One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] (5 page)

taken to the library and there will

his hideous pink testicles be removed

by the assistant librarian and put

in the terrarium with

the resident spider.

The ethical this,
what we really want, says my friend Harry, is to get the present in the present,
that which is not this
: to feel and transmit.

The felony logs for that period are mostly devoted to burglary and grand larceny, bad checks, attempted escapes, embezzlement; possession of a machine gun for aggressive purposes [correction, possession of three machines guns]. A man killed his wife with a hammer. A man found in possession of a fifty-gallon mash barrel and cooker. And one poor fellow was popped for having unnatural relations with a cow.

The biggest hit is Al Green. And the biggest hitter is Sonny Liston.

The Silver Fox kind of stalled.

A Quaker protesting the war in Vietnam has set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon. He dropped the baby out of harm’s way before he flicked open his lighter.

Phoenix is burning.

In August, Los Angeles burns for days, then Chicago.

Neck bones, 5 lb. a dollar.

The state’s 1929 antievolution law is thought to be impossible to repeal.

V’S HUSBAND runs a notice in the paper: I will not be responsible for any debts other than my own.

When she joined the marchers the husband’s business went directly to hell. When she was arrested. When they burned her car in the parking lot of the station house. While she was in jail her husband bought airtime and denounced her. When she was released she was served with papers for divorce and custody.

People were pointing the bone

at V. Women were supposed

to stay home. People were starving

the husband out. Men were supposed

to be in control. God’s plan

for Big Tree. They tore a page straight

from the book. When he worked

for Philco they sent him

to the Halley Bay. He was shooting

little rockets into the aurora

borealis. That was the last good time,

the International Geophysical Year.

The earth, a greenish blue ball

streaked with clouds, spun on. The sky

filled with streamers of colored light.

I never knew what misery was till I came to Arkansas

+ + +

Or: what if all you wanted was to walk across that field at the fifty-yard line on the arm of a boy wearing his shoulder pads lightly, as would you your faux stole. [O high school, steer clear. You still suck.]

+ + +

Recruiting Office/ Right Turn Here

[I hope no one falls for that one.]

New Homes/ $o Down

[I hope no one falls for that one.]

If your legs are trembling

try getting on your knees

[And they all fell down.]

DEAR ABBY,

Friends of ours have a son who has gone the hippies route. When we inquire about their children [they have others who are married and one who is in the service] should we ask about their hippie son? Or should we just not mention him like he is “dead”? We know that they are pretty sick about the life he leads.

DEAR NEEDS TO KNOW,

Knowing that your friends would be humiliated or embarrassed by the mention of their hippie son, don’t mention him.

Everybody has a problem. What’s yours.

The movie was
Run Wild, Run Free.

Come again.

+ + +

Her daddy, it was V’s one and only boast, naturalized Thomas Merton.

Mother dead by the time she was three.

Father married her mother’s sister.

Life on the farm was lonely with the mute and alcoholic father, the unloving, unlovable stepmother. Her only friend, a black hand named Wordan.

HER FIRST MEMORY is of a racial incident: I am sitting in a tub in an old kitchen. Wordan is washing my back. [N-word] you got soap in my eye, I must have said. Miss Olga, Missy done called me [N-word], Wordan must have said. I hear a German voice, my grandmother’s, Wash her mouth out with soap. And he did, and to this day I hate Ivory Soap. It enrages me. She was close to four, dating by the new 1936 Chrysler her father brought home moments after her mouth was soaped. She does not know where she learned the slur but it would not burst from her again.

There are no memories of her mother. She was thirty-three. V was three. Wordan was taking her mother to the doctor and to buy a new cap for himself. She asked Wordan to drive her home. And he knew she was going to die because she forgot the cap. Coldest day of the year. She wanted the window open.

In Louisville, after the family farm was lost, her house, the house of her father and stepmother’s, was cold cold cold.

HER CHILDHOOD FRIEND AND COUSIN: V always had good-looking legs and loved to sit in the sun.

Never allowed to do anything. About only thing she could do was read. Spent the night with her a couple of times. We put on gloves and wrote a letter to the principal.

Always for the underdog, whether it was a ballgame or a race war.

Always stealing a smoke behind the barn.

Always at the library. Always commingling with books she shouldn’t have. She wrote a report on Le Père Goriot, which was on the librorum prohibitorum list [in effect until 1966].

Ask her to go anywhere. Answer always no. No, I can’t, I have to listen to Bellini. No, I can’t, I have to memorize Browning.

Read from caint to caint.

Oscar Wilde perverted me, she told me as a calcified fact.

The Brontës, Austen, Galsworthy, Cellini’s
Autobiography
[I love it, remarked V with relish, when he is forgiven for all murders past and to come]. Cyril Cusack came to her school to lecture on Hopkins.
Macbeth
came one year as did an all-girl production of
Julius Caesar.

I was totally smitten, she told me, with Mark Antony.

