THE EARLY-MORNING SUN FLICKERING AROUND the edges of the broken front window seemed to cast Toby in a different light. I was sitting against a wall inside the church, staring at his casket. It wasn’t until the gray hours before dawn that the uproar outside had ebbed and a smoky sunlight washed out that of the torch flames that had raged outside all night. I couldn’t see much, but I could hear everything. I had sat huddled beside Dad in a back corner of the church, far from the front windows. Dad was on his back, holding his nose straight. Mom was dabbing his forehead with a damp towel. Mister Swanson popped up at one point and suggested that it might be light enough to leave. Dad hesitated, but I begged him please. My arm felt like it was about to fall off.
Yet another heckle and jeer rang out. A brick crashed through the window. Glass sprayed over the floor. There was renewed commotion about how best to avoid the few lingerers remaining outside. I gazed around at the others crowded inside the church. Most were intent on waiting for help to arrive from Albany. They didn’t want to be caught out on back roads alone before full light. Which left me and my aching arm. We bid the others farewell and left by the back door.
When we got to our truck, we found the windows busted and the tires slit, so we got a lift from Mister Swanson. The sun hadn’t crept over the horizon yet, but the sky was lit. The fresh smell of dew seeped in through Mister Swanson’s cracked front window. And as we made our way down the windy back roads that I knew so well, I thought about how strange it felt, after all these years, to be riding shotgun in Mister Swanson’s Plymouth. It wasn’t new, but the window roller worked, and there were no springs poking out of the seat cushion. Mom and Dad were jammed into the backseat along with Irma and Evan. They were each looking out their respective windows with blank expressions on their faces. No one seemed to have anything to say.
Mister Swanson dropped us off at the top of our drive and sped off. A gush of fatigue hit me like a tidal wave. I headed straight for my room and dove into bed. Didn’t even take off my suit.
I don’t know how long it was before Mom or Dad came into my room, but I remember a lot of wet washcloths and Mom pleading with Dad to call Mister Hofstetter. She couldn’t bring herself to call him “Dr.” on account of some comment he’d made to her when she was a young girl. Things came back to me in dribs and drabs, like the feverish dreams that replayed the image of Toby in that open casket. I had visions in my sleep of having been held hostage in that church, with a crowd gathered outside trying to rescue me. Flares zipped across the night sky. Rappel lines hung from swirling helicopters. Hand grenades and tear-gas canisters were tossed through the window.
My bed was soaked. I was burning up. I think my temperature spiked to 200 degrees with the realization that the crowd wasn’t there to rescue me but to hang me alive. There was a bounty on my head, and every single white person in Early County, with the single exception of Dad, wanted to string me up out front. It was set up in my dream just like those public hangings you see in cowboy movies, where the actual hanging is nowhere near as bad as all the hate-filled invective that precedes it.
I also had a foggy recollection of the racket Dr. Hofstetter made tripping up our front steps and the loud thumping sound his shoes made across our creaky pine floor before my bedroom door swung open and he sat down beside me with that stale cigar in his mouth and fumbled through his medicine bag.
Hold still, son. This is gonna hurt.
That’s my good arm!
I yelped, then fell back in bed. Dr. Hofstetter gave me a congratulatory pat on the shoulder and said that the needle was supposed to go in my good arm. He took one look at Dad and told him to take me straight to Putney.
Dad was in a pickle because the truck was still sitting in town, vandalized. He had no choice but to take the tractor. All these years of me wanting to ride on the back of that thing, and here my overprotective dad was tossing me on the back of it, limp as a sack of peanuts and with a fever of sky high. I was in and out of consciousness the whole way. But what I remember of it was good. It was so thrilling, I almost didn’t mind nearly falling off at every bend.
