by Andre Dubus
‘That it?’ Clay says as the fielders run in while he is swinging two bats on deck.
‘We have to go eat,’ the catcher says, taking off his mask, and with a dirt-smeared forearm wiping sweat from his brow.
‘Me too,’ he says, and drops the bats, picks up the Trapper, and hands it to Gerry. Gerry looks at it, lying across Clay’s palm, looks at Clay’s thumb on the leather.
‘I’m a crappy first baseman,’ he says. ‘Keep it.’
‘You kidding?’
‘No. Go on.’
‘What you going to play with?’
‘My fielder’s glove.’
Some of the boys are watching now; others are mounting bicycles on the road, riding away with gloves hanging from the handlebars, bats held across them.
‘You don’t want to play first no more?’
‘No. Really.’
‘Man, that’s some glove. What’s your name again?’
‘Gerry,’ he says, and extends his right hand. Clay takes it, and Gerry squeezes the big, limp hand; releases it.
‘Gerry,’ Clay says, looking down at his face as though to memorize it, or discern its features from among the twenty white faces of his morning.
‘Good man,’he says, and turning, and calling goodbyes, he goes to his bicycle, places his fishing pole across the handlebars, hangs the Trapper from one, and rides quickly up the dirt road. Where the road turns to blacktop, boys are bicycling in a cluster, and Gerry watches Clay pass them with a wave. Then he is in the distance, among white houses with lawns and trees; is gone, leaving Gerry with the respectful voices of his friends, and peace and pride in his heart. He has attended a Catholic school since the first grade, so knows he must despise those feelings. He jokes about his play at first base, and goes with his Marty Marion glove and Ted Williams Louisville Slugger to his bicycle. But riding home, he nestles with his proud peace. At dinner he says nothing of Clay. The Christian Brothers have taught him that an act of charity can be canceled by the telling of it. Also, he suspects his family would think he is a fool.
A year later, a Negro man in a neighboring town is convicted of raping a young white woman, and is sentenced to die in the electric chair. His story is the front-page headline of the paper Gerry delivers, but at home, because the crime was rape, his mother tells the family she does not want any talk about it. Gerry’s father mutters enough, from time to time, for Gerry to know he is angry and sad because if the woman had been a Negro, and the man white, there would have been neither execution nor conviction. But on his friends’ lawns, while he plays catch or pepper or sits on the grass, whittling branches down to sticks, he listens to voluptuous voices from the porches, where men and women drink bourbon and talk of niggers and rape and the electric chair. The Negro’s name is Sonny Broussard, and every night Gerry prays for his soul.
On the March night Sonny Broussard will die, Gerry lies in bed and says a rosary. It is a Thursday, a day for the Joyful Mysteries, but looking out past the mimosa, at the corner streetlight, he prays with the Sorrowful Mysteries, remembers the newspaper photographs of Sonny Broussard, tries to imagine his terror as midnight draws near—why midnight? and how could he live that day in his cell?—and sees Sonny Broussard on his knees in the Garden of Olives; he wears khakis, his arms rest on a large stone, and his face is lifted to the sky. Tied to a pillar and shirtless, he is silent under the whip; thorns pierce his head, and the fathers of Gerry’s friends strike his face, their wives watch as he climbs the long hill, cross on his shoulder, then he is lying on it, the men with hammers are carpenters in khakis, squatting above him, sweat running down their faces to drip on cigarettes between their lips, heads cocked away from smoke; they swing the hammers in unison, and drive nails through wrists and crossed feet. Then Calvary fades and Gerry sees instead a narrow corridor between cells with a door at the end; two guards are leading Sonny Broussard to it, and Gerry watches them from the rear. They open the door to a room filled with people, save for a space in the center of their circle, where the electric chair waits. They have been talking when the guard opens the door, and they do not stop. They are smoking and drinking and knitting; they watch Sonny Broussard between the guards, look from him to each other, and back to him, talking, clapping a hand on a neighbor’s shoulder, a thigh. The guards buckle Sonny Broussard into the chair. Gerry shuts his eyes, and tries to feel the chair, the straps, Sonny Broussard’s fear; to feel so hated that the people who surround him wait for the very throes and stench of his death. Then he feels it, he is in the electric chair, and he opens his eyes and holds his breath against the scream in his throat.
