by Robert Inman
“Serve,” he said simply. “I can’t think very far ahead. In fact,” he laughed, “I can’t think what I’m supposed to do a half hour from now.”
It took three days to count and recount the votes. At first tally, Fitzhugh astonishingly led by slightly more than five hundred. But Oscar Gainous kept demanding recounts and the district Democratic Committee kept obliging him. Each time its members sifted through the ballots, they found a few more for Gainous. And, mysteriously, there were three boxes from the far reaches of the district that somehow had not made their way to the courthouse in Columbus to be tallied. “They’re stealing the damn thing!” Monkey Deloach howled. “Fitzhugh, you’ve got to do something!” So Fitzhugh went to court. He found a maverick judge in Columbus who heard Fitzhugh and his allies out, then ordered the sheriff to confiscate the ballot boxes and bring them to his courtroom. There, in front of his bench with the judge glaring down at them, the members of the Democratic Committee counted again, including the three wayward boxes that had now magically appeared. It was seven o’clock at night when they finished. The district chairman got up slowly and walked to the bench, handed the judge a piece of paper with the final tally on it. “The sonofabitch won,” the chairman said.
Fitzhugh stood up from his seat in the front row of the spectator section of the courtroom. “Which sonofabitch, Your Honor?”
The judge looked down at the paper in his hand. “Birdsong by thirty-seven votes,” he said.
“Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch for thirty-seven votes,” Fitzhugh said. And even the district chairman laughed.
>
She heard the telephone ringing in the front hall through the pounding in her ears, ignored it for a long time. She had him now deep in the secret recesses of her body where they both touched gold and honey, set off explosions of light, whimpered and then cried with pleasure, the sweat-slickness of their bodies mingling in the hot June midnight.
But the telephone would not quit. It intruded, beckoning her back from the brink, until finally she said in exasperation, “Go answer the damned thing! And hurry.” He withdrew with a shudder of pleasure, rose and wrapped a robe around his nakedness and padded down the hall to the telephone.
He was gone for several minutes. When he returned, instead of removing his robe and sliding into bed beside her, he sat on the edge, pensive.
“Who on earth?” she asked.
“Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
His voice was so low she could hardly hear him. “Of course,” she laughed. “Who else this time of night?” Then he turned to her and she saw in the dim light from the window the look of wonder on his face. “It really was, wasn’t it.”
“Yes. It really was.”
She waited for a moment. “Well, what did he say?”
“He said ‘Congratulations.’ ”
“Is that all?”
Fitzhugh shook his head, returning to her. “No. He talked for several minutes. I don’t know who told him about me, but he said he’d been following my campaign, knew what I was saying about him. He knew the exact words, in fact, all that business about the folks back in the boxcars.”
“You’re sure it was him.”
“Goodness, yes. I’d recognize the voice anywhere. And the laugh. He has a great big laugh. You can feel the power of it, even all the way down here over the telephone line. He kept saying, ‘I love it! I love it!’ ”
“Well, what did you say?” she asked.
“I was as tongue-tied as a schoolboy. But he didn’t give me much of a chance, anyway. He said as soon as he disposes of Landon in November, we’ve got work to do. We. He said we.”
Bright felt suddenly very alone, very much at the edge of things. And ashamed that she felt that way just now when he was savoring this very great triumph. She took his hand, held it tightly in hers. “I’m very proud of you, Fitzhugh. To have the president of the United States calling our home. That’s rather nice, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he smiled. Then, his voice urgent: “You’ll come with me. You and Fitz.”
“Come with you?”
“Of course. To Washington. There’ll be so much to do, to see. What a great education for him, growing up there.”
She drew away from him, felt a sudden rise of panic. “That’s out of the question, Fitzhugh. We don’t belong in Washington. And there’s Papa…”
“Papa.”
“Yes,” she cried. “He’s old and he’s sick and he needs me.”
“And what about me?”
She shook her head in frustration. “No! You’re not going to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Make me choose. I won’t be forced to choose!”
