How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  Robert Dolittle. The name caused another dust-up in my memory as it had when I had researched the film before the QueerLive meeting. Still, I couldn’t place him. The ache of almost knowing more potent than pure ignorance. I turned off the radio and drove in silence, not taking the exit to Memphis. Not long after, the Mississippi state sign greeted me, its galvanized blue metal warped in the middle. Dapples of sunlight gleamed across it, a magnolia bloom sitting atop the second set of Ss.

  —

  The town’s name did little to recommend it. Bucksnort wasn’t somewhere you went to; you passed through it. After my mother’s death, my father and I drove up and down the highway that went through the middle of the town. Bucksnort had been predominately black, and we had gone into the area with hopes of attracting new members to Second Baptist. My father had been convinced that churches in the South—his church in particular—needed to be integrated. The greatest sin, he believed, was the lack of inclusion on Sundays when fellowshipping with the Lord. His liberal thinking only went so far. He was immovable in other respects, namely concerning sexual immorality, and firmly believed that those like me, the sodomites, fell short of God’s holy plan for human relationships.

  Early afternoon, I crossed the railroad tracks and entered Bucksnort proper. A cluster of dough-colored buildings, old but well maintained, constituted the downtown area, which was complete with a library, a Ward’s restaurant, and a gas station advertising its wine and spirits in purple neon. Farther down the road, a neighborhood of single-story houses cropped up. Few people were outside, the heat keeping most of them indoors, dependent on their rattling air conditioners. Trembling and overworked, the units created waves of white noise, beautiful in its own way, a kind of music for summer. Those who had braved the humidity wore large hats and little else. Damp rags draped across their shoulders, they lumbered to and fro, going nowhere in particular, it seemed. Like other parts of the Delta, Bucksnort had few trees big enough for shade. In a little clearing beyond the houses, a herd of cows congregated on the west side of a blue-black shed, jostling one another for purchase under the sliver of shadow the structure provided.

  The next turn was my father’s. Canaan Road was paved with red gravel, and I drove slowly, Doll’s wheels crunching over the loose rock. I remembered the name of the road from the wedding invitation. At the time, I’d thought it was just like him, my father, to live on a road called Canaan. It almost seemed as if he were bragging, but that wasn’t his way. Trailers appeared on either side of the road. Single-wides, mostly: long tubular shapes of tin covered in vinyl siding nestled back from the ditches on little hills to protect the occupants from flash flooding. I knew he lived in a double-wide and that these, with their butane tanks and satellite dishes and freestanding swing sets and aboveground pools, were not his. It occurred to me that he and his new family could have moved since last I heard from him, but I wagered he’d have tried to get word to me somehow first. I began to worry that maybe this was a foolish notion to have about a man I no longer spoke to, and then on my right, there appeared a double-wide nicer than the others. One of those fancy models with glossy black shutters and a shingled roof. Red bricks trimmed the bottom of it, giving the impression that it was, in fact, a real house about three feet off the ground. In the side yard was a Chevy resting on cinder blocks. The blue paint, chipped and scarred, was the same shade of sky I remembered, and the sight of it caused an involuntary cry to gurgle from my throat.

  I braked. Taken by surprise, Doll skidded in the gravel, doing a one-eighty in the road and nearly careening down into a ditch. A dust cloud was whipped up, coating the windshield with a skein of red powder as it settled back. I watched the yard and waited. No one was home, or if they were, they’d not been disturbed by Doll’s crazy fishtailing. The lawn sloped upward from the ditch. A flagpole sprouted from a flowerbed in the middle of the yard, the American flag limp in the absence of wind, shuttered like an injured wing. Sticker bushes bristled below the windows, and a stone fountain, discolored and mildewed, stood by the side door. The grass was recently cut, no more than half an inch high. Each of these details a clue to my father’s life now, to the man he had become. But my eyes kept returning, inevitably, to the truck.

