THE PUBLIC RECORD, in the form of a marriage certificate on file at the Mississippi Department of Vital Records, can tell you that Nadine Annalou Bevil married Arlan Baker Calloway before the justice of the peace in the Gulf Coast town of Willis on December 15, 1950. Her parents’ names—Annalou Patrick Bevil (deceased) and Hardy Bevil, of Hard Cash—are duly noted on the certificate, as are those of his parents, Norma Kay Calloway and John Bell Calloway, of Loring. The document is illegibly signed by the justice of the peace, whose name is typed below: A. E. Reno. The witness was one Josephine Melton.
From the Loring County Register of Deeds, you can learn that Ellis Buchanan officially assumed ownership of the Weekly Times on August 25, 1960. If, like me, you enjoy looking through old newspapers, you can quickly determine that the first issue with Ellis’s name at the top of the masthead was published on September 7, 1960, and that in his first editorial he introduced himself to his new audience, telling them that he had previously owned and edited the Clearwater Gazette, over in east Mississippi, that he was the husband of Olivia Buchanan, née Wadsworth, originally of Winona, and the father of a three-year-old son, Wilbur Cash (Will), and a two-year-old daughter, Alexandra Olivia (Allie). You can learn, from this same editorial, that Ellis intended to stake out a progressive position on “the most important issue facing the Delta, not to mention the state and the nation: civil rights.”
The public record won’t tell you a single thing, though, about how Ellis Buchanan bumped into Nadine Calloway in an aisle at the Loring Piggly Wiggly in the fall of 1961.
Around 2:00 p.m. on the day I went to see Andy Owens, I got back home, made a peanut butter sandwich and washed it down with a glass of beer. Then I went back outside and walked down the street.
Ellis came to the door in his bathrobe. I’d never seen him like that before. His hair hadn’t been combed, and he had what looked like a fever blister on his upper lip.
“Hey,” I said. “I hope I didn’t get you out of bed.”
“No, not really. Though I was taking a nap.”
“So I’ll drop by another day.” I started to turn away.
He reached out and grabbed my arm just below the elbow. He didn’t do it gently either. “You might as well stay,” he said. “I’d just as soon answer your question now rather than tomorrow or the day after.”
His fingers stayed locked around my forearm. His hand was big and, given his age, surprisingly strong. I remembered him telling me once that he could palm a basketball. “What question?” I said.
He let go, pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his robe and blew his nose. “The one you convinced yourself you didn’t come here to ask.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You thought we’d talk around the subject, I guess, and you’d gradually steer the conversation in a certain direction, like Perry Mason, I suppose, and then you’d say, ‘Oh, and by the way, I drove over to Arkansas today and interviewed Andy Owens for a book I’ll never write.’ Is that how you imagined this would go?”
Of all the people I knew, he was the only one who’d never once spoken to me in anger. For more than thirty years he’d maintained the same ironic stance, suggesting with every word and glance that if I wanted to live a long and happy life, I needed to regard myself and all my actions with a measure of skepticism and a heavy dose of humor. Now he was dead serious, and mad.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “He called you, I guess.”
“Yes. He may be a drunk but he’s loyal, and the two of us reached a bargain that you got him to violate today.” Finally, his face displayed a trace of the old familiar smile. “You see, he was dying to give somebody a haircut, and along you came.” He turned towards the kitchen. “I’m drinking bourbon. What about you?”
“I was already persona non grata when I met her,” he told me, balancing a glass of whiskey on his knee. The bottle—Knob Creek—stood on the coffee table. I’d taken one sip, and it had burned worse going down than anything I’d ever swallowed. “One of the first things I’d done at the paper was to editorialize against Mayor Finley for holding a Citizens’ Council meeting at City Hall. I said it was his business if he wanted to host meetings of such a shameful outfit at his own home, but that if he held any meetings on public property, they ought to be the business of all our citizens, the majority of whom, he might not have noticed, happened to be black. That caused a big ruckus. Then, after Ross Barnett spent three hundred thousand dollars in state funds installing gold-plated faucet handles on all the bathtubs at the governor’s mansion, I wrote that the stink of his racist policies would still cling to him. That kind of thing. They all thought my behavior was thoroughly outrageous, and began to cross the street when they saw me coming down the sidewalk.”
In a short time, he told me, he made quite a name for himself. One day a Time reporter who was writing an article about Tut Patterson, a Citizens’ Council founder, showed up at his office, and a week or so later, when the piece ran, Ellis got quoted: “Tut’s aptly named. He’s a kind of pharaoh lording it over the most reactionary elements of Southern society. And I personally look forward to seeing him entombed.”
