It was November. The north wind had blown the water from the beaches, and the casinos across the bay rose up like bad memories to remind us of greed and craziness. Not that anyone in Ocean Springs needed to be reminded of craziness in the fall of nineteen ninety-seven. We had spent September and October fighting off a plan to build a waste treatment plant in the marshes beside the Pascagoula River. Don’t even think about that. Think about good things. Think about the herons that nest along the shore. The sea gulls and rooks and crazy little terns that sing to us when we go walking in the morning, a song made of crackles and the beating of wings and hunger. Think about the wonder of flight and the improbable, yes, divine creation all around us and for God’s sake don’t think one rape wreaks a fall or defines a culture. Even if it was Miss Anastasia Provine. Even if it was the sweetest lady who ever lived.
Was the rapist black or white? She won’t tell. I want to tell you something about this little town of five thousand souls down here on the Mississippi coast, across the sound from the casinos in Biloxi, where the French first landed three hundred years ago this winter, where they first set foot in what would later be called the Louisiana Purchase. In the first place it belies the cynics who think a southern town can’t have good relations between black people and white people and all the shades of people in between, from albinos to darkest Africans. A long time ago the city fathers of Ocean Springs decided not to accept the government’s offer of public housing. Because of that, the black people of Ocean Springs are the same black people who have always lived here. They are handsome and tall and very proud. The poet Al Young is from Ocean Springs, although he never comes back to visit. The mystical painter Walter Anderson lived here all his life and left his legacy everywhere. Everyone paints. Ten-dollar sets of watercolors fly off the shelves of the expensive toy store on Washington Avenue. Back to the rape.
Miss Anastasia lives in a white house set back from the beach. When she was young she was the president of Mississippi College for Women. After she retired she came home and moved into her mother’s house and began to do good deeds. Good deeds she has done include tutoring bright children in Latin and French, overseeing the school lunch program for four years, including eating lunch at the public schools in town at least four times a week. Teaching children not to complain or put their elbows on the table. Walking everywhere she goes unless it’s raining. Setting an example of superior behavior twenty-four hours a day and lending books to anyone who likes to read.
After he banged her head against the wall and forced her to undress, the rapist relented and fled her bedroom. Why did he do that? Because she began to chant a Buddhist chant she had learned in her youth from a devotee of the Dalai Lama. Om, mani, padme, hum, she chanted over and over and he lost his erection and fled the house. She put her clothes back on before she called the police, which is probably why the police dogs lost the trail at the railroad bridge.
Rape is a capital offense. You could be put to death for raping an eighty-year-old woman at nine o’clock on a Thursday night. She was in her bedroom trying to stay awake to watch ER. “I didn’t know you watched ER,” I said when she told me that. “I would have come over and watched it with you.”
“They have it on too late,” she answered. “But I have to watch it. One of the writers went to MCW. I knew her mother. I’m fascinated by television. If I were younger I would write about it. No one since McLuhan has really tried to plumb the phenomenon of watching television. Of course we didn’t question the printing press, did we? We just made and read the books.”
“Are you all right?” I kept asking. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
“Come over on Sunday afternoon,” she said. “We are going to plant daffodils on the front lawn.” Her house is on a rise of land beside a small harbor. There is a wide front lawn with two live oak trees that shade the way to the beach. On Sunday afternoon the members of her Latin club were gathering to plant hundreds of flowers in honor of her escape from the madman. We have all decided he is mad. The police want to know why neither of her dogs went to her defense, but one of them is fourteen years old and the other one is blind. The police have also spread a rumor that her back door was unlocked and many who know her secretly believe it’s true. The rumor has slowed down the affixing of dead bolt locks to every door in town. For several days after the rape locksmith trucks from Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian, and Pascagoula were descending like a cloud of locusts adding dead bolts to doors that already had perfectly good locks on them. I had a vision that for years to come I would be noticing the double locks on bedroom doors and think of them as a communal art form, a monument to the night that madness entered the home of Miss Anastasia Provine and made us think we were not safe.
“Except we are safe,” she insisted, when I told her that. We were on our knees digging holes for the daffodils. She had spread out a piece of canvas and we were kneeling on it, trying not to get the Mary Copelands mixed up with the King Alfreds. “We are safe because our ancestors have striven to create a civilization where the weak and strong serve each other. The young men who came out when I called were so wonderful. The young woman who took the phone call sits up all night to guard us while we sleep. The people at the hospital also. We must have an appreciation day for everyone who is awake all night and on duty. When the daffodils bloom I will take baskets of them to the people who came to my rescue.” She sat back on her knees. How does an eighty-year-old woman kneel on the ground without pain? By walking seven miles a day, rain or shine, along the shore, her hair tied back with colored ribbons, her feet encased in the latest model Nike running shoes, her arms swinging, an example being set.