Gerry attends the state college in town, and lives at home. He majors in history, and is in the Naval ROTC, and is grateful that he will spend three years in the Navy after college. He does not want to do anything with history but learn it, and he believes the Navy will give him time to know what he will do for the rest of his life. He also wants to go to sea. He thinks more about the sea than history; by Christmas he is in love, and thinks more about the girl than either of them. Near the end of the year, the college president calls an assembly and tells the students that, in the fall, colored boys and girls will be coming to the school. The president is a politician, and will later be lieutenant-governor. There will be no trouble at this college, he says. I do not want troops or federal marshals on my campus. If any one of you starts trouble, or even joins in on it if one of them starts it, I will have you in my office, and you’d best bring your luggage with you.
The day after his last examinations, Gerry starts working with a construction crew. In the long heat he carries hundred-pound bags of cement, shovels gravel and sand, pushes wheelbarrows of wet concrete, digs trenches for foundations, holes for septic tanks, has more money than he has ever owned, spends most of it on his girl in restaurants and movies and night clubs and bars, and by late August has gained fifteen pounds, most of it above his waist, though beneath that is enough for his girl to pinch, and call his Budweiser belt. Then he hears of Emmett Till. He is a Negro boy, and in the night two white men have taken him from his great-uncle’s house in Mississippi. Gerry and his girl wait. Three days later, while Gerry sits in the living room with his family before supper, the news comes over the radio: a search party has found Emmett Till at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River; a seventy-pound cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire; he was beaten and shot in the head, and was decomposing. Gerry’s father lowers his magazine, removes his glasses, rubs his eyes, and says: ‘Oh my Lord, it’s happening again.’
He goes to the kitchen and Gerry hears him mixing another bourbon and water, then the back screen door opens and shuts. His mother and the one sister still at home are talking about Mississippi and rednecks, and the poor boy, and what were they thinking of, what kind of men are they? He wants to follow his father, to ask what memory or hearsay he had meant, but he does not believe he is old enough, man enough, to move into his father’s silence in the backyard.
He phones his girl, and after supper asks his father for the car, and drives to her house. She is waiting on the front porch, and walks quickly to the car. She is a petite, dark-skinned Cajun girl, with fast and accented speech, deep laughter, and a temper that is fierce when it reaches the end of its long tolerance. Through generations the Fontenots’ speech has slowed and softened, so that Gerry sounds more southern than French; she teases him about it, and often, when he is with her, he finds that he is talking with her rhythms and inflections. She likes dancing, rhythm and blues, jazz, gin, beer, Pall Malls, peppery food, and passionate kissing, with no fondling. She receives Communion every morning, wears a gold Sacred Heart medal on a gold chain around her neck, and wants to teach history in college. Her name is Camille Theriot.
They go to a bar, where people are dancing to the jukebox. The couples in booths and boys at the bar are local students, some still in high school, for in this town parents and bartenders ignore the law about drinking, and bartenders only use it at clubs that do not want yo
ung people. Gerry has been drinking at this bar since he got his driver’s license when he was sixteen. He leads Camille to a booth, and they drink gin and tonics, and repeat what they heard at college, in the classroom where they met: that it was economic, and all the hatred started with slavery, the Civil War leaving the poor white no one about whom he could say: At least I ain’t a slave like him, leaving him only: At least I ain’t a nigger. And after the war the Negro had to be contained to provide cheap labor in the fields. Camille says it might explain segregation, so long as you don’t wonder about rich whites who don’t have to create somebody to look down on, since they can do it from birth anyway.
‘So it doesn’t apply,’ she says.
‘They never seem to, do they?’
‘What?’
‘Theories. Do you think those sonsabitches—do you think they tied that fan on before or after they shot him? Why barbed wire if he was already dead? Why not baling wire, or—’
The waitress is there, and he watches her lower the drinks, put their empty glasses on her tray; he pays her, and looks at Camille. Her face is lowered, her eyes closed.
