by William Poe
In recent years, an oak tree had fallen across the creek, forming a natural bridge. As I carefully stepped through its limbs, I heard footsteps racing in my direction from farther back on the trail. I feared trouble, but quickly realized that it was Ernie. He looked gaunt and wore a wrinkled shirt and dirty jeans. For a moment, he was that shy, tow-haired boy on the other side of the fence—my first friend.
“Can I come over?” Ernie asked, following an awkward silence.
The chemical odor on his clothes and the glazed look in his eyes told me he had been sniffing glue.
Ernie shuffled in place, digging his fists into his pants pockets as he waited for a reply.
Could he come over? I wanted Ernie back, not the glue addict standing in front of me. A boy had died that year, suffocating on glue. I’d written about the incident in my column. Criticize sports, and the community might organize a lynch mob; write about easily available chemicals causing a student’s death, and nobody does a thing.
I probably would have relented and let Ernie come over, but I never got the chance. A car screeched to a halt on the road in front of the mansion. A girl waved in our direction as she leaned out the driver’s side window. Ernie forgot all about his question and ran toward the car. I followed at some distance. Ernie appeared to know the girls, but I was sure I had never seen them at Sibley High School.
“Ernest!” a brunette in the backseat called out. “We’ve been all over looking for you. You were supposed to wait for us at…” Her words trailed off as I approached.
We exchanged dirty looks. Ernie jumped in the car. The brunette threw her arms around him. The vehicle lurched forward, spun around, and zoomed off down the road, leaving me in a cloud of dust. Through the back window, I caught a glimpse of Ernie inhaling fumes from a paper sack.
Sickened by the experience, hurt and brooding, I locked myself in my bedroom, took out a fresh canvas, and used a palette knife to slather on paint. An abstract image of Ernie’s face took shape, equal measures innocent beauty and damaged child. I lay on my bed and studied the work, deciding on the ambiguous title Mind My Flower While I Am Away.
The haunting question “Can I come over?” nagged my thoughts. I tried to escape into my headphones, listening to Das Rheingold. Wagner’s universe of flawed deities provided no escape; instead, they drove me deeper into despair—anguish that was an equal mix of sexual longing, desire for love, and abhorrence at what Ernie had become.
I had no one to confide in, no one I could trust. Connie and I never discussed personal matters, especially after she married Derek and joined him as a member of the Nazarene Church. If I spoke to Vivian, the best I could hope for was the consolation of a platitude. Her explanation for all human foibles went something like, “I can’t understand why a person would do such a thing.” And I wouldn’t even consider talking to Lenny.
Perhaps Aunt Opal was on to something when she retreated behind the walls of our creaky mansion and cultivated a reputation as an eccentric, if not an actual witch. It certainly kept people at bay. Because I never really got to know her, Aunt Opal became a mythical figure to me. I treasured the Standing Liberty quarter. The cornhusk doll that bore the name tag still rested in my dresser. Since its discovery, I had learned that slaves fashioned such toys for their children from the natural materials at their disposal.
After I had learned cursive lettering, I made out the actual name on the tag. The doll most likely belonged to a girl named Sally. Mandy told me stories about how the Powell children played with the children of the house slaves—but I had tried to forget her tales that described such hateful parts of my heritage. I would never know why Sally was special, but I suspected that, in her youth, Aunt Opal and Sally were playmates. Sally probably died young, and Opal kept the doll as a remembrance. People used oils such as those packed with the cigar box as a kind of antebellum perfume. A young girl would have considered them a fitting tribute to Sally’s spirit.
