“Reckon you know what that stink is,” Arlan said. “Navy give you any training with gas?”
The navy had offered gas training, but that was when he’d been in the hospital with pneumonia, about to die, and then they shipped him out without forcing him to make it up. “I know how to put the mask on,” he said. “We had ’em on board.”
“Yeah, well we ain’t got ’em on board now.” Arlan pulled to the side of the road, got out and grabbed something from under the seat. While my father sat and watched, he walked around in front of the truck, into the glare of his own headlights, carrying a couple of towels. He stooped down next to the road ditch. Then he climbed back in and laid the soaked towels on the seat.
I told him it looked like he come prepared and he put the truck in gear and said that when folks started shooting it was best to be. I asked if he’d been shot at a lot and he said that a lot or a little it didn’t make no difference, it was like fucking, do it once and you get the gist.
Arlan pulled back on the road, and the truck topped a rise. Up ahead half a mile or so, they saw flashing lights and uniformed men running back and forth, hundreds of them. They were members of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, and my father thought, as any sane person would, they were setting up a roadblock to stop people like him and Arlan from reaching the campus. In reality, the police were on the verge of mounting an attack themselves. They’d just decided to storm the Lyceum and kill every last marshal if they had to. The attack was averted, according to William Doyle’s book, by a visit from Paul B. Johnson, Jr., the lieutenant governor, who told them: “Don’t go up there fighting with those federals.”
When he saw all them folks Arlan pumped the brakes but didn’t actually stop, he just looked at me and asked what I wanted to do. Said for me to make the call.
This was not, my father knew, in Arlan Calloway’s nature. Though he didn’t say so in the notebook, he must have realized that his friend was acting out of character, and this, in and of itself, should have given him pause. But it failed to—he must have been pumping adrenaline, his heart pounding, his face and neck hot. In his side-view mirror he saw headlights on the road behind them, several more vehicles streaming into town. They could all get together and try to force the roadblock, he guessed, or a group of them could engage the highway patrolmen while the rest took off through the woods ahead on the right. That would’ve made a certain kind of sense, assuming anybody felt like doing so that night. But he wasn’t much interested in concerted action. “Let’s park right up yonder,” he said, “and see if we can’t slip through them trees.”
“I get it—a little flanking maneuver, like Jackson at Chancellorsville?”
I knew damn well he was mocking me and I figured I deserved it like the whole damn state did and that this time next week Meredith would be sitting in school on a campus I’d never seen and probably never would, not that I wanted to because by then I didn’t. And I still don’t. Yeah I said, like Jackson. So he pulls off the road and says he guessed I knew what happened to old Stonewall a little while later in that battle. And I said yeah, that he got shot by one of his own, a Tar Heel confused in the dark. Then I said what I knew would get him good and I was right. I said if he was scared to go with me he didn’t need to. I said I got a lot less to lose than you do. You can go on back home and take care of your kids. And that great big beautiful wife.
He’d known Arlan Calloway longer than anyone else. He knew what his face looked like when he was mad, how his mouth used to get smaller when a teacher embarrassed him or a town kid taunted him, the corners of it drawn together so tightly that it no longer looked like a mouth at all, but more like an asshole. It certainly did that night.
“I can take care of my wife,” Arlan said. “Do not fucking besaddle yourself with any worries about that.”
Besaddle, my father felt fairly certain, wasn’t an American word, just a set of sounds Arlan had put together to disguise his despair, and this marked a turning point. Feeling in control for the first time all night, my father opened the door and climbed out of the truck.
Arlan sat there looking across the seat at him while the handguns and rifles kept going off and a column of smoke rose into the black sky. Finally he threw Dad one of the wet towels, then grabbed his shotgun and jumped out.
When he thought back on that night, my father always remembered how he and Arlan lingered at the edge of the woods, each one waiting for the other to take the first step. Neither of them carried a flashlight, a major oversight they normally wouldn’t be guilty of. It was as if they both understood that the business at hand could only be transacted in the dark.
My dad tripped on a log or stump but managed to right himself. Undergrowth broke beneath his feet, and when he stepped into a soggy spot the mud made a sucking sound. “Reckon the rattlers are out tonight?” he said.
“They got ’em up here?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I ain’t even set foot in Oxford and don’t know much about this part of the state. If we don’t get killed, though, I reckon we could ask old man Horton. He went to school up here. Him and that fellow that runs the newspaper.”
Mr. Calloway didn’t respond. The woods smelled of ammonia, onions, rotten wood. The gunfire got louder as they moved towards campus, and by then there would have been no shortage of it. My father recalled hearing the droning noise of chopper blades slicing the air, and somebody hollered something over a bullhorn. A moment later a cheer went up, like you’d hear at a football game when the home team scored a touchdown.
