The Blackstone Commentaries (28 page)

“Cry some more, baby,” Dugan had whispered, his eyes shrunken under puffed layers of sweaty, unbridled fury. How they had sparkled!
What did I do?

That had been the worst of it, that feeling of failure and shame, of rank inadequacy in the face of Southern male contempt for revealed weakness—any weakness, but helplessness especially, being the trait least male. It's positively military down here, he thought. They are terrified, obsessed by the possibility of their powerlessness, and fear that in themselves more than anything, a fear their women comprehend thoroughly and use against them if they are of a mind to. Oh, it's war, Claire, just as you always insisted: man raging against man, man raging against woman, woman raging against man, a mighty, hopeless war against dispossession—of land and property, true, but ultimately of self. And here he was, like them, raging from helplessness and shame. And self-pity. Dugan's hatred had stripped
away the last shreds of his romance with Blackstone County, a place he dreamed he'd inherited, a home he'd come seeking, only to try to devour it as a starving person might. Dugan had been right about that.

Will I always feel this shame? he wondered, for as he lay in that field, it hurt as nothing he'd ever known. The other pain, the fear of inexorable loss, he'd always known. Unbidden, persistent, voiceless, it had begun with World War II, his parents' war—almost with his first memory. Even after all these years, his body still ached with the hollow, weightless sound of that train he'd watched from the window of their car as they'd headed toward North Carolina, still a family, the train glorious and proud, passing down that long grade into the utter precariousness of their lives. He'd longed to be inside that train, carried effortlessly through a world that could never hurt him.

He remembered his father going to war in 1943, the skipping sound of fast-moving feet, the cold-concrete-smelling tunnel to the train platforms in New Haven tense with voices and choked emotions. He recalled soldiers, and his mother crumbling beneath the dead voice that echoed over them, naming towns and cities, signaling change, while the rails shook and an immense wall of steel sliced through their lives. Elmore had been four.

“You're needed here!” His mother speaking. Winter of 1948, the war over for more than three years. It was peacetime in New Haven, and he was almost nine
.

“It's not the same.” His father answering his mother. “Claire, they aren't aborigines running around down there in overalls and straw hats with muskets and jugs over their shoulders. They have country clubs and swimming pools, and even toilets that flush, and the mountains are like they are here.” There had been an expectant hush, a waiting silence, in their home the years his father was away at war, like one prolonged sleepy summer afternoon. But this was the first real hint of change. Or the end of romance. Or the very beginning of Elmore's.

“And hookworm and lynchings.” His mother. “And schools built by the WPA because they didn't have any damn schools before Roosevelt.” But with a touch of laughter, because the war was over and they were still holding to memory and promise.

“Hookworm was all but eradicated by Rockefeller at the turn of the century,”
his father replied primly, just like him at his worst.

“That's reassuring.” They called it love. “Why can't you be like the rest of them? It's a new world. Like the war, the Depression is over. They will survive down there in the South just fine without you. Things will get better for them. They already are—they're taking our factories away. You're needed right here in New Haven, and you're wonderfully qualified. They're asking for you! Why throw it away?”

Only much later had he understood the oppression of his mother's defeat when she acquiesced to his father's desire to move away from her beloved New England into a steaming country with soft, melodious accents. Those accents barely hid what she determined well in advance—even though she'd never been there—was a primitive intelligence capable of producing only prejudice, poverty, ignorance, superstition, violence and credulity in roughly equal parts, with the exception of violence, which was far and away the winner, the sum being far less than a whole Yankee, or anybody else on earth, for that matter. His mother's prejudices had never been along color or ethnic lines.

