by Terry Kay
The sing-chant rolled across the quadrangle.
I had heard reporters who covered the civil rights movement talking of a possible protest march to the campus, and I had listened to Jack Alewine rage about the absurd policy of segregation rigidly supported by Upton’s major contributors, but it had not occurred to me that a march would actually be held, not at Upton. I believed the talk of it was nothing more than newspaper gossip, the guessing game of reporters sniffing the air for a scent of controversy.
The door to the Administration Building opened and Dr. Olin Douglas, the registrar, stepped timidly onto the top step. A campus security officer approached and stood near him.
The marchers moved closer to the building.
Marian Shinholster and Henry Fain, both brilliant students and close friends, came out of the library and stopped near me to watch the gathering crowd.
“What’s going on?” Marian asked.
“You’ve got me,” I told her. “It’s a protest, I think. I heard there may be one.”
“Here?” Marian’s voice was edged with surprise.
“We’re not exactly overbooked with blacks,” I said.
“You think there’ll be any trouble?” Henry asked anxiously. Henry was small, with delicate, almost fragile features.
“I doubt it,” I answered. “From what I hear, these things are as much show as anything. Some singing, a few speeches, then everybody goes home to wait for the news.” I paused and watched the marchers positioning themselves before Olin Douglas. “Look at Dr. Douglas,” I added. “Looks like he’s about to faint.”
“He’s a nice man,” Marian said absently. “What are they singing?”
“Can’t make it out,” I said. “Come on, let’s go listen.”
“Not me,” Marian said quickly. “And you shouldn’t either, Cole. You could get in trouble.”
“How? All I want to do is listen. Come on. It’ll be something to tell your grandchildren.”
“Not me.”
“Count me out, too,” Henry said.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “But I’m going. Jack would never forgive me if I didn’t get close enough to tell him everything that went on.”
“He’s not one of them?” Marian asked with an edge of cynicism.
“Not today,” I told her. “He’s downtown, checking on the Peace Corps.”
“God help the Peace Corps,” Marian sighed. She added, “If you go down there, be careful. I don’t like the look of things.”
“Yeah, Cole, be careful,” Henry urged.
Marian and Henry walked away quickly, hugging their books.
The song-chant was festive.
One, two, three, four.
Teach us how, and we’ll count some more.
Five, six, seven, eight.
Open up this big white gate…
Olin Douglas trembled visibly before the singers. His face was pale. Bubbles of perspiration welted across his forehead. He tried to smile.
One of the demonstrators—a young black man with a large, joyful face—raised his hand above the crowd, and the song-chant became a murmur, then it stopped. He said to Olin Douglas, “Are you, sir, a representative of the university?”
Olin Douglas cleared his throat. “I am,” he whispered.
“We have some things we want to say to you,” the young man continued. He made a slight motion with his hand, like a conductor before a choir. The song-chant began again—softly, rhythmically, a rolling heartbeat of voices.
“All right,” Olin Douglas replied nervously.
I moved into the crowd, prying around bodies. I wanted to be closer to the young man confronting Olin Douglas, knowing that Jack Alewine would want to hear about him in exacting detail. His voice. His eyes. His posture. Jack would want to know all of it. To Jack, detail was important. Detail enhanced the moment, gave the moment sinew as well as nuance. Detail made the moment immortal, if the moment deserved immortality.
“Would you tell us your name?” the young man asked pleasantly.
The song-chant of the crowd bubbled quietly. Olin Douglas’s face blistered red. He said, “Dr. Olin Douglas. I—” He cleared his throat, swallowed. “I’m the registrar.”
I watched the young man. He had a happy, calm face, a smile that promised laughter. Jack would like him, I thought.
“Thank you for coming out to meet with us, Dr. Douglas,” the young man said. His smile radiated confidence.