“Sounds like maybe they just put a rope around Meredith’s neck,” my father said, and it occurred to him, once he said it, that this was as far as he needed or wanted to go, that right there in the middle of the woods was where he and Arlan ought to do whatever they were going to. The same realization must have struck Mr. Calloway, because when Dad stopped pushing through the undergrowth, he did too. They just stood there in the woods waiting for something to happen, and before long, my father recalled, it did: above their heads they heard the thunk of a stray slug tearing into a tree.
And right then is when he says to me I withdrew my bid on your land last week. Says I guess nobody told you. Or maybe they did and it don’t matter. Could be you think that me placing that bid took a few inches off your height or lopped off the end of your dick. I don’t know and I don’t care. I thought I had to when I did it, but I was wrong. I ain’t about to tell you I’m sorry though because you won’t believe me no way. You got your mind made up. But he was wrong about that. My mind wasn’t made up. It was when I placed that phone call and when I got in the truck and it was still made up back there on the road when I got out and started tromping through them woods into what was sounding more like a engagement between armies. It was not made up now because all I wanted was to keep a roof over the heads of my wife and boy and if Arlan didn’t aim to take it away then there really wasn’t any big problem. Which was not the same as saying we’d ever be friends again because we wouldn’t.
My father’s eyes were starting to burn—from the gas, he thought, though later on he wondered if it might not have been something else. “Why’d you do it, Arlan? What in the name of God made you want to take what little I call mine?”
He could see him over there in the dark—his small, trim outline—and the muzzle of his shotgun, which was not, Dad noticed, pointing at the ground. He was holding that thing waist high with the stock near his navel and the barrel jutting out from his rib cage like a extra arm. And though I didn’t know it till then my own right hand had worked under my waistband and wrapped itself around the butt of that Colt Python like it had gone there on its own without no help from me.
Arlan Calloway laughed. “What you call yours? Yeah, that’s about right. You might call that house and land yours, but they’re not and you shouldn’t ever forget it. My land actually is mine, but you don’t see a problem with standing in my front yard and throwing your arms around my wife and telling her, ‘Lord, if you ain’t something.
’”
At first my father didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he remembered Arlan dropping him off in front of his house that night after the Council meeting and then going off to check on things, that he’d seen Nadine standing there and made that remark. But Arlan couldn’t have heard it. His engine was still running and he was already backing out of his driveway. “Do what?” Dad said.
And that outraged Arlan. “Don’t you dare say do what. Nadine’s daddy used to talk like that, and he’s a dumb-ass redneck.”
It came to me right then that’s exactly what the both of us was. Only dumb-ass rednecks would be trying to settle their private scores while half a mile away folks was shooting at one another and maybe even dying to keep a air force veteran from going to school where he wanted to. I knew it was wrong to keep him out and though I didn’t want him in I wouldn’t of fought to keep it from happening. And it seemed to me then like it does now that me and Arlan had some disease in common though I’ll be damned if I know what to call it.
He heard himself laugh. “Is there such a word as benignant?”
“I have no fucking idea,” Arlan told him. “I have to look all that shit up in a dictionary. And if there is such a word, I don’t need it here tonight.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a word. I believe it means when something’s not dangerous, that it’s okay.”
“Things between you and me are not okay.”
My father probably tried for the jocular tone guys will use when discussing things they think only a man can understand. “My Lord, you thought I was trying to make time with your wife? Why?”
“I knew somebody was, and at the time you were the only one that came to mind.”
Somewhere behind them, a bullet pinged off a tree. “Because I said wasn’t she something?”
“I wouldn’t tell your wife that.”
“Well, my wife’s not exactly the kind of woman that makes anybody want to say that.” My father immediately regretted that comment. “Listen, don’t get me wrong,” he added, “I wouldn’t trade her for—”
“I don’t give a shit if you’d trade her or not. I got half a mind to shoot you, James. Nobody’d ever know I did it, not with all this hell that’s breaking loose. I could say we got separated in the dark and the marshals or the National Guard or somebody else must’ve shot you. But you know that. It’s why you wanted us to come up here in the first place. You meant to lead me out into the woods and shoot me, James, and that plain ain’t right. I might’ve taken your house—hell, there’s no might to it, I damn well would’ve if I needed to—but I wouldn’t have tried to kill you.”
I wasn’t safe from my neighbor but my neighbor, he was safe from me. I might of used the Python fifteen minutes earlier or fifteen years later if I ever needed to to protect my wife and boy. But I couldn’t use it then and there was nothing I could do but hope that Arlan knew it.
Evidently, he didn’t. While my father stood there suddenly awash in sweat, Arlan Calloway brought the muzzle around.
The sound, when Dad heard it, was right behind him where, as far as he knew, no living creature ought to be. A quick rustling followed by a couple thumps—of feet whacking the ground?—and then something dark and frantic darted past. Arlan swung his shotgun in that direction, and my father expected the night to explode, but it didn’t. Whatever it was had bolted through the woods towards the road—the dark form leaping forward, rising four or five feet into the air—with both of them staring after it.