Then the oppression finally got so bad she realized she couldn't hold her husband anymore, and would have to make do with their son instead, looking on Elmore almost as chattel property at times, which was surprising in a person as independent as she was. Years later, long after it was over, or should have been, there was not even the alluring drawl and softness of Southern womanhood to mitigate all her resentment, humiliation and rage, to make it palatable; she never tried. From the outset, she openly despised what she termed the pretense to manners that hid the castrating impulse she swore was the legacy of all Southern women, a result of the men being idiotic enough to begin the War Between the States when their real war was with the aristocracy, who made them feel better about themselves simply by assuring them they weren't black, because economically there wasn't a lick of difference. And then not only losing the damn war but bringing utter ruination down on their heads.

While his mother and father were still together in North Carolina, she would point out ad nauseam the little churches dotting the landscape with their unrelenting messages of sin and damnation, noting in connection that the women, even in the prime of often startling youthful beauty, displayed a certain tightness of feature, like repressed rage, as though their
real curse was the illusion that they mattered at all beyond momentary physical urges in a world replete with dogs, hunting and fishing—businesses and real professions, of course, being the province of the elect.

Elmore, one arm flung straight out to his side, groaned and felt the cold of the wet earth crawl into his body. He remembered his first day in Blackstone County, the car's fan whirring furiously, dark, wet strings of hair falling down the side of his mother's face, her cheeks flushed with heat and fatigue. They had stopped at a little store with a gas pump out front in a place called New Hope. Inside the store was a girl, her dark hair chopped evenly to her chin from one side to the other. She wore bib overalls patched on the knees, a boy's short-sleeve shirt and no shoes. There was a darkness to her skin, too, and an untamed quality in the startling blue eyes that unflinchingly met his. “You, there, Rachel,” the man at the counter said, his voice deep and imbued with that strange softness Elmore had been listening to for the first time ever during the past two days.

“Yessir,” the eyes still not budging.

“Fetch this gentleman the water for his radiator.”

“Yessir,” not moving, the eyes still locked with Elmore's in what was his first conscious contest of wills with a female, unsought, involuntary and, because so, bewildering. He knew with what was passably instinct that he could not turn away a moment, even to gauge the similarity between the girl, whom he figured was maybe just eight and sufficiently younger than himself to surprise him with what he would later recognize as audacity, and the tall, bony man with the heavy wrinkles on his sun-beaten face, whom he presumed must be her father.

“Then fetch it, hear?” The voice still bore that extraordinary softness even as it formed a sterner edge, though she was already gone out the back screen door, leaving Elmore with the memory and puzzlement of a pink tongue.
What in hell did I ever do to her?

Then, for just an instant, he forgot the field he was lying in and why, and wanted to laugh, to rejoice, because she was real again, as real as anything he'd ever known. Then he thought,
Blackstone County is a veritable minefield of revealed manhood, something from that moment in 1948 I should never have forgotten
. And he chided himself as the shame crept back in and his tongue wagged over a crushed lip, pulling in the taste of cold metal that was his blood.

How many hours ago did I hit that wall?
His shoes must have been three feet off the floor, and that wall solid plaster! His head would have broken through Sheetrock. As it was, it hit and didn't move, then a driving pain tore right through his skull and out his face. By then, his body had been sliding down the wall like a sack of corn, and his vision, bad enough before tables, chairs and cards started flying and people started vanishing out the windows, splayed flylike in a thousand directions.

“Rachel?” For a moment, lying in that field and whispering her name, he felt her. Then the shame probed deeper into his body, and he curled into a ball.

Some time had gone by—a long time, it seemed—and he'd believed Dugan had gone away, leaving him in that big, high-ceilinged, derelict room, ugly and trashed, all hints of its past pride laid waste in the glare of a bare-bulb chandelier. The worst pain had been in abeyance; he'd been too anesthetized, too damn drunk to feel anything—bootleg liquor will do that to you. But at least he'd finally managed to pull himself to a sitting position against the wall—
kind of like an old wino
, he remembered thinking. He'd been trying to comprehend the table in front of him because its legs pointed toward the door and there was no floor under them. Then he'd laughed and put his hand back to where it hurt and pulled away blood. His shirt had been torn, as well as his new forty-dollar slacks, his only pair—he preferred jeans and chinos, and could almost afford those.