There is a long red mark along the side of her face and the white of her left eye is blood red because he tried to choke her and her arm is bandaged. Aside from that she seems just like herself. This worries me. I think she is in denial. I think we had better get someone to come and live in the house.
I dug down into the earth. I heaved a long sigh. I turned and looked her in the eye and was quiet. Miss Anastasia is not a lady to whom you give advice, even if you are the principal of Ocean Springs Middle School, which is my hard-won post.
“I was thinking I should come and give a lecture on preparedness to the young women in your school,” she said. “Do you agree that should be done?”
“It would be marvelous. I can’t think of anything that would be more helpful. Anytime you feel like doing it. Just let me know.” I looked down across the lawn to the beach and the clear bright air above the water. The barrier islands that guard the coast were very clear in the distance, their tall pine trees like sentinels. It has only been a year since we fought off a plan to build a bridge out to the nearest island. The developers wanted to cut down the trees that keep the sand in place and put up a hotel and a casino. We are not the only town fighting for our life against insanity and corruption. We do not have petrochemical plants spewing toxins into the air like they do on the Louisiana coast. We have pollution of the spirit. The slot machine addicts wet the seats rather than leave their machines long enough to go to the bathroom. Forget I told you that. It was told to me by the parent of a student at my school. She was working in the all-night restaurant at the Grand. I got her a job at the school cafeteria so she can be home at night with her children. We do what we can.
“He told me he was going to kill me.” Miss Anastasia got up from her kneeling position and pulled her tall body into its most commanding posture. I stood up beside her. The great live oak tree behind her was not more powerful or imposing, and I tried to imagine a madman encountering this vision. “And I said, ‘No, it is not me you wish to kill. I am only a symbol of someone who has been cruel to you. Let me give you money. Let me give you food and drink. Tell me what is troubling you.’ So I got up from my chair and that is when he grabbed me and banged my head against the wall and began to choke me. Then he released me and told me to disrobe. I said, ‘Oh, please, let me put on my robe and slippers. I get cold so easily. Surely it is not me you hate. I have done nothing to engender your hate. Please think this over before you go any further.’ That is when he threw me down upon the bed and the dogs began to whimper and I saw the photograph of the Buddha Celine brought to me from San Francisco last year and I began the chant I used to console myself when my mother died. Om, mani, padme, hum, I began to chant and he raised up from the bed and fled the room. It was a miracle, Louise. I was saved by a miracle. By Celine going to San Francisco to meet with the Save the Oceans people and by their taking her to the museum to see the jade Buddha and by her kindness in wanting me to have a photograph of it and all the web of being in which we live.” She looked off toward Deer Island, and I rededicated myself to fighting evil wherever I find it and especially when it only seems like simple ignorance, which is all a teacher does, which is what we are here for, our mission.
“He thought you were some sort of witch,” I answered. “He thought it was voodoo. There you were, in that bedroom full of artifacts from the religions of the world, and he thought he had wandered into a voodoo den. Will they catch him, do you think?”
“He may harm another person first.” She hung her head. “I will regret all my life that I stopped to put on my robe before I called the police. I was cold, Louise. When I was a child my mother would warm my clothes before she dressed me on winter mornings. Well, it’s that memory I will focus on. Not this evil I have told you. Bury the evil with the daffodils. Come, let us go and see about the others.” We walked over to where the Episcopal bishop was planting a circle of Semper Avantis beside the driveway. The director of SCAN, the society for the prevention of cruelty to children, was beside him. It would impress you if you knew who was on that lawn planting flowers. When they bloom in the spring we will have obliterated the footsteps of the madman. We have taken back the ground beside the harbor in Ocean Springs.
He was caught by a series of events that are as bizarre as the crime itself, as strange as the chemistry that will turn the bulbs we buried into flowers, as miraculous as the flight of herons, as dark and troubling as the misplaced hope that causes a human being to urinate on himself or herself while playing a slot machine.
A young man Miss Anastasia helped get into Harvard University several years ago was home for Christmas and out walking on our beach at dawn. He noticed that the dog who prowls around the yacht club was tied to a post by the pier. This is not normal. For years that dog has stood by the driveway waiting to follow joggers down the beach. No one has ever seen him tied to the pier and besides the tide was coming in and the rope that held him wasn’t long enough for him to reach the pier if he needed to go there. So this small, neat-bodied young man named Howard who used to play a trumpet in the marching band slowed his pace and went to investigate. There, beneath the yacht club in the hammock, was a dark-coated figure asleep beside an empty vodka bottle. The young man untied the dog, walked quietly back to the road, and pulled out his cellular phone and called the police.
