Spinning Dixie (24 page)

I stayed in my room for the remainder of the day, railing against my nature—that torrent pulling me toward my own core, which just happened to be within the breast of another human being. I was unable to envision a scenario in which I could continue living without being near Claudine. But I stayed in my room, Odysseus tied to the mast, while Claudine did damage control with the Houses of Polk and Hilliard.

“Now, would you listen to this sackload of information,” Elijah said, reading
The Tennesseean
on the steps of the great house the following morning.

“A man flew upside down in a plane for four hours, nine minutes, and five seconds. A man flying upside down like a dumb-ass, and the newspaper prints it like it's an achievement. Is this what the future brings?”

“You're ornery today, Elijah.”

“The best assistant I ever had is leaving me and I'm supposed to be singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic'?”

“You're starting to talk like my grandfather with your questions.”

“He's not the worst man I ever met. Far from it.”

I couldn't meet Elijah's eye.

“What did they tell you, Elijah?”

“Just that you had to be off today. Nothing more.”

“If you hear anything bad about me, will you promise not to believe it?”

“Is this about you and Claudie getting all hot and bothered in the hay?”

“Did you tell anybody you thought that?”

“Who am I going to tell, son? Are you telling me nothing went on up there?” He pointed back toward the carriage house.

“What went on up there is what you think went on up there.”

“Only the dumbest idiot in all the world couldn't figure that out.”

“It's not that. You may hear that I stole something.”

Elijah winced and swatted with his hand. “My Lord, you didn't steal nothing!”

“How do you know?”

“I know a lost cause when I see it. Of my two sons here, you're not the prodigal.”

“I'm sorry. The prodigal?”

“The Bible story, son. The boy who goes away after he squanders his inheritance? From Luke?”

“Oh. New Testament.”

“I see, you don't know that story. Well, you read up on that, you hear? But you're not the prodigal. Naw, you're a worker. You don't see that boy, Six, helping out fixing the church, do you?”

“That was my job.”

“Yes, it was. And what was Six's job?”

“Being a kid.”

“Tell me, son, when were you a kid? Don't answer. You just read old Luke. See about the prodigal. Go on, now.”

 

After I said good-bye to a polite, but poker-faced Petie, Six met me outside of the church where I wanted to do one more walk-through. I explained away my departure with vague references to having to straighten out a housing issue at Dartmouth. I don't know if Six bought it. The church was pristine. I had completed the interior painting. The Polks would be worshipping here soon. Elijah said that they had considered air-conditioning, but decided against it because it would alter the aesthetics of the structure. For that reason, they would avoid using the church in the summer.

“This is all you,” Six said.

“No, Elijah was the mastermind.”

“Yeah, but you did it. You cleaned up history, fella.”

Six put his arm around me. “You know, Jonah, I don't mean to sound like a homo or anything, but you're the closest thing to a brother I ever had in my whole life. Or a brother-in-law. I don't know.”

“I don't know about a being a brother-in-law, but I was lucky you were here.”

“I haven't said anything to Claudie about the fight with J.T.”

“Thanks.”

Six broke into an elementary school snicker. “But, man, I've never seen anybody fight like that in my whole life. I told my grandfather every detail.”

I cringed. “What did he say?”

“He made me tell it to him three times!”

Six walked me up to the mansion and shook my hand. I hugged him. He probably thought it was weird, but I had to.

Indy appeared, faking jauntiness. He swatted Six in the behind and sent him off. Six bounced away as if I'd be back next week or something. Here I was, little Jonah Eastman of South Jersey, staring up at Indy Four, this mountain of history. He appeared to be only slightly less tortured than he had been yesterday, just more docile, resigned to his charge of the Polk legacy. I imagined it must have been the way a general felt after sending good men to their deaths: horror at the loss, but pride that a larger crusade was being served. If only I knew what that end was. If only someone else could be the one to pay the price.

“Indy,” I said, “I am sorry that your ring disappeared. I did nothing wrong, but, still, I am grateful that you let me stay here. I know you disapprove of me.”

A gemstone tear slid down Indy's cheeks. It was a point of honor for me not to cry.

“Now, Jonah. I don't dislike you,” he said wiping beneath his glasses. “I admire your pluck, though I suspect you've put more than one thing over on me. You sure do have a conspiratorial imagination, seeing all kinds of goblins when there's nothing there, but, hell, boy, you are what we were.”

“Why do you believe I would steal from you?”

Indy waved his hands around in front of him, and had a few false starts with a response. He finally settled on the following nonanswer: “Because, son, it's impossible. You two are children. You are special children, but children. Claudine is in love with the past, as we all are here. This happens to young girls who never get to know their fathers. They didn't bring my boy back from Khe Sanh, you know. Never found him. He's not even buried in our cemetery. It's just a marker. Claudine's life will be about restoration. She can't help it; it's in her blood. You stand square in the way of that. She'll do what she needs to do to keep Rattle & Snap alive. Not you, though.”

