by Wingshooters
He leaned into the microphone and his voice boomed across the park. “No one but God should determine how we lead our lives. We have every right to decide who we live among, who we worship with, and how we educate our children. People were made differently for a reason—a reason! Those judges and politicians in Boston, those heavy-handed liberals, have forgotten that simple truth. And now we’re facing a similar threat right here in Deerhorn!”
He stood up straight and scanned the crowd, his large hands gripping either side of the lectern. Now everyone was rapt, including the children.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I couldn’t believe what was coming from his mouth. While Father Pace would occasionally comment on current events, from the PCP overdose of the pharmacist’s oldest son, to the young women who were taking advantage of the sinful new law allowing the murder of unborn babies, to the robbery scandal involving the fire department, to the happy return or sad loss of soldiers who’d fought in Vietnam, this seemed different, like he was challenging his entire congregation. And he kept on going.
“In Boston, the Catholic parishes are accepting families whose children need a refuge from the public schools. We believe this is a generous and appropriate response. Some of you have already moved your children to our school, and I want you to know that more of you are welcome. And likewise, I’m calling upon our good Catholic doctors in town to take on a few more patients, so that people won’t have to go to that Godless clinic.”
He lowered his head now, his eyes nearly closed, and spoke in a firm, soft voice. “We may not be able to control the circumstance that has been thrust upon us, but we can control our response to it. None of you has to sit there and take it.”
And he went on to invite people to approach him after Mass if they wanted to enroll their children in the Catholic school. Then he began his regular sermon. It didn’t seem, though, that anyone paid very close attention. The crowd was abuzz with his unexpected pronouncement and no one could stay still.
I couldn’t believe that Father Pace had talked about the Garretts. Without ever mentioning them by name, without even speaking the words Negro or black or teacher or nurse, he’d made his position—and the position of the church—very clear. I didn’t understand how he could do this—how he could reconcile his usual words of doing right in the eyes of God with the stance he now condoned. But considering his church’s reaction to my parents and me, I suppose I shouldn’t really have been surprised.
Maybe if I’d been older, I might have had a better sense of how unsettled people were by all the changes going on in the country. Maybe I might have understood how what was happening in Boston was having effects that rippled all the way to Deerhorn. But the nightly images I saw on the news confused me more than anything. The sight of buses full of black children being pelted with rocks, of white children walking nervously through hallways full of black faces, of police in riot gear being taunted by white youths with baseball bats and hockey sticks, of the Irish city councilwoman speaking about the coming race war, felt as far away to me as the images of the disgraced president stepping off his plane, of the bombings in Cambodia. I did not understand what all the fuss was about. I couldn’t comprehend why people were so upset, or what exactly they believed was at stake. It seemed strange to me even then, when I was a child, and I’m not sure that my perception would have been any different if I’d been twelve or seventeen instead of nine. What I might have had with age, though, was a greater appreciation for the seriousness of people’s reactions. What I might have had with age was a healthier sense of fear regarding what was possible.
Later that afternoon, I ran into the Garretts. I’d been doing nothing in particular, watching the Packers game so I could be in the same room as my grandfather, when my grandmother asked me to go to the market to buy some milk and ice cream. The main strip of town, which included Jimmy’s Coffee Shop and Earl Watson’s gun store, was about six blocks away. The market, a small, five-aisle store that was the town’s main source of groceries, was at the near end of Buffalo Street, across from what used to be the Sears building and was now some kind of storage place for discarded old appliances.
