by R.J. Ellory
I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment, but there was no vanity or pride or self-aggrandizement. I felt I could be myself.
And though we had spent so much time together, though we'd shared things that would never transpire between myself and any other, she could never have guessed the depth to which I'd loved her… and for so long.
That day in August Caroline Lanafeuille came to find me because she wanted to.
That was the most important thing.
'Daniel,' she said, and she reached out and touched my hand.
I smiled. 'Caroline… how goes it?'
'It goes,' she said, and her voice was a whisper.
'What you up to?'
'I came to find you,' she said.
'So you found me.'
'I did,' she replied.
And then she touched my hand again, and this time she held it, and we walked for a while saying nothing much of anything at all.
And yet despite this, despite this sense of having arrived, I did not think of touching her. I did not think of her skin, the arch of her neck, the curve and dip of her hip or thigh. I did not think of the smooth, tanned silk of her back, the slender ankle, the short white sock or the cream-colored pump. I did not think of a midnight rendezvous in the back of a Chevrolet Impala, I did not think of breaking a sweat, of fumbling in the semi-darkness with buttons or bows or bra-clips.
Caroline Lanafeuille just walked alongside me down Nine Mile Road, and everything was alright.
Without a thought in my head, I smiled.
We walked for an hour, a little more perhaps, and then she slowed and stopped.
I slowed with her. She faced me, held both my hands, and there was something in her eyes that told me something was making its way towards me. Something that possessed sharp corners and rough edges.
'I have to go now,' she said.
'But…'
'I'll come see you later. I'll come see you at your house, okay?'
The way she looked told me not to ask anything. I nodded, smiled as best I could, and watched as she walked away once more.
Seemed like I'd spent almost every hour of every day with her for a month. She'd laughed at my stories, we'd gone skinny-dipping in Lake Marion. She'd even met Nathan and thought him handsome and bright and charming. She'd met my ma, my ma had thought her delightful and witty and one-in-a-million, and when Ma had made baked ham sandwiches she'd made them for two.
That, and that alone, made Caroline Lanafeuille almost family.
And yet despite all these things, these special moments and magic hours, I did not believe she loved me as I loved, and had loved, her.
I tried to believe, Lord knows I tried.
Perhaps I did not know what I was trying for.
It was like climbing a mountain, overwhelmingly high, and as I reached each visible peak I found another taller peak beyond it.
It was a good time, that month or so, and it concluded that night… suddenly, unexpectedly… a sense of beautiful tragedy.
I lost my virginity on August 17th 1965.
I stood on the back porch of my house. The verandah ran along the side and turned the corner, but the back door possessed its own steps down to the yard. From where I stood I could see the road that ran all the way to the Lake. I was thinking of Nathan. I had not seen him for two or three days, and then I remembered he had gone with his father to Charleston. Reverend Verney was on the fall testimonials, a series of gatherings he held for two or three weeks each year. Folks would come from all over to hear Reverend Verney speak in Charleston. He was a good speaker, he commanded an audience, and when you slipped a dollar or two in that solid silver collection plate it sometimes felt like a fee for a performance. Folks down here appreciated a preacher breaking a sweat in church, and Reverend Verney broke a sweat that would have carried Noah home.
I saw Caroline before she turned off the road and started down the path. I saw her through the trees, her white summer cotton frock, her shoulder-length hair, the breeze flicking it up around her face. She really was a beautiful girl.
When she turned the corner and saw me she waved.
In that moment I seemed to feel something I could never hope to describe.
It was an awareness, a perception, that something would both begin and end today.
I waved back.
She smiled, and though she looked like the same Caroline Lanafeuille there was something in her expression, something in her eyes, that told me something was different.
She reached out and took my hand as I came down the back porch steps. She sort of pulled me towards her and kissed my cheek.
I asked her how she was.
She said she was fine, just fine.
She asked if we could sit on the verandah swing.
I nodded, said I'd fetch some lemonade and bring it out.
She turned and walked towards the side of the house.
I watched her go, why I don't know, but I did, and when she reached the corner of the house she suddenly slowed and glanced back. She had expected to see me disappearing into the house, perhaps just the screen door closing behind me. The fact that I was still standing there surprised her. She smiled, and then she frowned, and then she sort of shooed me into the house like one would shoo a cat or a dog.
The lemonade was cool; chunks of ice floated on the top and clinked against the glasses as I walked back the way I'd come. The sound was like one of those delicate wind- chimes you would find in bedroom windows.
