by Terry Kay
You won’t, Amy promised. Not after a few days. You just think you shook the South. You didn’t. It’ll all come back.
His sister knew him well. Over the next few days, Cole began to remember the place of his childhood like a recovering amnesiac—in fragments, in sudden shocks of recognition, in spurts of exhilarating surprise. The feel of the ground under his feet healed him. And the fogcap of the creek and river. And the dark scabs of caved-in, tarpaper-and-tin sharecropper houses. And the empty, unused milking stalls in the empty, unused barn. And the hand plows retired under shelters, their plow points nailed to walls like artifacts of another era in roadside antique shops. And the apple trees in the orchard rows, and the chinaberry at the yard’s edge, and the carvings of names on the white, wounded trunk of the ancient beech tree. All those things healed him. His amnesia—self-inflicted—was cured by sight and by touch, by the soft, lyrical codes of a language he heard from his sister, a language that returned to him like familiar, but nameless music.
Because her husband, Jake, was away, teaching a certified public accountant’s workshop in Charlotte, Amy was with him like a home nurse, leading him daily back into his history. They fished above the beaver dams, picked wildflowers from swamp mounds, found pitcher plants in damp patches, walked to a place called Ruth’s Spring and sipped its cold, sweet water from their palms, visited the gravesites of their parents and of Toby, stopped by the falling-in structure that had been Dodd’s General Store and the great stage of his theater of youth. One day they sliced open a cardboard box and rode it down the slick cushion of pine needles on Pilgrim’s Ridge, as they had done as children. The ridge was not so high and the ride not so grand as it had been fifty-five years earlier.
Old people ought not do such things, Amy said on the painful walk back up the hill.
Two nights before the reunion, again relaxing on the patio, Amy said, I’m glad you’re here, Cole. I keep expecting to wake up and find you gone.
I’m glad I’m here, too, he told her, and he meant it. He was at his homeplace and he liked being there, liked being with her. The look of peace was in her eyes, in the soft flesh of her lips, in the spider’s web of gray in her hair. From his birth, Amy had been his surrogate mother, an embrace to hide in when his real mother simmered with despair over his impulsive behavior. Amy had always been witty and caring. And she had always known herself. Always. Completely.
What are you doing? she asked.
Doing?
Staring at me like that.
I was thinking that I love you, he told her simply. I guess I don’t say it very often, but I do.
She blushed. Why?
I don’t know. I like it when you forget yourself and cuss. I tell some of my students in Vermont that the most expressive word in a southerner’s vocabulary is shit. You say it beautifully. You make profanity sound like poetry.
And you, Cole, make poetry sound like profanity, she said. Remember, I’ve read your stuff.
He barked a lazy, sarcastic laugh. To understand what I write, you must be a sensitive, thinking person, and you obviously do not qualify.
Oh, shit, Amy said. Then: Art Crews called this afternoon while you were wandering around outside. I told him we’d see him in the morning.
All right, he surrendered. It’s probably time I met some ghosts.
What does that mean? she asked.
The past, he said. The past.
That night, in the privacy of his room, he unlocked his briefcase, took out another of Marie’s letters and sat on the bedside and read it.
Dear Cole,
I saw something today that reminded me of you. It was the picture of a basketball player—his name was Larry Bird, I think—and I remembered how sad you looked in a basketball uniform, although I lied to you and told you how sexy you were. How can anyone as skinny as you were look sexy? (The girls used to giggle about the bulge we could see in those basketball shorts—you know, where the penis would be if you had one large enough to cause a bulge. You didn’t, by the way.)
Still, it was a good memory, and if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can transport myself back to those nights when you were running around in some gymnasium, preening like a peacock, thinking you were a fearless, near-nude knight from some ancient kingdom. I can’t tell you how many times I screamed in laughter when you would strut up the court after scoring a basket.
