Totally disarmed by Amy’s outrageousness, Sarah laughs and says candidly, “I was afraid it was a ring.”
“No, no,” Amy says, tearing open the paper.
“He’s too cheap for that. If I wanted a ring, I’d have to go get one myself.”
Sarah grins, but looks at me to see how I am taking it. I laugh gamely. Presents, in my opinion, are a waste of money.
“If I could find one that would go through your nose …” I say to Amy, not bothering to finish.
“They’re sweet!” Amy says holding up a pair of silver earrings. She stands on her toes and kisses me on the cheek.
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome,” I say, giving her a hug. I already gave her my real present two nights ago, a red teddy I got for her at Victoria’s Secret. She modeled it for me fifteen minutes later in her bedroom. It wasn’t the kind of gift that I felt comfortable presenting in front of Sarah.
“Dad’s so original,” Sarah says, pointing to her own ears. The earrings I got for her are turquoise.
“Well, they were having this two-for-one sale at Ster ling’s,” I say, winking.
Amy rolls her eyes.
“I thought these looked familiar.”
It is my turn to open Amy’s present. I can tell by the box it must be clothes, but I have no idea what. Amy has been ridiculously secretive, not even giving me a hint. I open the box and find a dark blue pinstriped suit in a box from Bachrach’s, a men’s clothing store in the mall. I’ve been by it a dozen times, but the clothes always cost an arm and a leg.
“Good Lord, Amy, this is expensive!”
“It’s for his trial,” Amy says to Sarah.
“I’m tired of him looking so tacky. He’s been wearing the same suits since law school.” To me, she says, “Don’t worry I waited until it got marked down twice.”
I try on the coat and find it is my size, a 40 regular. She must have looked through my closet.
“You still spent too much,” I chide her gently.
“It’s beautiful.”
“You’ve got time to get the pants altered,” she says, getting in a slight dig at my waistline.
I hug her anyway.
“Thanks a lot,” I say. Damn, I feel cheap. Sarah has given me a new briefcase, which probably cost twice as much as her earrings. Her mother al ways went overboard on presents, too. As I go back into the kitchen to pour me and Amy a cup of coffee, I promise myself I won’t be so tight if this case works out and I get Dade signed to a pro contract. I have already called this morning to wish him and his family a Merry Christmas. But even with the commotion and excitement of four other children opening presents, Lucy sounded depressed. She knows that this time next year she may be loading up the car to go visit their oldest child at the state prison in Grady. Though I tried to minimize it in my call the day after I returned, she could tell I was shaken by the reaction of Blanche Perry to my suggestion that the case be dropped. I’ve had a fantasy that this case wouldn’t go to trial. As January 7 approaches, it is fading fast.
Sarah serves the coffee cake we made earlier today.
Amy, who isn’t much of a cook herself, pronounces it excellent, prompting Sarah to tell her about the time we went through three boxes of Jiffy cake mix before we gave up and went out for doughnuts.
“First we undercooked it; then we burned it; then the last time it looked like we had made a pan of corn bread
Amy has a way of drawing my daughter out and gets Sarah to talk about WAR. I learn that WAR is planning to hold demonstrations outside the courthouse during Dade’s trial. The difficulty is that students won’t be back on campus until the next week.
“It sounds like the judge outsmarted you,” Amy says to Sarah, her voice sympathetic.
I swallow a mouthful of cake and shake my head.
“The trial was set long before WAR was even more than a gleam in Paula Crawford’s eye. The trial date comes, not so coincidentally, after all the bowl games are played.”
“But Dade was suspended from playing,” Amy says, missing the point.
“The judge didn’t know the university would take any action. At the time he was just doing what he could to cooperate.”
“So he’s biased!” Sarah exclaims. She is seated on the couch beside Amy. As usual, I am being ganged up against by the women in my life.
“Not at all,” I explain.
“He’s just a true Hog fan. He probably assumed that the university wouldn’t do anything to Dade during the season. That’s usually what happens.
This was a bigger victory for WAR than you realized.”
