Sources of Light

by Margaret McMullan

  Had he really done this? And what was Stone's involvement? Had he stood by and watched, then done nothing? Or had he tried to stand up to these men as he had stood up to his father and saved me in McComb?

  But then, why would Stone have allowed me to take and keep Perry's camera? Maybe he wanted me to know. Maybe he wanted me to see for myself what he couldn't admit about his father and maybe about himself. Maybe letting me keep the camera was Stone's way of confessing.

  It came slow, but it all became clear to me, as gradual as the appearance of that picture on the blank sheet of paper.

  I found Perry's camera at the Petrified Forest, where they must have taken him. They had done this. Stone and his father and their terrible group had done this. They had taken a man to a place to be beaten, then Stone had taken me there to that same place to be kissed.

  Was it really possible that this boy I'd kissed was also someone who beat and kicked a human being to death? It took a gazillion years for those trees in that forest to transform into something they were not, but what I wanted to know now was how long exactly did it take for a human heart to turn to stone?

  And how could people you know, people you thought to be good, people who were busy, working people, neighbors, how could they do these kinds of things? How can murder happen in the everyday? How can a man be beaten to death while nearby others talked, ate sandwiches, did the dishes, put clothes out to dry, or kissed? How?

  Did good happen the same way? Could an angel fall from the sky while Willa Mae made tuna salad? Could help come on horseback or in a squad car while I was skipping rope?

  You're traveling through another dimension.... That's the signpost up ahead—your next stop... I might as well have been in a Twilight Zone episode—maybe the one in which they are all on a plane that accidentally breaks the sound barrier and they can't land because the year is not their year, but in my show, I'd land and the year I'd land in would be the future. Because I needed to know. I needed to know that things were changed, different, and better, not like this. Not worse.

  All I wanted to do was fight this hate with my own rising hate. I wanted to hunt Stone down myself, slap him, and kick him even. Because really, didn't it take murder and violence to knock some people to their senses?

  Outside the wind was blowing, and the hard leaves of the magnolia snapped against one another. Here was this beautiful world, so why were people messing with it?

  I stared at all the pictures hanging on the line. Here was proof that the police had arrested the wrong man. What now? Who could I trust with them? I couldn't give them to the police or to the newspaper.

  I left Perry's darkroom to find my mother on the sofa, weeping, Perry's photographs of her and us in her lap. I went to her and we held each other.

  "This will all be over soon," she said. "It just can't keep on and on, that's all. You'll see. Soon, we'll hardly remember any of this." I know she meant for that to sound like a good thing, not remembering what had happened and was still happening, but I didn't want to forget.

  It seemed to me that what James Meredith and Perry Walker and all the others did, what they had witnessed and lived through, what they sometimes died for, was of greater benefit to us than all the satellites and Sputniks being put into space. Their courage went beyond the courage of the cosmonauts or astronauts. I doubted I would ever have that kind of courage.

  I thought of them all. I thought of my dad and even people I'd never met—my great-grandfather Frank Russell and all the Choctaw who had been moved, plowed, or lived over. I used to think the dead went away as if they were going on vacation to Florida or somewhere else nice. Then I began thinking they might stay closer to home. They were with us and they were not with us. They reminded us. They kept us company. They could be our friends or our foes—we decided. I wondered if Perry would haunt the McLemores. He wouldn't be scared to. After all, ghosts couldn't die.

  CHAPTER 16

  AFTER I SHOWED MY MOTHER THE PICTURES I'd developed in Perry's darkroom, she wondered out loud what we should do. We hurried home and we showed my grandmother.

  I had two folders full. I watched my grandmother's face as she looked through them. It was odd; I felt as if she shouldn't see them, as though they would be too much for her. I wanted to protect her from their badness.

  Anybody could look through these and make out the struggle—the arms, the fists, the billy clubs. In the pictures, the men doing the hitting were smiling. Some of the faces were blurry, but some were clear and in focus. I looked for Stone, but I couldn't see him. Had he been there? If he had, he could have stopped them. If Stone was so strong, he could have tried and stopped them all.

  I wanted to ask my grandmother, How could this happen? But it felt good just to be close to her, to feel her long arms around me.

  "Their good time is coming to an end," she said, after a while. "They see it, and that's what the matter is." She sounded so old and tired. I felt terrible for showing her the pictures.

  How can we fix this? How can we fix this? I thought over and over.

  I got up and went to the phone.

  "Who are you calling?" my mother asked.

  "Stone."

  "Is that wise?"

  I sighed. "Probably not, but he needs to know."

  ***

  When he came to our front door that night, he looked surprised to see my mother and grandmother with me. I didn't beat around the bush. I just gave him the folders full of pictures, saying, "Remember that camera we both found at the Petrified Forest?"

  Stone saw what we'd already seen.

  "What are you going to do?" he said, looking at the three of us.

  "What do you want us to do, Stone?" my mother asked.

  He closed his eyes for a minute and took a deep breath. "We should take these to the police."

  "I'll take them myself," I started.

  "No," he said. "I should. I should take these to the police. I don't want you to get into any more danger. There are some people who shouldn't know you have these."

