Bubba Ray rose and made a great display of yawning, then slapped his flabby arms against his sides. I am very tired after taking care of Daddy all day. You’ve been gone so long you cannot know what I mean by that. So I leave you to your lady. He nodded his head to Stella then quit them with a sharp turn, flourishing the hem of his bathrobe, as if he were a knight errant soaked in manners and nobility and Jackson was a no-account peasant, lending emphasis to his crack about Jackson’s prolonged absence, making him out the bad son and Bubba Ray the good. The insult caused Jackson’s fists to clench, his jaw to stiffen. He was about to shout at his brother’s back when Stella put her hands on him. She pushed him into a seat, the effect of which was to cause him to swallow his words and silence him. She took his tortured face in her hands and spoke in a voice of command: Do not get so excited. It’s ok, I have experience in dealing with these characters. Remember, I’m a social worker. I know these troubled young men, and I’ve been trained in how to talk to them. He doesn’t frighten me. Oh, Lord! Jackson said loudly, only out of luck not waking the entire household. Oh, Lord! you do not know of what you speak!
Horrified with himself, he started to weep and then he started to blubber in a way that humiliated both of them. To blubber was unmanly. To blubber took every dictum of Southern chivalry and tossed them into the landfill. But he could not help himself. There was so much he hadn’t told her. That first night they spent together in New Haven, the night he’d put a chink in the stone wall that was his vow to Katherine Marie, he’d only told her that someone had threatened Katherine Marie, that he rescued her, without mentioning exactly who the villain was and how he’d hurt her. Over time, he convinced himself that was alright. He hadn’t named names nor given gory details. When he told her about that event’s repercussions the next year, he left more out than he told, so that seemed alright, too. Only on that warm night under his family’s roof did he tell her everything. Every last bloody detail. He felt terrible about betraying Katherine Marie in this way, but while he was talking he convinced himself that she had been wrong to exact a vow of silence from him in the first place. Who was he telling, after all? He was telling his beloved, his future wife. Wasn’t a man entitled to have no secrets from his wife? And he told her about the vow part, it wasn’t as if he forgot that in the telling. In fact, that was the part most difficult to get out of his mouth but also the most exhilarating to reveal. Stella petted him and kissed him, telling him she understood, that there are secrets so hard to bear they cannot be kept, reminding him he could trust her, she would not talk, who could she tell? Her voice, her touch was like a balm spread over a wound that had never really closed, a sore wound he’d got used to bearing until that balm was spread cool and soothing over it and the healing of it stood in contrast against the soreness like day does against night.
Oh, I need this, he thought. I need to tell someone. This secret is killing me.
Then it all came out. He told her everything he’d omitted before, told her what happened that night three years before, the summer after Bubba Ray’s assault of Katherine Marie.
NINE
Summer, 1961
JACKSON CAME HOME FROM COLLEGE late that summer before the fall semester of his sophomore year. Much as he longed to embrace his mama and bask in the admiration of his daddy, which given his grades he was certain the man could no longer deny him, he did not venture home until he knew Bubba Ray was gone to summer camp like all young people his age who could were that time of year. Jackson couldn’t handle being alone with Bubba Ray. It was the second week of August and dreadful hot. He slept on the hammock on the front porch rather than inside the house, which would have killed him after a whole year up north. He’d got used to that thin air, how the day’s warmth died at night sudden as a thunderclap. His very first night home he was sleeping hard by the light of a full moon when a hand on his arm awakened him. It was L’il Bokay, snuck up in the night. When he saw him, he tried, he tried like hell not to look in any way startled or annoyed, because the foremost thing in his mind that summer was finding out how Katherine Marie was. He would have thought his trip home a failure had he not determined how she was, that sweet, wronged girl who rose up like a ghost between him and all his conquests of the preceding year, conquests not inconsiderable in number. He was hoping to run into her or L’il Bokay so he could find out if she was alright, and here her future husband was crouching by his side with a finger held up to his pursed lips to caution him not to cry out. Jackson’s throat was dry as a Nevada desert and his muscles were tight, ready to spring should the need arise, but he said as if it were high noon and the occasion a lunchtime meeting planned well in advance: Why, Bokay, how are you?
