Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry

by Susan Vaught

  He held up his hand to block some of the light coming in through the windows. “You have a hippie’s heart, little girl,” he said to Indri. “I knew I liked you for a reason.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled back at him. “I think.”

  Ms. Manchester pointed to her paper, to another underlined section. “The situation at Ole Miss with James Meredith turned into a flashpoint for the push for integration. On September 29, President John F. Kennedy issued a proclamation calling on the governing authorities and the people of the State of Mississippi to ‘cease and desist’ their obstruction to Meredith’s registration, and to ‘disperse and retire peaceably forthwith.’ ”

  I had seen videos of President Kennedy before, and I thought about that stern, solemn face, and his weird Yankee accent, and imagined him saying cease and disperse and forthwith.

  Ms. Manchester relaxed in her chair and put both of her hands on the table, on either side of the paper she had written. “The next day, James Meredith arrived at the University of Mississippi, and a riot erupted.”

  “That’s insane,” Mac muttered. My father glanced at him, and Mac moved slightly to the left, giving Dad plenty of space as his aunt kept talking.

  “One group of marshals took Meredith to safety in a residence hall while another group faced the mob,” Ms. Manchester used a different voice than the one she used to tell us ghost stories. No drama. No flashlight. But I shivered anyway, because this was scarier than her spooky tales.

  Dr. Harper cleared his throat. His face sagged with a huge frown, and his voice was too quiet when he said, “I knew there was trouble, that there would be much, much more, but honestly, I was deep into working on an article and didn’t expect the worst to happen until school actually began.” He paused, keeping his eyes on his hands. “I remember sitting in my Bondurant office, smelling fire, smelling tear gas. When I looked at the clock, it was around nine p.m., and that’s the moment I understood I was in trouble, that the campus was in complete turmoil—and that Ruth might be at risk when she came to get the books I had collected for her elementary school class. It was far too late to warn her, since we had no cell phones. Gunfire erupted, seemingly from everywhere. I remember stuffing towels around my doors and windows and huddling on the floor until morning. I prayed very hard for your grandmother’s safety.”

  “Ruth and my mother had been working at your grandmother’s school,” Ms. Manchester said. “Like Dr. Harper, they expected the big showdown to happen the next day. By the time they reached campus, the Lyceum was under siege. A mix of students and citizens and Klan members and paramilitary groups had taken control of the Circle, and they raised the Confederate flag on the university’s flagpole. Groups of fighters roamed the campus, making trouble and attacking people.”

  “I can’t imagine that,” Indri said. “I mean, I know the campus like my own backyard. I’ve been to the Lyceum a zillion times. I knew there was a riot because of that statue of James Meredith, but I just can’t see a real military attack happening right out there on the grass.”

  Ms. Manchester studied her. “That’s one of the reasons I made it the focus of my paper, to try to get a better understanding of what happened, and how. That night, the badly outnumbered marshals fired tear gas, but the mob fought back with rocks and Molotov cocktails and attempted to drive cars, a fire engine, even a bulldozer into the marshals’ position at the Lyceum. By eleven p.m., most of the students had withdrawn, leaving Ku Klux Klan groups shooting at the marshals. More marshals came to reinforce the first group, but the Lyceum had become a field hospital. Hundreds of injured marshals were holed up inside with some journalists and medical folks, just trying to stay alive.”

  She stopped to let us absorb all of that. My dad got up, went to the coffee bar, and poured himself a cup. When he came back to the tables, he tried to pay Ms. Manchester for it, but she waved him off. After Dad sat back down, his face as grim as when he tried to watch war movies, Dr. Harper told us the rest.

  “I had my radio on by then,” Dr. Harper said. “President Kennedy called in the National Guard, and when that wasn’t enough, he sent in the United States Army. They started arriving in Oxford by air around one in the morning. By the next morning, two people were dead, a French reporter and a jukebox repairman. Over one hundred sixty federal marshals were injured, along with about one hundred forty other people.”

  Not in our history books, I thought. Not in our history books, not in our history books. I knew that the riot happened, but I didn’t know the names of the two dead people. I didn’t know the names of the three hundred hurt people—except for one, Ruth Beans—and this stuff happened right here, where I lived.

