Anthill

by Edward Osborne Wilson

  While at the University of Alabama, Cyrus had gone through the full course of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, starting in the fall of 1967. After graduation, he had served three years in the army as an infantry second lieutenant, then first lieutenant, for a full term in Vietnam. He seldom spoke about this period of his life, but on Veterans Day and the Fourth of July he wore on his lapel the tricolored ribbon of a bronze star. He never regretted the Vietnam War, only the way it had been waged and lost.

  Returning home after Vietnam, Cyrus entered the Law School of the University of Alabama. Afterward he joined his father's brokerage firm. He soon began a round of cautious dating, and within a year met Anne, an attractive, dignified young woman of good pedigree--the Baldwin family of Mobile and Montgomery, whose patriarchs included a Governor Baldwin in the 1890s and a full-bird Colonel Baldwin in the First World War.

  Cyrus and Anne were married within six months of meeting. The event had been the lead item in the Mobile News Register society page. After Jonathan's first heart attack, Cyrus took over the firm as acting president. Within a year he had made his mark by launching Semmes Gulf Associates, a consulting and investment firm, on a program of expansion across the southern tier of states from Florida to Louisiana. The eighties were a decade of rapid economic growth in the South, and Semmes Gulf Associates rode up with it.

  As an upcoming young conservative Republican and churchgoing Episcopalian, and not least as a decorated war veteran, Cyrus Semmes was occasionally spoken of as a possible future governor of Alabama. He was flattered by this talk, but he had no such aspiration. Semmes Gulf Associates had his complete attention.

  As the evening wore on, the conversation slowed, infiltrated by pauses and murmured responses with affirmative head-nodding. Cyrus knew how to end it. He glanced at his watch, then again a minute later, turning his wrist slightly each time.

  Whereupon Ainesley rose and said, "We gotta go. I gotta be at the store first thing in the morning, and I expect Cyrus has to be off and running too."

  "Well, yes," Marcia replied. "We hate to leave, but I just never want Scooter to be late to school."

  "Yeah, it's a long ride on a Sunday night," Ainesley added. "You got heavy traffic almost halfway to Clayville."

  On the way back Marcia noticed that Ainesley's driving was erratic. At dinner multiple glasses of Napa Valley's best and a snifter of Cointreau had been added to the three Millers that had comforted him during the stopover at Aunt Jessica's. Several times Ainesley let the truck drift over the center line, then abruptly jerked the wheel to bring it back.

  Then bitterness invaded her emotions. It settled in like polluted air. Each visit to Mobile, she knew, just reinforced the understanding of her sorry circumstance. Here she was, Marcia Semmes of Marybelle, taken away by a drunk from her birthright of status and economic security, to a four-room bungalow in a dreary small town. This would most likely be her life forever. In one catastrophic move, through her marriage, she had traded all the advantages she owned to enter a meaner world of few options.

  It was not in Marcia's nature either to fight her way out of a corner or search for a life of fuller meaning by adapting to changed surroundings. Yet, though she was a passive woman not given to invention and struggle, there was one hope left to her, one grip on her past that remained to her. There was little Raphael, squeezed next to her in the cab of the pickup truck, a Semmes by blood and the incorruptible survivor of her true identity. As her gaze lifted again to the stream of oncoming headlights, she summoned a silent prayer, that her son would somehow retrieve her birthright.

  7

  WHAT AINESLEY SAW WHEN he first encountered Marcia over a decade previously at the FloraBama Restaurant was a pretty twenty-one-year-old, small, almost tiny in stature, with the blue eyes of her father, and still blessed with a teenage trimness. Her smile was quick and welcoming, albeit only for those who approached her first. By nature she was relatively shy, the more so due to her sheltered upbringing.

