We were in the papers the next day, along with a few precautionary words about snapping turtles. Moe, it seemed, was an alligator snapper, larger and less aggressive than the common snapper, and rarely found this far north. The alligator snapping turtle takes its name, incidentally, from a habit of eating baby and juvenile alligators, though Moe was probably not big enough for that yet.
Obviously, we saw Eddie now and then after that—in the hallways at school, and later at bars and pool halls and so on. Shane tried to hang out with him once or twice just to say thanks, but really, we never talked to him again. Shane described one afternoon he spent with him: all “heavy metal, handguns, and dirty magazines.” For all I know he was talking about the church group. He could have been describing half the bedrooms in Evansville. Either way Shane couldn’t go back.
Shane still won’t hear a word against him, though. When Fast Eddie’s ran an Ass Wednesday contest before Lent Shane’s dad was very upset. This was twenty years on and 150 miles away. Shane said his old man just didn’t get it. I think they didn’t talk for a couple of days.
Then again, Shane won’t even hear a word against Moe. It’s not as though the turtle is actively prejudiced, acting out of malevolence, he says. That’s because he’s a turtle, I say. We speak of him in the present tense in deference to the longevity of his kind. In truth that twine must have snagged on something long ago and left him drowning, baffled. I picture him sinking into the mud and even in death accumulating an impenetrable disguise.
III
Box County
Uncle Dart and Aunt Loretta didn’t just come from Texas, they brought it with them. Dart would have put longhorns on the Cadillac if Loretta had let him. He smoked Lone Star cigarettes, and he had nineteen Stetsons that Loretta used to hide “to learn him they need to stay in one place.” He was sixty-two but still lean and swaggering. Loretta was the same age but her hair had gone white before she reached thirty. She always stayed the same after that, just got a little more wiry each year. She put jalapeños in her cornbread. When her new Indiana neighbors came over to say welcome she handed that out and left them speechless and gasping for Dart’s Lone Star beer.
Dart kept a loaded gun in every room of the house. I disagreed with that, but I didn’t grow up in Texas. His grandfather had been scalped by a Kiowa brave on the Oklahoma border in his father’s own lifetime. I think I’d keep guns, too.
Both wore boots most days, and if you asked what kind of skin they were made from you got a different answer every time. It might be rattlesnake or alligator, but it might be puppy or chimpanzee. That was Texas wit, and some of their new Indiana neighbors weren’t sure how to respond.
They had Texas tablecloths and DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS bumper stickers. They had just about every book about Sam Houston ever published, and some dubious theories that placed him in the family tree. They had plates on the kitchen wall with cartoon kids saying things like If we’re good, we’ll go to Texas. They had every conceivable thing that could remind them of home, and there was no trouble at all until Uncle Dart hung a WHITES ONLY sign up on the front porch.
Perhaps in Texas that would pass for a charming bit of historical paraphernalia, but people in Indiana expect you to be just as sincere as they are.
I worked in Box County State Forest seven days a week starting at five in the morning, though only for spring and summer. Dart said I was a birdwatcher, and he didn’t think that a fitting line of work for a young man. I didn’t either. Birdwatchers stand at a safe distance with expensive equipment marveling over colors and wing bars. What I did was track songbirds back to their nests and monitor the progress of their offspring. They were in massive statewide decline and Indiana University, my employer, was attempting to establish why.
“You’re a little John James Audubon,” said Loretta.
“Naw,” said Dart. “Audubon was a crack shot. How you think he got his birds to sit still?”
Each morning in any weather until ten thirty or eleven I patrolled a square mile of forest. There were several others doing the same throughout the state, but none nearby. I could differentiate by ear the male and female sounds of thirty-four species. When I heard a female I tried to spot her and follow her home. Some birds are wilier than others, and this could take hours. I also checked on nests I had already found. It is a myth that a mother won’t return to a nest contaminated by human touch. Frequently I took nestlings out to count and inspect them in my hands. Some birds are braver than others, too. A female Hooded warbler will fly her bright yellow body into your chest with all her might until you leave her babies alone. Her mate perches at a safe distance, chirping angrily.
