A Tidewater Morning, Page 3

  There was a thick cloud of rage in and around our stalled car. For good reason, we were not a very happy little family. But we generally kept our tempers and were decent with one another, being well-bred and imbued with many of the more gentle Christian prescriptions. Indeed, our love for one another had a special desperation. But I could almost hear the rage humming in the warm autumn air. My father, a patient man, was enraged because he could not fix the engine; he was a graduate of North Carolina State College, an engineering school, and never could reconcile this with his mechanical incompetence. Essentially he was a poet who had stumbled by error into technology. I heard him whispering his Presbyterian curses: “Blast it! Jeru-sa-lera!” My mother was in a quiet, stony rage because the night before at my grandmother’s house in Carolina, whence we were returning, I had misbehaved, and had misbehaved again in the car, making some brattish remarks about all the niggers in that part of the country, which caused her to cry out, in words I had never heard her use before: “Shut your mouth!” I was in a rage because of my guilt over the word I’d said, yet ego-stung and enraged at her rage. By demoralizingly slow and painful degrees she was being killed by cancer, and this too was part of the overall rage we felt. I was supposed to be unaware of her condition, formally, but wondered why, since I was neither stupid nor blind. A minor crisis other people would greet with a show of humor or equanimity made my mother and father, and eventually me, become frazzled and exhausted because of the way it represented in microcosm the oncoming disaster none of us could face or bear.

  Sulky, halfhearted, I tried to restore a touch of goodwill. I said: “In about fifteen years the Japanese are going to be in the United States, and we’re going to be fighting them.”

  My mother was silent. When she spoke, a soft undertone told me that she had curbed her anger at me; she had always been blunt, though, and now she said what was on her mind. “Paul, you’ve been reading that ridiculous story in the Post Your father subscribes to that magazine, though I don’t know why. That story’s simply trash. It’s also dripping with racial prejudice.” My mother was a cum laude Bryn Mawr graduate, high-principled, shrewd, and liberated; a Pennsylvania Yankee, she wore her abolitionism like a badge of honor in this part of the Tidewater, an enclave of ancient counties as fanatically segregated as darkest Alabama. “One of my dearest friends, Annie Wardlaw, whom you never knew—she died—lived for a long time in Japan with her husband, who was a diplomat. She loved the Japanese. They’re not like those—those beasts in that magazine. A story like that is inflammatory.”

  I remember asking what “inflammatory” meant. I gazed out at the peanut-field-and-pine-grove monotony of the landscape, the potholed asphalt highway down which, toward us, now came an incredible rattletrap of a truck, swaying and top-heavy with a dozen farm Negroes in overalls and the homemade, patched and repatched Mother Hubbards of those destitute years. It slowly crept past us, the motor stuttering, its human cargo a jumble of rolling eyeballs and flashing teeth and agitated wavings and jumpings. “Does you need any help?” I heard the driver call out. But I could sense that this only added fuel to my father’s fury as he nodded them on their way.

  “ ‘Inflammatory,’ ” my mother said, “is an adjective to describe that ugly word you used ten minutes ago about these people you see here in this countryside. A word like that is inflammatory. And disgusting.”

  She was unfair. She had already upbraided me violently; now she had recommenced the attack. Her unfairness began to restore my rage. Whatever I was on the verge of saying in protest was cut off by my father, who flung open the door and sank down behind the steering wheel in despair. “I don’t know what’s wrong! The distributor. A short. I don’t know! There’s not a telephone for miles!” His hands were black, greasy, quivering with tension.

  “Why didn’t you let those Negroes help you?” my mother said.

  “Daddy,” I heard myself saying, “the Japanese are going to invade the United States.” Inside me there was an intense need for retaliation, so I then employed a touch of the magazine story’s straight-shooting vocabulary. “Bunch of slimy butchers.”

  “You stop that kind of language!” she exclaimed, stirring to turn around and face me, in a jerky movement that must have caused her pain. “We are not going to war with anyone!” She glanced at my father.

  “Why do you read that magazine? Why do you consciously expose an eleven-year-old to such garbage?”

  “Listen, Adelaide, they have printed that genius from Mississippi, William Faulkner,” he said, making a fatigued sound. “And one of your favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also clever escape fiction like the story in question.”

  “There’s something profoundly immoral about publishing scare stories about war,” my mother retorted, “especially when they can be read by some children.”

  “Scare stories about war!” he echoed her mockingly. “How can you be so idiotic? I hate to say this, but I think you’re an idealistic fool You ought to have your head examined!”

  I was stupefied. The words had thrust a dagger through my chest. His dignity and forbearance had been such an abiding part of his nature that tones like these seemed—there was no other word—monstrous. Please! I had never once heard him lift his voice to my mother; her affliction had caused him to bestow on her daily an almost reverential tenderness. But now—this fury. It may have been only his aggregate frustrations—the sick engine, his family stranded in a backwoods nowhere, the bickering, my misbehavior, some unfocused anxiety. Whatever, he began to harangue my mother with a bully’s scorn. His manner sickened me. At first she flinched as if he had hit her; then she drew back and stared at him as if he had gone crazy.