I am barely paying the rent, Claire
, Elmore thought, lying in the field,
because somehow the people who come to me don't have a lot of money, just memories of my father and his kindness. Hear that? Kindness. So I'm not even getting to exercise choice in that either
.

Still sitting against the wall in that desolate room, he'd started feeling sorry for himself again, and even felt another tear or two, only suddenly there'd been boots in front of him, fancy cowboy boots. He'd looked up, way up, to find all that fury confronting him once again, only the look far worse than what had left the room earlier.

A curious calm had emanated from Dugan as he looked down, a calm that made Elmore want to sidle away into a hole somewhere and die. Dugan picked up a chair, then sat down facing him, arms crossed over the back. For a long time, he just stared. “He was here, wasn't he?” he said at last with that softness of voice that had to be one of God's best jokes. “He
went out that window, that right? Where did he leave his car?”

“I don't know who the fuck you're talking about.” Oh, he was brave and loyal. Why? He never did want to go to any card game that night, and he'd told Pemberton so. Or any more card games any other night, and had even told Pemberton that, too, over dinner. “It's getting old,” he'd told him. And other things were beginning to matter more. Pemberton, freshly bound over and high, not with relief but with the bravado that fear and anxiety produce, had glared at Elmore like he really wanted to say something insulting, probably something about Rachel, and Elmore had braced himself, almost wishing he would. For then he could have walked out. But like he'd suddenly understood the stakes, Pemberton had held his tongue.

“Well, let's just go play cards this once more,” he'd said finally, and at least, for the first time, Elmore had insisted on following in his own car.

Elmore had started tossing down drinks as soon as he got to Rance's and found the tension already cranked up, like it usually was in those places, one old boy goading another who looked half-Cherokee, calling him Big Chief and raising his hand and saying “Ugh!” every time the man spoke. Is this first grade? Elmore had wondered. Have I been held back? Except those two were aching to kill each other—it was in their eyes.

Whump!
He'd found himself up the wall again, hanging by a paw, and it was all so quick he hadn't known how he got there, or how Dugan got out of that chair and into his face again so quickly, breathing all that masticated hate over him so he wanted to turn his head, only he couldn't. Then, suddenly, Dugan just blossomed all over into a foul, sour smell of exertion, rage and frustration, all his pores exploding at once, his huge face melting before Elmore. “Boy, you have pushed me far enough! I got a deputy in the yard with his head bashed, and you are responsible.”

Elmore had no idea what would have happened next if the door hadn't smashed open and the small, dapper one, Eddie, hadn't busted in: “Dugan!”

“I told you to stay the hell out, and to never call me that!”

But Eddie had persisted, had even given a name to it: “Have you gone nuts?”

Still hanging against the wall, his eyes closed, he'd felt the hand holding him suddenly tremble. Then he'd been eased back down and had faded into blackness.

When he'd opened his eyes again, there was still plenty of light but no sound at all. Just that upside-down room and that single chair upright in front of him like it was waiting for Dugan yet, so he knew he hadn't dreamed it. He'd awakened full of pain, too, because the anesthesia was wearing off. It was time to crawl away and die.

It had taken him a long time to get out of that by-then empty house, the most desolate place in the entire world, he knew. Then there'd been all that darkness and the smell of approaching rain. At first, he'd tried to run across the field, to get as far away as he could, to find his car. But his body hurt, and all those ghosts from up north and elsewhere had finally pulled him down; they'd been waiting a long time.

His mother's litany:
“Twilit summer days behind blinds, fans and, if you're lucky, air conditioners, while outside ticks, red clay, copperheads, rattlesnakes, poison ivy and snapping turtles rule the land. And catfish—those big, ugly things with the feelers draped all over their huge heads like something prehistoric and better extinct. Only in that place could such a creature be considered a delicacy.”
Claire seemed to be making sense finally.