About half my birds were ground nesters. I found a Louisiana waterthrush nest once eight feet from a whole brood of corn snakes. Sad, but I couldn’t interfere. Twice a week I carried an enormous telescopic pole with a motorcycle mirror mounted at the thin end. Holding this in one hand and my binoculars in another I could just about guess the number and condition of eggs and nestlings in trees I couldn’t climb. The binoculars were heavier than the pole. They were German, about fifty years old. They were so powerful I imagined a previous owner atop a Swiss Alp just watching the whole war from there.
I knew every tree, ravine, raccoon lair, fox den, and deer run within my square mile. I knew the local humans only by reputation, and I would have preferred to keep it that way: that reputation was one of armed service in the cause of white supremacy.
Loretta explained to me that there was only one acceptable reason for leaving Texas.
“God don’t make everyone Texan so it’s a kind of ingratitude to up sticks and go live somewhere else,” she said. That could apply to my mother, too, but I didn’t point that out.
“But sometimes God’s a little forgetful and he gives you a grandchild from some other place.”
Dart and Loretta’s first grandchild had recently debuted in Indianapolis, home of their son Dave and his wife, Elia. They handed the ranch down to Dave’s older brother Jack.
“So you got to go there and make sure the child gets brung up right,” she concluded.
They were disgusted by some of the things we told them about Indiana. My dad explained turtle shooting, for example. Tin cans worked okay, he said, but you have to arrange them yourself. Turtles, usually sliders, will line themselves up nicely on any log you fix in a lake. Dart and Loretta had a half-acre lake outside their Indiana home with two logs perpendicular to the western bank. There were four or five sliders on each as he spoke, shining in the morning sun. The trick, said my dad, is to shoot one off without the others noticing. It wasn’t something he had done since he was a kid with a .22, but it was common in Indiana.
Dart and Loretta gave the impression that Texans were a little more sporting.
I had been sent to Texas for several teenage summers, myself, where Loretta had done her best to bring me up right. She was a woman of very sharp opinions.
“Git married young, Nate,” she told me. “Older you git the more you realize if you want a horse you gotta clean the shit out of the yard.”
One aspect of my Texan education was helping Uncle Dart out on the ranch, at which I was spectacularly inept. I once spent two hours on my belly painting one square foot of an old barn. After that I was put on paperwork and other stuff usually left to Loretta. I will say this for Dart: whatever signs he hung on his porch, he was scrupulously fair to his employees. I saw that in the ledgers I used to read when I should have been working, bound I think in the hide of one of his own steers. Sons of his friends got no special consideration. A black man named Moses was his right hand for sixteen years, and he got paid accordingly. I was family, but I got less than minimum wage.
My dad was dismayed when I told him that, but he explained it correctly, I think.
“Your uncle Dart takes every man as he finds him.”
Sometimes over dinner Dart cracked jokes about wetbacks and niggers. When I reported this by phone from Texas to Indiana in hushed tones to
my parents they told me firmly that he was a man of a time and a place that weren’t like my time and place. More important, he was my uncle and I should overlook his shortcomings and indiscretions, because he loved me. He sure as hell didn’t overlook mine, I said. They told me to get used to it.
Loretta put a different spin on things privately one afternoon in the kitchen.
“He doesn’t say that stuff when you’re not around,” she explained. “He doesn’t hate anybody but self-righteous Yankees, and he’s worried you’ll grow up to be one of them. He’s baiting you.”
When cousin Dave turned twenty-two he lit out for Mexico and spent several years writing jingles for Mexican radio on his computer. Computers were new then, especially in Mexico. He would get a phrase like “thirty pesos for each tooth” and he had to compose appropriate music for it.
After six years of that he phoned the ranch to announce he had married a local girl named Elia, and he was coming home.