I pushed gently around a young white boy, stopping behind two black girls who stood at the hem of the crowd. They were repeating the song-chant in girlish voices, voices with giggle and excitement. One nudged the other and gestured to the men gathered directly across from where we were standing. The men wore sullen, dangerous expressions. I could see jittery movement among them, like disturbed hornets. Two policemen stood near them.
One, two, three, four…. The song-chant swelled in repetition.
The girl standing directly in front of me laughed and her laughter carried high above us. She turned and smiled at me. I returned the smile.
The young man lifted his hand again, and the song-chant muted to a whisper.
“We have rights that we want to declare, Dr. Douglas,” the young man said in a rising, happy voice. “It’s time to open the doors of Upton University to—”
He did not finish the sentence.
There was a cracking sound, like the sharp snapping of a stick, and the laughing girl standing in front of me threw up her hands and fell backward. I caught her instinctively, dropping to my knees, and she rolled into me, nestling into my arms, her neck cradling against the crook of my elbow. I felt her body convulse in hard spasms, and I turned her head to look at her and saw the hole in her neck. I could feel the spurting of warm blood pumping across my face before I knew it was blood.
My memory of what followed is still a blur and is as much a memory of sound as of sight.
There was a stampede of movement around me, the pounding of frantic running. Piercing screams. I shook my head against the blood still spitting over my forehead, and then I was suddenly aware of Ernie O’Connor kneeling before me on one knee, his camera aimed. I heard the sizzle of the bulb as it fried on the battery stroke.
I ducked my head and curled the girl in my arms, wiped my face against her blouse to clear the blood from my eyes, and then I turned and saw two policemen, guns drawn. They knelt to cover me and the girl with their bodies. I struggled to stand.
“Get down, damn it,” one of the policemen commanded forcibly.
FOURTEEN
There was no reason for it, other than seeing the Christmas cards he had opened and displayed on his rolltop desk, but he thought of Olivia DeFoor as he took his dinner of stir-fried chicken and brussels sprouts, a quick and easy meal for him.
Her note to him was a pleasant surprise, and he wondered about the book she was writing, wondered, too, how he had influenced her enough to earn its dedication. Perhaps it was the conference he had had with her over an essay she had written on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick for one of his American literature classes.
She had called it a great book, but one compromised by study, by his classroom presentation of the celebrated symbolic content. He remembered one line from her paper: I had the sense that I was bending over a cadaver, dissecting it, rather than embracing a body still having life in it.
He remembered her sitting in his office, her hands playing nervously over books she held in her lap, her always-easy smile twitching in discomfort, her eyes darting from object to object on his desk.
He had asked what she meant by the line about the cadaver.
Her answer had been quick: I’m sorry, Dr. Bishop. I shouldn’t have written that. I love your class. I didn’t mean it as a criticism of your teaching.
And I didn’t take it that way, he had assured her. In fact, it may be the most profound sentence I’ve ever read from a student.
Her eyes had blinked in surprise.
I mean it, he had told her. It’
s exactly the way I’ve felt about many, many books with great reputations. I never really liked them as much as I was supposed to, and it bothered me. I believe you’ve given me the answer to a question that’s baffled me for years. I was dissecting when I should have been embracing.
A blush had come into her face, covering her smile. She had said in a rush of words, I love reading. I do. I always have. But I never read a book for the story, only for the characters. Sometimes, in class—and I don’t mean yours, but others—I get the feeling the teacher is only listening for what the writer is supposedly saying. I never read a book that way. I always listen for what the characters are saying. If I were a writer, I wouldn’t care if a reader forgot my name, as long as they remembered my characters.
He remembered sitting for a long moment, gazing at her.
He remembered saying to her, Olivia, I don’t know what you want to do with your life, but I have some advice for you: never teach. You know too much.
He remembered seeing her face blink in confusion, remembered adding, That was a compliment, Olivia. A poor joke, but a compliment.
Yet, she became a teacher.
A good one, he believed.