Around midnight, when the crowd thins, they move to the bar. Three couples dance slowly to Sinatra; another kisses in a booth. Gerry knows they are in high school when the boy lights a cigarette and they share it: the girl draws on it, they kiss, and she exhales into his mouth; then the boy does it. Camille says: ‘Maybe we should go north to college, and just stay there.’
‘I hear the people are cold as the snow.’
‘Me too. And they eat boiled food with some kind of white sauce.’
‘You want some oysters?’
‘Can we get there before they close?’
‘Let’s try it,’ he says. ‘did you French-smoke in high school?’
‘Sure.’
A boy stands beside Gerry and loudly orders a beer. He is drunk, and when he sees Gerry looking at him, he says: ‘Woo. They did it to him, didn’t they? ’Course now, a little nigger boy like that, you can’t tell’—as Gerry stands so he can reach into his pocket—‘could be he’d go swimming with seventy pounds hanging on his neck, and a bullet in his head’—and Gerry opens the knife he keeps sharp for fish and game, looks at the blade, then turns toward the voice: ‘Emmett Till rhymes with kill. Hoo. Hotdamn. Kill Till—’
Gerry’s hand bunches the boy’s collar, turns him, and pushes his back against the bar. He touches the boy’s throat with the point of the knife, and his voice comes yelling out of him; he seems to rise from the floor with it, can feel nothing of his flesh beneath it: ‘You like death? Feel!’
He presses the knife until skin dimples around its point. The boy is still, his mouth open, his eyes rolled to his left, where the knife is. Camille is screaming, and Gerry hears Cut his tongue out! Cut his heart out! Then she is standing in front of the boy, her arms waving, and Gerry hears Bastard bastard bastard, as he watches the boy’s eyes and open mouth, then hears the bartender speaking softly: ‘Take it easy now. You’re Gerry, right?’ He glances at the voice; the bartender is leaning over the bar. ‘Easy, Gerry. You stick him there, he’s gone. Why don’t you go on home now, okay?’
Camille is quiet. Watching the point, Gerry pushes the knife, hardly a motion at all, for he is holding back too; the dimple, for an instant, deepens and he feels the boy’s chest breathless and rigid beneath his left fist.
‘Okay,’ he says, and releases the boy’s shirt, folds the knife, and takes Camille’s arm. Boys at the bar and couples on the dance floor stand watching. There is music he cannot hear clearly enough to name. He and Camille walk between the couples to the door.
Two men, Roy Bryant and John William Milan, are arrested, and through hot September classes Gerry and Camille wait for the trial. Negroes sit together in classes, walk together in the corridors and across the campus, and surround juxtaposed tables in the student union, where they talk quietly, and do not play the jukebox. Gerry and Camille drink coffee and furtively watch them; in the classrooms and corridors, and on the grounds, they smile at Negroes, tell them hello, and get smiles and greetings. The Negro boys wear slacks and sport shins, some of them with coats, some even with ties; the girls wear skirts or dresses; all of them wear polished shoes. There is no trouble. Gerry and Camille read the newspapers and listen to the radio, and at night after studying together they go to the bar and drink beer; the bartender is polite, even friendly, and does not mention the night of the knife. As they drink, then drive to Camille’s house, they talk about Emmett Till, his story they have read and heard.
He was from Chicago, where he lived with his mother; his father died in France, in the Second World War. Emmett was visiting his great-uncle in Money, Mississippi. His mother said she told him to be respectful down there, because he didn’t know about the South. One day he went to town and bought two cents’ worth of bubble gum in Roy Bryant’s store. Bryant’s wife Carolyn, who is young and pretty, was working at the cash register. She said that when Emmett left the store and was on the sidewalk, he turned back to her and whistled. It was the wolf whistle, and that night Roy Bryant and his half-brother, John William Milan, went to the great-uncle’s house with flashlights and a pistol, said Where’s that Chicago boy, and took him.
