by Wingshooters
Now that Mr. Gordon was facing him, Earl seemed to hesitate. For years Mr. Gordon had been the only lawyer in town and that afforded him a certain standing, which was multiplied because he still farmed his own land and had helped other families hold onto their farms, too. He was educated, and a baseball hero, but he had no airs, and that combination of qualities earned all the town’s respect.
Even my grandfather seemed different as he approached his old idol. He faced Mr. Gordon directly but stood back on his heels, allowing the older man his due space. “Hello, Darius,” he said evenly.
“Hello, Charlie. What’s going on, fellas?”
Charlie looked a little uncertain now, as if it had taken all of his bravery just to get him outside. He waited for an especially loud car to pass before saying, “Well, everyone’s stirred up about that teacher, you know.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Gordon, looking at me. “Is he teaching your class? No, I suppose you’re too young for fifth grade.”
It was so unusual for me to be addressed by an adult that I looked behind me to see if someone else was there. I didn’t answer, but Mr. Gordon didn’t notice. My grandfather, though, put his hand on my shoulder protectively. “He’s not, but she’s seen him. Ain’t that right, Mikey?”
I nodded.
“Well, his wife works over at the clinic,” Mr. Gordon said, as if we didn’t already know; as if word had not already traveled, like a virulent strain of the flu, all over town and into the country.
“Yeah, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” said Earl. He did not seem particularly affected by the cold, nor by the status of the man he was speaking to. “We were just in Jimmy’s having our coffee, and John, he says, ‘I wonder what old Darius thinks about that nigger nurse working in his son’s clinic?’ And I says, ‘I don’t know, John, let’s ask him.’ And then we look out the window and there you are.”
Mr. Gordon held his coat shut and choked up on the leash. “I don’t think anything about it.”
“Well, why’d he let her in there?” asked Earl, leaning forward, cheeks red from the biting air. “And why’s she out at the country satellite? Just ’cos folks are poor doesn’t mean that any damn thing should be let loose on ’em.”
“She’s a top-rate nurse,” said Mr. Gordon. “Del worked with her down in Chicago. When he took over the clinic, with the expansion and the nursing school and all, he wanted to bring in good staff.”
“You mean he brought her?” Uncle Pete asked. “On purpose?”
“Yeah, he did. So what?”
“Well,” Earl said, “we just think he should have known better.”
Mr. Gordon turned his head slowly and looked Earl in the face. “There’s gonna be a lot of new people coming into town, Earl. You might as well get used to it.”
Listening to this exchange, I remembered what I had heard about Del Gordon. He’d spent most of his adult life outside of Deerhorn, going to college in Madison and medical school in Chicago. He’d been a military doctor during the war in Korea, and then had lived in Chicago until recently. Charlie and his friends must have thought about that too, because now Earl said, “See, this is what happens when people leave Deerhorn. Folks come back here confused.”
“My boy,” said John Berger, putting his hands on his hips, “didn’t come back here with no mixed-up notions.”
Mr. Gordon raised his eyebrows. He was a gentle man, but now he had been pushed, and it was clear he did not appreciate it. “Well, I wouldn’t hold up your boy as a model.”
T.J. Berger stepped forward, fists clenched, as if he’d forgotten that the man who’d just insulted him was old enough to be his grandfather. His father, glaring at Mr. Gordon, held him back.
“He’s just saying,” Charlie put forth, trying to calm the situation, “we’d of thought you taught him different than that.”
Mr. Gordon sighed. “Look. I’m not saying I would’ve done the same thing. But he’s a grown man, Charlie. What do you want me to do? I stopped taking him over my knee fifty years ago.” He paused. “And besides.” Here he looked meaningfully at Charlie. “You know how hard it is to keep hold of your kids.”