But don’t get me wrong, my sweet friend. I love those memories. I love thinking of you as a little boy having adventures in the body of a teenager flirting with manhood. That’s what you were, you know: a little boy.
And maybe you still are that person, that little boy. Maybe you have him hidden, put away in some drawer or closet like a genie that brings you secret pleasure from time to time.
I was never a little girl, was I, Cole?
Not really.
I wanted to be one, but it was impossible. That’s what my mother was, and she was magnificent at it. I think I knew from my first toddling steps that someone had to be the woman in the house and since the little-girl role was already taken, I became a woman while still wearing diapers.
Oh, Cole, I am in such a restless, self-pitying mood. Forgive me.
Do you know where I would like to be tonight? I would like to be at that old cemetery—the one you took me to see on our first date, the Breedlove Cemetery, where three-year-old Daniel Breedlove sleeps forever on the bosom of God. There is no reason for you to know it, but it became my favorite place. I used to go there a lot—by myself, of course; you would have been an aggravation, or at least a distraction—and I always felt great peace among those deserted people. If I were there tonight, this is what I would do: I would read the names and the birth-and-death dates of the people buried there. I would give them such wonderful histories, they would rise up from the clay and dance in jubilation over being reborn in my imagination.
And I would make certain each one of them had a childhood.
Write to me. Tell me you are ready to commit yourself to an institution because you can no longer live without me.
He put away the letter and, remembering his promise to Tanya Berry, he opened his laptop and began to write:
April 14, 2005
There were times when I believed Marie Fitzpatrick had cast a spell on me. Every moment of shock—pure shock—I have experienced, I thought first and immediately of Marie. Quirky memories, quirkily profound.
Marie believed every boyhood sport was barbaric and silly and that I was hopelessly miscast as an athlete, though she pretended to enjoy the melodrama of my over-blown heroism. It was part of our game, and she played it well. Gushy worship, swooning declarations.
“I hope our boys will want to play football, just like their daddy,” she cooed openly in class one day. “I can’t wait to see them all dressed out like little warriors. That’s something their daddy can do for them—teach them football. He won’t be able to teach them much of anything else, with me as their mother, but he can do that.”
“Oh, Marie, that’s wonderful,” other girls sighed.
“Marie, I’m not about to marry you,” I protested.
And Marie blinked her eyes like a seductive actress and whispered, “It’s all right, Cole. Everybody knows you’ve got to say that. We’ll have beautiful little quarterbacks. They’ll be born with ducktails.”
Privately, Marie berated me. “You look like the polio poster child out there. You’re not big enough to play marbles, much less football. You’re just plain stupid, Cole Bishop. You’ll have a permanent limp by the time you’re thirty and when you do, don’t come to me for painkillers.”
She did not like sports, but she attended games because it was part of the far more intriguing game she and I were playing. It was a dating ritual and she had responsibilities, and she would not forego them. She assumed a queen’s role in the stands and even learned the trick of flicking her hair proudly whenever my name was called.
Yet, she could not resist the opportunity to instruct me in mat
ters far more important than pubescent posturing.
Once, during a basketball game, I was injured when a player from the opposing team shoved me into a brick wall only a few feet from the backboard. As my teammates pumped breath back into my lungs, I looked up to see Marie leaning over me.
“Are you hurt?” she asked fretfully.
“Get out of here, Marie,” I ordered in a gasping voice.
“Shut up, Cole Bishop.”
“Coach is gonna have a fit.”
“Let him. I don’t give a damn.”
My teammates snickered and stepped away.
“Marie, you’re not supposed to be down on the court.”
“I’m here, so shut up. What happened?”
“I got hit.”
“I know that, fool. Why?”
“I didn’t see it coming.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I answered in desperation.
“You fool, you don’t ever see anything coming. And quit talking like a hick. You’ve got me doing it.”
“Marie, go away.”
“I swear, Cole Bishop,” she said angrily. “I can’t teach you a thing.”
