Safe from the Neighbors

by Steve Yarbrough

  May I sleep in your barn tonight mister

  It is cold lying out on the ground

  And the cold north wind it is blowing

  And I have no place to lie down.

  Oh I have no tobacco or matches

  And I’m sure that I’ll do you no harm.

  I will tell you my story kind mister

  For it runs through my heart like a thorn.

  Afterwards, he couldn’t say how long they’d sat there. But at some point he restarted the motor and pulled off down the road. My mother was dozing, chin against chest, and didn’t even wake when the van started to move.

  Driving back to town, he passed the house where the Calloways used to live, at the intersection of two country roads. The backyard has never been fenced, so when you’re driving by you can see what, if anything, is going on, and turning towards town you can see the north side and then the front. There’s nothing very fancy about it, just a ranch-style with a carport and that little pool out back. He didn’t know who lived there anymore, and I don’t either, but whoever it is must have a kid or two, because there’s always a trike lying in the driveway and, in the front yard, a football or basketball. The window trim could use a coat of paint, three or four shingles are missing from the roof, and the concrete’s cracked in the driveway.

  He recalled that there was a time when he wanted a house like this more than anything in the world. He wanted it not for himself but for Momma and me, and I believe he came to think of it as some kind of ideal, something that was out there waiting somewhere if only you could satisfy a certain set of requirements. The problem was, he could never figure out exactly what the requirements were, let alone how to meet them. I doubt it would be accurate, though, to say he had no clue.

  Meeting the requirements, he must’ve suspected, depended on your ability to forget everything you’d learned during that period when reproving looks, raised voices and razor strops were teaching you what the differences between you and the beasts that once roamed the Delta ought to be. When you needed to relieve yourself, you couldn’t squat in the middle of the kitchen and let go, as I once heard him say he had as a toddler. When your belly growled, you didn’t pick up a butcher knife, plunge it into your brother’s chest, cut his heart out and eat it on the porch. But when a panther’s bowels grew heavy, it emptied them on the spot. When it got hungry, it found something small and defenseless, then killed and devoured it. It didn’t waste time justifying itself. It drew no distinctions between need and want.

  I knew from others—my grandfather, my uncles—that my father’d had a harder time than most learning to draw those distinctions, which was why authority figures like his own father and various teachers used to holler and, from time to time, administer a whipping. He’d gotten into a fair number of fights in the school yard, after somebody who didn’t wear hand-me-downs made a snide remark about the length of his pants, or held his nose and said phew! at his approach. But eventually those lessons sank in, and back when forgetting them might have won him the keys to the house he sat looking at on that mid-October day, he couldn’t.

  Because in the end, he didn’t want the house, or one like it, badly enough. Because what isn’t yours, you don’t take. For him it was really that simple.

  A few days later he was driving my mother around on the other side of town, out close to Choctaw Creek. There weren’t a lot of places nearby left to see, and by then he’d gotten scared to go more than fifteen or twenty miles. He wanted to drive over to the big river, pull her up on the levee and let her see it again, but he feared that was too far. His eyesight was not what it used to be—for one thing—and if something went wrong with the van out there he knew he’d have a real mess on his hands.

  He also had it in his mind to show her the pool where he’d taught her to swim. I imagine he laughed when he thought about that because in reality she only knew how to for about two or three minutes. He’d taught her by doing what you’d do to a child: he pushed her in, and she flailed around, calling him words she’d never used before or since, but she managed to stay afloat. While my grandmother and I and fifteen or twenty other relatives laughed and slapped our thighs, she dog-paddled down to the shallow end, climbed out, grabbed a cup of punch and threw it in his face.

  He was forty years old then, and that was forty years ago. He behaved like a boy that day. It must have seemed impossible to him now that he could’ve actually been one, much less acted like that on a hot afternoon, which after all was during Vietnam, when kids were coming home in boxes every day. There was plenty in his recent past that would make his heart heavy, and the future held few promises. I remember hearing him tell my mother he didn’t have enough spare money to help rent the swimming pool that day, but he did it anyway, and I doubt he was ever sorry. It must have been worth twice as much to see her bound out of the water, soaking wet, and grab that cup of punch.

  The house and the pool were hidden behind tall hedges, but if you stopped right at the edge of the driveway, you could at least see the sliding board, which stands at the deep end. As he eased his foot onto the brake, he glanced over to see if Momma was awake.

  She was, after a fashion. Her eyes were open, anyway.

  “Remember what happened here?” I can hear him asking. “How fast you got from one end of that pool to the other? Lord, you done something special. That day you could’ve beat Don Schollander. Hell, I bet you could’ve even beat old Johnny Weiss-muller.”

  That October afternoon, she was actually responsive. She lifted her head, he remembered later on, so he raised his hand and, when it looked like she was focused on it, pointed out the window, directing her attention towards the driveway. She might have seen it before he did: my familiar old Ford Taurus standing beside a gleaming Mercedes with a North Carolina plate.