That line resonated. Dead animals began appearing in his driveway—a skunk here, a possum there, the occasional exotic creature like a porcupine or an armadillo. He made mean sport of the perpetrators. “Thanks to some of our friends and neighbors,” he wrote, “I’ve been sending a lot of business to a certain taxidermist over in Greenville. Before long I’ll be putting the results on display in an exhibition that I plan to title ‘Pets of the Citizens’ Council.’ An art critic at the New York Times has announced his intention to attend the grand opening.”
That’s what was going on in his life when he turned around one afternoon in the Piggly Wiggly and saw an absurdly tall woman with frizzy auburn hair staring at him. He’d noticed her around town before—always from a distance—but didn’t bother to ask anybody her name. She wasn’t news. Why should he care?
He had his kids with him. They’d come in search of ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise, for a cookout later on that day.
“You look,” she said, without introducing herself or saying hello, “like you could still ring one in from thirty feet.”
It had been years since anybody said anything to him about his exploits on the basketball court. The only sport that matters much in Mississippi is football. “Believe me,” he told her, “I never hit from thirty feet in my life.”
“I’d love to trust you,” she said, “but in this instance I don’t. I used to listen to your games. I heard you hit from thirty a bunch of times.”
“You heard Stan Tinsley telling lies. You know what we used to call him?”
“Mouth of the South?”
He nodded. “Did you go to Ole Miss?”
“No, but I played basketball.”
“Where?”
“Hard Cash High. They don’t have a team anymore. The town chose not to exist.”
“It’s a pity more towns don’t make that choice, isn’t it?”
“This one, for instance?”
Rather than answer, he told me, he snapped his fingers. “Hey, wait a minute. You didn’t play on that state championship team, did you? Back in Forty-nine? Wasn’t that Hard Cash High? Beat Jackson Murrah by two in overtime?”
This time, she was the one who didn’t answer. Because before she could reply, his son grabbed his hand and jerked it. “Daddy! Come on.”
No single emotion, she’d tell him later, would account for the look that flitted across his face. Annoyance was certainly part of it, she said, but she detected traces of guilt, confusion and resignation, too. All sensations with which she’d forged an intimate acquaintance.
“We probably ought to head home,” he told her. “Their mom likes to eat at six sharp.”
She stepped closer, as if to measure his height and let him measure hers. Six feet, he guessed. Maybe even six-one.
“Want to shoot a few sometime?” she asked.
“A few what?”
She almost died laughing. “Baskets,” she said. “What’d you think I meant? Kids?”
“South of the tracks,” Ellis said, “there used to be a basketball court. Really, it was just a patch of mud packed hard by all the bare feet that had played on it. Near the end of Church Street, behind what used to be called the Negro Masonic Building. We went down there because both of us knew that while a few eyes might be watching us through parted curtains, what they saw would never make it across the tracks. White people could meddle in black people’s business all they wanted, but we took it for granted they’d never meddle in ours.”
The hoop, he said, had been welded to a rusted deck plate that looked like it was lifted from a cotton gin, and the deck plate was bolted to a telephone pole. Which was odd, when you thought about it, because in that part of town, at that time, few people had phones.
Dribbling idly with his right hand, he used his left to point at the goal. “If I drive and dunk on you,” he said, “at least we won’t have to worry about the backboard falling on us. That thing’s really up there.”
“What makes you think you can drive and dunk on me?”
He didn’t really think he could. He’d never dunked in his life, though he’d once had the bad luck to play against the Oklahoma A&M center Bob Kurland, who’d park himself beneath the basket and stuff them in all day. Threatening to dunk on her just gave him something to say. His legs didn’t feel springy, they felt shaky. He felt shaky all over.
He’d felt no different the day before when he called her house. He’d jogged back to his office and dialed the number after seeing her husband walk into the Western Auto. When she heard his voice, she laughed and said she’d been wondering when he’d call. A real ballplayer, she told him, couldn’t resist a challenge.
“I might drive and dunk on you,” he said, continuing his dribble. “You’re a girl. I’m a boy.”
It was cool out, but she wore yellow shorts along with a pair of red Keds and a black worsted pullover. He had on an ancient pair of sweats, the same ones he’d worn years earlier at Ole Miss.
“I’m a girl,” she said, “that plays like a boy.”
“Twenty-one?”
“Yeah, but no free throws.”
He tossed her the ball. “Ladies first.”
She tossed it right back. “Do you see any ladies? I sure don’t.”
“Okay. Have it your way.” He backed up a few feet, then dribbled into the area where the lane would have been if there was one. Pulling up, he shot right over her. Too late, she put her hand in his face.
The ball whooshed through the remains of the net, his first basket in years. He didn’t go to games anymore or listen to them on the radio. He’d never even seen one on TV.
“See?” he said. “The fact is, I’ve got a natural height advantage, and more often than not that’s what this game comes down to.”
“There’s such a thing as court intelligence, too. And I have a feeling that I’m probably smarter than you.”
The next time he hit from twenty feet. “You may be smarter, though I seriously doubt it, and in any case it doesn’t make much difference. Your body is a prison.”