They found a list of names and addresses on the man. My name was at the top of the list. I will be thinking of this for years to come. Is it because my photograph was in the newspaper several times this fall when we fought the waste treatment plant? He told the police he found the names in the newspaper and the addresses in the phone book. He said he did not know why he had written them down and put the paper in his pocket.
I still cannot tell you if he was black or white. Miss Anastasia is adamant about that. She says the only relevant information is whether he was wanted or loved. She says children who are not wanted or loved grow up to be mean. She says Planned Parenthood is the long view and the short view is wariness and locked doors.
She identified him at ten o’clock the morning after Howard called the police. She picked him out from photographs and in an old-fashioned lineup. Then she asked if she could be allowed to talk to him.
“You don’t want to do that,” the chief of police told her. “You might prejudice our case. Let us prosecute him first.”
“What would you want to talk to him about?” I asked. I was there with her. I had driven her to the police station for her appointment.
“We might learn something that would be useful,” she answered. “The work of the world is never done, Louise. How often have we talked of that?”
The bad thing about Miss Anastasia is that there is no arguing with her. How do you argue with someone who has decided to view her rape as a learning experience and her rapist as someone she should counsel? On the other hand I am not a yes person. I don’t pretend to go along with a lot of left-wing hogwash and blame-the-victim thinking.
“I have to learn his history to put my mind at rest,” she continued. “I have to know the series of events that led him to me.”
“He had a list and I was on it. That’s all I need to know. I want him in jail. The way the men are talking the safest place for him is jail.”
“We must be privy to his records,” she insisted. “Who do we know who can get that information for us?”
My niece’s sister-in-law works at the police station. She copied the files that afternoon. Then my niece brought them to me and I took them over to Miss Anastasia’s house and she opened a bottle of sherry and poured us each a glass and we read the files.
It was completely depressing. He was born in south Florida and is thirty-nine years old. There are four arrests for public drunkenness and two for possession of marijuana. He worked at one of the casinos as a bellboy for a while. Now we have him on our hands in the Ocean Springs jail.
“Why would he suddenly go from being a drunk to becoming a burglar and a rapist?” Miss Anastasia asked. “This doesn’t make sense, Louise, I’ve been reading transcripts all my life. So have you. When does a person go from one modus operandi to another with no apparent cause? There’s something wrong here.”
“Gambling,” I said. “He was working at a casino, then he was fired. He must have been gambling.”
“Not necessarily. He could have been fired for drinking, but you have a point. Could a person become addicted to gambling on top of alcohol? If so, he could have wanted money to go back to the casino. I offered him money, however, and he still wanted me to disrobe.” She drank her sherry. I poured us both another glass. “I need to understand what happened,” she added.
“Well, you aren’t going to ask him and that is that,”
“I know someone who could. Isobel Madison is in New Orleans. She’s a renowned psychoanalyst. If she would talk to him we might sort this out. Perhaps there’s a treatment center where he could be sent for rehabilitation. I’ll talk to Judge Arnold tomorrow and see what he says.”
“And who will pay Isobel for driving to Ocean Springs to talk to a drunken rapist? She treats the richest people in New Orleans. She isn’t going to come over here to do charity work.”
“She would come if I asked her to.” Miss Anastasia sat back in her wicker chair and drank her sherry. Her mind raced off to a world where a great psychiatrist would come to Ocean Springs and rehabilitate the poor lost creature who had banged her head against the wall and tried to rape and kill her. I stayed quiet. I drank my second glass of sherry and poured us both a third.
“Am I getting carried away?” she asked. “Yes, of course I am.”
“My name was on that list. I don’t want to put ugly dead bolt locks on every door in my house and wear a bracelet that calls nine-one-one and go up to Woolmarket and buy a German shepherd.” The police had been trying to get Miss Anastasia to get another dog. They want to give her one of the black German shepherds the Hargrave family raises for them at Woolmarket.
“It might be better to get German shepherds than to have a man in Parchman Prison because I sent him there.”
“That’s it,” I said. “You’ve gone too far. You are not doing anything to that man. He did this to himself and I’m not listening to any more soul-searching. I am going for a walk. Put down that sherry and come along with me. It will be sundown soon. Let’s go and watch it happen.”
She put the glass on top of the copied files and we got up and left the house and started down across the lawn. We were almost to the road when we remembered to go back and lock the front door. Then we set off again. Let me describe her walking to you. She has on Nike shoes, a long skirt with a silk petticoat underneath, a dark green sweater buttoned up the front, a wool cloche she bought in Belgium thirty years ago. It is a lighter green than the sweater and comes down over one ear. Her soft white hair sticks out around the edges of the hat. She strides along the path beside the beach. Her arms swing, the wind moves in to meet her, the skies open out before her, the waves move in along our gentle, sandy shore. She moves as if she knows where she is going and who she is. Progress is being made, her walking seems to say. Much has been accomplished. Much remains.
