How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  I told him I expected nothing, which was true with everything, and went inside to brush my teeth in the dark.

  —

  The next morning, an e-mail appeared in my inbox.

  Dear Will,

  I’m so thankful your note found me. Let me begin by saying I understand. You’ve every right to be angry over the movie—over everything, really. I can’t change it. Lord knows, I wish I could. But that’s beside the point. Just know that Rick was upset about the movie, too. When he saw the direction they were going, he protested. He tried to buy back the rights. Of course they wouldn’t sell and even barred him from the set. He became very ill afterward—depressed, mostly. We suffered through a dark time, but that story is too long and complicated to be repeated here. Suffice to say, I’m happy he passed before the movie was released. He was spared that last humiliation at least.

  I suppose you are wondering why on earth I’m writing. Well, I have a request. I wouldn’t bother you, I swear, if you weren’t my last resort. As you probably know, the property in and around Camp Levi has been vacant for years now. It has come to my attention that the area is run-down, a refuge for transients and the like. I want to buy the land, Will. As you probably also know, it’s where Rick and I fell in love, and I have sentimental attachments to the place no matter how dark and stormy its history may be. More than that, I have big plans for what to do with the area. Here’s where you come in. My lawyers have written to your father, and so have I, pleading with him to sell me the deed. His silence is troubling but expected. I will gladly pay double what the land is worth, and since you reached out, I hope you may be open to a dialogue with me. I think your father would listen to you. I’d bet my life on it.

  Please let me know.

  Sincerely,

  Lawrence

  —

  Not many people knew Mother Maude was my mother’s younger sister. We kept this information from the others at camp. “So there is no question,” Mother Maude had said, “of favoritism.” I thought Larry knew because he was a counselor, but maybe he was as clueless as the campers. Anyhow, the truth was revealed during the trial, and he and Rick were in court the day I testified. They were the only people from Camp Levi I saw in the courtroom. Mother Maude had fled. We boys were kept apart so we wouldn’t influence one another’s story. And the prosecution had successfully petitioned for Father Drake to be removed to another room to view our testimonies by video. When my turn was over, I was escorted outside by my legal representative, where my father waited in his pickup. He never asked me about the camp, the trial—any of it. After I returned to him, he drove us to Dairy Queen. We ordered milk shakes and a large basket of curly fries. This combination was a favorite of my mother’s. We didn’t speak of her, either, but in dipping the salty fries in the ice cream, we grieved her absence all the same.

  Larry’s e-mail left me winded for several reasons—not the least of which was learning about Rick’s death. All day long I wallowed in bed listening to the movements of Elementary Ed below me. She clanged around in the kitchen, first making coffee, then frying eggs. At ten o’clock, she watched The View. The Great Dane barked not long after, and grumbling, she took him for a walk. While they were gone, my cell rang. It was Zeus. I ignored the call and sent him to my voice mail. A few minutes later, Bevy tried, and this time I picked up. “Wow,” she said. “I was thinking I would leave a message.”

  “Just leave your message after the beep,” I said. “Beep.” She wanted to have dinner with me. “Me and you and Alix and Zeus,” she said. “Damn the movies! Let’s go to a restaurant and chill—just the four of us.” I wasn’t surprised at the request, but I was surprised when I agreed. “But not tonight,” I told her. “Let’s shoot for tomorrow.” We decided on a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town, one that served real Szechuan food. I told her I’d never been on a double date before, and before hanging up, she said, “You know I love you, right?”

  —

  My father and I never agreed on much of anything in this world, but we do share a love of driving. It’s instinctual, the pull of the road. “It’s where,” my father always said, “I do my best thinking.” My car was nothing special, a silver Honda Accord I called Doll. I took her to these lesbian mechanics in town who kept her oil changed and her tires rotated. She was good on gas, easy on the eyes, and had never given me any trouble. More proof of my affection for her: I didn’t park her on the street. I paid fifty bucks a month to keep her in a hotel garage a few blocks from my place in a nicer area of town. On the day of my double date, I took her out early with every intention of meeting everyone at the restaurant.