“Yeah, and I have a feeling yours is, too.” She grabbed the ball and zipped it to him. He realized only later, he told me, that it was an unusually crisp pass. Passing, when he played, was his weak point, but the offense was set up for him to be the ball hog.
He drove the lane again. This time she jumped in front of him, sticking her face right in his chest, and he bowled her over. Rather than pull up and shoot, he reached down and offered her his hand, letting the ball skip into the ditch.
She slapped him on the wrist. “That was a charging foul,” she said. “My ball now.”
“Au contraire, ma’am. That was a blocking foul. Your left foot was about six inches off the ground. I’m not even sure the right one was down.”
“Bullshit. But if you need to cheat to stay ahead, take the ball. And by the way? Fuck you.”
It was the first time in his life, he said, he’d heard a woman use that expression, and he knew the shock showed on his face. But she’d provoked another reaction, too. They were playing a game and, when they started, the object was merely to score the most points. The end result was a foregone conclusion. Now the object of the game, as far as he was concerned, was to lower her self-esteem. Why should she have so much of it anyway? She might be a tall, good-looking woman, but she’d never gone to college and was married to a terminal redneck.
He lifted the ball out of the ditch, wiped off the slime, then walked to the end of the court, turned and drove on her. This time she got set, determined to hold her ground. He gave her a little head fake, which threw her off balance, and breezed right past her for a layup.
He walked the ball back up the court, bouncing it chest high. “You should have accepted my offer”—bounce!—“to let you go first. At this rate”—bounce!—“you’ll never get to take a shot. If you’d gone first”—bounce!—“you could’ve taken exactly one.”
The next time down the court, he switched the ball to his left hand and shot over her right shoulder. He hit from fifteen, from twenty. She was breathing hard, her face bright red, her sides starting to heave. “I can’t believe,” he said, after hooking one in down low, “that it’s in a school district’s best interests to spend money on girls’ basketball. Maybe that’s why your town went broke. Hard Cash? What a joke.”
He told me he finally decided that in order to complete her reduction, he really ought to let her shoot one. So on his next possession, he drove the baseline, lifted his right foot as high as he could and shot between his legs. “Damn,” he said, when it caromed off the makeshift backboard. “Missed one.”
She grabbed the ball and shoved it at him. “Look, I don’t need your charity, okay? We can just quit if you don’t want to play.”
“I don’t really want to quit yet. I actually expected to make that shot. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve made everything I put up all day. Maybe you don’t want to play? Scared you’ll get stuffed?”
She wasn’t fooling anymore, he said, and hadn’t been for the last few minutes. Her sweater was damp, dark spots spreading under her arms. He found himself wishing he could see her glistening flesh.
“I’m not scared I’ll get ‘stuffed,’ as you put it.” She still had the ball in her outstretched hands.
He wasn’t about to take it. “You know you can’t make a shot on me,” he said, smiling as if to show he bore her no ill will for that “Fuck you,” though he did and he could tell she knew it. “Are we agreed about that?”
“No, we’re not agreed about that.”
She walked the ball to the other end of the court. He bent his legs, crouching. She turned and dribbled towards him, keeping the ball close to her body, dribbling with the pads of her fingers. When she drove close enough, he committed and went for the steal, but she had a nice spin move. He recovered in time to slap at the ball, but he knew perfectly well that he’d hit the back of her hand. “Foul on me,” he said.
“Foul on you.”
She brought it in again. This time he took nothing for granted, moving with her towards the corner, then back to the top of the key, keeping his left foot forward, left hand extended, palm up, to swipe at the ball. She was a lot better on offense, he told me, than defense.
When she tried her spin move this time, he was ready. She leaned into him as she put up her shot, and he got nothing but ball. He shoved it right in her face.
She wheeled away, holding her nose.
“Hey, look, I didn’t intend to do it so hard,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true. He laid his hand on her shoulder.
He told me he never saw it coming. One minute she was bending over with her back to him, and the next thing he knew she’d punched him in the mouth. It hurt. She hit like a man.
He put his hand to his mouth, then lowered it and looked at his bloody fingers. “You know what?” he said.
Her nose was still red. “What?”
“Fuck you, too.”
He said it, and God knows he meant it, but when she stepped closer he couldn’t make his feet move. Her face grew big, then even bigger. Her mouth opened, her tongue flicked out and she licked that blood from his lips.
Listening to him talk about the day they shot baskets, I wondered if I’d ever run into him when my mother took me into town on her shopping trips. I didn’t know him then, so he would’ve looked like just another man who was obviously better off than my father, who wore a tie and wasn’t a farmer. If I had seen him around this time, I wouldn’t have known that he’d lately been split down the middle, that over the next several months two versions of Ellis would inhabit the same space, each trying to outlast the other.