Dad carried me through the front door, where a nurse took one look at my arm and asked how long it’d been like that. I’d broken out in a cold sweat, and my breaths were short. Next thing I knew, they put me on one of the unused gurneys lining the wall and rolled me off to some ICU room and pumped me full of penicillin to fight some sort of blood poisoning. How I got that, I have no idea. The doctor pulled out a jigsaw and said he was going to have to remove my cast to see what was going on. I thought he was about to take my arm off and screamed in panic. Two nurses held me down, and the doctor said something about the rubber bands that I couldn’t hear before he cracked my cast open with his bare hands. Several of my stitches had opened up and seemed to have festered. A thick white mucousy goo was seeping out and smelled so bad that the nurses made faces.
The doctor said that the infection had spread from the wound to my blood and that Dad had gotten me there in the nick of time. He asked me if I’d experienced joint stiffness and then nodded when I said yes, like he wasn’t one bit surprised. Said I was lucky not to have any neurological complications, whatever that meant. Dad asked if I’d have to get my stomach pumped. The doctor said no, he’d just put me on a heavy regimen of antibiotics—at which point my mouth went dry. The doctor took Dad by the arm and led him into the adjoining room. Said that he wanted to have a look at the gash on his face.
It wasn’t until my third day there that they got the infection under control and someone realized that the bone wasn’t healing right. This doctor was apparently some sort of bone specialist. The young Dr. Beck (or Smeck or Heck—something like that) speculated that I’d experienced some sort of highly unusual form of blunt trauma early on to the proximal region of my arm. He turned to me and asked if perhaps I’d fallen off a bicycle—said it was okay for me to admit to having ridden a bicycle with a broken arm. I wouldn’t be the first to have done so. He glanced at Dad and said that I wouldn’t get in trouble, right? I shook my head, no. I didn’t have a bicycle.
He cleared his throat and held the radiograph up to the light, then explained how it showed that there was a highly irregular rotation of the flexor digitorum sublimis so that the bone’s normal orientation was skewed. Called it a displacement fracture, or re-rupture—said it was the result of my arm having been twisted radially with the cast on. He demonstrated on Dad the vector, angle, and force necessary to cause such an abnormality. I didn’t understand any of it, of course. All I knew was that my arm hardly felt connected to my shoulder.
When Dad responded with a blank stare, Dr. Beck said that my ulna was healing out of whack and wasn’t properly aligned with the radius. The upshot was that disfigurement was inevitable unless something drastic was done.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, Doc. You just took a hard left on me. Did you just say “disfigurement”?
Dr. Beck took off his glasses. He looked Dad straight in the eye and said that the only thing he could do to make my arm heal straight would be to break it again. In response to which Dad walked a small circle while pinching the topmost part of his nasal bone.
I know I’m just a peanut farmer, Doc, but wouldn’t that be the third time? And on the same arm?
Dr. Beck took a good hard look at Dad. I’m not here to sugarcoat things for you, Mister Fairchild.
Dr. Beck explained that our only hope was that maybe it would heal straighter the third time around. To do that, he’d have to effectively start from scratch. I suddenly felt light-headed, like I probably shouldn’t be hearing this. I closed my eyes and imagined my arm in a vise, with some doctor in a lab coat taking a baseball bat to it. I heard Dad whisper, Isn’t there some sort of limit to how many times you can do that, Doc?
Dr. Beck called Dad aside. They moved farther down the wide, shiny tiled hall, out of earshot. After a lengthy conference in the midst of nurses busily entering and exiting the rooms on either side of them, they were both towering in front of me, agreeing that a third break wouldn’t be necessary. Which, in a sense, was good news. Or was it? All that medicine must have been making me stupid. I didn’t even know the difference between good news and bad news anymore. I mean, sure I didn’t want to have it broke again, but neither did I want to be—well. You know. The d word.
What about, you know—the deformity?
Dr. Beck said that it would be merely an aesthetic concern. The functional impact to my elbow, wrist, and fingers would be negligible. Dad seemed to think it’d be okay. So I did, too. The doctor had me stay one more night, to be on the safe side. The next day, they ran some more tests, after which they plastered me back up and sent me on my way.