  What remained was simple enough: the parking and the getting out and the walking to the front door. The knocking and the waiting for someone to hear and come. Listing off the movements in my head, I realized how impossible they were. I no longer knew what I was hoping to find here. Doll was easy enough to turn around, and soon I was back on the highway headed toward Hawshaw, toward the familiar. My father was still my father, kind but wrongheaded. Who else was I expecting to find? After all, he’d hung on to that truck longer than he ever had to me.

  —

  An hour later, I was at my childhood home. The parsonage had been torn down years ago. Only a slab of concrete remained of Agnes Musclewhite’s house. I stood on the foundation tracing the parts of the floor with my sneakers, cornering off my hallway bedroom, then my parents’ bedroom, then finally the kitchen, easily the happiest room of the house when we lived there. I half hoped for there to be leftovers, pieces of the inside that hadn’t made it to the landfill—a stray bit of religious wallpaper tangled in the monkey grass, chunks of hardwood floor left in piles. There was nothing; it had been wiped clean. I walked on, following the road to Second Baptist, counting to see if it took me the same amount of steps that it had when I was a boy. The windows of the church were boarded up and the doors locked. A part of the ceiling had caved in, and a wasp’s nest had formed in the eave above the front door. Behind the church was a mound of dirt the size of my car. I climbed it, and at the top, I saw the Delta, flat and brown, go on and on in all directions. To my right, Hawshaw was blinking like a reflector mirror on a bicycle.

  A four-wheeler motored up the road while I was walking back to Doll. I figured it was some kids mud riding. But the rider was a woman around my age, and she pulled right up beside me and got off, swinging one leg over the seat and jumping down as if she were dismounting from a horse. “We’ve had an outbreak of vandals in the past year,” she said. She stood six feet tall in her knee-high muck boots and carried on her hip a pistol she didn’t bother to hide. “I used to live here,” I said, but this information seemed beside the point for her. “Teenagers mostly,” she was saying. “Coming up here to screw and then get curious. Want to break into the church. See what’s inside.” She wore a purple shirt two sizes too big, pink cursive scrawled across it: SOUTHERN GIRLS LIKE THEIR TEA SWEET AND THEIR MEN SWEETER. I asked her if Mr. McBride was still living. “That fool,” she said, not elaborating any more on the man, and adjusted the pistol holster at her side. Then she got back on the four-wheeler, a Yamaha Grizzly, the bear’s snarling maw painted on the gas tank. “You be careful leaving.” Her voice almost lost to the small engine revving up when she cranked.

  I drove to First Baptist across town. The church filled up a whole block now, thanks to the new addition of an elementary school, a long, squat building attached to the sanctuary. Evening had taken hold, and the dying sunlight shot slantwise through the stained-glass windows. Geometric patterns of red and blue and green imprinted the sidewalk winding around to the cemetery in back. The temperature had cooled off enough that I wasn’t surprised to find a young boy cutting grass. He rode one of those zero-turn mowers, zooming in between and around tombstones with sudden and jerky turns. My mother’s grave was in the back in one of the newer lots. Her tombstone was polished granite my father had bought on time, a double slab so he could be buried beside her. A fern of some kind had been set at the foot of her grave, its tendrils exploding in all directions, slick and green. On the left side of the tombstone, my father’s name and birthdate had been engraved. I imagined he regretted binding himself to this final resting place, to a woman who’d not been his wife for almost fourteen years. Behind me, an ugly noise: the dull plunk of rock pulling loose from the ground. The boy had erred in a turn
, knocking over one of the older tombstones. The mower had stopped at an angle, one of the back tires propped on the fallen stone. The boy hurried to fix it. He was off the mower and pushing it off the stone when a man shuffled out from the sanctuary, waving his arms and shouting.