I went up onto the verandah and sat beside Caroline. She took the glass and sipped. She sipped like a bird. She pursed her lips and kissed the lip of the glass and you would imagine she could drink nothing that way. She did these things, these special little things, and it was for reasons such as these that I loved her.
'I'm leaving Greenleaf,' she said.
She came out with it like that.
Like a stone had dropped from the evening sky right into my lap.
The only thing I could ever remember being so sudden was in Benny's. Nathan had roundhoused Marty Hooper and he flat-fuck fell to the ground. Boom. Down.
And it was like that.
Bang. I'm leaving Greenleaf.
'Leaving?' I remember asking.
She nodded, turned away for just a moment, and when she turned back there were tears in her eyes.
'There's been a little trouble,' she said. 'My daddy's gotten himself in a little trouble, Daniel.'
She always called me Daniel. Never Danny or Dan or Danno like the others did. Always Daniel.
She paused as if to catch her breath, and then she reached out and held my hand.
Again I felt that something, something that moved inside of me, something cool and quiet and special.
'So we have to leave,' she said quietly.
I was silent for a time.
'When?' I eventually asked.
She turned away. I could tell she wanted to look at me but could not.
'In the morning,' she whispered, and there was such emotion in her voice I felt like crying myself.
'So soon?' I asked.
'So soon,' she stated matter-of-factly.
She still could not look at me.
I wanted to ask what trouble she meant, what had her father done that was so bad he would have to leave Greenleaf. But I did not ask. For me to have asked would have been unfair. If she'd wished me to know she would have told me.
We stayed like that for a little while longer, Caroline looking out through the trees towards the Lake, every once in a while sipping her lemonade like a bird, and then she turned, eventually she turned, and she said something that I would think of later as I languished in a jail cell in Sumter.
'We should… you know, we should... before I leave…'
I felt that something inside me again. No longer cool and quiet and special, but alive, a fiery thing, like a Catherine wheel or a roman candle in my stomach.
The way she said it - we should - required no explanation. I knew what
she meant, she knew I knew, and when she turned and smiled I just smiled back.
There was innocence in that moment, innocence and passion, and something that you felt only one time in your life.
There were no trumpets, no rah-rahs, no cheerleader troupe with pom-poms and brass bands playing Sousa marches across the endzone.
There was warmth and silence and promise, and a moment of sweet perfection.
My ma went out that night.
My ma never went out alone.
Night of August 17th 1965 she changed the habit of a lifetime.
I think God had something to do with that.
We lay on the narrow bed beneath the window, the same bed where I had lain when my father came to tell me Mr. Kennedy had died.
She smelled of juniper and toothpaste and a sweet sense of beauty that would linger long after she'd gone. It was cool. There was a breeze beyond the trees, and every once in a while the leaves would rustle like they were whispering delicate secrets one to another.
I had never done this before, neither had she, but somehow we seemed to know where we were going and why.
I remember the moment she stood before me naked. I felt hot and flushed, dizzy almost, and when my hands reached towards her they shook.
'You can touch,' she whispered. 'I won't break.'
She took a single step forward, and my hands reached further, almost grabbed her with a life of their own, and then I could feel her skin, the curves of her thighs, and I could barely hold my eyes open long enough to look.
Her skin was pale and unblemished. Her hair was tied back behind her head with a loose bow. She smiled, she stepped back again, and then she held out her hand and I took it. I rose from where I'd been seated on the edge of my bed.
She pulled me close, Caroline Lanafeuille, and she closed her arms around me and pulled me tight. Tight like Sunday-best shoelaces.
I stayed there forever it seemed, and then she leaned close to my ear and whispered: 'I think you're s'posed to take your clothes off too, Daniel.'
I smiled, I blushed, I felt simple and naive.
She released me and I started to remove my shirt, my jeans. For a moment I stood there in my shorts, and then she pushed me back to the bed and sat beside me.
I kissed her hair, her cheek, her neck, her lips. I wanted to kiss every inch of her, wanted to swallow her whole. I felt clumsy and awkward, but somehow my awkwardness seemed to be appropriate. I kissed each closed eye in turn and tasted the salt-sweet tang of tears. And when she lay down I lay there beside her. She moved slightly across me and I felt the weight of her breast upon my shoulder.
'These too,' she said, tugging at my shorts. 'Sex with your shorts on is like taking a bath wearing socks.'
