“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 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….

Ten poems

by Diann Blakely

What follows is a short anthology, a sampling of Diann Blakely's work that reaches back to Hurricane Walk, her first book, and forward to the book-in-progress Love in Vain: Duets With Robert Johnson, from which we see her most recent work.

Blakely was born in Anniston and raised there and in Birmingham, and educated at Vanderbilt and NYU before turning to writing full time. Her first book Hurricane Walk was published in 1992, her second, Farewell, My Lovelies in 1999. Her third collection, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, which one the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, given for a work-in-progress by the Poetry Society of America, will be published by Zoo Press next year. Blakely is currently at work on a fourth volume, entitled Love in Vain: Duets With Robert Johnson.

Hurricane Walk

It was better than sex, the way it relaxed me.
My thighs throbbed for ours, each finger
seemed limp. I lighted
a cigarette, then found it too heavy to lift.

A more comfortable lust would have kept me
inside. Yet I wanted
the wind’s touch, to feel its whorled force.
I stood on a bridge, there were no trees

to stop it — I saw thin sheets of water
spin like ghosts from the Charles.
And now, damp from a bath, I feel
honed, quite essential.

This robe seems too big, it abrades
my cleansed skin. The room’s warmth
stings my lips; they were left raw and chapped,
almost bruised. It will take days

to heal them, the slightest good-night kiss
is out of the question for weeks.

 

 

Civil Wars

The guilty are left without protest.
Their burned houses freed slaves, black flesh
bought and sold. In the New Orleans market,
some asked to see teeth … fingered women
for defects. Yet some masters were whipless.

I read now of invasions, most far more unjust.
The oppressed seem so worthy, I admire
their best poems. Their spokesmen
are bearded — they seem wise, and have
something to say.

Still I know women’s house-pride, their fear
of removal. Sherman knew
these sweet zealots, and plotted his course.
I keep my house clean, my silver
well-polished — I too dislike change,
and protect my own.

 

 

 

Last Dance

Not swans or flowers, these tulle-shrouded furies gliding
      en pointe, their eyes blank in chignonned heads that lilt
              as each glances at the hand curved on her breast,

black-lipsticked mouths hardened as the eyes shift toward
      Myrthe, their merciless queen, who tells them yes,
             Albrecht too, through his clasped hands beg forgiveness,

love’s betrayers must be danced to death, leapt
      and spun till blood cools in his veins. That when tenderness
             ghost-flickers those hollows where their hearts once beat,

they must look at that cradled air and remember
      the babies denied them. Merciless, their black lips curl
             as Myrthe flings Albrecht to his first unearthly partner,

then pirouettes offstage as Giselle’s starring bad-ass.
      Acting ugly, said my family’s women when I squirmed
             at concert halls like this, itchy in lace skirts,

or tantrummed during yearly perms. Acting ugly,
      they’d say about these red-lipped firls in the bathroom
             at intermission, blowing smoke and admiring

each other’s baby doll dresses, worn with fishnets
      by the taller, whose peroxide-stricken curls droop
             to her shoulders. A fucking bore, she pronounces

the ballet, slumps regally against the tiled wall,
      a fucking A-1 bore. Their mothers bought the tickets,
             bargaining seats for Hole’s next concert, I hear too,

and through smoke glance at the black armband — Kurt Forever —
      tied to the blond queen’s sleeve. We both saw his widow
             on TV, screaming to mourners in phrases mostly bleeped,

her darkly-painted mouth condemning the ugliest act
     she’d known — her husband’s hand caressing his own temple
             with a gun’s cold and blue-sheened barrel after years

of their ghost-dance with heroin; and how they wanted
      to fly higher than bodies lifted in roiling pits,
             than those guitars’ amped keening snarl: Kurt Forever

and never again — an asshole, a fucker — formed
      by the lipsticked mouth before footage cut to stills
             of their child, eyes blank as the lamb’s propped beside her,

lips parted wide while her blond mother tried to hush
      that merciless birth-wail, that transcendent fury
             thumping loud and echoed in tiny blood-leaping veins.

 

 

 

 

Birmingham, 1962

Scarcely affluent, we always had maids.
       One worked a few months then left for Detroit,
the next for a husband's home town; some took
       their children and returned to elderly mothers
who still lived beneath rural tin roofs,
       having found cities and their men “no good.”
I was a good girl, they all told me so
       when I’d stand by their ironing boards, dipping
my fingers in a bowl of water to sprinkle

on my father's shirts, my mother’s lace-wristed
       blouses, the pale dresses I wore to church.
The TV murmured with husky-voiced women
       in negligees; I was admonished to listen
to what preachers told me, to remember
       that Jesus was watching always. I watched
black hands guiding roasts out of ovens,
       turning pieces of chicken in skillets
of sizzling oil, noticed the rough pink

of blisters and scars. These hands dressed me
       each morning; I imagined they loved me.
One August afternoon, my mother home late,
       back from a bridge party, shopping. Delores
had missed the last bus. We drove for miles
       through heat-steaming streets to a part of town
I’d never been to; the houses grew smaller
       and closer together. Peeling paint.
No real driveways, or yards. Then nothing

but rows of small brick apartments,
       “projects,” as if someone had made them
for school. Heat shimmered from roof-tops;
       as we pulled to the curb, my mother locked both
our doors, I heard a kitchen radio playing hymns,
       and saw in the red sun boys my own age
stripped to their briefs, alarmingly white
       against their skin, laughing while pummeled
by water from the corner hydrant they’d opened.

 

 

 

History

It’s blood, and generals who were the cause,
Shadows we study for school. In Nashville, lines
Of a Civil War battle are marked, our heroes
The losers. Map clutched in one fist, my bike
Wobbling, I’ve traced assaults and retreats,
Horns blowing when I stopped. The South’s hurried
And richer now; its ranch-house Taras display
Gilt-framed ancestors and silver hidden
When the Yankees came, or bought at garage sales.
History is bunk. But who’d refute that woman
Last night, sashaying toward the bar’s exit
In cowboy boots to drawl her proclamation?—
“You can write your own epitaph, baby,
I'm outta here—comprendo?—I'm history.”

 

 

The Old Slave Market, Charleston

                                                                            — May, 1992

 

The cracked bricks have loosened with age, with two earthquakes
       rivaling any that collapse skyscrapers elsewhere;
with twenty hurricanes, the last whose devastation
       left in its wake scaffolds around the pastel walls
of stately columned houses and breeze-front piazzas;
       around the steeple of St. Michael’s, the oldest church—
or is that St. Philip’s? Words like “first” and “oldest”
       spark arguments here, though surely not on this gift

of a spring afternoon. I finger baskets made
       by plaiting sea-grasses, an art which may die out
with women who sell in this tourist-crammed market
       on weekends, weaving new holders for bread-loaves,
dried flowers, or jewelry. “Basket ladies,” they’re called,
       & a few feet away hang Christmas ornaments
that resemble them: black wooden silhouettes
       wearing real bandanna headrags. A founding father

gave this land to the city, a permanent marketplace
       for anything but slaves, natives are quick to tell you.
Its name comes from the field hands used for hauling barrels
       of rice & indigo, ripe-to-exploding peaches
& tomatoes, from plantation wagons; or stacking
       cotton bales between brick pillars while the auctioneer
took bids, his voice echoing through salt-heavy air.
       Now, two thousand miles distant, the glass shatters

from Los Angeles storefronts built to weather nothing
       but daily traffic, the quick glances of passersby
en route to bus stops or street corner deals, at worst
       the usual burglaries, with metal grating drawn
at closing time, with alarm bells & triple-locks.
       “Our first multiracial riots,” a newsman proclaimed,
voiced-over shots of whites, blacks, & Hispanics
       who carried armfuls of wrenches & clocks, sparkplugs

& a butcher’s fat hams. They rushed through streets littered
       with broken liquor bottles, foam-spewing cans of beer
dropped by those running from police or store owners.
       Or each other. Lawn sprinklers, cartoons of Twinkies
& cigarettes, rhinestone necklaces in gutters,
       on sidewalks, in hands trembling with adrenalin
& greed. The woman’s hands before me are steady,
       sinewed from generations of slaves’ hardscrabble,

the continuing lineage of taking in laundry,
       diapering white babies in bay-windowed nurseries,
polishing silver to grace meals eaten off china
       passed down from mother to daughter, except for
those dinner plates dropped too hard in sinks, tea cups
       allowed to smash on floors always swept clean before
the bus ride home. Ignoring signs above her cashbox,
       her newspaper folded beside it, the woman lights

a cigarette, tosses the match too near the grass
       piled at her feet, as if wanting conflagration,
as if wanting to see huge flames weave their bright orange
       & red together, then lift their work toward a sky
today unclouded with judgment, perhaps waiting
       another century before darkening with flood-rains,
before loosing winds which may or may not blow
       these famed houses & churches, these old brick walls, down.

