The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “I’m sick of all this liberal shit!” Emily found herself yelling.

  “Yeah, you’d like to get out the bloodhounds, wouldn’t you?” snapped Sammie.

  “It’s society’s fault, it’s the fault of Susannah’s unconscious. Marx says this, Freud says that. Fuck it! It’s the fault of five motherfucking dope heads with Swiss cheese for brains, who ought to be strung up!”

  “Scratch any Southern white and you’ll find a cracker,” drawled Lou.

  “Fine,” growled Emily. “You all go right ahead and donate to charity. Give your cast-off clothes to the Salvation Army. Write your senator about job training programs.”

  “Beats the hell out of a lynching,” suggested Lou.

  “I’m not talking about lynchings. I’m talking about individual accountability. What about the men who grow up subjected to poverty and injustice and humiliation who don’t rape? Are they just weak or cowardly or insensitive or what?”

  “They don’t need to rape,” explained Maria. “They got these cats keeping women down for them. Just like the Germans had their storm troopers, and the plantation owners had their overseers.”

  Susannah sat silent. Suddenly they all felt ashamed, having shifted into theory so as to stave off their rage and grief. “I was victim number fourteen of those men in the van,” Susannah continued, “and the police actually caught one while they were picking up number fifteen. Shot him through the head while the other two drove off. John took me to the morgue to identify him. They rolled him out, and I looked at his face and the bullet hole in his forehead, and I …”—she began heaving and hiccoughing with sobs—”… and I was glad. I was just so goddamn glad!”

  All the sweet sad brave women of Emily’s youth—the church was packed with them. Beaten and abused and silenced and exploited their whole lives long. That night, listening to Susannah, the scales had fallen from Emily’s eyes. In every country, throughout history: Breasts sliced off, clitorises torn out, spears shoved up vaginas. By men. By the hirelings of the motherfuckers sitting in these pews looking smug and devout. Raymond in his overalls and suit coat, immersed in the idiocies of rural life. His smug “self-made” father, with his slicked-down hair and long sideburns and stiff-looking suit. Her own father and grandfather down the pew from her. She kept trying to make exceptions for “her” men. But Maria was right: There could be no exceptions. They all profited from each act performed by other men that kept women afraid and in their service. And what about Matt sitting next to her, looking confused and troubled? Could she prevent his turning out exactly like them? Probably not, but she’d sure as hell try.

  The moment everyone had been waiting for had arrived: Sally was gazing through her veil into the coffin at Jed, looking unable to make up her mind whether to weep softly like a Methodist, wail loudly like a Baptist, or bear it in dignified silence like an Episcopalian. Every eye was on her, savoring her widowly grief. She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief and her shoulders began shuddering.

  Jesus, what a time it had been. Sally and her kids in pieces, the Tatros hysterical, Newland in an uproar, newspaper headlines. As everyone around them became more and more frantic, her own parents had become increasingly calm, grimly making all the arrangements. Emily had tried to follow their example, taking Matt and Joey and Laura to movies and drive-in restaurants. They even went on a scenic tour of the parking spots of Emily’s adolescence, while she reviewed all the back seat grapplings and rumblings with Raymond and Earl.

  She’d also done her best to give poor Sally some support, though she doubted she’d helped much, feeling as she did about Jed in particular, and about men in general. She’d finally managed to come out to Sally, who seemed shocked at first, then pleased that Emily had shared this with her. They’d been more or less estranged ever since the days in the Castle Tree. It felt good to Emily to be able to use this sad time as a way to get back in touch. After all, they were both women, shared a common plight.

  She pictured The Five in the Castle Tree, Jed shirtless, ribs showing like a xylophone, grinning and sticking out his tongue at Sally, who giggled through her light brown braids, which she’d tied into a knot in front of her mouth. The world seemed so simple and benign back then, created solely to delight and entertain The Five …

  Emily realized that the only thing she’d failed to cope with these last few days was her own grief at the brevity and difficulty of life, grief that was now surging around inside her like a caged tiger. She longed to get back to New York and to Maria, who would hold her, touch her, and gently stroke life back into her numb body. And to the women’s group, who would hear her out, taking on her sorrow as their own, restoring to her the strength and the will to continue the struggle on behalf of all the downtrodden women of the world, so that none of their daughters would have to go through what Sally was now enduring.