  May was ending with an unseasonable cold snap. Steely clouds traced across the sky, washing the color from the trees. Everything was pale. Wintry. I arrived at the restaurant an hour before I was supposed to be there and circled the parking lot. The China Blossom was in a strip mall between a Japanese karaoke bar and a store that sold used books. No one was around. The parking lot was rife with potholes, and not wanting to park, I took Doll back out onto the road. Traffic was light, and the driving soothed me.

  My father and I had driven across many highways and interstates in Mississippi. Before he left the church, the span of his outreach had grown—from Olive Branch to Kosciusko, and all points in between. When I tagged along, I learned to manage a vehicle well enough, driving his pickup on back roads while he napped in the passenger’s seat. I took Doll onto the interstate, hoping to outrun the overcast. Mississippi never had much of a spring and was probably sweltering now. Nothing like this, where you went hunting for sunlight. When I left home, I thought I’d never miss the summers. But after a few brutal winters, I came around to appreciating warmer climes, even longing for them.

  Bevy once told me that we can’t help loving the places we came from—no matter how broken or terrible they were. I wasn’t sure I believed her. Sometimes people just like to talk, and she was no exception. I wasn’t sure I believed Zeus, either, about that business of telling your story making you stronger. Like the more you chewed on the past, the easier it was to swallow. My story was the story of Camp Levi, which was the story of the Neck, which was also the story of my family. A circle of bad—one secret led into another and another and so on. Doll cruised at seventy now, humming along nicely, and I thought, Fuck it. Why not? So I turned off my cell phone and kept on driving, headlong into my past.

  TWO

  ■

  THE NECK

  I learned about the Neck long before my summer at Camp Levi. My mother knew of its colorful lore and shared the stories with me on occasion—usually when my father was out of earshot. “East of a town called West,” she’d begin, “and west of a town called Weir, there was the Neck.” She often produced a drink koozie from the back of a kitchen cabinet with the same quote scrawled across it lest I disbelieve her. The Neck was in the Mississippi hill country and thick with trees. The geography was so different from the Delta that it might as well have been on another world. A nowhere land in between two counties, lousy for crops because of all the flooding from the Big Black River. “Bad for growing,” my mother said, “but good for mischief.”

  She talked about the Neck without adding any varnish to what my father called “the rougher side of life.” The women in the woods, the moonshiners, the lost mother—these were stories of the Neck I knew by heart. But she kept her own story, which included a girlhood at the Neck, mostly to herself.

  One time or another, she said, “Most decent people stayed away from there.”

  And I said, “But you lived there.”

  “Yes, nugget, but I wasn’t much decent myself—not before I met your daddy.” She said she had no intention of ever becoming a preacher’s wife. “No, sir. I was a bona fide wild woman.” When I asked her what “bona fide” meant, she said, “The real deal. Down to my toes. I was bad.” But that was as far as she’d ever go, and for a while, that was all I needed.


  —

  My full name is William Bruce Dillard, but my parents, the Reverend Dr. Frank and Debra Rose Dillard, sometimes called me Rooster. The nickname was inspired, so I was told, by the way my tuft of blond baby hair poked up in the mornings like a bantam rooster’s comb. Then the name became, in my toddler years, a form of discipline. I’d hear, “Rooster, boy—I’d be ashamed,” and was liable to glance over my shoulder for the boy my parents corrected. Certainly not me. I felt more like a Will Dillard, plain and simple. This Rooster person was somebody else. Another boy entirely. The older I got, the more I understood: The reason the name never stuck had something to do with how I misbehaved.

