“People are scared,” she said. “People are ruled by fear.”
“How much longer?” I says. She said she didn’t know. She could see I was afraid. She could tell that by the way I jerked my head around every time a car passed to see who it was. Was it some white person who’d tell it out in Prince George that they’d seen me down here on this porch in the broad daylight? That set my mind racing after a horde of dark possibilities which she interrupted with a slight clearing of her throat.
“What did you really come to tell me?”
“My husband did it,” I said softly.
“I see,” she said.
“I don’t know what to do about it,” I said.
“I don’t either,” she said.
Hoagie hollered from the kitchen asking which muffin tin to use. I muttered something about it looking like rain.
“My soon to be ex-husband,” I said, grasping the full reality of that for the first time. “Everything I know about it is secondhand. If you know more, if you have any idea where I can get some proof, then I’ll do the right thing.”
She stared at me for a long time. Then she pursed her lips and said softly, “It might just be best if you go now, honey.”
I
leashed James Edward up and we made it to work on foot. I was half an hour late. I tied the dog out back. I had a knot on my forehead and my arm was bleeding. The boss gave me holy hell, but I could see it was an act. They like me down at the 7-Eleven. I give them a day and a half’s work for a day’s pay. I worked my shift and caught James Edward and me a ride home in the morning.
I had rented a little trailer and built a pen for James Edward. I had nearly saved enough money to lease the field behind it. I was planning to raise pumpkins and melons for a cash crop. I have always wanted to try to pull a cash crop out of the land.
That morning after I came in from work, I picked up the telephone and called the local radio station. I asked them to please announce that the Harmony Festival had been rescheduled for next Saturday. I asked them to broadcast my phone number. I knew a lot of people would say that I was trying to start something. The fact is I was determined to finish something.
I have tried to tell a thousand people since then that the things I did had nothing to do with race. I’m not here to champion one race or right the wrongs of another. The stand I took was a private choice not to be ruled by fear. That’s what rules men like my uncle Dashnell and Jake Kelly and to a large extent my own father. That’s what holds the world back. That’s what stands between us and our
purpose on this earth. You cannot live in fear and feel the breath of the Living God on the back of your neck. You cannot be afraid and change yourself, because the fear is a paralysis, a weight on your arms. Yes, I know awful things may happen to me because of what I’ve done. No, I don’t like that. I don’t want that. Fear is not just the unpleasant emotion we think it is. Fear is the failure to act.
That morning I didn’t care. I knew if I didn’t pick up that telephone and call the radio station, I would be condemned to a living death. It was Sunday. I made the call and then I crawled into bed and I slept as I have never slept. I slept as if I had been to the New Jerusalem. I would almost swear as my head hit the pillow and I glanced out the window, I saw it rolling over the treetops just above the pink-eyed sun.
I rolled out of sleep about noon. I sat up trying to remember the thing I’d done that I shouldn’t have. It was a natural reaction left over from my drinking days. The quiet slapped the stubble on my jaw and the loneliness swallowed me for a minute. I still had no idea how to make coffee and a shower seemed pointless. I tossed yesterday’s tuna salad to James Edward. The phone rang, probably Mama wanting to yell at me for missing church.
“Hello?”
“You’re going to die.”
“Who isn’t?”
“You go through with your nigger walk, and you’ll see.” I tried to place the voice. I’d heard it a thousand times. But its owner wouldn’t register.
“Excuse me, mister. But why are you calling it ‘a nigger walk’ when there are no known black people for miles around here?”
Click. Dial tone. Nigger walk? There it was. The whole beautiful thing that needed to be done. I had to find some black people to walk with me. Because that’s their fear. They live in blind terror of the black race. All their bully tactics and their killing, all their threats and menace, add up to an unspoken paranoia that they might not be the only ones made in God’s image. I had to find some black people. But I didn’t know any except some fellows I’d met down in Folsom.
The phone rang again. This time the voice was old.
“I got a bullet with your name wrote on it.”
I was too busy struggling to write up my press release to answer the phone the third time it rang. By the fifth call, I had it right enough to drop off at the local paper. It told people where to gather and when and it welcomed all races, creeds and religions. Then I broke for the shower. I was singing by then. I’d stumbled onto it. I’d found that
something
, that bigger reason or purpose or calling. I had to do this thing. I had to be the one to smash that wall of fear that people in Prince George had lived behind since I don’t know when. I was hearing voices. I was dancing around naked and foolish. For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be a whole and all the way living person.
I found a quarter sticking out of the floor mat on the passenger side of my truck, so I called Belinda Hodgkins after I dropped my announcement by the local paper the next morning. Belinda is the local correspondent for
The Birmingham News
and since I’m a longtime believer in wasting all found money on the spot, I told her answering machine the whos, whats and wheres of the Harmony Festival and I left my number, but she never called me back.
Then I set myself to the task of drumming up some local support. I tried preachers and schoolteachers and people I felt would see things my way. Some of them actually did. One or two said they’d think it over. No one actually said they’d walk with me. Scared little rabbits.
E
xamining myself or the events of my immediate past with Lily I can find no answers. I search the car radio for country songs about good men loving bad women. I try to tell myself that Lily is bad, that a terrible mistake has come to an end. It’s all just my way of waiting for her to come home.
I sometimes think I’d be better off if she were dead. That way I could grieve and get on with living. I know now when she left me that time in Texas I had some unspoken hope or faith that she would come back. I know that’s what kept me going.
I know I’m a fool possessed. I understand her more, I love her better, than any man could. I sit on the front steps and watch the road like I don’t know every minute takes her farther away. I envision her pulling into the driveway and getting out of the car and kneeling down in front of me, telling me that she’s sorry, she’s seen the light for true this time. I have to believe that sooner or later she will.