Something rippled across Charlie’s face and his body grew tense; I could feel it through his hand on my shoulder. He was in conflict; I knew that, everyone must have known that. Because as much as he hated the way my father lived, as much as he disapproved of my mother, how could he totally reject their union when it had produced me, whom he loved? Still, my presence there was proof of Stewart’s choices. I kept waiting for Charlie to stand up for my father. I kept waiting for him to say that his boy was coming back, that he was on his way home, but he didn’t.
“Well, you better let Del know,” said Earl, “that folks in town are real unhappy with what’s going on up there. Real unhappy. Especially now that she’s going out to the country and treating white people.” He said “treating” as if it meant injecting them with poison. “You know what it’s like when folks get upset around here. There’s no telling what might happen.”
Mr. Gordon heard the threat there, and he lifted his chin, looking down the length of his nose. “I’m not saying I would have done the same thing,” he repeated. “But the clinic’s going to bring a lot of good to this town. It’s going to help business, it’s going to help construction, it’s going to create jobs. My son is trying to bring in the best people he can. And I believe that he knows what he’s doing.”
Earl walked up so close I thought he might touch him. “You better shut that coat tighter, Darius. I think the cold’s affecting your head. Or maybe you’re just getting senile.”
“Get out of my face, Watson,” said Mr. Gordon, and I knew that despite his age he would not be afraid to fight. “Get out of here and go do something useful with your time.”
That night, we were awakened by a phone call. I didn’t know what the sound was at first, and I was so asleep it was like I was hearing it underwater. I only began to surface when I heard the creaking of my grandparents’ door, the heavy padded footsteps of my grandfather. He left the door open between the hallway and the dining room, so I heard him clear his throat, pick up the receiver, and say, “Hello?”
I figured it was Pete or Earl, both of whom went out drinking and occasionally came home late, or Ray, who was sometimes on duty. But whatever they were calling about—probably a new development at the clinic or at the school—Charlie wouldn’t be happy about being awakened. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Do you know what time it is?”
I looked at my clock face, and by the light of the moon, I could see it was 12:27. I waited for him to say that whoever it was, Pete or Earl or Ray, should call him back later, or that he’d see him in the morning at the coffee shop. But what he said was, “She’s asleep. I’m not going to wake her up.”
My eyes flew open and I sat up in my bed. Charlie was quiet, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded terse. “Well, she’s home every night and all weekend. Wanting to hear from you. And then you wait till after midnight to call.”
Now I heard a softer set of footsteps, my grandmother’s. She came down the hall and went into the dining room, pulling the door closed behind her. I heard her muffled, questioning voice, followed by his sterner, lower one. But I couldn’t make out the words anymore, so I crawled out of bed and carefully made my way out of the room. I stepped quietly down the short hallway, stopping in front of the door. It wouldn’t close all the way, so I put my ear up to the crack, which wasn’t big enough to see through but enabled me to hear.
“Yes, we got it,” Charlie was saying. “Yes, the postcard too. It’s good you’re in one place for a while.”
“Ask him when he’s coming,” my grandmother said, and although I couldn’t see Charlie, I could picture him waving her off, gripping the receiver and frowning.
“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s no trouble at all. About twice as big as when you last saw her. She’s looking forward to you coming for Thanksgiving, you know.
Your mother is too.” Then he was quiet for several moments. I heard some shuffling, as if he was walking or turning in place. When he spoke again his voice had a harder edge. “Well, make up your mind, son. Are you coming or not?” Another pause, and now he was breathing so hard I could hear him from where I stood. Then: “You can’t keep saying you’re doing something if you’re not going to do it. You can’t keep getting her hopes up. It’s not fair.”
More quiet, and then his voice so loud I jumped back from the door. “I’m not being hard on you! I’m just telling you how it is! It’s not just you you’ve got to think about. You’ve got a child here, remember? And she needs you to—”
He stopped abruptly. Then he said, “Goddamnit!” and slammed down the phone, and I knew that my father had hung up on him.