• • •
DAD DIDN’T SAY a word on the drive home. We sat at the railroad crossing, watching a wall of ochre-colored boxcars and rust-colored boxcars and navy-colored boxcars rumble past, one after the next. It felt weird being stuck in that truck with him, in silence, after three whole days of having a chatty hospital staff wanting to know every last thing about me. Part of me wished my fingers would swell up again if it’d get him to say something.
So you fixed the truck?
Hm.
New tires?
Hm.
All of ’em, or just the ones that got slashed?
Dad looked over, distracted. Huh? Oh. Not the windows, though. They’re still busted. I just keep them rolled down. Until we get some more money coming in.
At least the truck was still good for getting a few words out of him. The caboose whooshed past, and the clang clang clanging railroad crossing gate lifted. We crept over the double bump of the railroad tracks. Dad looked over and said how happy Mom would be to have me home. After that, he scratched at the thick scab set across the bridge of his nose and went quiet again.
Dad tapped the horn as we pulled into our drive. Mom appeared in the doorway before the engine stopped knocking. I jumped into her arms. She held me tight and said she was sorry she hadn’t been able to come to the hospital. It was only because she didn’t want trouble. It’d been three days but it felt like two months.
Dad and Mom looked at each other and hugged. Then they kissed, and we all embraced. It was the first time I’d seen them do that in a long time. We all just missed each other. We headed inside, and Dad pleaded for Mom to please go easy on me. He understood the temptation but thought that kind of gushing love was only good when applied sparingly. Thought I might still be adjusting and didn’t want to see me in shock or something.
Mom told Dad to hush and tucked me into bed and brought me a tray with chocolate milk and oatmeal cookies and a tiny little vase with some of her petunias from out back. She placed it on my nightstand and told me to get some rest. She kissed me on the cheek and stroked my hair and told me again how great it was to have me back. Said it was the longest three days of her life. I dozed off before she finished drawing the curtain.
I slept like a rock that night. I remember waking up groggy from all the medicine and being half asleep and slapping around on my end table in the dark for some water and overhearing Mom and Pop talking tenderly and sharing in laughter in the kitchen. Whatever problems we’d had seemed to be all fixed. Somehow the events at Toby’s service, along with my subsequent hospital stint and maybe even Dad’s fistfight with Mister Buford, had brought us all together. I was happy to have my family back.
I felt like a new person the next day. I sat up in bed with my comic books and let Mom and Dad wait on me hand and foot. All I had to do was to cough, and one of them would poke their head in the room and ask if I needed anything. Seemed that every few hours, one of them would stick their head in the doorway and remind me to take my medicine.
The new cast the doctor had put on me was somehow getting the respect the first one never got. No more scrubbing dishes—I didn’t even have to carry my dirty plate to the sink. No one bothered me about the mess in my room. Mom even offered to help me brush my teeth that first night. I finally had the time I needed to finish the puzzle I’d started at the beginning of summer. Dad didn’t leave the house, which was unusual. He usually went out at least once a day to do something important in town. But he just said that he was working on something out in the shed and that he wanted to stay close to me.
Then, after dinner, Dad told me that I could stay up and watch a ball game with him if I wanted. “If I wanted?” He never let me stay up late. I sat down on the sofa and kissed my new cast. It seemed to have the power to work miracles. Mom was in the kitchen, doing Miss Della’s hair. They’d been in there for a good hour or so together. Miss Della was going on about all the people she’d known who had left and were now living these interesting lives up North. Dad turned up the volume of the game. He wasn’t interested in hearing Mom gabbing on to Miss Della about how she had no delusions about his family. I popped into the kitchen to scrounge myself up a cookie. I froze at the mention of Connie. Mom never talked about Connie.
Mom had a comb in her teeth and was combing out Miss Della’s hair in her fingers, saying how she did what she always did in the face of slander—especially when it came from one whose primary grievance was a pitted heart. Miss Della said, Oh child. Mom said she simply swallowed her pride and took what little comfort she could from the fact that the man sitting in the other room hadn’t left her when she was carrying. Miss Della said, Hm. Mom said men were a dime a dozen, but those men weren’t. Miss Della said, Hm. Because he could have, Mom said. Miss Della said, Hm.
