Then, where any normal man would roll away and drift into self-satisfied fantasies, he stays on top of me. He burrows his head into my pillow and sobs, lamenting that his love for me is slowly draining the life out of him.
When Michael hugs you, his fingers knead your back, his fingers tell you he’s there with you and you’re there with him, and his hair brushes your cheek and his eyes unite with yours and he lets your breasts linger against his chest. He knows you feel his hardness down there and it doesn’t scare him to be a little excited or exciting. It’s harmless. It’s natural. He trusts you and assumes you trust him. He could hug a man the way he hugs a woman and enjoy the tenderness of it without turning it perverse. Why isn’t that considered manhood?
I can go on biting my tongue in half when Glen is babbling his thick paranoia and Sarah is ten minutes into a tantrum. I can starch his pillowcases and ignore the insult when the only thing he compliments
is the extra coat of wax on the kitchen floor or a hundred other things I do in an effort to deserve him and the children, to appreciate them, to be grateful for them and my health and my house and the sun on the lake. What I cannot do is love them.
Do my children know when I tell them stories at bedtime or hold them shivering after nightmares that my arms invent kindness my heart doesn’t contain? Do they understand that I don’t hit them because one slap would reveal my disdain? Will they ever realize that when I sit with them at the kitchen table and patiently tend to their homework or lend their sputtering stories my full attention I’m silently clocking the minutes until their bedtime?
We look wonderful in Christmas card photos, sitting on the front steps of our dream house. We draw comments, walking into church two minutes late: Sarah in the ruffled cotton dresses that take me an hour to iron; Travis, the little monarch in his burgundy blazer. Glen knows how to dress himself in olive and khaki suits, how to seem completely self-effacing as he steps back to let us into the pew; how to lay his hand benignly behind my back, showing off his familial devotion and his Rolex watch to the congregation of the righteous.
Sarah is Glen all over again; but someone smart and loving might be able to save Travis. I want him around Michael. I want him to know what a real hug is, what the stars might be, what a man can be if he lets himself or he can’t help it. I pulled Travis out of that aluminum Piss-on-Jesus private Bible elementary school where Glen was sending him. Now I have to tell Glen.
I hosed down and waxed his garage and organized his tools this afternoon. I stood over a pot of boiling grease, making his grandmother’s doughnut recipe. I made up our bed with five hundred dollar polished cotton sheets, turned his side down and laid my oyster pink negligee on my pillow. I’m wearing the perfume he gave me for Mother’s Day. I went to the beauty shop and had my hair cut and curled into that baby doll look he adores.
When I told Rose what I was up to, she insisted on taking the kids for the night. I told her I couldn’t impose like that, but she insisted so strongly I took advantage of her offer. She pulled down a
pasteboard box of meticulously painted model cars and set up an old electric train all over the living room. She pulled dolls out of a trunk that made my teeth drop and an old fashioned, handmade dollhouse with miniature French furniture that belonged to her grandmother. She must have some fine ancestors back there someplace.
Sometimes I list my faults in one column, Glen’s in the other. Mine runs off the page. His amounts to six or eight habits that get on my nerves. I wish he’d run after women or find Jesus or join the Air Force. I told Rosie one time I think Glen is a madman. It’s just that he has the uncanny ability to make it come off normal. I told her I’d rather have a crazy old warthog like Dashnell. It doesn’t take any scrutiny to see what he is. It’s all right there in front of you. Glen hides his sickness.
She brought up Dashnell.
“Afraid to leave them up here with Dashnell about?”
I admitted I was.
“Children are his exception—his blind spot. You’ll never see Dashnell Lawler abuse them or anyone near them.”
You think you know people.