The trial is in early fall. The defense lawyer’s case is that the decomposed body was not Emmett Till; that the NAACP had put his father’s ring on the finger of that body; and that the fathers of the jurors would turn in their graves if these twelve Anglo-Saxon men returned with a guilty verdict, which, after an hour and seven minutes of deliberation, they do not. That night, with Camille sitting so close that their bodies touch, Gerry drives on highways through farming country and cleared land with oil derricks and gas fires, and on bridges spanning dark bayous, on narrow blacktop roads twisting through lush woods, and gravel and dirt roads through rice fields whose canals shimmer in the moonlight. The windows are open to humid air whose rush cools his face.
When they want beer, he stops at a small country store; woods are behind it, and it is flanked by lighted houses separated by woods and fields. Oyster shells cover the parking area in front of the store. Camille will not leave the car. He crosses the wooden porch where bugs swarm at a yellow light, and enters: the store is lit by one ceiling light that casts shadows between shelves. A man and a woman stand at the counter, talking to a stout woman behind it. Gerry gets three six-packs and goes to the counter. They are only talking about people they know, and a barbecue where there was a whole steer on a spit, and he will tell this to Camille.
But in the dark outside the store, crunching on oyster shells, he forgets: he sees her face in the light from the porch, and wants to kiss her. In the car he does, kisses they hold long while their hands move on each others’ backs. Then he is driving again. Twice he is lost, once on a blacktop road in woods that are mostly the conical silhouettes and lovely smell of pine, then on a gravel road through a swamp whose feral odor makes him pull the map too quickly from her hands. He stops once for gas, at an all-night station on a highway. Sweat soaks through his shirt, and it sticks to the seat, and he is warm and damp where his leg and Camille’s sweat together. By twilight they are silent. She lights their cigarettes and opens their cans of beer; as the sun rises he is driving on asphalt between woods, the dark of their leaves fading to green, and through the insect-splattered windshield he gazes with burning eyes at the entrance to his town.
Anna
HER NAME WAS Anna Griffin. She was twenty. Her blond hair had been turning darker over the past few years, and she believed it would be brown when she was twenty-five. Sometimes she thought of dying it blond, but living with Wayne was still new enough to her so that she was hesitant about spending money on anything that could not be shared. She also wanted to see what her hair would finally look like. She was pretty, though parts of her face seemed not to know it: the light of her eyes, the lines of her lips, seemed bent on denial, so that even the rise of her high cheekbones seemed ungraceful, simply covered bone. Her tw
o front teeth had a gap between them, and they protruded, the right more than the left.
She worked at the cash register of a Sunnycorner store, located in what people called a square: two blocks of small stores, with a Chevrolet dealer and two branch banks, one of them next to the Sunnycorner. The tellers from that one—women not much older than Anna—came in for takeout coffees, cigarettes, and diet drinks. She liked watching them come in: soft sweaters, wool dresses, polyester blouses that in stores she liked rubbing between thumb and forefinger. She liked looking at their hair too: beauty parlor hair that seemed groomed to match the colors and cut and texture of their clothing, so it was more like hair on a model or a movie actress, no longer an independent growth to be washed and brushed and combed and cut, but part of the ensemble, as the boots were.
They all wore pretty watches, and bracelets and necklaces, and more than one ring. She liked the way the girls moved: they looked purposeful but not harried: one enters the store and stops at the magazine rack against the wall opposite Anna and the counter, and picks up a magazine and thumbs the pages, appearing even then to be in motion still, a woman leaving the job for a few minutes, but not in a hurry; then she replaces the magazine and crosses the floor and waits in line while Anna rings up and bags the cans and bottles and boxes cradled in arms, dangling from hands. They talk to each other, Anna and the teller she knows only by face, as she fills and caps Styrofoam cups of coffee. The weather. Hi. How are you. Bye now. The teller leaves. Often behind the counter, with other customers, Anna liked what she was doing; liked knowing where the pimientos were; liked her deftness with the register and bagging; was proud of her cheerfulness, felt in charge of customers and what they bought. But when the tellers were at the counter, she was shy, and if one of them made her laugh, she covered her mouth.