Stella finally said, “Well, on second thought, Hollins is not a bad place to hide these days.”
Joel said, “If I go to law school, I’ll probably go to Ole Miss. That way I can visit Mom on the weekends, and I can also hang around Wilbanks’s office and help with the lawsuits.”
“I’m sure he has things under control,” Florry said. “We can afford Vanderbilt if that’s what you want.”
“No. Four years there is enough. I need to branch out. Besides, there are more girls at Ole Miss.”
“When did that become important?”
“Always.”
“Well, I think it’s time you got serious about a girl. You are, after all, twenty-one and a college graduate.”
“Are you giving unsolicited advice on romance, Aunt Florry?”
“No, not really.”
“Good. Just keep it to yourself.”
Before leaving for the fall, Joel and Stella made three more trips to Whitfield to sit with Liza. Dr. Hilsabeck encouraged this and assured them their visits helped immensely, though they certainly could not see any improvement. Liza’s physical appearance remained unchanged. For one visit, she refused to leave her dark little room and said virtually nothing. For the other visits, she allowed them to roll her around the grounds in a wheelchair, looking for shade from the August heat. She smiled occasionally but not often enough, said very little, and never strung together enough words for a complete sentence. So she listened as her children tag-teamed their way through the same long narratives. To break the monotony, Joel read articles from Time magazine and Stella read from The Saturday Evening Post.
The visits were emotionally exhausting, and they said little driving the long way home. After four trips to Whitfield, they were becoming convinced that their mother would never leave.
Early on September 3, Joel loaded his sister’s luggage into the trunk of the family’s 1939 Pontiac, and together they drove to the pink cottage for a farewell breakfast with Aunt Florry. Marietta stuffed them with biscuits and omelets and packed a lunch for the road. They left Florry in tears on the porch and hustled away. They stopped for a somber moment at Old Sycamore and said a prayer at their father’s tombstone, then sped to the train station, where Stella almost missed the 9:40 to Memphis. They hugged each other, tried not to cry, and promised to keep in touch.
When the train was out of sight, Joel got in the car, drove a lap around the square, then through the side streets past the Methodist church, and finally returned home. He packed his own bags, said good-bye to Nineva and Amos, and drove an hour to Oxford, where law school was waiting. Through a friend of a friend he had a lead on a tiny apartment near the square, above a widow’s garage, a cheap place rented only to graduate students. The widow showed him a tiny three-room flat, laid out the rules, which included no alcohol, no parties, no gambling, and of course no women, and said the rent was $100 cash for four months, September through December. Joel agreed to her rules, though he had no plans to follow them, and handed over the money. When she left, he unpacked his bags and boxes and arranged his clothing in a closet.
After dark, he walked along North Lamar toward the courthouse in the distance. He lit a cigarette and smoked it as he strolled past stately old homes on shaded lots. Porches were filled with the post-supper gossip as the families and neighbors waited for the heat and humidity to break for the night. Though the students were back the square was dead, and why wouldn’t it be? There were no bars, clubs, lounges, dance halls, or even nice restaurants. Oxford was a small, dry town, and a long way from the bright lights of Nashville.
Joel Banning felt a long way from everywhere.
Chapter 38
The lawsuit was over a deadly collision between a sedan filled with a young family and a flat railcar loaded with several tons of pulpwood. It occurred late at night on a main highway between Tupelo and Memphis, at a crossing that for reasons never to be known had been built at the foot of a long hill, so that the traffic coming down the hill at night could not always see the trains until the last moment. To avoid collisions, and there had been several, the railroad installed red flashing lights on both sides, east and west, but did not splurge on gates that descended and actually blocked the highway. The flat car was the eleventh in a long train of sixty, with two engines and an old red caboose.
The lawyers defending the railroad made much of the fact that any driver paying sufficient attention to the road could certainly see something as large as a flat railcar that was eighty feet long and stacked fifteen feet high with timber. They passed around enlarged photos of the flat railcar and seemed confident in their proof.
However, they were no match for the Honorable Burch Dunlap, attorney for the deceased family — both parents and two small children. In two days of trial, Mr. Dunlap attacked the men who designed the crossing, exposed the railroad’s lousy safety record, proved that it had been warned that the crossing was dangerous, discredited two other drivers who claimed to be eyewitnesses, and presented the jury with his own set of enlarged photos that clearly revealed a severe lack of maintenance by the railroad.
The jury agreed and awarded the family $60,000, a record verdict for federal court in north Mississippi.
Sitting low in the back row, Joel Banning watched the trial from beginning to end, and felt sick. Burch Dunlap was masterful in the courtroom and owned the jury from start to finish. He was at home, comfortable and relaxed and thoroughly credible. He was meticulously prepared, smooth on his feet, and always two steps ahead of the witnesses and the defense lawyers.
Now he was coming after the Bannings and their land.
Because Joel was watching the court’s Oxford docket with a keen eye, he happened to notice the upcoming trial involving the railroad collision. Out of curiosity, he decided to skip classes and watch it. And then he wished he had not been so curious.
After the verdict, Joel thought about calling Stella, but why ruin her day? He thought about calling Florry, but her phone line was not private. And why bother? He needed someone to talk to, but in his first weeks of law school he had remained reclusive and met few other students. He was detached, aloof, almost rude at times, and always on the defensive because at any moment he expected some loudmouth to ask about his father. He could almost hear the whispers behind his back.
Three months after the fact, the wounds from the execution were still open and raw. Joel was certain that he was the only student in the history of Ole Miss whose family had suffered through the shame of such a spectacle.
On October 9, he skipped class and drove to a lake where he sat under a tree and sipped bourbon from a flask. One year ago, his father had murdered Dexter Bell.
Joel studied hard but found the classes boring. On Saturdays, when the talk was of nothing but football, he drove to Whitfield to sit with his mother, or he drove home to check on Florry and look at the crops. Home had become an awful, empty place with only Nineva to talk to. But she, too, was depressed and moped around the kitchen with little to do. Hell, it seemed as if everybody was depressed. On most Friday afternoons, Joel stopped by John Wilbanks’s office to discuss the family’s legal troubles, or to hand over a brief or a memo he had polished off at law school. Wilbanks was impressed with young Joel and had mentioned more than once that the firm could use some fresh talent in a few years. Joel was polite and said he had no idea where he wanted to live and practice law.
The last place would be Clanton, he thought to himself.
As the holidays approached, Florry began dropping hints about another road trip to New Orleans. However, her plans seemed to collapse almost as soon as she made them. Joel and Stella suspected the reason was money. With the family’s finances so uncertain, they had noticed a few cutbacks here and there. The 1947 cotton crop was good but not great, and with Pete gone the picking had lacked some intensity and efficiency.