Of course I adore her so I read a lot into her slightest whim. Which is why I have to be on guard against being caught up in her academic, ultra-liberal slant on things. She ran a small college for privileged girls. I run an integrated, understaffed, underfunded middle school. I love my job, but it is much closer to reality than the manicured lawns of Mississippi College for Women.
“I will come and lecture to your young women this week, Louise,” she was saying as we walked. “I’ll tell them to lock their doors. I’m not sure my back door was locked. I have to admit that.”
“If it hadn’t been your house, it might have been mine,” I answered. “I have a gun, you know, and I wouldn’t have been afraid to use it. I might have shot him in the face.”
“More reason to call Isobel and see if she can get him into a rehabilitation program. You would have been sorry you shot him. You’d have to live with that forever.”
“I would not be sorry. I’d be glad.” We picked up the pace and walked around the beached sailboats by the Washington Avenue entrance to the sound and out onto a spit of land where dozens of sea gulls were resting on the wet sand. The tide was so low the beach went out halfway to Deer Island. A blue crane came in and made a landing. He turned and looked us over.
In the distance a fake pirate ship was being hauled from Mobile Bay to a new mooring at Biloxi, where it is slated to become the fifty-first casino on the coast. We watched its progress. We watched until the drawbridge opened and it passed through. Then we moved around the sea gulls and the heron and kept on walking.
She will call Isobel Madison and Isobel will come over, I decided. Then Judge Arnold and Isobel will pull strings and the wretched man will be sent to a rehabilitation program instead of prison. Then he will get out and come back to Ocean Springs and break into my house and my pair of black German shepherds will tear him limb from limb while I shoot him.
“I told you so,” I practiced underneath my breath, but she heard me.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“I said I’m going up to Woolmarket on Saturday and look at those dogs. I want one whether you do or not.”
“Don’t be foolish, Louise,” she answered. “Of course we aren’t going up to Woolmarket and get some vicious dogs.”
“I’m getting one,” I answered. “I might get two.”
Be careful what you say in jest or fear or anger. Two days later we were up in Woolmarket looking at the dogs. A young police officer had driven us there in a police car. There was a litter of five puppies the chief of police wanted us to see. They were three months old. The mother was a beauty. We petted the father and watched him go through his paces. He had been a Seeing Eye dog but his owner died and he had been retired to the breeding program. I thought he was the smartest dog I had ever seen and I told Miss Anastasia so. She was already holding a puppy in each arm.
Which is how three-fifths of a litter of black German shepherds bred to be working dogs are now living the life of leisure on the coast. Two are at her house and one is at mine. I named mine Cincinnatus after the Roman hero and she named hers Rafaela and George. She says it’s pretentious to name dogs after historical figures and I say it’s pretentious to name them the first thing that pops into your head.
Miss Anastasia’s presentation to the young women at the middle school went well. It was a cold day and she wore the long dark green velvet cape lined with fur which she has had since 1946. She talked to the girls about being aware and protecting themselves and the sacred beauty of the human body and also its resilience and power to forget and heal.
She fielded questions, including one from an animal-rights activist about the cape. “I would not buy it now,” she answered. “Neither do I see any need to throw it away.”
“Have you forgiven this guy then?” a girl asked. “Or do you secretly want to hit him or do something bad to him?”
“I want you girls to work very hard at math and raise the overall math scores in Mississippi,” she answered. “I think about the man who harmed me and try to figure out what society can do to lower the number of desperate people who live among us. Filling the world with jails is a primitive solution to our problems and doesn’t seem to be solving them.”
“That’s enough questions for now,” I broke in. “You are all going to be late for third-period classes. Miss Anastasia will be eating lunch with us in the cafeteria. You may talk to her there, later, if you wish.”
The lovely girls of the Ocean Springs Middle School broke into applause. Miss Anastasia stood beside me while they filed out of the auditorium and into the hall.
“What if they really raised the math scores?” I asked. “What if they actually did that?”
“It could happen,” she answered. “If the winter is long and it rains a lot and the parents turn off the television sets.”
The wretch in the jail was set free. The police were forced to let him go for lack of evidence. Fingerprints in Miss Anastasia’s bedroom did not match his fingerprints. Footprints did not match his shoes. There was nothing but her identification, and that is not enough for the law. The local newspaper put the story on the front page. SUSPECTED RAPIST FREED, NO EVIDENCE, the headline read. We all expected Miss Anastasia to be embarrassed by this but I think she was relieved. I was the one who got scared and made my daughter sleep at my house for two nights after they let him go. After all, this dog is not grown yet and I don’t really want to use my gun.
In spring five hundred daffodils bloomed on the lawn of Miss Anastasia’s house. Also, math scores on the standardized tests at the middle school went up seven points for the year, but, of course, we cannot prove Miss Anastasia did that.