Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry

by Susan Vaught

  “I thought I’d try to find the old steam tunnel entrance Ms. Manchester and Dad told us about, if it’s still here, and check out the spots with loose dirt, the ones that would have been the same a year ago. You know, the little trees and benches. Maybe the flowerbeds.” Why did I always seem to be filthy, or in trouble, or sweating down the back of my neck when Mac showed up? Why did I even care? I wished I didn’t care.

  “You’re not serious about those flowerbeds,” he said. “They’ll never let you paw around in the tulips. Even if you come back at night, the lights will rat you out and security’ll be all, Miss, we need your parents’ names.”

  I banged my head on the back of the bench. “That box has to be here somewhere. Dr. Harper said she left Ventress with it, and she didn’t have it by the time she got to the Lyceum.”

  Mac studied me with his eyebrows raised, letting his gaze drift around to the different trash cans and sidewalks.

  “No.” I held up one dirt-crusted palm. “I know what you’re thinking, but I refuse to believe Grandma threw that box in the trash, or that some stranger picked it up, and now they’re sitting on it somewhere with no idea what they’ve got.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he stopped giving me the you’re-goofy look. Just like that. Wow. I had forgotten Mac could be easy to get along with, like Indri. “I’ve tried to call you,” he added, “to see how you were. Your phone’s been off for days.”

  “Yeah, still grounded.” I picked up my notebook and stood, and Mac stood with me, and he followed me as I walked around the bench to stand on the main wagon spoke sidewalk, staring toward the Lyceum and the big flower beds he said I’d never be able to explore. “But thank you for getting the key back for me. That was amazing.”

  “I owed you,” he said. “But I would have done it anyway.”

  I stopped walking, suddenly feeling nervous. Mac stopped too. Together, we looked at the Lyceum’s six huge white columns, the ones that most everyone in the South recognized in pictures. Somewhere, sprinklers had come on, and water made a gentle whooshing sound, turning the air damp. The scents of grass and dirt and trees and fresh tulips mingled with hot concrete and asphalt.

  It should have been relaxing. And yet . . . “You owing me—you mean, because you blew me off the last day of school?” I squeezed the binding of my notebook hard, and didn’t look at Mac.

  “Yeah.” His voice seemed too quiet.

  My brain shifted into high gear and full speed. So, he was apologizing. Sort of. Well, he did at Mom’s office, and he gave me my key back like a peace offering. Did hurting my feelings the last day at school add up to something Mac couldn’t fix by saying he was sorry?

  Guess that was up to me.

  Setting sunlight glared off each one of the fourteen windows behind the Lyceum’s columns, yellow and pink and searing white, making my eyes tear up from the brightness. That had to be it, because I so wouldn’t go all misty over Mac apologizing and wanting to be friends again, right?

  “So all that stuff you said when you shook my hand and gave me the key at Mom’s office, did you mean it?”

  Silence.

  My jaw started to hurt. I realized I was grinding my teeth, so I stopped, but I kept squeezing my notebook and staring at the bright, bright windowpanes behind the Lyceum’s columns.

  “My parents threatened to take away my guitar and music lessons,” Mac said. “They told me they’d break up my band if I stayed friends with you. It was so stupid, but they said we’d end up being some national news story because of our grandmothers, and the reporters would never leave us alone. I got scared about the music stuff. I’m really, really sorry. You meant a lot to me. You mean a lot to me, but my music—” He stopped. Kicked at something on the ground next to my foot. “Just, sorry, this is coming out all wrong.”

  I let myself blink, but even with my eyes closed, outlines of the bright windows stayed etched on my eyelids. “I get that. Your music’s important.”

  Mac kicked the ground again. “I didn’t know how to say no to them, even when I knew they were wrong, and I really wanted to.”

  I thought about Mom at work, assuming I was already home, and Dad out in his garden, trusting me to show up when I said I would. “I get that part too,” I said.

  Then we both stopped talking for a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes. My eyes roved the Lyceum, from the clock at the top to its big columns to the windows to the redbrick face to the five marble steps leading to its white doors with the golden handles.