  One Sunday, when I was seven, I was singing in the choir, and the week’s offertory hymn was “In the Garden.” I cut loose during the first chorus. I shook my hips back and forth, gyrating to Mrs. Audean’s slightly off-tempo rendering of the old song on the piano. He walked with me and he talked with me and told me that I was his own. I lowered my voice and swung my arms. The night before, while my father prepared his sermon at the church, my mother and I had watched Written on the Wind on TV. It was my first time seeing Dorothy Malone shimmy with Rock Hudson. My mother and I were mesmerized. “Look at her,” she said. “Just beautiful.” Later in the movie, as Malone frolicked by herself in her bedroom to a jazz record, her father was felled by a heart attack, tumbling down a long flight of stairs. We were riveted by the scene, my mother and I, and held each other close until the very end. In the choir, I copied Dorothy Malone’s chaotic movements.

  My carrying on amused some in the congregation, mostly the older ones up front—the widows and widowers who cut me more slack than they did the other children because I was the preacher’s son. Every Sunday they filled my pockets with peppermints and denture-safe chewing gum, and told me what a fine boy I was. I’d done nothing, so far as I could tell, to earn such praise, but I was happy to have them say it, especially in front of my father. My mother, sitting in the very back pew, was hard to make out in the audience. I imagined the look of surprise on her face at how well I remembered the dance from the movie. Also watching me were the Woods, the Dickersons, and the Musclewhites—the three families who had founded Second Baptist. Various cousins and aunts and half brothers and distant relations connected by marriage. I paid them no mind. My mother said they were all stuck-up. “Those people,” she remarked more than once, “think they are that white speck on chicken poop—and you know what, nugget? That’s chicken poop, too.” My father was hidden behind the pulpit, seated in his maple chair that looked more like a wooden throne. When the hymn was over, he rose to lead us in prayer. His face flushed, his ears the color of blood.

  “You, sir, need to grow out of this curiousness,” he told me later. He’d kept me behind after service and sent my mother on back to the parsonage to get dinner started. He and I sat facing each other in his small office, a large metal desk between us. The picture of Jesus—the blond, blue-eyed, pre-crucifixion Jesus—hung on the wall behind him, angled just above his head. The Son of Man’s lips were arched in a slight smile and glitter dusted his white robe. I asked my father what he meant by “curiousness,” and he sighed. He removed his rimless glasses and rubbed his eyes until they turned pink. A heavyset man, my father had a wide, moon-shaped face. “You can’t see how you’re acting?” he said. “How you embarrassed yourself?” He asked me what I had been thinking.

  “I guess I was just doing my best, Daddy.”

  “Your best?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He told me to explain myself.

  “Well.” I swallowed and glanced about the room. His framed diploma from seminary hung beside Jesus on the wall. My father, it told me, was a doctor of divinity and entitled to all the rights and privileges pertaining to that degree. “I wasn’t acting,” I said. “I was just showing the Lord my best—my best self. Who I am.” I decided in the moment not to tell him my inspiration for the dance. It seemed like tattling on my mother, though I wasn’t sure why.

  “Rooster, boy,” my father said. “You’ve got no clue who you are. Not yet you don’t.” He rapped the top of the desk with his knuckles to punctuate the importance of his words. Normally a quiet man, my father never said five words when one or two would suffice. Even in his sermons he spoke to the congregation in a volume just above a whisper and called them “Dearly beloved” like they were the sweetest children in the world. When I displeased him, like now, I wanted nothing more than for him to yell at me. Bring down Old Testament judgment upon my head. In the Bible people who transgressed were rebuked. Lot’s wife was transformed into a pile of salt for looking the wrong way. Moses was kept out of Canaan for hitting his walking stick against some rock. Their sins baffled me as much as my own did. My father never punished me severely. He believed the quickest way to the heart was through the brain. When you know better, he told me, you do better. “Boys don’t act that way,” he said now. “You see what I’m saying, don’t you?” I was silent. He whispered, “Rooster?” as if I had disappeared from his office. “Rooster?” As if he were searching desperately in a crowd of strangers for the boy who was his son.

  —

  First, the women of the Neck.

