and it took some doing to coax him out of the car.

“Did you see them, boss?” Puddin took his cap off and blotted sweat off his bald head with a blue bandana.

“Yeah, Pud. We saw them.”

As Puddin told it, he had just finished loading up the car with groceries when the nightriders passed. Puddin was the last customer before the clerk at Abernathy’s locked up. The door had just shut behind him when he heard the bugle sound. Puddin had quickly raised the top on the car and hid under the steering wheel, praying that nobody would spy him through the windshield. He was so frightened that he stayed there, cramped and numb, long after the parade had past.

“Poor fellow.” I said, patting Puddin on the back. “That’s terrible.”

“I am too old for this aggravation,” said Puddin, putting his cap back on. He stooped to rub his knees. Pinion took the two full sacks of food from the backseat and put them in Puddin’s arms. “Go take the goodies into the kitchen for Odetta, Pud. Have her fix you a cup of coffee. You might ought to spend the night with us. I don’t know if you want to go home in all this.”

Puddin nodded and headed for the kitchen door at the side of the house. He turned around when Pinion began to put the top down. “Now where are y’all going?”

“Miss Marla here wants to see them burn that cross, Pud. You want to come too?”

Pinion winked at me and my bourbon giggles picked up again.

“No, thank you, sir,” replied Puddin, biting down hard on the word sir. “Why do you want to take Miss Marla into such a spectacle as that? You know something sorry is bound to happen.”

“Don’t worry about me Puddin, I’m a big girl,” I said, waving goodbye to him.

Puddin shook his head. “Ain’t nobody big enough to be out with those crazy fools.” He turned his back on us and disappeared around the side of the house.

Pinion just smiled. When he was finished with the hood, he opened the passenger’s side door for me. After he got behind the wheel, he reached across me to open the glove box. His shoulder brushed against my chest and I closed my eyes as he fiddled with the latch, trying not to blush again. When I opened them, Pinion was holding an ugly black revolver. He opened the chamber and quickly snapped it shut. Then he gave me a lewd grin. “Loaded,” he said. “Just in case we smell some trouble on the road.”

Within a few minutes, Pinion had turned off Queen City and we were speeding down University Boulevard. The stars appeared to be far away, maybe because on the horizon there was a dim orange light growing in the northern sky. We rode past the edge of the university’s campus and turned left at Bryce toward the river. As we past the beautiful old asylum with its Doric columns and cupola, I noticed a dozen or so inmates standing on the expansive lawn. Was something wrong? I looked up at John’s office window, which was, of course, dark. I imagined him up there smoking a cigar, writing in one of his green medical ledgers with the gold fountain pen I’d given him for Christmas. Below most of the inmates were milling around barefoot in their bed clothes; a few of them stood stone still, looking up in the night sky as if expecting a lunar eclipse or a fireworks display. Two stringy-haired women clasped their hands around the tall iron gates that surrounded the yard. None of them waved at Pinion’s car as they might have in the daytime. They didn’t seem to notice our passing at all. It was unnerving, and for the millionth time I wondered why John had exiled us to this tiny country town inhabited solely by football fans and failed suicides. Before I knew it, my fingers had found their way again into Pinion’s free hand.

He looked at me in a sort of pleasant mocking way and said, “Hey, reach down on the floorboard and hand me the flask.” The flask was wrapped in the crumpled folds of the Constitution. The paper had also printed Bryant’s yearbook picture. Standing in his uniform, tall and handsome, he could easily pass for a matinee cowboy. We passed the flask back and forth, taking little sips as Pinion navigated through the heavily wooded road.

Then out of nowhere, Pinion said, “You know the Yankees burned down the university during the civil war, even the library?”

I shook my head. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“Yep, got all four of our books.” He winked, and I grinned back. “A Polish mercenary named Croxton torched it. He thought Bryce was the president’s mansion and ordered his men to burn it down too. Luckily the soldiers discovered that it was an asylum before they carried out the order. Can you imagine what that would have been like, a hundred or so madmen on fire and screaming?”

I took a slug from the flask and handed it to him. “I think by the time you catch fire, you’re mad. At that point, it doesn’t matter where you’ve been living.”

Pinion nodded. “True enough.”