He got up then, walked over to the window and stood there for a long time looking out at the yard while she huddled in the bed, feeling wretched, trapped. “Well,” he said after a while, turning back to her, “Congress isn’t in session but a few months out of the year. We’ll make do for now. No sense in disrupting things, I suppose.”
“No. No sense,” she answered.
“I don’t want to make you choose, Bright.”
“Then don’t,” she said bitterly.
“Perhaps later …”
But she didn’t answer that.
>
Fitzhugh went to Washington to take his seat in January of 1937. And Dorsey Bascombe began slowly to lose his mind.
Bright was jarred awake by the telephone in the middle of the night, several days after Fitzhugh had boarded the train. “Bright,” Dorsey said, “I can’t find your mother’s things.” His voice was very calm, very matter-of-fact.
She fought through the grogginess of sleep. “What things, Papa?”
“All her things,” he said. “You know. I’ve looked all over the house for them, but I can’t find them. Can you come help me?”
She was wide awake now, alarmed. “Papa, it’s the middle of the night.”
He seemed not to hear her. “The cameo brooch. The one I bought her in San Francisco. It’s missing, and I’m afraid somebody has broken in and stolen it.”
“Papa, nobody’s broken in …”
“But if he comes back, I’m ready for him. I’ve got my gun here, and I’ll blow his goddamned head off.”
He never cursed, certainly not around her. “Papa, you put the gun away. I’ll be right there.”
But by the time she arrived, carrying a sleep-logged Little Fitz in her arms, Dorsey seemed to be perfectly all right. He was sitting in the parlor in his pajamas and robe. There was no sign of a gun. The front door was unlocked and she let herself in, looked quickly around the parlor, saw him there in the dim light from a lamp on the telephone table. “Papa?”
He looked up, gave her a thin smile. “Hello there.”
“Are you all right, Papa?”
“Of course I’m all right. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and had a glass of milk and thought I’d just sit here for a while.”
“You …” She hung fire, not knowing how much to say. She crossed the room, sat down next to him on the sofa. “You called me.”
He looked surprised. “Called?”
“On the telephone. Just now.”
He looked over at the telephone. “No, it’s just your imagination.”
He seemed very composed, his voice even. Am I crazy? No. There is something desperately wrong here.
“I think I’ll go back to bed now. And you go home and get some rest, for heaven’s sake.” Then he got up abruptly and left her there, staring at his back and feeling the cold fist of dread squeezing her insides until she could hardly breathe.
He came and went as the weeks passed, often quite lucid and in control of his faculties—if anything, even sharper of mind than he had been previously. He made elaborate lists, plans, took great notice of the smallest details. But other times he was either in the grip of fantasy or wrapped in a cocoon of silence in which he barely acknowledged his surroundings or the people who spoke to him. He was never violent, b
ut his behavior was unpredictable. He might be at the lumberyard conducting business with perfect clarity one moment, then suddenly get up from his desk and wander off on some fanciful errand only he knew about. He disappeared altogether one April afternoon and turned up in Columbus the next day, asking for directions from a policeman. Bright, wild with fear, drove with Monkey Deloach to fetch him and found him sitting calmly on a bench in the police station. He seemed to have not the foggiest idea what the fuss was all about.
Dr. Finus Tillman was little help. “It may be temporary, or not.”
“Is he going mad?”
“I suppose in the clinical sense, you could say so. In a more practical way, he just goes off by himself, off to places both physical and mental where we can’t follow. It’s a way of coping, I think.”
“Coping with what?”
“With whatever is bothering him,” Tillman said simply.
His wanderings drove both Bright and Hosanna to distraction. But then in the early summer they ceased, and Dorsey seemed to come to himself. He simply said to Bright one day, “I’m tired. I’m ready to sit for a spell.”
“What do you mean, Papa?”
“You handle things.”
“The lumberyard?”
“That. All the rest.”