  "So," I said. My voice came out flat. "You were there."

  "No. I wasn't."

  "Stone, you don't have to—"

  "With all due respect, Mrs. Thomas, I really do have to. They wouldn't believe you, but I'm his son."

  "Well, son, with all due respect to you..." my grandmother said, taking the pictures from Stone, putting all that hate back in the folders. I thought at first she would tuck them away somewhere, under a bed or in a closet, where all boogeymen and scary things go to be hidden and forgotten. She smoothed her dress over her knees and held the folders on her lap. "How about we have Samantha develop two sets of prints. You have your copies, we have our copies. It's not that we don't trust you to do the right thing, mind you. It's just"—she hesitated—"insurance." She stood up. She looked tall all of a sudden. "A man's dead and the wrong man is in jail." She went to the phone and dialed. No one asked whom she was calling. "Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it."

  "I understand, ma'am, but there's no time to make copies."

  "Sam's got the negatives," my mother said.

  "We'll go with you to the station anyway. I'll drive. We go where the pictures go."

  "Grandmother."

  "Your grandmother's right, Samantha." Stone stood up. "Let's go."

  ***

  We all piled into my grandmother's big clean car, a car she called her Dinah Shore Chevy, which she had bought sometime in the fifties. She insisted on driving, offering us each Butter Rum Lifesavers from her purse as though they would give us strength and keep us safe for the ride ahead.

  We headed downtown, toward the police station.

  Inside the station, police officers looked through all the pictures, their faces turning to frowns. This time there was solid evidence and witnesses to that evidence. They said they would have to keep a few of the photos and Stone for further questioning.

  "Can they do that?" I asked my mother.

  "I'm afraid they c
an."

  "Leave me," Stone said to my mother, my grandmother, and me. He looked at me then and smiled.

  "I'll call your mother," my mother said.

  "No," he said. "Really. That isn't important."

  I hated that we had to leave Stone there in that place, but when we looked back at him, I was surprised to see him look relieved. His jaw unclenched, and he didn't look angry anymore.

  Inside the car, my grandmother said we had one more stop to make, a thirty-minute drive from where we were then.

  "Where?" I asked.

  "Mother, are you sure about this?" my mother asked. She was up front in the passenger's seat.

  "What are we doing?" I said.

  "No need to know until we get there," my grandmother said. "That way, if someone stops us, you won't have to lie."

  "What in the world is going on?"

  "Samantha," my mother said, turning around from the front seat. "You're just going to have to trust us just like you trusted Stone."

  ***

  My grandmother never really caught on to driving, maybe because she was unsure about women driving at all. Whenever she set out to drive, my grandfather would call after her, "Watch out for all that vehicular traffic!" But that never did her much good. She would slow down at green lights and whiz past red ones. She had not gotten into an accident yet because when they saw her coming down the road, everyone in Franklin pulled by the side of the road as though she were an ambulance. But we were outside of Franklin now.

  She hated going over bridges because she was scared of heights, so when we drove over the Pearl River she had to sing "Amazing Grace," which only put my mother to sleep.

  After we crossed the last bridge, my grandmother looked at me in the rearview mirror. My mother was still asleep. She signaled and turned on to another highway. "You know what my father used to tell me, back when I was growing up?" She sighed, and then she laughed outright. "He said, 'Thelma Addy. Being right is right lonely.'"

  She laughed again. "My father was right. But being wrong and doing nothing is worst of all."

  My grandmother drove on, turning off the highway, then stopping in front of a little white house with green shutters and a big front porch. There were so many woods and back roads and little unnamed pockets in these parts, it was easy to have and keep secrets here. A man with a dog sat in a rocking chair. He stood up when he saw my grandmother's car. My mother woke up, groggy. He asked us all up to the porch and they talked, this man and my grandmother. They were friends from way back. My mother and I sat and listened. They could have been kin for all that they had in common. My grandmother gave him the folders. He looked at the pictures.

  "Sometimes I think to understand Mississippi, you have to live here a hundred years," he said, looking through them once, twice, then stacking them neatly again. The oscillating porch fan whirred as we waited. "Samantha, I run a small newspaper that's getting some attention up north, maybe because we report the truth. Truth is hard to find down here. Us southerners tend to bury everything, then kudzu grows up over it. Perry Walker is dead. You found these pictures and you printed them, so I suppose I should ask you for your permission to publish these." He talked while turning the dog's floppy ears inside out.

  I looked at my grandmother, at my mother, then at him. I figured he might not really need my permission. Maybe he was just being polite. Who knew for sure? But I thought of my father then, when he told me I'd know when it was time to do the right thing. Nodding, then whispering my okay, I signed the sheet of paper called "Permission." We drank iced tea, and outside we watched the light go from yellow to slate blue. It was way past that time of day when everyone and everything has gone on home. And this is what we finally did.

