When later she had left Hinds County suddenly, he had considered it good riddance. He’d heard she married some schmuck of a guy in Tupelo. There’s a sucker born every minute. But less than two years later she’d come back to Hinds County, divorced, with a young daughter named Mae. And he’d despised her all over again.
Maybe he hated her slightly less seeing her sitting in the back pew at his daddy’s funeral service, head bowed, hypocritically clutching her small Bible, but appearing to sincerely grieve the death of his father, one good man in what Truely assumed to be her lonely life of lesser men. Her daughter, junior high age now, sat beside her mother and looked essentially bored by the funeral proceedings. How could she be made to understand the wonder of a simple man who’d lived a simple life? Truely had been late coming to understand it himself. How could Mrs. Seacrest even begin to try to explain the complexity of Truely John Noonan to her disinterested daughter, Mae, who sat beside her mother, distracted, shredding a tissue, letting the pieces drop to the floor.
A day earlier, Mrs. Seacrest had brought a three-bean salad by their house, leaving a note of condolence. It only reinforced Truely’s belief that the woman had impaired judgment. Truely Junior, your daddy was a good man in an imperfect world, the note said. God bless your family. Luckily Truely had intercepted the note before the others saw it. He crumpled it in his fist and threw it in the kitchen trash with the coffee grounds and tomato peels.
SEVERAL TIMES the day of the funeral Jesse asked Truely if he thought his old girlfriend, Tay-Ann Rogers, would come to pay respects to his father. He told her he didn’t know. He doubted it. But Tay-Ann did come by the house after the service and brought her two brown-eyed children and total stranger of a husband. Truely didn’t even catch her new last name. She was prettier than she had been in high school. She was full-bodied now and had a calmer demeanor than he remembered. She told him she worked as an RN over at a hospital in Jackson. She squeezed his hand and said, “Lord, Truely, you’re looking more and more like your daddy.”
“Thank you,” he said numbly.
“You know your daddy is the one who gave me the cuttings that got my garden started. I wish you could see my yard, Truely. It’s beautiful — thanks to Truely Senior. He was special. My kids loved him too.” Truely had looked at her as though she had never existed until this moment. No particular memories presented themselves, just some vague blur of sweet recognition. “Thank you,” he said a second time.
SOME OF HIS OLD BOYHOOD BUDDIES from out around Highway 18 showed up wet-haired and over-cologned in ill-fitting sport coats and bright neckties. They were loud and sincere in their affection for Truely and he was genuinely happy to see them. These were the guys he used to roam the woods with when he was a boy, building forts from pine logs and saplings they chopped down with dulled hatchets. They’d spent hours catching snakes, turtles, raccoons and the occasional wild dog; shooting at squirrels and birds with BB guns, slingshots and badly aimed rocks; swimming stark naked in the muddy red clay waters of Snake Creek and claiming to be part redskin afterward — Creek, Cherokee, or maybe Crow.
Later these same guys were the ones Truely camped and fished with who had first introduced him to the comforts of Southern Comfort and all manner of spirits — home brewed and store-bought. They used to pump loud country music into the night by rigging their truck stereos to big box amps, sit around a dwindling campfire, not doing much, just sipping brew, swatting mosquitoes, swapping lies, and if Billy Bishop was with them, maybe passing a joint when the liquor was gone, finally passing out cold in the early morning hours, sleeping facedown on the damp ground. It was where Truely first learned brotherhood. “Man church,” Fontaine Burroughs had once called it. Where a guy learned to love his fellow man.
Seeing Fontaine come in with his shy young wife to pay respects touched Truely. Fontaine had grown up poor on the red dirt road about half a mile off the gravel two-lane behind Truely’s house. Fontaine’s daddy always had a hard time keeping a job. His mother sold eggs and homegrown tomatoes when she could. But there were times in the winter months when you could go weeks and not see smoke in their chimney.