I liked to go to the market, or maybe I just liked how important I felt when I was running an errand for my grandmother, and there was one cashier, a dyed red-head named Gloria, who always gave me candy. That day, because I could handle the load with one bag, I took my bike up to the store. I skipped inside and passed the end displays of potato chips and Pabst, and as I turned the corner into the freezer aisle, I almost ran right into them—Mr. Garrett and the woman who must have been his wife, a thin, dark-skinned woman of about his age. He was leaning on the shopping cart while she opened the freezer door and pulled out a carton of strawberry ice cream. They were talking easily, unguarded, and when Mrs. Garrett turned back from the freezer I saw how she looked at him, eyes showing a pleasure I wasn’t used to seeing expressed between married people. She had strong, high cheekbones and slightly hollowed cheeks that were so polished and smooth they might have been carved of stone. There was something in her bearing and the set of her shoulders that made her look regal, even there in the freezer aisle. She was wearing a neat blue dress and carrying a handbag, as if they’d just come from church. (And now I wonder—had they been at church? Did they drive up to Wausau or all the way to Steven’s Point to find a community of other black congregants? Because they couldn’t have worshipped in Deerhorn, of course. No local church would have had them.)
I stood and watched them as he poked her like a teenage boy trying to get a girl’s attention—and it was hard to believe that these two people, this playful man and his dignified wife, had thrown the town into such frenzy. I didn’t think they would notice me—I was so used to people ignoring me that I’d almost come to believe I was invisible—but as Mrs. Garrett turned back toward the freezer, she stopped in mid-movement.
“What?” her husband asked.
She nodded in my direction and he turned. When he saw me, his face broke into a smile.
“That’s just Michelle,” he said to his wife, and I was both scared and thrilled to realize he knew who I was.
“Oh, right,” his wife said, and the guardedness that had started to come into her manner was gone again, and she smiled too.
“Hello, Michelle,” he said gently, in a tone of voice he might use to coax a cat out from under a bed. He was looking right at me—they both were—and suddenly I felt exposed, painfully aware that there was no corner I could easily slip around, no crowd of people into which I could blend. I knew I should answer but all I could manage was a nod and half a smile.
“Are you here with your family?” Mrs. Garrett asked. Her tone was friendly, but there was something about her that made me want to stand up straighter, a self-assurance I wasn’t used to seeing in a woman. “What are you looking for?”
I couldn’t get anything out of my mouth—it was like the muscles in my throat had cramped up—so I gestured toward the ice cream. I took a few steps forward, opened the freezer door, and pulled out a frost-covered carton. It was strawberry, just like theirs.
“That’s good stuff,” Mr. Garrett said. “My wife and I got some, too. Well, I’ll see you at school tomorrow, Michelle. You have a good day, now.”
I looked from them to the carton of ice cream and back again, wanting to speak, unsure of what to say. But finally I got so nervous that I just waved goodbye. Then I ran past them down the aisle, feeling their eyes still on me, and hurried to the counter to pay. My heart was beating a hundred miles an hour as I handed over the money and waited for Gloria to bag my item. After receiving my usual Peppermint Pattie, I biked home as fast as I could. I was so flustered that it wasn’t until I mounted the stairs that I realized I’d forgotten the milk. But this I could handle—at the end of the block was the Cloverdale Dairy, and so I walked up and bought half a gallon.
After I’d given my grandmother the ice cream and milk, I took the dog up to the attic, to my father’s old roo
m, and thought about what had happened. I’d seen the Garretts, both of them. And they’d been nice to me. And they’d excused or overlooked my inability to speak, my awkwardness in their presence. I felt like I’d been let in on a secret, and I knew instinctively that I couldn’t tell my grandparents about it, or anyone at school. But something important had happened; I felt like part of something. For the next hour and a half, before my grandmother called up for supper, I sat there smiling, thinking about my chance meeting in the store, holding it, turning it over like a jewel.
No one paid much attention when the following item appeared in the paper two days later:
Free Satellite Clinic to Open; Will Serve Outlying Areas
As part of its planned expansion, the Deerhorn/Central Wisconsin Clinic will provide free care once a week at a satellite location serving the outlying areas of Deerhorn, a clinic official said today. The clinic will be open on Wednesdays, and will operate out of the old Carver Package Store building that is currently managed by Henderson Realty. “We want to be able to serve people who don’t normally come into town for medical care,” said Dr. Del Gordon, the clinic’s chief administrator. “There are a lot of people out there on the old farms and in the backwoods who never see a doctor.” Free services will be provided by licensed medical staff and students in the clinic’s new nursing program, and will include immunizations, tuberculosis tests, mammo-grams, and physicals. The Deerhorn Central Clinic will be absorbing all costs of renovating the building, Dr. Gordon said. “We want to extend our appreciation to the town of Deerhorn and both our old and new staff for helping turn our clinic into the medical jewel of Central Wisconsin.” The satellite clinic will be open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., every Wednesday, at 342 Besemer Road, just off of Route 5.
