Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry

by Susan Vaught

  Nothing. Just slow, soft breathing.

  I kept watching Grandma’s mouth but took her hand in mine again, trying not to let the disappointment and frustration grind at me. “I know you got hurt in the Meredith riot. Dad said you had to go to Chicago because the hospitals here wouldn’t treat you since you were Black.”

  In the shadowy light, I saw a tear slide down Grandma’s face and hit the pillowcase. “Ava,” she said. Her mouth moved. I was sure of it. And then, “Why?”

  Nothing else.

  I stopped talking, because I so didn’t want to make her cry. No more tears appeared, and her breathing went back to even, like she had fallen asleep. I kept tracing my fingertips along her skeletal hands, glad they were still so warm, even if they were soft and fragile.

  Dad found me there later, when he came in for one of the night checks. Instead of fussing at me for not being in bed, he picked up another chair from around the desk, brought it over to the bed, sat down beside me, and put his arm around my shoulders.

  “You upset, Dani?”

  “No.” I leaned against him.

  “You telling the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  He yawned and gazed at Grandma with me. “I noticed you didn’t call Indri after dinner tonight. You two have words or something?”

  “Nah. She had another Skype call with her dad tonight. They were trying for around eight our time, but it’s whenever he gets to the front of the line and gets his turn.”

  Dad’s profile looked huge and funny in the near darkness as he turned toward me and asked, “How long can they talk?”

  “Half an hour, maybe. He can get back in line after that, but it takes hours to get another turn.”

  “Huh.” His attention shifted back to Grandma. “That didn’t start until after I retired. I would have liked to talk to you and your mother when I was deployed, but I probably wouldn’t have had the patience for all that waiting-in-line mess.”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t tell him about Grandma talking. We all knew she did it now and then, but it seemed private, the conversation she and I had before Dad came into the room. I wondered if he had his own private talks with her when Mom and I were gone for the day. I hoped he did.

  The two of us watched Grandma breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. She seemed peaceful and easy now.

  13

  A SMART PERSON WOULD HAVE BOLTED

  * * *

  Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 316

  Am I your friend, CiCi, or am I not?

  Of all the . . . what was I supposed to say to that? What was the truth? I dug around inside myself, sweat forming at the back of my neck. “Yes. I rate you as a friend, Leslie.”

  Her tense shoulders relaxed. Then she sat down at one of the classroom desks. “So what am I supposed to do when I’m sorry isn’t enough?”

  And here we were, back to why I had trouble moving past the Kream Kup situation. A crushing weariness took me. “Do you know who Billie Holiday is?”

  Sitting at that desk, Leslie looked like a ninth grader trying not to laugh at her teacher. “Well, yeah. Only the most famous jazz singer ever.”

  “Which of her songs are your favorites?”

  “God Bless the Child,” she said. “Oh, and Summertime, and Ain’t Nobody’s Business.”

  “Those are ones everybody knows. Did you ever hear Strange Fruit?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Well, I’m no Lady Day, but Strange Fruit goes like this.” I cleared my throat and closed my eyes. My hand moved to my gut, and I squeezed the dickens out of my dusting rag as I pulled up the deep tones and made myself form the gritty words that almost shut down the Café Society club in Greenwich Village in 1939, the first time Billie Holiday sang them.

  Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root . . .

  I opened my eyes to take a breath, and all I could see was Leslie’s horrified expression. I sang the rest of the verses, only two more, but each worse than the last, poetically describing the pastoral Southern scene, what a hanged person looks like, fruit for the crows to pluck . . . a strange and bitter crop.

  When I finished, Leslie stared at me. Waiting. I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say.

  “That’s why you got to be more careful,” I whispered, my throat raw from the song. “Enough of us are gonna die as it is.”

  Leslie nodded. Then she put her face in her hands, and she cried.

  DAD TOTALLY SURPRISED ME WEDNESDAY morning by having a sitter for Grandma, and taking Indri and me to Courthouse Square himself instead of having Mom drop us off. He said Dr. Harper would meet us there, and I managed not to tell him I’d just as soon Dr. Harper stay far, far away from me. If Dad was along, nothing bad could happen.