She kissed him softly on the forehead, smoothed the thin gray strands of his hair. His skin looked very transparent, like paper. He was a ghost inhabiting the wasted remains of his body. “Yes, Papa. You rest now. You’ve done enough.”
She went to Monkey, told him to take charge of the lumberyard operation. She did not think Dorsey would be back for a good while. Monkey was obliging, as ever. Yes, he would take over. He would keep Dorsey Bascombe’s business on its feet. It would be there when Dorsey was ready to return. Bright knew in her heart he never would. He was quietly drifting away from them now, disappearing into the temple of his disappointment.
>
In 1938, Fitzhugh ran for a second term, but it was a hideous business. Oscar Gainous ran again, swearing revenge, giving no quarter, thundering condemnations. Fitzhugh Birdsong, he fumed, was no true Southerner, but rather a captive of the Mad Hatter in the White House, part of a sinister cabal that was leading the country down the road to socialism or worse. That was what he said in public. In private, he and his supporters carried on a brutal whispering campaign. The worst of it was directed against Dorsey Bascombe. He was, they said, a drunk and a lunatic who kept company with a black woman. Gainous was well financed. His advertisements filled the newspapers in the district. His slanderous smear sheets were everywhere. The windows of Fitzhugh’s car were smashed. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on their front yard, though nobody could quite figure out why. Midway into the campaign, it became clear that Gainous’s tactics were working. The steady drumbeat of his criticisms and accusations, public and private, had Fitzhugh in deep trouble.
Bright was stung and furious. “How can you let this go on?” she railed to Fitzhugh. “Do you know what he’s saying about Papa?”
“Yes. I know every word of it. He says things about you and me too.”
“Well, stop him,” she demanded.
“I’ll stop him by beating him.” But there was no conviction in his voice. He looked whipped already.
“And what if you do,” she said bitterly. “What will you do about the hurt and the humiliation?”
His eyes were bleak with the frustration of it. But all he could say was “Bright, I’m sorry. For your father, for all of us.”
Surprisingly, it was Dorsey who energized him. She found him on the back steps of his house one morning two weeks before the election, staring out across the yard. It was warm, but he wore an old brown sweater with a moth hole on one sleeve, a faded pair of pants, and a straw hat. He hadn’t shaved for several days and his cheeks were flecked with the white stubble of his beard. She sat down beside him, grieving at the sight of him, the pain of what was being done to him. He didn’t acknowledge her at first. “Good morning,” she said, trying to keep her voice under control.
“It’s right nice out here,” he said after a moment. “I always liked the backyard. It’s big and open, and if you sit here long enough, you can fill it with your thoughts. That’s why I never wanted to plant much of anything back here.”
He seemed talkative this morning. Many days, he barely gave her a mumble. He seemed so deep inside himself most of the time. “I never knew you for a backyard sitter,” she said.
There was a long silence and she wondered if he had heard her. Finally he said, “I used to come out here at night years ago. Just sit for a while and take stock of things. It seemed I could reason things out if it was just me and the darkness and the backyard. There’s plenty of room out here for your thoughts to wander about without bumping into anything.” He looked at her then, studied her for a moment. “You look a little peaked this morning.”
“Oh?”
“Election bothering you?”
“No,” she lied. Then, “Yes. It is. I’m mad as hell. At Oscar Gainous. And at Fitzhugh. I don’t know what to do.”
“Remember who you are,” he said without hesitation. “You’re a Bascombe. And a man doesn’t go around spitting on Bascombes and get away with it. The best way to get even is for Fitzhugh to win this election.”
She gave him a close look, saw the set of his jaw and the way the hair stood up on the back of his neck. “You’re fighting mad, aren’t you,” she said with a trace of wonder.
“No, I’m not mad about anything anymore. But Fitzhugh had better be. It’s the only way he’ll win. You tell him that.”
