Suddenly the car was slowing into the outskirts of Clayton. “This is a pretty little town,” observed Wallace. “All little towns are pretty.” The car eased around the square, where that night's rally was to be held, turned a corner, went a short distance down a quiet street in deep shadows, and then pulled into the back yard of an old white frame house sheltered by large and generous trees. Wallace and Lurleen had lived there before he became governor, when it was an apartment house, and they had wound up buying it as Wallace's fortunes rose; but it was still only a token and tentative settling place, occupied now by Wallace's paternal grandmother. Called Momma Mae, she was a frail little lady with soft white luminous hair like spun glass, as thin as a bamboo slat, with a sparrowlike face and small round eyes behind rimless glasses. She greeted Wallace at the screened back door with a dry brief kiss on the cheek, as he murmured, “Hi, Momma Mae, how you feelin'?” and bolted on into the house. Harper and the bodyguards drove off to eat supper somewhere else, leaving Wallace and Lurleen there.
Wallace now was hurrying from room to room, furiously smoking his cigar, looking as if he were being propelled from one quick discharge of smoke to the next, and leaving behind him a thin trail of ash. His coat still buttoned, he paused in each room only long enough for a swift embracing glance-the spacious front parlor with clay-colored rug and green draperies and an old burnt-umber velour couch, a lot of chill air hanging between the furniture and the high ceiling this autumn evening; the back bedroom, with green floral wallpaper and thickets of family photographs on dresser and chest of drawers; the small cold dining room, with an arrangement of white chrysanthemums placed in the precise middle of a table on a white doily. Here Wallace squatted on his heels to rummage through shelves below a wall cabinet. Lurleen presently entered the room and asked, “What are you digging for, George?” He mumbled, “Scrapbook I just wanted to find.” She told him, “It's not there, George. I moved it with some other things up yonder to Montgomery.” He continued shuffling through the shelves until she repeated, her voice higher, “George, honest, it's not there.”
He retreated to the pine-paneled den and watched television while waiting for supper, slouched low and deep on the sofa, his tiny heels crossed on the coffee table. Lurleen looked in, and he asked her, “How you like that Abbeville crowd, honey?” “It was all right,” she said. “That was a good crowd,” he informed her. Then he said, “What you gonna tell 'em tonight?” and she replied, with a touch of a smile, “I'm gonna say howdy.” Wallace merely looked back at the TV-he didn't think her remark very funny.
Supper-served in the large kitchen, with its formica breakfast table and, on one of the damp yellow walls, a display of undersized plastic fruit-consisted of coffee, homemade chicken salad, pimento cheese, and more coffee. The talk around the table was of the town's Republicans, a conversation conducted mostly by the women in the shrill and slightly incredulous tones of outrage and scandal, Wallace listening to them with small sniggers. Presently a neighbor-an elderly effusive woman- walked into the kitchen without knocking and cried, “Oh, George!” Wallace now was like a small boy basking in the adoration of fond womenfolk. When he rose to leave with Lurleen, Momma Mae followed him out to the back porch, telling him, “Now, you can stay here whenever you want. That's your bedroom back there, George, that's your bathroom.”
There was a huge throng at the square in front of the courthouse, with the combined country high-school bands bleating lustily. The air was warmish, with an almost spring-like flush and promise of rain, but Wallace, when he pitched out of the car, asked the first people who approached him, “Yawl cold? It's not too cold, is it?” A woman came up and squeezed his hand and said softly, “How you, George?” her eyes twinkling with tears. “I sho am glad to be back home,” he declared. The music, with a few stray squawks and honks, abruptly dwindled into silence, and the local Methodist minister opened the rally with a prayer: “Tonight, our Father, we thank Thee for Lurleen and George. We pray that Thou will use them…” It did seem a special and beautiful night, limpid and sweet and filled with love and the tender thrill of homecoming. Wallace whispered to an aide, “Watson out here tonight?” and he was told, “No, Guvnuh, I ain't seen him yet.”
Lurleen gave her talk, her voice ringing over the hushed crowd. Waiting for her to finish, Wallace stood by his car in a small, momentarily empty circle, his head ducked, pulling thoughtfully at his jowls, hearing finally the spatter of clapping as Lurleen turned from the mike. Then, with his own hillbilly band breaking into a spry mischievous, hot-diggety-dog Dixie, he was on.
