Nathan
was caught up in it, perhaps even more than I, for here he seemed to find release
from the strictness and discipline of his father's world. His upbringing had
not been harsh, he had never gone without, but the world from which he'd come
was black and white, clean, reverential and temperate.
Nathan
smoked weed with these people. I did too, but I didn't smoke like Nathan. We'd
work all day, break our backs in the sun, our hands shovelling fish from nets
into boxes packed with ice, loading those heavy boxes onto trucks and watching
them drive out to Tallahassee and Orlando. There was an endless convoy of
vehicles, and the drivers would get restless waiting for their maximum load to
be stowed, and we worked like crazy people. Come the end of the day we would
walk down to the beach, strip our clothes off and wash in the sea, and then we
would sleep for a while, sleep until the evening grew cold, and then we would
light fires and wait for the others to arrive. They drove down in pickups and
Volkswagen vans, guys and girls, kids even, their long flowing hair, bright
clothes, bottles of sourmash and wraps of weed and this old music player that
hooked right into a generator in the trunk of someone's car. We gathered in
circles, and the circles became wider, the fires became brighter and somewhere
beyond the point where the light reached there were couples making out. You
could hear them. They sounded like free people.
Nathan
was enchanted and empowered by this stuff. He learned guitar down there, half a
dozen chords that's all, but with his gospel-church trained voice he could sing
above the sound of the sea. His voice carried, an unearthly sound, and he
proved something I had figured many years ago at high school. It was neither
your color nor your looks that counted, and not a great deal to do with your
personality at first: it was all to do with attention. He got their attention,
he really got their attention, and there was barely a night that Nathan
wouldn't be one half of a couple out there where the light didn't reach.
For a
time I felt I was losing him, but he always came back, always searched me out
to see how I was doing, and it was he who brought the Devereau sisters, the
Devereau
twins,
back to where I sat by the fire one night towards the
end of the month.
Rosalind
and Emily Devereau were from somewhere in Louisiana. I never knew exactly
where; but you could tell from their looks, that wild-eyed, dark-haired, bold
and confident spirit that there was something about these girls that wasn't
anything close to what I'd experienced before. They were not identical, but they
were close, and they possessed an uncanny ability to sense what the other was
feeling. They completed each other's sentences, would stop mid-flight and
suddenly leave to find one another. Later, in conference, Nathan and I would
discover that though we had been three hundred yards apart down the beach the
two of them had gotten up simultaneously and walked in each other's direction.
They did things like this, and had it not been unnerving it would have been
funny.
They seemed
to gravitate towards us, and though I spent more time with Emily and Nathan
spent more time with Rosalind, it was almost as if it wouldn't have mattered
the other way around. They were so alike in everything, almost as if you could
start a conversation with one, finish it with the other, and never notice the
break in between.
We
took an apartment, Nathan and I, right there overlooking the beach, and though
it was small, though we shared a single room with two mattresses on the floor,
we really felt that there was something special to be experienced in this
place. Rosalind and Emily Devereau, for the months between October 1968 and the
early part of 1969, became part of our family. That's the way it felt: that we
were family.
I
remember a night we spent in that apartment. Rosalind and Emily had come down
to the beach as they always did, and after a little while Rosalind suggested we
go home, take some Thunderbird wine and hang out for a while.
We
went, all too eagerly we went, and by the time we arrived Nathan had drunk half
of that bottle and was laughing as Rosalind tried to waltz him down the
sidewalk.
Once
inside they collapsed together on the mattresses, and I watched them, happy to
see Nathan free of every vestige of North Carolina and his father's world.
'You
guys want some of this?' Rosalind asked. She held the bottle out towards her
sister.
Emily
took it, asked me to get some cups from the kitchen, and when I returned the
three of them were seated back to back in an outward-facing triangle on the
floor. I joined them - seated there cross-legged, Rosalind behind me, Nathan to
my right, Emily to my left. I felt at ease. I felt strong-willed. I felt like I
was exactly where I wanted to be, sharing my time with people whom I had
chosen.
'So
how long you planning on staying here?' Emily asked.
'As
long as it takes,' Nathan said.
'As
long as
what
takes?'
'The
war.'
For a
moment there was silence.
'You
jumped the Draft,' Rosalind said matter-of-factly.
'We
jumped the Draft,' I said, and even as I said it I imagined it was possibly the
hardest thing I had ever uttered.
No-one
spoke, not a word, until Nathan sort of leaned forward to reach his cup, and
then he said something that surprised me more than anything I might have
guessed.
'Danny
made it happen,' he said.
I
frowned, turned to look at him, and he smiled at me.
'There
was a time many years ago,' Nathan went on. 'We were in North Carolina, our
home town. The whole black- white thing was really getting itself up to speed,
and we were in this soda place where the kids hung out. Some kid grabbed this
girl's ass or something, some girl that Danny was sweet on…'
There
was a smile in Nathan's voice, an underlying element of humor that was hard to
miss.
'Anyhows,
this kid grabbed this girl's ass… what was her name, Danno?'
'Sheryl
Rose Bogazzi,' I said.
