by R.J. Ellory
We were six years old, me and Nathan Verney, and the world we were walking towards would welcome us with open arms.
At least that's what we believed.
My father was a railroad engineer. A railroad engineer for the Carolina Company, and a just man. I can recall the number of times he switched me exactly. Four times. Just four times in all those years. And each time I deserved it.
There was a tacit consent between us, always had been, still would be today if he'd been alive. That consent was an understated agreement that certain things were done, certain things were not. You did not throw stones into the branches of the trees beside the church in order to knock down the fruit. You did not fill a canvas bag with mud and water and drop it off a bridge onto someone's car. You did not tie half a dozen tin cans to the neighbor's dog's tail and howl with laughter as he hurtled down the street. And you most certainly did not put a live fish in someone's mailbox.
The fish was Nathan's idea. We were eleven years old then, and summertime had crept around the world to meet us once again. Those first spring shoots, the run-offs melting and freshening the earth, the smell haunting down off the river, the geese and flamingo coming up from Florida… all these things were so much a part of the eternal magic that was summer near Lake Marion.
Nathan's daddy, a Baptist minister with his own church and congregation and solid silver collection plate, taught Nathan how to catch fish with a length of bamboo, a pin and a feather. Nathan's daddy believed that it was well enough to catch fish, sure well enough to eat them, but to kill another of God's creatures - namely a worm or a bug of some description - was just altogether unnecessary. Jesus performed a miracle with the fish, Jesus was a fisher of men, but he caught fish with nets, not worms. That was the way God wanted it, and so Nathan's daddy figured a feather would do just fine. Wet a feather it goes slim and curved, looks pretty much the same, and feathers could be found everywhere when the summer flocks came down and shed their winter plumes.
So that's what we did, me and Nathan Verney, with a length of bamboo, some string, a bent pin and a feather. Nathan said as how you sat still, sat like a stone, and even when your legs went numb you just had to keep on sitting there until something came along. If you moved they could see you, and if not you then they'd see your shadow, and these were no dumb fish, these were smart fish that came down from Albemarle Sound and Cape Hatteras on the coast.
So we sat there, Nathan perched like a small dark statue, the bamboo rod jutting from the middle of his body, the line trailing in the water, and every once in a while the silver flicker of something moving there beneath the surface.
When Nathan shouted he near scared me half to death.
My heart jumped into my mouth, and for a second I couldn't breathe.
'Yo! Yo!'
He sounded like some whooping bird, coming up suddenly and nearly losing his balance 'cause all the blood had been stopped from his knees down.
I could see him struggling with the rod, the line taut, so taut, and something at the end that pulled like a wild thing.
I got behind him, my arms around the sides of his torso to hold onto the rod as well. Between us we hauled at that line, hauled until I was sure it would bust right in half and whatever was on the other end would go catapulting down the river into a memory.
But hell, if we didn't land that sucker! Hauled that baby right in and up onto the rocks, and we watched as the silver monster flipped and flopped on the warm stones like someone had tossed him onto a griddle.
We were excited, more than excited, and the two of us squatted there and watched this fish as it jumped and skipped from side to side, its eyes wide, its tail going like a triphammer.
And it was Nathan who suggested the mailbox.
'Put the fish in her mailbox,' he whispered.
I looked at him askance. 'You what?'
'The witch… put the fish in the witch's mailbox.'
The witch of whom he spoke was Mrs. Chantry.
'Are you completely out of your tree?' I said.
'Scared huh?'
I frowned, stepped back. 'Scared? You wanna put a fish in her mailbox and you ask me if I'm scared?'
'You are, aren't you? Skeered like a jackrabbit caught in a billy-can.'
'No way, Nathan. There's no way on God's green earth that you're gettin' me to go put that in her mailbox.'
I would look back months, years, decades even, and still see the way his face looked, and how it sounded, and remember as if it were yesterday the way we laughed until we flip-flopped on the rocks like someone had caught us and was set to griddle us too.
Mrs. Chantry, Eve Chantry, was la grande dame, the matriarch of Greenleaf, the little town where Nathan Verney and I would spend what would seem like most of our lives.
Mrs. Chantry was a widow, and among the children that gathered and spoke in hushed tones on the boardwalk near the barber's shop she was widowed because she'd eaten her husband when he returned from the war. The fact that Jack Chantry was a hero who'd earned the Purple Heart and the Silver Star, a man who gave his life to save three young men he never even knew, a man who never did come back from the war in 1945, was hearsay and rumor and undoubtedly untrue. Eve Chantry was a witch and a cannibal and her house was a gateway to Hades. She appeared twice weekly, once for church, once to collect groceries, and it seemed that when she walked from her gate there was never a child to be seen from one side of the town to the next.
And Nathan worked on me, worked it good and proper, calling me scared, calling me chicken, and every once in a while looking at me like I was the one who'd lost the plot.