I used to get frustrated with Glen because I took him at face value. I thought he was just average, switched off, knee jerk New South Republican normal. It’s uncanny how he manages to look and sound like everyone else. That’s his mask, the intricately woven cloak of illusion behind which he operates. There’s a demon coiling inside that man’s brain, a crafty little monster, drawing itself up tighter and tighter. It lurks there, waiting for me to make a false move. Sometimes I feel it peering at me from behind his eyes. Every impulse I own says to flee, but I dare not. My only course is to remain here, its prisoner and its cornered prey, vainly hoping some miraculous distraction will deflect its hypnotic spell long enough for me to run. Even then, I’m doomed—unless Heath was right.
The last time we saw each other I explained my predicament. He said surrender and defeat were my only hope. He said they unbind secret wings hidden in our souls that bear us across our sorrows.
Pretty words spoken from a tender heart while the night breeze bristles the pines and makes the moonlight dance on the water—useless in the airless dark when his fingers rip my hair and my insides scream and he whispers, “Baby, I love you.”
I
can’t go back to that discussion group. Once a thing is told, it’s told; it seeps out in the best, most confidential circumstances. The boy, I’ll say the young man, Michael, has a way about him of drawing you out of yourself. He’s tender. He reminds me of Carmen a little. Carmen wasn’t that dark headed and he was a nice looking boy, too, but this one up there at that school, he’s possessed of a charm that neither I nor Dashnell could ever have taught Carmen. He reminds me of a wizard or a magician.
At first I thought it was his brown cow eyes and the thick, curly lashes. He uses his long, pretty hands when he talks. At first, I was halfway annoyed with the softness of his voice, the way I had to strain to hear him, but then I realized that’s because most people I’ve been around all my life practically yell at each other. Initially I took him to be very effeminate, but then I gradually realized it was only that he lacked that tension that makes most men a little stiff and bulky. I’ll have to say to Dashnell’s everlasting sorrow that I didn’t detect one communist tinge unless you call looking for threads that bind people together communist.
Still and all, I don’t get an overriding good feeling about the group. It’s loose talk, and by that I mean ideas your average person might not accept. It’s good to see the common thread, but common thread makes out into all different kinds of designs and those differences
can’t be ignored. At some point people are made and finished and not likely to change. I suppose that’s why one generation leaves its messes to the next. Old dogs, new tricks. It doesn’t work. It scares me. Change scares me. I’ve been contemplating all kinds of changes without letting myself admit it. I learned that tonight.
A lot of the group aren’t native Prince George. Most of them moved up this way from the Birmingham area. One woman asked why there aren’t any black people in Prince George County. That opened a deep discussion about Prince George and its history and how the black people were burned and driven out. Most of the group had never heard it in much detail. I grew up with the story, so I told it. I had never stopped to make a connection between “the Trouble,” as Mother and Daddy always called it, and present-day life. The past was always something frozen and finished to me.
I no sooner had it told than one of them said we ought to do something to let the world know that the people here in Prince George aren’t that way anymore. I had to bite my tongue in half to keep from saying, “But they
are
just that way!” Of course I was thinking about poor McCarthy Smith being shot on that lake a few months back, most likely
by my husband.
Lily must have read my mind, because she immediately started talking about that poor murdered man in the boat on the lake and how it wasn’t ever investigated. To her that was no less than a continuation of what happened on that evil night of the Trouble.
Something went off in my head, some Scripture we used to hear in church about sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
They sat on my back porch and sucked beer and planned it. I waited with the women while they did it.
Lily jumped off from there to say that she had read a piece in
The Birmingham News
that a minister had tried to get the governor to make something of it. She said that she had called that minister and told him everything she knew about it. I was trying not to let my face show.
Then I asked a question. How come, if that man knew the ways of Prince George, if he knew that he might be killed, how come he came here alone and unprotected despite both warnings and threats? Lily jumped back with “Well, maybe he sacrificed himself
so we’d have this discussion, so I’d call that minister in Birmingham, so that minister would trouble the governor about it, so that change would take place.”