We continued down the road until we came to a large man-made clearing that gave a view of the Black Warrior River. On the shoal, scores of cars were parked bumper to grill in a semicircle. Women and children sat on the hoods of these cars, some of them eating sandwiches. Men stood atop the running boards drinking soda-pop. A few frat boys had brought dates. The boys had unfolded colored blankets down on the grassy sand and now held hands with their sweethearts through the handles of their picnic baskets.

A ring of a hundred or so spectators, all men, crowded around the Klansmen, who were standing in formation. Down by the banks, there was a huge weeping willow, its body arched across the water. A mound of red Alabama clay had been packed in front of the tree and a tall lumber cross, more than twenty feet high, filled the night with orange flame. It shined over the murmuring crowd. The Klansmen nearest the cross must have suffered terribly from the heat; occasionally held up their hands to shield their faces.

It was similar to the grand bonfires the university built on the quadrangle for its homecoming pep rallies. I remembered the way Dixie Howell had addressed the crowd the previous fall and how the fans had cheered at just the sight of him, waving their crimson and white shakers in the air. I glanced down at the newspaper again and the handsome young Bryant looked back up at me.

Pinion let the car idle in the back of the makeshift parking lot for awhile. When he finally killed the engine, he said, “Stay sharp, I want to be able to leave quick if we need to.” I started to ask why, but then he took his gun out of the glove box and put it in the front pocket of his trousers. That alarmed me, but I kept my mouth shut. Pinion walked toward the crowd and I followed. A few yards from the weeping willow, there was a platform with a microphone. At the foot of the platform, four Klansmen held a banner that read “Klavern 117 Tuscaloosa Knights of the KKK.” The crowd began to applaud.

“They’re getting ready for the speaker,” said Pinion. “Here we go.”

Sure enough, the lame Klansman limped up to the platform and stood before the microphone. I cursed. Pinion gave me a quick smirk.

But then came the booming voice, rich and powerful, spilling in waves over the crowd. I have to admit, for a moment I was spellbound: the hooded army, the ghostly speaker, the murmuring crowd, the burning cross silhouetted by the soft green branches of the bent willow and the black sheen of the river reflecting firelight.

“Why?” shouted the speaker, “Why do you suffer? Because of the Papist dictatorship in Rome. Because the Pope has his minions right here in these United States, and is, at this very minute, planning to overthrow our democratic government. Do you want to wake up one morning and find a dago priest in the White House? Do you know what he plans to do right here in Alabama? He’s got it all worked out. He is going to hand Alabama over to a nigger cardinal!”

When he said that something inside me broke, and then all I could think of was poor Puddin cramped and afraid under the steering wheel of Pinion’s car. Suddenly I noticed that some of them had baseball bats and ax handles.

“Are the people of Alabama—in whom flows the purest Anglo-Saxon blood—going to stand for this humiliation? How will we face the challenge of the beast in Rome?”

Now I was beginning to suspect that I had actually won the bet, despite the orator's’ limp. The voice sounded older, like that of a middle aged man, and surely that wasn't the vocabulary of a twenty-year-old footballer.

“By banding together in noble communion. We will fight to the last drop, together, for freedom from oppression. We must band together to fight the devilish plot of foreign potentates—”

I felt sick now. All that liquor and sugar had not settled well. “I don’t believe this,” I said, holding my stomach.

“What, about the Pope? Of course not. This is all just muckraking nonsense.” Pinion scowled up at the speaker.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it. Come on and get me away from these hayseeds.”

“What did you expect, a Mardi Gras?” Pinion turned on me as if I had insulted him. “You’re the one who wanted to come here and get educated. Wait a second.” Pinion cupped his hand behind his ear. “He’s gone to preaching on evolution. I bet this guy is hell on Darwin.” Just as Pinion mentioned Darwin, the orator removed his mask and spread his arms as if trying to embrace the crowd. It wasn’t Bryant, but a stout man with a shock of dark hair. Pinion forgot about me and glowered at the platform. “God almighty damn.”

“You know him?”

“The bastard.”

“What makes you say that?”

“No, I mean a real bastard. One of my uncles’s little indiscretions. The country’s thick with them. Dunwoody’s the worst. He goes around claiming we’re kin.” Pinion squinted into the distance. “I thought I’d run him off years ago, but that’s him. Wood’s a real bad penny, I’m telling you. He’s here to screw with me just like he did in school.”