 

Bodies

Low-angle shots show Viv, Eliot’s hormone-plagued first wife,
sunk to her knees and scrubbing, scrubbing blood-stained hotel sheets
while her husband walks along the beach, crowded with housewives
and families on holiday. He wishes his new wife
were like those singing mermaids he wrote poems about in college,
poems he later recited Camside to court his future wife,
eyes needy in the flashback as when she becomes his wife,
as when she’s pronounced “morally insane,” drunk on ether
and raving about thrice-monthly periods and saints. Either
you take his side or you take hers: wives sympathize with wives,
usually, husbands with husbands, but I fell in love
with Eliot during freshman year, read “Prufrock” and loved

every last word. Getting pregnant the first time you make love
is awful luck: my roommate hid in clothes like a fat housewife’s,
spent five months drunk before she finally told her ex-lover
and me, who took the Pill each time I thought I was in love.
A shot and—I’ll call her Ruthie—writhed on clinic sheets,
writhed as I read to her the bedstand’s From Russia with Love
and Modern Poets, read to myself Saying No and Love;
and British spies and Prufrock and freak pregnancies collaged
with punk blared from next door, where kids from another college,
in that town we’d come to by bus, heard the death of love
and God and maybe Queen Elizabeth screeched by either
Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten, or maybe both. “Ether

is contraindicated for your friend’s procedure; ether
lessens the contractions and the fetus won’t expel, love”
a nurse said on that night’s first rounds, the full moon etherous
and clouding over in the window pane. Smell of ether—
no, Lysol—and Ruthie’s sweat. Was Nancy Spungeon a wife,
 or a girlfriend, when her nags sabotaged that haze of ether
Sid wrapped around himself, a heroin drift etherous
and shared like the Chelsea Hotel’s cigarette-scarred sheets,
till he stabbed her dead? I read “Prufrock” aloud, smoothed those sheets,
fed Ruthie ice-chips till she finished screaming in the calm ether
of the recovery room, dark as that bar near our college
where the father cried and gave me cash: “Three years of college

and she thought a baby could be wished away?” Back at college,
Ruthie moved to another dorm; by the next year, either
she’d lost contact with me or vice versa, and I left college
for more school, to study those poems Eliot wrote at college
on erotic martyrs like Sebastian and the arrows he loved.
Now Viv dies in the asylum: I’m pulled from friends at college
to recall scenes from that other movie, just after college,
its scenes razored by Nancy’s whine—she was a perfect wife,
if you live in hell and want some company, like a wife.
The two films twine with that clinic, the club’s kids from college
who spewed cheap beer, Ruthie’s why not you? muffled by sheets
as I left at twelve to buy cigarettes and stand in sheets

of rain like tonight’s, peering through the door at a torn sheet
emblazoned with a safety-pinned Queen Liz, at a collage
of pulsing acrid spotlights, of beer and spit and blood in sheets.
“I’m not an animal,” rose Sid’s dazed choral leer, sheeting
the words in cut-throat fury. “And I’m not a discharge, either”—
“I’m an abortion.” Eliot sent his friend Aiken a sheet
of the Times once, red-circling words like “mucus,” “bloody sheets,”
but this after he’d renounced Viv and her half-mad love.
Aiken’s left out of tonight’s film, which, like London, I love,
though I’m travelling alone, sleeping chilled by nylon sheets.
On the late bus, a punk trio—husband, toddler, wife—
nuzzle each other’s spiky hair; he kisses his wife,

who’s given birth to more than rage and pain. Both of us wives
just after graduation, Ruthie, and I sent you lace sheets
but missed your wedding, write each year in care of the college.
This scrawled postcard will say there aren’t any mermaids here, either,
but the punk husband’s singing—I swear—a lullaby, with love.

 

  

HOME MOVIES

 

1. Christmas: Ext., Wide-Angle

A Dantescan pit, the city glitters into view
         As this climbing, until street levels off and curves,
Curves so sharply the odd gift, a book of photos —

Fin de siècle dead girls from police archives,
         Also silverprinted porn — thuds to the car’s floor;
You’re dizzy from brandied fruitcake and surviving

Another visit home and — stop. Aren’t you bored
         With those family scenes, replayed so many times?
And “Dantescan” and “surviving”—can’t you find words

Less grandiose? And yet who doesn’t feel godlike
         Speeding on deserted streets, the gorgeous sprawl
Of city lights below, those skyscrapers spiking

At your feet? And how the sweeping eye’s lust swells
         As your ears vibrate with the tape player’s chords
Now thrumming, that post-punk diva and grunge pin-up girl

Who wails yeah they really want you in “Doll Parts.”
         Not what you really wanted, the evening’s first show:
Your parents’ surprise gift of home movies, cartons

They’d saved for years and copies onto video;
         The cheerless opener showed a foundry burning down—
O dying town of Bethlehem Steel—and windows

Shattered, wooden rafters split and sparking flames,
         In one hour your grandfather’s job gone
That Christmas Eve. And close-ups of his sister, the shame

Of her suicide just months away. O dying town.
         In which infernal circle did Farinata rear
His scorched and ash-smeared head to stare down at Dante

From the glowing tomb, ask who were your ancestors?
         Close-ups of a wedding cake.  Yeah they really want—
You know about the singer’s husband, dead now ten years,

Another suicide, MTV still haunted
         By his ashen junkie’s face, by barbed-wire guitar licks
And shots of his little girl, who dances frenzied

On legs as plump as your were kicking in red socks:
         Santa brought one doll, but you’d asked for two,
And tantrummed—I want to be the girl with the most cake,

The tape goes—by the tree. Yeah they really want you—
         Who gets to wish0list anyone as parent or child?
An obvious afterthought, the book of ghastly photos

On the car’s floor, late-arriving from hundreds of miles
         To this city’s sunken glitter; yet you forgive
Distracted, distant friends more than your family. Smile,

They said: is that such a wrongheaded way to live?
         Dead girls and bad girls blur their singing answers
Like the city, like the last shot of clustered graves.

 

2. After Baudelaire

The beggar child mistook my bread for cake,
And I was glad to share my loaf with him,
Having travelled so far from native hates
And loves. My eyes grew vast as the sky’s dome
In that picturesque land, its mountains where
Clouds floated at my feet, where the faint bells
Of invisible herds tinkled like prayers
And I watched a lake’s deep black ebbs and swells—
“Cake,” grasped the little urchin, as if hoarse,
And I offered him another slice, smiled
At his greed until another appeared,
As small, as filthy, his eyes and hair as wild,
To fight him till the prize was crumbs and dirt.
You! Hypocrite voyeur! Ma semblable! Ma sœur!

 

 

3.  Antonion’s Blow-Up

Already dated when I’m in college,
David Hemming’s bell-bottomed swagger
And talk of Nepal, the thick eyeliner
Raccooning his models: misogyny

Or a knight errant’s heart makes him walk out
Of one shoot, leave the models standing there
With eyes shut, arms artfully akimbo, bare
Bony torsos thrust sideways as they wait;

Already dated, the Mary Quant bangs
And white lips of two Twiggy wannabes
Who haunt his trail. The three fuck like bunnies
In one scene. It’s all in fun. He hangs,

In his swank Knightsbridge flat, not fashion spreads
Or even portraits of the most gorgeous—
What happened to … was her name Veruschka?
But poster-sized shots of London’s rag-clad

Scrounging for fish and chips in curbside bins,
Sleeping in tube stations, sleeping in parks.
(Film 301. Late 70’s. No talk
Of homelessness except after hurricanes,

Those fires and earthquakes covered on TV.)
Sleeping in parks. In a green leafy copse—
Even then my brain translated corpse—
A body lies waiting to be found. What’s real

But the shots developed in his darkroom,
Characters and props taking hazy shape
As fixative scents the air, as blow-ups
Reveal a splayed leg flattening grass, an arm

Holding a gun, a woman’s frightened face—there—
Then dissolve to grains? Or is the body,
And the gun, a trick of light? I’m twenty,
Taking notes as if the world might disappear.

4. “Installation,” Warhol Museum

Swelled to peaks, the hot tinted streaks of flame
On each black canvas—one hundred in all—
Cast their symmetric flares around this room,
Almost a textbook chart of the spectrum
Through in skull-rattling, postmodern hues:
Blues like cheap eyeshadows, or fake tattoos;
Reds metallic as Coke cans, vibrating greens
The color not of grass but of migranes;
Still the yellows, centered on one white wall,
Are three pulsing flickers like distant flame

From a plains campfire in the last century,
Its sparks glittering the hope-fevered ones
Who pick lice from blankets and pray, half-sleeping,
That tomahawks don’t take their scalps; that springs’
Tornadoes don’t burst down from clouds to rip
The handspun muslin off their wagon hoops;
Pray poisonweed won’t kill their stark-ribbed horses;
Pray when they search for water at sunrise
That rattlesnakes don’t coil their hollow bones
To strike. From later in the century,

Trapped in the palest set of flames, I see
An image reprised from that Christmas book,
Its silvery outlines blurred: the murdered girl
Who fled the prairies’ brute smother to curl
Her hair and hang a mirror on each wall,
To raise her skirts for men who paid to call
Her sweetheart: she bought the fluttering curtains
And plush, now-bloodied chair with the reflection
Of naked backs. Sex, like pain, is work—
See how carefully her sleeves are rolled, see

Her bruise-splotched legs above the boots she saved
For months to buy. The photographer’s hand
Casts shadows on his model, her name unknown;
Warhol’s shadow casts its throbbing neon glow
On his silkscreened subjects, here still living:
Pink-suited Jackie, Truman and Marilyn,
Shorn Edie with her skeletal glamour.
More voices swell their purgatorial choir:
We prayed for sparks from fame’s magic wand;
Poor faceless pilgrim, pray we shall be saved.

 

5. Against Aristotle

Margaret eats fried chicken with her fingers;
Mine pick at still-warm bread as a fresh round
Of drinks arrives at our plush booth. “The ground?”
She asks, half-giggling at my arguments
Against catharsis. She’s a long-time believer,
Assuaged the loss of dolls or pets in childhood
With Charlotte’s Web; on bad nights, she cried
At Wilbur’s near-death, his eight-legged repriever,
And slept, soothed. “When my parents’ fights got loud,”
I slur, “That pig made me sob worse: some days
I’d take my father’s golf umbrella and crouch
Beneath the pin trees, pretending to be—
Not purged by transported!—a mutant snail
Or neon-capped mushroom. Some wine? On me?”