  “On October 1, 1962,” Ms. Manchester said, “James Meredith officially matriculated into the University of Mississippi. By the next day, twenty-three thousand troops occupied Oxford to keep order, and Mr. Meredith had to be escorted by federal marshals until he graduated in 1963. There’s a lot more to the details, like secret deals made and broken by the governor, and the fact that Ross Barnett’s own son had to face down his father to do his duty as a national guardsman during that crisis.”

  Indri held up her hand. “Wait. Twenty-three thousand troops? Here?”

  “I have photos.” Ms. Manchester pushed back from the table and went to the stack of books. When she came back, she had a folder full of black-and-white pictures. When she spread them out, the scenes looked like something straight out of World War II—jeep after jeep, transport after transport, packed with rifle-toting Army soldiers, rolling through streets I recognized. In one photo, gas-mask-wearing soldiers with their round helmets marched ten across, for as far as I could see. In another, troop transports crammed the football field and the area all around it.

  “If that happened today,” Indri whispered, “I would freak out.”

  “The Posse Comitatus Act—that’s a federal law—limits when regular military troops can be deployed on U.S. soil, even to keep order,” Dr. Harper said. “So it’s rare. Thank God.”

  Ms. Manchester gathered up her photos and faced me, holding the stack in both hands. “The bottom line is, Ruth and my mother unknowingly drove into the middle of an armed insurrection during a time when the highway patrol wasn’t restricting access to the Ole Miss campus. From what I can piece together from what Mother has told me, and from what she wrote in Night on Fire, she and Ruth made it to the Circle and got stopped by the mob and the tear gas. They got out and tried to get past the Lyceum to Dr. Harper’s office. The mob went after Ruth, and Mom stood up to them and tricked them into backing off. They got separated, and Ruth wound up injured. Mother thought she might have fallen in a steam tunnel.”

  My chest ached at the thought of Grandma hurt in the steam tunnels, lying down there in the dark and calling out for somebody to rescue her, and realizing nobody would come. The screams from the steam tunnels. Just like that ghost story.

  Wait. Didn’t that start in the 1960s?

  I didn’t have the book with me, but I was sure that’s when the screaming-in-tunnels tale first got told. Had people heard my grandmother screaming and turned it into a story?

  No way. No way!

  The thought made me a little sick, and I wondered about the family of the guy who died in the car wreck, the ghost that was supposed to be haunting Saint Anthony Hall. They probably got ill every time they saw anything about that story.

  All of a sudden, I didn’t want to read any more about ghosts that might have been real people. Witches and werewolves and vampires, those were probably still fun enough in the right book, but ghosts—no. I was done with ghosts. Real-life death and pain just didn’t seem that entertaining.

  But there was one thing I was beginning to realize I did need to read, and more than just the excerpts I’d seen on websites about the feud. Night on Fire. Wonderful. I could almost feel the boredom and misery clawing at my brain, and I didn’t even have a copy yet.

  “I’m going to get more coffee,” Dad announced, and he got up w
ithout waiting for an answer. Talking about this was bothering him, I could tell. Ms. Manchester went with him, and Mac got up and scooted down the stairs, I assumed to make sure Avadelle Richardson wasn’t in a fistfight with the William Faulkner statue, or some innocent tourist.

  That left Indri and me alone at the table with Dr. Harper. When I glanced at him, he was staring straight at me, and my heart did a tap dance in my chest. Indri got a bad case of lemur eyes, and both of us were just about to shove back from our spots and go over to the counter with Dad and Ms. Manchester when Dr. Harper held up both hands, palms out.

  “Girls,” he whispered. “Please wait. I owe you an apology.”

  We didn’t get up, but neither of us relaxed. Indri’s gaze darted from Dr. Harper to Ms. Manchester and Dad, like she was judging the number of steps to the coffee pot and safety. I found myself meeting Dr. Harper’s eyes, sort of mad, sort of scared, but also curious. When I nodded, he spoke, low and quiet.