“In school?” I could see Pinion drifting away into a private world of vengeance. The expression on his face made him look as I imagined him in my novel, ruthless and cruel, and for a moment all that vicious country club gossip seemed justified. Pinion put his hand in the pocket that held the gun. “That’s him, isn’t it? That’s the boy you shot in school. You shot one of your own cousin’s and that’s why he’s a cripple.”

Pinion grabbed my arm. “Who in the hell told you that?”

“I don’t know. People talk.” I jerked my arm free and thought about slapping him.

“He’s no cousin of mine.” Pinion lit up a Picayune and blew smoke at me. Suddenly, I was more sad than angry, more afraid than sad. For the first time all night, I felt the old loneliness creeping in.

“Stamp it out!” roared Dunwoody. “Stamp out the worship of graven images just as we have stamped out the immorality and licentiousness in parked automobiles along our country roads and shameless nude sunbathing in this lovely spot right here.”

“What kind of fool would want to do away with nude sunbathing?” Pinion asked, trying to start up with the mockery again.

“I want to go home now,” I said.

“So go.”

Slowly I stepped forward and put my arm around his waist, just to see what it would feel like. “Please, honey, take me home.”

Pinion look at me from the corner of his eyes, annoyed.

“Please,” I said again. That was all I could think to say.

“You know, Marla. You think you’re pretty goddamn smart, but--”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Your right. I’m sorry. Please, take me home.”

On the way home, wheeling down River Road, Pinion hit a man in a white gown. Like a startled deer, the gaunt little fellow flung himself out of the woods and tried to cross the road in a mad dash.

“Look out!” I grabbed Pinion’s arm, but it was too late. The man’s body flipped up on the hood, and the next thing I knew, my head had bounced off the dashboard. Everything went black for a second, and when I opened my eyes I had a lap full of glass. The man on the hood of the car was bareheaded, and his glassy green eyes glared at me. His gown began to flood with jagged streaks of blood.

“Oh, my God, he’s dead!” I shouted.

“Shit.” Pinion opened the door and stepped out.

As he did this, the man came to and sat upright, jerking forward like a marionette.

“Are you all right?” Pinion moved to touch him. The man screamed as if Pinion were the one who had just come back from the dead. He jumped to his feet and screamed again and then ran toward Pinion as if to attack. Startled, Pinion balled up his fists but slipped before he could swing and fell onto the road. By the time I made it around the car, the screaming man had run past Pinion and fled into the woods, heading toward the river.

“Jesus, are you okay?” I helped him up.

“Yeah. How did he run away like that? How could he stand to move?”

“Shock,” I said. “He could have broken every bone in his body and wouldn’t know it if he were in shock.” I didn’t feel sick anymore. I was high on fear.

Pinion put his arm around my shoulders. “You’re shaking,” he said. “And you have a cut on your head.” He reached for his handkerchief and pressed it against my head. I let my body relax as he held me.

“Is it bleeding?”

“Not much. Here, keep pressure on it.” He took my right hand and gently moved it up to the cloth. Then Pinion walked around to the injured side of the car. “Goddamn it.” Not only was the windshield shattered, so was one of headlights. Worst of all, the right front tire was blown. “I hate to say this, but it looks like we’re going to have to hoof it back to town. You think you can?”

I nodded, removed the handkerchief. The blood on the cloth reminded me of the blood soaking through the little man’s robe. “Who do you think we hit?”

“I didn’t know him to look at him. And he was barefoot. What kind of sorry-ass Klansman can’t scare up a pair of shoes? Probably nothing but ringworm under that sheet.”

It took me a second to put it all together. “No shoes. Pinion, that man wasn’t in the Klan. That was a patient at Bryce. He must have slipped over the gate and gotten loose.”

“You’re kidding.”

“My God. What’s going to happen when he hits the river?” I wondered out loud.

“Anybody’s guess. If he keeps going that way, he’s going to run into Dunwoody’s group. They could get rough on him. Those boys are pretty keyed up. On a night like this, they’re just looking for a reason to bust heads.”

I imagined the little man, bloodied and bruised by pipes and baseball bats, the uncomprehending look of terror on his face as the Klansmen strung him into one of the tall oaks that lined the river. I closed my eyes and thought of the safest place I could imagine, my father’s study, with his volumes of Thucydides and Herodotus lined side by side on the shelves.

“Marla,” Pinion put his arm around me and led me back to the car. He cleaned the glass off the seat and then sat me down, “Wait here, maybe I can fix the tire in the dark. We shouldn’t walk home in all this.”

