Well, now, my old mama, she was settin’ across the den watching me rant and capitulate. And my pitiful excuse for a sister Dereesa setting on the couch eating cereal from a serving bowl with her dyed red hair on curlers the size of soup cans. The two of them looking at me crossways like they do when they think I lost my mind. Dereesa says, “Well, brother, you select your tombstone before you go.” I admit it. I turned ugly. I said, “Sister, you got a nerve to sit up in my house, eating my food and talking to me like that.”
I was wrong. Dereesa had every right. She’s my sister and nobody
ever became as trifling and poor boned as Dereesa without some help from life. She wasn’t her fault and I knew it. She let my remark pass.
It got as quiet as a well bottom. Then Mama said, “He’s going, Dee. If there’s anything left in us, we’re going with him.”
I
had rented a room from an old man down in Yellow who either didn’t know who I was or needed my money so badly he didn’t care. I was lying on the bed watching the news coverage. I had a cut on my chin and a bruise under my right eye. No use pretending otherwise, my head hurt. I felt dizzy when I got up or sat down too fast. I was shaky like I was coming down with a cold or the flu. But it wasn’t the flu. It was the eyes of the crowd. It was the voices of people I’d known all my life, friends and cousins and former teachers, even that Pentecostal preacher who had befriended me the summer I got religion, condemning me, wishing me dead.
I had thought of myself a kind of David against Goliath. But my slingshot hadn’t worked. The great ugly giant had proven his power over me. Prince George would never change. It would go on forever, an impenetrable fortress of ignorance and fear, a godless corner of creation to be shunned by all decent people.
What had overwhelmed me that afternoon was the size of the crowd. In spite of what I wanted to believe, the Klan was somehow rekindling strength. I had expected fifty, maybe seventy-five old die-hards out there. I had believed until that afternoon that because I had changed the world had changed. It wasn’t so.
I was stunned by some of the faces I saw in that crowd. Like my
daddy. I didn’t figure the man for a flaming liberal. But I thought he was above hurtling rocks and bottles at his own son.
Something whizzed by my head. Then I heard a thud. A bullet had made a perfect little round hole in the window. The pane didn’t shatter, but the mirror on the opposite wall did. I dove for the floor and I waited. I peered out into the yard. Nobody. Nothing. Mist and blue streetlamp, my truck. No footsteps fading on gravel, no neighbor’s dog barking, no engine starting. Nothing intruded on the quiet. I sat in the dark on the floor. I didn’t know if I was awake or asleep, if some phantom was screaming in my head.
At last I understood Michael England’s fear. Like me he must have lulled himself into the belief that if he stood against their ignorance, the light of truth would somehow dissolve it. Like me he had come face-to-face with their dark power. Like him, I finally accepted that I had to leave them their dominion over that cursed corner of God’s earth. I had to grant a certain wisdom to his fear. Like Michael England I had followed my heart to the edge of a cliff. It was time to turn around, to surrender to the shadowed ignorance and superstition that had overpowered me.
I woke up around three A.M. It was raining hard. It was cold. Something swirled blue in the darkness. At first I thought it was the fear. Then it started to roll like maybe cigarette smoke. It was too sad to be an angel. It wasn’t of this world. If I had to give it a name, I’d call it the sum of human failure. I was alone and afraid in the dark and the rain. I was afraid. The fear had won. There was no point in trying to sleep. So I rattled around pulling the sum of my worldly possessions into a pile. I had to wait out the rain before I could put my things into the back of the truck. I had no idea where I was going or how I’d get there. But that’s my life in a nutshell. It quit raining around seven. I dried the truck bed as best I could with an old sheet. I was loading up the last of it when I heard the phone ringing.
“Lawler?” It was the reverend. “You alive?”
I said I was.
“Lawler, we got to do it again.”
I thought he was kidding.
“We’re going to let the grass work on this one. We’re going to get organized. We’re going to put the word out. We’re going to go at it slowly and carefully. Then we’re going back to Prince George with the Army of the Lord!”