And so it was that Nathan Verney and me decided to put that fish in her mailbox.
I can honestly say that I don't ever recall being so scared. Scared is an understatement. I was terrified, stricken, aghast. I remember approaching that house, feeling all the color bleaching from my skin, as if my blood was sensing danger and withdrawing even as we neared it.
Nathan held the fish. We had wrapped it in the same piece of linen in which my ma wrapped my sandwiches. The fish had been out of the water for a good while. It was dazed and wriggled weakly every once in a while. But the fish was never the problem. It was what we intended to do with it that was the source of the difficulties.
If we had been caught by Mrs. Chantry we believed we would've been skinned alive and basted with maize oil and baked for ten minutes per pound. Perhaps served up with some corn and salad.
'You take the fish up there,' Nathan said.
'Hell, Nathan, it was your idea. You take it up there.'
'Yellabelly,' he sneered. 'No better 'an a girl.'
Had I felt any less terrified I would have slugged him upside the head.
'You gotta go,' he said.
'Why me? Why do I have to go?'
'Because it'll prove you ain't wearing a streak down your back.'
I stood there gaping at him, my mouth open, barely breathing. I shook my head, shook it like it would snap off if I went any faster.
But Nathan persisted; that was Nathan's special quality, and for a further five minutes we stood at the bottom of Mrs. Chantry's drive and argued back and forth in this forced and unnatural whisper.
'You don't go then I'm gonna scratch your name with a stone on the side of her mailbox,' he eventually said, and there was a look in his eyes, a look of determination that turned me cold inside.
The idea that he would never ever do such a thing didn't seem to enter my mind, and it was only later that I realized that Nathan possessed another quality: he could convince you of anything, catch you up in the fever of the moment, and with those wide traffic-light eyes and the mouth that ran endlessly from one side of his face to the other, he could tell you a story that was all smoke and shadows and you'd think it gospel. Later, many times as I now recall, that quality would both help and harm us.
So I took the fish.
With my terror, with my tight stomach and Jell-O knees, with my heart in my mouth and my
pulse racing like a bird- dog, I took one step at a time up that pathway towards the mailbox. If that fish had been anything other than comatose it would have wriggled from my grip without resistance. Seemed with every step I took my physical and mental co-ordination slipped away by degrees, and when I stood beneath the shadow of that tall wooden structure I could feel the coolness of the house. Despite the season, despite the bold sun and lack of breeze, despite the midday high that settled around eighty-five degrees, that house, the Chantry house, exuded a darkness and a dead chill that seemed to invade the street, seemed to creep through the earth beneath my feet and start up through my ankles.
I glanced back.
Nathan Verney stood on the sidewalk, and for the little while I was there beside the mailbox he was as white as I was.
I could see him trembling. Trembling enough to wriggle out of his skin and run away.
I looked down.
My shoes seemed a million miles from me.
I felt the weight of the fish. Could feel the texture of the linen, and through that the smooth silver skin of the creature.
I looked up, raised my right hand, and with a flick of my thumb I released the catch and the front of the mailbox popped open. That little door seemed to spring quickly, and then slow down as it completed its arc. Seemed to slow down once more and then suddenly gain momentum, and as it approached the post upon which the mailbox sat it gathered velocity, gathered velocity at such a rate I believed it would snap right off its hinge.
But it didn't.
That door just came rocketing back until its rim connected with the post.
The sound was like a church bell at midnight.
Like a man going at a garbage can with a billy club.
The sound of two cars in a head-on up Nine Mile Road.
I dropped the fish.
Nathan screamed and started to move.
I felt like my bladder would bust right open and soak my shoes.
I looked down.
The piece of linen was there between my feet, and within it the fish, stunned now, suffering another degree of unconsciousness, and it moved ever so slightly from side to side.
Why I reached down and grabbed it, why I scooped up that fish, linen and all, and threw it into the mailbox I'll never know. It was as if a crime had already been committed. There was the evidence, right there on the path. The evidence had to be hidden, had to be concealed, and the only place at hand was right there in Mrs. Chantry's mailbox.
And that's where it went.
And once that special delivery had been made I went too.
Like a comet with turbo-charged afterburners, we hightailed it down the street until we arrived, gasping and sweating and laughing fit to bust wide open, at the edge of the Lake.
Nathan could barely breathe. He had to sit with his head between his knees, his hands gripping his ankles for a good five minutes before he could even speak. His face was streaked with tears, his eyes red and buggy, and when he tried to stand up he fell sideways like a plank and just lay there.
Never been so frightened.
Never laughed so much.
Never seen my father so angry as when he came home that night clutching a fish-smelling piece of linen that Mrs. Chantry had so kindly given to him with the message: Pass that on to your son, Mister Ford, and tell him and his little negro friend that I did enjoy the fish.
My pa switched me that time. Switched me good in the woodhouse.