“We never played basketball again,” he said. “We took to meeting wherever we could, often around noon, usually in a town nearby. Our favorite was Belzoni. I didn’t know anybody there, and neither did she. There was a café on the highway back then that served the best chili burgers either of us had ever eaten. She had this way of hiding her mouth behind her palm if I made her laugh while she was chewing. The gesture would’ve seemed precious and dainty if a smaller woman like my wife had made it, but when she did it there was an offhandedness about it that I found entrancing.
“I loved drinking with her in the middle of the day. She always had alcohol. Sometimes it was regular bonded whiskey, in a bottle with a printed label. Sometimes it was clear stuff in a Mason jar and she wouldn’t say where she got it, just laughed, turned it up, took a swig and smacked her lips. She’d say things like ‘Who would’ve thought corn and chicken shit could taste this good?’”
He told me it thrilled him when she said “shit” or “fuck” or even mild swearwords like “damn” and “hell.” Those words were exciting not because they sounded dirty in her mouth but because they didn’t.
Most of all, he loved how she behaved when removing her clothes in a motel room, talking about inconsequential things, mostly, as if nobody was watching her disrobe. “Ever heard the term hill-dropping?” she once asked, unbuttoning her blouse on a blustery day in January. They were in a motel across the highway from the café in Belzoni. The radiator was on—you could hear water gurgling through the pipes—but so far it hadn’t accomplished much.
“Hill-dropping? I don’t think so.”
She tossed the blouse onto the foot of the bed and reached around behind her back to undo her bra straps. “That’s how they plant cotton now. They’ve got these four-row planters that drop four or five seeds in little hills about eighteen inches apart. It used to be that the planter would just drop a steady stream of seeds down the middle of the row, but not anymore.”
“And it’s an improvement?”
“Yeah, because they don’t have to put hoe hands in the field to thin the cotton out.” She dropped the bra on top of her blouse. “Remember when they first started calling those things bras instead of brassieres?”
“That was just after the war.”
She unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down over her thighs. “My momma had a thick accent like they do back in the woods in Sharkey County, and she never learned to say ‘bra.’ She called them ‘briars.’”
He said she didn’t make love like he’d expected. Given her aggressiveness on the basketball court, the forthrightness with which she stripped and her occasionally profane tongue, he was prepared for a certain degree of crassness, but instead she always lay down beside him and rested her head on his chest and said, “Hold me for a while before you get after me.” And so he always did. He held her and stroked her hair, and she put her palm on his stomach and let it lie there.
She talked sometimes about her husband. From the outset she’d made it clear that she had no plans to leave him, and not just because they had kids. There were things about Arlan to admire, she said, even if he couldn’t see them.
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t. Not much point in trying to conceal that.” He knew he should change the subject, or at least fall silent, but that wasn’t in his nature. He asked if she knew what went on at those Citizens’ Council meetings.
“I can guess.”
He told her about the one at City Hall, how her husband and my father and the other men spoke openly about putting black people who’d registered to vote out of their houses and making sure they couldn’t find work.
“So far,” she said, “they’ve been pretty successful at it.”
“They won’t succeed forever. They’ll start failing soon, and I wouldn’t like to be them when that day comes.” He heard himself drone on: “That fellow your husband hangs around with, the one who looks like a beanpole?”
“James May?”
“He follows your husband around town like a pet. He’s got ‘loyal dog’ scrawled on his forehead.”
“He and Arlan knew each other growing up.”
“He always has such a hungry look in his eyes.”
“Maybe he’s never had enough to eat.”
Ellis told me that Nadine said my father wasn’t a bad man and neither was Arlan, that they both grew up poor, went off and fought in the war and, after they came back, had never known a day when they didn’t have to work hard. The thing was, she said, if you didn’t own at least a thousand acres, in the Delta you were a nobody. And if you wanted to be a somebody, according to Arlan, you had to join the Council. He talked all the time about securing their children’s future.
When she said things like that, what Ellis found himself thinking of was a future with her. For him, that meant stolen moments, and he failed to see why they couldn’t steal them forever, but she said when they started they were already in overtime. “You’re at the free throw line,” she liked to tease. “Better sink another one if you can before the buzzer.”
Her tone, when she made those kinds of statements, was far too breezy for his taste. She’d started it all, making the initial approach, stalking him at the grocery store when he had his kids in tow. She was the one who got emotional when they met to shoot baskets. He did tell me he conveniently managed to overlook the fact that he’d gone to the trouble of finding out what he could about her husband, then flipped through the phone book and called her when he knew Arlan wasn’t at home. But even so, if he saw her downtown with her kids, she wouldn’t even glance at him.
He in turn couldn’t stand the sight of her children, especially the girl. He saw them all one day on Front Street, right there in front of the Piggly Wiggly, a week or two before Christmas, a life-size Santa rotating above them in the window, Nadine talking to my mother, a sack of groceries tucked under her arm. He knew better than to speak. All he did was try to make eye contact as he passed, but the girl caught it and her dark eyes flashed.