They all agreed except an old banty hen named Esther, who kept trying to steer the early part of the discussion back to the likeness between all Protestant denominations. She got up and left without a word. As afraid as I was, as badly as I wanted to follow Esther out that door and back to Baptist prayer meeting, I have to say, in that moment, I thought Esther looked, well, maybe tawdry or ignorant or shut down, and to follow her would be like following Dashnell. Now that’s a change in my way of thinking, and I don’t like it.
They were all talking loud by then, different ones cutting in on the other with wilder and wilder ideas about what needs to be done to change Prince George. I didn’t want to go against the grain, but when somebody said we ought to have a little demonstration to show that all people are welcome in Prince George, I couldn’t hold back.
“You’ll start a war,” I said. “There aren’t enough who think like you to make the kind of change you’re talking. The hatred here is the kind that has to die with time.” Lily flew down my throat. “Hell, it hasn’t died in a hundred, maybe two hundred, years, it’s time we killed it outright.”
Michael looked confused. “You mean a little peaceful demonstration to the effect that Prince George County is part of the rest of the world would actually start a war?” That’s when the words flew off my tongue before I could arrange or arrest them. “Yes, a war people like my husband Dashnell have waited their whole lives for the opportunity to fight!” The rest of them looked at me like I must be out of my mind to have a husband like Dashnell, as if almost every woman in Prince George County doesn’t have a husband exactly like him.
“I don’t know where you people think you live,” I says.
Michael reminded us of the hour and said we should all think about this hard and talk some more next week. I brooded in the car while Lily went back to Michael’s office with him and borrowed a book on Mahatma Gandhi. Suppose this evening’s talk got out?
Suppose Dashnell heard what I said about him fighting a war? Suppose they became more serious about this brotherhood demonstration? I had to back away from these people fast. They were striking wooden matches on dry sticks of dynamite.
H
is church had been vandalized again. Windows had been smashed, books ripped into shreds, chairs and tables chopped up with an ax. Hez had spent the morning trying to explain to the Birmingham police commissioner that this was no ordinary robbery. It was an exhausting argument made all the more difficult by the fact that the man simply wouldn’t admit that it was an act of terrorism meant as direct retaliation for the bus boycott. The commissioner didn’t waste time trying to convince Hez that it was neighborhood kids. He didn’t take Hez for that big a fool. Instead he tried to convince Hez that he himself fervently believed it had been neighborhood kids. Or so he tried to posture. The bald truth was clearly hidden in plain sight between the commissioner’s words. He knew Hez was heavily involved with the boycott. He knew planning sessions had been held in Hez’s home and his church. He knew that Hez was in direct contact with Martin Luther King, Jr., the real source of the trouble, and that Hez could expect much worse than a few broken windows unless he denounced the boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr., from his pulpit.
Meanwhile, Cheryl was at home packing up the baby. She was going to stay with her mother up in Memphis. She had left him periodically during their five year marriage, tucked tail and run home. Cheryl’s father owned three large funeral homes in Memphis.
She wasn’t cut out to be a minister’s wife. She had no tolerance for drafty parsonages, no experience doing without and no patience for the endless stream of suffering humanity she found at her door around the clock.
She had married Hez believing she would lure him away from his chosen profession. Hez had married her hoping the same thing. He despised the ministry. Cheryl’s father was still more than willing to pay for a legal education or take him on in the funeral business. It was too late now. Hez was hopelessly chained to his calling. He was a man of God, a servant of his people, a community voice. Never mind that he despised it almost as much as his wife did. He had come to faith and through it to a sense of mission, a divinely intended purpose he couldn’t shake. He tried to explain to Cheryl that he had no choice. She refused to accept that. She might have left him altogether, but then the baby came. It wasn’t that she thought the child should have a mother and father. It was her hope that somehow she could use it and its needs for security to goad him into giving up the ministry. Of course that only galvanized Hez’s stance. More than any luxury, his son would need a shining moral example of what a man could be. If anything the birth of their son served as a confirmation in Hez’s mind that he must not waver from his divine work in this world.