Memorized Cardinal Wolsey’s speech. And recalls being shepherded into the auditorium to watch General MacArthur on a little snowy television mounted onstage.

Wordan kept an alligator. Built a cement pool for it in back. Drain and everything.

V kept a retired fighting cock.

Helmet was her only pleasure.

That wasn’t her favorite bird though. Her favorite bird was a shrike.

Now, you might be praying

for a fence or the ability to read

and write; you might be praying

for a better shift, a 50¢ raise;

you might be praying for a truck

that starts right up, a pair of long legs

or the recovery of a loving mother;

you might be praying for the safety

of your twins riding the bus

with a cold sack lunch

You have to watch hear me

how you carry yourself

Festina lente
my darlings

King called it a disease, segregation. [Sounds contagious.]

Then there’s the consolation of religion; whereas the promise cannot be broken if it applies only to the hereafter and thereafter; whereas herein things can remain in whatever order the ones with the most money and the most ammo say shall they stand.

RADIO MINISTRY: Now the nonrepentant homosexuals, they’re declaring war on the Gospel. Now the infidels are dying from the neck up. Now I didn’t write the Bible. Now your old-line churches are losing members. Now if I’m going to be saved, I have to be saved from something, the vile and the dirty and your low-downs. It’s not like joining the Rotary Club. Salvation, it’s a heaven or hell issue.

Now V, she wanted something

entirely different:

To feel and transmit/ The ethical this

that is not that

The Gospel helps some bear the pain/ helps

bury the hate

The swimming pool is also buried therein

and therefore this

Petition for relief/ Awaken to the task

Call for calm/ Waver never

Forever forward/ Backwards never

it says on the ex-Invader’s machine

The dirt up there

on the Ridge is called loess

Windblown stuff

good for growing peaches

Hemingway penned

some of
A Farewell to Arms

on the Ridge when he was married

to Pauline [wife number two]

The marchers make fifteen miles a day in spite of the heat

I think my arches have fallen

says the Invader to the stringer

Oh yeah, I remember her, she celebrated all her kids’

birthdays on the same day

I met the retired welding teacher at the Colonel’s. We were the only customers. He had a big soft drink. We sat in the lipstick red booth. He was a veteran. He thought he would never come back to Big Tree, but he did:

This was his sky, his clouds rucked up over the fields. The blackbirds flashing their red shoulders. His country. He gave all the credit to God and His plan.

He was drafted and got arrested right before he went to boot camp, stops to add: That wasn’t the first thing we did though.

Before he left for Nam, there was something he had to do.

He and Toad and some other buddies, they were going to that bowling alley. They were going bowling. Toad had a truck, and come Sunday, come Sunday evening they were going.

There were four of us. And when we came over the rise to where you see the bowling alley on your left, there were more white people than I ever saw in my life.

Someone knew, someone told.

The bowling alley is long gone. Burned. I cruise over the rise in my rental car. There is an electrical and plumbing supply place. A collection of prefab structures.

It could not look more ahistorical.

I think of him coming over the rise, ten thousand times since then, and every single time, sensing a turbulence in the air above the surface of his skin. The way when my daddy took us back to his homestead, and we would pass a certain farmhouse, he would say, There was a murder in that house when I was a boy. It caused a great commotion.

Some thing happened on that spot. No one was shot. No one got strung up, but belligerent men glommed in a parking lot.

Some one among them said, We aren’t going to do anything to you. Whoever it was that spoke was heeded, a narrow channel formed through which the young African American men could go forward to the glass door. They are cursed, spat upon, mocked, threatened. Then they hear a tremendous crash. The truck, Toad’s truck has been hove on its side. But the one of their number in front, maybe James, opens the door, walks inside, picks up a ball [it had to be a ladies’ ball, blue and speckled like a mockingbird’s egg] and lets it drop down a lane or down the gutter [he does not linger to see if a pin falls]; turns and walks out. The four move as one to the overturned truck and hoist it upright, climb aboard, not a word spoken. Toad pops the clutch.

After that, was the bowling alley integrated.

After that, it burned.

After that, we tried to integrate the lunch counter at Harmon’s.

What happened.

They tore out the lunch counter.

The marchers are resting in the city park. They dine on neck bones, black-eyed peas, and soft drinks.

No incidents have been reported.

Well, what about so-and-so, I say. He’s not a bad sort.

Yes, but a well-meaning white man, he can just go so far. So we beat him at the polls. It was time. It did not mean we would get a better man for the job, but we would get shed of the skin of the injuring parties. It is something that had to be done.

I ask if he has any memory of any good-intentioned whites.

Had a little old cleaning job. An older man came in while I was sweeping. He called me [N-word]. Bawled me out for stirring up dust. The owner came from out behind the counter, moving fast-like and close-up. Don’t you ever call him out of his name again, you hear me. That was a stand-up moment he would not forget. He could not recall any other.