  Indri and I sat in the backseat of Dad’s black Mustang convertible, with the top down and Fink’s “Hush Now” blaring from the radio. Damp morning air tingled against our faces. Everything smelled like grass and dirt and concrete, so soon after last night’s rain, and Indri kept grinning as the wind whipped her ponytail in big circles. We had on nearly matching blouses, pink like a lot of the flowers we passed. I felt like spring and summer all at the same time, and I grinned too. Dad drove the slow loop around Courthouse Square looking for a parking spot, I hugged my pack with Grandma’s writing and the key.

  We passed the courthouse and the tall statue of a Confederate soldier gazing off in the distance. Then we drove past city hall on the right, with its familiar bench holding the bronze statue of William Faulkner. He sat on one end, in the same cross-legged pose I had seen all my life, smoking his eternal pipe and staring out across the square. On the other end of the bench sat Avadelle Richardson, dressed in a pink jogging suit, wearing her fedora hat that exactly matched the one on the statue, holding her eagle-head cane, and looking crankier than ever.

  Spring-summer-pink popped like a balloon inside me, and I blinked my eyes fast, hoping she was a hallucination. A soft groan from the seat beside me let me know that Indri had seen her too.

  Indri leaned forward to my ear and whispered, “What’s she doing here?”

  I almost said I had no idea, but that would have been a lie, so I just gave a little shrug.

  Indri groaned again. “You didn’t. You really, really didn’t. Dr. Harper—and now her, too?”

  “Sshh. Dad’ll hear you.” I started to sweat even though it wasn’t hot. I mumbled to her about how Dr. Harper called Dad and planned to show up, and about what I texted to Mac. Then, too loud, I said, “How was your Skype call with your dad last night?”

  Indri’s evil look went way past epic, but she gave Dad a sideways glance and answered with, “Good! He thinks he might get to come home over Thanksgiving.”

  Real emotion chased away her annoyance, and she actually grinned. Meanwhile, I was thinking, Thanksgiving. Wow. That was like months from now, but she looked so excited. I smiled for her and tried to look excited back, but I couldn’t imagine being away from my mom or dad for months and months and months, with just Skype connecting us.

  “I’m glad your dad might get to be here for some of the holidays,” I said as my dad parked.

  Indri’s smile got pretty huge. I decided she was a lot stronger than me. The whole warrior thing, it must seep down from soldiers to their kids—but maybe it only worked when the soldiers weren’t retired. I mean, my dad had been career military before I could really remember. How did I get to be such a weenie?

  “Come on, ladies,” Dad said. “Ms. Manchester doesn’t have all day.”

  We got out of the car, and Dad led us through the crosswalk to the entrance of 160 Courthouse Square, the two-story brick building with a balcony that most everyone in Oxford and outside of Oxford knew about: Square Books.

  Dad held open the glass door and we walked into a world that smelled like old books, older wood, and really new books too. Right near the door, tables heaped i
n copies of bestsellers took up most of the space. Wooden shelves along each wall bent under decades of other books, and through it all wound the unmistakable aroma of brewing coffee from the little coffee bar upstairs. Indri drifted immediately to one of the tables that seemed to have a blue cover theme, and Dad instantly got distracted by a pile of green gardening encyclopedias.

  I shouldered my pack as my eyes got pulled to gallery art, then to shelves full of mysteries, then to the stairs, and . . .

  Um, oops.

  Mac Richardson leaned against the bannister about ten feet in front of me, wearing a yellow T-shirt with a guitar on the front and jeans with holes in both knees. He gave me a nod, but then his gaze flicked to Indri, and on to my father, and back to me with narrowed eyes.

  You didn’t say anything about your dad bringing you, that look said.

  I tried to be stern with my answering expression, going all, Hey, I didn’t have to text you about coming here, did I?

  But I couldn’t quite move, so I just formed an ice barrier of total freak-out between Dad and Indri and Mac. A smart person would have bolted out the front door.