He lay in his bed and let the memory of Marie quarreling with him on a basketball court rewind and play again, rewind and play again. The moment was something he had forgot in his earlier writing, and he was glad reading her letter had jarred it loose. Being home, he believed there would be other such memories.
Through the opened window, he heard an owl, low-hooting in the woods, and the monotonous sound of frogs from the pond made by beaver with their stick-dams. Night bugs chirped bravely, cheerfully. All sounds of his childhood and different from the sounds of Vermont.
He touched his chest, let his fingers rest on the rhythmic beat of his repaired heart, and his heartbeat and the night sounds of Georgia lulled him to sleep.
NINETEEN
Art Crews had moved from Overton to a farm in Crossover. In Amy’s description of it, he had rebuilt the farmhouse, bricking it, and had added a sunroom and expanded the kitchen. A showcase, she called it.
Yet, the road to Art’s showcase home was a washboard road, humped slightly in the center by roadscrapers. It had been graveled and hard-packed by traffic and a skim of heat—summer in April—flowed up from it like a simmering liquid. The heat was another thing Cole remembered. Heat that seared the ground. Heat too thick to breathe.
You should come to Vermont, he said to Amy. It’s not like this. You can breathe water straight out of the ground.
It’s not home, she replied.
He wanted to tell her she was wrong. He wanted to say that Vermont was now his home, yet he knew she would lecture him on the difference between the home of heritage and the home of choosing, arguing that the home of heritage was the rightful place, the only place that mattered, and she would use as example her own mis-placed life in Arizona and Atlanta as proof.
You’ve got a point, he conceded.
Art had changed more than Cole expected. He was at least seventy pounds heavier than he had been in high school. His face told stories in the hieroglyphics of deep age lines. He was bald on top of his head and the sidehair he did have was white as cotton. The only recognizable thing about him was his smile, hinged by the dimples that had mesmerized Sally Dylan.
He said in a soft, yet glad, voice, It’s been a long time, Cole, a long time.
It has, Cole replied.
Come on in, he urged. I’ve got some sun tea made. We got a lot of catching up to do.
They stayed at Art’s home for more than an hour, sitting in his living room, drinking the sun tea he had made and refrigerated the day before. His home was neat, well-kept. On one wall was a plaque acknowledging him as Northeast Georgia Builder of the Year for 1993, and photographs with Little League teams he had coached. He confessed the cleanness of the house was the work of a woman named Brenda Moss, who had her eyes fixed on him as a late-life catch. She was a couple of grades behind us, he said. Married Luther Moss. He died of cancer a few years ago.
He asked if Cole remembered Luther. Cole confessed he did not.
He played quarterback three or four years after you did, Art said. Took over from David Crane, if I remember it right. He was pretty good. In fact, I think he was quarterback of the last winning team they had before they consolidated the schools.
Amy sat quietly, listening to the talk, the back-and-forth test of memory. She was amused, Cole thought, over his failure to connect dots of people and events.
Art told of their football teammates and of familiar teachers. Wormy, a career soldier, had been killed in Vietnam. Lamar, now an attorney, lived in Toccoa and owned huge tracts of mountain property. Corey, the father of six children, two of them serving time for selling drugs, worked for a car dealership in Monroe.
Cone Bailey had died in an institution.
Marilyn Pender had died of breast cancer.
Unbelievably, O. L. Mayfield was still alive, but in a home, ancient and mindless.
He talked openly, almost happily, of his divorce from Sally. She got out of control, Cole. Spent money like it was growing on kudzu. I hear the old boy she’s with now is working two jobs just to keep her in face-lifts. Our kids—two girls—take the grandchildren to see her once in a while. But I don’t have nothing to do with her, and, tell you the truth, Cole, I don’t want to. Last time I saw her, she looked like a blimp. Some things turn out for the best, I guess.
And then he asked the question Cole knew he would ask: What’s Marie up to these days?
