Safe from the Neighbors (17 page)

“Speeds it up?”

“No, though that’s a popular misconception. Research shows that it actually causes it to slow.”

“Whose research?”

“Mine.”

He was looking down at her, and she was looking up at him, right into his eyes, each of them apparently so focused on the other that for a moment it was as if the rest of us had left the room. I was used to seeing Jennifer look at him that way, and back when I was his intern the two high school girls who helped deliver papers gave him the same rapt attention, though he was almost fifty.

“I’ll bet Luke would pour you a glass of wine if you asked him,” he finally said.

“I’ll pour you several glasses. As many as you want.”

She let go of his hand. “One will do,” she said. “I’d hate to show my greed the first time at a new place.”

The main course was lamb rubbed with mint and basil. Jennifer chose to roast it, rather than trust me to grill it, given how many dinners I’d burned in the past. My lack of zeal for cooking was one of the things that had come between us. She had little tolerance for bad food, and before Candace and Trish became adept in the kitchen, she’d often come home from a long day at
work to find frozen French fries stinking up the place while I read in the backyard with weenies burning on the grill.

Late that afternoon, after popping the lamb in the oven, she’d gone to the mailbox and plopped a wad of stuff, mostly junk mail, on the kitchen counter. A few minutes later, while making myself a cup of coffee, I glanced down and noticed she’d gotten a letter from
Tin House
, one of the journals she subscribed to, and the envelope had been opened. Her name and address had been typed, so it didn’t look like a renewal notice.

She was sitting there at the table, drinking a cup of tea and reading the
Commercial Appeal
, and her cheeks had more color in them than I’d seen for a long time. They were glowing.

“Did you get a poem accepted?”

She raised the cup and took a sip, then swallowed and set it back down, her eyes not once leaving the paper. “Actually, they took three.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t know you’d be that interested.”

“Are you serious? Three poems at once?”

“Well, it happens like that sometimes. Until now, it just never happened for me.”

I walked over and put my arm around her and was amazed, once again, at how small and brittle her bones were. She felt breakable. “That’s a great outfit, too, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m afraid so.”

Now, sitting opposite her at one end of our dining room table, with Maggie and Ellis on one side and Ramsey and Selina on the other, I considered her response. She’d just experienced her greatest success. What was there to be afraid of? The only answer I could come up with was that she probably feared she’d never succeed again.

I’d recently noticed how poorly I understood her. Having convinced myself that I knew what Maggie wanted—passion and excitement—I still couldn’t fathom what Jennifer’s hopes
were, beyond the urge to see her poems in print and get her daughters through college so she could quit that onerous job at Delta State. She was as much a puzzle to me as the poems she wrote, which often were impenetrable.

The meal she’d prepared was her second great success of the day, drawing compliments from everybody and a request from Selina for the recipe. Jennifer promised to e-mail it, and Maggie asked if she could send it to her as well. While I watched, she wrote her address on the back of a business card Jennifer handed her, then said they should go out for coffee one of these days. Rather than get sick at that prospect, I actually felt the warm glow of pride.

We’d finished the lamb and started on our salads when Ramsey thought of something he said he’d meant to ask earlier: “That institute you mentioned up at Duke, Maggie? Was it named for Terry Sanford?”

She nodded. “The full title is the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy.”

“He was one fine man,” Ramsey said. “Ask me, he was about as good a person as you could find in the South at that time. I bet you’d agree with that assessment, wouldn’t you, Ellis?”

I was sure Ellis admired Sanford. He admired all the great Southern liberals—folks like Hugo Black, Lister Hill and Maury Maverick—so it surprised me when he frowned and said, “Not entirely.”

It surprised Ramsey, too. “No?”

“He could afford the positions he took on race, Ramsey,” Ellis said, “because he knew the tobacco industry would do everything in its power to keep him in office—and in North Carolina, if you had Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds behind you, that was about all that really mattered. My wife died of lung cancer, and Sanford moved heaven and earth to keep the surgeon general’s warning off cigarette packs. The line of his I’ll always remember is, ‘We don’t label automobiles dangerous, though
they’re one of the greatest killers.’ I wouldn’t be too quick to grant him sainthood.”

Maggie speared a shred of lettuce. “Who
would
you grant sainthood?”

“Well,” I interrupted, “I’d nominate Ellis himself.”

“Oh, I’m far from saintly,” he said.

I laughed. “Bullshit. Saints are associated with miracles, and it’s miraculous you managed to survive the Sixties. Any number of people in this town would’ve liked to kill you.” I assumed everybody could tell I was joking.

And everybody could, except him. “I never
performed
any miracles,” he said.

“Tell us something you did,” Maggie said, “that wasn’t saintly. What was your Philip Morris moment?”

Ellis has never been at a loss for words. He’d fired fusillades of them at Ross Barnett, Byron de la Beckwith, Clinton Finley and the Citizens’ Council, even though it was not unreasonable to fear they might fire back with something more than rhetoric. But that night he just sat there stiffly, staring at a spot somewhere to the left of Selina’s head.

To fill the uncomfortable silence, I said, “Speaking of unique moments, here’s one. This afternoon, Jennifer had not one but three poems accepted by
Tin House
, one of the best magazines in the country.”

That lifted Ellis out of whatever dark mood he’d lapsed into. “My God, child,” he said. “And you managed to keep quiet about this all evening?”

“I was going to give you a copy when it comes out. They said I’ll be in the spring issue, right around your birthday.”