Carrying what?
They both looked up. They hadn’t realized I was there.
Boy, you go back into that room and watch yourself some TV. Go on, get. Don’t make me get out of this chair, young man.
I held up my new cast and didn’t move. They sighed and turned back to each other. Mom said “that” seemed to her to be proof enough that he was a decent man. A man not so much of distinction or refinement as of a prominent family and who had always treated her decently. She claimed that must count for something. Miss Della said, Hm.
Miss Della pursed her lips and let Mom talk. Mom acknowledged that it was a modest victory but merely claimed that it was a victory nonetheless and that while these weren’t exactly the happiest of times, she was clutching onto it for dear life. Miss Della said, Hm, hm. Mom put clips in Miss Della’s hair and said, Just wait. You’ll see.
Mom reached to the counter for more clips and assured Miss Della that her man was better than most. Miss Della said, Hm. His brave actions at the church proved that—again and again, he’d proven it. And when would people just let up and accept that he wasn’t the lecherous wretch they were making him out to be? Because it was no different than her not being the lecherous person Connie was always making her out to be. Dad had proven beyond any doubt that she could count on him in a pinch. Not to cut and run, like so many others did these days. Miss Della said, Hm. Hm. Hm.
Mom paused.
What is wrong with people? They’ve got it all backward. Him being moody doesn’t mean he’s in cahoots with this group or that group. He’s no renegade. That’s part of his charm. That his love for me is not political is a good thing. Doesn’t that make his love better? More pure? Damn it, he’s not political, he’s pigheaded. Love isn’t black or white for him. A little blinding, perhaps. But isn’t that just the way it’s supposed to be?
Hm. Hm. Hm. Hm. Hm. Della sat there quietly appraising Mom. Her gaze was steady, if doubtful. Child, you light-skinned niggers are all the same. You think that just because you’ve weathered a few storms, you’re going to be okay in a hurricane. Now, put on more of that grease and let me out of this chair. It’s almost eight, and I gotta get back to the Orbachs’ to wash up from their supper.
The TV roared. I returned to the den and checked on the ball game. The last time Dad had let me stay up this late, he’d gotten me out of bed to watch Roger Maris jogging around the bases to thunderous applause. Dad had told me to pay attention. Said that I must never forget that moment, because someday I’d have kids of my own and he wanted me to be able to share with them how I was standing there beside him, my own pop, staring into the glare of the TV on the evening when baseball’s longest-standing record was broken. He didn’t call it baseball history—he called it human history, the history of men. He put a hand on my shoulder and said that he wanted to share it with me.
Remember Maris’s home run last year?
Dad nodded. Over the right-field wall. Three hundred and forty-eight feet. Home run number sixty-one for the year.
Mom hollered out from the kitchen, wondering if World War III had broken out and nobody was bothering to tell her. Miss Della was gathering up her things. She joked that if Castro managed to get his hands on a missile, at least she’d go down with pretty hair. When Dad told them that Bob Burda had hit an eleventh-inning walk-off home run for the Crackers, they responded with a communal shrug.
I put my arms around Dad’s waist and held him tight. The warmth between us filled me with joy. Dad shook his head and turned off the TV. Said it was time for bed—I had a big workday tomorrow. The screen went blank and Dad went into the kitchen. I stood there staring at the dark screen and thought about the time Toby and I had used a broken stack pole to tee off on the rotting peaches lying along the side of the road.
• • •
EARLY THE NEXT morning, Dad told me to sort through some stack poles. Said we were behind on a bunch of stuff and he needed me to pick out a hundred good ones by the end of the day. Once I was done, it’d be the end of sorting poles for the season. He apologized, because he knew I still wasn’t one hundred percent, but asked me to just suck it up and to finish strong. Then he disappeared into the bathroom with a newspaper in hand. I didn’t say anything, but I think he could tell by the look on my face that I wasn’t happy about it.
