Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (11 page)

I closed my ghost story book and focused on the lyrics.
It don't matter where you bury me/I'll be home and I'll be free.

“Oh,” I mumbled. “Sorry.” I tapped the pause button. “I'll find something lighter.”

“No, it's fine.” He wiped both his cheeks, then folded the bandana and tied it back around his head. He had his beard pulled into a rough braid this morning, and he tugged on it as he looked at me. “That's exactly what your grandmother believes. You like this version better, or Emmylou Harris?”

I put down my book and picked up his iPad, scrolled through the song list, found the second version, and played
it for a minute or so. “I don't know. They're both good. Do you think Grandma's right? Does all pain end when you die?”

“I hope so, baby girl.” Dad came over to the garden bench and sat beside me. He smelled like dirt and salt and wild onions and spices from the oil he used on his hair and beard. He kept his eyes on the beds he had been weeding, but he scooted closer, then folded his hands and squeezed them between his knees like he did when something was really bugging him. “I'm sorry I was short with you last night.”

“It's okay—” I started, but he cut me off.

“No, it's not.” He patted my leg, then went back to squeezing his hands between his own knees and staring out at the garden. “I want you to understand something. Before your mom and I ever got married, we thought about what our children might go through, on account of us being different races. It never occurred to us we'd end up back here in Oxford. In Mississippi, of all places. But Mama started getting older, and—” He sighed. “Man plans, God laughs, you know?”

I'd heard him say that before, and I knew what he meant. “Oxford's great, Dad. I love it here.”

Dad smiled, but he looked skeptical. “I never wanted you to have a rough time of it. Not over me, and the color of my skin—or yours.”

I touched my skin, which seemed so light compared to his. “Maybe people just think I'm really tan?”

“Don't joke.”

“Okay, sorry. But I haven't had a rough time.”

“Then your mother and I, we've done some right things.” He stared off into the sky. “What to tell the babies,” he murmured. “That's always been a question. When to start. How to warn them. How to make them see.”

I frowned at him. “I'm not a baby, Dad.” His eyes met mine, and his smile seemed sad.

“My baby,” he argued. Dad seemed relieved by this. “I still don't think it's a great idea to go poking around about the Magnolia Feud or Oxford's past, but after watching Mama cry—Dani, maybe you're right and we should try to ease her mind. Maybe your mom is right too. You won't be finding out anything that didn't already happen.”

I laid Dad's iPad on top of my book, on the bench between us, and I must have bumped the play button because “All My Tears” started back again, with Emmylou Harris singing. I slid the volume down but left it playing. “You and Mom and Grandma taught me a lot. We really have studied the Civil Rights Movement in class, too. I know it was bad, especially in Mississippi. I know it's happening now, too, with so many people getting shot, and how more people of color go to jail. That's in the news and books too.”

Dad kept his hands between his knees, and his jaw looked tight. Finally, he nodded, but he said, “What they write in books can sound clean. Wars should never be sanitized like that.”

I thought about that for a few song verses, and my brain hooked it up with the hospice pamphlets and other stuff I'd read about Alzheimer's disease. “So, it's like what people write
about dying from what Grandma has? Facts and how-to, but nothing about changing diapers and how stuff stinks—or the drool and how tired everyone gets?”

“Exactly.” Dad nodded. “Once the people who yell the loudest and write the most have a chance to clean up history's rough edges, it can look like revolutions happen without horrible hardships and losses. Then it gets easy to lie to ourselves that the same disasters can't happen again.”

At that moment, Dad looked almost as far away as Grandma did. My pulse picked up, and the air seemed too hot to breathe. I eased my hand over to his, worrying he'd jump when I touched him. He did that sometimes, if he was thinking too hard about wars and bombs and people he knew getting killed. When my fingers brushed across his, he didn't flinch, and all of a sudden, I could breathe again.