“Charlie, keep your voice down,” my grandmother said, but my grandfather didn’t answer. He’d hung the phone up with such force that it made the desk shake, and either that, or my grandmother’s getting up and moving toward him, caused the door to open a couple of inches. I hid my body behind the wall and peered through the open crack, and saw something I had never seen before—my grandfather sitting down with his head in his hands, fingers working through his thinning hair. My grandmother stood in front of him and gently put her hand on his shoulder. I expected him to shake it off, to tell her to leave him alone. But they both stayed where they were.
I felt strange and confused standing there, seeing them like this, so I slipped back to my room and then back into bed, where Brett was still snoring on his pillow. My father had called—I couldn’t even remember the last time he had called—and it was clear that he wanted to talk to me. Sure it was late, and sure he and Charlie had argued. But he wanted to talk to me, wanted to see me, and they had talked about Thanksgiving. He would come after all of this, wouldn’t he? I knew he would come. There was no way he would have traveled so far, gotten within striking distance, if he weren’t headed back to Wisconsin. If there had been any question about it, maybe the fight had even helped. Maybe Charlie had shamed him into keeping his promise.
The next morning at breakfast, my grandparents were both subdued. They were quieter than usual, not talking about the goings-on in town or their plans for the day, and Charlie hardly touched the eggs and sausage on his plate. I kept waiting for them to say something about the call, about my father, but neither of them mentioned it. They were both especially kind with me, my grandmother letting me put more brown sugar than usual on my oatmeal, my grandfather refilling my milk glass. I thought maybe my grandmother would mention the call after school, when Charlie was gone to the coffee shop, but she didn’t. Neither of them brought it up at supper, either. By the next day, I realized that they weren’t going to tell me, and I didn’t know what that meant. All I knew was that my father might be coming, that I might be seeing him soon. And I was starting to hope that, when he left again, he’d think about taking me with him.
SIX
A few days after my father called, I stopped at my locker to pick up my scarf and gloves and was a little late in getting outside. By the time I made it out to the playground, Missy Calloway was sitting on my bench with Jessica Brown, speaking in her most teacherly voice about the math test we’d just finished taking. I continued past them, beyond the kids playing handball and hopscotch, and headed for my second favorite spot. There was another wooden bench around the corner of the building, toward the front of the school. This square area of concrete, to the right of the swings, did not have any grass or equipment. Because there was nothing to play with it was usually empty; because it faced east, it was sunny through lunchtime. I liked to sit on that bench sometimes, away from everyone else, and lean my back against the wall. This physical distance made me less self-conscious about being alone; at least here, out of sight, I wouldn’t get teased for it. But if someone approached me in a way that seemed like trouble, I could just slip around the corner, back in view of the teachers.
On this morning, though, when I turned the corner, my usual space wasn’t empty. Several boys—they looked like third and fourth graders—had surrounded another boy I recognized as Billy Coles, one of the children from the trailers in the country. He was sitting on the bench, back pressed flat against the wall, the four other boys standing around him in a semicircle. One of them was leaning over him, finger pointing in his face; Billy kept trying to back up but there was nowhere to go, so he just slipped a little further down the wall. Although Billy wasn’t small and didn’t seem especially weak, he was often clipped on the head or shoved into the lockers when he made his way down the hall. He had a voice that was always on the edge of a whine, and he often scuffled with other boys. But this confrontation was clearly one he hadn’t invited; he looked scared, and his eyes were darting between the other boys’ bodies, looking for a path of escape.