  Mac pointed to one of the columns near the top, then to a spot over the Lyceum’s main door. “Supposed to be bullet holes in those places,” he said. “Some from the Civil War and some from the Meredith riot.”

  “I still can’t believe it happened here,” I told him. “I mean, I can. It’s just that everything feels so different now.”

  “My folks got grumpy when I tried to ask them about it,” Mac said. “Dad griped about how the South, and Ole Miss especially, never gets to move on from the past. Everybody still sees us as a bunch of psycho racist rednecks.”

  I shrugged one shoulder, and the side of my hand brushed Mac’s arm. All of a sudden, the evening seemed very, very warm. Almost stuffy. I wanted to step away from him, but at the same time, I didn’t. Confusing.

  “Well, there are a lot of psycho racist rednecks around here,” I reminded him.

  He groaned. “There are psycho racist rednecks everywhere. Indri’s dad probably even meets guys like that all the way over in Afghanistan.”

  I stared at the columns, then the flowerbeds, then all the big, old trees lining the sidewalks. Words from Night on Fire came to life, just like those photo images from Ms. Manchester’s books. Tear gas clouds covering the exact spot where we sat, drifting over dozens of exhausted-looking men wearing gas masks and carrying rifles. It was hard to imagine, but that’s what Avadelle and my grandmother drove into. By the time Grandma got out of her car, rioters had taken the Circle and raised the Confederate flag, right where the center flagpole was now. They were trying to run over the marshals or break into the Lyceum driving trucks and bulldozers.

  Was Grandma scared? Probably terrified. The thought made my teeth clench again—but I knew Grandma. She came to get books for the kids she was teaching, so she would have gone straight on with her plans, determined to finish what she intended to do.

  “My grandmother wanted to get to Dr. Harper’s office,” I said, finally opening my eyes all the way again, and pointing back behind the Lyceum. “And I think Avadelle would have helped her. With where his office was in 1962, they would have had to cut to the left of where we’re standing.”

  Mac stared in the direction I was pointing. “If all the tear gas was here in the middle where the marshals were,” he said, “she probably would have pulled to the curb and stayed as far to the side as she could without getting off the road and risking getting caught between buildings.”

  He led the way to the curb at the edge of the Circle, and we turned around, taking in the view as she would have seen it.

  “All of this was mostly grass then, right?” Mac asked.

  “Yeah.” I inched forward, like I might be Grandma, head down, face covered to keep the drifting gas out of my eyes and nose. Why didn’t you just get back in your car and run away? Stubborn woman.

  Yep, Oops, I imagined her answering. Just like you, with no earthly business being out here when you’re still half in trouble and supposed to be home.

  “In the videos, people were running around a lot,” Mac said. He started jogging back and forth and pretending to throw air-Molotov cocktails at the Lyceum. He looked seriously ridiculous, but I couldn’t find it in me to laugh.

  On Mac’s second pass, he bumped into me. I stumbled to the right, dropped my notebook, and I almost stepped on metal bars set right into the ground. The steam tunnel grate. It was about three feet across and four feet long, rusty but solid, and held down by a thick chain and padlock.

  I stared at it for a few seco
nds, then sank down beside it on my knees. This was the right spot. The steam tunnel entrance my dad mentioned. It had to be.

  Mac knelt beside me, put my notebook on the ground next to my leg, and then fiddled with the big chain. “That opening is pretty small. Not big enough for a person to fall through, really, is it?”

  “A person could fit on purpose if they tried,” I said. “If it was unlocked and open and stuff. Mom was right. There’s no way the marshals moved Meredith through these smaller steam tunnels to get him to classes, like some people think. It would have been too tight a fit.”

  It was weird, how many times I’d been to Ole Miss, and the Circle, and even the Lyceum, and I’d never noticed this little grate, sitting over in the grass by itself, with its chain and lock. I didn’t know it mattered.

  I leaned forward and peered into the darkness beneath the bars. It seemed to go on forever, bottomless and black. If this were one of my fantasy books, it could be a portal to some other universe—but this was real life. Likely nothing was at the bottom besides concrete, dead leaves, and rank, stagnant water.

  “There’s a ladder,” Mac said, showing me the metal rungs at the side. “Makes it even more of a tight fit.”