“Do you ever wonder,” he asked, lying beside Nadine in bed in the motel down in Belzoni, “what it would be like to see each other at night?”
“Oh, hon, what difference would that make?” Once again: easy and breezy.
“What difference does any of this make, then?” he asked. “I go to the store to buy ketchup. I’m not thinking of you, I don’t even know you exist. I’m mentally composing the first paragraph of an editorial when you pop up out of nowhere and start that shit about me ringing one in from thirty feet. You’re lucky I don’t wring your neck.”
“You won’t wring my neck,” she said, “but Arlan would if he ever found out what we’re doing.”
He laughed. “That little man? He couldn’t get his hands around your neck. You’re too damn tall.”
“He could if I was lying down.”
He told me he hated to think of her lying down with Arlan Calloway. A journalist was supposed to be married to the truth, and for much of his life he had been, but after they got involved he lied to himself all the time. He told himself his main problem with her husband was political, when deep down he knew perfectly well that if Arlan would just walk out his front door, taking the kids with him and leaving his wife alone for the taking, he’d forgive him for every racist notion he ever subscribed to. The Meredith case was winding its way through the courts by that time, and Arlan could have stood on the corner of Front Street and Loring Avenue with a big sign saying LYNCH JAMES MEREDITH, and Ellis never would’ve mentioned it in the paper, so great would his gratitude have been.
He wanted to be with her every few days—in this motel room or another, it didn’t really matter much where. He wanted something permanent in a transient environment, something he could leave behind today and go back to on Thursday and find it just as strong because he’d left it alone for the last forty-eight hours. That, he told himself, was what he wanted.
“Don’t you ever get scared?” she asked him there in the motel.
“Your wife finding out.”
He couldn’t imagine how she could. They had one car, and he drove it. She was busy taking care of their kids. She stayed home all day, and hardly anybody around Loring knew her. Anyway, nobody knew about Nadine and him. They’d been careful about that. “No,” he said, “I guess I don’t.”
“I do. I wouldn’t want to do that to another woman.”
Even when somebody’s lying motionless beside you, you can feel when she starts to pull away. He’d never known it until that day but could detect it then, some faint lessening of the pressure exerted by her hand on his chest. They’d been seeing each other for three months. Though the end was hardly imminent, he could feel it coming, and this made him want to do something rash. It never occurred to him, he told me, that what he was doing right then, at that moment, was.
“I’ve never seen the inside of your house,” he said.
“Well, I’ve never seen the inside of yours, either.”
“I don’t know what the floor looks like in your kitchen.”
“You don’t need to.”
“What we’re doing is not about need,” he said. “It’s all about want.”
“How do you turn the word profound,” she asked, “into a noun?”
“Profundity.”
“Then, hon, I think you’ve just uttered one. What we’re doing is all about want.”
It certainly was, and he wanted her, so he turned towards her and pulled her into his arms, thrilled by her size, though until now he’d always been drawn to smaller women. “I hate it when you talk so flippantly about this coming to an end,” he said. “Just plain hate it.”
“I want you to,” she whispered, her nose nestling against his neck. “Remember how you felt when you played your last game? That’s how I want you to feel when this ends, only ten times worse. And I want you think about that every time you’re with me.”
“My last game ended in a loss.”
“So will this one,” she said.
They kept it up, Ellis told me, through the spring of ’62, meeting for lunch and sex whenever they could. Her daughter was in school, her son in kindergarten with me, Arlan in the field, so it was easy enough to slip away every few days. “Then when summer rolled around,” he said, “she fobbed the kids off on your mother a couple of times a week.”
“I remember that,” I said, and for a moment it was as if I were watching a movie, in which a little dark-haired girl with skinned knees begged her mother to take her along to wherever she was going.
While they conducted their affair, the rest of the people in the state—and a good many folks in other parts of the country, too—became intensely focused on the Meredith case. It was clear, Ellis said, that a showdown was coming. In late June, in New Orleans, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Ole Miss to admit Meredith for the fall semester. But one member of the court began issuing stays, the first three of which the full court of appeals invalidated. When the maverick judge issued a fourth stay, Meredith’s lawyers, joined by the Justice Department, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
People were starting to go crazy, and Ellis registered their madness, which at another time in his life would have absorbed all his attention. But the editorials he wrote that summer, as the state became a powder keg, were tame. He weighed in on the issue a couple of times, duly noting there was no point in trying to put off the inevitable, that the longer they drew things out, the worse the consequences would be, but his words lacked the passion that was being spent in cheap motels from one end of the Delta to the other.