 

6. Gone with the Wind, Boston, 1967

The favorite book of Anne Sexton’s daughter
Fills the screen decades after its première

And Linda’s wide-eyed when Atlanta burns,
Those Technicolor yellows, read, and oranges

As brightly-hued as her mom’s sleeping pills,
Gulped with vodka while Linda reads the novel

Aloud, ask falling from Anne’s cigarette,
Ash falling on those war-smashed streets. Nervous,

 

So agoraphobic that she rarely leaves
The house when her husband travels—flee, flee

On your donkey—to sell his company’s wool,
Anne’s let her Linda-Pie, her first-born girl

Choose her own birthday gift, this movie outing.
What large children we are here. Now pouting,

Scarlett slaps Rhett in their grand living room.
Anne digs stained fingers into Linda’s popcorn

And swills the orange soda she’s spiked, sees light
Caress her daughter’s flickered hair, sees Rhett

Carry Scarlett, who fumes and kicks, upstairs.
Life is a trick … Linda’s half-transported,

Repeating lines with those figures onscreen
Till Anne’s shhh, shhh. Her hand in Linda’s popcorn.

Her hand between Linda’s stiff legs at night.
Children forgive anything if hugged tight—

But like that? Life is a kitten in a sack.
Stubbing out a Salem, Anne draws her mink

Around them both and pulls at Linda’s hand.
At home, champagne and cake wait, also candles.

 

 

7. The Pink Palace

Not quite heaven, Utopia Parkway,
Those rooms cluttered with movie reels, tin stars,
Antique maps hung above stacked dossiers,

And two bins labeled “Dolls.” Against a door,
A battered TV tilts, the sound turned off
To remind Cornell—arthritic, snowy-haired—

Of silent films. Miles distant, at the Gulf,
I’m six years old, assembling paradise
From broken shells that washed ashore like gifts,

Although a sunburn glows its fevered outline
Beneath my gown. No one’s wakened yet:
Beyond the rusted screens, the dawn’s pink light

Tints the sand like frosting; the TV set—
Do they have cartoons here?—and its dials
Are low enough to reach. “B-movie actress

And buxom bombshell, Jayne Mansfield, has died”—
A crashed convertible on the highway
That leads south, her bleached and hair-pieced head

Smashed against the windshield. My small hands trace
Her smile in montaged clips onscreen as static,
Also white lines, erupt; outside, blue waves

Grow blurred with hungry gulls. Often awake
All night, and lonely, Cornell looks for stars
In pre-dawn movies, breakfasting on cake

And cherry soda, or skims his assortment
Of girlie mags, whose backlit, earthbound angels
Part their lips as if to sing. Their harmonies

Will link the constellations and seashells
His hands frame in fantasias, gifts often mailed
To actresses performing loftier roles

Than Jayne’s best: Love me. Make me seen and real.
Near his TV hangs a box from years before,
“The Pink Palace”; and maybe Cornell sees

Another pink mansion, Jayne in her yard,
Bikini-clad, bestowing stills and kisses
On startled tourists. If I can see and touch her,

Can she really be dead, vanished to drift
Like Cornell’s last angelic nudes, whose gowns
Float sheer and pinkly as dawn’s cloudy wisps?

A good girl, I don’t wake my sleeping parents
For an answer, or unlatch the screened door
And soothe my sunburn in that gull-scavenged ocean,

But play distractedly with souvenirs
While the sun rises higher, casts the outlines
Of those screens, rust-brocaded, on the floor,

Hot blurry boxes glowing like my skin.
A long gull dives, his black eyes trained on fish;
I grasp a seashell, whorled and cleft and pink

As any human heart, and the roar slips
Those fragile borders when held to my ears,
Which pulse like the world, like its homemade gifts.

I’m A Steady Rolling Man: Duet with Robert Johnson

In early 1995, a 19 year-old white native of Guthrie, Kentucky—ironically, the birthplace of Robert Penn Warren, the sole member of the Vanderbilt Fugitives to recant some of the group’s early racist writings—was fatally shot just over the Tennessee border by a fellow Guthrie native, a young African-American man who had given chase to the victim’s pick-up truck after being angered by the large Confederate flag flying from its bed. The vehicle’s tinted windows obscured the identity of both young men, who, according to several sources, had been neighborhood friends as children.

Almost in Kentucky, the state that gave
My country ‘tis of thee two armored foes
Named Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis, who rolled

Both night and day to let their people go,
         The Fugitives, in meters grave,
         Exalted a post-bellum woe

For yeoman farms plowed red by Yankee wheels.
I’m the man that rolls when icicles hang
On the tree, you hitched rides here to sing, and moaned

So even dead Confederates knew your slang
         And called for an encore. Their flag
         Still flies from pick-up trucks adorned

With gun racks and, on chilly autumn nights,
Antlered, rope-trussed deer. Some drivers lagged
At one country funeral to lift beer cans

To their hard workin’, steady rollin’ friend
         And—maybe—the Ku Klux Klan,
         Which never bought the farm or scorned

Their own, in town called Rednecks and White Trash
Since long before freckled front porches sagged
And girls bought their first radios. You can’t

Give your sweet woman ev’thing she wants at one time
         And men know this, especially those
         Whose bullets plowed Kentucky dark,

Who heard no classmate sing from that crashed truck,
Nor his young wife’s duet. O Dixie’s flag
Still croons Nigger, still sings the Klan reborn

In last century’s flamed youth; and there’s no rhyme
         For gelding knives, nor Emmett Till,
         Who traveled downhome for a summer

From Chicago and bragged he had white girlfriends
By the score: She gets ramblin’ in her brain, other men
On her mind. More rope. A gin wheel. Don’t look away

From fugitives, you and the shot white boy
         Just might agree. And his black friends,
         Now jailed, like you sing They and We.

 


 

Rambling on My Mind: Duet with Robert Johnson #33

And now they’ve found your grave again, your grandson too,
His claim to the estate — T-shirts, CDs, movies

And postage stamps, their cigarettes airbrushed—

Ruled valid when he got himself a witness, his aunt
Whose deathbed memory rambled to your origins,
          The pants and lovecalls rising from underbrush

After a fish fry, rising from a ditch right next to hers.
No one predicts the mess of truth’s red afterbirth,

Not me, fumbling with devilment and forebears,

Who claims the first woman killed by Nat Turner’s gang,
Two war suicides, a master who damned slaveholding
          And plunged his fortune past what the market bears,

Past—he prayed—mean things. Mean things like those you claimed for songs,
Which foretold more bad news: factory and stockyard closings,

King shot in Memphis, schoolkids selling crack

By fallen tractor sheds. All great migrations done,
And done for. You treat me so unkind, sing thousands gone
          Half-mad with hearts that history has cracked

Like a sun-warped guitar, ditched and almost forgotten—
My time ain’t long, you sigh, edged near the door. What then

About the Greek guy who cut a ewe’s throat

And watched ghosts bend to drink from its ditch-runnelled blood,
His rambling heart grown still? They rose in packs from Hades,
          Among them his own mother, her prophet’s throat

A mess of wrinkles, to warn that her son’s journey home
Would be long and kill all his men—he wept, his arms

Embracing loveless air three times. Truth sides

With history’s open veins, we’ll reprise when the curtain
Of that dimestore photo booth opens, its mirror stained
          And thumb-stamped by those called from the other side.

 

 

 

 

All poems © Diann Blakely, reprinted by permission of author.

“Rambling On My Mind” originally appeared in Bomb and was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2003. “I’m a Steady Rolling Man” originally appeared in Callaloo. Both poems are reprinted here by permission of the author.

Flaming Cross

by Carl Carmer

 

 

 

All poems © 2004, Kathleen Thompson. Printed by permission of author.

“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.

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.

The girl in the iris stills. Flash. Bone. Exposed tulip,
your eyes twinkle and well like visible
pitch but feathery and cheapside. It’s there
for the taking

and finally you wish to see how spatially wizened
the perfect view a brief but tiny contretemps or,
contre-risposte, the girl in frame
number three is still

tied to the train terrifyingly moon-struck and irised,
watch the bubble. What Rousseau calls false air
and fairyism, you call spicy human pleasures
something faisandé

née twinkly, no? Ha-ha. I said ha-ha, cheaply. Ah-ha,
girl! Everyone sees bright and luminous lights
in the paper. It’s a sad day for canary,
like-it-or-not

the universe living out its end capaciously perfect,
seas thrashing in their humdrum reservoir
tip: seen just this way an angel switches
lens and look!

Mary Oliver’s House of Light (1990)

You could not believe in a kind
of failure. Inside your sleeve the sonnet’s dark

unfold, the wide harbor. You are thirsty.
Gazing and sleeping, in your language the finger is small
and quick. Like the aimless god’s instant seize
you remind the devout
of home. The body’s fabric, Rilke’s small
poem of silent. You have said no
and nothing has broken.

Only a few moments ago an instant
of herons is the forge of loneliness which is anything
or nothing.

When god burrowed her soft breath, you were
holy. In your anarchy
children are small lyrics
of blossom full of water.

Tell me, where is your theatre, your wonderful bird, your small
lily as it breaks among angels
or windows?

You can be lovely and lonely,
or lonely and
lovely.

Your loving words, like water
they are clarity, the human
egg, shimmering.