“Would you sit with me a second?” I asked, drying my eyes. “I’m scared.”

He looked hesitant but then walked around to the driver’s side. I buried my face his shoulder as soon as he sat down and cried hard. We stayed like that for a long time, Pinion’s arms around me, patting my back and shushing me like a kid. But soon his other hand wandered down to my thigh. Pinion lifted my chin up in order to kiss me quiet. I started to open my mouth to kiss back but closed it again. Hadn’t I planned this? Wasn’t this what I wanted? But not here. “Wait,” I said. “Not like this.” But Pinion didn’t wait, and what could I do— go limp, fight, scream? Do people ever get what they really want, anyway? The hand on my thigh rose up to my breast. I started to ask him, are you crazy, are you out of your goddamn mind? But he kept my mouth filled with his sour sweet tongue, rank with booze.

My hands started moving too, from his knee to his belt. With my fingers, I found the revolver in his pants. He stopped kissing me long enough to draw the gun and place it under the seat. As he did so, the unclaimed silver dollar I’d won fell out of his pocket and rolled under the clutch. I thought about the handsome young Bryant, all his talent and courage and how I didn’t seem to have much of either. Pinion’s hand was under my dress now and I knew what he was about to do to me wouldn’t take long, not as long as it would take to fix the tire in the dark afterward. I knew that tomorrow I would regret this whole night. I knew that I would be more alone when I woke in the morning than in all the time since John had left. Maybe after I nursed the hangover, I would work on my novel. Maybe the Polish mercenary would return from the dead to finish his arson and burn down the whole damned town.

As Pinion climbed on top of me, a stray shard of glass cut into my hip, but I didn’t care. There was a cold fire in my belly, and it made me wonder what it would be like to burn all over, to be doused with lamp oil and set aflame and burn mad-crazy forever. Soon my thoughts were eroded by the powerful sounds of crickets, tree frogs, and whippoorwills. It was just something I couldn’t get used to, how the forest around Tuscaloosa at night was so alive. I listened to the enigmatic music of the woods and watched the tiny stars glimmer through the open top of the convertible. The eerie orange light continued to pulse behind us in the distance. Pinion was on top of me now, pinning me to the seat, but I felt light, numb, and etherized. I couldn’t help sense that someone was spying on us from above, as if the stars I watched were watching back. Maybe the landscape itself had eyes, the stagnant marshes to the south, the mountains leering over us from the north, brooding over the town, bending all of us to strange purposes.

No sooner had I thought this than I saw another flash of white, a figure spying on us from the edge of the road. Had the man we hit returned? Surely not. I yelled for Pinion to stop, but he paid me no mind. I beat my fists into his back as he groaned.

“Someone’s here,” I screamed. I was sure that this time it was a Klansman with a horsewhip come to punish us. “They’re here. They’re here.” I said. I slapped Pinion in the face, hysterical. He grabbed my wrists and pinned them above my head.

All about the car I heard footsteps. Not the orderly march of the parade, but a sound like wild animal hooves. Pinion moaned, grunted and rolled off of me. Just then another figure in white ran past, a woman. She had wild hair, her breasts bounding up and down inside the white linen of her bedclothes. Two men followed, both of them screaming with glee like boys released early from school.

“Hell.” Pinion had one knee in the floorboard, desperately trying to pull up his pants and buckle his belt.

I pulled my dress down over my waist and rose up on the seat. By then I could see them, maybe forty inmates running wildly, surrounding us from all sides, their eyes glowing in the lone headlight. Running together, their bodies appeared to be fused into a single white monster, a pale hydra of madness. Some of the inmates moaned in otherworldly agony; some squealed and chattered like jungle birds. Pinion’s hand lurched under the seat, looking for his gun but the time he found it they had all passed, the tails of their nightshirts disappearing into the dark. They were running toward the river, toward the orange light on the horizon, toward the burning cross, leaving us alone in the terrible silence.

But I had ash all over my face...

2007-03-31T00:46:33Z

test

My guide encouraged me to look more cheerful....

2007-03-31T00:46:04Z

Someone was seeding pine trees along the river

2007-03-31T00:45:35Z

Test

When we went to the forest, everything was bare...

