by R.J. Ellory
It was Nathan Verney who rescued that child.
I saw him appear from behind the Reverend. He went down there and he lifted her as if she weighed nothing. He gathered the papers that had fallen and handed them to a white man who stood expressionless and dazed at the side of the road. The man took those papers without question.
And then Nathan saw me.
He nodded, walked towards me, and when he was a foot or two from me I held out my arms for the child.
The child reached back, I took her, and her slim arms enwrapped my neck.
She pulled tight, I started walking, and I went to Mrs. Chantry.
I think back now, all of us standing there, the Reverend, the witch who ate her husband, the black kid who floored Marty Hooper in Benny's, and the white misfit, the gangly pale-skinned youth holding this tiny colored girl. I see it now as if it were a photograph, and it makes me think of how it should have been all along. We were the universal family, and there was no difference, and no separate language, and we all breathed the same air and ate the same food and shared the same grief.
It was a day that went on forever, and I still believe now, in my heart of hearts, that we all carried a little of that day for the rest of our lives.
In December of 1963 my father had a stroke. He would live for another year, a little more, but he would never fully recover his speech. My mother was an anchor, a tower of strength for both him and myself, and without her I believe he would have died much sooner. The Carolina Company gave him an allowance, a generous one for all the years he'd served, and even after he died they continued to pay that allowance to my mother. She went through the motions for another handful of years, but she was never the same. The spirit that was my mother had left with her husband, and even as she spoke, even as she helped me deal with the difficulties I would later experience, I could see so clearly her pain, her loss, her longing to be once again beside him in whatever hereafter may exist. Almost as if she was merely awaiting my permission, some sign of my own independence to surface so she could let go. Let go in the knowledge that I could care for myself.
I think it was in that year that I ceased to be a child and started to become a man. Nathan went with me on that awkward painful journey into adulthood. I seemed to strain at the leashes of the past: those lost summer days where we sat at the edge of Lake Marion with string and bamboo and mischievous thoughts. The County Fair. The football field. The smell of summer mimosa down Nine Mile Road. And Caroline Lanafeuille, heart of my heart, soul of my soul, light of my life and star of my heaven.
I was approaching my eighteenth birthday, talk of the situation in Vietnam became ever more prevalent, and Nathan Verney and I sensed trouble on its way.
* * *
Chapter Five
Today is Thursday.
Today we eat creamed beef on toast. Shit on a shingle they call it, and though shit on a shingle is something I cannot recall eating before, creamed beef on toast is a good enough approximation.
While I eat Mr. Timmons speaks to me. He tells me a minister will come down to talk to me today. It is part of the process. Learning how to die I think.
Mr. Timmons tells me his wife has been admitted to North Carolina State Hospital. She has deep vein thrombosis. He tells me she carries too much weight for her height. He is worried. I feel his worry but there is little I can say. I can tell that he loves her dearly, and much as my own mother found it difficult to continue without my father, so Mr. Timmons will find it difficult if his wife dies. I honestly hope she will recover. Mr. Timmons deals with enough death already.
The minister I will meet. I will speak with him. I will listen to what he has to say. Personally I think we keep coming back 'til we get it right. I don't believe in Heaven, and Hell would be so crowded I don't think such a place could exist. The minister will challenge me, tell me that I have to have faith, the implication being that I have none.
I do have faith.
I have faith in the truth.
I have faith that the sun will rise and set.
I have faith that the spirit of Nathan Verney lives and breathes and walks the world, and one day I will meet him.
I have faith in the fact that I am going to die.
I recall something then, something that occurred soon after Kennedy's death, and even as Mr. Timmons returns to his duties I see Nathan's face once more.
I close my eyes.
For some reason I feel calm inside.
The world seems silent, patient perhaps, as if time is being afforded me to reminisce, to address my own life, to make some sense of it all before it is complete.
So be it, I think.
Grateful for small mercies.
In March of 1964 Jack Ruby went to Death Row. He'd been found guilty of the first degree murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, the mystical and impressive man who, with no training or experience, had fired three shots into JFK's motorcade and killed the King. Despite the complete impossibility of replicating this feat, even with the highest trained FBI and military marksmen, the Warren Commission, led by the same man who had earlier been sacked by Jack Kennedy, would complete their report, their beautiful whitewash, and announce that it would always and forever be nothing more than a lone gunman.
I never believed it. Hadn't believed it from the first.