  FOR MANY YEARS, the chancery clerk in Loring County was Robert Worthington. Back in the ’60s, while a member of the Citizens’ Council, he wrote incendiary letters to Ellis Buchanan and the Weekly Times, alleging all kinds of devious behavior by black people involved in voter registration drives and those few whites like Ellis who supported them. The person he hated most, it seemed, was Charlie McGlothlan, the attorney who led the boycotts and eventually got crop dusted in front of the courthouse. In one letter, Worthington stopped just short of calling for his lynching.

  By the beginning of the next decade, though, he’d experienced a change of heart. In 1972, he supported McGlothlan for the state legislature, and even though Charlie lost and never ran again, that was the first of many political campaigns on which they collaborated. When I moved back to Loring to start teaching, Worthington was one of a handful of whites who still voted Democrat beyond the local level. A delegate to the 1984 National Convention, he pledged to Walter Mondale.

  Around then, Jennifer and I took a trip to the East Coast to visit battlefields and monuments and art museums, take in a few poetry readings and browse used bookstores. In Philadelphia one day, I picked up a copy of the Inquirer, and whose face should appear on the front page, with the Loring County Courthouse in the background, but Robert Worthington’s? The article detailed how he’d gone from being an ardent foe of civil rights to a devoted champion.

  There on the street, just a block or so from Constitution Hall, I got tears in my eyes. I’d never met Mr. Worthington, but that didn’t matter. I knew where he was from and understood just how far he’d come, so I bought several more copies of the Inquirer, folded them neatly and put them in my suitcase. A couple of weeks later, when we got back home, I looked up his number and called him.

  This was in the days before the Internet, so while he’d known the article was coming he hadn’t seen it yet. Since I was the first person he’d heard from who’d read it, he asked me to come right over.

  When I got there, he’d just made a pot of coffee and offered me a cup, which I drank at his kitchen table while he read the piece. He was about sixty then, still serving as chancery clerk, married to his high school sweetheart, a woman,
he said in the article, he’d loved for forty-five years. She wasn’t at home that day. As I recall, she’d gone shopping.

  He was an old man who possessed no unusual gifts, as far as I could see, but he’d started his life in one world and adapted to another, and it occurred to me, sitting there watching him read, that he was the most curious kind of immigrant, one who lived right where he’d been born. When he finished and laid the paper down, I told him how I’d felt there on the street in Philadelphia. It was the first time, I said, that I’d ever been proud to come from Loring, Mississippi.

  That remark seemed to take him by surprise. “Why?” he asked. “Why would this article”—he tapped the paper with a stubby finger—“make anybody proud?”

  “Because you knew you were wrong,” I said, “and you were man enough to change. That’s a rare thing.”

  “Oh, son, every day somebody quits doing something he knew was wrong, for the same reason I did, and there’s nothing special or heroic about it.” It must have been obvious that I hadn’t followed his reasoning, so he went on to explain. “I didn’t tell this to that Philadelphia reporter, because I knew he couldn’t understand. But I imagine you will. The truth is, I don’t like black folks. Never have, never will. Now, that’s a weakness of mine, and I know it. But trying to convince yourself you’re right when you know you’re not—well, it gets to be too goddamn much trouble, son. It’s just a whole lot easier to give it up.” For a minute, I thought he’d leave it at that, and I wanted him to, so I could excuse myself and escape this disappointment. Instead, he added: “If my experience’s any gauge, though, I have to admit that doing right’s a lot less satisfying.”

  Spending time with Maggie was the most satisfying thing I’d ever done, so I tried to convince myself it wasn’t wrong. Jennifer, I told myself, didn’t really care that much about sex anymore—the last few years offered perfect proof—but what she did care about, and what any woman would, was being treated with kindness by her husband.

  Therefore, I reasoned, my involvement with another woman, at least while it lasted, might actually make our marriage happier. I started making breakfast for Jennifer, getting up before she did and brewing her tea and fixing her oatmeal. The first couple of times it happened, she was thrown into confusion. “Have you switched from coffee to tea?” she asked me, standing there in her rose-colored bathrobe with yet another thin book tucked under her arm.

  “No, the tea’s for you.”

  “Are you eating oatmeal?”

  “No, that’s for you, too.”

  I saw her glance at the wall calendar, wondering if she’d forgotten some special date, but the nineteenth of October was just another day. “All right,” she said. “Thanks.”

  I poured a cup of coffee and sat down across the table from her, leaving the Commercial Appeal in its wrapper. She glanced at the book of poems—the title was a real eyepopper, The Beauty of the Husband—but I guess she thought it wouldn’t be quite right to pick it up and start reading. “I had a pretty good class last night,” she said. “There’s a bunch of older people in it and they all did their assignments, which was really quite amazing. Normally, in that night class you get the dregs who put off registration until nothing else is left.”

  The previous afternoon I’d gone over to Maggie’s for the fifth Wednesday in a row. We’d sat on her couch for a while, drinking and talking, and before long she disappeared into the hallway and returned with two photo albums. We looked at pictures of her and her husband in Japan, Argentina and Saudi Arabia. They’d even been to the Himalayas—a few shots taken in a Sherpa village, both of them soused on rakshi, which she said was a potato brew similar to vodka. Her husband had gray hair and a square chin, and it only dawned on me later how much he resembled Arlan Calloway.