Indy Four puffed out his chest as if he were a stage actor playing Indy Four.
What did any of this have to do with his stolen ring?
I thought of Deedee calling me “Jonah
Godol
,” and considered what she might have been getting at. Which was this: As the 1970s—a decade where we were all marinated in our own specialness—receded, perhaps there were greater sands shifting in the universe than the ones between my toes at the Jersey Shore.

“Your life, Jonah, is over those hills. You'll bury your past the way we did, so lasses like Petie can celebrate those few generations that made the South, so that she can tell her sorority sisters what she married into. You're going to make your own plantation, once you forgive that old man of yours. Many great families got their start in something unholy. I'm afraid Rattle & Snap will be your phantom life, the life you didn't lead. We've all got that phantom life that spooks us. It's the tax on having a romantic spirit.”

I wanted to tell Indy that I knew very well the tax on a romantic spirit, but what exactly was the dividend? I was further tempted to bring up the unkosher Hilliards, but I had caused this giant to suffer, however unwittingly, so I kept silent. The circumstances surrounding the elusive arrangement between the two families probably distressed Indy more than I would ever understand. The encroachment of the Hilliards was an intangible monument to what Indy must have regarded as his failure as a Polk—his “phantom life.” Booting me out of Tennessee was the closest he'd come to making a strategic military decision.

I listened, unblinking, as Indy Four tugged at his fingers. He held my hand to keep it from shaking and bent down toward me. He began to speak quietly, his trademark pomp deflated.

“Claudie's father would have liked you, Jonah. He had one heck of a business mind, my son. Claudie has his kind of mind. I'm afraid I'm not much for business, and maybe that's what…hell, I don't know. I'm going to try to live long enough to watch your career. Dammit, I will try.” I felt a quick rush of promise. “It just won't be here, son.”

Indy turned and saluted me. Then he retreated inside his history.

 

I stood with Claudine on the front portico facing north. A black hole, the cosmic kind, bobbed through my stomach, sucking out vital energy that I needed. Neil Young whined “After the Gold Rush” from Six's window. Something about “Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.” My delusion was that something biblical was happening, although I knew too little about the Bible to determine what. Claudine was quiet but tender toward me, as if some grotesque, pulsating creature creeping up on her had been vanquished. Or perhaps it was her confidence that this was so definitively The End. Everything that we shared had two poles, which made me think how I hadn't once looked at a map this summer in an attempt to see where I was.

The mansion's dual front doors were hooked wide open so that any curious Polks could have witnessed Claudine's unrepentant possession.

“As long as I live,” she said, “I'll look out this way and see you riding up on Spilled Kiss the same way that Sallie Polk waited for James to come home from the war.”

“I'm not going to war, Claudine,” I said.

“But those men up there where you're from—”

“Mickey said it's safe.”

“Not for us, Jonah.”

“I love you, Claudine.”

“Oh, Jonah, no.”

Claudine kissed me and lightly bit my upper lip. She did it on purpose. To please the lover and punish the thief. She was angry, but not rabid enough to hurt me too badly. I felt a light whip of wind on the open wound.

The sky was a humidity-stricken, weak aqua. A brilliant streak of orange sun, perhaps the vestiges of a long-faded comet, had wedged itself between the foothills and the clouds. I read it as hope—hope that perhaps there was a life beyond Rattle & Snap, something that I found hard to imagine at this moment.

An autumnal breeze blew across the portico. It was strong enough to make the front doors creak against the hooks that bound them. A singular puffy cloud that looked like a bust of Elvis, pompadour and all, slid across the horizon. I felt a short blast of excitement at the second sight of the northerly foothills. The jackpot scent of ivy moved me north.

I climbed into Carvin' Marvin's Cadillac. He wasn't pleased to be back so soon. His ropelike hands, which could have been made from Polk hemp, assumed the ten and two o'clock position on the steering wheel. My Supertramp eight-track cassette “Breakfast in America” dribbled out of the mouth of the audio system. Deedee had probably made Marv bring it. My Eden disappeared along a treeline beneath the Elvis cloud. I became angry with my home state's balladeer, Bruce Springsteen. It was he, not Elvis, who should have been looking over me, strumming out The Ballad of Jonah and Claudine. I felt owed a ballad.

I remained composed throughout the ride back to the Shore, but I registered Mount St. Helens behind my eyes. I felt the abyss of loss, the sting of betrayal, and an aborted sense of wonder that I never found out what had been glowing in the night sky.

2005

“Are we not men?” the giant repeated, citing a popular New Wave song from when we were so much younger.

