Safe from the Neighbors (29 page)

While I sat there at my parents’ kitchen table, she told me exactly what she recalled about that night, her voice as coldly matter-of-fact as if she were repeating a speech she’d delivered a hundred times before. And when she finished, she said, “See who you got tangled up with? I bet you wouldn’t have, if you’d known.” She paused—giving me a chance to disagree, I supposed, and when I didn’t the connection got broken without her goodbye.

And I thought that, finally, there could be nothing left to find
out about October 1, 1962. This was a notion I clung to for just over a month.

On Christmas Eve it snowed, something I’d seen in Loring only once before, the year I was seven. I recalled my father hustling me out of bed the next morning, telling me to hurry up and get dressed, there was something outside he wanted to show me. He wouldn’t let me go into the living room, where I knew Santa had left my toys. Instead, he marched me through the kitchen and out the back door. He was carrying the Kodak he’d given my mother a couple of years earlier for her birthday.

When we got outside our house, the bright sunlight glaring off all that white blinded me. My dad told me to shield my eyes with the back of my hand, and that’s what I did as I followed him through the yard, our shoes crunching the crust with every step. At the north end of the house, near the chimney, there were two parallel grooves in the white powder on the ground, maybe four feet apart, and in between them a bunch of heart-shaped indentations. These started right at the base of the chimney and ran across the entire yard before evaporating near a pine thicket that separated our house from the field beyond.

“See?” my father said. “He must’ve landed the sleigh right by the chimney, and after he jumped down off the roof he needed a little bit of runway to take off. Looks to me like they just barely cleared them trees. That would’ve been a mighty mess, wouldn’t it—if he’d crash-landed over there and hadn’t nobody but you got their presents?”

While I stood there staring at the ground, reveling in the thought that something so mysterious could also be so demonstrably factual, my father backed up a few steps and took my picture.

I knew that photo had to be around here somewhere, and on Christmas Eve—sitting alone in the house and watching the big
wet flakes float down while waiting for Ellis to arrive with the ham he’d baked and the bottle of wine he’d promised to bring—I badly wanted to see it.

Until then, I hadn’t gone through my father’s things. His desk drawers were full of stuff that at other times in my life had seemed fascinating: old checkbooks, farm ledgers, letters from former shipmates, newspaper clippings announcing that his granddaughters had made the honor roll, expired driver’s licenses, medical bills and so on. He’d never been any good with a camera—tending to behead his subjects—and I’d never known him to put photos into albums, but my mother had, up until her illness.

I turned on his desk lamp and went through the three drawers quickly, not turning up much that captured my attention except his Citizens’ Council card—frayed at the edges, as though it had been carried in his wallet and sat on for a good many years—and a handful of black-and-white photos: him and my mother waving from their seats on a Ferris wheel, me wearing a black cowboy suit and pointing a silver pistol at the photographer, my grandfather perched on our old Allis-Chalmers.

Just off the den is a long, narrow space dominated by the washer and dryer where I knew he’d been stockpiling junk for years, so I moved in there and pulled the string dangling from the single overhead bulb.

I seemed to remember seeing some fake leather-bound albums on the floor beneath shelves that held a couple hundred paperback westerns and fishing tackle he hadn’t used in forty years. I got down on my knees and looked, but all I saw were several rows of
American Rifleman
, the NRA magazine. I pulled one stack back, though, and behind it were several of those albums, and I dragged them out.

They were full of pictures that had to date into the late ’40s. There were several shots of my mother at about the same age as my daughters were now, her hair long and blowsy, her face
unlined, and there was one of my dad standing behind her and helping her aim a shotgun, both of his hands bracing her right elbow. I laid the albums aside and, hoping there might be more of them, reached behind the other copies of
American Rifleman
to see if anything else was back there, up against the baseboard.

My hand touched something that felt like a spiral ring, and I withdrew a stack of notebooks, some of which were obviously quite old. The one on top, however, looked new. I realized it was the green one I’d spotted back in September on the floor by his chair. I flipped it open and read a few lines, written in my father’s surprisingly small script:

    
He was sitting on the living room floor eating popcorn. He wasn’t worried about nothing and I remember thinking that’s how it should be, a boy ought not have to worry while he was only a boy
.

“I
F THIS COUNTRY
should ever reach the point,” the president was saying, while I sat on the floor with that bowl of popcorn between my legs, “where any man or group of men, by force or threat of force, could long defy the commands of our courts and Constitution, no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.”

All over the South, in living rooms like ours, people were jeering at the image on their TV sets, and my father knew it. But he himself felt no such urge. And it wasn’t because my mother, sitting beside him on the couch and culling pecans, thought JFK was right. It was because he’d just recently come to understand something he never would’ve wanted to admit: he was hardly safe from his own neighbors.

Certainly not from Herman Horton. From 1948, when he began farming with my grandfather, until I left for Ole Miss and he gave up and quit, he had to trudge into the bank and face that old man or another just like him, and even though he always got his furnish, he’d walk out feeling poorer. Nor was he safe from the guy who ginned his cotton, though they attended the same church—if his trailers were standing out in the yard full of cotton as a storm front approached, they’d stay right there while those belonging to people who owned land and had money got
pulled under the shed and onto the scales. It was the same with Feed and Seed, Delta Lumber and Allis-Chalmers.