  “Adelaide, don’t you realize the whole world is aflame with war—has been, is, and ever will be? What do you think I’ve been doing with myself these past years? What do you think I helped build the Ranger for? To send airplanes sightseeing over Chesapeake Bay? What do you think we’ve built the Yorktown for? And the Enterprise. And why do you think we’ll be building the Hornet? And so on ad infinitum. Do you think the United States government is spending millions of dollars on these ships just to have a handsome, up-to-date, show-off Navy? No, my dear”—the “dear,” usually so gentle, had a hard, sardonic tone—“they are to make war, and they will make war and you and I and all our friends on the Virginia Peninsula even now are the beneficiaries. Are you so blind that you can’t see the contradiction of this awful poverty over here in Nansemond County, while we ride in an Oldsmobile—a defective Oldsmobile, as we have seen demonstrated, but the kind of car that very few people are privileged to ride in, in the midst of economic collapse. It is simple, my dear. We are the lucky few feeding off profits made from the machinery of warfare.” He paused for an instant, then said: “And what about those Flying Fortresses from Langley Field, Addy, and their racket you complain about nearly every morning? Do you think they’re merely part of some game we’re playing? And the Navy fighter planes from Norfolk? And the minelayers from Yorktown? And those truck convoys rolling down every day from Fort Eustis? Certainly all that has to be put to use! Don’t you see—”

  Suddenly he came to a halt. Knowing my father as well as I did, I sensed there was no way he could long sustain this harsh, aggressive mood. And indeed at that very moment he turned away from my mother and looked straight ahead down the highway, at the same time raising his hand to touch consoling fingers against her shoulder. I saw her relax again; the perplexity and momentary shock softened, faded into a pale calm, and I relaxed too, feeling the hunched-up muscles in my arms and legs go limp with relief.

  “Oh, Lord, forgive me, Addy,” he said at last, in a distant grieving voice. “I’m sorry to raise my voice like that. But I can’t help thinking”—again he hesitated, as if searching for words, and for what seemed a long while the only sound in the car was that of our breathing, a trio of different rhythms—“I can’t help thinking of the generations—as I once told you, I think: every direct ancestor hurt or mutilated or
dead in nearly all the wars this country has fought. The great-grandfathers in the Revolution and in 1812. Both of them scarred. My grandfather in that despicable war with Mexico, dead at Buena Vista. My own father at the age of seventeen half-blinded and mutilated so badly at Chancellorsville that he hobbled and jerked like a spastic for the rest of his life. I alone got away during the Great War because of that friendly heart murmur, but somehow compensated for this by serving my apprenticeship in the shipyard, building heavy cruisers.” He turned to her briefly. “I suppose you could say that it was your poor brother David who, in a distant and indirect sense, kept it in the family, became my substitute, his mind blown away at Château-Thierry, so that even now, wandering around that veterans hospital at Perry Point—”

  “Don’t,” she whispered, and slowly let her head fall against the back of the seat. She was not yet fifty. Years before, beyond the limit of my earliest memory, her hair had turned gray, and now most of it was white, though remarkably soft and lustrous because of her determination to keep a trace of her former beauty. It reminded me of the white of gardenias, and now the glossy strands of it next to her brow had become damp and darkened with tears. “Don’t say any more, please,” she said.

  It was plain that he was ravaged inside by what he had caused himself to spill forth. He had also (I think unwittingly) allowed a meditation on war to flow to the edge of an unspoken thought—a prophecy concerning his only son and heir. As always, as much as I adored him, I was embarrassed by the emotionalism that impelled him, with passion at once fierce and clumsy, to twist around and with both arms embrace my head and my mother’s as if trying to merge them into one, murmuring: “Dearly beloved … dearly beloved.”

  Even as Halloran’s words broke through the cloak of memory, broke through my whiskey haze, I was aware that he had neared the end of a story he had told us before. Stiles and I gazed patiently at the colonel, who drifted back to stage center. He was poised delightedly at the edge of his denouement. The teeth flashed beneath the vaudeville mustache and the laughter heaving up from his chest had made him very nearly incoherent. “So Willie,” he gasped, “so Willie was lying there with this broad Ludmilla. They still had their clothes on, you see, but he knew for sure he was going to score. And then he got his hand down there—you know where—and she was moaning and groaning and suddenly he felt”—another gasp—“and suddenly he felt what was obviously this big, stiff … Russian .. . gazoo!”

  Counterfeiting laughter with convincing heartiness is another of my social skills, and I joined with Stiles in the general explosion of merriment. “Oh, wow!” I cried.

  “It wasn’t a she, this Ludmilla, you see, but a he. He was a White Russian fruitcake, I mean one of those whattayoucallems—”

  “A drag queen,” Stiles put in, “a transvestite?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Boy, did Willie make tracks out of that joint!”