2007-03-31T00:44:49Z

Test

Four Poems

2007-03-30T21:38:03Z

To My Mother Who Smokes Cigarettes
Rain doesn’t dampen one petal of the flowers the vendors sell downtown at Cleveland’s Terminal Tower. The vendors’ stalls are so bright and dry. I hardly notice the shower outside the arcade where I sit on a bench next to a garbage bin, enclosed, almost hidden, but when the way opens forsythia and roses brush the hair on my forearms, resting their sweet leaves on my eyes and I think of overused tears, the overused moon and my mother who says she misses me with her tears, tears.... tears, forever. I am all she has. All I have is the city’s din, and a little damp wind that brushes the hair on my forearms, rattles papers plastered across the wall which from far away look like prayers to God that worshipping Jews, nodding and singing their little songs, jam into the crevices of the wailing wall, but when you get close enough, you can see they are just advertisements: Flamingo’s Hair Salon, Nike, Coca Cola with its wavy C’s coal black. And above me, the brown awning’s hard lining. A woman sits beside me, with glue and grease in her hair. She smokes. I want to compare her to my mother who smokes too much: her nails or as brown as the awning above me: glutenized, cracked at the edges: a pigeon’s flaking beak. I compare thee woman to a pigeon, the most ubiquitous of birds unchecked by buildings or ticks: You gray-brown woman with joy and small, what stormy winds will you compass tonight? Do you feel your pulse’s flagging wing? She blows smoke on these lines, this pathos, this poetry, this ever-changing palimpsest of love and lovelessness.

Handle With Care
The package from my mother is taped so tightly it makes me wonder what’s inside: a Terra Cotta Xian Warrior, perhaps a fishbowl in a computer? It’s a sweater, the same light-blue as my mother's pills for angina and high blood pressure: the comforting color of pharmaceuticals. She bought the sweater at Goodwill where Paul had left it and his name in permanent marker on the label. I think of him, a freckled, red-haired man wearing a round hat, round spectacles and smoking a pipe. I put on the sweater. Envision the darkest Ugandan wearing the skin of a mountain goat. Sweat forms at my back It is the heart of summer. I’m in Alabama. I want to throw away this monstrosity, but I see my mother, lifting it from the rack, if not tearful then tearful in her heart, thinking of her son and blind to what the moths have done.

The Paper Ark Display: An Allegory

He’s made the ark so bright, it’s like looking into the sun. The flat-head tacks look stung. The paper is the whitest I’ve ever seen, and when the wind blows, the boat swings on bright lines attached to a thin, curved pole. My eyes can’t track the brightening shifts. But inside the ark is shade. Although the sun is at my back, I feel like I’ve entered a cave, that I’ve peered over some palace wall and stepped into a fairy tale full of unloosened silk ribbons and feathers, and layers of Polly Pratt paper dolls: plump babies in bathing suits, spinning ballerinas, cowboys, clowns and dancing pink hyenas— so many paper flame cutouts, curved eyes, half shut, stacked in layers inside this paper boat that flies I think the artist wants to save me, to take me back into childhood, but it’s too light. How can anything so light save? It’s like the air or cloud, anything a body can pass through—spirit. I’m too jaded to believe in that. But when I was a boy, a box of animal crackers could save me. They came in a colorful box with so much promise and mystery. And, oh, the anticipation of lifting the tabs and tearing open the plastic bag that piped a little when torn like a breath that carried the smell of cookies. I’d reach in and pull out something deformed, a shadow of a shadow of what it was meant to be. I’d put it in my hot mouth and maybe let it melt a little before chewing. That was salvation, I guess. I didn’t think about tomorrow, or tomorrow’s Eucharist, the shadow I cast against the wall of the store, a mouth open towards the light I didn’t think— not even of the blissful sweetness of the cookie on my tongue.

Heaven

Every Easter When my father sees “Jesus of Nazareth,” he tells me how he marched on his knees and dug through layers of leaves like a dog to resurrect old coke bottles from the forest floor where they had been flung by drivers. He tells me how his chest heaved in the darkness under the trees. He rolls up his sleeves. He shows me the bruises. He spreads out his palms and shows me the calluses as the great crowd gathers around Jesus and spreads palm branches above his head and along the road. I see my father rub his head. He’s really not watching TV. He’s thinking that this is not what he wanted: a second grade education, these hands that push mowers across the lawns of the rich. I hear him murmur of another world he can hardly see or understand.