Neither one of us said anything for a minute. Then he cleared his throat.
“Lawler, you’re in, ain’t you?” He sounded tired. He sounded old. “Lawler, I need you.”
For the first time in my life I understood the terrible price of faith. The faithful do not work on with any surety or comfort. The faithful merely continue in darkness and fear and disillusionment. They continue on without hope, past reason. The burden they carry is their fear. Their belief is no more than the actions they carry out.
I heaved into a wave of nausea. I swallowed hard.
“Yeah, Rev, I’m in.”
S
he’s different. I try to let her know she can talk about it. But I don’t force the subject. She must not be ready. Something is broken in her. It’s not just physical weakness. Those bullets went a long way. They exposed her heart and soul to the open air. She’s gaining strength. Her voice is back. But the restlessness is gone out of it. She’s calm. It’s because she’s living on past her worst fear.
A brother from California showed up to claim Michael’s body. He didn’t talk to either one of us. The clerk down in the morgue said he was the imperious type. He made fun of her Texas accent. He barked orders at everyone. He made it abundantly clear that Michael was the black sheep of that family. He acted like they had always expected Michael to come to no good end. That’s a big cover over something. But what we’ll never know.
I’ve given routine to my days. Very early in the morning I dawdle along the beach. The dark gray water turns pink and then slowly deepens into blue green as the sun rises. Eight o’clock I take my breakfast in the motel coffee shop. I’ve been here ten days now. I’m practically a regular. Helena knows just when to pull my toast. Nine-thirty, I’ll call Mother.
I learned how to get to the hospital on the bus. But, if it’s pretty, I walk. It takes about forty minutes. I generally stop off at the bookshop in the next block. Lily is one voracious reader.
It’s all but over, though. She’s walking up and down the corridors now. She’s in the chair most of the day. Thursday or Friday at the latest, she’ll be out of there. There was no question about where she’d go. I’m taking Lily home with me and Mother for the next while. She’s got to sort out the rest of her life. She said she’d go straight on back to the lake house. She asked me to find her a live-in care giver for a few weeks. But I wouldn’t hear of it.
In the first place, she doesn’t need to be by herself with a strange care giver at a time like this. Sad to say I think Mother and I are all that stands between her and universal estrangement. Not that I have anybody except Mother and she’s breaking.
I
t felt like Rose stayed down in Texas three forevers. I really thought she’d gone down there to bring a corpse home. But something wasn’t ready to let go of Lillian. Dashnell’s nephew called over here three or four nights ago. I thought it was Rosie checking in when the phone rang. He told me who he was. If I’m remembering straight, he’s that little towheaded one we called “Spit-in-the-Pants” the time we went up to the state park for the Lawler Gathering. I had no earthly business out there eating their food. I never ran with any Lawlers and it was not my intention that my daughter would become one. There is a lot of whiskey put back in that family. Near about all of them have seen the inside of a jail one time or another. Anyhow, I remembered the boy because he and Carmen stayed out on the lake in a rowboat until after dark and some of the men had to go out to find them.
He asked about Lillian. I’ve begun to feel like Lillian Central out here. Half the town has called to ask about her. I’d like to say they called from charity, but she’s a big topic in these parts and everybody is just trying to stay up on the latest. I believe Heath was the only one to ask for an address and a room number. I told him Rose was down there and he sounded genuinely glad. I don’t know what the connections are. But it pleased me that any Lawler has a positive
feeling towards Rose of Sharon. Them people stick together. They’re Lawler right or wrong types.
I had talked to Rose of Sharon earlier that afternoon and she had said, barring unforeseen complications, Lily was going to be out of the hospital by the weekend. Like I say, I don’t know what the connection is, but there must be one because I could feel Heath Lawler grin on the other end of the line when I told him that. Then I told him that Rose of Sharon is going to bring Lillian home to recuperate with us awhile. He mentioned that he’s handy and he’d noticed we’re doing things around the place. I told him I keep as far out of all that as I possibly can, but I’d sure mention it to Rose of Sharon when she come in.