'Right,
Sheryl Rose Bogazzi -'
'Oh
come on,' Emily interjected. 'No-one's called Sheryl Rose Bogazzi.'
'Go tell
Sheryl Rose that,' I said.
Rosalind
laughed. 'That's like Betty Sue Windmill or Mary Joe Plankboard.'
'One
of those Southern places where you grow up only to find out that your mother's
really your sister, and when you reach thirteen you have to marry your
grandfather,' Emily added.
'Enough
already,' Nathan said. 'Anyway, you pair of crazy witches can talk… you came
straight up out of a swamp. Mad freakin' Appalachian mountain people with
snakes in the house and learnin' the Bible by heart.'
'The
story,' I said, wanting more than anyone present to know what Nathan was going
to say.
'Right,
the story… so this girl gets her ass grabbed by a guy called Marty Hooper, and
he had this sidekick, Larry James -'
'You sure
it wasn't Cletus Knackerback and Billy Bob Dickweed?' Rosalind asked.
'I'm
sure it wasn't,' Nathan said. 'Now will you pair shut the fuck up and let me
finish?'
'Sorry,
Nathan,' Emily said.
'Me
sorry too,' Rosalind echoed.
'So
Danny fronts up to these guys, all ready to get the shit kicked out of him, and
I yank him back and floor the asshole.'
Nathan
started laughing.
'This
kid goes down like a house of cards, Danny's standing there not knowing whether
to be pissed off I hit the guy or relieved he didn't get his teeth knocked out
through his ass, and then someone calls me a nigger… just like that. Nigger he
says, and silence fills up the place to bursting.'
Nathan
pauses, and there is a quiet tension in the room. Four of us seated together
and there isn't a sound. Not even a breath.
'And
then someone else says it,' Nathan goes on. 'And someone else… and we hightail
it out of there like someone lit our fuses.'
'So
what does that have to do with dodging the Draft?' Emily asked.
Nathan
smiled as he looked at me. 'You have any idea what kind of guts it took to side
with a black guy like that?'
Neither
Emily nor Rosalind said a word.
'Twenty,
thirty kids, crazy kids, all fired up, angry… and Danno takes off with the only
black kid there. We ran out of there and they chased us, threw stones, ready to
catch us and fucking lynch us… and Danno runs with me all the way.'
'And
what happened?' Rosalind asked.
'We
were saved by the witch,' I said. 'The witch who ate her husband.'
'You
what?' Emily asked.
'The
witch,' Nathan said.
'There
was a witch?'
Nathan
laughed. 'There was indeed a witch… but that is a totally different story. The
point is that Danno did something that no-one else did. He stuck by me when
everything told him he shouldn't have… and that taught me something. Taught me
that you do what you think is right no matter what anyone thinks.'
Nathan
turned and looked at me. He didn't smile; he just looked at me. I felt he could
see right through me, right through to the lie that sat inside me like a tumor.
Maybe that time I had done what I'd believed was right, perhaps out of fear,
out of self-preservation, or just out of sheer terror. That time. But this time
was different. This time I had come because I didn't have the courage to say
no.
I
would think back in years to come, think back on all that was said and done in
Florida, and I would see that there I found my feet, my balance, my
self.
The
Devereau sisters were a special breed of person, they were wise and deep and at
once passionate and irresponsible. Never in my life would I meet people so
spontaneous and impulsive. They wrote poetry together, poetry for us, and then
they would have Nathan play guitar while they sang love songs to us. Love songs
to me and Nathan Verney. And sex. There was so much sex. We stayed with the
same partners, always the same, but there were moments when the four of us
would lie down on those mattresses, mattresses that had been pushed closer together
by either Emily or Rosalind, and somewhere in the midst of our passion I would
catch a glimpse of Nathan, and he would look upwards, and they were there,
these sisters, and though we were there in body they were looking at one
another. Like they were on the same spiritual wavelength, feeding off one
another's arousal and intimacy, and we just happened to be there to appreciate
the closeness these girls felt.
It
was not perverse, it wasn't ugly or degraded. It was none of these things. It
transcended the physical, it entered the realm of nirvana and the mountains of
the moon. And though sometimes I would lie close to Emily and in some small way
wish it had been Caroline, or Linny, I did my best not to think of such things.
I did my best to live for that moment, and that moment alone. In my mind the
past was like a collage of sounds and faces and colors, of the love I'd felt
for Caroline and Linny, of betrayal and loss.
This,
now, was a time I would never forget.
A
time of learning, of self-discovery, and more than everything, of promise.
The
Devereau sisters left in the latter part of January 1969. There were no tears,
no regrets, no recriminations, no sense of loss even. They had come, they had
visited, they were leaving. They intended to return to Louisiana, their family,
their previous lives perhaps, and Nathan and I felt nothing as we watched them
go.
I
remember turning towards him as the bus took a bend in the road and
disappeared, and his face was blank, expressionless, neither happy nor sad nor
anything else identifiable.
'Gone,'
he said quietly.
'Gone,'
I replied.
We
turned together and walked back the way we'd come.
We
didn't speak of them again.
Like
it had all been a dream.
And later
that same day Nathan turned to me and asked, 'You ever fall in love, Danny?'