Other than me, Billy was the most unpopular child at school. He had dirty-blond hair that was jaggedly cut, with a ponytail half a foot long. His face and clothes were often streaked with dirt, and his shoelaces were always knotted and clumped, where they had broken and been tied back together. His fingernails were always dirty, and his nose often ran; I’d seen teachers recoil physically when they had to touch him. Billy had several equally dirty brothers and sisters whom I sometimes saw in town—at the ice cream parlor, or the movies, or in the grocery store, anywhere businesses were giving something away for free. His mother was a small, silent woman who came to the market to buy groceries with food stamps. His father was tall and skinny, with tied-back hair as long as Billy’s; I sometimes saw him picking through garbage cans on the outskirts of town, and we’d both turn our heads away, embarrassed. Billy was not the only child at school from the country trailers—once a week a group of them were marched into the gym for a bath—but because he butted heads with the kids from town, he was the one who drew the most attention. I’d never particularly liked him myself—he was one of those children whose own self-pity provokes as much irritation as sympathy—but right then I wanted to say, just slip to the left. Turn the corner and you’ll be safe.
“You stink, Billy,” said the boy who was leaning over him, and I saw that it was Dale Davis, Ray Davis’s son. Dale was a decent, popular boy, and not a known bully. “Why don’t you go take a bath or something?”
“He don’t have a bathtub, Dale,” said another boy, Walter Kale. “He’s got to take ’em here.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Dale said, as if this was news to him. He was dark-haired and compact like his father, but there was a self-assurance in his manner—even at age eight—that his father seemed to lack. “You don’t have a bathtub, or a car, or even a bedroom, ain’t that right? Hell, if it wasn’t for the bus that brought you to school, we wouldn’t even know you were out there.”
Billy grimaced, as if these words were a physical assault. “Leave me alone, Dale,” he said miserably.
“You want me to leave you alone, huh?” said Dale, standing up straight and crossing his arms. “I’ll bet you didn’t tell that nigger nurse to leave you alone.”
Now I understood. Dale usually didn’t bother the country children, or any of the outcasts, really. But he’d been listening to his father. And his father knew that people had started going to the clinic.
Billy looked up at him now, and his expression neither confirmed nor denied Dale’s suspicion. Still, Dale stepped in close again. “It’s true, ain’t it? She was out there, wasn’t she? She was out at that clinic they made from the store.”
“I had to go there!” Billy protested. “I was getting sick to my stomach and my head always hurt. I didn’t know the nurse was gonna be a nigger!”
“So now you’re a nigger-lover, ain’t you, Billy?”
“No.”
“She touched you everywhere, didn’t she?”
“No!”
“And I’ll bet you liked it, too!”
They began pushing him, poking him, trying to get him to react, emboldened by his anguished “Stop it!” and awkward
attempts to defend himself. Their focus and excitement intensified with each passing moment, and then all four boys pressed around him so tightly that I could no longer make him out between their bodies. Billy’s cries and the excited shouts of the boys who surrounded him were noticed by kids on other parts of the playground, who began to rush over to watch.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large adult figure come around the side of the building. It was Mr. Garrett. He must have been on recess duty that day, and he came whipping around the corner faster than I’d known an adult could move. A couple of the newcomers shouted out, “Run!” and the boys who’d cornered Billy all scattered, like flushed birds who fly in no particular direction in their desperate attempt to escape. Even Billy took off, as panicked as all the others.
“Hey!” yelled Mr. Garrett, grabbing this way and that, but the boys slipped through his grasp. “Hey, you’re going to hear about this later!” He turned toward the bench where Billy had been, looking at me for a moment, then looking back.
And then, right after our eyes met, we both saw something else—one boy who hadn’t gotten away. He was sprawled out on the pavement in front of the bench, and it looked like he’d tripped on the thick link chain that secured it to the playground. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and I saw that it was Kevin Watson. His black hair was falling over into his eyes and he was trying to catch his breath. Kevin pulled down the sleeve of his jacket and looked at his forearm—there was a large red scrape, and seeing this, he promptly began to cry. He had always cried easily—I remembered the tears that followed his scolding by a teacher in the cafeteria the year before—but in this case tears were war-ranted. It looked bad—a deep scrape maybe four inches long, blood running down his arm, bits of dirt and rock pressed into the open flesh. When Mr. Garrett saw this, he gave up on the other boys and came rushing to Kevin’s side. He knelt down on one knee and placed his hand on Kevin’s shoulder.