  The loud voice of Brother Mims had not aged, unlike the rest of him. His red hair had thinned and yellowed. His frame held fifty extra pounds of paunch around his middle. The boy Brother Mims harangued towered over the little preacher. Curls of red hair flamed above the boy’s ears, the rest hidden by a green Delta State baseball cap. When Brother Mims glanced in my direction, I waved, and he stopped speaking. He shaded his eyes with a hand to get a better look at the stranger in his cemetery. “Will Dillard!” His voice rang clearly across the field of graves separating us. When I was close enough to reach, he grabbed my hand and shook it. “Look at you!” he said. Standing behind him, the boy clasped his hands behind his head, pushing the cap farther down. He was a baby when I knew him. As if reading my mind, Brother Mims said, “You remember my son, Toby?” He gave the boy a look, and the boy was obliged to nod. I said to him, “You’ve grown up,” and Brother Mims piped in to say, “So have you!” He told Toby how I used to be heavy. “A husky thing as a boy—waddling everywhere, but then”—here he turned back to look at me—“you lost it all, didn’t you?” I nodded. “It was not long after Mama died,” I said. “Didn’t have her cooking and it just fell off.” For about a year after we buried her, I had tried to make some of her recipes—the casseroles, the Sugar Dump—but they always made my father and me sad, so I stopped.

  Mentioning her caused Brother Mims to glance down at his feet. We stood by an ant bed, a little mound of red dirt the preacher kicked. An army of black ants, like crawling semicolons, swarmed out. Toby jumped back as the ants appeared to move in his general direction. “I thought I told you to pour them beds with gasoline,” Brother Mims said to him, but before Toby could give an excuse, his father waved him away and asked me where I lived nowadays. When I told him, he whistled. “Lordy Lord! I bet it gets cold up there, don’t it?” I said you get used to it, and he added, “If you say so, sonny boy!” We all moved away from the teeming ant bed toward the lawnmower. Brother Mims told Toby to go on inside the church and cool off. “We’ll worry about this mess later,” he shouted to the back of the boy’s head as he loped away. When it was just the two of us, Brother Mims asked what had brought me back to these parts. I told him a small truth: “In the neighborhood and thought I would visit Mama’s grave.” Brother Mims laughed and said she always had the freshest flowers. “I keep thinking I’m gonna run into your daddy one of these days,” he said, “but he must come and go at early morning or dead of night.” I said that sounded like him, not wanting to make a fuss. Brother Mims’s voice turned serious when he said, “You know, I don’t agree with how they treated him, son. Second Baptist was never the same.”

  I agreed. I didn’t tell him how I could more easily forgive evangelicals for what they did to me than for how they abandoned my father, the truest believer I’d ever known. After he was voted out by the deacons of Second Baptist, he never ventured behind a pulpit to deliver another message, and I suspect the Christian faith was lesser because of it. I often thought his giving up on the ministry had, in part, to do with me, too. That he didn’t think himself worthy to preach again because of how poorly I turned out. When I started attending the Mississippi School for Science and Mathematics in Jackson, I saw him only on major holidays and one month during the summers. While I perfected my ACT score and GPA, he moved around the state, following odd jobs. He spent my senior year on the coast, working offshore two weeks at a time. But the beach didn’t suit him, so he returned to the Delta, finally settling in Bucksnort. In the meantime, we grew into separate lives. While in college, I discovered the longer we stayed apart from each other, the easier it became. By the time he married again, it was second nature to pretend he was as dead as my mother was.

  Brother Mims’s voice continued as loud as ever. “They never could find anybody like your daddy—so the church just shut its doors.” He had his hands on his hips and was smiling. I wasn’t sure what he knew about Camp Levi. The events never made the newspapers, as it wasn’t something people were ready to talk about back then, and my father kept his distance from Brother Mims after he left the clergy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some gossip had reached him—such was the way with small towns: Information could travel from one mouth to another faster than most would believe possible. “All those Woods came on back to First Baptist,” he was saying now. “And most of the Dickersons and Musclewhites, too.” He laughed again. “I’m still not sure it was such a good idea to accept their letters of membership—they do like to meddle.” He pulled a rag from his back pocket and wiped his face, a glimmer of the young man I had known still in the eyes when he wasn’t grinning like a fool. “Their money sure is nice, though. Built that there schoolhouse by the road.” He gestured behind me, and I turned to acknowledge the building I had passed walking over. When I wasn’t facing him, he got brave and whispered, “You know, the people here was sure shocked by all that happened.”