Afterward he leaned down from the flatbed trailer, his bodyguards having to catch him by the coattails to keep him from tumbling into the surge of faces below him. “Hi, Josephine. Martha, honey, glad to see you. Listen, now, yawl be careful goin' home, heunh? Birdy, honey-Mr. Charlie, how are you? Don't yawl stay up too late, now, honey.” An old lady, when he took her hand, fairly wriggled with fondness and wrinkled up her face. “Bless you heart, we need you so much!” A young mother lifted up her little girl for a handshake, a blessing. An old man in a corduroy coat strained up to him on his tiptoes to mutter the message he had been waiting all evening to deliver: “We got a little sumpum over yonder now to pick you up if you want-it's what we got it here for, now.” When Wallace declined, the old man announced, “Well, I think I'm gonna have me a little. But I'm keepin' it for you, in case you decide later on.” Wallace clung to a pretty girl's hand. “Aw, Lucille, honey, I didn't recognize you”-burst of happy laughter under him “I got sinus trouble, you know, and it's kind of hard to see sometimes.”
It was over now. Dismounting from the platform, Wallace found the youths who had traveled through the campaign distributing bumper stickers ahead of his rallies, and he told them, “Boys, we'll wind up in California someplace…” He then wandered over to the Dixie Academy fried-chicken stand, a booth that had been set up on the square for the evening to raise funds for a private school in the county-a hasty assembly of raw planks now dappled with puddles of melted ice in the bleak glare of a string of light bulbs. He told the townsmen who were closing it, “I'll see all yawl in the mornin'. I'll be around with you boys tomorrow for the votin', heunh?” The square now was nearly deserted, with paper blowing in a light, damp, late night wind and a few people still lingering under the street lights, quietly talking. From somewhere came a high hoot of mountain laughter. Wallace made for his car, giving an unlit cigar two swift licks and then popping it into his mouth still unlit. Then he noticed, heading toward him like a pair of pale specters, the two women who had been following him all over the state in their aged black Cadillac. The girl, her damp dark eyes still stricken and full of suffering, whined to him with a brave little smile, “We done recorded a victory song.” He instantly swerved to avoid them, calling to them over his shoulder, “Well, I 'predate yawl bein' with us. Good-bye, sweetie. We'll see yawl, heunh?”
He could have spent the night there in Clayton, where he was to vote the next day, but, too energized, he decided to drive back to Montgomery. Lurleen went on ahead of him in another car. Before following her, he dropped by his brother's house, a few blocks from the square. There was a yardful of cars, and as Wallace got out, he exclaimed, not unhappily, “Godamighty-damn, look at them people. I'll never get away.” The den of his brother's home was paneled in the same bright yellow pine as Momma Mae's, but with the addition of a large brick fireplace. As soon as he entered, he asked, “Don't guess Watson made it out tonight, did he?” and someone answered, “Didn't see him, George.”
A few members of the national press were waiting for him; they were a trifle uneasy, laughing a bit too quickly and loudly at the banter going on around them among the assembled townfolk. Cokes were served, the bottoms of the bottles wrapped in paper napkins. Wallace settled himself on a sofa with a jaunty, “Well, what yawl wanna distort tonight?” The newspeople from New York and Washington and Chicago all laughed heartily, but their eyes were quite blank. It was a short session.
<
br /> After they left, Wallace was informed that Watson had “passed out” at the supper table that evening before the rally. “It was just the excitement, probably,” someone said, “and he'd probably had a couple too. You know Billy.” A moment later, someone phoned to say Watson had suffered an insulin shock but was coming out of it. “Well,” snorted Wallace, “don't let him know we been askin' about him. He might get the idea we worryin' about him or something.” But he seemed vaguely troubled.
On the way back to Montgomery, he talked for a while about Martin, the Republican candidate: “He's dead now. He's finished. He might could of been senator, but he ain't gonna be nothing now. He fixed himself, we didn't do it. People say we used to be close, me'n'him, but it wasn't like that-he tried to get close to me, but I was never close to him.” He finally subsided into silence. As the car hummed on through the night on the long drive back to Montgomery, he periodically leaned forward to peer out the window at passing cars and trucks, still checking for Wallace stickers.