I smiled, inwardly more than visibly, and I tried so hard not to laugh.
Her hand was smooth and delicate, like a ballerina, and when she made small circles across my stomach I felt myself stir and rise.
I believe my heart was beating more slowly than ever.
Time didn't matter.
We had all the time in the world.
Some time later she made a small sound, a sound that was neither pain nor pressure nor anything I knew. The sound she made was one of completeness.
I understood that sound, for I felt complete also. Whole and pure and satiated.
Our movement was in unison, a narrow dance, a soft ballet of sounds and emotions and feelings, and all the fears I had possessed about such a moment seemed irrelevant.
And though my eyes were closed I could see her, and her beauty was more complete than I could ever have imagined.
And it was in that moment that I understood love.
Love more than life itself.
And though there would be times when I would think of Sheryl Rose and Linny Goldbourne, there would never be a moment like the one I shared with Caroline Lanafeuille that night in August when I was nineteen and the world seemed like heaven.
Later she left.
She left me there half-asleep.
She dressed. She leaned over me. She kissed my forehead, rested her hand on my cheek, and then she left.
I heard the screen door downstairs, and though I wanted to lean up towards the window and watch her cross the yard and start away towards the Lake, I did not.
Could not.
I never wished to remember her leaving.
I wanted my last abiding memory of Caroline Lanafeuille to be that moment I knew I truly loved her.
Nothing else.
I would not see her for many, many years, when we both had changed irrevocably.
I would never really learn what her father had done that had taken her away, and I said nothing to Nathan when he returned from the fall testimonials in Charleston.
I believed that some things, just a handful, were for yourself and God alone.
* * *
Chapter Six
In November of 1965 the Army came to Greenleaf.
Why they chose Greenleaf I don't know, but they came, and with them a tent the size of half a football field.
They sent out buses to bring people from the surrounding towns, and those people came in their hundreds. They saw it perhaps as a family outing, and when they arrived they found the Army had laid on fried chicken and corn and potato salad.
People crowded into that tent, and like an evangelical gathering they sat and waited for the Army man to arrive.
Despite the season it was warm, and soon that tent was like an oven, people fanning themselves with the brochures they found on their seats. Children gathered in small crowds along the edge of the tent, chattering and laughing and squabbling.
But when the Army man arrived they were hushed and well-behaved.
I sat beside my ma, and to my left was Mrs. Chantry. In the row ahead Reverend and Mrs. Verney sat, with Nathan between then.
The Army man was Sergeant Michael O'Donnelly of the Airborne something-or-other. He told us to call him Sergeant Mike. They'd rigged up a loudspeaker and his voice was clear and measured and precise. He'd done this before, many times I was sure, for it was from places like Greenleaf and Myrtle Beach and Orangeburg that LBJ's 35,000 men a month would come.
They would give fried chicken and corn and potato salad to America's parents, and in return they would take their sons. Perhaps, to folk in Washington, it seemed a fair exchange.
Sergeant Mike was a spirited speaker, a man of verve and passion. He believed in America. He believed in the Constitution. He believed in freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, and he was doing just fine until Karl Winterson who ran the Radio Store asked him how many of our boys had died out there already.
For a heartbeat there was silence, a palpable tension within the acreage of that tent. Inside that heartbeat it seemed we were all gathered beneath a single blanket.
And then there was a child's voice from the side. A single child's voice that cut through that moment and separated it like a razor. The moment split in half and rolled each way like an orange on a chopping board.
'Serpent Mike… is the Vietcong like King Kong?'
A moment's perfect silence, and then laughter broke like a wave.
The tension was shattered.
The question Mr. Winterson asked was never answered.
It was a question Sergeant Mike had not wanted to be asked.
'No, son,' Sergeant Mike eventually said. 'The Vietcong are an awful lot more real than a big monkey.'
Nathan glanced over his shoulder towards me. The expression in his eyes told me that I was not alone in doubting the truthfulness of that statement.
And then the time came, the time to ask, the time to sell us our own freedom, a freedom I believed we already had.
The evangelical minister was asking for money, that's how it felt, and folk were embarrassed because they knew the minister was a drunk and a liar and a philanderer.
But Sergeant Mike had asked before, many times before, and he pounded the crowd with quotes from Lincoln and Rob
ert E. Lee and General Patton.
I realized then that Sergeant Mike was talking to me, talking to me and to Nathan, and to all those others that still hung out at Benny's and believed the world could never reach that far.