  My head snapped back around. Old feelings of shame and embarrassment returned, the blood rushing to my cheeks. I was angry with myself for caring what this man thought of me. He kept on speaking in uncharacteristically hushed tones as if someone might overhear us. “There’s nothing biblically wrong with it,” he said, “with what your daddy did, but it sure bucked the sensibilities of his former congregation, let me tell you. They saw it as more of the same with that fuss he stirred up years before, when all he talked about was bringing the blacks into the church house to worship alongside the whites.” The look on my face must have shown my confusion. He said, “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What else?” His eyes widened. “Your daddy marrying that colored woman.”

  I almost laughed at the absurd words coming out of his mouth. I wanted to hug him and punch him, opting for a third choice instead: I backed away. But he grabbed my shoulder, holding me there while he continued to speak. “Please tell him to come see me—when he brings the flowers for your mama. I just, I just miss him.” I shook myself free from his grasp. “I have to go now,” I said, and he hollered after me as I scurried away, “You tell your daddy for me, son, that I still love him! The good Lord loves him, too! No matter who he chooses to love!”

  —

  At night Canaan Street was pitch-black. Not a single streetlight to guide me to my father’s front yard. I’d parked a quarter mile down the road from his house and used my cell phone to light the rest of the way, stepping over the ditch and sidling up the steep lawn past the flagpole to the windows. I looked in several at the front of the house, the closed blinds shutting out everything but the glow of lamplight. The sticker bushes prevented me from getting too close. Around back, the blinds had been left open. In one of them, the living room: a ceiling fan, a U-shaped sectional couch, a flat-screen attached to the right wall. With her back to me, a little girl sat at a keyboard in the middle of the carpeted room, wildly slapping her hands against the keys. The keyboard must have been turned off since no sound came out of it. Eventually, a woman padded into the room from the left. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, and her nightshirt trailed down to her shins. She spoke to the girl, the well-insulated trailer blunting most of her words. The woman tapped the girl on the shoulder, punctuating some command she’d just made, and the girl got up. The mother—for who else could she be?—sat down on the folding chair in the girl’s place. She flicked a switch at the corner of the keyboard, turning it on, and began to play. Now I heard music vibrating through the walls, and it was something familiar. A show tune—no, Gershwin. She played “Stairway to Paradise,” and when she rounded to the chorus, a man charged into the room, the words belting from his mouth: “I got the blues! And up above it’s so fair!” When they finished, t
he girl leaped onto the couch and applauded my father, who, like me, was much thinner, having lived so long without my mother’s casseroles and cakes. He stooped to kiss the woman on her forehead. She was his wife, and jumping onto his back, this girl was his daughter. My sister. I pressed my face closer, my breath steaming up the glass. How lovely it was to watch them. Like a movie you never wanted to end.

  FOUR

  ■

  DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME

  A year after my mother died, on a balmy night in 1996, my father drove us to an old county coliseum in Clarksdale to watch the Holy Warriors, a troupe of bodybuilders, perform feats of strength in the name of Christ Jesus. It was the middle of October, and neither of us especially wanted to go. Already that month we’d volunteered at the First Baptist Harvest Festival, manned the cakewalk, and sung in the choir at a religious play put on by the Baptist Student Union from a nearby community college. We were tired. But then there we were anyway, an hour from home, because we’d felt compelled to attend by Brother Mims. He claimed a portion of our ticket price went to missionaries in South America. “Well, that’s something good at least,” my father told me on the way. “Even if the rest is foolishness.” My father had little patience for this type of ministry that combined the gleam of show business with religion.