The thought of picking up just one more cockamamie stack pole made me tired. A hundred? It would require going through a thousand to pick out that many good ones. I dragged my feet out onto the back stoop and stared out at that pile of stack poles that, no matter how many I’d sorted through and no matter how many we’d repaired, never got smaller. I resented them. They were ruining my life, and I just wanted them to go away. Why couldn’t Dad just have been a stupid housekeeper or hairdresser or bookkeeper, like Mom?
Finishing strong was overrated. I’d been in the hospital, was still having medicine shoved in my face four times a day, and, frankly, was still recovering. Sure, I felt a lot better, but that was all the more reason to continue taking it easy. Apparently, it was working—I hadn’t been in a hospital for three whole days just so he could dump more work on me.
I popped into the shed and riffled through the gloves and drill bits and screwdrivers covering Dad’s workbench. I snatched a jar of paint thinner and a box of matches, paused in the doorway, and glanced back inside. There was a stack of boards leaning against the wall that I hadn’t seen before. A big box of nails and a hammer was sitting on a chair beside it. I had no idea what he was making. All I knew was that he should have been helping me sort through stack poles instead of parking himself on the john for hours at a time while I was left to do the heavy lifting.
The pile of stack poles loomed like a mountain beside our house. It reached well above the eaves. I climbed up it with paint thinner and matches in hand, careful not to slip, all the way to the creaky top. I was momentarily distracted by the view. It was magnificent. Everything seemed familiar and new at the same time. The sun was just now emerging over the tree line. Shards of sunlight burst through the trees. The rolling hills and wide-open landscape was shrouded in an early-morning mist that had not yet burnt off. I could smell it in everything around me: the trees, the shrubs, and the dirt road, even the stack poles. I could even make out the top of a building downtown. Of all things, it was a damned church spire. It looked so small and insignificant surrounded by all this natural beauty, swaddled as it was in a sprawling countryside, connected to everything around it by threads of road.
I screwed off the top of the paint thinner and poured it out. I hadn’t even wanted to look in that casket, but Mom had taken me by the hand and dragged me down the nave to the flower-draped corpse anyway. I’d never seen so many of those stupid little purple wildflowers in one place. God only knows how long it took Evan to collect them all. I spilled some paint thinner on my hands and was concerned that Mom might be able to smell it. I pulled out the matches anyway. Striking them with a broken arm was easier said than done; the whole box flew out of my hand and tumbled down the stack like it was happy to be free. I screwed the top back on the jar, and on my way back down after them, I told myself how it wasn’t going to be so much a pyre as a distress call. I was sick of feeling isolated. After Derrick, Toby had practically been my best friend, but I’d gone from feeling that I’d always known him to feeling like I’d never known him at all.
I was halfway down that rat’s nest of dried sweet gum when Mom hollered out for me to come in. I froze. The piled creaked. The matchbox had wedged itself among several stack poles. I stuck my arm in after it as Mom barked out again, wanting to know what I was doing. She said for me to change out of my brand-new sneakers because they weren’t for wearing outside before school had started.
I looked up. The backyard don’t count! It’s hardly considered outside! And if you’d get out of this stinking house more often, you’d know that!
Mom stepped down from the stoop. She climbed atop the pile of stack poles in her house shoes and bathrobe, after me. She snatched me by the wrist and hauled me down alongside her, teetering the whole way.
What do you think you’re doing, Mister? It’s not enough you have a broken arm? You want to break your neck, too?
She paused. What’s that smell?
What smell?
On your hands. Christ almighty, you been drinking moonshine again? Let me smell your breath.
I stormed off to my room and tossed myself atop my bed and curled up with my favorite comic book. When I looked up from Sea Devils, Snowflake was dashing around erratically in her cage. She had always been a source of comfort for me in times of family strife. Just holding her relaxed me—something about the softness of her fur, the reassurance of her heartbeat. She was anxious about something. I lifted her out and took her over to the window. I held her over the ledge and gave her a peck on the fluffy scruff of her neck and told her that I was sorry for being her oppressor. But I was a changed man now. I was finally ready to do the right thing. I leaned over the ledge and let her go. Mom’s petunia bed sat beneath my window. Snowflake bounced once, but otherwise landed fine. She only took out a few flowers.
