A Death On The Wolf (38 page)

“
I love you, Nelson Gody,” she said as I leaned up and stepped back from the car.

“
I love you, Mary Alice Hadley,” I responded, and closed the car door.

Sachet got in the backseat on the other side and Aunt Charity got behind the wheel and started the engine. Even though I knew she could not see me, I waved to Mary Alice as Aunt Charity backed the car down the drive. But as if by some connection between us, where sight was unnecessary, Mary Alice raised her hand and waved back at me. And with that final wave, I lost my battle with the tears.

Frankie had come off the porch and was standing beside me. I turned and embraced him and he put his arms around me and held me. I cried like a baby on his shoulder. The summer that had changed all our lives forever was over.

Epilogue

August 22, 2009

It’s been forty years to the day since I waved goodbye to Mary Alice in Aunt Charity’s front yard and cried in my best friend’s arms. After that summer, Frankie never did return to live with his family. When his mother and brother were released from the hospital, they moved back to Philadelphia where her family was from. A year later, Daddy talked to Preston Marks to see if there was anything further he needed to do to retain permanent legal custody of Frankie and Preston said no, the ex parte order stated that it would remain in effect “until further order of this court,” which meant Daddy had custody until a new court order was issued saying otherwise.

Frankie thrived having Daddy as his surrogate father. And Aunt Charity’s doting on him gave him a mother figure like he had never known at home. To the extent that anything good came from Frankie’s encounter with Peter Bong, it squelched whatever nascent sexual adventurism had been growing within him. As we progressed through high school, Frankie developed a close circle of friends that he trusted enough to tell that he was gay (a term that was unknown to us back then). He had two brief and discrete relationships that I knew of, one with a boy in our school and one with a member of the football team of our archrival school. Once we were in college, Frankie had a steady relationship with a student from Scotland named Graham Sinclair that lasted from our sophomore year until we graduated and Graham returned to the U.K. I’ve often thanked God that Frankie never succumbed to the reckless sexual promiscuity that was rampant in the gay community of the late 70s and early 80s and which led to the death of so many from AIDS.

Frankie never mended his relationship with his mother, but he and Mark are still close to this day. In 1972, on his nineteenth birthday, as a freshman in his first semester at Ole Miss, Frankie got a card from his brother and they began to write to each other. Eventually, when Frankie was convinced that Mark’s overtures were genuine, they arranged a meeting during spring break. It was the first time they’d seen each other in three years. Frankie and I are still best friends. He will tell anyone that will listen that whatever measure of success he has enjoyed he owes to the Gody family who took him in and loved him for who he was with all his flaws. And he has been quite successful. After graduating with his business degree from Ole Miss, he went to a culinary school in New York. Today he is a manager and the head chef at the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in Biloxi.

My sister is married now with two children. My nephew is a rising senior in high school and my niece is about to graduate from Belhaven College in Jackson. Sachet and her husband live in the house that Daddy built on the spot where our house was destroyed by Camille.

As for me, I went to Ole Miss too. Frankie and I were classmates, both graduating with honors in 1976. I majored in English and when Frankie packed up and headed for New York to learn how to be a chef, I left for New Jersey to attend Princeton Theological Seminary to study for my Master of Divinity degree. Of course, I didn’t go alone. My wife and 13-month-old son went too.

The promise that I made to Mary Alice, that I would drive to Poplarville every weekend and bring her back to Bells Ferry—well, I kept that promise. I kept it for the next five years, except during the summers, when, just as she’d done the summer of ’69, she would come to live with us, staying at Aunt Charity’s. We were married at Bells Ferry Presbyterian Church the summer before I started my junior year at Ole Miss. Frankie Thompson was my best man. Beau Hadley gave the bride away and Mary Alice asked Aunt Charity to be her matron of honor. Mary Alice and I have been married 35 years now and our only child, Nelson Patrick Gody, Jr., just turned 33. He is married, has a son and two daughters, lives in Jackson, and is a partner at the law firm where Mary Alice’s brother was clerking in 1969. Beau has been a judge on the Mississippi Court of Appeals since 1995, being one of the first judges appointed to that court.

I finished my divinity degree at Princeton in 1979 and after pastoring several churches all over Mississippi, I finally wound up right back here at the church I’d grown up in, Bells Ferry Presbyterian Church, where I’ve been the pastor for nearly twenty years now. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was to preach Aunt Charity’s funeral not long after accepting the call to this pulpit.

Daddy is still going strong at 82 years old. He lives with Mary Alice and me in Aunt Charity’s house, which she bequeathed to me and my sister when she passed away in 1990. By “going strong,” I really do mean that literally. Daddy doesn’t look his age and still rides his motorcycle regularly, and I ride with him whenever I can. And speaking of motorcycles, back in ’69, when Frankie spent the night with me, the day when he’d almost made a fool of himself with Beau, I was reading one of Daddy’s motorcycle magazines after Frankie and I had gone to bed and I noticed the road test on the new Honda 750 had been all marked up by my father. Well, there was a reason Daddy had marked it up. He had put down a deposit on a 1970 model that was scheduled to be delivered that September. But after he assumed the responsibility of taking care of Frankie, he knew he couldn’t afford it so he canceled the order and lost his deposit of $200. I found out all this at Christmas that year and Daddy made me promise not to tell Frankie. I kept that promise until just before Daddy’s sixtieth birthday in 1987. When I told Frankie that story, he broke down and cried. I had an ulterior motive for finally revealing this secret to my best friend. I had located a fully restored 1970 750 in candy red, the color that Daddy had ordered, and I was planning to give it to him for his birthday. But I got to thinking what a nice gesture it would be if it came from both me and Frankie, especially if I could tell Daddy that Frankie knew why he was getting this bike nearly twenty years after he’d first ordered it. I did not ask Frankie about this joint gift with the intent of him helping pay for the bike, but that’s what he insisted on doing. He wanted to pay for half of it, and he reminded me that was what we had done when we were boys and got joint gifts for Daddy or Aunt Charity at either Christmas or for birthdays. Daddy still rides the old 750 on occasion, but the bike he really enjoys getting out on is his 2007 Road King. I have a new Super Glide, which has caused not a few tongues to wag among the older members of the Bells Ferry community, for I’m the first preacher in Bells Ferry of any denomination that anyone can ever remember who rides a motorcycle to the Wednesday night prayer meetings—or anywhere else, for that matter.

The Studebaker GT Hawk remained my trusted mode of transportation all the way through seminary and into my first pastorate. It finally gave up the ghost in 1981. I sold the car to a man in Nashville who later restored it, and for years it made the rounds to various car shows. It is now on permanent display at the Studebaker museum in South Bend, Indiana.

And, yes, I am a Freemason now. I joined O. D. Smith Lodge #33 in Oxford while a student at Ole Miss. When Mary Alice and I finally settled back here in Bells Ferry, I transferred my membership and for nearly two decades I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in Lodge with my father and working the Craft that did so much to shape his character, and consequently mine.

As for the white sand beach on the Wolf River, where, until the summer of ’69, Frankie and I had spent many an hour swimming and playing, we never set foot down there again. We abandoned our cabin and never went back after that day because of the horrible memories associated with it. Whenever I’m driving that way and cross the river, I sometimes catch myself glancing over at the spot where the path Frankie and I cut into the woods once was. I sometimes wonder if our tiny cabin is still down there. I sometimes wonder if the only death on the Wolf that day was the death of my childhood or if the man I shot died there too.