American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  Jolie finally gave in the weekend before Thanksgiving and let him call her father and request an official appointment with the pastor, like everyone else. Brother Hoyt didn’t realize the import of the request and had Sam meet with him in the same place he met anyone in need of pastoral counsel: in the sanctuary on Sunday afternoon, when it was deserted, in the first couple of pews. El Bethel was too small to have a vestibule and opened right to the pews from the front doors, and when Brother Hoyt came in that afternoon, early, after lunch, he was amazed to find Jolie there, too, sitting quietly at Sam’s side.

  He’d eaten dinner with her in the parsonage, and not a word of the meeting had been mentioned. Only when Raymond saw them sitting there together, looking so shifty and cornered, did he realize what was upon him. But he didn’t shy away from it, just sat down on the pew in front of them, Sam not making any mention of their afternoons at the river (heaven forbid), but just asking in all humility and sincerity for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  The Old Man absorbed this incredible news with his usual calm, only asking one question: “D’you love her?” which was the same thing he asked all potential grooms, hardly ever the brides. In his experience, women were moldable to marriage and could be happy in any situation if there was security and love. Men were another matter. They had to start out in love, or it’d never last.

  Sam was quick to assure him that, yes, he loved her and went on to speak of his bright future in academics, even produced the letter from Professor Keyes that mentioned the teaching assistantship and handed it over the pew.

  Brother Hoyt hadn’t brought along his reading glasses and gave the letter the merest glance, then moved to his next question and asked if they’d set a date.

  “Soon,” Sam stammered, glancing aside at Jolie, who was sitting there, pale and quiet, not offering so much as a word. “By the first of the year,” he added, the nearness of the date making the Old Man sit up and take notice, actually turn toward his daughter and peer at her a long moment.

  “What’s the rush?”

  She wouldn’t meet his eye, and Sam hastened to answer, “Well, I have to be back at UF by January, to start the winter term.”

  Brother Hoyt’s eyes were still on his daughter, his expression not unkind, almost teasing. “Well, sister? Ain’t you gone say a word? You want to marry dis boy?”

  Jolie was more devastated by his kindness than if he’d railed at her and called her names, for she had an inkling that he knew about the camper and the river. Maybe not in detail, but he wasn’t an idiot, her father. He was a Hoyt. He knew about the mysterious lure of the fast-talking outsider, and all that it entailed. She couldn’t speak for a moment; finally answered in a small voice, “Yessir. But I don’t want to leave you.”

  Brother Hoyt didn’t argue, but nodded his head slowly, then reached over the pew and patted her leg. “It’ll be all right, baby. It’ll be fine.”

  And that was about it.

  He braced himself on the back of the old pew and came massively to his feet, handed Sam back his letter, and told him that he’d have to pray about it—for them to keep it to themselves till then.

  Sam also came to his feet and assured him they would, and since it was still barely midday, he and Jolie went out to the campground on some pretense, to be alone. They didn’t head straight to the camper as they usually did, but just sat on the pier in the slant of the noonday sun, which wasn’t as brutal as it’d been in August, having grown mellow and golden with the closing of the year. They were both a little overcome with the enormity of what they were doing and sat without speaking till Jolie finally commented in a mild voice, “I almost fainted when he asked us what was the rush. If you’d have said that idiot thing about your penis, I would have dropped dead.”

  Sam stared at the black water. “If I had said the word penis in front of your father, our troubles would be over. Because mine would have fallen off.”

  Jolie smiled, then laughed aloud, as his old Sam-humor was a great joy to her.

  “Well, I do love you,” she told him, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder. “When are you gonna tell your parents?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he sighed, his eyes still on the water. “I was thinking next week, but hate to spoil Hanukkah.”

  “What’s Hanukkah?” she asked, with such innocence that Sam expelled another long sigh.

  “Ah. Nothing. Little winter festival my mother is fond of.”

  “And telling her will ruin it?” she asked, so lightly that Sam blinked back to the present.

  “Not ruin,” he assured her. “Complicate.”