  The gospel quartet was singing, “… proceed to that gate called Calvary. / Reservations secured from the Savior / For your one-way flight to Glory Land …”

  Emily heard Mrs. Webb behind her whisper to her sister, “Who does that Raymond Tatro think he is—Snuffy Smith? You’d think he could at least wear a suit to his own brother’s funeral.”

  “Heard him talk lately? Sounds like he oughta be on ‘Hee-Haw.’”

  “Ain’t he been up North? He making fun of us, do you reckon?”

  Chapter Two

  Raymond

  His father took his mother’s arm to hold her up, so Raymond took Sally’s. According to the Bible, he should have been taking Jed’s place in the marriage bed by now. He grinned, thinking that fucking Sally would be like fucking a chicken carcass. You’d come away full of bones. Then he realized it wasn’t the most tactful thing in the world to be grinning as you walked away from viewing your brother’s corpse.

  Emily was sitting there watching him, wearing a suit and tie. Out front waiting to process, he’d heard Mrs. Webb whisper to her sister, “Why, honey, don’t you know Emily’s mama and daddy just hate it that they sent her up North to college?” His first true love a dyke. Well, that was the story of his life. He’d learned one thing from living in Tatro Cove for the past year and a half: Everybody betrayed you in the end and had been deceiving you all along. You couldn’t count on nobody but yourself.

  Staggering up the aisle and wailing, the relatives from Tatro Cove had already viewed Jed. Mr. and Mrs. Prince had looked shocked at this unseemly display as they peered into the coffin with dutiful tight-ass ruling-class dignity.

  Sally stumbled and Raymond found himself practically carrying her. You always knew when there was a funeral on in Pine Woods because people holding fans from the Ready Funeral Home, decorated with Martin Luther King’s picture, would be prancing around the sidewalks rejoicing that the Lord had seen fit to release the dear departed from this earthly prison. The folks from Tatro Cove didn’t feel any such optimism, though. The corpse rotted in its grave and got eaten by worms was how they saw it.

  They sat down in the front pew beside his parents and Joey and Laura. His mother’s face was bright red and puffy. She hadn’t stopped crying since she heard about the accident. She wouldn’t have a son as vice president at the mill now. Raymond wondered if she’d be crying like this if it was his corpse in that casket. He doubted it. He and his father had had a terrible fight just before leaving for the church over Raymond’s attire. But he didn’t own a suit, much less a black one, and had no money to buy one, and wouldn’t have bought one even if he had. Newland would just have to take him like he was. He wished his presence could be a comfort to his parents, though, instead of a trial. But it was a little late to worry about that.

  Mr. Marsh up front was enumerating all Jed’s sterling qualities: football hero, foreman, husband, father, church usher. Sally shook with sobs. She put her hands to her face. Raymond felt real bad for her, and awkwardly put his arm around her shoulders. Jed couldn’t have made it much more humiliating for her if he’d tried. Maybe he had. Totaled by a semi on the Chattanooga
highway with his best friend’s wife, after an evening at the Lazy Daze Motel. When he was supposed to be Joey’s manager at Peewee Boxing at the Robert Prince Sr. Shopping Mall. It was the stuff great mountain ballads used to be made of. Old Jed always seemed like such a goodie, too. The town even swallowed the story about his secret marriage to Sally. But there wasn’t no way he could deceive his way out of this one. Maybe that was partly why everyone was so upset. Virtue Unmasked: The Double Life of Big Jed Tatro, Public Goodie and Closet Kink.