  I couldn’t imagine how looking at those pictures made her feel, knowing that the man she’d spent a quarter century with was now gone, and I said so. “When he was dying,” she said, “the worst part was sitting by the bed in the hospital and facing his optimism.”

  “He was probably better off, remaining optimistic.”

  “Probably. But until then he’d always been such a realist, and that’s what I loved most about him. The first time he found out I’d been sleeping with another man, I cried and promised I’d never do it again, if only he’d take me back, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘This is a measure of what you mean to me: I’ll take you back knowing full well I will go through this again and again.’ And he was right.”

  “And now you feel terribly guilty about it?”

  “I am guilty. And I would be whether I felt it or not.”

  “Do you wish you hadn’t done it?”

  She shook her head. “I could say yes, but what would that be worth? I did it. It’s a fact. And now I’m doing it again.”

  I pointed out that there was one crucial difference: she was no longer married.

  “Yes,” she said, “but you are. And I imagine that for whoever keeps tabs on this, it’s the same thing.”

  “We could stop,” I said, though I didn’t mean it. Maybe she could, but by that point, I knew I couldn’t—or wouldn’t, anyway, of my own accord.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not anytime soon. We’ll have to get caught and be humiliated.”

  After that sobering exchange, neither of us said anything for a while, and then I asked a question that had been on my mind ever since she came back with those photo albums. “You don’t have any pictures of your mom, do you?”

  She closed the one that was lying in her lap. Several seconds passed before she made a sound, and when she did it was just to heave a deep sigh.

  “What?” I said.

  “I knew when I went to get the albums that you were going to ask. But then you didn’t, and I’d just about decided you wouldn’t after all.”

  “Look, if you don’t want to go there, it’s all right. Forget it.”

  “Oh, but I already am there. Or I guess I should say I’m already here.”

  “Please,” I said, as she got up off the couch and gathered up the albums, “really, just let it go.”

  She went off down the hallway, leaving me sitting there feeling like a member of the paparazzi or, worse yet, a plain old voyeur. A few moments later she returned with a frayed manila folder, sat down beside me and opened it, and there stood Nadine Calloway, in black and white, eye to eye with an enormous dark-colored horse whose nose had a lighter streak down the middle. Her left hand was reaching out to pet it, and her mouth was open as if she were talking to it. Her dress had padded shoulders and a cinch around the waist.

  My throat felt constricted. I was afraid that when I spoke, my voice would come out as a croak.

  Maggie saved me the trouble. “As you can see,” she said, “I don’t look anything like her. If I thought I did, we wouldn’t be where we are. I don’t want to be a substitute for someone else. Not even my mother.”

  My voice was actually more like a squeak. “What?”

  “You always had such a crush on her,” she said. “It was worse than most little-boy crushes, and I sometimes wondered how it made your mother feel. I guess it didn’t bother her, though, because she adored my mom. Everybody did.”

  “You aren’t a substitute for anybody,” I said, “and nobody could take your place.” I spoke without thinking, saying what I believed the moment called for, and it wasn’t until later that I realized I’d inadvertently told the truth. She’d created a desire nobody else would ever satisfy. When she went back to North Carolina—and I reminded myself every day that she eventually would—she wouldn’t leave behind a hole. She’d leave a bloody wound.

  She pulled off the top snapshot and quickly showed me the two underneath. In the first, her mother had stepped away from the horse but was still looking at it, her head cocked slightly to the side, her right hand shading her eyes. In the second, they’d turned away from each other, the horse’s left foreleg a foot or so off the ground, beginning to bend, and her mo
ther’s right hand was raised, thumb in the air, seemingly gesturing backwards at the horse. It looked as if she was speaking to the photographer, since she was staring right at the camera and her lips had formed a word. Whoever was taking the pictures had stepped farther back before snapping the last one. You could see a wooden post and a couple strands of wire between the lens and Nadine.

  “That’s an electric fence,” I said. “See this little white thing there?” I pointed with my fingertip. “That’s a porcelain insulator.”

  “A little electricity never scared her. I remember that she crawled under it, dress and all.”

  “What was the occasion?”

  “She wanted my father to buy that horse.”

  “I don’t recall your having one.”

  “We didn’t. He said no. Then he laughed and offered to get her a riding mower instead.”

  “Whose horse was it?”

  “Just one she saw beside the road. Somewhere nearby. I’ve thought several times in the last few weeks that I recognized the spot. But lots of things look different now with all these fish ponds where the cotton used to be.”

  She put the snapshots back in the same order, then closed the folder. When she looked at me, there was no missing the moisture in her eyes. “Satisfied?”

  “Sure. Thanks for letting me see them. I guess I overstepped a boundary by asking.”

  “Well, we’re stepping over every boundary we can find. What’s the harm in one more?”

  She carried the file back down the hallway, and left it wherever she kept such things, and when she came back we grilled a couple of steaks and ate dinner in her kitchen, drinking a bottle of the best French wine I’d ever tasted. I asked her where she’d gotten it, and she said she’d gone to Memphis on Saturday and bought it at Wild Oats. When we finished, we dumped the dishes in the sink and then she said, “Would you like to go upstairs?”