                                                                        for Julie

        Lynching. We all know what it is, how lynching — often with a wound sisal rope but at times with other regrettably convenient means — is a matter of taking the decreed law into one's own hands, often by night, usually in vigilante fury and self-righteous indignation, a matter of crowd thinking and peer pressures, blood too hot to govern, words raised like smoldering brands. Certainly such extemporaneous committee behavior reflects, in part, our native inclination to self-reliance, our reluctance to shun the necessities of justice and abrogate our impulses, to rely upon the courage of the appointed few. But public-spirited and corrective as many lynch mobs may start out to be — essentially, I mean, only philosophically, for I would not condone their actual haste nor furor — such aroused citizens do on occasion go awry, miss the mark, and rash judgment as well as premature, even misdirected vengeance upon the profoundly unguilty has always lurked as a possibility. Lynching, yes, it is a crucial element in the question we convene to consider today, but we must remember that there was no lynching on October 31 of last year on Dye Street of Scabbard, Alabama, no mob, no raging adrenaline, no threat of a lynching, not even the slightest innuendo to any potential victim that he might be the target of a lynch mob. Not one soul was bruised or damaged, no one person's rights denied or encroached upon, not a single individual's pride scuffed or tainted, damaged or spoiled, and the only actual lynching to which we need turn our communal, duly-appointed and judicious attention is the one our — no, not "our," probably not "your" and certainly not "my," but perhaps only "the moment's" — assistant district attorney is attempting to propagate and enlist your complicity in. His desire to terminate the education of these five fine young men and incarcerate them, to hang the albatross of shame about their necks forever, to make an example of them as admonishment for mere make-believe and an ill-chosen seeming-resurrection of the historical tradition of the minstrel show is the only possible lynching in this case, for the D.A. wishes to deprive the lads here at this table — Trey, Bedford, Jubal, Uncas and Bobby — of their Bill-of-Rights-guaranteed license to practice freedom of speech, freedom of expression, which amounts essentially to attempting to deny them their freedom of belief. And if you, dear ladies and gentlemen, allow him to execute this travesty of justice and to place an indelible black mark on the records of these otherwise-unblemished students, to perpetrate this mockery of all the freedoms we hold sacred and dear, then you will leave that jury box, this consecrated chamber and life on our planet with no less than the invisible but indelible imprint of a lynch-rope on your own hands. A masquerade is not a murder, a jest is not an assault, a thoughtless lapse of prudence is not a campaign against another race.

       Indulge me for a moment, if you will. An anecdote, an exemplum, perhaps, certainly a reality check. It was a time when no one was afraid of hazing, the late sixties. I was pledge master of my fraternity, and on initiation night I paraded the shackled pledges out to the pole where the oversized American flag proudly waved from dawn till dusk. It was about two in the morning, however, and we were all slightly tipsy, exploring the now-taboo zone where play and pain intersect. We were by custom supposed to drop the boys off a few miles out in the country and let them make their way back to the chapter house in pairs, but my roommate Montgomery Lalonde and I had an inspiration: we wrapped their brotherhood chain around the flagpole and padlocked it with a Yale, then returned to our room for some serious sleep.

       The next morning, I picked up the ringing telephone to hear a voice identifying itself as Johnson Colvard, president of the university. He wanted me to know that the pledges had been released, our hasp hacksawed, the colors run up, but that I was due in his office in fifteen minutes, sharp.

       You see, friends, I had been so focused on fraternal fellowship and festivities that I had not listened to the news throughout the previous evening. None of us had, and we had no inkling that Mister Martin Luther King, the revered leader of his people, had been shot and killed in Memphis that evening. In the president's somber waiting room that morning, I was shocked and terrified. Suddenly, I was certain my college career and my good name were behind me and nothing but infamy ahead. I was convinced I would be branded forever with this one imprudent act performed under the influence of Mister Jack Daniels's finest and only by coincidence at the worst time imaginable.

       And he did rake us all over the coals, my friends. President Colvard paced the room as we sat in his plush guest chairs and told us in a quiet but quivering voice how foolish such an antic would have been at the best of times, but how on that particular day, it looked less foolish than defiant, snide, even vicious. He told us how the African American community would be rightly offended, how disappointed our mentors and parents would be. He said our behavior was "unbecoming" and "sorry." I tell you, I left that office feeling about the size and configuration of a toad.

       However — and here is the point, ladies and gentleman — my friends and I were not prosecuted or even suspended. President Colvard was an educator, much wiser than even the faculty firebrands who called for our dismissal, more far-sighted and shrewd. We were scolded soundly, placed on probation and required to clean the campus for the rest of the term, forbidden to conduct our formal initiation ceremony or hold our annual spring dance. We were all driven to extremes of remorse beyond description, but we were sentenced to work out our salvation with diligence in sight of the student body, to whom we issued a public apology. I believe this was a fitting end of the episode. As you see, I am now an attorney. Monty is a respected surgeon in Baton Rouge, and our Delta Upsilon Mu brothers are almost all prominent citizens, one a dean at Emory, another a major general in the United States Air Force, yet another a full-blown Pentecostal minister. We are the products, not of indulgence, but of mercy and understanding, of a wisdom far larger than any impulse to punish, and we are much the better for it. I might even venture to suppose that the world we live in is slightly the better for this act of clemency.

       Now, let us review the atmosphere that pervades this case at hand. A Friday night fraternity party, a romp to relieve the pressures of pursuing higher knowledge, and what better time to allow for release and good fellowship than Halloween, the traditional occasion for the Lord of Misrule and King of Topsy-turvy to hold court? Imagine the weeks of anticipation, the excitement of another gridiron season, another hotly-contested skirmish with the Florida Polytechnic Rattlers, perhaps with the Sugar Bowl bid hanging in the balance. Imagine the excitement of playing dress-up somewhat like children, as well as like the adults of our own grand-but-gone cotillion era. The Chi O T dining room was festooned and garlanded, the band's shimmery equipment all set up, plugged in and sound checked, kegs tapped, the snacks like crab canopies, savory sausage balls and kisch squares arrayed and wafting their seductive aromas throughout the chambers of one of the most prestigious and exclusive fraternal organizations in the South. You cannot fail to sense the excitement, to appreciate and share it, to yearn at least a little for those days of innocence when you, too, were green and eager, esurient and — truth be told — somewhat on the prowl.

       So, yes, voices would be raised and spirits would flow. I think we would all agree that the atmosphere in the Coyote House on last All Hallows Eve was conducive to high jinks and horseplay, the trick-or-treat mood, but who can believe that some evil seed, some instinct to wound and offend would dwell at the center of this understandable appetite for revelry? The district attorney will tell you that these five young men before you, the flower of our state today, the hope of our future and no older than many of their ancestors who gave their lives in defense of our great state during the War for Southern Independence, that these five youngsters chose to dress up (three in sheets with hoods and two as black cotton pickers) because they were brutal and benighted, no more aware than so many hounds how important it is that blacks and whites work together now to secure Alabama's place in this mighty nation. What sort of perverse imagination would construct — or should I say "project"? — such a motive?

       And is it not, furthermore, true that this innocent bit of humor — which I will not claim was especially tasteful or wise — occurred in a setting where no actual members of the African American community were present or even invited, even likely to be? Was it not a party closed to all but the brotherhood of Chi Omega Tau, their pledges and their dates? Had they not taken photographs of the offending scenario — which I admit might have the potential, removed from proper context, to cause some offense to a few who were not privy to the joke — had they not photographed themselves posing with toy rifles aimed at the boys in blackface and with noosed water-ski tow ropes in hand, no one might have been the wiser. And when they deposited the negatives with the Mall-Mart booth to be developed and printed, were they behaving like some secret society which had performed a skit of their mysteries or some criminal and surreptitious taunt of which they should be ashamed? The young man who processed the film, who just turned out by the unlikeliest of circumstances to be a Negro American, now I ask you, does he have the right to monitor and report the content images which run through his hands? Every customer's private memories and intimate keepsakes? He was actually over-reaching the boundaries of his position, and the strongest testimony to this fact is that the Mall-Mart has terminated his employment as the expression of their discontent with his invasion of my clients' privacy.

       So who, except for the most accidental, the most unpredictable observer of the photographs, could be called the "victim" of this crime? Though it was not performed behind locked doors, it was acted out in the temporary but no less real and legally protected homestead of my clients, the property of a national organization which has given us engineers and senators, scientists and attorneys, even I might add, an assistant district attorney or two. Though it was not flaunted nor openly advertised, the momentary event was, after the fact, spied upon — this prank, this miscalculation and abandon of the courtesy that generally characterizes the brotherhood of Chi Omega Tau — and it was only through such invasion of privacy that the mime of a hanging became any more public than some off-color joke I might whisper into my associate's ear. So where is the harm, where the foul, where the stench of evil?

       And I will grant my esteemed adversary that Scabbard University, long a bastion of conflicted and quasi-racist policies, has decided to aim for the moral high ground by playing the political correctness card, which in this case can only be a one-eyed jack, winking at the past. Yes, the university provost has locked the fraternity house and expelled the boys, acts which we expect to contest in another venue, but for the moment remember: they were operating within the grounds and community of an institution which has taken its own actions, which has its own conventions and sanctions, regulations it has invoked in meting out punishment without due process, so does not our very presence here today constitute (a word I would never deign to use lightly) a double jeopardy situation? Must these boys run the gamut of mock-justice twice before anyone will take the leap of faith to see their view? Now I ask you. . . .

       But let us further analyze the actual behavior, the specific postures and expressions which lasted only long enough for these boys to mug for the camera. In a house full of grunge music and young ladies costumed in provocative outfits — from Playboy bunnies to circus riders, Elviras and Scarlett belles — and boys adorned as imaginary ghouls — Frankensteins and vampires, mummies, aliens, Jasons and old-fashioned laundry-draped ghosts — can you not see the temptation for some to decide that Klansmen, who in reality could certainly not now be found any closer to the Scabbard campus than a Dracula, might be a fair disguise to increase the festive horror? And does not their donning the costumes of White Camellia knights and other such archaisms bear some similarity to strutting around the party in the get-up of a Barbary pirate or Comanche war chief?