They had one month before Elia and Dave arrived. In that month Loretta and Dart spent five hours a day on an intensive Spanish course. “Shouldn’t have bothered,” said Loretta. “Her English is better than ours anyway.” Dart read deeply in Mexican history, and he could name every Mexican state and its capital city, though he had to slow right down for Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl. Loretta bought a tortilla press, which was more work than it was worth. She marked all the saints’ days on the calendar, too. This from a couple who hadn’t forgiven the Alamo.
Dart still made wetback jokes out of habit sometimes, but otherwise he treated Elia as his own daughter. Dave and Elia didn’t hang around in Texas very long, though. Indianapolis had a nascent IT publishing industry and Dave’s expertise was in demand.
Box County was one hour’s drive from Indianapolis and it had what they required most—space. “Room for Dart’s boots” is how Loretta put it, but it was not a detail, shifting everything from a sprawling Texas ranch to a smaller Hoosier home. They got what they were after—a small A-frame on six acres of land, with a half-acre lake by the house. They had forest instead of pasture, and they had intermittent water and unreliable electricity they hadn’t counted on, but they said it would do for a while. They hadn’t been through a Yankee winter.
I stopped by most days after work and scandalized them both by drinking Dart’s Lone Star before noon.
“I get more done by nine a.m. than the army does all day,” I said. Dart found that unbearably smug.
“Ranchers don’t sleep late either,” he said.
I went to their bathroom to get my deer ticks out and flush them down the toilet. I never had fewer than nine or more than twenty-seven, and I always got them off before they sank into my skin. When I finally got Lyme disease I was four thousand miles away on a different project in central Europe.
Dart and Loretta had been in Indiana for a month when a scandal erupted. An all-black high school basketball team was traveling by bus from Evansville to Indianapolis to compete in the state championship. They won, too. But just as their bus came off the interstate to join Route 42 through Box County, they saw by the side of the road an immense and upright wooden cross in flames.
“This would not happen in Texas,” said Loretta over the morning paper. “Not anymore.”
“A lot of work just to scare some kids,” said Dart.
This was in 1994. To my knowledge there have been no crosses burned in Indiana since then—not publicly at least. Uncle Dart’s sign would today be classed as a hate crime, and people have been arrested for similar signs recently in other states.
It is my impression that other places were changing then. Loretta once took me to a vast Dallas amphitheater where thousands of cowboys in ten-gallon hats sat on the grass sharing wine with their women, while Prospero bickered with Caliban onstage in accents a mile wide. It wasn’t the Texas she grew up in. She loved it, though, and kept season tickets for the opera.
There were plenty of men like Dart down there who bridled at change. But they were policed to some extent by family and friends and neighbors. Loretta reined Dart in hard when she had to. In Indiana there was no such broad solidarity, no Southern cultural cohesion. There were just loners in the trees with guns.
“Take that damn sign down this instant,” said Loretta.
“It was a joke,” said Dart. “A relic of my childhood.” He took it down, and it’s the only time I ever saw him look sheepish.
The cross-burning culprits were never identified. A spokesman for the Ku Klux Klan went on television to deny all involvement.
That part of Indiana is mostly forested hills with scattered settlements called “townships,” an administrative dodge for a place not big enough to warrant a real name. The forest is heavily protected, so the townships will never grow. Within an area of twenty miles deep and thirty wide there are two or three trading posts—townships with a gas station and a convenience store. There is one incorporated town with a little more to it, called Boxville.
Boxville, where the Klan spokesman lived, was infamous for an unsolved murder in 1974. A twenty-two-year-old black woman selling encyclopedias door to door had been hauled into a car and stabbed with a screwdriver several times. Down South they would have hidden the body but in central Indiana that was an unnecessary precaution. National reporters on the scene said the whole town seemed to clam up. The case went cold and was forgotten elsewhere, but it was still talked about locally. Most people wanted to know what she was doing there in the first place. It wasn’t an obvious market for encyclopedias. It was a sundown town, which you might describe as a white community that expects its domestic help to find some other place to sleep. Sundown policies were outlawed in 1982, when they were obsolete and irrelevant in most places anyway. Boxville may not have had the policy, but it retained the reputation. Still does.