My daughter puts down her fork, protesting, “That’s so cynical! They just would have used Dade and then put him on trial.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” I concede. Another way is that Dade would be using the university to show how good he was.
We are interrupted by a knock at the front door, and I open it, realizing that Woogie has not returned. I should have taken him out and walked him.
“Your dog just ate one of our newborn kittens,” Fred Mosely, who lives across the street and four doors down toward the school tells me, “and if I find him, I’m going to kill him.”
Shocked into silence by this totally bizarre allegation, I try to look around Fred, who easily weighs three hundred pounds, to see if Woogie is hiding somewhere across the street. Fred, one of the few remaining whites on the street, is not the most stable guy in the neighborhood.
Chronically out of work, alcoholic, and abusive toward his wife, he is more than capable of doing what he says.
Still, this is so ridiculous I’m tempted to make a joke out of it and tell Fred that after twelve years of dog food, Woogie probably thought it was time for a little variety in his diet, but Fred doesn’t seem in the mood.
“Are you sure?” I say weakly.
“Maybe the mother ate it.”
“You’re damn right I’m sure!” Fred thunders.
“My wife saw him do it! You get rid of that dog, or I’ll do it for you!”
Candice, Fred’s wife, isn’t nearly as loony as her husband, but still I can’t believe it. Woogie has his faults, but eating kittens has never been one of them. I catch a strong whiff of Christmas cheer on Fred’s breath and decide that he might not appreciate any crossexamination right now. What does he want me to say that I’ll have a talk with Woogie? I can hear that conversation. Woogie, I know cats are a dime a dozen, but you’ve got to quit eating them. Sarah comes up behind me and asks, “What’s wrong. Dad?”
I say hastily to Fred, “I’ll do what’s necessary. Thanks for letting me know.” I shut the door before Sarah can find out what is going on. She would want to argue Woogie’s case to the Supreme Court, but this isn’t the time to doit.
I tell her and Amy that Woogie may be lost, and we need to go search for him. Before we can get our coats on, however, there is a familiar scratching at the door, and Sarah lets him in. The little murderer prances in as if he didn’t have a care in the world. As we watch Woogie lap water at his bowl in the kitchen, I tell Sarah and Amy about my conversation with Fred.
“That’s crazy. Dad!” Sarah exclaims.
“Woogie wouldn’t eat a kitten!”
I am not so sure. We need to keep in mind that Woogie is not Sarah’s ugly little brother who couldn’t find any sugar cookies lying around and went outside looking for a snack.
“He is a dog,” I say, bending down to check him for signs of cat hair.
Woogie coughs suspiciously as Sarah strokes his head.
Amy, who has followed us into the kitchen, giggles.
“Move over, Sherlock. Gideon Page is on the case.”
Annoyed, I say, “I’ll call Candice tonight. She wouldn’t make something like this up.”
“Dad!” Sarah shrieks.
“You can’t just take her word for it.”
“Well, for God’s sake! What are we supposed to do?” I ask.
“Look for hair balls? We ca
n’t cut his stomach open.”
Woogie yawns as if he had just finished a big meal and ambles over to his favorite corner in the living room and closes his eyes. The phone rings, and I pick it up, fearful that we have a serial cat killer asleep on our rug. It is my sister Marty, calling to wish us a Merry Christmas. I haven’t talked to her since I went out to her house almost two months ago.
“Marty,” I say, without preliminaries, “how’s Olaf these days? I didn’t see him around when I was out there last time.” Olaf was a big-chested boxer whose only trick was to pretend to devour your hand.
“Olaf?” my sister says, accustomed to my rudeness.
“Since he’s been dead for three months, I’d have to say he’s been pretty quiet.”
Have I got a dog for you, sister.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say politely.
“Listen, we may need to find Woogie a new home….”
The next morning, after drawing up a power of attorney for Gordon Dyson’s wife, I drive north on Highway 5 to Heber Springs, passing through towns with such wonderful names as Romance and Rose Bud, on my way to interview Jenny Taylor, Sarah’s other source of information about Robin’s affair with her professor. I feel depressed and edgy, knowing today is Rainey’s wedding day. How can she be marrying someone else?