I’ve been starching sheets all morning. I threw three blackberry pies. I tried my pound cake, but it wouldn’t rise. It came out gooey. It’s too humid. But the fact is I like it that way. I can make a good supper out of a bowl of Jell-O stirred up into fallen pound cake. It killed my soul, but with Rose and a guest expected here home, I had to let Nadine take me to the Winn Dixie. My cupboards are groaning.
I hear tell Lillian’s so thin you could read the newspaper through her. I can get back there in my kitchen and cook my way with Rose gone. Though I can’t find half my things and I’m not used to hers. So, me and Nadine was in the Winn Dixie, which takes me a year anyway. But Nadine had to talk to everybody in the place. She went to telling everybody that Rose of Sharon was bringing Lillian back. Two or three of the women came right up and said to my face they wouldn’t allow such an immoral woman in their houses. One of them said Lillian was half the cause of the trouble coming and Heath Lawler was the other half. I had no earthly idea to what they were referring. But I haven’t heard people speak of “the Trouble” in that way since the night this county nearly burned to the ground more than seventy years ago. I wouldn’t ask neither. Not with Rose of Sharon being criticized for helping somebody out. As Searle used to say, that’s Christianity Prince George County style. If you ever want to see evil, then you watch Nadine and that pack from her church running somebody down with their mealy jaws barely opening
and their heads bobbing and their little hands waving with their fingers pressed together.
But it stirred things, them saying “the Trouble.” I got up twice in the night thinking I’d heard my back door slam. Finally I went to peeling apples and I made a cobbler. Who in the New Jerusalem is going to eat all this food?
Those women up at the Winn Dixie was riled. They’re working up to something evil and you can almost feel it spreading up and down the road here. Like a bad wind gathering before it blows. I thought Rose would be home by now. The paper said they had storms over Texas this morning. I warmed supper twice. The rolls went so hard I had to run a fresh batch in the oven. I’m so brittle with worry I feel like I’m going to snap in two. But I dare not show any effects of it when she walks in that door. You don’t worry about Rose to her face. She’s at that in between age where people think they can handle life all by themselves.
S
he was out in the yard taking some air and sunshine and talking to Aunt Rose, who was dividing monkey grass along the front sidewalk. She was wearing a gray cloth coat and her hair was covered in a scarf. It was sunny, but it was still right chilly. She looked different. For all she’d been through, she looked younger. At first I thought it was because I’d never seen her without her makeup. But the change ran much deeper than that. She cried when she saw me the way people who have been through a trauma or a death will cry when they see you the first time after. I held her for a long time. I cried too.
Hers were tears of remorse. Mine were tears of joy. I hadn’t counted on being that close to her again. It was a passing moment, but it reminded me why I had made such an ass out of myself over her. I didn’t want that to show. I didn’t want it to add to her consternation. She needed my support more than she needed my love. The longer I stood there the more I knew that it had been a mistake to come. I would never stop loving her. Sooner or later it was bound to show.
“Are you trembling?”
I just shrugged and smiled nervously. Aunt Rose had managed to slip off around the side of the house without either one of us noticing.
Aunt Rose can be the most weightless, practically invisible woman on earth when she chooses.
“Walk with me.”
“Are you able?”
“Can’t exactly lift weights yet. But I walked half a mile yesterday.”
We had passed a hundred yards up the road. I didn’t know what to say, so I told her all about plans for the march the Saturday after next. She had wrapped her fingers around mine and I was trying to keep from holding them too tightly. Every now and then she’d give mine a little squeeze. She thought I had come back to her with the love of a brother or a friend. I knew I could never love her that way alone. My heart couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t tell her. I wanted to run away. It started to sprinkle. We crossed the road and stood in Miss Eula Pearl’s deserted peanut stand.
“Heath? Do you know why I came back here to White Oak?”
“No, Lily, I don’t.” I really didn’t. Coming back here was deliberately slapping herself in the face with a lot of people and things she’d be better off to forget.