It took me a few moments to get my heart rate under control, stop the icehouse from spinning, and remind myself that a belief in the supernatural was more likely a reflection of whatever chemicals were coursing through my brain than actual events. Independence Polk VI, or Six, had grown up to precisely resemble his grandfather, Indy Four. The resemblance was almost spiteful, as if to remind the Upper West Side of Central Park that Dixie could rise in any millennium it pleased. Even Six's shoulder-length hair conveyed defiance.

Six helped me up, and I answered his lyrical question: “We are Devo.” He bear-hugged me off the ground. He wasn't as monstrously tall as he had initially appeared against the backdrop of the sun. Maybe six two.

“You always bring the entertainment, don't you, gangster boy?”

“Special events are my thing.”

“Well, let's kill the fatted calf, the prodigal son is back, baby!”

I backed up higher on the pitch of the roof in order to meet Six eye to eye. “Yes, but which one of us is he?”

Six and I sat on the roof.

“This is some crazy stuff,” he said, taking in the swelling landscape of warriors and media.

“Well, Bud, you wanted to be a rebel. Time to be a rebel.”

“Think I can command a division like this?”

“They're here,” I said. “You don't have any choice.”

Six scanned the battlefield.

“So what do you make of our reunion?” I asked. I was fishing. I wanted to hear that I was family. I wanted him to say that he knew about Claudine, Sallie, and me.

“The reenactors?”

“No. Uh, I haven't seen your sister in all these years—”

“Oh, yeah, that's great,” he said. “Great.”

“Sallie came to the White House,” I prodded.

“Right, Claudine told me,” Six said after a beat. His eyes dragged along the clouds. I thought I saw his Adam's apple quiver. Maybe not. I'd drop it. Too much too soon, perhaps. “Well, guess who just showed up since you've been lying around out here?” Six cackled. “The Tennessee National Guard.”

 

The Maury County Airport had an average of seventy-nine landings per day. Today, the airport logged one hundred and forty-two landings. Many of the aircraft were owned or leased by media organizations, such as EBS News. Nashville-based helicopter-leasing services were experiencing an unprecedented boom in business. Both print and broadcast media were clamoring for aerial shots of what EBS's Liz Marsh referred to as a “Confederate Woodstock.”

Fifty National Guardsmen were lined up at the outside gates of the plantation. Technically, they were not on Polk grounds. According to the “information officer” being interviewed by Marsh, the National Guard was called out as a response to a large “unscheduled assembly.” It was a precaution. The Confederates weren't so sure, and began lining up on the other side of the fence facing the guardsmen. It was a peculiar display—the guardsmen in their dark, menacing gear and automatic weapons, and the Confederate reenactors in their antiquated costumes and toothpick-ish rifles. The scene appeared to depict storm troopers about to vaporize a local theater troupe.

EBS News had begun promoting short segments entitled “Rebel Voices,” in which one of the Confederate reenactors would address Liz Marsh's seminal question. “What brings you to Rattle & Snap?” Marsh asked a lanky reenactor of about thirty, as the “Rebel Voices” logo (which incorporated a black-and-white photo of an attractive woman in a Confederate uniform raising a fist) appeared, and the signature
pa-rum-pum
drumbeat sounded.

“Them,” Lanky said, pointing to the National Guard. “They want something that doesn't belong to them.”

“Do you actually think you can stop them?” Marsh asked.

“No, but we can get 'em thinking, now can't we?”

Marsh moved to a female Confederate. “What's your name and where are you from?”

“Kay Starr from Atlanta.”

“What brings you here?”

“I started off wanting to do a reenactment,” Starr said. “I didn't know I'd be fighting a real war.”

“Help me out here, Kay,” Marsh asked. “Is this a protest, or not?”

“You're darned right it's a protest.”

“But what's at stake? Civil rights? Secession?”

“What's at stake is the freedom to be who we are.”

“And who are you?”

“We're people who want to assemble.”

“Nobody's stopping you.”

“They are,” Kay Starr said, pointing to the National Guard. “They'll probably shoot us down like at Kent State.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I'm not a mind reader.”

“They haven't set foot on the property.”

“Then why are they here?”

“The government's got its own agenda,” Starr saluted, walking away.

“And there we have it,” Marsh said into the camera. “The fertile grounds of another Civil War, one not about slavery or secession. In the end, it may not be about gold as we initially heard, because no one has reported discovering any, at least not yet. The root of the conflict remains unclear. Nevertheless, it is a struggle that has an undefined passion at its core, plus the two necessary ingredients: Us…and them.”

I saw in the monitor of a mobile EBS News crew the graphic box containing Marsh's talking head growing smaller, and being displaced on the screen by an ever-broadening fish-eye lens showing the ragtag band of reenactors fanning out across the hills to the horizon.