And perhaps she did it in search of characters that intrigued her, knowing she would find them in an underprivileged neighborhood in Pittsburgh. It would be a rich lode for discovery, a complex and harrowing environment.
Once Marie had said much the same about Overton. On one of their nights in her home, studying, she had said, If I decided to be a writer, this is where I’d want to live, Cole. You can walk down the street of this town and run into more weird characters than you’d find on Fifth Avenue in New York. The sad thing is, they don’t know they’re weird.
And that was what was waiting for him at his laptop.
The Overton story.
He did not read, as was his after-dinner habit. Instead, he got into his car and drove, without a destination to guide him. After the killing on Upton University campus, he had done the same, borrowing Jack Alewine’s Volkswagen Beetle. Driving somehow relaxed him, helped him clear away the rubble his mind had collected. He did not know why it was so, but it was. One of the reasons he had decided to return to Overton for the reunion of his high school class was the drive he would make to get there, watching the greening of spring as he traveled south. He had never made the trip in autumn, due to his teaching schedule, but he had always wanted to—a leisurely, drifting drive, beginning in Vermont and meandering to Georgia, following the changing of the season. He loved autumn. In autumn, the trees colored themselves like dancers dressed for a festival—flamboyantly costumed in crimson and orange and yellow and gold. In autumn, the colors of the trees could be breathed from the leaves and the odor of the colors was as euphoric as a narcotic.
It had snowed lightly in early morning, then stopped, leaving its dusting to cover the landscape. In his first year at Raemar, his first winter, he had sent dozens of photographs to his mother and she had compared them to postcards touched up by artists. She had said the scenery did not seem real. To his mother, it as though God had spread a white quilt over the land with a flip of his hands, tucking in the land for a long sleep.
It was as apt a description as he had ever read.
He made his drive through Raemar. All stores and shops were closed, the town mostly deserted. He believed a car parked in front of Arnie’s Place of Gathering belonged to Wilber Etz, though he could not be sure, snow-covered as it was. Likely had a dead battery and if it belonged to Wilber, he had not bothered to get it charged. Wilber would have offered a discourse of man’s dependency on such objects as batteries, and then he would have talked someone into driving him home.
He found himself on Green Hills Drive, the street where Tanya and Mark Berry lived. There were no lights showing from the house, and he wondered if they had already retired to bed or if they had gone somewhere. It was early for bed, not yet being eight o’clock, but after the Christmas party, bed might have been too inviting to ignore. And maybe they weren’t sleeping. Maybe they were making love. He smiled. Knowing both of them as well as he did, he imagined their love-making was vigorous and gleeful.
He wondered if she had emailed him, asking for new words.
The thought of it made him want to continue his writing.
In his home, he made a fire, stacked it well with wood to bring the flames high, and then he took his laptop from his office and carried it into his living room and settled into his oversized reading chair, balancing the laptop across his thighs, and he began to write.
December 26, night
I am surprisingly energetic, though I know I should be exhausted after a long day of writing and still sensing the effects of my twenty-four hour sickness and having had very little sleep—almost none, to be honest. Yet, I want to keep working. The iron is hot, as my father would say when it came time for harvesting. Now’s the time to strike, he would declare. Not tomorrow. By tomorrow, the iron might be as cold as well water.
After the killing, I had to endure the presence of Jack Alewine.
Jack was a maverick with an intimidating mind and a punishing tongue. Jack did not debate issues. Jack made declarations. The most inconsequential argument was global war, fought with one objective: complete annihilation. In an argument, Wade Hart was stubborn and persistent, but Jack was a madman, an assassin. He did not strike and retreat; he drew blood, crowed over victims, reveled in their agonized surrenders. He was an irritant with a talent for non-conformity, proclaimed with colorful obscenities. On the night we met, Jack said to me, “If you don’t like me, you can kiss my royal ass. If you do like me, I may find it in my soul to like you one day, but don’t hold your breath. I hate rednecks, and you look like one to me.” I thought of the assualts I had endured from Marie Fitzpatrick, and I smiled. I think the smile confused Jack.