You’re free! Now go!
Snowflake scampered over to the railroad tie upon which our house sat. She clawed at it.
Not up here, you idiot! That way, damn it! Go!
She looked up at me with those beady little eyes of hers and continued clawing at the railroad tie.
Goddamnit, you stupid little beanbag! Don’t you get it? You’re free! Now go!
A hawk carving broad circles high up in the brightly lit sky screeched. Snowflake looked confused and darted off. She had the whole open field, acres upon acres of food so good you couldn’t buy it in a pet store—all the yummy dried peanuts and hay that an animal like her could possibly dream of. And where did she go? Dumb shit scurried under the house. I leaned farther out the window, the better for her to hear me.
You want me to lock you back up, is that it? Well, I’m not doing it! It ain’t right!
I went into the den and sat down in front of the TV, disillusioned. All I had wanted was for her to see her newfound freedom for the peace offering that it was. Toby had always said that when something was broke, you fixed it. Here I had tried to honor his memory and done just that, and it only seemed to turn out worse.
I flipped through the channels. The only thing on was Governor Vandiver standing at a podium, saying something about having to call in the National Guard. There were lots of flashes of light bursting in his face. Cameras clicked and snapped, and flashbulbs were popping all around him. The last press conference I’d seen, General Harkins was hogging all three channels, bragging about a coming troop buildup. Dad had said for me to pay attention because the man on TV was talking about important stuff. Turner Airfield was up the road, and half of the airmen they’d need were bound to come through town on their way to training. I’d come across a few of them enjoying a little R&R at Mister Abrams’s pool once or twice. Others bought half-pound bags of boiled peanuts from me on their way through town. They loved ’em. So I kind of knew them. Those were the things Dad worried about—real problems. The kind that required soldiers.
Anyway, Harkins was a real dumb shit if you ask me. Here Dad had been watching so much news yapping about the coming offensive for the last six months, I probably knew more about it than the general. The only surprise to me was that Ho Chi Minh and those damned Vietcong didn’t know who the hell Walter Cronkite was.
I turned the volume down at the mention of Toby—not on TV but in the kitchen. Mom and Dad were at it again. Why did it seem that peace and harmony were only ever a highly contingent state of affairs in our house? Dad was in the kitchen rummaging through the drawers, looking for the insurance papers for the truck, all the while grilling Mom about whether she’d sent out the last payment on time.
The twenty-seventh, damn it! The premium was due on the twenty-seventh! You’re supposed to know that!
Mom was holed up in the bathroom, shouting from behind the door. Of course I know that! Keep looking. It’s in there somewhere!
I peeked in to see what she was doing and caught a glimpse of her sitting atop the toilet, secretively unclumping bills from the coffee tin. Mom slammed the door in my face and told me to mind my own business. The lock clicked. I went to the kitchen doorway. It was still hard for me to look at Dad without staring at his busted-up nose, the stitches above his eye, and the scab on his fat lower lip.
Here. Now leave her alone. She paid it, okay? It was in the bureau, mixed in with the unpaid bills.
Dad snatched it out of my hand and left for the front door. He opened it and looked around, then called me to his side. He said for me to forget about the sorting for now and told me instead to get the hammer from the shed. And nails. Said for me to bring the whole box.
I plopped myself back in front of the TV and announced that I wasn’t moving a muscle—at least not until he told me what he was making. I was starting to suspect that it was a coffin, which I didn’t want any part of. At least not until I knew who it was for. Besides, the governor was on the tube, saying something important—about what, I couldn’t say just yet.
Dad cracked a grin and gave me an aw-shucks look. He said that he was happy to have me back to my old self.