  “There’s no way Grandma fell down this tunnel by accident,” I said. “That’s for sure. If she went to the bottom, it was on purpose, and probably on that ladder.”

  My mind danced around the thought like the hundreds of fireflies beginning to play in the dusky air around us. Wink, wink, wink—I could sort of see the truth, but I didn’t think I wanted to. Not really.

  Mac settled on his knees beside me. “Could there be some other tunnel entrance?”

  “This is the one closest to the Lyceum, like in the ghost story I read. People said they heard screaming coming from just out front. Dad and your aunt think it was this one too. Besides, the nearest other entrance is nowhere close to where they would have walked to get to Dr. Harper’s office.”

  “Maybe there were different entrances in 1962?” he suggested. “I know the websites say nothing was padlocked back then.”

  “Mac, Grandma was a Black woman who walked into a race riot. Even though Avadelle was with her, that would have gone badly. In Night on Fire, some of the rioters saw them and caught them—that’s probably true.”

  “In the book, GG tells them off, and the two characters run away.”

  “But not in real life,” I picked at the grate. It moved on its hinges, just a little. “In real life, Grandma ended up down at the bottom of this steam tunnel entrance, hurt. Maybe the rioters pushed her down there. Or she went down to keep them from hurting her worse.”

  I suddenly was too aware of the tanned whiteness of Mac’s skin, and my browner tone. Fifty years ago, one of us might have been arrested, just for talking to the other one.

  Mac rattled the chain keeping the grate closed. “It’s rusty,” he said. “I can pull it a little—here.” He stuffed his free hand in his pocket and pulled out a keychain with a little flashlight on the end. “Use this. It’s bright enough.”

  Grunting, he shifted the chain, and I was able to move the grate just enough to make space for my arm. I pushed the little flashlight through and switched it on, illuminating the ladder and the stone walls at the top. Dirt and mold clung to the rocks in places, but I was surprised how clean it seemed.

  Bit by bit, I moved the light down the ladder, pressing my face into the flaking metal of the grate, peering through divides in the lattice. I tried to imagine my grandmother climbing down, down . . .

  The beam played off a rusted, snapped metal rung.

  “There’s a broken step,” I said. “Maybe that’s what made her fall.”

  Mac grunted again, and I realized he was leaning all the way back, holding the chain so I could keep the grate shifted to the side. If he let go, the grate would probably smoosh my arm off. I flicked the beam down to the bottom of the entrance, and saw the yawning circle of the actual steam tunnel. Spiderwebs covered it, and leaves were all over the bottom, like I had thought there would be.

  Did Grandma fall into leaves like that?

  I turned the beam to the walls—and almost immediately, I saw it. Scrawled writing, only it was more like etching, rock on rock, words cut into the stone by some other bit of stone, just above the tunnel floor, as if somebody had done it from a prone position. My heart thundered as I read the words, and tears filled up my eyes almost immediately.

  “Dani,” Mac said. “What is it? Do you see something?”

  “Yeah.” My voice sounded choked. “There are words on the wall. ‘Ruth Beans was here.’ ”

  I pulled my arm out of the grate so Mac could let go of the chain, and I sat up and handed him his keys. Then I choked up even more.

  Mac rubbed his hands like they might be cramping from holding the chain. “So, definitely the spot—but no lockbox?”

  I didn’t move.

  Mac switched on his flashlight again, and leaned toward the grate to look for himself. He had his back to University Circle, so he couldn’t see the cars moving, or the black mustang parked in the spot nearest to us, or Dr. Harper getting out of the passenger side, moving slowly around the car.

  Mac also couldn’t see my father, grim-faced and glaring, seeming to take up half the sky as he stalked toward us.

  21

  LET THE GHOSTS KEEP IT FOR YOU

  * * *

  Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 471

  My father always said snow falls in the South like an unwelcome guest, that it comes in those secret hours, when darkness begs for dawn. He told me a frozen Mississippi moon could turn cold enough to hide the devil’s own heat.

  “All that preaching on Satan your mama’s church does,” my father warned, “you mark my words, CiCi. They’ll call Old Scratch’s name so many times he’ll show up right here in town, cloven hooves and all.”