  Marcia had spent two years at Hartfield Academy, an elite finishing school at Hattiesburg a short car trip from Mobile across the Mississippi line. Well taught there, she had impeccable manners, and her knowledge of dinner arrangements and protocol was almost professionally thorough. She fitted the mold of her region and class. The Old Rich are more polite than others around them. Southerners are more polite than those of other regions. Therefore Southern Old Rich are the most gracious people in America. And egregiously proud--it has often been remarked that Southern gentlemen and would-be gentlemen are both the best mannered and most heavily armed.

  At the time she met Ainesley, Marcia was a junior at Spring Hill College, a small Catholic liberal arts college of good reputation. The campus was within convenient walking distance of Marybelle, with much of the route lined by live oaks and the photogenic gardens of sufficient quality to regularly make the Home and Garden section of the Sunday News Register.

  Her social life at Spring Hill had thus far been almost entirely with other girls who themselves had not yet settled on boyfriends. Disciplined and compliant by both nature and training, she was a dutiful student, earning mostly A's and B's. Only moderately talented in art and music, she possessed a compensatory intellectual passion for American history. Her parents, Jonathan and Elizabeth, were more than a little pleased to see that from an early age she was fascinated by stories of the extended Semmes family, of Mobile, and of the South, in that order. While still in her teens, she had spent three afternoons interviewing Aunt Jessica for a research paper on Semmes antebellum genealogy.

  When she came of age in the mid-1970s, America's great social revolution had already spread across the South. It had reached Mobile, and engaged the full attention of the faculty and students of Spring Hill--short of bra-burning and cafeteria sit-ins. Women were increasingly seen as capable of gaining professional and economic parity with men. Neither Marcia nor her parents, however, particularly wanted her to enter the venues now opened by this change. She was raised to be a Southern lady. Her vision of an appropriate life was to be Old South: white women of the middle and upper classes the customary rulers of the home, and men the providers.

  The preferred professional venues of the best families were law, medicine, and the military, with esteem graded in each according to rank, income, or both. And all the better if a successful older son later took over management of the family estate. Business was acceptable, especially if conducted as a member of the family firm. A political career was also acceptable if taken to a sufficiently high level. Congressman, senator, or governor were excellent. Mayoralty okay, if of a decent-sized city, preferably also accompanied by membership in the Cosmopolitan Club or an equivalent elite group.

  Marcia's expectations for her own eventual place were lofty. At least it never occurred to her that she might someday descend to the warrens of the proletariat. She had witnessed herself some of the great changes that were still sweeping across the South. Studying history, she knew how so much of the region had emerged from poverty, finally to join modern America only during the Second World War.

  Marcia was wholly aware of the changes occurring immediately around her. She had watched the gobbling up of the highways out of town by strip malls, so that the suburbs of Mobile turned into warm-weather replicas of those around, say, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis. The rural South had been further transformed by the conquest of disease. One seldom heard anymore of hookworm, pellagra, or dysentery, the former scourges of poor country folk.

  Marcia's parents could remember WHITE ONLY signs on drinking fountains. They could tell her when fast-food restaurants began to replace "cafes," and when strip malls pushed out five-and-ten downtown stores. When their own parents were young, they saw highways crowded on Saturday mornings with the mule-drawn wagons of sharecroppers, white and black, on their way to market. Now there were cars and trucks driven by employees with paychecks and credit cards in search of the best affordable satellite dish.

  The voters of Alabama, current
ly among the most conservative states politically, had flipped in only one generation from populist Roosevelt Democrat to hard-right Republican. Marcia was used to seeing bumper stickers that advised GOD, GUTS, AND GUNS MADE AMERICA, LETS KEEP ALL THREE. On one side of the rear bumper, that is. A sticker on the other side might read SO MANY PEDESTRIANS, SO LITTLE TIME or DON'T LIKE MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT.

  But that fierceness was softening too. New homes in the best parts of Mobile and across the bay in the arts-and-literature pockets of Fairhope were as likely to be occupied by a Stanford-trained neurosurgeon or an architect from Chicago as by a scion of old wealth. They were coming in, and joined by their equals born in South Alabama. All were welcomed. They were the spearpoint of the New South.