I often sensed that Aunt Opal looked out for me. No doubt, it was her inspiration that drew me toward mysticism. At age eleven, I read Thomas Sugrue’s biography of Edgar Cayce. Not much later, mining books at the public library, I discovered the spiritualism of Emanuel Swedenborg and the “other worlds” of Ruth Montgomery. I read the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and became enthralled with Madame Blavatsky. Most of all, I found fascination in books on ancient Christian heresies, often wondering why the ideas had been suppressed. Many, such as the ideas of Arius, and even the obscure Ebionite beliefs that emphasized the humanness of Jesus, seemed more plausible than what I knew of orthodoxy. No theologian had successfully explained the impenetrable idea of an eternal Trinity. Among those once considered Orthodox, but later condemned, was the brilliant Origen. I admired him for his generous attitude, suggesting, as some of my reading proposed, that even Satan might one day reclaim his position as the Angel of Light. Origen taught hope and forgiveness.
If I encountered a smidgeon of antidote to the heady spirituality encountered at the library, it was Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, which served to plant wonder about a kind of thinking that was foreign to my upbringing—science. Morris’s book first introduced me to the view that we are not special creations; rather, natural selection fit us to ever-changing environments. That glimmer of inquiry about the universe—that it was, indeed, just as it seemed and that there wasn’t “another world” out there populated by spirits and deities—led me to enroll in anthropology when I entered college. Over the years, the sacred and the profane waged battle for my loyalties, but for most of my young life, mystical views held me in their grip.
A few months after my sad encounter with Ernie, Lenny decided to clear out the basement to make room for a buzz saw he had gotten in trade for plumbing services. When he and some of his coworkers hauled out the heavy couch that had been there since we moved in, a plywood panel that the couch had been holding in place fell down to reveal an otherwise unobserved door that opened into a small storage closet. Inside, we found a new stash of crates. Lenny wanted to burn them, but I took the hoard to my room, half expecting to find mummified body parts. What I actually discovered were ledgers from the late 1800s and early 1900s that told of long journeys. Many pages were hopelessly water stained, but I could make out the names of cities in India and Nepal. Two boxes contained books with bindings eaten away by mice. The pages were mostly intact, but loose. Some of the books I recognized from my reading of esoteric literature, and I was especially excited to find an 1890 edition of Isis Unveiled, the renowned book by Madame Blavatsky. A paper napkin, quite yellowed, had served as a bookmark. On it were scribbled the initials HPB, perhaps written by the great lady herself!
Aunt Opal had been an adventurer. I liked the idea that I wasn’t the only eccentric among the collection of slave owners and businessmen that made up my ancestry. Someday, I considered, I’d embark on my own quest to find the Truth.
CHAPTER 9
The age when a Powell had resources to traipse off to Nepal seeking spiritual enlightenment ended long before I was born. The force of destiny sent me to a summer job at the local hamburger joint.
On Friday and Saturday nights, teenagers who had reached driving age rode their rusting Ford pickups and ten-year-old Pontiacs into town from the remotest parts of the county. They joined Sibley youth, in their slightly newer cars, cruising through the Burger Chef parking lot. A kind of hierarchy ruled the procession. If a high school senior drove up and honked, a place opened up for him at the front. Juniors never dared to insert their cars anywhere closer than halfway down the line. Ranks below junior fought to avoid ending up last. The idea was to get the best vantage point for whistling at the girls in the hopes that one of them might hop into your vehicle. What ruled the pecking order among the girls, I had no clue, but one thing was for sure: the top-ranked cheerleaders sat on the best cars, and those drivers were the handsomest boys in school. Beyond that rule of thumb, the only criteria seemed to be that couples of similar good looks gravitated to each other.
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What I knew of the weekend ritual I had learned by observing from behind the counter, serving walk-up traffic, which mostly included parents, especially fathers of the hood-ornament cheerleaders, intent on ensuring that the shenanigans didn’t go beyond whistling. Lenny had thrust the job upon me, demanding that I not spend another summer isolated in my room, “throwing paint at the walls,” as he characterized my creative efforts. Lenny said that if I wanted to paint so badly, the barn needed whitewashing. I was happy to take the job at the Burger Chef, actually. My plan was to save all the money I could, study hard to get a college scholarship, and leave Sibley far behind.