But most of all, he wasn’t even safe from Arlan Calloway. They used to ride the same bus into Loring after the one-room schoolhouse at Fairway Crossroads closed down, and when they reached their destination they were given the same treatment. Town kids said they smelled bad and made fun of their clothes, their long country vowels, so they ran off together more times than my father could count and, when caught, took their floggings from the principal in tandem. Later on, they joined different branches of the service two days apart, which was the first time they ever disagreed about anything: my dad said he’d rather drown than get shot, while Arlan, who could barely swim, preferred to face bullets and land mines. They wrote each other throughout the war, letters that surely must have stumped the censors:

Back then, according to what my father wrote in the green notebook I found in the laundry room, Arlan wasn’t the kind of person who took. He was the giving sort. He gave the answers to homework if he knew them and you didn’t, and he gave you a bite of his sandwich if he knew his was better than yours. During the war, if you confessed to being scared, he gave you to understand that he was, too, probably even more than you. When I finally found a few of his letters, in a shoe box my dad had stashed in the attic, he came across as an affable young man.
I bet I’m going to die before I can get home
, he wrote in one that had
several passages blacked out.
If I do I sure am sorry if I ever did anything nasty to you. If I don’t then I’m not!

After he came back in one piece and went to work down in south Mississippi, Arlan still wrote my father occasionally, but over time his letters started sounding different. He began to use unusual words and phrases.
Today leaves me bemired in a situation with which I was previously unfamiliar but I don’t mean to bemoan my fate for fact is I have found my beloved and she’s half a foot taller than me. Kissing her’s like climbing that old slash pine at the edge of Daddy’s porch
.

In 1962, by which time he’d been back in the Delta for just over three years, Arlan Calloway owned a good car and a good truck and a new house with a swimming pool, not to mention several hundred acres. He had the respect of the same people who used to say he smelled bad and talked funny. And he also had the best-looking wife anybody around town had ever seen. But before long he didn’t have her all to himself anymore, and a couple of times—after learning that his friend had placed a bid on our land—my father nearly let him in on the secret.
I figured if I told him
, he wrote in the green notebook,
he’d be so ashamed he’d pack up and leave town. But I couldn’t stand the thought of the expression I knew I’d see on his face, it would just about kill him, he loved that woman so much
.

I once heard Dad tell my uncle about riding a train home from California at the end of World War II. He didn’t have a seat when it left Oakland, so he stood at the counter in the dining car, treating himself to several cups of coffee and two different kinds of pie while looking out the window and watching the great San Joaquin Valley slide by. Then the train stopped in Fresno and a lot of people got off, and after it pulled out again he paid up and went to find himself a seat.

He was walking down the aisle, looking for an empty row,
thinking maybe he’d stretch out and grab a few hours’ sleep, when a man reading a newspaper glanced up and broke into a broad-faced grin. “Say, mate. You just got off a ship, didn’t you?” he asked.

My father told my uncle he was wearing civvies he’d bought in a shop on Market Street, that the blues he’d been discharged in were packed away in his duffel bag and stowed in the baggage car. He didn’t know how the man could tell he’d been in the navy, and didn’t want to be badgered with a bunch of questions about where he’d been and what he’d seen, but it wasn’t in his nature to be impolite. So he just said, “Well, sir, what makes you ask?”

The man laughed. “Everybody else that comes down the aisle hangs on to the seat backs for dear life. But you, you’re at home on your feet.”

I didn’t know why that story pleased me so much when I was nine or ten, but it did. And it still does.

On the evening of September 30, 1962, as JFK neared the end of his speech to the nation, my father was decidedly not on his feet. He was sitting there on the couch beside my mother in a house that wasn’t his on land he didn’t own. Across the room, cross-legged on the floor, I was munching away on the popcorn. I can almost see myself as he must have seen me then, a snaggle-toothed kid with a cowlick, fingernails bitten to the quick. I’m staring at a book that lies beside the bowl, the standard first-grade reader,
Fun with Dick and Jane
.

That’s what my father believed I expected from life: fun. Which is what I was supposed to expect, as he saw it, because I was still a boy and was right to think life ought to be fun, that it was a game, and if today you happened to lose, you’d start over again tomorrow with the score tied at zero. My father and Arlan Calloway were having fun when they ran off from school,
slipped into the bakery through the back door, stole an angel food cake and ate it on the roof of Western Auto, and they never once regretted it, not even when they got a good whipping. But as for the fun itself, that night my father hardly recalled what it felt like. He hadn’t had any in years.

He knew I wouldn’t have any myself either, if this winter I had to stand in the yard and watch everything that was mine being thrown into the back of a pickup, as if this were the Dust Bowl and we were the Joads. My boyhood would end then. Even he’d had a longer run than that.

He rose off the couch. Momma, still culling pecans, throwing the rotten ones into the trash can near her knee, asked, “Where are you heading off to, James?” He didn’t answer, but she appeared not to notice. She was listening to the president conclude his speech by saying something about how we had to heal the wounds that were within us so we could turn to the greater crises without.

But the wounds within my father could not be healed. The other crises—well, they were a different matter.

Our phone, at that time, was on a party line. You could have a private line, if you were willing and able to pay for it, but we weren’t able to and, even if we had been, I doubt Dad would’ve been willing. He hated talking on the phone and usually wouldn’t even answer if it rang when no one else was home.