Deerhorn was not a generous place. Almost everyone in the town had once been poor, or had at least struggled hard to get by. Every family had stories of crops that didn’t flourish, businesses that folded, farms that closed up as country people moved into town; and the Depression was still so fresh in the memories of my grandparents and their friends that it might have occurred within the last decade. Years before, a local boy—the son of a poor farmer, a veteran—had been elected to the House of Representatives, and had eventually become one of the most conservative members of Congress. People in town believed that if they had made it, if they had struggled and fought successfully to keep their heads above water, then everybody else could too. The people I had seen the previous week, living in tin shacks and cobbled together hand-me-down trailers, did not evoke their sympathy or sorrow. And so no one seemed to care that those same people would now have access to medical care. An institution whose presence the townsfolk resented was helping a set of people they chose not to see.
Those next few days at school, it seemed like the contro-versy around Mr. Garrett had settled down, or at least had leveled off. The number of students who came to his class held steady at ten or eleven. From what I could gather, no one from the school called the other students’ parents to demand that they return; some of them had enrolled in the Catholic school. There had been talk that the two fifth grade classes might be combined, putting Mr. Garrett out of a job, but nothing came of it. Things were quiet. Miss Anderson had settled into a kind of tense determination, and we all started to learn again, at least a little. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday rolled by, and I was almost lulled into believing that the school was accepting Mr. Garrett and that everything would be all right.
Then on Wednesday afternoon the telephone rang, just as we were sitting down for supper. My grandfather answered it and his expression grew darker. His fingers curled into a fist, which he placed on the desk. “All right,” he said into the phone. “Come over after supper and we’ll get our heads together. Call Jim and Earl too.”
He hung up and sat at the table in front of his empty plate. My grandmother, who’d been getting ready to bring in the food, looked at him expectantly.
“That clinic out there for the country people,” he said. “That nigger nurse was out there today.”
We looked at him, waiting for more.
“That nurse,” he repeated, looking up at us now. “She gave people shots. She was giving them physicals. She laid her hands on our children.” And as he said this he cringed, physically withdrawing from his words, as if from the actual hands he found so offensive.
I looked at my grandmother and saw her eyes open wide. “She shouldn’t have gone out there,” she said, sounding more surprised than anything, as if one of her friends had played out of turn in bridge. “They should have told us she was going to be working there.”
“Those people had no warning,” my grandfather said. “No warning at all. It just got sprung on them.” He got up from his chair and walked out to the patio, letting the screen door slam shut behind him. My grandmother looked from the door to the table back into the kitchen, but it was clear we weren’t eating just then. After a moment or two, she went into the kitchen and I walked over to the patio door. I opened it gingerly and peeked my head around the corner. My grandfather was sitting on the old worn couch they’d dragged out there, staring absently across the street at the Miller children as they climbed their apple tree in the fading light. He didn’t speak or move when the door creaked open, so I stepped out and sat down beside him. It was mid-October and cool enough for sweaters, although neither of us had one on. Normally it would have been dark by now, but because of the gas shortage, daylight savings was in effect all year so there was still a bit of light. I waited for him to take my hand with his rough, callused fingers, but he didn’t move; he just stared out the window.
“Junie Miller lets those kids run wild,” he said, and I looked across the street. The two oldest ones, Jarrett and Karen, were up in branches fifteen feet off the ground; they were eight and ten, old enough to be climbing trees. But the baby John, who was only three, was trying to get up too, his little arms reaching futilely for the lowest branch.
“They’re okay,” I said, by which I meant that at least they—unlike so many other children in the neighborhood—generally left me alone.