Still, we had become friends. It was a friendship constantly tested, and from moments of near-enmity we had developed warning signals that always tempered our encounters. In the unspoken acts of forgiveness to heal disagreement, I learned that Jack was a tender and compassionate man, and his caring was as demonstrative as his insults.
And on the afternoon that a girl—a black girl—died in my arms at a protest on the campus of Upton University, Jack appeared in his Volkswagen at Morrow House. He had with him suitcases and wadded bundles of clothes and books and his typewriter and a table lamp with a damaged bronze shade. The bronze shade, Jack believed, had properties as magical as Aladdin’s lamp.
“They’re about to cut your nuts off,” he announced as he dumped a shouldered load of clothes onto the sofa in my apartment. “And you’re gonna need the best man you can get to stand beside you, and that’s me, son. They piss around with you, they got to piss around with me, and nobody in his right mind wants to do that.”
“What’re you talking about?” I asked. “That situation this morning?”
He stared at me incredulously. “That situation,” he began, punching the word with his voice, “is about to be the biggest thing that’s happened in this town since Sherman’s little wiener roast incensed Miss Scarlett. You dumb shit, a girl got killed out there today—a black girl, a colored girl, or as they say in your hometown, a nigger girl—and you just happened to have been right there in the middle of it, like somebody with good sense.” He ripped a cigarette from its package and lit it quickly and sucked hard from it.
“And?” I said. “I didn’t kill her. She fell into me, and I caught her, Jack. That’s all. If you were here thirty minutes ago, you could have asked the police. They just left, and they seemed perfectly satisfied with what I just told you—I caught her. And, by the way, that girl has a name—Etta Hemsley.”
“Etta Hemsley,” he said softly, exhaling a ribbon of blue smoke. “Good name. It’s a name to celebrate and, Cole, they’ll certainly do that, whether you like it or not.”
“I’m sure they will,” I replied. “I hope somebody does. I’d hate to think she just died. Jesus, I’m no
t that callous, you asshole, but no matter what you think, it’s got nothing to do with me.”
He pushed a stack of books from a chair and collapsed onto it. He said wearily, “You know, Cole, sometimes I think you’re one of the smartest people I know, and then I think you’re just plain stupid. It’s like that idiotic fascination you have with Joel Chandler Harris, of all people. You’re out-of-step, Brer Rabbit, and I mean way out-of-step. Christ, my friend, you’re the doo-doo and the doo-doo’s about to hit the fan, and the fan’s running on high.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Try ‘because,’” he said dryly. He drew from his cigarette and flicked ashes across the floor. “Cole, Cole, Cole,” he muttered. “Come on, help me get the rest of my stuff out of the car.” He pulled from the chair. “You had any calls yet?”
“Three or four.”
“Who?”
“Some newspapers,” I said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he replied. “Write down everything, every name. But best of all, quit answering the phone. I’ll handle that.”
“One of them was a guy I know at the Chronicle—Dempsey Rhodes. He just wanted my reaction,” I said.
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him the truth. That I was just there, listening, and the girl fell into me. That’s all there was to it. He’s a good man. I talk to him a lot. He likes Joel Chandler Harris as much as I do.”
“You idiot,” he sighed. “How dumb can you be? Everybody and his brother will have it forever fixed in their minds that you were part of it. You were there, Brer Rabbit. Do you honestly think the administration won’t hang you out to dry? They don’t like agitators, boy, and, right or wrong, they’ll think you’re an agitator. I know. That’s what they think about me.”
“All right,” I said. “You want to know why I was there? You can ask Marian Shinholster or Henry Fain. I was there because I thought you’d like to know what was going on, because I knew you’d pester me about it until they carried me off in a straitjacket if I couldn’t tell you every shady little fact. What would you have done? If you’d been around, you’d have been leading the singing.”