  He insisted on calling them immediately, to demonstrate his goodwill, though he did ask that Jolie not mention she was from Hendrix.

  “Why not?”

  Sam sighed. “Let’s save something for New Year’s.”

  All in all, the call went well, all polite absorption at this point (“Oh? Really? So soon? A pastor’s daughter? How nice”), which Sam figured was the emotional equivalent of clinical shock, the hammer blow to the thumb that doesn’t hurt for about three seconds, then, oh, yes. It hurt a lot. It howled.

  But he was the baby of the family, the nonconformist who’d spent twenty-four years outflanking them. He rubbed his neck when he hung up, told Jolie with a wan smile, “See? I told you they’d be fine.”

  Once the hurdle of informing their parents had been cleared, they went about tying up the loose ends of the fall semester so they could marry as soon as the maid of honor (Lena) and groomsman (one of his brothers, though Sam was less picky) could be depended on to show up at either El Bethel or the courthouse in Cleary after Jolie’s last exam in mid-December. Sam would be gone by then, or soon after; Jolie would transfer to UF for the summer semester, or maybe in January, if the right strings could be pulled. That was the plan—to be gone by January in a quick and simple flight, one complicated by the holidays, which were rigorously celebrated in Hendrix, hamstrung by all manner of tradition and family gathering.

  Both Carl and Lena were coming home for the annual Thanksgiving feast Raymond traditionally hosted at the parsonage, which filled the little house to the rafters with cousins, in-laws, exes, and more than a few hunting dogs. The menfolk did the outside cooking—the turkey-smoking and the pig roast—while the women did the inside cooking and arranging and stepping and fetching. All of it came at a most inconvenient time, the week before finals, keeping Jolie in a stew of irritation and sleeplessness that made her snappy with everyone, including Sam.

  He picked her up from school as usual the day before Thanksgiving, on a sterling-clear afternoon, as muggy as July, though a front was due by morning, and the first frost of the season had been forecast. Jolie was nearly done with the labyrinthine preparations of a Hoyt family feast—mountains of red potatoes peeled, corn bread crumbled, celery and yellow onion and free sage chopped. She ate a green apple as he drove her home and tried to give him a preview of what to expect of a Hoyt Thanksgiving.

  “—probably thirty or forty, at least. Aunt Kibby went up to Tennessee, Daddy says, but Uncle Ott and Uncle Obie will be there, and all their wives and children and grandchildren and all their exes and stepchildren and hunting buddies, who’ll only stay long enough to eat. They won’t come unless it’s raining or turns cold; they’ll be wantin’ to get back to the woods before dark.”

  Sam had studied the Hoyts from afar so long that he was actually looking forward to seeing them assembled, en famille, an overwhelmingly masculine microculture, as Jolie had, at last count, eight uncles, and twenty-three first cousins, mostly male, who ranged in age from fifteen to forty-three. Such was their devotion to hunting that they had hardly appeared since Sam had been there and weren’t expected to appear till deer season ended in February. Jolie didn’t seem to mourn the absence as she was more like a sister than a cousin to the larger clan, a spoiled, mouthy sister who treated her younger cousins with the same eye-rolling dismissal she did Carl, referring to them as the
Hoytlings, and seldom missing an opportunity to comment on their unvarnished idiocy.

  “They never leave the woods?” Sam asked.

  “Not the first week of deer season. They’ve had the dogs out since September, but this is the first week they can actually shoot,” she explained. “Brace yourself, because they’ll be coming straight from the woods, in camo and boots, full of this overflowing machismo—niggering- this and niggering- that to try and impress you.”

  “Why would they think that’ll impress me?”

  “Because they’re idiots.”

  She left it at that, sidetracked to discuss the supper they’d had the night before with Sister Wright, queen of the El Bethel Sisters, a spunky little woman of definite Muskogee stock who was related to the Stricklands on her mother’s side and had made it to the formal tribal roll.

  Like all the Sisters, she was the soul of generosity, and before dinner was through, she had given Sam many gifts: a dozen brown eggs, an angel-leaf begonia, and a big square of something she pulled out of her refrigerator, which turned out to be a huge square of processed cheese.