  They had skulked in those woods since time immemorial, my mother said, and would probably still be there, too, if the moonshiners hadn’t showed up and ruined everything. “A commune before it was fashionable.” A mix of blacks and Choctaws and poor white trash. “Tough women,” she told me. “Hard women. The kind who carried knives. Knew how to hunt.” They fashioned tents from whatever they could find: old tarps, hand-me-down quilts, clothes. They ate what they killed, mostly squirrel and deer, and traded wares with men who braved the woods to find them. Their company grew one at a time, mostly when a woman’s unhappiness became too much for her. “Not just sad,” my mother was always quick to add, “but the deep-down blues that don’t have a name.” A woman would be hoeing the garden or sweeping off the back porch or hanging up bedsheets on the clothesline when she’d hear a voice. The gentlest voice, whispering, “Find me.” Invariably, she’d look over her shoulder. Nothing. Maybe the wind. A child’s voice from far away. But no, not either of those, and the voice persisted. At dinner, in bed, seeing her children off to school—find me, find me.

  “Like a ghost?” I said.

  “Not exactly,” my mother said. “More like a feeling so strong it only felt like words.”

  A kind of rapturing when she left. One minute she was there, and the next she was gone. She went to the Neck with nothing more than the clothes on her body, drawn there by the rumor of these women, and if she ever found them, nestled in that sanctuary of trees, hidden from the busy world, she never left. My mother could only guess at what sort of agreement existed among them. The here and how never made it beyond them. But for a time, at least how my mother tells it, the Neck was theirs: a hundred or so acres of freedom.

  “You ever feel that pull?” I said.

  “Oh, honey.” My mother smiled, dragging her fingers through my hair. “All the time.”

  —

  Before returning home on that Sunday of my scolding, we drove to the First Baptist Cemetery across town. Hawshaw had several Christian denominations, and the church building for the First Baptist congregation was easily the most impressive. The church was built more like a cathedral: large walnut doors, maroon bricks, a steeple piercing the sky. A house of worship fitted with stained-glass windows depicting scenes from the New Testament. By comparison, father’s church was a modest affair, big enough for ten rows of pews with an office tacked on to the side and a fellowship hall in the back. He preferred his church house to this other, grander one. The plainness of it, the smell of sawdust rising from the floor, the pure light blasting through the bare windows—the little church fed his notions of God as homegrown and personal, not highfalutin. “High-dollar worship,” he called First Baptist, even though we were bound to the church
for all the facilities we couldn’t afford: its baptistery, its large fellowship hall, its several acres of land for the dead. We called on them when one of our members needed to be saved, married, or put to eternal rest. Which was often—our members were a lively bunch, always up to something. And he and I took frequent trips to the First Baptist Cemetery. We checked on the grave sites of our members, made sure they were kept neat, that the floral arrangements around their tombstones hadn’t been knocked over or blown away.

  On the drive over, both of us smarted from our conversation about my behavior in choir. In my father’s old Chevy, we passed Hawshaw with the windows rolled down, the humid air slapping our wet faces. A paved side street took us through a neighborhood of houses with small lawns where the grass was yellow and dry. Two men stood beside a smoking grill, one of them wiping his shiny face with his shirttail. In another yard, a sprinkler spurted out streams of water that arced several feet into the air. Delirious children my age jumped into and around and through the steady pulse—boys, shirtless and bandy-legged, their joy a kind of mystery to me. They hooted and hollered, and I pictured myself among them, my laughter as loud as any of theirs. Myself, but different. I was rowdy and true, a boy who knew the things a boy was supposed to know in order to please his father even when doing wrong.

  After we crossed a river bridge and turned down East Leflore Street, the First Baptist steeple appeared in the distance, a spear rising above the squat buildings constituting downtown Hawshaw. Long before I was born, the Woods, Dickersons, and Musclewhites left First Baptist over a dispute concerning the election of deacons. Supposedly, a Wood was denied the deaconship because he was divorced, and in protest, the families removed their letters of membership and formed Second Baptist. The Woods’ construction company built the church out in the country, using Dickerson lumber and Musclewhite land. The Musclewhites donated a nearby house and grounds of a recently deceased relative to be used for the parsonage that eventually became my first home.