In April Sidney Poitier became the first black man to win an Oscar. He won it for a film called Lilies of the Field. At first it seemed some progress was being made, but two months later Martin Luther King was back in the Big House for trying to enforce racial integration in a restaurant in Florida.
Later that same month three Civil Rights workers went missing. They would soon be found dead.
In July, Lyndon B. Johnson, the new President of the United States, signed the Civil Rights Act, a sweeping condemnation of segregated restaurants and buses and railroad stations and hotels, an Act that denied the right of any man to choose color as a preference in employment or position.
Nathan and Reverend Verney led a congregation of hundreds that day, but later Nathan told me he didn't think the promised changes would really come within his lifetime.
He didn't know how right he was, though never in the way he intended.
I turned eighteen. I was still a virgin. This caused me a deep-seated sense of concern. As the fall of '64 unfolded I sensed my father's physical condition worsening, and this served to take my attention away from my lack of sexual conquest.
I watched him die then, through the latter part of October and into November and, coincident with the Vietcong launching attacks at Bien Hoa and the declaration of martial law in Saigon, my father the railroad man, the just and lawful railroad man, slipped away silently.
I wanted to bury him in Reverend Verney's churchyard. My mother, understanding, compassionate, said we could not. The Civil Rights Act 1964 hadn't yet reached Greenleaf, North Carolina.
In February of 1965 Malcolm X was shot and killed and the U.S. started bombing North Vietnam. In March LBJ sent the Marines in, and within weeks they were pulling 35,000 recruits a month. Warren Myers, Max's son, was one of those who went, willingly and with duty in his heart; the son of a man I wouldn't meet for close on a decade. There was talk of conscription, the Draft, and Nathan and I would meet and speak of these things - of the war, the promise of the future, and the fact that we were not ready to die.
I don't believe I am a coward. I don't believe I was ever a coward. But the idea of lying dead in some rain-swollen field in the middle of nowhere haunted me.
I remember something from the spring of that year. A man came back, a soldier. He was older than us, perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four, but his face was that of a man in his forties. His left leg was missing below the knee, and he walked with help and a shoulder and a heavy-looking stick. The expression on his face was one of perpetual sadness, as if he was always on the verge of tears. He had been there, out there in Vietnam, and he came to Greenleaf to see his cousin and his cousin brought him to Benny's.
Like the things they carried determined who they were.
He spoke of things I didn't understand, this young man with his forty-year-old face.
Things called heat tabs, Kool Aid and C-Rations.
He spoke of a steel helmet with a liner and a camouflage cover; a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket; compress bandages and a plastic poncho. He described an M-16, the cloth bandoliers filled with numerous magazines. He spoke of rods and steel brushes and gun oil, fragmentation and phosphorus grenades, of Claymore anti-personnel mines, and sometimes mosquito netting and canvas tarpaulins. And then he told us there were items of choice, such as razors and chewing gum, paper to write letters home, playing cards and lucky dice. He spoke of a young man from Myrtle Beach - not a dozen miles from where we sat - who carried a rabbit's foot on a string around his neck. Carried it until he died in the arms of a twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant called Shelby White.
We listened, me and Nathan and others I don't recall, and we looked at one another at moments with the same expression.
Then, even then, I knew what was coming, and the fear I'd felt a thousand years before as I stood on a path with a fish in my hands was nothing compared to what I was now feeling.
Nathan Verney felt it too.
We were one and the same, he and I, and I believe now that we knew what was going to happen.
And it did. Not for some time, but it did.
Like a wave breaking for the shore, once started it cannot slow or stop or change its direction.
And it was big, big enough to drown us both.
After my father's death and into the summer of 1965 I spent more time away from home, as if I could see the burden my mother was carrying and did not possess the strength to share it. I hung out at Benny's, I listened to the same scarred and scratched records, and I watched for Caroline.
She would come down there perhaps once or twice a week, and she would sit with her friends drinking soda and talking girl-talk. I would sit alone more often than not, and sense her presence, and feel the distance between us, and remember the Scotch-taped picture I had carried for so long. Where it was by then I didn't know, but I could still feel its smooth surface between my fingers, still recall the sense of longing that possessed me each time I looked at it.
It was at the end of July that she first spoke to me. Spoke to me directly. Her friends had gathered as they ordinarily did, and then one by one they seemed to fade away. I could not have said how they went, or when, but they did, and sure enough I turned and saw Caroline seated alone at her table.
I tensed. I think I prayed a little. I rose from my stool at the counter and walked nonchalantly towards her.
