“You got to go back down and—” I turned to Silas. He was gone. He hadn’t seen any of this. I walked back up to Wright’s.
“Hero,” I said to him.
“You know damn well I wasn’t throwing at the girl.”
“You left a lot of innocent people standing around back there.”
“You wanted me to hang around and be arrested? I told you about that son of a bitch and what I saw him doing. I’m fed up with the people in this state like that walking around free. He hit the man with that cane, didn’t he? Tell me, did he hit him?”
“No. He touched him with it.”
“Touched him? Well what kind of touch was that? You want people touching you with a fucking stick?” Then he went on, reviewing me again on what he’d seen Peter doing at Oxford during the Ole Miss riots over James Meredith; the night Kennedy made his appeal to Mississippi on television, the night they set cars on fire and students attacked the Lyceum Building, where they had the FBI hemmed in; the night the tear gas flew and one student would have driven a bulldozer against the door of the Lyceum except he ran out of gas; the night a jukebox-supplier and a Canadian journalist were murdered by unknown snipers; when the local reporter said FBI men had attacked a girls’ dorm with tear-gas guns, when the Mississippi Highway Patrol was indignant; when General Edwin Walker was alleged to have led a crowd of student quasi-lancers against the FBI; the night Silas missed, driving into town in the early morning of the next day, seeing something curious on an overpass of the railroad between the town and the campus. Parked his car and walked up there. He walked up to the scene of a group of busy adolescents with a grown man ordering them around. Some of them were scouting the traffic and others were moving crossties toward the rail. It was still gray and foggy. “Here’s one!” one of the kids yelled. The older man clapped his hands and directed them to get the crosstie on the rail. “Be ready!” he said. It was Colonel Lepoyster, using his hat that way, sleepless, as at Cold Harbor or some other perimeter above Richmond, 1864, reduced to boys and no ammunition. Coming under the bridge was an olive truck with canvas over the trailer. The boys dropped the crosstie over the rail and the huge beam fell on the trailer. Then the other group dropped another crosstie on the windshield of the truck as it emerged. The crosstie hit end down and plunged into the cab as if into water. The truck roared across the wrong lane of the road and smacked into a telephone pole. The pole broke and fell back on the canvas, full of wires. The truck rolled over on its side. There was a cheer on the rails. A man with a star on his helmet put his head up out of the cab window. The soldiers who weren’t hurt were angry, and squirmed out the back. Colonel Lepoyster told the teenagers to run, and they did, down the railroad in both directions and off into the high weeds. The man in the starred helmet had a.45 in his hand but was still dizzy.
“This is the Mississippi National Guard!” cried the man. “Who would do this to us?” He looked up at the rail embankment; his face was bloody. Peter turned to Silas with a cowed, sick face.
“I thought they were the United States Army. I didn’t know they were the National Guard. Those boys are from Mississippi,” he said.
Silas went down the hill to report to them who was responsible for that crosstie being dropped through the windshield. By the time he and the man with the.45 lumbered back up, Peter was gone into the weeds too.
This was the story. There was no reason Silas should know the final end of it, that it was General Creech, Fleece’s stepfather, who had the bloody face and the.45. Fleece had seen the scar from the windshield glass which the general still carried, and I had not told Fleece, either, about who was leading the troops who dropped the crosstie.
I was concerned enough on my own and of my own. Did not tell them something else: that I’d been taking out Catherine roughly every two months, until this last three months, for two years. I’d seen her the first time in maybe an overlong time, out there on Capitol Street.
5 / Last Date
What do I say? The very same night I fell to dreaming about her. I dreamed about her Christmas night; dreamed one of those mesmerizers, where every sense you have is sharp-edged and you sleepwalk toward the déjà-vu as if the palm of a hand is pushing you from behind. You couldn’t tell the sex of the hand. It could be Geronimo’s hand; it could be Catherine’s. I awoke with my tongue on my cold pillow. In three weeks I was at their house, after telephoning. Peter answered the door.
“I’ve been buried in my books.”
“You do look haggard. Come in. We saw you on Capitol Street. I was about to make a call to you, but she wouldn’t let me.” The place was dark. He led me through the den. The glass peeped through the break of the curtains. I walked over and drew one of them back, wanting to look through the glass and see what one could see outside.
“We don’t open those,” said Peter. I sat down next to the hearth.
“Where is she?”
He hung over me and said nothing for a moment. What I caught of his face was something like a Santa Claus who had been assaulted and shaved and who was angry.
“Don’t stare at her nose. She had it broken playing volleyball at the college.” The lie clung about the room for a while; he didn’t follow it up immediately.
“You know, I really covet your freedom,” he said. “You sit there without one enemy in the world, enjoying your youth and your beard. Soon a doctor of medicine.” This lie clung about the room with the other one. He clutched one of the curtains, and kneaded it, looking out the split through the glass which he’d just told me not to look out. “You would never understand the term lover, would you? I can’t hope you could ever comprehend the term lover. No time. Too fast a pace.” I believe he had been making tiny, almost undetectable loin-movements against the curtain, but this may have been only his agitated way. “My wife never had even a high school degree. She had an endowed body which was timid, but she learned to speak with it. She had no speech until I came to her. She was not a being until I came. She learned a dialect in the language of love. Months, it took. She would moan out her own name, Catherine!, so happily when at last her praise and wonder thrilled up. Then she led me, me! into a humility, an immersion, not foreseen by one so proud as I. She “—Catherine walked into the kitchen, but he did not see her, and she receded, but only just out of sight—“saw me below her, trying to throw my failing wet bridges, my webs, up to connect with her being, having as much as burned my own bridges of the practical world. It was then she betrayed me. ‘You have to eat,’ she would say. The niggers might wander through the yard and see us. What a cold stare from her, at the last. What dry mechanical lifting up of her fingers on the hem of her skirt. But,” he came away from the curtain, not looking at me, though, “pthis Catherine will finish college soon. Did you know that? She’ll have some education to appreciate the one who takes her.”