Bright went home and told Fitzhugh what he had said. And it seemed to give him a sudden surge of strength and conviction. In the waning days of the campaign he attacked Gainous head-on, lashing out at the personal smears, charging that Gainous and the moneyed interests he represented were only trying to get back to the public trough by climbing over the backs of little people who still had nothing. He was ferocious in his assault, and people responded. By the time the vote was taken, he had turned the election upside down. He won comfortably, the results confirmed by a recount of the state elections board. And it was the instant consensus that, having survived so mighty a challenge, Fitzhugh Birdsong was in Congress for as long as he wanted to stay. But Fitzhugh never forgot what a brutal thing it had been. It would haunt him for the rest of his political career.
20
In the spring of 1939, the river flooded. Back in the time of Dorsey’s mayorship, he had warned that the river would eventually rise up and spread itself across the broad flatland at its banks, into the streets and homes and businesses. He could look at the lay of the land and tell how the river had helped to shape it. “Nature,” he said, “is inevitable. This whole valley belongs to the river. We’re temporary squatters here.” Indeed, there had been a few minor floods over the years—a foot or two of water in the pasture bottomland, the yellow water lapping at the udders of cows that had been stranded and, petrified by fear, refused to move until it subsided. But people generally took the minor flooding as proof that Dorsey, who was right about many things, was wrong about this one. And by 1939, few people paid much mind at all to Dorsey Bascombe. He was part of the town’s history, not its present. Few people even saw him anymore.
The late winter of 1939 was unusually wet—dreary, unending days of cold, miserable rain; never great torrents of it, but a steady downpour that kept people cooped up inside, staring morosely out of their streaked windows, and soaked the soil to a spongy saturation. There had been a drought the previous summer, so the rain was welcome at first. But by the beginning of March, folks had had enough of a good thing. Fields were so waterlogged it would take a month for them to dry out before the farmers could plant their spring crops. And townspeople half-joked about being devoured by mildew as they slept.
On March 11, the weather broke suddenly. The rain stopped, the skies cleared, and it turned unseasonably warm. Dazed people threw open their windows, left
their houses, wandered the streets of the town, stepping around puddles glistening in the sunshine. In the afternoon, the temperature warmed to eighty-five and steam began to rise from the sidewalks. The school superintendent declared a one-day holiday on March 12 to calm the frayed nerves of his faculty. Crowds gathered on the riverbank to gape at the angry orange water, carrying tree limbs and other debris as it surged along. A log floated by with a rooster clinging to it. The river was swollen and dangerous, but it was still where it was supposed to be, even after more rain than anyone could remember.
On March 13, the bottom fell out. It started late in the afternoon with thick gray clouds boiling in from the southwest. From near Columbus, there was a report of a tornado—a barn destroyed, a cow pierced through the side by a flying board. At dusk, a sprinkle of rain drove people back inside. By eight o’clock it was raining heavily. By nine, there were sheets of water so thick people could not see past their front porches. They went to bed grumbling. They woke the next morning to find it was still raining and the river was in their yards.
Bright woke to the raucous yammering of a flock of crows in a tree outside her window, the barking of a dog, and a strange swishing sound under the house below her bed. She rose, put on her robe and slippers, went to the front door, opened it and looked out, saw the sea of reddish-brown stretching out from the front steps under the pecan trees on the front lawn, down Claxton toward the river as far as she could see. A block away, a boy splashed furiously along in the middle of what had been the street, the water already up to his waist. He was the only sign of humanity.
“Oh, my God,” she said softly. She thought instantly of Dorsey, then of her child sleeping in the back bedroom. She looked in on Little Fitz, curled in a knot under his blanket. Then she went back to the front hall, clicked the light switch. Nothing. The power was out. The hydroelectric plant at the small dam upstream was probably completely underwater by now, she imagined. She took the telephone receiver off its hook, gave the hand crank several furious turns. Nothing. Either the operator at Central had abandoned her switchboard or the lines were waterlogged and useless. Probably both. She went back to the front porch and stood there staring at the water, saw how it was creeping up the front steps. She began to hear shouts now as the neighbors woke—Buster Putnam’s elderly grandparents beyond the high hedge to her left, Clayton Pulyard the barber over to the right.