“Jim Miller’s gone so damn much,” my grandfather continued. “And when he is here, all he does is drink beer.”
Jim Miller was a long-distance truck driver, and it wasn’t unusual for him to be on the road for two or three weeks at a time. I always knew he was in town because the big red cab of his truck would be parked in the Millers’ front yard, dwarfing their garage. When I thought of his loud voice, though, laughing with the kids, the way he threw them over his shoulder and made them squeal with delight; when I thought how he was home at least part of the time, those kids seemed pretty lucky to me.
“Grandpa,” I said now, “what’s wrong with the nurse working at the clinic?”
He sighed and patted my hand and kept looking out the window. “You wouldn’t understand yet, Mike,” he said. “Some things you’ve got to grow up to understand. But people don’t like to mix with people different from them. They like to be with their own kind.”
I understood what he was saying about the Garretts, about himself. But what exactly was my kind?
I couldn’t ask him, though, because he was still staring out the window, and I knew it wasn’t the Millers he was thinking about. Five or six times in the year I’d lived in Deerhorn, there had been tornado warnings on TV. Each time, my grandfather planted himself out on the porch, looking angrily out at the horizon as if daring the storm to approach. I usually sat with him through these hours-long vigils, despite my grandmother’s pleas that we come inside and take shelter in the cellar. He would tell her to stop worrying, it would be all right, and then turn to me and wink and say, “Women.” Then we’d sit together quietly and watch the sky. Twice, we actually saw the funnel-shaped cloud twisting across the horizon, hesitating, teasing, as if considering all the houses and trees on the ground before deciding which ones to touch down upon. But even when one funnel got so close that it ripped out a stand of trees two blocks
away from us; even when we were looking at the storm eye-to-eye; even when I got so scared I covered my head with my arms and burrowed into his side, my grandfather would not retreat. He stood firm and stared the tornado down. He would not let it come any closer.
And that was what he was like that night, the night we found out about Mrs. Garrett and the clinic. He was looking out the window, staring straight into the face of the storm, and there was no way he was about to back down. The difference this time, though, was that he wasn’t squaring off against an act of nature. The thing he was trying to hold at bay wasn’t dangerous at all. I wondered if he had sat on the porch like this when he’d heard about my mother; whether he’d steeled himself against my parents’ union. And I wondered if he was the reason my mother hadn’t liked to visit; whether his influence, his legacy, were also why she couldn’t stay with my father, or with me.
I sat outside with my grandfather for a good half an hour before the first of his friends arrived. It was Jim Riesling, who said, “This isn’t an emergency, Charlie. We don’t really need to do anything.”
And my grandfather, as he often did when someone said something he didn’t like, simply acted as if he hadn’t heard him. In the next few minutes Earl Watson appeared, too. Ray Davis arrived a bit later, and eventually Uncle Pete. My grandmother made me eat quickly in the kitchen and then shooed me into my room, where try as I might, I could not make out the conversation. But the men stayed up late, talking around the dining room table, huddled together against the gathering storm. They didn’t seem to realize that the danger was not out there, on the other side of the window. They didn’t realize that the storm was right there in the room, contained in their own minds and hearts.
FIVE
Although no one would ever know it if they looked at me now, I was raised to live in the country. Now I have an apartment in a fashionable section of Los Angeles, close to restaurants and museums and nightclubs. Now I go to grocery stores to purchase my produce, and take my car into a shop for even simple repairs. The people here in L.A. would never believe what I was doing as a child, while they were going to the beach and playing soccer. By the age of eight, I knew how to shoot a gun. I could drive my grandparents’ Pontiac, milk a cow, even operate a tractor if I had to, which I learned to do out on the old family farm still owned by my grandmother’s brother. I knew back pain from bending over in my grandparents’ garden, picking vegetables for dinner and canning. I’d helped scale fish, gut squirrels and ducks, string deer up by their feet in the garage. And while I never actually killed the game I ate and helped prepare, I’d been there when it was shot, with Charlie in the wild, stalking silently through the fields at dawn.