       Ladies and gentlemen, can we set aside for the moment the inflammatory rhetoric, the hate accusations and mob mentality of the northern press and look at the cultural shift which allowed these boys — with the considerable confused innocence of any fraternity hullabaloo — to act without awareness that old animosities might be resurrected or sacred cows trampled? To these young men, all born around 1980, the Klansman and his ilk are no longer a fact of history so much as a facet of myth. All suburban boys, the products of high-quality preparatory schools, scions of the New South with all its hope and forward-looking policies, these five saw the lynch gang they momentarily imitated as being bogeymen, fright figures just like the cinema wolfman, taloned Freddie and Michael Myers, creatures who cannot genuinely set us to trembling in broad daylight — especially at a time when terrorism's poison gas and bombs and sniper fire are far more real and chilling. What their behavior does is not so much to resurrect the horrors of the past — "past" being as crucial to this equation as "horrors" — as certify the impotence of such outdated and deflated shibboleths. Those times are gone, a fact for which we are all thankful, and only ravenous journalists, who are both the vampires and the lynch mob of present-day America, could fail to perceive how we are far enough from an era of racial strife and open discrimination that we can now joke about it with, dare I say, something of a gallows humor, the kind of behavior which further distances and muzzles, jerks the eye teeth right out of what may have troubled us in the past. As any psychologist will tell you, we turn to humor to certify the withdrawal of danger, the emasculation of what was once a threat. It is the humor that can salve and heal.

       The history of this state, ladies and gentleman — and I'm certain my esteemed opponent and even the salivating reporters tapping out their text messages on cell phones over in press row right now would concur — is one of ambivalence concerning relations between the races. Tensions, yes, and even regrettable actions. But even while denying African Americans some privileges, some access to advantages in our state, the likes of Kissing Jim Folsum, George Wallace and even Mighty Fob have also thrown their political and moral weight behind measures which would protect and shelter minorities.

       We cannot, my friends, change the history of this state and our storied region. We cannot undo harms and insults of our formative past, but we can cease to walk around with our fingers on the hair trigger that the press and other agitators depend upon for their livelihood. Before we examine the evidence, listen to the testimony and come to the fullest understanding of how little racial acrimony was involved in the Halloween party in question on the grounds of Scabbard University, let me remind you that the legal system has already encroached upon the lives of these five fine-looking young men, some of them honor students, one an athlete on the tennis team, yet another a member of the poetry slam squad. And they are not here to deceive anyone, to damage anyone's good name or to hoodwink a single one of us. True, they would like to apologize for creating a circumstance in which offense could be taken, and they are a little ashamed of their naiveté, their not knowing the ramifications their acts might have amid the scrimmage of appetites that characterizes our socio-political environment. But primarily, out of no arrogance, but rather the legitimate pride of place and state and legacy of the truth, they are here within a football field's length of where governors take their oath of office and where Jefferson Davis once raised his hand to pledge his solemn allegiance, here to remind us all of our own serious obligation to remember, honor and act upon the motto emblazoned upon the Great Seal of our beloved state: "We Dare Defend Our Rights." I trust you would be no less bold to defend the rights of these young scholars to a simple and benign error which has grown out of proportion due (yet again) to outside agitation of the most meddlesome and belligerent kind.

Tuscaloosa, The Penny, and The Train

I see the woman everyone calls crazy.
She waits ahead like a dancer,
and the sidewalk
is like a ballroom floor
on which she smiles, turns,
and reaches for my naked hand.
I don’t know how to refuse: every night
bottles break in this town;
stars litter the sidewalk,
the road on which I walk;
like an iris, the moon stands
in the sky. Cars pass; their headlights
spill our shadows on the road.
Red lights flash up ahead.
The train whistle blows. The arm
of the semaphore comes down
behind us. The woman lets go
of my hand. She speaks—no one
in this town has ever mentioned
that she could. She says,
I want to put a penny
on the tracks. I consider
crossing, leaving the moving train
between her and me. She fishes a penny
from her sock and puts it
on the rail. The train wails,
passes smooth as a boat
between the tiny yards
of the tiny houses,
a rushing that makes my eyes burn.
I’m standing five feet
from the rail. Her white dress
waves in the wind
like a flag.

Jukebox Gothic

 

 

 

 

All poems © 2004, Alan May. Printed by permission of author.

]]> http://www.storysouth.com/thicket/poems/may_poems.html http://www.storysouth.com/thicket/poems/may_poems.html Poems Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:17:26 -0600
Toeing the Line

by Teresa Jones

 

So we're in her house, sitting on her new sofa with a pizza between us watching the news coverage of Desert Storm, the original Gulf War.  You know how it is, some things never change.  But anyway, it's the first time I've had five minutes with her in six months, and I'm feeling good, you know, like things are back on track, like whatever she was mad about she's over.  So I'm tamping down the cherry root tobacco in my pipe, stretching my legs out.  "Yeah," I'm thinking, "the fucking world's at war, but we're OK." Kimberly turns sideways, pulls her knees up, swings her hair out of her face, and I think, "God, this is perfect."  She had on a white T-shirt and cut-off jeans.  I wasn't even wondering whether she had on underwear.  I was just sort of feeling, "This is it, this is the way it should be."

            Then she says, "Jeff?" like, you know, she's uncertain, like she's answering a knock in the middle of the night.  She pushes her hair away from her face, hooks it behind one ear.  Here it comes.  "We need to talk."

            Shit.  Goddamn.  Why don't people just say, "It's time to fuck you over"?  I suck on my pipe and flip through every channel until we get back to CNN, and then I say, "OK."

            She says, "I think you need help."  Jesus Christ, you know, why doesn't somebody just kill me?

            "You think I need help?  What kind of help?  Think I've got a tire iron in my pocket?"  I'm laughing at her now.  I mean, she's got to be kidding, right?  "What is it?  You think I'm psychotic? Afraid to leave me alone with the kitchen knives?"

            She's not laughing.  I'm thinking, Take me, Jesus, just go on and take me.

            "No," she says.  She is so fucking calm.  "No," she says and sips her Diet Coke.  "I don't think you have a tire iron in your pocket, although you may, but I do think you're very angry."  She's not looking at me yet; she's warming up.  She's about to be sensitive and caring; she's about to lay down the rules.  I've seen this show before.

            She says, "I think," and then instead of finishing the sentence, she very methodically and precisely folds the top of the pizza box into the bottom.  Then she gathers up napkins, plates, and this is great:  knives and forks.  Kimberly eats pizza with a knife and fork.  So I'm following her to the kitchen and she stops in front of the sink and stares at the garbage disposal.

            "Jeff, I think you're decent and compassionate.  I think you're smart. I think you're funny.  No, I'm minimizing.  The plain truth is," and here she straightens her glasses and, as nearly as I can tell given the glare from the ceiling light, looks right at me, "you are the only person I have ever wanted to slap, and one of the few people to ever make me laugh out loud."

            I smile in a way that I hope reminds her I know her better than anybody.

            "OK," she says, "no one else ever made me laugh the way you do, but the point is, Jeff, it's your friendship I value, the friendship you extended a long time ago when there was no one I could talk to the way I talked to you."

            I'm a fish on the line, a big old bass.  She's reeling me in the way she always does.  Yeah, I'm thinking, I make you laugh all right, 'til you can't sit up straight, 'til you have to whip off those glasses, and wipe those pretty eyes.  Yes ma'am, I rub those aching shoulders, and slap Band-Aids on those little knees.  I'm the one all right, but you have a hard time remembering all that when somebody else has got you smiling, and those muscles ain't so sore.

            "But that's good," I say like I'm trying to convince a kid it's a good idea to share. "That's what friends are for, right?"  And I want to scream, "REMEMBER?"

            She nods like a social worker reassuring a child molester who says, "I didn't mean to hurt them little girls.  They was pretty little things."

            "It is good," she says. She wipes off the counter and restacks a perfectly neat pile of mail.  "But I think maybe your concern for me, your interest in me, sometimes works to your detriment."  She holds up her hand like a fucking stop sign.  "I'm afraid your way of caring is obsessive, Jeff.  I'm afraid you'll explode and it scares me."

            Goddamn it, motherfucking, son of a bitch, shit.  Kimberly Renee Cleveland doesn't know what it means to be scared.  I'm 6'2" and 185-90 pounds.  I know some mean motherfuckers, and I've been so scared piss ran down my leg.  I know what it means to be scared, but I'm telling you Kimberly has never even had her mouth go dry, never had a reason.

            So I say, "Scared?  You're scared of me?  Kim, I would paint myself black and sleep on the interstate before I would hurt you.  You know that.  Shit, you know that."  Sometimes talking to Kimberly is like slapping yourself in the face.  You know something is wrong, you know you ought to stop, but somehow you keep hoping it will start to feel good.  So I pull way back and make myself remember that dealing with Kimberly is like dealing with a cat.  You may have played with it and fed it and let it sleep on your face forever, but if it suddenly cowers when it hears you and shudders when you stroke it, you can't just slam it against the wall, even if you want to.  You have to put out catnip toys and cat food treats, and then you have to fucking wait.  So I apologized.  Start with what you know, right?  Bottom line:  she didn't buy it.  What's new?  She said I'd have to get help.  Said she couldn't be around me until I did.

            I said, "Fine," and let my eyes water.  She patted my arm and asked me to think about it.

            If I had to pick one word to describe Kimberly, it would be this: appropriate.  To give you a little contrast, the word for me is "inappropriate."  Kimberly comes from small town, Southern Baptist stock.  Her daddy owns the hardware store in Autaugaville, Alabama, and always has. Her mama sews or cooks or, hell, I don't know what the woman does, but she was always home when Kim and her brother got home from school, and dinner was always on the table at six.  They are what you call "fine people," all four of them.  They're as normal as, I don't know, whatever is normal these days—a baseball game?  A Walt Disney movie?  I don't know.  Anyway, they're so completely who they should be they could pass for stereotypes, except for Kimberly who somehow shot a little wide of the mark, but I'll get to that later.  I come from a bag of lunatics.  We had one of those middle class ranch houses in the middle of a mid-sized city called Montgomery.  Apart from tall grass and sheets at the windows, everything looked all right until you noticed that the boys never brought friends home, and the mother never left the house until she nutted up, and then she didn't go past driveway.  Honest to God, I came home from school one day and my crazy fucking mother was laying out rows of socks on the driveway. Why?  She said they needed to dry.  We didn't have a washing machine.  How could they need to dry?  Hell, I guess she sprayed them down with the hose.  I was sixteen.  My brother was twelve.  As for my father, he's an asshole.  Details:  he made good money that we never saw, and he used his fist for a reprimand.  I never, not once, saw my father kiss my mother, but I sure as hell heard him fuck her.