Bokay answered in an urgent whisper.
Forgive me, Jackson. I’ve been waitin’ and I’ve been watchin’, ready to swoop right in and talk to you whenever you got home and the moment seemed right. I guess this moment ain’t quite right, but here I am anyway as the moon’s so bright I saw you from the street when I passed. It appears my courage and the very stars have aligned in a moment of opportunity. I cannot wait another second. There’s somethin’ I must ask you, somethin’ I need quite desperately to know, and I believe you and you alone can give me the answer. May we talk, Jackson, in honor of all past friendship?
Jackson rubbed his eyes, smacked his lips, nodded, and stretched although his heart raced.
Let’s go to my truck and talk, then. It’s just there, down the driveway, where I thought it might escape notice from the house.
Alright, Bokay. Alright.
He pulled the blanket up from his feet and wrapped himself in it. Not because he was cold but because he was dressed only in his shorts and felt without armor in the presence of this man and needed some. They got in the truck.
Bokay. Oh, poor Bokay. Although the windows were down, his presence in the cab overwhelmed Jackson. He was large, large like Bubba Ray, and then there was his scent—the sour, pungent scent of a man in panic, a scent that blended with the scent of the night, of honeysuckle and gumbo mud, heavy, confusing in the nostrils. It was a scent that forced one to breathe shallow because it seemed as if it might kill you contained in full in the lungs, it would kill you all at once, like a gaseous poison. It was the scent of masculine despair, of a man’s heartbreak. It was a very different scent from that of a woman’s comparable extremes. A woman’s emotion blends with the earth in a natural way, Jackson thought. They become part of the whole instantly, connecting to it without resistance, like a child that fastens to its mama’s teat moments after birth, without being shown where or how or why. For a man there is a rending to contend with and it comes out from his pores in fumes. This is what he smelled when he breathed Bokay in. He stiffened his back. He knew from that scent what he was going to ask.
Jackson, he said. Jackson, I believe somethin’ happened to Katherine Marie in your house last year. I don’t know what it was. I only know that somethin’ happened. She’s been different ever since she left your place. First, it was just a little. First off, it was in a way only I would notice, because I love her and she’s my own. But it’s grown. Doubled itself or maybe tripled. See, she started out just kinda jumpy. She quit your family after fallin’ down the stairs at the library where she’d stopped on her way home to return a book for your mama, least that’s what she said, and the very next day went jumpy. She went jumpy always when it was dark, sometimes in the daylight if it was especially quiet, and she went jumpy whenever we went into town, day or night. Next, little by little she froze out on me. It might be a kiss she did not return, then it was an arm around her she shuffled off without cause, then it was any kind of touch. Doesn’t matter who touches her—me or her auntie or one of the twins—if she gets touched she shudders or flinches. I don’t know if you know this, Jackson, but this is a gal warm by nature, hot-blooded you might say if you’d a mind, headstrong and independent, suddenly gone cold and frightened. And I can only think after analyzin’ the timing of everythin’, analyzin’
‘til I am sick at heart, that somethin’ happened to her in your house, Jackson. And I want you to tell me right here, right now, exactly what it was.
Jackson shifted in his seat. He squirmed. He wrapped the blanket more tightly about himself. He blushed. He stammered. He denied all knowledge of anything amiss. He told him he was very sorry to hear that Katherine Marie seemed troubled, but there was nothing he could add to his knowledge about what was wrong with her. He asked: What does she say the trouble is? Does she acknowledge it?
He didn’t answer. He stared instead, leaned over and put his large black self not ten inches from Jackson’s face to peer at him with the sweat rolling down his brow and the scent of him nearly choking his childhood friend.
I don’t believe you. You know somethin’.
Jackson made his eyes as innocent as he could and dragged up from the deep, warm place where he had buried all the love he had for Katherine Marie, the love that honored his vow that he not tell a soul what had happened in the basement that afternoon a year now past. It evened his voice and he swore again:
I do not know what you’re talkin’ about. I do not know anything.