Tonight will be sad, too. Sarah and I are taking Woogie to live with Marty. His dark deed has been confirmed by Fred’s wife, and Woogie will be the newest canine resident of Hutto, the dog capital of the western hemisphere, according to my sister. Last night after the arrangements were made I could hear Sarah talking to Woogie in her room, next to mine. Woogie has been her only brother for twelve years, but it is for the best, I told her. With his bladder going the way of all flesh, Woogie needs open spaces. Fred, when he is boozed up, is fully capable of killing him, too.
Without Amy, the day would have been a complete disaster. Usually, part of each Christmas Day has been spent with Rainey for the past three years. Amy filled in nicely. Nothing stays the same forever, I told my daughter, before we went to bed, whether we want change or not. With that truism out of the way, I went to sleep and dreamed about the day Rosa, Sarah, and I got Woogie as a puppy from the animal shelter. It served me right for trying to be so stoical.
In little more than an hour I am standing on the wraparound porch of Jenny Taylor’s home, a three-story red brick structure only two blocks from the Clebume County Court House. I rap hard on the door, hoping Jenny is home by herself, but it is her mother who opens it. Mrs. Taylor, who looks remarkably like my own mother with her prematurely gray hair and straight Ro man nose, invites me in and calls her daughter from up stairs.
“She should never have gone to the university,” Mrs. Taylor says, leading me into her living room.
“I
shouldn’t let her go back next semester. That school is nothing but trouble.” She points to a chair and sits on a sofa across from me.
I sit down and look around the living room and notice a water stain on the ceiling. Though the house is large, it is not in good condition and could stand a paint job. The Christmas tree, in the process of being taken down, is a small and scraggly spruce. There may be another reason why Jenny should transfer. By the time you pay for all the extras at the University of Arkansas, the family bud get has been depleted.
“Ma’am, I’ve got a daughter up there, too,” I say, trying to ingratiate myself.
“I know exactly what you mean. All I’m trying to do is find out what your daughter knows about Robin’s relationship with her professor. If my client is guilty of rape, he’ll be punished.
But if he isn’t, that should come out.”
“Of course, he’s guilty!” Mrs. Taylor shouts.
“What girl is going to lie about being raped? It’s not worth the hassle. What upsets me is that if the damn state didn’t care so much about sports, there wouldn’t be any blacks up there in the first place. They’re not up there to get an education, and don’t you try to tell me any different. My husband and I moved from Forrest City to get away from them, but there’s only so much you can do.”
Eastern Arkansas. I can’t seem to get away from it either. If this is the kind of racism that Dade is going to face from his jury. God help him. I wonder if Jenny is sit ting on the stairs listening.
“Ma’am, the more I know now about what happened, the better I can advise my client. If I find out he doesn’t have a chance, I might ad vise him to plead guilty in the hope he’ll get a lighter sentence
Mrs. Taylor gives her head a vigorous shake.
“They damn well better have a trial. I know how you lawyers do. You want to sweep this under the rug like everything else that happens up there. A jury ought to string that boy up by his you-know-what.”
At this moment Jenny Taylor comes down the stairs and pleads, “Mom, please.” Jenny Taylor looks so much like her parent that I have the feeling I am looking at my own mother as a college girl. She must have been pretty.
Jenny is a brunette with big gray eyes and a full mouth. I introduce myself, and she smiles. Sarah must have been kind. She sits down by her mother on the sofa and says tentatively, “I don’t know much about this at all.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” I say, wishing her mother would go clean the bathroom or something.
“I just need to hear what you know about Robin’s relationship with Dr. Hofstra. I understand you’re in the same sorority house with her.”
“Not much,” Jenny says, nervously running her hands up and down her jeans.
“Robin told me during the summer that she was having an affair with him, but she broke it off before she came back this fall. I asked her about it after she had been raped, and she said he didn’t even call.
That’s all I know.”
Damn. This is what I was afraid would happen.