  Weenie, weenie, weenie.

  Indri came up beside me. I didn’t have to look at her to know she was glaring. As for Dad—no. I just couldn’t even turn around to see what he was doing.

  “Don’t look for sympathy from me,” Indri said in a deadly quiet voice.

  “It’ll be okay,” I whispered back. “Don’t make a thing out of it.”

  “There is something seriously wrong with you,” she said.

  A big hand closed on my shoulder. “Mackinnon,” Dad said loud enough to be heard through the whole store. “This is a surprise.”

  Mac had the good sense to keep looking uncomfortable, but he managed to straighten up and nod to my father. “I had to bring my grandmother to the Square for her morning walk and communion with the bard, and I knew you’d be here to see my Aunt Naomi about the Meredith riot.”

  “You knew—” Dad started, but Indri cut him off with—

  “Communion with the bard?” She folded her arms. “What, she worships William Faulkner? Wasn’t he a mean old drunk?”

  I closed my eyes for a second, but at least Indri left off the too on that sentence.

  Mac didn’t take the bait. “GG says Mr. Faulkner liked his whiskey and mint juleps, just like her.” His lopsided grin was cute. “I thought maybe I could help y’all figure out what happened the night of the riot, since GG won’t tell anybody.”

  “I see,” Dad said.

  My head got a double-cold sensation, like Dad might be staring freeze-lasers into my skull. A thousand excuses and explanations popped into my brain, but before I could fumble around with any of them, Ms. Manchester appeared at the top of the steps.

  Dr. Harper was standing right behind her.

  Indri and I both jumped at the sight of the professor, but he was dressed in khaki slacks with a tweed jacket, and his white hair had gone back to unkempt. The unlit pipe in his teeth finished his transformation back to nice-old-guy, but I couldn’t help staring straight at his face, waiting for that other professor to make an appearance. The angry one, with the edge of something like hunger.

  “Morning!” Ms. Manchester waved down to us, and I had an insane urge to run up the stairs and hug her, but I didn’t want to get that close to Dr. Harper. Instead, I waved back as she spotted Mac. “And hello, nephew mine. Where’s Mom?”

  “Out by the statue.” Mac jogged up the steps and gave his aunt a hug. “You know, searching for inspiration, or whatever it is she does on that bench.”

  “What she does on that bench is scare the town with her grouchy face,” Ms. Manchester said, her tone matter-of-fact.

  “Well, yeah.” Mac grinned again, and I fixed my eyes on my feet as I climbed the steps to avoid noticing he was cute this time.

  Dad and Indri followed along behind me, not helping my shivery insides with their cold silence. Jeez. It wasn’t like Mac robbed gas stations for a living. Maybe I should have hated Mac for disrespecting our friendship, but I just didn’t anymore.

  As for Dr. Harper, maybe he was having a bad day yesterday. Or maybe he’s going to drag you into a dark alley and club you in the head to steal that key. Yeah. That little fear spoke itself in Indri’s voice.

  I almost walked right into Ms. Manchester, who had stopped at one of the coffee bar tables. She pulled two of the tables together, then gestured to Mac to bring the high-backed wooden chairs closer.

  I took the spot at the end of the table, with Dad on one side and Ms. Manchester on the other. I was thinking about the locker scene with Mac. Maybe, just maybe, if Mac and I kept talking and being peaceful, I’d get to ask him the real reason he wanted to stop being friends.

  “Baby girl,” Dad said, annoyed. “This is your show, remember?”

  “What?” I snapped my gaze away from Mac and gaped at Dad, then slowly, slowly remembered why we had come. “Ms. Manchester, you know my grandmother’s not well.”

  Ms. Manchester nodded, and her smile faltered. Her eyes drifted to my father, and filled with sympathy.

  “She’s been getting agitated this last week or so, and saying stuff that I think is related to Avadelle—to your mom, and to whatever happened between them. Dr. Harper told us that most feud scholars believe the fight started over Night on Fire, and something your mom did or didn’t say in her novel. But Dr. Harper also said the fight could have started before that, and their friendship seemed more troubled right after the riot. So, I’d like to understand more about the night James Meredith came to Ole Miss.”