            I was twenty-three when I met Kimberly.  It was at the Montgomery Little Theatre.  I was in the audience with some girl who wanted to spite her boyfriend by dating someone tall and, since I was a good eight inches taller than he was, I figured she might want to spite the hell out of him, and I was ready.  Until I saw Kimberly.  Kimberly played Irma.  The show was Light Up the Sky, a 1940's gangster-style romantic comedy.  She wore gold lamé and she had some sort of plumes, peacock feathers maybe, coming out of her hair.  The reviewer said she was "sweet and believable with good comic timing."  Bullshit.  She was magnificent.

            The next night, I was on the front row alone.  The night after that I had to bribe a guy for tickets with his girlfriend standing right there whining, "But you promised."  I said, "I owe you one, bud," and I think he understood.  I saw all fourteen shows, including the Sunday matinees.  The last night, I went backstage to meet her.  She didn't scream when she saw me, but she didn't drop her pants either.  She graciously thanked me for my "curious but faithful attendance" and for the "beautiful roses."  Then she handed me off like a basketball to the male lead, a guy I already hated because he kissed her in the third act.  I waited outside.

            Kimberly was the last one out.  I was across the street, leaning against my hand washed 1972 Monte Carlo, casually tamping down cherry root tobacco.  She studied the empty parking lot as though she were trying to remember where she left her car, but with more concentration, like she couldn't be sure what her car looked like.  I lifted my pipe to her.

            "Misplace your car?"

            "More like my affections, I'm afraid," she said and kind of laughed.

            I walked over to her, extending my hand.  "I'm Jeff Burns.  I met you backstage."

            "My performance may not show it, Jeff, but the truth is, I have an excellent memory.  I often go whole minutes without retraining.  At least," and here her smile began to reach her eyes, "without extensive retraining.  Thank you again for the flowers."

            She was a scrawny little thing with weak eyes, and a bushel of red hair hanging down to her butt and, Jesus Christ, just thinking about it makes me sick.  She was so damn cute, I couldn't decide whether to hang her from my rearview mirror, fuck her in the parking lot, or marry her.  OK, OK, OK, that's how I feel about her now.  At the time, I just wanted to spread my jacket over potholes for her or maybe fight a duel or, at least, stand in her front yard and sing Frankie Valle songs.  She was just that kind of girl, and I was just that kind of asshole.     

During the next two weeks, I called her often enough to find out she lived with her parents, often enough for her mother to recognize my voice, but not often enough to catch her at home.  I could have been on a testosterone high, but I don't think so; there were other girls.  I think it was more the way she seemed to be right there with you, like what you had to say was the most important thing in the world and, at the same time, someplace else—not just with me, but with everyone.  I drove by her house on average two or three times an evening, but saw her only once.  I was parked half a block up the street, listening to the radio, smoking my pipe, when a blue Honda pulled up.  A huge pecan tree that had already uprooted the sidewalk and needed to be cut down blocked the street light, so I couldn't see who was in the car, but they sat there for almost an hour.  I memorized the tag number.  When Kimberly finally stepped out, the Honda was already in gear.  Before she reached the porch, the Honda was gone, and I was moving in.

            "All right," I called to her, "you've had your big date.  Now how about coffee with a buddy?"

            "I need more than coffee tonight, Jeff."

            I couldn't believe it.  She actually turned around, jumped in the car and said, "Anywhere that stays open all night."  She turned up the radio, rolled down the window and lit a cigarette.  "I'm not even going to ask why you're here.  I'm just going to assume you're not a killer, and count myself lucky."

            "I'm not a killer."

            "Whatever you say, Jeff.  Whatever you say, so long as you keep talking."

            "That I can do," I said, and headed for Howard Johnson's.  Once we settled in, I really opened up.  I told her that my favorite literary and cinematic hero was James Bond.

            "Really?" she said. "Why?"

            "Well," I said, "obviously the films are clever and exciting, and Sean Connery is a tremendous actor."

            "None of that is obvious to me," she said as she picked the ham off her ham and cheese sandwich.

            "How can it not be obvious?"

            "I guess it's hidden behind the sexism and stupidity."

            "Sexism?"  This was 1976.  I was twenty-three.  "What sexism?"

            "Pussy Galore."

            "Kimberly," I became avuncular, "it's a joke."

            "Oh," she said, "it's supposed to be funny.  The way it would be funny if your name were, what?  Asshole?"

            I let her slide on that one because she had me, and because I was much more interested in the Honda than the politics of filmmaking.  I leaned back in the booth, stretched out my 34" legs casual style under the table, and tried to sound bouncy.  "So.  Who's the guy?"

            With her mouth fish-lipped around the milkshake straw, she rolled her eyes up at me, and took a breath.  "What guy?"

            Already I knew she wasn't stupid, so I suspected evasion, and evasion signifies only one thing: something to hide.  I glanced around the restaurant as if I needed the waitress, and then leaned my elbows on the table.

            "In the Honda.  Who's the guy in the Honda?"

            She pulled the straw up and sucked the shake out of the wrong end.  "A friend of mine."

            "What kind of friend?  The kind who doesn't show up for your last performance?"

            She shrugged.  "The failure to show was an aberration brought about by difficult circumstances.  But, what kind of friend?  I'd say a very dear friend, an old friend from college."  She pushed her dishes to the edge of the table and lit a cigarette.  "I think I'll go track down some coffee."

            I motioned to the waitress.  "Here it comes."

            Kimberly held her coffee cup in one hand, her cigarette in the other.  She alternated bringing each to her mouth while she stared first at the counter, then at the list of ice cream behind the counter, then the other patrons, and finally the emergency exit.

            "Friend or lover?"

            "Well," she said, closing one eye and then the other as if she were testing her visual acuity on the giant E in Exit, "a lover is a friend, right?"

            Her face was pulpy, as if there weren't any bones behind it.

            "No," I said, stirring my coffee like what I was saying was sad but true.  "Lovers come and go," I told her, "But, friends, Kimberly, friends, remain."  I felt very wise and also as if I were about to bag a good one, but I knew I couldn't rush her.  You can't rush women.  It doesn't work.  They always think the one who just left is the one and, as such, deserves a considerable period of mourning and affectional and sexual fidelity.  That's how they avoid feeling like fools and sluts.  I understood all that.

            "The bastard," I said.

            "No bastards."  She squeezed a drag out of the filter.  "No bastards, no bitches, no lies, no deception."

            "Well, he's a fool and an idiot."

            She laughed.  “I don't think so, Jeff."

            Over the next three months, we went out repeatedly, to movies mostly, but we also saw Harry Chapin that fall and, I think, Peter Frampton.  I kissed her a couple of times.  Actually, I kissed her twice exactly, and she was gracious.  She was so gracious that I didn't understand that "Let's not do that" really meant "Keep your fucking hands off me."  So I was patient.  I introduced her to my favorite music.  I told her about my crazy family.  I told her about my affair at nineteen with the twenty-eight year old woman who took up with a buddy of mine while I was out buying tacos.  Tacos, for God's sake.  I wasn't gone fifteen minutes and I get back and he's putting it to her and she's making noises like she's never come before.  "Jesus God," I'm thinking, "what do I do with this food?"  No, really, I'm pacing back and forth across the twelve foot living room trying to figure out how to make the bags get out of my arms, but they won't let go.  Then it's like the Taco Supreme says, "You're fucked," and the burrito snorts out, "Yeah," and I wake up two days and a pumped stomach later telling some clown intern, "I don't know, codeine and beer, I guess."  My point is, I told Kimberly everything, and she told me next to nothing.  She always laughed when I meant her to, said "I'm sorry that happened to you" when I didn't expect it, and added "You deserve better than that" when I didn't think I deserved a damn thing worth having.
    

            Kimberly worked at the bookstore downtown.  She ran two miles around the track at the "Y" before work and five miles after work.  The rest of the time, she read.  I tried calling her instead of waylaying her at the bookstore, at the "Y," or at her front door at midnight, but once she was inside the house, she was always "busy."

            "Reading is not busy," I told her from the Exxon station pay phone around the corner.  It was our ninety day anniversary.  "Reading is what you do until the telephone rings."

            She disagreed.

            "Kimberly," I lowered my voice and spoke very slowly, "you're becoming Emily Dickinson."

            "Virginia Woolf."

            "What?"

            "I'd rather be Virginia Woolf."

            I was missing something.  I knew I was missing something.  "Didn't she," I was struggling, "didn't she go insane and kill herself?"

            Kimberly is not prone to melodrama.  She is argumentative, obstreperous, and belligerent, but she is not now, nor was she then melodramatic.  She said, "Killing herself may have been an act of sanity."

            Well, I had been there, hadn't I?  I knew how it felt to stand in the living room with my arms full of Taco Bell bags and not know how to put them down.  I knew how it felt to overhear fucking in the next room.  I knew how it felt to want to scream and be unable to, to want to smash the television and not know how, to need to kill somebody and realize the best and only candidate was me.  I had to stop her.  I dropped the telephone and ran.

            When she opened the door, she said, "Or, as I was saying before you left me chattering to myself, it may have been an act of desperation, it may have been a giving up, it may have been the acting out of a tormenting dream.  I'm not a proponent of suicide, so I can't say I wholly support her decision, but I do think it's unfair to reduce her reasons and her experience to the glib summary we term insanity."  Then she invited me in.

            "Are you going to kill yourself?"

            "When?"

            "Tonight, ever, right now?"  I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, then leaned over and braced myself with my hands on my knees.  I thought I was going to throw up.