“What if I told you,” I say, before Mrs. Taylor can get in her two cents, “one of the cheerleaders said that Robin was still having an affair with him as recently as a week before the incident with Dade.”
“Who was it?” Jenny asks, her gray eyes narrowing.
“Lauren Denney,” I answer, thinking it must not be easy to be a girl.
Her young face becomes hard.
“Lauren’s the biggest liar at the university. She hates Robin and every girl up there who is as pretty as she is. Robin wouldn’t tell her that anyway. She couldn’t stand Lauren after this summer.
I’d be surprised if she said two words to her this fall.
Lauren was lying if she said that.”
I try not to sigh. Her mother gives me a look that makes me feel as if I were out scouting for guests to be on Geraldo Rivera. Sorority girls who lie. We talk a few more minutes, but I get nothing I can use. I tell her that I won’t be needing her as a witness and leave.
To keep the trip from being a total waste of time I drive across Greers Perry Dam and get out of the Blazer at the overlook to stare at the massive structure and think about the hearing next week. If Binkie Cross knows about Jenny Taylor, I’ll have no chance. As it stands now, I have no idea what the judge will do. If he doesn’t let Lauren testify, Dade is going to have an uphill battle. If it comes down to a question of nothing more than whom the jury believes—Dade or Robin—I can’t imagine an acquittal.
If I couldn’t believe that my grandfather had sex with a black girl from my hometown, how can I expect twelve men and women to believe Dade Cunningham when he tells them that he didn’t rape a white girl? Why didn’t I believe Lucy that day when she told me?
A few yards from the overlook I come upon a bronze plaque bearing a likeness of John IF. Kennedy, who I learn dedicated the dam on October 3, 1963. It is sobering to realize that this man, who was such a hero of mine, had stood in this same spot, and was murdered only a little over a month later. By joining the Peace Corps and working in the rural areas of the northern coast of Colombia, where most people had a mixed racial background, I thought I had overcome my racial prejudice
s, but maybe I didn’t. Why did I join? For years I have told myself it was some form of youthful idealism, a manifestation of the hubris that came with being American during our golden age of seemingly unlimited power before Vietnam so rudely interrupted our global fantasies. I remember seeing an American propaganda film ostensibly about Kennedy’s South American foreign policy, the Alliance for Progress, that was shown before the regular feature in the outdoor theater in the town where I worked on the Magdalena River. Actually, the film had been a testament to Jack Kennedy. God, how the Colombians had loved him. Only the Pope inspired more adoration.
“Ask not what your country can do for you,” his words had implored my generation of college students, “but what you can do for your country.” I remember tears coming to my eyes as he thundered, over Spanish subtitles, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
Bear Creek was, in relative terms, as poor as Plato, Magdalena. If I was so hell-bent on saving the world, why didn’t I start at home in the thirteenth-poorest county in the United States? Perhaps the truth was that by joining the Peace Corps I was staging a mini-rebellion against the status quo. But if I had wanted to stand on my two feet and tell my mother and Bear Creek, Arkansas, to go to hell, why didn’t I have the guts to do so directly in stead of trying to organize in my hideously accented Spanish unbelievably poor communities to build out houses, schools, and health centers?
I stop to have lunch in a diner on the outskirts of Heber Springs and stare at the middle-aged waitress, a delight fully saucy confection of a woman with dyed blond hair and big breasts under a T-shirt that advertises her employer business: Leo’s Eats. Lewdly, I think of the message as a profoundly self-satisfied sexual communi cation. The feeling that I have been telling lies to myself for a long time is as inescapable as my own libido. I didn’t have the guts to stay in Bear Creek and say what I thought. I smile at the woman who, paid to please, or at least to bring the food out, grins as if she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
What did I think back then? Nothing remarkable for a twenty-one year old. That God was probably dead or at least sleeping and that east Arkansas was a pretty crappy place for treating blacks so badly. Yet, if I didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to come back to Bear Creek with my mixed-blood wife from Colombia and preach this un original coming-of-age sermon to my mother and her friends, what else have I been kidding myself about? Obviously my psyche and I have some unfinished business.
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