  Yet hereditary privilege and its aura persisted. In Marcia and her parents and many others of their class, a residue of antebellum glory still lingered. It could be summarized by the Three Graces of Southern Nobility. First, there was Old Family and Money; next, Gracious Living, including spacious houses surrounded by sumptuous gardens that displayed large showy flowers, and indoors featuring antique furniture passed down, not bought; and finally, the gray wool of the Confederacy. For this last, forebears were better remembered if they had been officers. If that was fortunately the case, portraits would hang in the library or along the center hallway. A general was a treasure for the ages, and lower-ranked officers were certainly acceptable, while enlisted men were best left as add-ons during postprandial conversation.

  Marcia Semmes was a modern young woman but her roots were in an antebellum ghost town. People there, if they accepted you socially, delighted in telling you their family history. More than the members of any other American subculture, they wanted to discourse on their "people"--their forebears, back more than three generations, back to participation in each war in turn, back, if their phylogeny could be so documented, to the English-speaking pioneers who had settled the land. And they wanted to show you their homes, if those homes were sufficiently large and grand, and the better if built not by themselves but a long time ago, by their people.

  Marcia's branch of the Mobile Semmeses was descended from a cousin of the Confederate "Sea Wolf," Admiral Raphael Semmes. Although direct descendants of the great man were also present in her generation, and her own line was only collateral, she was later to say to Raff more than once, "Remember, son, you are what your people are." And, "You need all of the help you can get in this life, and down here a great name means a lot." She never admitted to herself the possibility that Raff might eventually settle elsewhere in the world, like some ordinary person looking for a job up north, or that the treasured memory of the great man for whom he was named might someday be reverently folded and put away for good in some safe and remembered place along with the stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag.

  8

  THE FLORABAMA RESTAURANT was a famous establishment located on the coast precisely at the line between Florida and Alabama. Out back lay a sugar-white beach and shallow turquoise water that stretched unbroken from Perdido Bay on the east all the way west to Fort Morgan at the entrance to Mobile Bay. It was already famous in the 1970s as a center of Redneck Chic, where families could eat piled-up shrimp off paper plates, and men could drink American beer directly from longneck bottles. Young lawyers and stockbrokers squeezed in at the bar among truck drivers and oystermen--among real people, in other words, the ones who actually produce and fix things for a living.

  On a Saturday afternoon Marcia came to the FloraBama with a group of other Spring Hill College coeds. One of the real people present when Marcia arrived was Ainesley Cody of West Pirate Beach, Alabama, a graduate of Fairhope Senior High School and an expert automobile mechanic and part-time persimmon and strawberry picker. He was seated at a table next to the bar with four of his friends, sipping beer and rating young women as they came through the entrance. They were assigning scores from zero to ten for overall attractiveness, and planned to confer a crudely made imitation gold medal to the first one given a unanimous vote of ten. After an hour and a half without a winner, the impatient judges were arguing over whether the requisite score should be lowered to nine.

  When Marcia walked in, Ainesley was startled, then riveted by the look of her. First was her petite size, matching his own. She was even smaller than Ainesley. This was an increasing rarity in the well-fed South. Most young women were his size or bigger, and they had big feet. Marcia's were much smaller. Her clothing size, he was to learn later, was petite small. Then, in the two-second survey hard-wired in males, he saw in sequence: nice shape, lovely face, well-groomed hair, neat clothes, graceful walk. Summary: a really great-looking young woman. Moreover, she was talking with animation, flashing an orthodontically corrected perfect smile.

  "Do you see that, the one on the left?" he said to his scruffy companions. "Check it out. A perfect ten, you gotta vote ten. This one I'm gonna personally meet."