“Mostly, they leave out how much death hurts,” he said. When he looked at me, his eyes were wet like he might cry. He tried to smile but didn't make it, then shook his head. “And not just the dying part. Sorry, Dani. It just tears me up to see Mama like she is now.”

“I know.”

He kissed my forehead, giving me a fresh nose-full of wild onions and garden sweat and spiced oil. For a few seconds, I sat there feeling like I had no ghost stories at all, and like maybe Mom's proverb was wrong, and everything really was everyone's circus, and all monkeys belonged to all people.

“You and Indri don't give Dr. Harper too much grief, you hear?”
Dad interrupted my thoughts. “He's old to be keeping summer hours on top of working till midnight all the time, and he might wear out pretty easily.”

“We won't wear him out.”

“I mean it. Respect his time.”

“I know, Dad.”

He messed with my hair a little bit, then gave me a push off the bench. “Go on now. Don't make your mom jumpy this morning.”

I slid my book from under Dad's iPad, then picked up the backpack holding Grandma's papers and the key and walked away from the garden, leaving Dad to his plants. I heard the iPad music switch to “Whatcha Wanna Do” by Mia X, the first song in Grandma's attitude mix. I had to smile. That was Dad, trying to change his mindset.

Go, Dad.

Feeling a little better, I went to Mom's car and climbed into the passenger seat, leaving the door open for air.

I read my ghost story book for a while, skipping over the stadium cemetery and Saint Anthony Hall tales I had already heard at camp. Instead, I studied the story from the 1960s, about screams coming from the steam tunnels under Ole Miss. There wasn't much information about it. Just a bunch of people swearing they heard screaming and yelling late at night near the Lyceum, when they were crossing campus alone. If what we learned at camp about why people told
ghost stories was true, the steam-tunnel-screaming-and-yelling tale probably had to do with scaring people into acting right.
Don't walk across the campus alone at night
. That made sense.

I put down my book, fastened my seat belt, and closed my eyes, listening to birds and traffic through the open car door.

My grandmother's secrets, they were like a ghost story. Like she was haunted by some ghost or other that only she could see. But she wouldn't feel all haunted just for entertainment, and she was too smart to be haunted by something she didn't understand. She mostly acted right, and didn't tend to try to scare people into doing things her way, and I didn't think she was scared of dying, either. That left something that should be remembered—only, she couldn't remember much of anything now. That had to be it. She needed to remember something, maybe say it, or take care of it.

“Jerk alert!” screamed the phone in my pocket. “Jerk alert! Jerk alert!”

My heart whammed as I jumped and grabbed at my pocket, nearly choking myself on the shoulder strap.

What—? I—no way. I managed to get free from the seatbelt strap and get the phone out of my pocket, because Mac Richardson, Mr. Worm Dung himself, just sent me a message.

I fumbled with my code, finally got the stupid thing unlocked, and read,
@ campus with GG 2day. If U see us don't show papers.

Breathe. Air. Must have air.

The phone shook in my hands as I forwarded the message to Indri.

She popped back immediately with,
No way!!!!!!!!!!
! setting off her alert of, “Best friend texting!” Then,
Don't answer WORM DUNG.

She was right. I shouldn't answer Mac. Or at least I shouldn't answer him right away, right?

Leave me alone,
I sent back. Then I put the phone down and glanced at the front door. No sign of Mom. She still had five minutes before we would have to hurry. My eyes went back to the phone. The jumble of emotions in my chest turned circles and bashed into each other until they finally settled on pissed off and . . . of all things, curious.

Crud.

The papers. He didn't want Avadelle to see Grandma's writing again.

“Best friend texting!”
R U talking to WORM DUNG?

No,
I typed to Indri on reflex, then sent a quick
Yes
to make up for it.

“Jerk alert! Jerk alert!”
Just keep papers to yourself.

“Best friend texting!”
STOP TALKING TO WORM DUNG!!!!!!

“Jerk alert! Jerk alert!”
Please.