  Ms. Manchester didn’t answer right away, so I added, “We know Grandma got hurt during the riot.” I pointed to Dr. Harper, who was sitting beside her. “He also told us about that. We’re hoping you know something more than the rest of us.”

  She stayed quiet, but she got up, went over to a stack of books beside a shelf, took off the top one, and came back. When she put it on the table, I realized it was a bound document, not a book—and by the title, it was the paper she had written about the Meredith riot. She opened the paper, pulled a pencil from behind her ear, and tapped the first paragraph. “I’ll answer what I can, but a little context will help.”

  “Oh, here we go with the context again,” Indri said, sounding miserable. Across the table from her, Dr. Harper laughed, and she closed her mouth.

  Ms. Manchester tapped the bound document in front of her. “James Meredith first applied to Ole Miss in 1961. Let’s trace history from that point forward.”

  14

  UNDER ATTACK FROM EVERYWHERE

  * * *

  Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 361

  Early on Saturday Morning, July 7, 1962, I woke to somebody pounding on my front door. My heart jumped straight to my throat, and I near about fell out of bed. Rain pattered on the tin roof as I pulled on my robe and slippers. It might be the police. The classes, helping with voter registration—I was going to jail.

  Aunt Jessie and Abram and I hit the living room at the same time. Mama had stayed in bed, in too much pain to move. I grabbed my boy and pushed him at Aunt Jessie. “Take him to the kitchen. If it’s the police, you go out back with him, and you keep going, and you don’t stop until you get three states north, you hear me?”

  Aunt Jessie set her mouth and nodded. She took hold of my son’s hand, and she towed him out of that room, leaving me to face the door alone.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  I didn’t hear anybody hollering for me to open up, but then, that’s how they did sometimes, sneaky-like and mean, so you couldn’t be ready or run. I straightened myself, tied my robe, and made my feet walk.

  Hand shaking, I gripped the handle and pulled open the door, my eyes blinking so fast, my skin and bones already waiting to be grabbed and tackled and beaten. Instead, I found Leslie standing in the rain like a half-drowned puppy, bawling her eyes out.

  I snatched hold of her and pulled her into my hou
se, slamming the door quick behind her. “Are you out of your mind showing up here in daylight?”

  “He had a heart attack, CiCi.” She sobbed, then covered her mouth. “It was a heart attack.”

  “What are you even talking about?”

  Leslie lowered her hand, but her eyes were barely focused. Her words sounded like so much crazy rambling. “At Byhalia. At the sanatorium where he goes, you know, after a run of drinking—Wright’s? I think that’s the name of it.”

  Noises behind me let me know that Aunt Jessie had realized I wasn’t being arrested. She and Abram eased up beside me to face Leslie, and Aunt Jessie put a hand on my elbow.

  Understanding began to dawn. I stepped back from Leslie, my breath leaving me like I’d been punched. My world got darker and sadder, and I would have cried if life had left me with any tears at all. “Oh. Oh, good Lord.”

  Leslie nodded and sobbed again. “He’s gone, CiCi. William Faulkner died yesterday.”

  “BY 1961,” MS. MANCHESTER SAID, “Southerners felt like they were under attack from everywhere because people were insisting that the races get mixed and treated equally. James Meredith applied to Ole Miss, and his application was denied due to his race. On September 10, 1962, the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the University of Mississippi to enroll James Meredith, effective immediately. Three days later, Governor Ross Barnett got on television and radio and stated, ‘We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them never!’ ”

  “Sounds like he wanted people in Mississippi to riot.” Mac frowned. “Telling people to do violent things—that’s not legal, is it?”

  “What a nutjob,” Indri said, sitting back in her chair.

  Dad quit rubbing his head long enough to pat Indri’s arm. “That’s how people talk when they’re scared.”

  “That’s how people talk when they’re huge idiots and want to make people panic and grab guns and start shooting,” Indri fired right back, making Dad smile at her, even though his eyes were half closed.