In early September, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black announced that after polling the other members of the court and finding all in agreement, he was voiding the stay and ordering Ole Miss to enroll Meredith immediately. “People couldn’t even focus on football,” Ellis said. “That tells you just how bad it was. All kinds of crazy things happened. Meredith would try to register and be turned away by the governor or the lieutenant governor, and the Justice Department would issue another threat, and that would lead Barnett to make another insane speech. At one point some group out in Orange County—I believe they called themselves something like the First California Volunteers—sent a telegram urging him to hold fast and pray because they were en route.”
One day, when he and Nadine were having lunch at an Italian restaurant over in Leland, she asked what he thought was going to happen.
All around them, farmers on their lunch break were discussing the same topic, making sweeping gestures with their knives and forks, their palms pounding the tables. They inveighed against the Catholic in the White House, though apparently it didn’t bother them that the owners of the restaurant were Catholics, too.
“Nothing much,” he said. “Barnett will rattle his saber some before falling on it in front of the Lyceum.”
“You don’t think folks’ll turn out in force?”
“Folks? What folks?” He waved his hand around the room. “The plantation aristocracy? Not a chance.”
She wound several strands of pasta around the tines of her fork. “There’s been some talk,” she said.
“There’s always talk. What kind are you referring to?”
“People in the Council. Some of them are saying maybe it’s time to take up arms, that what’s worked before may not work now.”
“You mean your husband intends to load his six-shooter, march off to Oxford and take potshots at, say, the National Guard or the federal marshals?” He shook his head. “If you want to make me laugh, you’ll need to tell a better joke.”
She laid down her fork still wrapped in spaghetti. “Look, I’m not telling jokes here. If something happened, it wouldn’t be funny. He doesn’t want to go to Oxford, but he doesn’t want to let his friends down, either. I think he’s scared of getting embarrassed.”
He knew and she did too that the organization had been embarrassing from the outset. But insulting her husband wouldn’t wash, and he could tell from the way she sat there—both elbows on the table, legs spread apart as if she was about to push herself up—that she was an inch from walking out. It was amazing, he thought, how the balance of power could shift. Ten months ago, James Meredith had been just another black man Ole Miss could dismiss, and now he had the federal government doing his bidding. Ten months ago, she was trying to attract his attention in a grocery store and he was stuffing a basketball in her face. “It won’t come to that,” he mumbled, picking up his own fork. “Nobody’s going to Oxford, except Mr. Meredith.”
That seemed to satisfy her. Her shoulders relaxed, and she went back to eating, and before long, Ellis said, it was all forgotten—up until late in the evening on Sunday, September 30, when the phone rang at his office and he picked up the receiver and she told him he was wrong.
Ellis had been there since the afternoon, listening to the radio and talking on the phone with a friend of his in Oxford, a retired professor who’d taught him at Ole Miss. He’d been calling his ex-students around the Mid-South, people who ran little papers like the Weekly Times, pleading with them to do whatever they could to keep their readers calm. “Tell them,” he urged Ellis, “not to come. Please.” He said he’d seen pickups with license plates from all over the state, from Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia, too, even a few from Texas. The U.S. marshals had arrived by plane earlier in the day and when transported into town were pelted with bricks and bottles. Now a National Guard unit was heading onto campus. He’d just seen the trucks through the window, light from streetlamps reflecting off the Guardsmen’s bayonets. Nobody knew Meredith’s exact location, but rumor had it he was inside the Lyceum, hidden in the registrar’s office. Folks were forming up in the Grove, cars were set on fire, the air smelled odd.
Ellis told me that when Nadine called, he was considering a special edition that he’d print himself, a few hundred copies he could distribute around town under cover of darkness so people would see them first thing in the morning. If it kept even one person from jumping in his truck with a shotgun and heading for Oxford tomorrow, at least he would’ve made that small difference. So he was less than eager to pause and have a chat. He didn’t stop to wonder why she was free to call on a Sunday evening. “Listen,” he began, but she cut him off.
“Still want to see my kitchen floor?”
“What?” He could hear her breathing. Normally, she wasn’t a heavy breather. He’d talked to her on the phone countless times and taken naps beside her, but not once could he recall ever having been aware of her breathing. Which seemed odd, if you think about it.
“Arlan’s gone,” she said. “I begged him not to go, but he did it anyway, and now I’m here unguarded.”
He was having a hard time, he told me, processing both the information and the invitation, if that’s what it was. It occurred to him that maybe she’d been drinking. This wasn’t a bad night to be drunk. “Whose idea was this?” he asked.
“Going to Oxford was James May’s idea. He called and said they ought to do it, and Arlan was so worried about losing stature in his buddy’s eyes that he agreed. So he loaded his shotgun and went to pick him up. Now they’ve ridden off to defend states’ rights. Probably both of them’ll get shot.”