  “Just after your grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she brought me a lockbox and asked me to keep it safe for her, until she passed away.” He pulled off his glasses and gave them an inspection like he was checking for smudges, but I figured he just didn’t want to see our faces as he dropped that little bit of dynamite into our brains. Indri twitched in her chair, and I leaned forward in mine.

  A lockbox. A lockbox! That key—yes. It would be perfect for something like that. My thoughts rushed ahead so quickly that I barely heard what Dr. Harper said next.

  “She told me that once she was gone, I should give it to you, Dani. That you’d have a key to open it, and I could help you decide what to do with what she had left inside.”

  “So, the key I have goes to that lockbox?” I asked, so excited I wanted to get straight up and run back to his office.

  “I suspect so, yes. Needless to say, I wanted very much to see what she had hidden in that box.” He got one of his huge, sad frowns. “I’ll admit the thoughts of income from publishing papers and books solving the feud mystery weighed on my mind. I felt very greedy.”

  “Well, let’s go over there and open the box!” Indri whispered, so loud it was almost like talking.

  “I’d love to,” Dr. Harper said, putting his glasses back on, “but she took back the box.”

  “What?” Indri and I asked at the same time.

  “About a year ago,” Dr. Harper said, “just before your family started keeping her mostly at home, she showed up late one evening, when I was working. She demanded that I return the box. Went on about people stealing from her and conspiracies and disrespect. She said she was going to give her story to history and let the ghosts keep it for Dani. When I tried to talk her out of it, she slapped me.”

  Give her story to history. Let the ghosts keep it. . . . I’d heard that before, from my grandmother’s own lips. My mouth sagged open, and heat rushed to my face. “She—what? She hit you? Oh, I’m sorry. I—wow.”

  He waved me off. “I knew it was the disease, not her. In the end, it was her box, so I returned it to her.”

  “But,” Indri said, sounding shocked and lost, “where did she take it?”

  Dr. Harper lifted his shoulders and let them drop, looking totally beaten. “I have no idea. I locked my door when she left, because I didn’t want to be yelled at or slapped again. She stayed in the building for some time, then I saw her walking off into the dark, in the direction of the Lyceum. She had something in her hands, probably the box. When I saw her all alone like that, I got worried that she would get lost or struck by a car, so I ran after her. I caught up with her on the steps of the grand old building—but alas, no box. She couldn’t even speak coherently about it when I asked her.”

  The noise in my head was unbelievable. My thoughts pinged from glass soldiers to the thousand spots between Ventress Hall and the Lyceum where my grandmother could have hidden the box. “Have you looked for it, Dr. Harper?”

  “Indeed I have. I’ve done a fair search of Ventress, and walked the route she took—all to no avail.” He shrugged again, and looked even sadder.

  Indri seemed like she was deep in concentration. “Why did Avadelle visit you yesterday?”

  Dr. Harper fidgeted in his seat, and for a second, I worried that he might go back to being that other guy, the greedy one who scared us both. After a few more fidgets, he seemed to decide that he was definitely and fully on our side in this little fight, and he said, “Avadelle wanted to know if Ruth had talked to me about the night of the riot, or about anything. She asked me if Ruth had left me any of her writing, and more specifically, if she and I had discussed Night on Fire.”

  I managed not to imitate his fidgeting, but it was hard. I kept trying to take whole, relaxed breaths, but that was hard too. “What did you tell her?” I finally asked him, when I thought I could trust myself not to be too loud.

  “The truth as it stands now,” he said, his eyes wide and his expression earnest. “That I have nothing of Ruth’s.”

  “Did you tell her about what we showed you?” Indri asked. She glanced over at my father and Ms. Manchester, making sure they were still away from the table and not paying attention to us. “Did you tell her about the key?”

  “Absolutely not. We have an agreement.” He shook his head. “I’m certain Avadelle has gotten concerned about something being discovered about that night—I just don’t know what.”

  “Dani, we need to—”

  And that was when we heard the first thump.

  I slowly registered the sound, like a rubbery bump against wood, and my heart stuttered.

  Thump!

  It was the rubber tip of a cane hitting wooden steps.