I
The Pea River Church, on a country road between Clayton and Clio, is a stark brick building with opaque milky windows and a bleak cemetery, scantily tufted with weeds, spread under a few antique gray oaks. The oldest tombstones, many of them broken and toppled, have the small simple shape of Moses' tablet and bear the names of Baxters, McRaes, Mclnnesses, McCor-micks, Rosses, Murdochs, and McKnights-descendants of those gaunt fierce Calvinist Celts and Anglo-Saxons who came from cold moors and misty heaths into sensual heat and honeysuckle, unaware to the last of the decadence with which they casually contracted, remaining in the midst of slavery as plain and harsh as the churchyard into which the generations of them have been commonly absorbed, the final sum of each of them a single dimming inscription on a mottled slab: ANGUS MCLEAN ASLEEP IN JESUS BLESSED THOUGHT … BELOVED WIFE SHE WAS TOO GOOD, TOO GENTLE AND TOO FAIR TO DWELL IN THIS COLD WORLD OF CARE. … Like most Southern cemeteries, the churchyard is also dense with tombstones from all the crusades: that first great, grave, gray crusade more than a century ago; then the crusade in France; and then the one in Europe and the Pacific twenty years later.
The countryside is flat and grassy and only thinly inhabited. The narrow highways on bright empty Sunday afternoons are roamed by spidery, grimy youths with flowing hair who explode out of the stillness on motorcycles, bent forward over the chromium handlebars in a rigid furious lean of eternal anticipation, like the figures on the prows of wooden ships, sometimes with famished-looking yellow-haired girls clinging to their humped backs, vanishing with a blattering roar back into calm and timeless space. The land abounds with palmists and fortune-tellers who live in trailers and tiny pink concrete-block houses under pecan trees. Carnivals come with the fall, appearing overnight in some pasture a few miles out of town, shabby and raucous and sourceless, like wicked gaudy beggars, and for the span of their uncertain and not quite real tenancy in each field the soft cool nights are filled with calliope music and the high slow twirl of a ferris wheel and a dense, crazy cacophony among the gaming booths and the secret illicit tents.
This, the southeast corner of Alabama, has always been an amiably violent county. “We aren't particularly mean here,” says one native, “we just have a lot of murders.” Its past crackles with shootings, explosions, angry burnings, deputies with shotguns trampling through autumn woods behind baying bloodhounds. “I can remember,” says a resident of Clayton, “when folks during the Depression would blow up their houses and stores because they didn't have the money to pay taxes. It mostly happened on Thursday nights for some reason. Got to where the boys and girls would make their dates by saying, I'll see you at the fire Thursday night.' Got to be a kind of habit. One fella trying to burn up his store got blowed all the way across the street, and they found him by following the blood where he had crawled away.” In one of Wallace's first cases as a lawyer, he defended a husband who had planted eight sticks of dynamite under his wife's bed “and then went off dancin' with another woman to wait for his wife to blow up. He was right in the middle of dancin' when the sky lit up”; the plea was insanity. Not long ago, reports another Barbour County native, “we had a banker who had him two Caddies, an airplane, a fine home with a swimming pool. He was storing peanuts for the government, and he came up about one hundred thousand dollars short on the amount of peanuts he was supposed to have in his warehouses. So one night he goes out by himself and gets into his plane and takes off, circles over town about three times, and then dives. The next morning, we find him up in trees all over the place.”