After Ellis relayed that conversation, I became aware of my own breathing—or, more truthfully, my failure to breathe. I sat there motionless, feeling as if my face had turned to plastic. For a moment I couldn’t speak. “My dad called Arlan Calloway?” I finally said. “Going to Oxford was his idea?”
Ellis lifted his glass of whiskey and sloshed it around a little, as if it contained ice cubes and he wanted them to melt. “You came here to find out what happened, didn’t you?”
“I came here to find out why you bought Andy Owens a barbershop.”
“I bought him a barbershop,” Ellis said, “in part because your father made that phone call. If you look at it in a certain light, James and I were coinvestors.”
When he realized Nadine’s husband was gone, he dismissed his plans for a special edition. The thought of being with her at night, in her own house, possessed a strange allure. “What about your kids?” he asked.
“Sound asleep. Tomorrow’s a school day. Reading, writing and arithmetic.”
He wasn’t worried about his wife. It went without saying that his job required him to visit odd places, at odd hours. Tonight, of all nights, he needed no excuse.
Crazy, yes, and dangerous, too. But doable.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” he told her. When she started to give him directions, he said, “I know where you live.” What he didn’t tell her was how many nights he’d driven by there, looking at the lights along the front of the house and trying to figure out which room was hers.
“Park down the road a little ways,” she said, and he told her not to worry, he had no intention of leaving his car in her driveway where every redneck headed for Oxford could see it.
“Actually getting there took me a lot longer,” Ellis said. “I discovered that hiding a car in the Delta’s no simple matter. I finally drove into somebody’s cotton field and parked on the turnrow, figuring that as long as I got back before the pickers showed up I ought to be okay. And I fully intended to return before then, because I had no guarantee that Arlan and your father would go all the way to Oxford or, if they did, that they’d stay any length of time. Of course, as she said, there was always a chance they’d both get shot.
“I remember that while I was slinking up the road to her place, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if they really did get shot. I imagined Nadine remaining my mistress, living several miles out of town where most of the people who saw me visiting her would be field hands. Her kids didn’t even figure into my calculations.”
Gravel crunched when he stepped into her driveway. The house was dark—so dark that for a moment, Ellis said, he wondered if she’d changed her mind, if she’d turned everything off and gone to bed. Just then, the porch light popped on.
She opened the door. She was wearing a bathrobe, a pink one that looked surprisingly threadbare, with ragged strands dangling from both cuffs. It was too short, having been made for a much smaller woman. “You look scared,” she said.
It bothered him that she spoke in a normal voice, and what she said bothered him, too. He was scared, all of a sudden, but it seemed wrong for her to point it out. Who wouldn’t be scared going to the home of another man’s wife? Especially if he knew that when the other man left, he had a loaded shotgun? “Well,” he said, “then maybe I am. Aren’t you?”
“Do I look scared?”
“Not especially.”
“Well, then, that’s a good indication I’m not. With me, what you see’s what you get. You ought to know that by now.”
She turned and walked off down a dimly lit hallway, and he couldn’t think of anything to do but step inside. Once past the threshold, he closed the door and then groped around until he found a dead bolt and threw it. This made him feel secure until he realized that, since there was also a back door, if he needed to leave through the front in a hurry that dead bolt might be his undoing.
“Take a look,” he heard her say from somewhere down the hall. “Here’s my kitchen floor.”
He followed the sound of her voice. The floor, when he saw it, was just black-and-white linoleum that held the scent of Lysol. There was a Frigidaire in one corner, a gas range in the other, in the middle a table with four chairs arranged around it, on top of the table a bowl of wax fruit and, above that, dangling from the ceiling, a lamp with a white bell shade. The journalist in him logged details, looking for one that stood out from all the others and, if aptly placed in an article, would make the reader sit up and take note, but he couldn’t spot it. The scene was unbrokenly familiar.
“So what do you want to do?” she asked, her hands hidden in the pink robe’s pockets. “Complete a little home-inspection tour? Want to check my pipes and make sure they’re not obstructed?”
He suddenly wanted to be anywhere else. He’d never in his life changed his mind so fast before. Usually there was a kind of bridge between one mind-set and another, when you knew you were taking corrective steps, going from over here to over there, though on that night it was instantaneous. He wanted not only to get out of her house but also to get away from her and stay away. He thought of his wife sleeping at home alone and wondered if he’d been lying to himself about her, that maybe she did know or—even worse—suspect that what used to be hers had been spread around from town to town, in one rented bed after another. The Delta wasn’t that big a place. God only knew who might’ve seen them together. How, he asked himself, could he possibly have been so foolish?
While he stood there trying to compose the speech he intended to deliver, he heard a noise come from down the hall, and it sounded like a footfall, like somebody’s bare heel hitting the floor. “What the hell was that?” he said.
Later, he’d wonder how much it cost her to say what she said next, or even if you could ever put a price on the kind of courage it must have taken. He’d become convinced she always knew exactly what he was thinking, which meant she must have known what his answer would ultimately be.