  “Maaan,” Mac muttered as he appeared at the top step, moving backward and fast, like he was fleeing something carnivorous. “She’s got fifteen minutes left on her morning communion. Why’d she have to come in here?”

  Thump.

  Thump!

  I grabbed the stack of papers from the coffee table and worked them into my backpack, pronto. The zipper kept jumping away from my fingertips.

  “Oh dear,” Dr. Harper said, loud enough to get Dad and Ms. Manchester’s attention.

  I finally got my pack closed as Avadelle crested the stairs. Dad came to stand behind me, still squinting from his headache, while Ms. Manchester and Mac stopped behind Indri. For some reason I couldn’t explain, we all looked guilty, like we’d been caught at something.

  Avadelle took a few steps toward us, cane bumping hard on the floor, and then stopped.

  I felt like the principal had just walked into my class and found me texting instead of doing my work. My attention snapped to her face, or her cheeks and mouth, which was all I could see under her Faulkner fedora. Her wrinkled skin wasn’t red, like I expected. It was pasty white and covered in sweat. Her mouth was twisted, and her expression was all thunder and rage, but under that, something else—

  Fear.

  No.

  Terror.

  Had she heard us talking before she started up the stairs?

  I found it hard to breathe. But we weren’t doing anything wrong, and she couldn’t stop me from hunting for clues about what happened to my grandmother the night of the Meredith riot. She wasn’t my grandmother, no, and she wasn’t even nice to me—but I hated thinking about anybody old getting embarrassed or upset, for any reason.

  Whether or not she had been eavesdropping, Avadelle seemed to realize we had been talking about something related to her, because she focused on her daughter and said, “What’s going on here, Naomi?”

  “The girls had questions about the Meredith riot,” Ms. Manchester said. “They’re learning about the town’s history.”

  “Town’s history, my eye!” Avadelle screeched, holding her position between us and the stairs. She pointed at me. “That one’s digging up bones about the feud. She’ll have the paparazzi down on us again, and the clamour won’t ever end.”

  I realized she had us blocked in, unless we wanted to bail over
the second-floor railing. Mac leaned in that direction, like he was considering the option.

  “Please calm down,” Ms. Manchester said as she got up. “We’re just trying to help Ruth—”

  Avadelle cut her off, still pointing at me. “Leave the past be, you wretched heathen!”

  Heathen? I didn’t know whether to yell back or laugh. My cheeks got hot. I stood, and Indri scrambled out of her chair. Carefully, hoping Avadelle didn’t focus on it too much, I picked up my pack and slid it onto my shoulder. My thoughts sped up, dashing from point to point on Grandma’s time line, and bouncing between all the questions I had.

  “Did it ever occur to you that Ruth’s not in her right mind anymore?” Avadelle reached out to a display table on her right and shoved all the books on the floor. “All of you, stay out of her business, and stay out of mine!”

  “That’s enough,” Dad said. “It’s nearly time for the store to open. Dani, Indri, come on. Let’s go on outside.”

  “You made a mess, Mother.” Ms. Manchester sighed. “Mac, give me a hand with the books.”

  Avadelle’s lips trembled, but she didn’t yell anything else. Mac followed his aunt closer to his grandmother to pick up the books, but I could tell he didn’t want to go. Indri moved behind me and seemed to get smaller, like she was trying to be invisible.

  “Answer one question and I’ll stop looking into what happened the night of the Meredith riot.” The words left me in a rush, and I almost clamped my fingers over my own mouth, I surprised myself so much.

  Dad and Indri didn’t make a peep, and Mac and Ms. Manchester paused in mid-display repair, obviously surprised too. Avadelle tilted her head back to study me under the brim of her hat. A second ticked by, and then another.

  Avadelle snorted. “No. I don’t believe you. I’m not telling you a thing.”

  “Whatever. I’m going to the library and I’ll read your book, and everything Ms. Manchester gave us, and anything I can find that my grandmother wrote about that night. I’ll talk to her any time she’s able to talk, and I’ll visit any place that might give me a clue, and I’m going to figure out what happened. So if you want me to stop, why don’t you just tell me yourself? What happened the night of the Meredith riot that you don’t want anybody to know about?”