Fontaine missed a lot of school as a kid. Some mornings old Mr. West, the bus driver, would sit in the road an extra ten minutes sounding his horn two or three loud times trying to rouse Fontaine, remind him that it was a school day and everybody was waiting on him, hoping he would see fit to join the rest of them in their eager pursuit of education and the better life that was supposed to lurk on the other side of that education. “Anybody know if Fontaine is going to honor us with his presence today?” Mr. West would holler out to nobody in particular. Truely remembered that bus of ragtag kids, himself included, with their runny noses and sack lunches in hand, waiting silently, secretly hoping Fontaine would hear the school bus horn and come running, wild-haired and repentant with his books under his arm. Truely remembered times when the kids on the bus actually clapped when they saw Fontaine come running up the road, kicking up a small cloud of dust.
Some evenings Fontaine and his starved excuse for a dog paced the back edges of the Noonans’ land. It was before Truely’s daddy planted the fruit trees. Truely’s mother would see Fontaine out there, sometimes with no jacket, sometimes with no shoes. “Go get Fontaine,” she would tell Truely. “Tell him to come eat supper with us.” Fontaine never refused their invitation either. It didn’t matter whether they were having fried chicken, fresh vegetables or tired leftovers the second day running, he was glad to get it. Fontaine would eat until there was hardly a scrap of food left on the table. He was so skinny Truely’s mother swore he must have a tapeworm. After Fontaine had eaten his fill, Truely’s mother wrapped up what she could in aluminum foil to send home with him. At the time neither they nor anyone else had high hopes for Fontaine’s future.
Nobody was ever sure whether Fontaine’s daddy was killed in a car wreck up in Tennessee or whether he just yielded to his destiny and disappeared from their lives. Rumor had it that after Fontaine’s daddy vanished there were nights his mother loaded Fontaine into the secondhand pickup truck with that loud muffler and drove out to a local nightspot where she would drink and dance and try to quell her sadness with some unsavory types she would be sure to encounter there. Meanwhile young Fontaine worried himself to sleep wrapped in an old quilt in the locked truck cab. On more than one occasion when the sheriff’s department was called to deal with an eruption of drunken tempers, they discovered Fontaine just barely big enough to peer over the steering wheel of his mother’s truck, big-eyed and brave.
Years later, when Fontaine’s mother died of a broken heart and a broken spirit, Fontaine, her only child, inherited the small plot of land. Right away he sold off an acre of timber and replanted it. Then he bulldozed the old family home, which was caving in on itself, had been for years, and put money down on a nice double-wide trailer, fully furnished. He selected Mediterranean-style. It was all the rage in Jackson at the time. Fontaine had dropped out of high school years earlier and gotten a job washing cars out at the Ford dealership. Later he ran their detail department, supervising a staff of twenty guys a lot like himself. He was doing okay. After he married he had added a wraparound porch to his trailer and put latticework around the underside, making it look less like a trailer and more like an actual house. He expanded the modest garden his mother had started and built a patio with a brick barbecue grill out back. A few years ago he’d put in a swing set in the side yard for his twin daughters.
Seeing Fontaine again reminded Truely that there are things right with the world — even with something as seriously wrong as his daddy’s death at hand. Here was Fontaine, beating the odds, finding a way, living a decent life when nobody had much hope that he ever would. Including Truely. Fontaine had let go of Truely almost completely when it got to be clear Truely would be a college boy someday and he would be a tenth-grade dropout with a fifty-fifty chance at a minimum-wage life. Now he walked across the room and hugged Truely, and both men fought th
e surge of emotion they felt in remembering themselves as a couple of wild young boys, roaming the woods as if that was where all the answers were hidden. Fontaine’s wife’s name was Tiffany. She was the size of a child herself.
“Who is that man?” Jesse had asked.
“That’s Fontaine,” Truely said. “We were kids together.”
“He’s handsome,” she said. “He has such beautiful black hair.”
It made Truely happy to think that Fontaine’s miserable boyhood hadn’t defeated him. According to Jesse it had not kept his hair from being gloriously thick and shiny and full of natural curl. On this day Fontaine was maybe the best-looking man in the room and as content with his life as anybody there. Truely took note of that too.