She turned as I came, and she smiled - Lord how she smiled. That same tilt of the head, the way her hair fell sideways from her face, and the flicker of tension around her lips before she let loose with such a radiant smile I could feel sunshine breaking out.
'Daniel Ford,' she said.
I nodded.
'You wanna come sit down?'
I nodded again.
She laughed. 'Cat got your tongue, Mister Ford?'
'No,' I replied, and slid along the seat facing hers.
'Just got the words with more than one syllable, right?'
I laughed. 'I'm sorry,' I said.
'For what?'
I shrugged. I didn't know what I was sorry for. Sorry for being a schmuck perhaps.
'I was gonna get another soda,' she said. 'You want one?'
I nodded.
'Yes, Caroline,' she prompted.
I smiled. 'Yes, Caroline.'
She turned and waved her hand. Benny nodded from behind the counter and went about his business.
'So how ya doing?' she asked.
'I'm okay,' I said. 'My father died you know?' I blushed. I didn't know why I'd said that. It seemed idiotic, like I was trying to win her over with sympathy.
'I know,' she said.
She reached out her hand. I saw it coming in slow- motion. She reached out her fine and delicate hand and she touched my ugly, stumpy, fat-fingered hand.
'I heard,' she said softly. 'I'm sorry.'
'Thank you,' I said, and I really meant it. Someone important to me, someone other than my ma had expressed their sadness about something that in its own way had tortured me silently.
'Your ma's okay?' she asked.
I nodded. 'She's coping.'
Caroline smiled understandingly and withdrew her hand.
Benny brought sodas. We drank silently, and for all the world to see we could have known each other for a thousand years.
It was an important moment, a profound moment, a moment I would remember for years to come. Caroline Lanafeuille was the first, and in some way she would be the last, though the significance of that I would not understand until I believed I was going to die.
'I've seen you here a lot,' she said. 'You always sit on your own.'
I shrugged non-committally.
'Where's Nathan?'
I frowned. I was unaware of the fact that we were so well known together.
'With his folks I s'pose.'
'So when you come down here you should come talk to us,' she said.
I smiled and shook my head. 'Don't see as how I'd fit in with half a dozen girls,' I replied.
She nodded. 'So perhaps you should just come talk to me.'
I felt myself blush. It seemed to please her.
She smiled. 'So that's settled then… when you're down here and I'm here too then you come talk to me, okay?'
'Okay,' I said, and in that second I wanted to tell her everything - of the picture, the Journal of Endeavor, of how I had longed and hoped and prayed that she would speak to me just once. And now she was telling me it was okay.
It really was okay.
She stayed a little while - ten, perhaps fifteen minutes - and then she rose slowly, gracefully, from her seat and said she would have to go home.
'I'll walk you,' I said.
'Thank you, Daniel,' she replied, and I did. I walked her home, and though it took the best part of twenty minutes, and though I don't believe more than a dozen words passed between us, it was the most memorable walk of my life.
Arriving at her house she thanked me for being a gentleman, and she reminded me that she would be at Benny's the following Wednesday.
'So you come talk to me, okay?'
'Agreed,' I said.
She held out her hand. We shook.
'Agreed,' she said, and then she passed through the gate at the foot of the path leading to her house.
At the door she paused, and then she turned, and she tilted her head and sort of half-smiled.
I raised my hand. I smiled. She disappeared.
I floated home that night, floated three feet from terra firma with my head in the clouds.
I was nineteen years old, and I did see her again the following week, and two days after that in fact, and the subsequent day as well.
When she stood near me I could smell Bazooka Joe bubble gum and toothpaste. When she held my hand I felt something moving inside me. Something cool and quiet and special.
She spoke with a Southern accent - pronounced and lyrical - and when she talked it sounded like the words of a song.
She was so different from the other girls I knew. She read a lot, things by Hemingway and Robert Frost, and she quoted lines from something called 'Song of Myself' by Walt Whitman.
I had watched her from afar for so long, but never really spoken to her. Two weeks became three, and I felt she was the only girl I had ever really shared my thoughts and dreams with, the only girl who ever gave me the feeling she understood something of who I was.
And then there was a day, a day in August, and she came to me that day, came walking towards me as I crossed the Nine Mile Road, and there was something in her expression that told me she'd been looking. The sun was high and hot, and I could see the fine gloss of
sweat across her top lip. I wanted to kiss it away. I remember thinking that, and for some reason the thought did not embarrass me. I felt settled somehow, and when she walked beside me it didn't matter that she was there, that she was a girl, that she was pretty or funny or interesting. She was just there.