  He hadn’t opened it till he got to the camper, but now he asked Jolie, “Why did Sister Wright give me a big chunk of Velveeta last night?”

  “It ain’t Velveeta—it’s commodity cheese. The government gives it to poor people—they pass it on to me and Daddy all the time, pay tithes in it. It’s better than Velveeta; makes good grilled-cheese sandwiches. How’s your begonia?”

  “Alive, so far.” He wondered aloud, as he often did, about how generous they were, the poor people of Hendrix. “They won’t let you leave empty-handed—your father has given me four Bibles, a sewing kit, and four Independent Life fans—Sister Turner gave me a straw hat—and they hardly know me.”

  Jolie smiled. “They know you enough to know they like you, and around here, if you like somebody, you give them stuff. It’s saying you’re one of them. They’re giving you a piece of them.”

  Sam had already described the practice (a local form of potlatch, as far as he could tell) in his just-dispatched paper, but continued to go to Jolie as the first source for all things Hoyt and Hendrix. “Why do they like me?” he asked, pleased, because he liked them, too: their eagerness to talk and their long memories, their weird and passionate convictions.

  “Well, mostly because you treat them with respect,” Jolie explained. “You don’t look down on them because they’re poor; neither did Lena. That’s why they loved her—rooted for her back when she was after Carl.”

  “Are they rooting for Sam and Jolie?” he asked with a smile.

  Jolie answered oddly, with a short bark of laughter. “Oh, yeah. They’re pulling for Sam and Jolie.”

  An unpleasant note in her laughter made Sam glance aside. “What d’you mean by that? Are you sure they’re oaky? With the Jewish thing?”

  Jolie had been asked that at least one hundred times and assured him, “They’re cool with the Jewish thing. They’re mighty cool with the Jewish thing.”

  Again, he heard that odd undercurrent and insisted, “What d’you mean by that? What’s the strange smile about?”

  She suppressed the smile. “Nothing. It’s an old hick thing, hard to explain. And it’s kind of insulting.”

  But Sam was only more intrigued and pressed, “Come on, Jol. You got me curious.”

  By then, Jolie had come to enjoy sharing all the little strange corners of the Hendrix mind, but still hesitated on this one, glanced at him slyly, and asked, “Promise you won’t get mad?” At his emphatic nod, she added, “Well, before I tell you, you got to remember that Sister Wright, and all the Sisters, they’re poor old country women, never lived outside of Hendrix—”

  “I told you I’m not gonna get mad,” he insisted with growing impatience. “What?”

  She shrugged, then confided in a mild, amused voice, “Well, to them, you’re not just Sam Lense, nice guy. You’re also”—she paused—“Sam Lense, rich Jew.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. That’s why they’re so happy—think I’ve been very clever, snagged me a catch. They really do.”

  This was unexpected, and indeed a little insulting to Sam, who only half believed it, arguing, “But I live in the crappiest camper in Florida. My father is a building inspector with the City of Miami. My mother works for HRS.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with it. Your father could dig ditches and it wouldn’t make any difference. You know Sister Noble’s daughter? The one in Chicago?”

  “With the white piano?” he asked, for he’d heard a good bit about that white piano every time he ate supper with Sister Noble.

  “That’s her. Well, she wouldn’t say it around you, but that’s how she got the Cadillac and the white piano.”

  “She married a rich Jew?”

  Jolie smiled. “Exactly. That’s why she tells you about it all the time—it’s the measure of her daughter’s success: not any piano, but a white piano.”

  Sam wasn’t sure he was so happy with this unexpected twist and sniffed, “Well, it’s nice to know that I’m loved for my own sweet self.”

  “You said you wouldn’t get mad, and they do love you for your sweet self. I mean, you treat them like maybe they’re human beings and step and fetch to please them, and that’s all any Southerner asks. I’m saying that it’s funny, all these little winks and grins I’m getting, as if I’ve done something verrry clever, landed me a catch.”