  With that, he stood up and walked across the floor to the girls, who were settling at their table. Ignoring the others, straightening his shoulders, he looked into Marcia's eyes and assumed the winsome grin he had practiced so often in front of a mirror.

  "Excuse me, miss. My name's Ainesley Cody and I live close to here and I come in a lot and I've just got to say, and the other fellows over there agree with me, that you are the prettiest girl that ever walked into this place. You are just terrific!"

  Marcia glanced nervously left and right, then back to Ainesley with a surprised You mean me? expression. The other girls giggled. Several, all larger than Marcia, were thinking they were just as pretty.

  Ainesley, the talented fast-talker, abruptly shifted gears. A sadness came into his face, and he continued in a calmer voice, shaking his head slowly, in mock remorse.

  "Well, I guess I just made a fool of myself. Believe me, I've never just walked up to someone like this before. I hope you'll forgive me, and I apologize to you, ma'am, and to you all."

  Marcia stayed stock-still. The girl to her right elbowed her in the side, laughing, then turned to Ainesley and said, "Do you mean me?"

  Without answering, he walked back across the floor to rejoin his buddies and stood with them, making gestures and facial expressions meant to look both serious and concerned. He cautioned the others not to laugh or raise their voices. He knew Marcia and her companions would be looking his way in eager conversation of their own. He kept them in view furtively, with sidewise glances.

  Later, as the girls were heading for the door, none carrying the gold medal, Ainesley eased up to Marcia, making a pleading gesture with his hands up, palms forward, and fingers spread.

  "Excuse me," he said, then hesitated. He knew what he wanted to say, but in an un-Ainesley lapse was beginning to feel confused. The would-be ladies' man and casual seducer felt a pang of sincerity.

  "Could I say something?"

  Marcia halted politely. Two of her friends stayed with her as he finally put the words together.

  "Listen, I'm sorry if I seemed rude when I came up to you. But you do look like such a terrific person. I'd appreciate if I could just talk to you sometime, maybe get a cup of coffee, like they say in the movies. That's all." He turned his head down a bit to imply modesty, then added, "May I at least give you my name and number? And maybe could you give me yours? Just to give me a chance to talk a couple of minutes on the phone someday, that's all. And then I'm gone. I promise."

  Ainesley nervously handed her a pencil and two scraps of paper torn from the table mat. One had his name and telephone number written on it, and one was for her to write hers. Marcia was flustered. This was not in her finishing-school playbook. Trying not to be rude, she took the slips of paper and said, "Thank you. Excuse me, I have to go." And walked quickly to the waiting van.

  She thought, Ms. Rhodes at Hartfield would have given me an A for that. Or maybe not. Did I just make a mistake?

  Ainesley caught up with one of the girls who had stayed with her, and commanded, "Quick, what's
her name? Please, I'm a good guy. I just gotta know."

  "Marcia Semmes."

  With that innocent betrayal, Marcia Semmes's fate was sealed.

  A few days later, with a telephone directory of Mobile and Pensacola, in which few Semmeses were listed, Ainesley quickly tracked Marcia down.

  "Is Marcia there?" he asked on the telephone.

  "No, she's at the college today," Elizabeth Semmes responded.

  "Spring Hill College, I guess."

  "Yes. You can reach her there. Who shall I say called?"

  "A friend. I'll call her there. Thanks a lot."

  Knowing he wouldn't be given her number at the school, Ainesley simply waited until the first holiday weekend and called her at home again. This time she was the one who answered. "Yes?"

  "Hi, is this Marcia Semmes?"

  "Yes. Who are you?"

  "I'm Ainesley Cody. We met at the FloraBama a month ago. I sort of hoped you might remember. I'm a senior at the University of West Florida, over in Pensacola," he lied. "I hope you'll forgive me, but I didn't want to bother you. After I saw you, I just wanted to talk to you, you know, maybe for a couple of minutes." He strained to sound casual. "So here I am. I won't come around or bother you or anything."