I never expected to fall in love, and certainly not with a girl, but after three weeks on the job, I met fellow employee Virginia Sorrel. Under different circumstances, Virginia would have dated the driver of the lead car in the procession of revving V-8 engines that circled through the parking lot. However, Virginia was new in town and, therefore, had no standing in the community. Newcomers were invisible, no matter how attractive they might be. As pretty as she was, Virginia disappeared into the background for all the boys but me.
There was something about Virginia. She didn’t dress in the miniskirt fashion of the other girls. If anything, she brought to mind a San Francisco flower child, more Marianne Faithful than Bridgette Bardot. For the first time in my life, I found myself attracted to a member of the opposite sex.
As the July heat bore down on Sibley, I finagled my schedule to coincide with Virginia’s. We closed down the store together, scouring the grill, mopping the floors, and emptying the trash. Afterward, we’d sit in the ’55 Chevy I had inherited when Lenny bought a used Pontiac, and listen to late-night radio, moving close to each other as Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses” played across the airwaves. Several nights, we hurried to finish our tasks so we could listen to a re-creation of Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds on a show called Bleaker Street. It impressed me that Virginia knew about Orson Welles. It impressed me even further that she could converse about art and music and that she had read many of the same books I had, including the Edgar Cayce biography.
As rain pounded the roof of the car one night, Virginia leaned over and kissed me, confirming what everyone else had presumed—that we were going steady. No one had imagined that I would date, much less that I would have such a beautiful girlfriend.
When I brought Virginia to the house to show her my paintings, Lenny nudged me, saying, “It’s about time.” His only stated hope for my life was that I would settle down one day “with a decent woman” and take good care of my children. The unstated assumption was that I would one day take over the mansion.
Vivian liked Virginia instantly and insisted she stay for dinner. Virginia took over the kitchen, telling Vivian to relax. Vivian responded with a broad smile and said, “I won’t object to that.”
Lenny was ready to pronounce us husband and wife when he tasted Virginia’s meatloaf, accompanied by creamed potatoes and gravy.
Virginia’s response to my paintings brought me close to proposing. For the most part, no one understood my work. The galleries in Little Rock sold paint-by-number works by old ladies in nursing homes or roosters and hens created by gluing different colored beans onto a square of cardboard, a purple hull pea forming the perfect chicken’s eye.
After a quick look at Mind My Flower While I’m Away, Virginia said, “You like Willem de Kooning, don’t you?”
It was strange enough that Virginia was in my room looking at this very personal work of art, and even stranger that she was familiar with the artists who inspired me.
“He is one of the painters I admire the most,” I said. “I also like Jackson Pollack.”
“The early period, of course,” Virginia replied.
I took a large work from a stack of canvases leaning against the wall and removed the sheet that protected it from dust. “What do you think?”
“She-Wolf,” Virginia said, referring to an early work by Pollock.
Virginia slipped her hand around my neck and we kissed. While in her embrace, the abstract painting of Ernie dissolved into a mass of conflicting colors. I gently pushed Virginia away.
“Vivian might come upstairs,” I said, though the truth was that Vivian never came into my room without alerting me as she walked down the hall.
Virginia smiled, pecked me on the cheek, and started browsing through a stack of drawings. “I like these,” she said, and then choosing one, asked if she could take it.
“Keep it forever,” I said.
Eventually, I met Virginia’s parents. Her father, Harvey, was a cook at the restaurant in the Holiday Inn along Interstate 30. Her stepmother, Jane, worked from home selling Amway products. Jane was even more enamored of me than Lenny had been of Virginia. After a couple of visits, Jane made a place for me to set up an easel on the enclosed back porch. I did a portrait of her, which, Virginia pointed out, was more Emile Nolde than Willem de Kooning. Jane agreed. It turned out that she was the source of Virginia’s art education. Jane had once aspired to be an artist.
“No offense to the fine folks of Sibley,” Jane said, “but you’re the only sophisticated person I’ve met since we moved here.”
“No one’s ever called me sophisticated,” I replied.