Other guys from Truely’s past showed up on and off during the day. A number of guys who had played high school football with him came by with their wives whose names Truely couldn’t remember. Like Truely these guys had loved the game then and loved remembering it now. Their coach had made it clear to them that a football player needed a lot more than just talent. “Talent is the easy part,” his coach had said. “Either God gives you that or he doesn’t.” He told the team that a football player needed great heart, a work ethic and a mind-set that could trump talent in the long run and serve a boy well all his life. They had liked that way of thinking. Truely knew for sure he did. He had never been afraid of hard work. Football taught him that. Goal setting, getting stronger, never quitting, never blaming, never whining, being part of something bigger than himself, all of it, had made sense to him. Truely bought in completely and by his senior year had earned a spot as second-string corner and got at least a little playing time in every home game that year. He wouldn’t trade that experience for anything he had ever done. His daddy had never missed a game either — and hardly a practice. Truely could still tell you the score of every game he ever played and what the key plays were that won or lost it.
When he saw Mose Jones come in the house alone, the only black guy there, his heart actually jumped a little. It was Mose who had been with him that night when they first spotted his daddy’s truck at that motor court near Meridian. Mose had never brought up the events of that night to Truely afterward — not ever. That alone was reason enough to love him.
Mose and Truely had become unlikely friends off the field. Several times they went up to Memphis together and twice down to New Orleans just to hear some music and see what sort of trouble such places had to offer two small-town, small-minded boys. Nobody in Hinds County ever knew anything about it either. Even the time the cops stopped them for speeding outside New Orleans they managed to use their fake IDs and pay their fines in hard-earned cash without having Truely’s parents called. They’d been thrown out of more than one seedy place for the crime of being underage, but they had never committed any real sort of misdeed. They just looked to hear some good music and dance with any wild and willing women they could find.
As much as Truely’s daddy had loved watching Mose on the football field and admired him as an athlete, he would never allow Mose to eat supper or stay overnight at their house. He was old school like that. It had been a sore point with Truely, who was embarrassed by his daddy’s overt, church-sanctioned racism. And Mose was ashamed of the little shotgun house he lived in with his toothless grandmother and impaired uncle and would never have thought of inviting Truely or anybody else to come over there and bear witness to his actual life.
So they lied to their families, borrowed Truely’s mother’s station wagon, and set out for weekends in the bigger worlds of Memphis and New Orleans about which they had heard tales which they’d decided to believe. They assumed possibilities existed in the big cities that never did in Hinds County — or even a town like Jackson. They’d imagined a place where beautiful black girls would line up to dance with a white boy like Truely and beautiful white girls would line up to dance with a black boy like Mose. It never actually happened the way they imagined. But they had some stories to last them the rest of their lives.
Straight out of high school Mose had gotten a scholarship to Ole Miss amid great public hoopla. He was as good as a local movie star. Truely would have traded places with him in a heartbeat. Anybody would. Mose’s college career was the stuff of legends. Four years later he was drafted by the New Orleans Saints in the second round and signed a contract for more money than anybody had ever heard of at the time. Truely remembered calling him, saying, “Well, I guess it’s the only way anybody would ever get away with calling Mose Jones a saint!” Truely was proud of Mose. Mose had set out to do it and he had done it. There was nothing to do but be happy for him.
Of course shit happens. His sixth year with the Saints he blew his knee out and was sidelined. Two surgeries later and a free-agent trade to Atlanta and his career was virtually over.
Mose, still a striking figure, had grown into a mature version of himself in recent years. He was slightly heavier now, square-jawed, and his hair was beginning to gray at the temples. Truely was a little bit surprised to see Mose at his daddy’s service and later even more surprised to see him come to the house where he had never been made welcome. With his daddy dead Truely guessed Mose wasn’t worried about being turned away at the door. The last time Truely’d seen Mose was when he had come out to San Francisco and stayed with Truely and Jesse because his agent got him a tryout with the Raiders, which in the end didn’t work out either. He had stayed for almost a month before giving up completely on city life and city women — whom he had attracted like mosquitoes — and heading back to Jackson.