            "Is that why you're here?"  She spread her thumb and index finger across her forehead as though a headache were imminent.

            "Yes.  That's why I'm here."

            "Then you may leave.  I'm reading Saul Bellow and I fully expect to survive the night."

            Did I mention that she could be infuriating?

            "Kimberly," I said, "please talk to me.  I know you're unhappy.  Let me be your friend."

            Thirty minutes later, we were sitting in a booth at Denny's.  We were waiting on coffee, I was trying to get my pipe going, and she says, "The guy in the Honda was a woman."

            I was clenching the pipe stem between my teeth and starting to unscrew my lighter to replace the flint.  "What guy?"

            "In the blue Honda, in front of my house."

            I always carry extra lighter fluid and flint, but I couldn't find either.  I had just started rummaging in my inside jacket pocket when she handed me her lighter.

            "Did you hear me, Jeff?"

            You know how when you've got one thing on your mind it's hard to pay attention to something else?  Well, I was thinking about how my brother must have been stealing my stuff again, and I was getting really annoyed.

            "Yeah, Kim, I'm listening.  The guy in the Honda.  What about him?"

            "Nothing, Jeff."

            "What?  What about him?  Tell me.  What do you think, are they grinding coffee back there or growing it?"  No, it wasn't my brother.  It was my fucking mother, playing scavenger fairy.

            "My ex-lover, Jeff, the one from college, in the blue Honda, was a woman—not a man, Jeff—a woman."

            If thoughts come together like pieces of a puzzle, my 2000 piece landscape just collapsed in a landslide.

            "What do you mean?"

            She just looked at me.

            "What are you telling me, Kim?"

            Kimberly turned the bill over, and started counting out change.  When she had $4.36 stacked on the table, she looked up.  "I'm a lesbian."

            I don't know if you've ever had the experience of seeing someone turn out to be somebody else, but it's like meaning to kick a pile of clothes out of your way, but slamming your toe into the bed frame, instead; it's like looking up in traffic to realize that tractor-trailers really do make wide right turns and the front of your car is coming off.  But it's more than that.  It's like you're humping away saying, "Baby, baby," and the woman clutching your ass rears up and whispers, "You can call me Mom."  It's like, damn, you know?

            So I'm sitting here with this girl who looks healthy and normal, and I'm thinking I really like her and she's been dumped by her boyfriend and that's a shame, but I can be a shoulder for a while and then move in on my white horse, and let's face it, nail her.  No, if it had been like that, I would have tossed a couple of bills on the table and split, but it was worse than that.  I had already been thinking about a bunch of two feet tall redheaded kids in glasses who look just like her and call me Daddy.  I'd known her twelve weeks and already I had decided to go to college, get a real job, join the PTA, go to church, call her parents by their first names, and trade my 1972 Monte Carlo for a station wagon.  It was that bad.

            I sat there musing while Kimberly lit one cigarette off another. 

            Finally, I said, "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"  Translation:  What the fuck is the matter with you?

           Her hands were trembling.  These were the seventies.  This was a big deal.  Her face was red.  When she reached for the coffee, she knocked the cream over.  When she grabbed a napkin, the coffee spilled onto the seat, and two cups went spinning toward the edge of the  table.

            "How was I supposed to know, Jeff, that you would ever need that information?  How was I supposed to know that one day of your omnipresence would turn into a lifetime of surveillance?  How was I to know you would never go the hell away?"

            And then I had this epiphany, the blinding kind that hits hard, fast, and usually too late:  Jeff, you're fucking up.  You've got her riled, now, and for what?  Look at her.  So she's a lesbian, so what?  It could be worse, my man, it could be worse.  She could be a vegetarian or a Catholic or, Jesus Christ, an animal rights activist!  Those people are lost, Jeff, but a lesbian is not lost, so much as waiting to be found.

            When I let her out, I circled the block and parked in front of her house, her parents' house.  It was a two story, white frame with black shutters.  An open porch curved around the front and down the left side.  Ferns hung from the ceiling.  Azaleas and hydrangeas crowded the steps.  There were pecan trees and oak trees, and at the right corner of the house, where a driveway should have been, a huge magnolia tree flooded the yard.  Two weeks before, her Dad had put his hand on my shoulder and said, "You're becoming a regular fixture around here, aren't you, boy?"  I liked the sound of that, but I still scrambled out of his recliner, and tried to hand him his TV remote control.  He waved the remote control away, and nodded toward the chair.  "Keep your seat," he said.  "I'm just passing through."

            I don't know which he found harder to tolerate, my being there every time he walked in the door or my touching his things, but I trailed him through the dining room to try to make it better.  "Mr. Cleveland," I said, "I noticed you've got some dead limbs in the back."

            He kept walking.

            "I'll be glad to help you take those down, if you've got a chain saw, or any kind of saw, I guess."  Asshole.  Potato head.  Like I can chop wood with a friggin' jigsaw.

            "That's quite an offer, Jeff.  I expect if I need you, you'll be close by."

            Then he trundled into the kitchen and told Kim's mom that I needed to go home or start paying rent, and she said, "Hush, Charles, he'll hear you."  And he said, "He needs to hear me."

            I almost ran into the kitchen with paycheck in hand.  I would have gladly worked two jobs and given him all my money to stay there.  I belonged there.  At Kimberly's, there was Kimberly.  But besides that, the washing machine worked, roaches didn't creep across table tops and skitter across walls; beer bottles and "Fuck you's" didn't land on a naked mother who cried from the assault, but cried just as hard in response to, "Let's throw away these old newspapers."  At Kimberly's, everybody played ball.

            In the days since then, I not only helped her dad cut down limbs, but I carved a walking stick out of one of them.  I keep it in the trunk of my car.  Then, I helped him paint the house, and he finally said I could take the brushes with me, which I did.  For Kim's mom, I had gone to the post office, stopped by the grocery, and taken out the trash.  Some of that trash was pretty nice, like the mailbox Kimberly had decorated in Vacation Bible School.  I cleaned it up, and installed it under my dashboard.  It's handy for paper and pens.

            It seemed to me, sitting in my car that night, that I was a son-in-law in the making.  Her father's reluctance to embrace me as such was simply the reluctance any father would feel toward the man who planned to marry his daughter.  But he was softening, the way Kimberly's mother, who probably knew she had a lesbian for a daughter, already had.  That left
only Kimberly.

            I devised a plan.  It consisted of one rule:  Don't be a prick.  I didn't tell Kimberly that.  I told Kimberly that I wanted, more than anything in the world, to be her friend, which was mostly true, inasmuch as it was a start.

            In the spring, Kimberly returned to school in Montgomery to finish her master's degree in Speech Pathology.  I initiated an independent program called "Know Your Lesbian." 

I read Psychology Today, and I photocopied articles for Kimberly on lesbianism and women's sexuality in general so we could talk about them, increase our knowledge.  I bought her The Joy of Lesbian Sex and a book of Sappho's poetry so that I, we, could understand the existence and expression of love between women.  When the War Widow, a show on PBS about the "romantic friendships" between women that formed while the boys were away fighting World War One, was on, I insisted we watch television without telling her why to surprise her, as a friend.  I stole the library's copy of The Well of Loneliness , and asked her if she identified with the heroine/hero and, if so, how?  If not, why not? 

            She said, "Jeff, I identify more with a cross-section on a slide."

            That might have sounded like a complaint from some people, but I know Kimberly.  I knew she liked the attention.

            Nine months later, with an internship coming up in Birmingham in January, and only three more weeks to live at home, Kimberly decided it was time to go to the bar.  Montgomery had only one gay bar, and I had to almost literally kiss ass to find out about it.  I sat on her bed and talked to her while she put on make-up in the adjoining bathroom.

            "Kimberly," I said, as I fell backwards and stuffed a pillow under my head, "just marry me."

            "Why?"

            "Why not?  We have fun together, we talk together, your parents like me.  I don't care who you sleep with."

            She leaned around the door frame with a mascara brush in her hand.

            "First of all," she said, using the mascara as a pointer, "my parents do not like you.  They tolerate you because you're male, and they live in hope."

            God, she was beautiful.

            "Second, and this is far more important: you'd want to live with me.  I have to hide to get away from you as it is."

            "I'd go out when you had company.  I'd have my own bedroom in the basement."

            "Jeff, you didn't let me finish, did you?  Worst of all, you would touch my things.  I know it sounds harsh, but Jeff, stop shaking your head; you aren't listening when you shake your head."

            She was going out to find a woman.  She was so excited, I couldn't help being excited, too.

            "Tell me the worst of it, Kim.  I'm ready.  I can take it.  I'm a man, remember?"

            "That's probably the worst of it right there, but I was going to say that, sooner or later—“

            I waited.  She was brushing her hair and deciding how many buttons on her shirt to leave undone.  I voted for all of them, she ignored me.

            "Sooner or later you’d want to use my toothpaste, and that would be bad enough, but then you'd want to use the washing machine or the iron or the refrigerator.  Then you'd bring your clothes over and whatever else you own, and everywhere I looked, I would see evidence of you.  Then, one day—you would lie and say it was an accident—you would buy a recliner and your own remote control, and as you signed the charge receipt, you would refer to me as your wife, and, as you know, I would hate that.”  She flipped off the bathroom light and stepped to the center of her bedroom smiling, waiting for me to say she’d done good, she looked good, she could have her pick of women.  “Do you see what I mean, Jeff?  It's impossible."

            I saw all right.  Jesus, God.  I gave her a shadowbox to the shoulder to make her laugh.  “You got it, babe,” I said.  “There’s nobody could turn you down.” 

            On January 3rd, I moved her to Birmingham.  I pulled the U-Haul, she led the way in her '72 Nova.  Her apartment was one of four in a converted house on the southside.  From her screened porch, you could see through the trees, down the mountain, to all the lights of the city.    

            She said, "This could be romantic, don't you think?"  I set up her stereo.