The stories would make a plump volume: Tales of Barbour County. Wallace's youngest brother, Jack, who is now a circuit judge in Clayton, recalls, “We had a fella here once who blamed his daddy for the loss of his leg-seems like his daddy had gone up to Montgomery and gotten drunk and had called down to Clayton for his son to come get him. On the way up, the boy had an accident and lost a leg. He just never got over it. I knew him pretty well. I used to take him over to Blue Springs swimming a lot, but he really wasn't a very pleasant fella to be around after he lost that leg. He had a terrific temper. He asked his daddy one time if he could use the car, and his daddy told him no, so he took his walking stick and bashed out a windshield. Anyway, one day around noon his daddy was coming home from work for lunch, he was going up the front walk with two bags of groceries under his arms, when his boy steps out from behind some bushes where he'd been waiting with a shotgun. He didn't say a word. He just blew his daddy to pieces right there. Wasn't but a few hours later that I heard about it. I was kinda scared to go over there-I'd been trying to avoid the fella lately, I'd told him several times I couldn't take him to Blue Springs and he'd gotten right mad. I didn't know what he'd do now if he saw me. But I heard they had him upstairs in the house in his room, fixing to leave with him, so I went on over. I went on into the house and walked upstairs. When I opened the door to his room, there were some policemen standing around him, and he was packing his bag on the bed. He looked up at me and kind of smiled, real calm, almost like he had been expecting me. 'Well,'” he said, 'I don't guess we'll be going to Blue Springs anytime soon, will we?'”
Clio, a humble settlement of a few hundred souls, is seventeen miles from Clayton. The square in Clayton really serves as the town square for all the other little villages around it. Dry-goods, drug, and grocery stores drowse in the sun around that inevitable obelisk, the Confederate monument, planted in the center of the community's consciousness and conscience like an altar to some half-forgotten religion. Clayton's Confederate soldier, set atop a granite shaft on a meager patch of faded grass, has about him a faintly neglected and extraneous look. But still he leans on his rifle atop his pedestal with a kind of heroic Greek slant-hipped languor (a pose which Wallace, canting his hips as he speaks before crowds, seems unconsciously to be imitating), a curiously puny figure, a bit less than life-size, his steady, unblinking, blind scowl fixed forever on the North in complete changeless granite-bound concentration. The legend beneath him reads:
IN PROUD AND LOVING MEMORY
OF THE CONFEDERATE PRIVATE SOLDIER
He bore the brunt of the great war
His privations and sufferings
Were surpassed only by
His manhood and his courage
He was of our home and blood
And we love his name
And memory with a feeling
That is beyond the reach of pride
Or the power of misfortune
COMRADES TO OUR CONFEDERATE DEAD
Behind him, across the street, is the courthouse-actually, Barbour County has two courthouses, the other maintained in the larger town of Eufala, some eighteen miles to the east. This odd extravagance owes to the fact that, despite its being barely populous enough to justify even one courthouse, Barbour is probably the most virulently political county in the state: one courthouse simply wasn't enough to satisfy its appetite and energies for politicking. It's as if the fury of its politics works in inverse ratio to th
e scantiness of its population. It has produced an inordinate number of aggressive state politicians, and the number of governors it has sent to Montgomery is wildly out of proportion to its size. Growing politicians has been its chief industry and its major pastime. One of Wallace's current cronies was elected mayor of his town when he was only twenty-one, and Wallace himself was campaigning door-to-door for the local candidate for secretary of state at the precocious age of thirteen.
Beyond his grandparents, all that is known of Wallace's progenitors is that there was a Methodist preacher once, and a great-grandfather who was wounded at Chattanooga in the Battle of Lookout Mountain-the family still has the pocket Bible he carried through the war, in which the event of his wound is recorded in faint spidery ink, and the worn tablespoon which he used to peel potatoes. Behind him there is only a vague glimpse of Wallaces filtering down into Alabama out of the mountains of North Carolina sometime in the early 1860s. Then they are lost, there is no memory of them, they disappear somewhere into the teeming faceless tides of immigration from Scotland and Northern Ireland during the late eighteenth century.
The most recent Wallaces are buried in the Pea River cemetery, and among their tombstones is a plain chaste tablet marking the remains of a member of the family who is usually recalled as “Uncle Edwin, the holy terror.” He perished at twenty-four, leaving behind him only a few rather gaudy memories. “Uncle Edwin was married once, but it didn't last long,” says one of Wallace's brothers. “I remember him coming by the house late one raining night-we were all in bed when he knocked, and Daddy got up and went to the door. His yellow LaSalle convertible was parked outside, and there was a gal in it waiting on him, and he told Daddy he was on his way somewhere from Miami and needed a little money to frolic on. Daddy just slammed the door in his face-the power company had just cut off our own lights. Yeah, Uncle Edwin. He was up in Washington, D.C., on an excursion boat on the Fourth of July around 1935, and he fell off and died.”
Wallace Page 6