Back at home he opened a health club — Jackson’s Gem (Gym). Mose was a high-dollar personal trainer now, with an upscale clientele who came from afar to work with him. He’d assembled a staff of high-profile trainers from among NFL remainders such as himself. He claimed it was easy to attract people to Jackson because the cost of living made the good life a steal. Recently he’d expanded Jackson’s Gem to include full spa services and a weight-loss clinic. It had become a bit of a celebrity destination too, with well-known actors trying to get in shape for film roles, or trying to reclaim their health and fitness after a bout with drugs or divorce or some other form of defeat.
A rush of memories flooded Truely when Mose approached. It was like being transported back in time. They came together in an embrace, locker-room-style. “Sorry about your old man,” Mose said.
“Thanks for coming, man,” Truely managed to say. “I know my daddy never …”
“Look, I never did hold nothing against your old man,” Mose said. “He was a old dog. I know can’t a old dog learn no new tricks. I’m good with that.” He slapped Truely’s outstretched hand, and the recollections, both sweet and bitter, rushed them. It was not the only time Truely found himself choked up that day, but seeing Mose standing there in his daddy’s house he came dangerously close to losing his composure.
He draped his arm over Mose’s shoulder. “I hear you’re the mayor of Jackson these days.”
“Sheeeee.” Mose laughed. “I hear you still out there on the West Coast. Story is you struck it rich out there, son. It’s about time for you to come on home where you belong, ain’t it? Where is your girl, Jesse? You ain’t run her off, have you?”
Mose reverted to the Hines County dialect when he was among friends, but he could switch the dial to standard English, what Mississippians referred to as “the King’s English,” at will, and well enough to do commentary on network TV. He was a Mississippi Renaissance man and Truely admired him for that. But he admired even more his ability to keep a confidence and to forgive those who trespassed against him.
“Jess, look who’s here.” Truely waved Jesse over. “What, old timer, you still can’t get a girl to marry you? You still way too pretty for them?”
“Can’t get no volunteers,” Mose teased. “You know how it is, man.”
“Shoot I say.” Truely laughed.
Jesse came across the room and hugged Mose. “Hey, handsome.”
&nb
sp; “You looking good, Jess,” he said. “But you still hanging with this old guy? I thought you’d come to your senses by now.”
Truely loved hearing Jesse’s answer. “What can I say, Mose? I’m addicted to this guy.”
In high school Mose and Truely had always imagined themselves to be ladies’ men in the making, with great potential as lovers. Mose had proven it to be true in his case. But Truely was the one who’d scored Jesse, so in his mind that made him the real winner.
HASTINGS HAD DONE his part to make the day go well. He introduced himself to strangers and said, “Truely Senior was a good man. I couldn’t have asked for a better father-in-law.” Anyone who heard him say this would have believed it. Truely did. Hastings received callers, condolences and casseroles. He hand-delivered Courtney to nearly forgotten friends who came by expressly asking to see her. He kept her well oiled with sugary iced tea or when necessary orange juice with vodka. Whenever she signaled him he came, escorted her away from the mourners until she was ready to be among them again.
Their mother was like a spiritual vapor, floating through their daddy’s funeral more angel from on high than earthbound woman. Truely got strength from her seeming weightlessness. She had been composed, reaching for Truely’s hand when she needed to. He held on to her to keep her from drifting away, drifting heavenward, where she believed their daddy was hovering, waiting and whispering her name.
TRUELY MENTIONED it to no one, but immediately after the funeral services his daddy’s lawyer, a man Truely Sr. had evidently met at the Elks Club, asked Truely to come by his office early the next day — and to come alone for reasons he would explain. Truely agreed. The following morning he made some excuse about needing to make a trip to the drugstore to get something for a headache and drove into Jackson to the small, renovated house turned law office out near the mall.
Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi Page 7