Jane added to my worldly education by introducing my first taste of alcohol. While other mothers made iced tea for their teenage kids on a hot summer day, Jane served frozen daiquiris. Jane was a casual drinker. Virginia’s father was another matter. Harvey was unpleasant even when sober, a person who never combed his hair, whose shirt stank of sweat, and who didn’t shave for days on end. Whenever he came into the room, Virginia and Jane grew silent. Little sister Beth, seven years old, would scamper into her bedroom.
One day in late August, Virginia invited me for dinner. Jane blended daiquiris and chatted with Virginia before they went into the kitchen. I was relaxing on the couch when Harvey unexpectedly came home from work.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, sitting on the couch next to me and throwing a hairy arm over my shoulder.
“What do you mean?” I said, managing to squirm out of his embrace.
Reeking of alcohol, Harvey said, “You getting any?”
“Your daughter and I are friends,” I said, choking on my daiquiri as I rose to my feet.
Harvey stood unsteadily and grabbed me around the waist. Rancid breath accompanied equally foul words. “Ah, come on, I know better’n that.”
Virginia emerged from the kitchen carrying a platter of food. She placed the tray on a side table and grabbed her purse. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, impaling her father with a sharp look.
As we sped away in my car, Virginia held her hair behind her head and leaned out the window to cool off in the wind. I drove us to the bauxite pit where Ernie and I used to play. We sat on the edge of a hill and kicked pebbles into the water. Prisms of sunlight danced along the waves.
Virginia was silent for a long time before saying, “We’ve moved around a lot. Jane gets set up with Amway, Dad gets a cooking job and promises to stay sober, but he always gets drunk and ruins it.” Virginia turned to face me. “I’ve never met anyone like you, Simon. Most boys run away when they meet my family.” Her green eyes flashed with apprehension.
I stroked her hair as she rested her head in my lap. We spent the evening in each other’s arms, cooled by the breezes flowing across the unnaturally deep waters of the blue hole.
Jane and Virginia laid down the law, and for a while, Harvey controlled his alcoholism. He put in double shifts, finding it easier if he focused on working. Jane and Virginia, however, knew it was only a matter of time—which turned out to be two weeks. Virginia and I were sitting on the couch watching Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In when we heard someone fumbling with a key at the front door. Harvey crashed into the room and fell backward against the door. When he saw Virginia sitting near me on the couch, he swaggered toward us.
Virginia’s face became stone. “Not this time,” she shouted. “You’re not chasing Simon away.” She ran into the kitchen and returned with a large knife.
Jane rushed into the room from the backyard, where she’d been smoking a cigarette, and yelled, “Virginia, stop!”
Virginia lunged at her father.
“Filthy bitch!” Harvey yelled, fearless against his daughter’s attack.
“Come on,” I said, taking Virginia’s arm. “I’m here. No one’s chasing me away.”
Virginia’s muscles tightened with rage, but I managed to move her toward the door. Outside, she thrust the knife into the soil at the base of a shrub.
I drove us to the blue hole, hoping she would remember the calm afternoon we had spent there. We walked to the banks of the dark water, serenaded by a choir of bobwhites, cicadas, and deep-throated bullfrogs. The moon was just rising over a white slag hill. Virginia embraced me and wept.
“Talk to me,” I said. “I want to understand.”
We sat leaning against each other and took in the night sounds. Virginia threw her head back to gaze at the stars.
“No one knows this, not even my stepmother,” she began, taking my hand and rubbing her thumbs across my palm. “When I was five years old, Harvey found my mother in bed with another man. Something dreadful happened. I think he killed the man. It was in Texas, and they might have considered it justified. I don’t know.”
Virginia stood to pick up some rocks, throwing them against the slag hill to create small landslides. “When I was little, we moved from one town to another, just like we do now. I had barely turned eight when Dad married Jane. We lived in Jackson, Mississippi. He never told me what happened to my mother. I don’t even have a picture of her. I guess they officially divorced, because I know he’s legally married to Jane.”