  When Oxford nearly burned for the second time, I knew my father had been right. Even God wouldn’t have been able to sort sinner from saint the night James Meredith came to Ole Miss.

  FROM A NOTE, STUCK TO my door:

  Since I’m not getting through to you out loud, I thought I might try writing. Honey, why won’t you let this go?

  —Dad

  I wrote one back:

  I don’t like making you angry, Dad. I don’t like making Mom angry. I really, really hate disappointing you. I don’t want to disappoint Grandma, either. I know you and Mom and most people think she’s already gone, and maybe she is, but I don’t believe that, way down in my heart. I think some piece of her’s still with us, for as long as she breathes. Grandma asked me to do something for her. It’s probably the last thing she’ll ever get to ask me to do, so how can I just let that go?

  —Dani

  When Dr. Harper drove you home with your father night before last, he told you he couldn’t in good conscience help you anymore, since we didn’t approve. Indri’s mother is planning on keeping her home from camp now. Mac got in trouble last night with campus security and his folks for searching tulip beds with his dad’s metal detector. The Richardsons came by to ask us if we could get you to stop whatever you’re doing, because Avadelle’s having chest pains. Is this what you want? To hurt people?

  —Mom

  I don’t want to hurt anybody, not ever. I don’t understand how looking into something that happened so long ago can be such a huge problem. And Mac? A metal detector? Wow. That’s seriously awesome. Did he find anything?

  —Dani

  Mac didn’t find anything with that stupid machine, unless you want to count sprinkler lines, pipes, and a gardening trowel somebody left buried on the south end. Do you like that boy, Dani? Is it time for us to have . . . the talk? About boys and girls?

  —Dad

  Nobody does that anymore, Dad. The Internet and books take care of it as soon as most of us are able to read. And I like Mac as a friend. I don’t know if I like him for more. Do I have to know right now?


  —Dani

  You absolutely do not have to know until you’re ready. I’ll take care of this with your father.

  —Mom

  I’m reading this too, you know, Cella.

  —Dad

  I took down all the notes and threw them away so my parents would stop using them to try to “communicate better.” I sat in Grandma’s room, beside her bed, watching her sleep and trying to write about whether I liked Mac or not, or come up with ideas about where to look next for the lockbox without getting grounded longer, getting arrested by campus security, getting my friends in trouble, or giving the Wicked Witch of Oxford a heart attack.

  “This is complicated,” I told Grandma as I tore out yet another page of false starts and pitched it in the trash near her bed. “I don’t have a single clue where you put that lockbox. I gave it to history. I let the ghosts keep it for you. Okay. What does that even mean?”

  And should I even keep trying to figure it out?

  I wasn’t allowed at camp, per Mom. I wasn’t allowed out of the house, per Dad. I had no phone, no computer time, nothing but my books and a notebook, and hanging around with Dad and Grandma. Dad talked plenty enough, about squash and lettuce and aphids and soil mixtures. Grandma hadn’t said a word in days.

  After a while, I gave up and walked over to her open window and looked outside. Dad was in his garden like always, picking produce and digging in the dirt. He didn’t look up, even when I willed him to. He just gardened on, oblivious to all my staring and wishing.

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Maybe for him to glance up and grin and wave, like I was still his baby girl. He hadn’t called me that since he picked me up on campus. Just Dani, and a few times, honey. Mom was still mostly using all of my names, every time she said anything to me out loud.

  “Grandma,” I said, “are you sure we’re all gonna be okay? Lately, I’ve really started doubting it.”

  When I turned toward her, her eyes were closed, but I thought she might have been smiling. I went back to her bed and gave her a kiss. Her skin felt warm against my lips, and for a while, I kept my head on her pillow, breathing in the scent of baby oil and freshly washed cotton. When I sat back, I realized Mom had taped two pictures over Grandma’s bed. A couple of weeks back, in Creative Arts Camp, we studied flowers around campus, and tried to draw them. Indri’s Dutch crocus looked like something off the cover of National Geographic. It fluttered on the wall in the slight, hot breeze. Next to her masterpiece, my version of the flower looked like a blue and purple deformed ghoul-goblet.