Wow. Mac wasn't usually one for politeness or extra words.
Please
was a real stretch for him. I almost got a case of the warm-fuzzies . . . but then I glared down at the phone. First he blew me off, then he treated me like I was weak and stupid and couldn't look after myself against a crazy old
woman, and now he wanted to tell me what to do?

Blocking your number,
I wrote back to him. Then I did it. And a minute later, I unblocked him. Block, unblock. Block, unblock.

I totally needed to beat my head against a great big tree.

Blocked. There. Leave it
.

Mom came out the front door almost at a dead run, and I put the phone on mute and stuck it in my pocket. Too many text alerts got on Mom's nerves in the best of circumstances, much less early in the morning before her third cup of coffee. Plus, if she found out I was just texting Mac, she'd be way less than happy.

“You ready?” she asked as she got in and fastened her seat belt. She reached over and handed me a signed note, giving me permission to go see Dr. Harper during lunch break at camp.

“Sure thing.” I took the note and tucked it in my pack, closed my door, and tried to ignore the phone vibrating between my butt and the car seat.

Excerpt from
Night on Fire
(1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 299

By the time 1960 turned into 1961, Leslie and I worked like a machine with our teaching, but I could tell she was frustrated.

“Not even seven percent.” She tossed the latest figures on my school desk. “That's not even one out of ten registered to vote in Mississippi, Cici. In some counties, it's nobody, not even the war veterans. They're beating any person of color who tries to register, much less vote. If they can't vote, they can't elect anyone who might change the situation.”

I slid the latest literacy test and poll tax documents toward her. “These are getting harder. More subjective. The registrars and clerks are failing preachers and professors, and letting through illiterate Whites
with no challenge at all. We don't have a good strategy yet, and we need more help. We need a plan.”

Leslie rubbed the sides of her head. “And we need to get more men in our class, and— What?”

She caught the look on my face before I could wipe it clean. Her eyes narrowed, and all of her features went sharp. “What do you know that I don't?”

We'd had these fights before, and I always lost, a testament to the fact that Leslie was really the one who could argue with a fence post and win. I started off slow. “Most of the menfolk here, they're sick or dead since we don't have doctors and hospitals who'll see us close to where we live—or they've joined up with the service for a ticket out of the South, or they're working two or three jobs to feed their families. They can't risk stirring up trouble.”

“Or getting beaten or murdered,” she said, and sighed, and I thought maybe, just maybe I was gonna get by with it, but then she went all narrow and sharp again and said, “And what else?”

It was my turn to sigh. And then be honest. “Some of them, they're scared to risk being around you.”

And I waited, and I watched it sink in.

“Because I'm White,” she said.

“Because you're a White woman,” I corrected, and I wondered what she heard in those words. My soul heard the sobs of Emmett Till and the shouts and
screams of so, so many others, boys and men, slaughtered for smiling or speaking to or even being near a White woman like Leslie Marks.

“Jim Crow,” she said, like she was talking to God instead of me, and that was good, because I couldn't do a thing about it, more than I was already doing.

I
NDRI EYED ME WITH SUSPICION
the second I sat down beside her in the Bondurant camp classroom, and she stuck out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

I forked it over immediately. She knew my passcode, so I didn't even have to tell her.

Her expression stayed tense as she examined my text exchange with Mac. After a few seconds, I realized I was holding my breath, and let it out.

“Fine,” she mumbled. “You really did block him. I guess I won't have to scream at you for interacting with Worm Dung anymore.”

“Um, okay.” I smiled at her. “Thanks. Sort of.”

She rolled her eyes, and Ms. Yarbrough cut us off as she breezed by, handing out construction paper and glue.

When she passed the phone back to me, I unblocked Mac. You know. Just in case.

We had lunch in the Grove, and Ms. Yarbrough let Indri and me finish our food quickly and head over to Ventress Hall. Mom had called ahead to Dr. Harper and made an appointment
before she wrote out my permission note to visit him.