“I’d leave with you,” she said, “if you asked me to. I thought I wouldn’t, but now I know I would.”
He’d never felt so stupid in his entire life. How could he have failed to see this coming? It was there that day in the grocery store. He should’ve seen it on her face, in her eyes. She wanted more from life, and who wouldn’t? “That noise,” he said. “Did you hear it?”
She studied him as if she were breaking him down into his various components with an eye towards reassembling them into a more coherent whole. “What noise?”
“A moment ago.”
She laughed. “You’re trying to buy time,” she said. Her hands came out of her pockets, her arms crossed over her chest. As if performing in a Christmas cantata, she broke into song. “Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains.”
“Jesus,” he hissed. “Are you out of your mind?”
“And the mountains in reply echoing their joyous strains.”
He stepped over, grabbed her and gave her a good shake. Her breath smelled like whiskey.
“Gloria, in excelsis Deo!”
“Stop it!”
“Gloria, in excelsis Deo!”
After that she subsided, insofar as a woman her size could be said to. Another minute or two passed while they stood face-to-face, his hands still gripping her forearms. Eventually she said, “I’m sorry.”
He let go of her. “You don’t need to be. I’m the one that’s in the wrong.”
“You give yourself far too much credit. In case you didn’t notice, you had a partner in all of this.”
“I noticed,” he said, “and I was grateful.”
Just like that, Ellis told me, they had consigned it to the past. And just as she had in so many motel rooms and lunchrooms, she began to speak of things that didn’t matter—or of things that might matter a lot to others and even to both of them if they hadn’t been where they were right then. “What do you reckon’s happening up at Ole Miss?”
“I imagine all the actors are putting on quite a show.”
“Think Meredith’s still alive?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s very much alive. By now he might have been named chancellor.”
“Speaking of now,” she said, glancing over his shoulder at something on the wall behind him, “I think maybe you better be going.”
He turned around to see what she saw, and there it was, the detail he would’ve seized upon if he’d been writing a story about what had taken place in that room, in these last few minutes: a burnt-orange wall clock designed to look like a basketball, with black script across the top that read 1949 mississippi state girls champions.
The hands told him it was 2:05 a.m.
Did he kiss her before leaving? He told me he liked to think he had, but that in truth he couldn’t remember. They might have shaken hands. Or simply nodded at each other and said good night. He did know, though, that the moment he stepped out of the house his heart was full of promises—that he would never again cheat on his wife, that she’d always know where he was and when he was coming home, that he’d take a greater interest in their children, that he’d moderate his tone when stating opinions while continuing to stand up for the ideals he believed in. He would work hard to make friends of his enemies.
These were the things he was telling himself as he walked down her driveway. And because he was so thoroughly focused on those thoughts, he didn’t notice the sound of the engine until he was halfway between her house and the road. Too far to turn back. Not a bush within thirty feet, not a tree within forty.
He assumed it was Arlan returning, that he’d realized it was fruitless to take up arms for a cause that was lost nearly a hundred years ago, that the more he considered it, the less he relished facing off against professionally trained soldiers armed with the best modern weaponry. He could’ve come to all those realizations, though, and still blow several holes in a man walking away from his house in the middle of the night. Nobody would have blamed him if he did, not even Ellis.
But the truck that braked at the foot of the driveway was old, and Arlan Calloway’s was new.
The driver rolled down his window, grabbed something white and pitched it towards the driveway. Like any good deliveryman, he followed its arc, to make sure it didn’t land to one side or the other, where the morning dew might render the newsprint blurry.
It hit just a foot or two away. In the few seconds it took the driver’s gaze to meet his own, a memorandum of understanding was drafted. On the other side of the Mississippi River, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, stood a small brick building with a for sale sign in front. It wouldn’t remain empty much longer.
“Hey, Mr. Buchanan,” Andy Owens said. “What you doing way off out here?”
Ellis leaned over and poured himself another shot of Knob Creek. “So that’s what I can tell you,” he said. “That and nothing more. I got the news the next morning along with the rest of the town. Heard it from Elnora Napier when I walked into the office. You can probably imagine the emotional cocktail I drank that day—grief, shock, shame, fear, big slugs of self-disgust. I told myself that morning that I’d never get over it—that I couldn’t and shouldn’t allow myself to—and I can see that on some level I was right. Everything comes back at you one day. But since I don’t ever want to discuss this again, in however much time I have left, I’m going to ask you a question now, if that’s all right.”
There wasn’t much I could do except nod. I thought his question would be about Maggie and me, and I didn’t know how I would answer it. But I was wrong. Because all he asked was “Is there anything at all, Luke, that you’d like to tell me?”
I picked up my glass and drank down the last of that burning whiskey, then set the glass on the table. “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to tell you how sorry I am that I came here today.”