  On our way back, my grandmother slowed and stopped for three college-age boys standing by the side of the road, next to their station wagon. Their car needed a jump-start, and my grandmother always kept cables and plugs in her trunk. While my mother and the boys hooked up the cables between the two cars, they told us they had come all the way down from New York and were headed for Philadelphia, Mississippi, to help black people register to vote. These boys were white boys, and my grandmother told them that Philadelphia was a strange, backwoodsy sort of town. The one dark-haired, dark-eyed boy told her he knew that and that was why they were staying in Meridian.

  It didn't take long for my grandmother's Dinah Shore Chevy to jump-start their station wagon, and after we said goodbye we headed our separate ways. It was late, and we all of us had a long drive ahead.

  CHAPTER 17

  THAT WEEK WAS OUR SPRING FIELD TRIP, and our class went to the Petrified Forest. I was dreading the day, but then when we all piled out of the school bus, I couldn't help but look down every now and then, secretly hoping to find my pearl earrings.

  Our guide showed us arrowheads people had found there. We passed them around. We touched them and held them in the palm of our hand. Mary Alice was wearing a leotard under her skirt, and she was doing something she called plies, going down-up-up, down-up-up. I wanted her to quit while our guide was talking. I moved away so I could listen more closely to our guide telling us what all and who all had come here before us.

  Something changes when you find out about who lived in a place before you, when you find evidence of everyday life from another time in your own time. Those arrowheads came to us as a sort of message, making me feel different about the ground I walked over that day.

  My grandmother made a roast that night for dinner, and she showed us her friend's newspaper. There in two full pages were Perry's pictures of his own brutal beating.

  "They ran a double truck," my grandmother said.

  My mother and I both stared at her.

  "A double truck!" she said again, as if she couldn't believe we didn't know what that meant. "That's newspaper talk for two full pages. I've learned a thing or two from my friends through the years."

  Our smiling felt strange, but then we grew quiet, looking at the awful truth those pictures revealed.

  ***

  Somehow everyone at school assumed that I had something to do with the pictures in the paper that now made the national news. My mother and I had heard that Mr. McLemore had been held at the police station, then released with Stone soon after that night we left him there. But after the pictures showed up on the national news, Mr. McLemore and two other men were arrested again, and this time charged with abduction and battery. The police found the black man they had arrested to be innocent and released him.

  Stone quit coming to school for a while. In all, he missed something like three weeks. Mary Alice kept coming, though. We heard that Mr. McLemore's business suffered from the publicity, and that Mrs. McLemore wouldn't leave the house. When Stone finally did come back, he came to my locker, and his right eye was black and blue and swollen. I didn't ask what happened, and I could tell Stone appreciated my not asking.

  I had thought about this time, when we would finally talk again. For days, I'd dreamed I yelled at Stone, telling him that Perry Walker's blood was on his hands, then in the same dream we were kissing on a bed of pine needles in the Petrified Forest. I woke up feeling embarrassed and guilty.

  But he didn't say anything, and his face didn't look angry. We were both so oddly calm in a way I never would have expected. We walked together out of the building. It was raining. The weather had turned balmy. We stood and looked out at the playground near the church and the sidewalks flooding with rainwater.

  He told me there would be a trial, and most likely he was going to be used as a witness against his own father. He sounded tired. He looked at me with his handsome dark eyes. "You know, I wasn't sure until I saw the pictures." He stopped himself. "I just wanted you to know I didn't mean for things to happen the way they did." He looked at the ground. It was as if he went back to being a little boy then. "I do what I'm told, but not everything. I tried to stop them, Samantha, but there were so many of them. And it was just me. I didn't go. I wasn't there when they did what
they did to Perry in those woods, but then, when I saw those pictures..." His eyes filled with tears. "I didn't know they'd taken him there to the Petrified Forest. I wouldn't have taken you there that day, if I'd known. Really, I wouldn't have. But when you found Perry's camera that day, that's when I started to wonder. That's when I started putting two and two together. I guess I was trying to fool myself."

  "I'm sorry." It was all I could think of to say.

  He shrugged, looked down, and shook his head. "He did wrong, but I had to do right. The police had to see those pictures. Facts don't lie. But he's still my dad." He sighed and put his hand to his eye. "He'll always be my dad."

  I put my arm around Stone. He pulled me to him and hugged me close, and for a while, I didn't think either one of us would ever let go. Quietly and in his own way, Stone had done the right thing, after all. We both had, separately. I couldn't help but wonder what we might have accomplished together. In a camera, the aperture is an opening through which light passes. Without the aperture, without this opening, you would never get a picture or any of the masterful photographs I'd learned to appreciate. It had been risky, but Stone and I both opened up a part of our selves to each other. Surely he and I captured something—a moment, a feeling, a document of the heart, to keep, review, and hold close.

  When we finally did let go, we looked out toward the street, and I started walking. I needed to get home.

  "Watch the puddles," Stone said after me. I turned and nodded, then waved goodbye. The sun coming out lit up the top branches of the pine trees. I wished then that I had my camera. The picture I really wanted? That's the one I never took—a profile of Stone looking skyward, thinking on all those stars. You'd see his nose, his upper Elvis lip, and the silhouette of his eyelashes. That picture would show the Stone I knew and that time when we had only our lives and the heavens to consider, nothing else.