The other man searched his eyes a second time. A silence stretched out between them with those tortured features stuck in Jackson’s face for what felt like forever while he wondered if Bokay would blow up and kill him.
Dang it, I believe you, Bokay said at last. I believe you. You’re the only one in your house she speaks kindly of, Jackson. Mention anybody else and she curls her lip. So I’m going to believe you. Dang it, I have to.
Suddenly, the man let out a strangled sob and fell back against the driver’s seat. He grabbed the sides of his hair and tore at it, then crossed his arms over the steering wheel and buried his head there and his whole body shook.
I’m nothin’ without her, Jackson. And I’ve lost her somehow.
Jackson didn’t know what else to do so he put a hand on Bokay’s back, made circles, and patted as if he were an infant needing a burp.
You haven’t lost her, Bokay. She loves you, he said. When she was working for us, if somethin’ went wrong and she got down, all I had to do was mention your name and she picked right up. Half her conversation was about you and your future. That kind of affection doesn’t just up and die. Maybe she got the weddin’ jitters. Is your date soon?
Bokay picked his head up from the steering wheel and studied him again.
Thank you, Jackson, for those words, he said. Suddenly, his features lit up with hopefulness. Listen. It occurs to me that you two always talked easy. Maybe if you kindly spent a little time with her, she’d tell you how she feels, tell you what’s wrong.
I don’t know, Bokay. It’s been a long time...
His face crumbled. It hurt to see a proud, strong man ruined like that, especially the hero of his long-ago. And the idea of spending time with Katherine Marie was definitely attractive, especially now his fears for her state of mind were more or less confirmed. Jackson switched gears. But I don’t see how it could hurt.
Bokay brightened in a heartbeat. How about right now? She got a night job over to the rest home on Dalrimple. We could stop by. There’s not much that goes on in there at this hour, everybody’s drugged-out and sleepin’. How about it?
Jackson laughed and waved his blanket around.
I go over there like this and they might admit me, Bokay, against my will.
He smiled and said, Ok, then tomorrow night?
Alright, Bokay. Tomorrow it is. Around eight, how’s that? We can meet here at the end of the driveway. My folks will be watching the TV. They won’t notice.
The men shook hands and quit company. Jackson spent the next twenty-one hours in a state of extreme, if conflicted, excitement. The idea of seeing Katherine Marie again was thrilling in itself, but the specter of all that had happened the previous year, his vow to her, and the difficult task Bokay set before him colored that thrill considerably. He wondered if he went to embrace her hello if she’d shudder or flinch. Preparing all manner of speeches for her mentally, Jackson took a shower after dinner, put on a clean shirt, and pants. Got a hot date, son? Mama asked. No, Mama, just getting’ together with some old friends tonight. Jackson believed she would have asked more questions, which might have left him in a pickle, but Daddy called out, Missy, honey, What’s My Line’s nearly over, and she hurried off. Jackson walked down to the street at ten to eight to wait for Bokay, but he was already there. They nodded gravely to each other and Jackson got in the truck.
Maybe they should have waited until later in the night. It was still light out, the sun had just begun to set. They stopped at a traffic light and next to them in a green Ford Maverick drinkin’ beer were Joey Hicks and Earl Bob Turner. Those two had not changed a hair since the days when they’d torment Jackson on his way home from school, push him in the mud, and steal his books. They were white trash then and they were white trash to that day without a stop in between. They saw Bokay and Jackson together and this struck them as funny. They set in to whoop and hit the dashboard with the palms of their hands and Joey Hicks gunned the motor. Jackson had learned a few things about defending himself since he was six years old and he’d learned more up north. He was about to give them the New Jersey finger when Bokay spoke up.
Do not look at ’em, he said. Do not meet their eyes. Remember where you are and who you’re settin’ besides.
Aw, come on, Bokay. They’re rilin’ me.
His hand rose from where it rested. Bokay reached over to grip his wrist and hold it down. Jackson winced under his force.