  Raymond wondered if now people would believe him about Jed’s blowing up the Confederate statue during the strike. “Why, Jed Tatro would never do nothing like that,” they insisted, down to the day he got himself smeared across the highway with Betty Osborne. Raymond realized that his bitterness was left over from childhood. He’d had to tote the burden of rebellion single-handedly, breaking the trail so that Jed could float right along it. Everything—riding a bicycle in the street, staying out after dark, crossing the highway to the drugstore, going out with girls, driving the family car—Raymond had had to lock horns with their parents over. By the time Jed came along, nothing was a big deal for them. But Jed never once thanked him. Or even allowed that he was aware of the situation. In fact, he grabbed every chance he could to side with their parents against Raymond. And during the strike he spread it all over town that Raymond was a Red, a faggot, a nigger-lover, a hippie, and God knows what. It had been so strange going overnight from Justin’s calling him a cracker to Jed’s calling him a Commie.

  At his last FORWARD meeting when he’d announced he was returning to Newland, they’d just looked at him. Maria finally said, “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?” asked Justin.

  “My people need me.”

  “Your people?” sneered Morris.

  “The working people of the South who’re being enslaved by the Yankee capitalists.”

  “I think you’ve been reading too much Marx,” murmured Maria.

  At first it was like walking on egg shells. During his years in New York he forgot all the things you weren’t supposed to say in Newland. When his mother asked him what he thought of her new winter coat, he said it was the wrong color for her. She burst into tears. He was baffled. Why had she asked him if she didn’t want to know what he really thought? He’d forgotten those all-purpose Southern phrases, “That looks real nice” and “I’m just fine, thank you.”

  It irritated him when he walked down the street and some woman would rush up and squeal, “Why Raymond Tatro Junior! I heard you was back in town. What you wanna go up at New York City for anyhow? How’s that nice mama of yours? Now, you tell her Velma says hidy.” Perfect strangers would smile and say, “Purty day, ain’t it?” Why couldn’t they mind their own goddam business? In a matter of weeks he moved to a remote hill off the Kentucky highway.

  He was sure it was just a question of describing to his fellow workers at the mill their exploitation by the capitalists. But when he tried, some would smile pleasantly without comprehension. Some would shrug and walk away. Others would ask what a capitalist was. Still others would try to initiate a discussion about the virtues of Fords over Chevys.

  Thinking about it on his porch one night, he realized that a trait of Southern working people was the tendency to personalize situations. He had to adapt his tactics to the peculiarities of his constituency. Since his own field of perception had shifted so drastically during his last days in New York, he had no difficulty portraying Mr. Prince as a greedy slave driver. “Look at him setting in that big yaller house on the hill! You think he gives a shit bout yall down here in the village?” But they insisted on seeing Prince as the Messiah. Some scurried away when Raymond talked like that. Others tried to punch him out or called him a goddam Commie.

  He was baffled. It was all so elementary. How could they fail to see it? Bunch of ignorant hillbillies who couldn’t follow a rational argument if you marked it with skunk scent. He’d come home, milk the cow, collect the eggs, cook some supper, sit on the porch, and listen to the night sounds. From time to time he felt a gnawing in his stomach that he eventually recognized as loneliness. Nobody down here understood him. He began yearning for FORWARD meetings. Maybe they disagreed with him, but at least they knew what he was talking about.

  On the highway was a truck stop with an attached motel, and a small store where he shopped. When the gnawing became too awful, he went down there for a meal. As he ate, he watched Thelma, the waitress, cope with leers and lewd remarks from truck drivers. He admired her calm refusal to take their shit. One night she asked him if he lived nearby. They began chatting, and before long he was going there every evening for supper. Thelma lived a few miles down the highway, was married to a man who’d been paralyzed from the neck down in Vietnam. She began fixing special treats for Raymond’s dinners. Sometimes he sat there all evening drinking coffee and talking with her when she was free. He tried to explain what he was up to at the mill. With her simple native shrewdness she seemed to understand. Unlike Maria, Thelma didn’t have theories, or quotes, or big words, but she actually lived what Raymond was talking about. Hard work for pitiful wages. A husband almost destroyed defending the interests of the capitalists in a place they had no business being in. Salt of the earth, Thelma. An honest hard-working woman. He especially admired her devotion to her disabled husband, her refusal to give the time of day to all those horny truck drivers.