            I tried commuting to Birmingham for almost a week.  It didn't work out.  Travel time allowed Kimberly time to make other plans.  I got a job in the produce department of A&P and found a room halfway between Kimberly's apartment and UAB where she was working.  I called her every day, took her clothes to the laundry, delivered snacks when she was studying, pumped her up when she was sure, as she often was, that she would fail.  I waited for her at the Speech lab, at the Learning Center, at the library, at the bar, the women's bar a classmate had told her about, offered to take her to, but "She's just a friend, Jeff."

            Like so many things, status can change overnight. Every time I showed up, there was a Nissan blocking the drive.  Whenever I called, it wasn't "a good time to talk, Jeff."

            "Who's your buddy, Kim?"

            "You are, Jeff, but I really need to go."

            I could hear dishes clattering in the sink and someone laughing.  The woman could cook.  Handy.

            At the end of the term, with degree in hand, she got a job, "A real job, Jeff!  With money and benefits and vacation and everything!"

            I was proud of her, pleased for her, but mainly glad to hear from her.

            "That's great, Kim.  Where?  UAB?"

            "Baton Rouge."

            Baton Rouge?  Louisiana?  “Well, all right,” I said, “Baton Rouge is good, lots of Cajuns and crawfish.  Now that I'm thinking about it, I've always liked Baton Rouge.  Always have." 

I wanted to put a boot through my head.
            "Don't follow me, Jeff."

            "What are you talking about?"

            "Come on, Jeff.  There aren't that many men smoking pipes in the back corners of women's bars.  There aren't that many men reading water meters at midnight and 2 a.m.  Don't follow me, Jeff."

            I did not follow her to Baton Rouge.  I sent letters.  I sent letters, postcards, telegrams, photographs, Fourth of July cards, birthday cards, Labor Day cards and Halloween cards.  When she opened the twelve inch tall Casper and a six inch heart bounced out to say "Boo!  Guess hoooos missing you," she called me.

            "What's going on, Slick?"

            "Not a thing," I said, "not a thing.  Just waiting for your call.  What's going on with you?"

            "I'm in love, of course."

            "Great.  Anybody I know?"

            "I'm not really in love, but I am seeing someone."

            "How's the sex?"

            "You're crazy.  What are you doing for dinner?"

            "Sucking crawfish heads with you, if you'll let me."

            "Come on," she said, and I did.  I went the way salmon swim upstream, the way some people adopt children, the way others climb mountains, jump out of planes, and go to work every day; I went because I had to, and because I wanted to.  She called me for the same reasons.

            Kimberly boiled crawfish until they turned to nuggets.  I swatted them off her balcony with a nine iron until she relented and took me to New Orleans to eat Shrimp Po' Boys and listen to Dixieland Jazz. I downed a Hurricane at Pat O'Brian's and things seemed to be coming together.  I paid a guy $25 to vacate a seat in Crazy Shirley's, sat down, grabbed Kimberly by the waist, pulled her stumbling onto my lap and whispered in her hair, "You is loved, girl."  Kimberly laughed, untangled my arms and said, "And you is drunk."

            I stayed the weekend, left Sunday afternoon.  In fact, I was backing out as she, the girlfriend, was turning in.  She smiled and waved.  Why not?  She was going in to get some, while I was going to fucking Alabama with a penis the size of her arm flopped over like an old dog worn out from doing nothing.

            "That's all right," I said as she pulled the door closed behind her, "you'll be gone before the warranty expires."

            I was right.  She didn't last long.  I knew she wouldn't because I know Kimberly.  We see the world the same way.  Sex objects are good for two years or thirty thousand miles.  That's it.  Then you've got to have a break.  That's where I come in.  "Who's your buddy?  Who's your pal?"

            I wasn't invited back to Louisiana, but I drove down often enough to know just about exactly when that little mud bug was swept back to sea.  An empty parking space tells a lot.  I drove by, I called and wrote and, a few times, I called her from the Chevron station half a mile from her apartment, told her I was in New Orleans with friends and wanted to stop by before heading back to Alabama.  When my timing was perfect, she said, "Come on."  Other times, I would have done better to sit on the curb and drink sewage: Was that my car in the parking lot last night?  Why didn't my letter have a postmark?  How did my friends get to New Orleans?  Walk? 

            "Give me a break, Kim," I'd say, "give me a fucking break."  And then she would say, "Don't do this, Jeff," and I would want to tear the phone off the wall.

            Five years ago, Kimberly moved to Atlanta.  I switched from A&P produce to B&B construction, and relocated myself to Atlanta a very few days later.

            "I'm not following you," I told her.

            We were standing in the parking lot outside the gym where I had coincidentally, I assured her, happened to notice her Subaru, and thought I might as well wait a second or two and maybe talk to her for a minute, but, "I was not following you."

            "Jeff, where do you live?"

            She had on shorts and a tank top.  Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail.  Her glasses were sliding down her nose.  She was flushed and sweaty.  She looked good.

            "Where do you live, Jeff?"

            "Midtown."

            "Why do you live in midtown, Jeff?  Why do you live in Atlanta?  Why are you here?"

            "You know I've always liked Atlanta.  I don't know, the time just seemed right."

            "The time seemed right because I moved here.  That's not a good reason, Jeff.  That's a sick reason."

            Some women are usually so calm, so composed, so reserved, that when they finally get all worked up, it doesn't matter what they say, it's mesmerizing all the same, like watching energy burn.  She opened her car door and threw her sports bag onto the passenger seat.

            So I said, "Do you want to get some dinner?"

            "I need to leave, Jeff.  I really need to leave, but before I take myself to the presumed safety of my home, I would like for you to tell me exactly where you live.  Can you do that?"

            "Sure I can, but I'd rather show you."

            "Tell me, Jeff."

            "I've got an efficiency on Yorkshire."

            Her teeth were so tight, her cheeks were quivering.

            "Do you know where I live?"

            "I've got an idea."  I tried to look appealingly sheepish, but apparently there was some
malfunction between intent and result because she slammed the door, got right in my face, and got loud, real loud.

            "You son of a bitch.  You know exactly where I live.  For all I know, your stupid apartment is right next door, and you're peering through my windows and rifling my mail.  We've been through this, Jeff.  We've been through this.  Am I right?  Didn't we reach an understanding before I moved to Baton Rouge?  Maybe we didn't.  Maybe I'm insane.  Maybe you lived in the crawl space.  I don't know, but I do know I don't want you to call me, I don't want you to come to my house, I don't want you to send me any mail or flowers or anything.  I want you to leave me alone."

            Well, she was mad.  I hated that because I had hoped to spend some time with her, like old times, you know.  But to help heal the breach, I did move to an attic apartment on Monroe.  That way I wouldn't be living on her street, but I could still see her lights and her driveway from my outside landing.  I left a dozen roses on her front steps with a card saying she was right and I was sorry and I wouldn't do anything wrong again.  She had forgiven me before.

            For a while, I didn't expect to hear from her.  There were too many different cars in her driveway.  I understood that.  Eventually, I sent a few cards, not really that many.  I called occasionally, but not all that often.  I was always cheerful.  We would talk a few minutes, and I'd let her go.  No arguments.  No demands.  It wasn't so bad.  Then the Toyota came.  Then there were two bikes on the patio.  There were fucking flowers in the yard.  Leaves were raked, gutters were cleaned, shutters were painted, and two people left for work every morning and kissed good-bye, and two people came home every night, and there was never a "good time" to talk, and dinner or a movie was always somehow "impossible, Jeff, but I hope you're doing well."

            You hear that shit too many times, you get restless.  People think you're angry, think you've lost sight of what it means to be a good friend, say they're scared of you.  I'm not the one who lost sight.  I never lost sight.  I'm sitting on a ragged sofa the color of leftover hash browns and the texture of sprung wire.  Why?  Because Kimberly and I sat on this sofa in her parent's house about a thousand times.  I have ticket stubs, programs, T-shirts, posters from every concert, movie or play Kimberly and I ever saw together.  They're stored in the old oak desk I inherited from Kimberly when she refurnished her study in teak.  The black walnut coffee table came from Kimberly, as did the 8-tracks and the discarded stereo, the milk crate bookcases, the orange velvet bed rest, and the red bean bag chair.  She was sitting on the bean bag chair the first time a woman kissed her, and not just any woman, but the woman from college, the blue Honda.  As she dragged it to the street, she said, "It's the kiss that matters, Jeff, not a piece of vinyl."  Not a piece of vinyl, not the flannel shirt she used to sleep in, not the half-empty bottle of "Charlie," not the notes left on the windshield.

            Tonight, with the help of my friend Jim Beam, I've been figuring some things out.  I explained to Mr. Beam here that I believed our Miss Kimberly had made an error in judgment.  I said, "Jim, my man, she has become rigid in her thinking, narrow in her view." 

            He said, "It's lack of experience, boy.  She's never been where you are.  Sometimes you have to teach a woman how to say yes."

            And I thought, that’s right.    

            By the time I got to her back door, I expected it to be open; I expected her to be waiting.  I expected her to know that tonight, if I had to, if she made me, I would take the door down.  She had to know.  I tried the doorknob, but it didn't turn.  I tried it again, and then again.  "Goddamn, Kim.  I just want to talk to you," I said and rammed my shoulder against the door.  "I just want to fucking talk to you."

            I kicked a lawn chair off the patio and into the yard.  It bounced.  The fucking chair bounced across wet grass, and the grass fucking glistened.  "This is too much," I said, "too fucking much."  Everything sparkled:  the flowers, the cars, the bikes, the windows, even the fucking moon, and I thought what I always think:  Kimberly should see this.
    

             

© 2004 Teresa Jones, printed by permission of the author.

]]> http://www.storysouth.com/thicket/stories/jones_toeing.html http://www.storysouth.com/thicket/stories/jones_toeing.html Stories Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:15:44 -0600