  Sam drove along in silence awhile, then finally asked, “What would they have done if you’d brought home a black man?”

  Jolie quit smiling at that. “I’d never bring a black man to Hendrix,” she told him flatly, with a finality that was startling.

  “Why not?”

  She’d lost her good humor and shook her head. “It’d be—” She paused, but didn’t finish. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not? There are plenty of rich black men in Miami.”

  “It ain’t about money—”

  Sam cut her off. “But you said—”

  “No,” she insisted with an abrupt, almost ill-temper. “I never said it was about money. I said . . .” She paused. “Oh, never mind. I can’t explain Hendrix to outsiders. It’s hopeless.”

  Sam was a little hurt that he—who’d been told how beloved he was by the locals—was now too outside to matter, to even comprehend the inside. He drove in silence down the wilderness highway, close to Hendrix now, almost to the church, and finally said, “Well, it’s hard for me to believe that the Sisters are that racist. I’ve been here three months and haven’t heard them rage on the local blacks—”

  “That’s because there aren’t any,” Jolie told him bluntly. “There haven’t been, for a long time.” She made one last attempt to explain. “They just grew up in a different day, Sam. I mean, Sister Noble, she’s eighty-two. She remembers when they used to have Commemoration Day in Cleary, when the old vets from the Civil War used to march through town in their uniforms, the Klan marching by their side.”

  Jolie paused, and Sam finally said, “Yeah?”

  “Well, they’re all like that—Uncle Ott and Uncle Earl and Daddy. They’ve lived through a lot. To them, racial things—they’re not far removed, some historical footnote, but close, really close.”

  “So you’re excusing them for being racist because they’re old? Because they saw the Klan march through town?”

  Jolie was capable of a fierce protectiveness toward her father and the old folk at Bethel, and a steely edge crept into her voice. “I’m not excusing anything. I’m just trying to— Listen, have you ever heard of something they used to have around here called slavery?”

  Sam pretended to think hard. “Oh, yeah. I think I read a line or two about it at UF. I think they had a war over it.”

  She ignored the sarcasm. “Yeah, they did. And they lost a war over it, too. Did I ever mention that my Big Mama, she lived in a slave cabin?”

  “A slave cabin? How old was your Big Mama?”


  He said it as a small joke, though Jolie didn’t smile, but answered with a straight, set face, “She was born in 1899, as a matter of fact. But you know, Sam, it was a funny thing about the war—they didn’t come in and bulldoze the slave cabins the minute it was over. They left ’em stand around here. They found ’em mighty useful, believe me.”

  “So what are you saying?” he asked as he pulled to a halt in the drive.

  “I’m saying that Big Mama, she lived in this rinky-dink little slave shack on and off for years— a lot of people did, raised a lot of children in ’em—and it was nasty, makes Daddy’s old shed look like a mansion. I mean, to them slavery isn’t some far-off thing. It’s real—a live, strange thing. It’s the reason I’d never bring a black man to Hendrix.”

  Jolie said it with rare passion, yanking up her book bag and opening the door with a jerk, her face down, more flushed and furious than the argument warranted.

  Sam called for her to stop, but she kept going, so quickly that he was barely able to catch her. “Why are you so pissed? I’m the one who should be mad. I’m the token Jew.”

  But she refused to be drawn out and felt for her house key with a distracted “Nothing. I’m just sick of talking about it. Listen, I got a thousand things to do—I need to get moving. I’ll call you in the morning,” she promised as she unlocked the door.

  “You don’t need me to help?”

  She made a noise at the word. “No. You’ve helped enough. You’ve helped plenty.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” she murmured, then unbent enough to add, “Just do me a favor, Sam, and don’t get too moon-eyed over the Hoyts, and Hendrix, and our glorious past.”

  She said it with such bitterness that Sam repeated, “What the hell’s got into you?”

  “Nothing’s got into me. I just can’t believe you been here this long, and talked and talked, to everybody, and you still don’t git it.”

  “I git that I love you,” he mimicked with a chin-out belligerence.