And then Arlan looks at me and says I wish I’d shot that goddamn deer. You’ve sure made me want to fire this gun tonight.
Driving back to Loring they kept meeting cars and pickups, hundreds if not thousands of folks bound for Oxford. Arlan had turned the radio down low, but my father could still hear it. Someone else had been killed, and the 108th Cavalry was moving into position to assault the campus. Helicopters hovering near the administration building were constantly being shot at by the rioters. One reporter claimed the marshals had run out of teargas, that the Lyceum couldn’t be held much longer. Nobody seemed to know where Meredith was, even whether or not he was still alive. There was speculation that the marshals might have airlifted him back to Memphis.
This would prove false. In just a few hours, accompanied by the chief U.S. marshal and an assistant attorney general, Meredith entered the rear door of the Lyceum and registered for classes, becoming a junior at the University of Mississippi. On August 18, 1963, he earned the college degree that my father never dreamed of.
None of that would have mattered to Dad had he known it that evening. What mattered, as he and Arlan rode together through a night as dark as any he’d ever seen, was that this time next year he and my mother and I would be right where we’d always been, the three of us eating around the table in a home that belonged to the county. It wasn’t an especially good place to be—most folks, he knew, would consider it pretty awful—but at least it was familiar. We wouldn’t be undergoing any big changes. And, on some level, he was grateful to Arlan for putting him to the test. Now he knew something about himself that he’d never known before, and this could only be a good thing. You need to know yourself. You need to know what you’d be willing to do in the service of those you love.
When Arlan stopped on the main road to let him out, it was a quarter till four on the first of October. He could walk the two hundred yards to our house and maybe get an hour or two of sleep before heading off to the fields to pick the rest of his crop. And the moment his feet hit the ground, he felt strangely buoyant. He looked into the cab at a man who’d been his best friend for as long as he could remember, a little guy with a hard face and tired eyes. He had a lot that my father lacked, and almost anybody assessing their relative merits would say that his future was a whole lot brighter. But my dad wouldn’t have traded places with him even if the opportunity arose. “You take care of yourself, Arlan,” he said.
There was no reply. So my father shut the door and Arlan Calloway drove off down the road, heading home to his kids and his wife.
When Ellis rang the bell that Christmas Eve, I didn’t open the door. He knocked a few times, too, but then had the good sense to leave. It was cold outside, the snow falling heavily now, and he didn’t intend to stand there with that ham and bottle of wine under his arm and freeze. I apologized later on, and of course he understood once I told him I’d been sitting on the laundry room floor with my father’s life spread out across my knees.
In the months since I’ve thought a good bit about what we know and how we know it and have concluded that I know a lot more about some things than I realized and much less about others. Some of what I know involves facts, some of it doesn’t, and even the part that does isn’t as dependent on the facts themselves as it is on my own capacity to believe and accept truths that might be painful. I’ve also spent time thinking about how one event can lead to another and have come to understand that while cause might well be, as I’ve long thought, the most frequently misappropriated term in our language, its properties are nevertheless real and more than a little mysterious.
The day I asked Dad what he meant when he said he’d been out looking after my interests that night in 1962, he replied, “I’ll tell you this: the answer won’t never be found in no book.” But about that, and no small number of other things as well, my father was wrong.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the writing of this novel, the following sources were invaluable: The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity, by James C. Cobb; Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, by John Dittmer; An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, by William Doyle; Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, by John Egerton; Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, by W. Ralph Eubanks; Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, by Paul Hendrickson; Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White
Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945–1986, by J. Todd Moye; and The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890, by Vernon Lane Wharton.
Thanks to Linnea Alexander, David Borofka, Steven Church, Bill Doyle, David Anthony Durham, Susan Early, Alex Espinoza, Ralph Eubanks, Lillian Faderman, Connie and John Hales, Coke and James Hal-lowell, Kristyn Keene, Beverly Lowry, Emily Milder, Todd Moye, Samina Najmi, Vida Samiian, Tim Skeen, Liz Van Hoose and James Walton for their advice and support. I remain indebted to Sloan Harris for being the best agent any writer ever had, and to Ewa, Lena and Tosha for being the best family anyone could ever ask for. Last, as always, my special thanks to my friend and editor Gary Fisketjon, who has no peer.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Steve Yarbrough
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
A portion of this work originally appeared in slightly different form in Ploughshares.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Funeral of Bobò” from A Part of Speech by Joseph Brodsky, translation copyright © 1980 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yarbrough, Steve, [date]
Safe from the neighbors / by Steve Yarbrough.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59327-6
1. History teachers—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Civil rights—Fiction.
3. Mississippi—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3575.A717S34 2010
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