When the Klan denied involvement in the cross burning, people tended to believe them: the fact that they had a national spokesman showed they were changing tactics. But out in the hills of Box County there were a lot of other people nostalgic for the days when the Klan controlled half the general assembly and the governor’s office, too.
As Loretta pointed out, that wouldn’t happen in Texas, either. Though the Texas legislature was so infested with Democrats it might be almost as bad.
They couldn’t be sure which neighbor or neighbors had seen the sign. Probably all of them. Every household in the area had sent a welcome delegation in that first week or so. There was no telling who kicked off the recruitment drive.
At first it was newsletters in the mailbox, hand-delivered in the middle of the night. They had titles like The Liberator and The Klansman’s Voice, and comprised a lot of dense, obfuscatory prose on political topics. They presented specious statistics about “Negroes” and contained articles about “Catholic power,” a phrase you probably wouldn’t encounter anywhere else.
Dart and Loretta had opinions about these things, of course, and they were the same as Texans everywhere. Pay your taxes and be damn sure to vote, in a word. By which they meant Republican. But that is not how they think in Box County. Even Republicans are part of a federal government that must be dismantled by force.
There were items about ethnic minorities, Jews and Muslims—even in 1994—none of which lived within thirty miles of their house. What was most disturbing to me about these leaflets was that they contained almost no trace of humor, however off-color—they were not the work of casual jokers and Yankee-baiters like Dart, but of serious cross-burning white supremacists.
There was one joke among them. What’s the same between a wife, a dog, and a slave? one leaflet asked. The more you beat them, the more they behave, read the punch line.
Dart repeated that approvingly.
These leaflets were followed by invitations. There was nothing suspicious about the invitations themselves, so they were hard to decline. A retired judge who lived two miles away asked Dart if he would like to hunt some white-tailed deer. Dart accepted. He didn’t
have an Indiana hunting license, but the judge told him not to worry about it. Dart thought nothing of it until the morning arrived. He drove to the agreed rendezvous—not far from where I worked, but I didn’t know about it—where he found the judge and seven other men.
Eight men together stand no chance whatever of getting close to a deer.
I don’t know what it was like for Dart to find himself in an Indiana forest surrounded by rifle-bearing Klansmen—men who had taken him and his sign seriously. He never talked about it to me. Yet I can picture it. The fog rolls heavy at that hour, and you can’t see more than a few feet. I picture seven disembodied blank white faces—men you might find at the bank or the barbershop talking about football. They hover in the mist around Dart like a supernatural jury. I hear their hushed bland voices talking in code: emphasizing patriotism and heritage, for which Dart’s sign was a direct translation. They refer to each other as Exalted Cyclops and Night Hawk and Imperial Dragon. Perhaps they delineate the long dark history of the Invisible Empire: defenders of a defeated realm, protectors of white womanhood, soldiers in the service of a white Christian culture besieged on every side.
Perhaps one of them cracks a joke about niggers and is sternly rebuked by his superiors. This is not a laughing matter. It is only the Knights who can through discipline and dedication halt the decline of the entire white race. Dart probably thinks it’s a good nigger joke and he tries to remember it for later, when Loretta is not around. Maybe he’ll tell it to me, because that would surely get my sanctimonious Yankee goat. Perhaps he hung that sign up for that very reason.
Perhaps they regale him with tales of D. C. Stephenson, the Klansman who controlled the whole state and was a presidential contender until his conviction for the murder of a white Indianapolis schoolteacher. (Perhaps he tells them that Stephenson was born in Texas but found insufficient support for his views there and set up shop in Evansville). Perhaps they tell him the details of that unsolved case of the encyclopedia girl stabbed with a screwdriver.
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