What’s the matter with you, Jackson? Didn’t you read a newspaper or listen to the radio up there in Yankeetown? Watch news on the TV? Don’t you know what’s been goin’ on here all summer? You wanna get us killed? Those boys are kluckers. I know that for a fact. How do you think they got that fancy car? Ever know either one of ’em to hold any kind of job longer than a week? Lord knows what kind of mischief they’re up to tonight. I know for a fact they spent most of the month of May holed up in the Busy Bee Inn out there on Route 55 makin’ forays over to the bus station in the city every day lookin’ for heads to crack. They found ’em. Believe you me, they found ’em.
Chastened, Jackson stared ahead and mumbled: I thought things were quiet since the riders were released.
Quiet. That’s a good one. Quiet.
Bokay’s tone stung. Jackson felt ignorant. Disloyal. It was true he’d kept his nose out of the news from back home as much as he could get away with. Current events made sore his heart. They frightened him on behalf of all his loved ones back home, embarrassed him in front of his college peers. He relied on telephone calls from Mama to keep up. She was more anxious to talk about Daddy and Bubba Ray than racial politics. That’s Jackson’s heartache, she’d say. Guilford’s a whole other kettle of fish. The day things change around here is the day the heavens split open and the Messiah comes. You can thank your daddy’s Council for that. They make sure the Klan’s lid’s screwed on tight. Jackson was young. He chose to believe her.
Bokay clearly fumed beside him. He attempted to defend himself: Mama told me things were much the same in Guilford. There were no incidents here.
What makes your mama think she’d know if folks in my part of town get harassed and worse by the likes of those two boys? Everything that happens in Jackson just fires ’em up. There’s more trouble for all of us, and I include your own people in that. Most of those civil rights workers are New York Jews. Don’t think that little detail escapes the minds of our neighbors here, tiny as those organs might be.
The light changed. Laughing their heads off, Joey Hicks and Earl Bob Turner peeled out, leaving them their dust to eat. Bokay drove under the speed limit awhile giving them a chance to get a good distance ahead. The Riverside Rest Home on Dalrimple was situated over on the outskirts of town. Jackson knew one way over there, straight down Main Street, right at the feed store, but the roads Bokay took were foreign to him, stretches of dirt lined wi
th nothing but deep, weedy trenches and trees. They went over wooden bridges past fence lines Jackson never knew existed. Bokay was taking an evasive route in case those boys were up the road waiting to trap them. But at the time, Jackson began to feel a tad uncomfortable wondering where all in the backwoods Bokay was taking him. He wondered if Bokay already knew everything and was going to take revenge on the Sassaports through him, that his skeletal remains would be found years hence with no forensic evidence left intact to tell the cruel tale of his unjust demise. He’d heard the anger in Bokay’s voice, anger he’d never heard outta him in all his life when surely there were occasions in the past when a public display of anger was called for, even fools such as Jackson readily acknowledged that. Then he recalled that vengeful fantasies were unlikely in the man, since Bokay was a churchgoer, a deacon, a pastor in training, and the song he was humming under his breath, presumably to calm himself, was “I’m So Glad,” which Jackson happened to know. To calm his own self, he started singing it over the accompaniment of his basso hum.
I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me,
I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me,
singing glory hallelujah, Jesus lifted me.
Satan had me bound, Jesus lifted me,
Satan had me bound, Jesus lifted me...
Bokay turned to stare at him in surprise, then laughed out loud and joined him in full voice. He slapped the steering wheel with his hand to guide their rhythm and they sang together louder and faster verse by verse until they quit the woods and came out all of a sudden onto the battered blacktop of Dalrimple Street with its strand of streetlamps. There weren’t so very many, it was a poor gal’s adornment, but what there were gave off what seemed a sunburst of miraculous light after the darkness of their way and Jackson sighed and said: Well, praise the Lord, here we are! And they both broke out into huge grins, Jackson with relief, Bokay with genuine humor. How’d you know that song, Jackson? You meet Jesus up north? And Jackson grinned then with genuine humor of his own. No, no, no. But you can hardly grow up ‘round here without learning a gospel song or two. Bokay pulled up to the back entrance of Riverside Rest Home and parked his truck in the service lot with the other cars belonging to the night workers. Well, you sang it right fine, he said.
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