I had the lawn seeded and bought those shrubs she wanted. I had a service out to triple-clean the place, and I spent several evenings painting the trim. I took up jogging and doing sit-ups and I’m letting my hair grow just a little. This time when she comes back, I’m going to make it perfection for her. I bought a book,
How a
Woman Wants to Be Loved,
and I look forward to sharing the things it’s taught me with Lily.
I know she ran off with that guru because I was loving her wrong. His love could never match mine. I won’t misuse the chance when she comes back.
The kids are down at Mama’s for the time being. See, my Lily, she’s smart. She knew I’d do that. She knew I wouldn’t keep them here with a sitter while I went off to work all day. She knew. She called down there this morning. She gave Mama the address. They’re at some leftover hippie-type commune or something near Galveston, Texas. She talked to the kids, told them she loved them. It’s all just her way of keeping in contact with me, of feeling me out, of telling me not to despair, that she’s easing her way back home.
The way I see it, Lily and I need this separation. It’s to end the old way and allow a little space for the new one to begin. I see it so clearly.
Except when I wake in the night and see snakes crawling around the room, and my heart is like a two thousand pound dumbbell and I lose all hope. I don’t feel that way long. Mostly I feel like, if it’s ever written, ours will be the greatest love story ever told. I just wish she’d call me or send me a card or something, anything to hang my heart around till she comes home.
Oh, God, send her home!
I
found the little train set Lily described. It was my first trip to Wal-Mart since I quit, and they all hugged my neck and told me they missed me. Except Marjean. She stood back and wrinkled her lips into that electrified grimace she applies when she feels for some reason she has to be nice. It gave me pause to think of the hours that woman spent on my porch up at the lake. When did I ever have time for her?
I had the train set wrapped in Superman birthday paper and six different Wal-Mart clerks took turns nosing over to gift wrap to ask me who it was for.
Glen was out on the front lawn with the hose watering light green squares of new sod like it doesn’t rain every other day in this part of Alabama in January or that sod had any intention of growing before the middle of March. I was in luck. I could pull into the drive and hand him the present and be on my way.
He came at me like a crazy man or a demon possessed, opening the door for me and kissing my cheek and taking my arm like I was his long lost mama or best friend. It chilled me, because I saw right off that he was holding on to me because he believed somehow it was holding on to her. He insisted on showing me all through the house. He’d had stereo speakers wired from the den to the bedroom and put a fully stocked wine rack in what used to be a broom
closet. He wanted to know what color carpet I thought Lily would want him to order. It was like visiting people so bereaved that they have to convince you their dead are alive by keeping everything just like or a little better than the deceased ever had.
I saw I had little comfort to offer him and made a half dozen excuses for leaving, but his loneliness grabbed at me. He said the kids were down at his mother’s. I told him he’d be a lot better off with them home and their needs to meet. I took the tour and we had made our way back to the kitchen. By then he’d showed me how he’d had all of Lily’s clothes cleaned and wrapped in plastic and sorted summer and winter in the closets, the insides of which he pointed out he had just painted with three coats of enamel. I’d seen the newly mirrored wall in her dressing area and the extra phone over her commode and looked at his plans to convert the attic into an exercise area.
It put a hard spot on my stomach to see the monument he was creating, because I’d talked to Lily a few hours earlier and she sounded nervous as a cat and tired and scared, but she wasn’t even dreaming about going back home to Glen. He pushed me down into a kitchen chair and poured us both a glass of wine. He acted like Lily had done something that was perfectly all right with him, like maybe she was at the PTA and he expected her home directly. It went downhill from there. All that sadness in him started mixing into his happy act. The anger and the regret began to boil up. He seemed to have no concept of where he ended and she began. He had himself confused with Lily. He had no self at all without her. I hurt with him, but I also saw his was a very selfish hurt that took none of Lily’s needs into account. Without saying as much, he was telling me that God had created Lily to ensure his existence. It smothered me as I sat there, and I couldn’t help but begin to feel how smothered she must have been trying to exist under the same roof with him.
Still, I wanted to leave him some straw to grab.
“I wouldn’t know how to ask a person to live with me if they didn’t want to,” I said, and I didn’t sugarcoat my tone of voice. I hoped that would pierce his delusion a little, but all he did was
smile at me with condescension and explain that I had no concept of a love like theirs.
“You were miserable the whole time and so was she.” He said it probably seemed that way. He said that Lily probably gave me that idea because she had a hard time admitting to herself that down deep she would never love anyone the way she loved him. I said that he’d never get over this thing until he faced facts. Lily had her share of faults, but like any other human being she deserved a chance at happiness. He was gulping wine and talking fast and sometimes he’d smile. Mostly he was angry at me, and I tried to tell myself that was because I was right there to receive his anger. The one he despised was in Texas with that dark and distant young man. I tried to leave, but he was raving, and I actually feared what he’d do next.
I needn’t have. All his ferocity dwindled into heavy sobbing. I figured that it was good for him to cry. At the very least, it would help him sleep or wear him out, but I was weary of him. He obviously thought he was in some exalted state, some divine suffering that entitled him to all the world’s comfort and condolence.
“She doesn’t want you,” I says. “She had to reach past all the guilt and shame she feels about that and try to live. Let her live. Figure out how to let her go and draw new strength from it.” I sounded like something I probably read in one of those magazines I peruse on the checkout line.
Somehow he took me to mean that I compared him to Dashnell and myself to Lily. Before I could refute that, he was raving again. At that point, I didn’t care how low it looked, I grabbed my purse and I stood up and walked out the door with him following, drunk and raving about how I wouldn’t know nothing, I was the ignorant brunt of Dashnell Lawler’s wrath. I was a dry old bag who’d given up on life and love long ago, and on and on like that until I finally managed to get my car doors locked against him and the motor started.