  “Jim, he got him no regrets,” she insisted when Raymond tried to explain Vietnam to her. “He loves his country. Feels like that no sacrifice was too much to ask.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “Honey, I got my regrets,” she said. “You better believe it.”

  “That he was incapacitated defending interests not his own?”

  “Naw, honey.” She blushed. “That he can’t put it to me no more like he used to could.”

  “Ah.” Raymond had hardly thought about sex since he’d recovered from Maria. She’d inoculated him against “falling in love.” Nobody would ever again be in a position to hurt him that much. Jerking off a few times a month was all he really needed. “So what do you do instead?” He liked his kid brother role with women. It beat the hell out of playing Lothario.

  “Eat,” she said, grabbing a fork and finishing his piece of chocolate cake. “And I complain a lot to whoever’ll listen.”

  “I’ll listen all you want, Thelma. After all, you listen to me.”

  “I been thinking, Raymond.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You could do a lot more than listen, honey.” She lowered her eyes.

  He choked on his coffee.

  “Think about it,” she requested, moving away, her large buttocks swaying under her white uniform dress. He gazed at her back, wounded. What about Jim? Were there no trustworthy women in the world anymore?

  “You don’t let nobody near you, do you, honey?” she inquired the following week as she lay in his arms in a bed in a motel unit out back during her break.

  “Not if I can help it,” he murmured, swept with waves of gratitude. He hadn’t fucked anyone since Maria, hadn’t even been sure he could as Thelma led him from the restaurant. But she was delighted with him. He felt like a regular stud with her pitching, heaving, and moaning beneath him. And she didn’t have any trouble having an orgasm. All these goddam castrating Yankee intellectual bitches.

  “That’s why you and me’ll be good to each other, honey. I won’t intrude on you, and you won’t ask me to desert Jim.”

  “God, I’m going to be so good to you, Thelma.” He gathered one of her large breasts in both hands and nibbled on the nipple as it stiffened.

  By the grapevine he heard an ATW organizer was coming to town. Together they mapped out a strategy and persuaded a few of the more intelligent workers like Mrs. Pritchard and Hank and Betty Osborne to join an organizing committee. After winning the election and defeating Mackay’s challenge that the votes hadn’t been properly cou
nted, they negotiated a pretty good contract. Even the workers who’d fought against the ATW seemed pretty pleased with the benefits package. Except his father and brother, of course, who’d go to their graves still tools for the bosses. Almost everywhere he went, Raymond was respected and admired. At union meetings when someone questioned something he said, someone else would say, “This boy’s been up North. Better listen to him. Knows what he’s talking about.”

  Raymond would reply irritably, “Look, down here we know everything they know up there, and then some.” Sometimes he wondered if these people understood what he was telling them. He reminded himself to be patient, to remember that they’d been in thralldom for so long that they needed reeducation. Eventually he’d organize classes to teach them about their proud Southern working-class heritage—the strikes and union wars, Harlan and Evarts and Gastonia, Barney Graham and Mother Jones and John L. Lewis.

  Then a new machine was brought into the card room, and Mackay announced he was hiring a new woman to run it, instead of giving it to Mrs. Pritchard, who’d been reinstated and had seniority. Raymond, as shop steward, went to Mackay, who said, “Mr. Tatro, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

  Raymond squared his shoulders. Who did this Mackay think he was anyhow, trifling with Southern working people?

  “Let me tell you this, Mr. Mackay: You put somebody new on that machine, and we’ll all walk right out of this place.”

  He turned red. “Mr. Tatro, if you walk out, you’ll walk back in over my dead body.”

  At the rally at the high school gym after the walkout the ATW district representative said he was impressed with the local’s solidarity, but that they’d broken their contract, and that they’d better get their asses back into that plant and follow the grievance procedures. Raymond leaped up and yelled that if they went back in with that new machine still there, they’d never get it out again. He urged people to stay out until the machine was removed. The room erupted in cheers and angry shouts of agreement.