Next day I stayed inside.
Nathan didn't come over. Nathan's daddy didn't switch him, didn't believe a child should be beaten. Believed the best discipline for a child was to have him stay indoors and copy out scriptures until his hand didn't work no more. Write until you're wrong, Nathan would tell me.
Later we spoke of Mrs. Chantry and the fish. Believed she ate it whole and raw and talked about how her neck swelled up as she almost inhaled the thing complete.
That was the way we saw it, and so that was the way it was.
Those years, as we approached our teens, were years that warned of things to come, like premonitions, portents, readings in sand.
Eisenhower became President in 1953, though Rocky Marciano's retained heavyweight title after he K.O.'d Jersey Joe Walcott seemed far more real and relevant and necessary to know. Jackie married JFK in the same year, and near Christmas something happened that only later, much later, would we even begin to comprehend. December of that year the U.S. Supreme Court took the banning of school segregation under advisement, and though another three years would pass before Nat King Cole was dragged off stage by a white mob in Birmingham, those mutterings of discontent and disaffection were so much the sign of Old America's death throes. Though folks seemed more occupied with Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Elvis Presley singing 'That's Alright Mama', James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and someplace called Disneyland in Anaheim, Cal., there were things running their own agenda behind the scenes that carried so much more significance.
In March of '54 Eisenhower committed the U.S. to united action to prevent any communist takeover of South-East Asia. Seven months later Viet Minh troops began to occupy Hanoi. Tension was building. Out there in some unheard-of jungle a war was being born, a war that would take the minds and hearts of this nation and grind them together into one unholy regret for a million mothers and fathers.
Nathan Verney and I were children. We did not understand. We didn't want to understand.
In Montgomery, Alabama, the City Bus Lines ordered an end to segregated seating. Eisenhower told the schools down there to end their discrimination, and the Supreme Court ruled the segregation law invalid.
I was a white kid from North Carolina. Nathan was black. It was not until '57 and '58, when the Federal District Court ordered Little Rock, Arkansas to treat us all the same, when
Martin Luther King was arrested for loitering and cited police brutality and was fined $14 for refusing to obey a police officer, that the pains this country was experiencing started to creep into our lives in a way that actually touched us. February of 1960, Nathan and I were nearly fourteen years old, and someone put a bomb in someone's house. That house belonged to one of the first black students to enroll at Little Rock Central High. We heard about that, heard about it from Nathan's daddy, and he went down to Montgomery and marched with those thousand black students in March of the same year.
Martin Luther King spoke with Eisenhower, urged him to intervene to defuse the tension, but Eisenhower was a politician not a negotiator. Ten blacks were shot in Mississippi in April. They called it the worst ever race riot. They called it many things. Me and Nathan called it madness.
I recall Nathan's daddy back then, and twenty years later I would still remember the passion, the fury, the anger he lived inside for all those years. Religion, he said, was unimportant. Didn't matter what we called ourselves. Didn't matter what church we attended. Didn't matter what hymns we sang. And sure as hell, our color didn't matter. A man was a man, all men made in God's image, and all men equal at birth and equal in death. All men called to account for the same sins, no matter their race or belief.
Nathan's daddy came home one day with a bleeding head. Didn't want no bandage or dressing, and though Mrs. Verney fussed and clucked and hovered he sent her away while he talked to us. Said he would scar, and scar gladly. This was something he would wear for the rest of his life. He was a man of God. He was a minister of the faith. Yet to the police officer that hit him in Montgomery, Alabama he was another poor dumb nigger who'd forgotten his manners, his mouth and his place.
Nathan and I had never really seen a difference between us; not until then.
In January 1961 John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United States. He walked into a minefield. Three months in office and armed Cuban exiles made a bid to overthrow Castro's Marxist government in Cuba. Khrushchev vowed to give Castro all the aid he needed. The following month the U.S. agreed to give more money and military aid to South Vietnam.
&nbs
p; A week later white mobs attacked the freedom riders at the bus station in Birmingham, Alabama.
I was fifteen years old, and foremost in my mind were girls - girls like Sheryl Rose Bogazzi, Linny Goldbourne and Caroline Lanafeuille - but something out there told me that the trials and tribulations of a 9th-grader were the least of the world's concerns.
As I turned sixteen, Nathan there beside me, America seemed to hang on the edge of the abyss both at home and abroad.
We heard about someplace called the Bay of Pigs, and for thirteen days people honestly believed, I mean really believed, that the world would end. Like Dean Rusk said, 'We were eyeball to eyeball, and the other guy just blinked.'
More than eleven hundred Bay of Pigs invaders were jailed for thirty years and Castro tried to ransom them for $62,000,000. A month later, May '62, and JFK sent his Marines into Laos. In July, Martin Luther King was arrested for marching illegally in Georgia, a stone's throw across the state line from where I sat in Greenleaf Senior High.