He lifted his wineglass and proposed a toast, and after we’d all had a sip he said, “You need to bear in mind that I’m nearly eighty. When spring comes, you might well be composing my epitaph. So why don’t you go get those poems and read them for us right now?”

Her cheeks were about the color of the Cabernet we’d been drinking, and she shook her head, but by then a chorus was demanding that she read to us before dessert. Finally, she got up, went into the study and came back with a single sheet of paper. “All right,” she said, “here’s one of them.” She sat down, took another swallow of wine, then began reading.

For a moment, nobody said anything. I, for one, didn’t know what to say, but then I’ve never felt comfortable commenting on her work. And this poem seemed so relentlessly dark I was stunned.

“Goddamn, Jennifer,” Ramsey said. “You got a lot of pain packed into that thing. Must’ve used the word
hurt
at least three or four times.”

Selina just sat there looking embarrassed.

Ellis said it seemed fragmented to him, like a lot of contemporary poetry, but he liked the imagery and thought the poem as a whole was very well executed.

As for Maggie, she reached across the table, touched Jennifer on the wrist and said, “I’ve felt like that myself. Though I could never express it so beautifully.”

“Well, it’s a persona poem,” Jennifer said, as if to preempt the suggestion that those emotions were actually hers.

“I know it is,” Maggie said, still touching her wrist. “And there have been a great many days when that persona was mine.”

“Mine, too,” Ramsey said. “Last summer, when my French teacher drifted off like gin smoke over tall cotton—man, I felt like I had a stone around my
own
neck. And then here comes Maggie to save my worried ass.”

Everybody laughed, and before long we were toasting Jennifer once more, then raising our glasses to
Tin House
, Ole Miss, Duke University, Walt Whitman, Bennie Thompson, Thurgood Marshall and Maury Maverick.

It’s fitting, isn’t it, that this particular evening should end on an image?

We all said our goodbyes, exchanging drunken embraces, the one Maggie gave me punctuated by her fingernails digging into the small of my back. I told Jennifer I’d handle the dishes, and she said okay, she was whipped anyway, and went off to bed. I toted plates and glasses, cups, saucers and silverware into the kitchen, then gave everything a good rinse and stacked it all in the dishwasher. You lose track of time when you’re drunk—I do, anyway—but I’m sure a good fifteen or twenty minutes passed before I punched the button to start the wash and turned out the kitchen light.

The last thing I do every night is check the front door. I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember, all the way back to childhood, even though I knew my dad had already locked up. This night I checked the dead bolt and lock chain and then, for no reason I can name, pressed my eye to the peephole.

The Mercedes was parked on the opposite side of the street, the lights off, with no sound of an idling engine, no exhaust visible from the tailpipe. Gradually my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could make out her silhouette. While I watched, she brought her hands to her face. A flame flickered and disappeared. There was just a single pinpoint of light, the orange glow of a cigarette between the lips of a woman who doesn’t smoke.

“S
OMETIMES THINGS JUST HAPPEN
.”

My father said that with perfect equanimity, without the slightest trace of anger or exertion, though when he spoke those words he was holding me a couple feet off the ground while I beat the air with my fists and tried to kick him, his right arm wrapped around my chest like a piece of steel.

The muley-headed Jersey my grandfather called Mollie stood some distance away, in front of the pump house, where he’d kept the grain he fed her and the other cows. He’d owned three, and except during the winter, when he drove them into the barn at night, they were always in the pasture behind the house.

This was around the time the USDA declared fresh milk unsanitary and I began drinking it from cartons that my mother bought in town. Grandpa never made the transition, and it wasn’t purely a question of economics. When I asked him why he went to so much trouble—getting up early to milk them, toting the bucket inside, straining the liquid through cloth cut from an old flour sack—he smiled and said, “Fresh cow milk’ll put lead in your pencil.” I couldn’t see the connection between milk and lead pencils, but he just laughed and said that one day I would.

My father had grabbed me because a few moments earlier, he’d returned from the funeral home and caught me shooting Mollie with my BB gun. The first time I hit her, she just stepped
to the side, as if she’d barely felt it, and this enraged me. I got a little closer and tried to shoot her in the face but missed three or four times in a row, then went back to shooting her in the flank, where I’d have a broader target. After five or six BBs pinged her, she began to snort and toss her head.

I didn’t hear my dad drive up, didn’t hear the truck door slam, didn’t know why suddenly the BB gun lay on the ground where I’d been standing. “Easy,” he said. “Shooting that poor animal won’t bring your grandpa back.”

“I don’t care,” I hollered. “Somebody’s got to pay.”

“She’s not a somebody. She’s a something. And making her pay won’t do a bit of good.”

A few days earlier, my grandfather had gone out to feed the cows and discovered that Mollie had somehow nosed open the latch on the pump house, dragged a burlap sack out and eaten every last bit of grain. Then, for good measure, she relieved herself on it.

This was undoubtedly what made him mad enough to haul off and kick her. The problem was that she moved and he missed, and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back, all the wind gone from his lungs, his leg turning purple and growing hot. Though he didn’t know it at the time and managed to make it home under his own power and return to the field the following day, he’d dislodged a blood clot that had formed in his leg. It was headed straight for his heart.

When I finally got tired and quit thrashing, my dad let me down but kept pressing my body against his. “Sometimes things just happen,” he said again, as if they’d happened to him over and over. “It may be like the song says—that we’ll understand it all in the sweet bye and bye—but right now there ain’t no point in wondering why. Your grandpa’s dead, and poor old Mollie here’s alive.”