Say, Pop, why do they have two dozen photographers there taking the exact same picture? Wouldn’t it be smarter just to have one? I mean, he could share it around with the others instead of having fifty guys taking the same photo of the same man at the exact same time. Doesn’t make sense to me.
Why did Pickett’s Charge fail at Gettysburg? Why’d the Red Sox let Ruth go? Why is Ford holding out on fuel injection? Huey, a lot of things don’t make any sense. That’s just the way the world is. Might as well get used to it.
No wonder the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.
Without a doubt. Huey, the world just lacks basic rudimentary skills of coordination and cooperation.
But I thought that’s what kindergarten was for?
Dad nodded. He was outside, setting up the ladder beneath the front picture window. The sofa sat directly beneath it. From where I was sitting, in his easy chair, he appeared framed like in a portrait in the window. He teetered atop the ladder, fumbling around with Toby’s tool belt slung over his shoulder and a board in his hands, hammering. I couldn’t hear a thing Governor Vandiver was saying. Dad couldn’t have picked a worse time to be putting up siding. I got up from the TV, went over to the sofa, and knocked on the window.
I can’t hear the TV!
Dad had four nails poking out of his mouth. He couldn’t hear me over his hammering. He wasn’t interested in listening to what I had to say, and didn’t seem to care about the governor’s statement, either. He didn’t have time for press conferences. This was a time for action. The bathroom door burst open. Mom appeared in the doorway with her coffee tin in one hand and a wad of lumpy bills in the other.
Twenty years, and this is what Toby has to show for it? That’s not right, Buck—and you know it. And what the hell has all this got to do with swimming in a damned pool anyway? I really hope those swim lessons were worth it, Buck Fairchild. Because now you got people back there crying over a damned white man’s swimming pool. And you know who I blame? Stanley for building that stupid damned pool and you for taking Huey to swim in it. I don’t care what people say, the law’s the law. And swimming in a damned pool isn’t going to change a goddamned thing but where white folks go to swim!
Mom couldn’t let go of that damned pool to save her life. Dad stopped hammering and pulled a nail from his mouth. He mumbled something through the glass about how first it was all about how she was going to take me there herself, and now she wouldn’t let me near the place if it was the last thing she did, and to just make up her damned mind because it was confusing him. He was having a hard time keeping up with her constantly changing opinions. Said they were like clothes she was trying on to see how they fit, and when was she going to understand that they weren’t going to fit her at all because they were cheap thrift-shop clothes that you buy by the pound, not the inch?
It was impossible to hear Vandiver fielding a bunch of reporter’s questions. Mom began to sob. It was a strange mix of sounds: Mom crying and the TV droning and Dad mumbling with nails poking out of his mouth behind the window.
I swear on my grandmother’s grave that I meant to let Toby have a go at it on his own. I just needed a little more time. A little more time, that’s all! A man has got to be able to do things in his own time!
Twenty godforsaken years! And his father worked for your father for forty more—as did his father before him. And he’s got absolutely nothing to show for it but this and a four-by-six plot out behind Mount Jacob! It was long overdue that you put a stop to it—and you wouldn’t have ever put a stop to it. And that’s on you!
I know that! You don’t think I know that? I just hadn’t known what I’d do without him. Okay? I don’t have a problem admitting that. What’s fair is fair. Of course he could have done a fine job on his own. I know that. Hell, there’s no question that he knew what he was doing.
Mom sat down on the sofa and buried her face in her hands. I went over and sat beside her and stroked her back as she cried into the coffee tin. I took her hands in mine and steadied them. Dad was hammering directly behind us. It wasn’t until the light started to fade in the living room that I realized what he was doing. I turned around and asked Dad if there was a hurricane coming. He said maybe, but hopefully not. Mom got up and turned on the overhead light. Dad’s hammering stopped. He peeked beneath the last board yet to cover the window before his hurricane shutters cut out the last of the light coming through it.
Listen—it doesn’t even matter if he did it or not. Okay? People just had it out for him. There. I said it. Happy?