Cole forced a smile, paused before saying, Your guess is as good as mine.
Alyse said you couldn’t get in touch with her, Art said.
No, Cole replied.
Art’s smile spread across his face. I always wondered if there was anything to all that talk abut the two of you getting married.
Me, too, Amy added. I remember how upset Mama and Daddy got over that. I got letters every other day from Mama about it.
It was a joke, Cole said. Something she made up just to toy with everybody. We had fun with it. Everyone did, as I recall. But I have to admit I admired her, even if she was a little over-board at times.
Art laughed heartily. Over-board? Cole, that girl was a one-woman assault force. I’m surprised she’s not running the country. Maybe she ought to be. Maybe we could get out of that mess in Iraq.
Cole could feel a muscle twitch in his face and he forced a smile to cover it. You’ve got to remember, there was just one of her and a lot of us, he said, sounding more defensive than he had intended.
Art’s smile stayed fixed. Cole, he drawled, if there’d been two of her, none of us would have made it through the year. Lord, she was the strangest one person I ever met. Remember her speech at graduation?
I do, Cole said.
I thought she’d gone off her rocker, Art added. But, you know what? She sort of knew what she was talking about. Everything she said would happen, happened, and then some. I would’ve bet my life we’d never see integration over here. Never. But I was wrong. It’s worked out all right, and you know why?
No, Cole replied. Why?
Football, Art said. When blacks got on the team, we started winning. All it took, Cole. Football paved the way. All you got to do is look around at what jersey number the kids around here are wearing, and that tells the tale. Number seven. Michael Vick’s number. Atlanta Falcons. And I’m talking about white kids as well as black kids. That’s who they want to be—Michael Vick. You think something like that would’ve happened when we was growing up, Cole? Lord, no. He chuckled. Of course, we’d of been better off if we’d had some blacks on the team, I guess.
We might have been sitting on the bench, Cole suggested.
Art’s head bobbed in agreement. Cole could see a glaze in his eyes and he knew it was a glaze of memory, of being young, of Friday nights on the grassless field of Overton High School. It was the same sense of flashback he had had in his writing.
And then Art turned to Amy. Would you do me a favor? he asked.
Of course, Amy replied.
Leave Cole with me for a little while. I’ll bring him home later.
That’s up to him, she said. Just don’t tax him. I told you about that little scare he gave us last Christmas.
I’ll be fine, as long as he doesn’t keep me out all day, Cole offered. I’m a senior citizen now. Have to get my afternoon nap.
Art’s smile became a laugh, robust and happy. Don’t worry, I’ll get you back, or we’ll both be falling asleep in the car. I take a little siesta, too, and I like it so much I think I must be part Mexican. Just thought we’d drive around a little bit, let you see some of the old sights. Maybe even some of the new ones.
Before leaving for Georgia, Cole had had dinner with Tanya and Mark Berry at their home, a casual, enjoyable evening. He liked Mark Berry. Mark was a construction engineer specializing in large commercial projects. He was personable and bright-minded, a good conversationalist. His only apparent social failing—one Cole had never noticed until hearing about it from Tanya—was his tendency to drift to his work, his thoughts curled around some problem that needed attention. You can see it in his eyes if you look closely, Tanya had revealed. They glass over. Nothing else about him changes; only his eyes. What amazes me is that he can continue a conversation with his mouth while his mind is on the concrete foundation of some building a hundred miles away.
Their dinner had been spontaneous, a call from Tanya saying Mark had bought tuna for grilling and there was enough to feed the multitudes, but Jesus was off at a revival somewhere in the Midwest. They had eaten informally at the kitchen table and their talk had been as comfortable as the environment, prompted by a house rule strictly enforced by Tanya and known by every visitor to her home: no shop talk. Shop talk, whatever it was, was for the shop, wherever it was. Cole had always suspected it was her way of telling people not to unburden themselves to her without an appointment.