  Our laughter died away but amid the residue of chuckles Halloran fell into thought. “Willie almost never got over that, but it was quite a story.” A tone of gravity crept in. “Jesus, though, imagine what he must have felt like afterwards. I mean, think of kissing. Having your tongue inside the mouth of this Igor or Boris or whatever the fuck his name must have been.” He gave a shudder. “Murder!”

  “Make you sick to your stomach just thinking about it,” Stiles said accommodatingly.

  “What in the goddamned hell are you crying for, Paul?” I suddenly heard Halloran say, shocking me back into present time. On one’s face the borderline between hilarity and grief may be, of course, ill-defined; thus I was able to press one hand against my brow, concealing my eyes while I murmured, “So funny, so funny,” and let the tears of sorrow continue to course down my cheeks. In reality the homesickness that had first seized me when I awoke on deck had now engulfed my spirit, and I felt as helpless and as vulnerable as I had at any time since I had gone to war. I’m sure the remembrance of my father’s desolation had made me sense the power of history to utterly victimize humanity, composed of forgettable ciphers like myself. What am I doing in this strange fucking horrible war? I thought, dumbfounded by the virginal freshness of the question I posed to myself. I rose from the bunk and quickly mumbled an excuse, saying that I had to go to the head, but once clear of the cabin I plunged down the putrid-smelling passageway in the opposite direction and burst out again onto the deck. I hung over the rail for a while, and let the cathartic tears drip, windblown, into the sea. After the unnumbered hours and days I had trained for warfare, I perceived the first small chink in the armor of my bravado; I accepted the sweet logic of the inner voice telling me: You are really grateful that you won’t be invading that island tomorrow; you will be overjoyed to go back to Saipan Then I banished the treacherous advocate from my mind, wiped my eyes, and stalked back to the cabin through clots and clumps of Marines who were oiling their rifles and making their unsheathed bayonets glitter like spears. “Is it true, sir,” I heard one kid say, “that they’re goin’ to pull the plug on us? Is it true that we’re not ever going to make a landing?”

  “Sir, is what we hear true?” called another. “That we’re goin’ to head back to Saipan without seein’ any action?”

  “I honestly can’t say,” I called back. “If it’s true, then, boys, we’re getting a royal screwing.”

  I actually shivered at the insincerity that gripped me as I spoke these words: their falseness was shameful. I was sure my coolness would return. I’d just been caught with my guard down. But at the moment I was in shambles. Walking along the deck (adopting my old casual swagger), I jollied up the troops with small talk, put on a frozen grin, and kept murmuring to myself with rhythmic fatuity: You love the Marine Corps, it’s a terrific war, you love the Marine Corps, it’s a terrific war ...

  SHADRACH

  My tenth summer on earth, in the year 1935, will never leave my mind because of Shadrach and the way he brightened and darkened my life then and thereafter. He turned up as if from nowhere, arriving at high noon in the village where I grew up in Tidewater Virginia. He was a black apparition of unbelievable antiquity, palsied and feeble, blue-gummed and grinning, a caricature of a caricature at a time when every creaky, superannuated Negro grandsire was (in the eyes of society, not alone the eyes of a small southern white boy) a combination of Stepin Fetchit and Uncle Remus. On that day when he seemed to materialize before us, almost out of the ether, we were playing marbles. Little boys rarely play marbles nowadays but marbles were an obsession in 1935, somewhat predating the yo-yo as a kids’ craze. One could admire these elegant many-colored spheres as potentates admire rubies and emeralds; they had a sound yet slippery substantiality, evoking the tactile delight—the same aesthetic yet opulent pleasure—of small precious globes of jade. Thus, among other things, my memory of Shadrach is bound up with the lapidary feel of marbles in my fingers and the odor of cool bare earth on a smoldering hot day beneath a sycamore tree, and still another odor (ineffably a part of the moment): a basic fetor which that squeamish decade christened B.O., and which radiated from a child named Little Mole Dabney, my opponent at marbles. He was ten years old, too, and had never been known to use Lifebuoy soap, or any other cleansing agent.

  Which brings me soon enough to the Dabneys. For I realize I must deal with the Dabneys in order to try to explain the encompassing mystery of Shadrach—who after a fashion was a Dabney himself. The Dabneys were not close neighbors; they lived nearby down the road in a rambling weatherworn house that lacked a lawn. On the grassless, graceless terrain of the front yard was a random litter of eviscerated Frigidaires, electric generators, stoves, and the remains of two or three ancient automobiles, whose scavenged carcasses lay abandoned beneath the sycamores like huge rusted insects. Poking up through these husks were masses of weeds and hollyhocks, dandelions gone to seed, sunflowers. Junk and auto parts were a sideline of Mr. Dabney’s . He also did odd jobs, but his primary pursuit was bootlegging.

  Like such noble Virginia family names as Randolph and Pe
yton and Tucker and Harrison and Lee and Fitzhugh and a score of others, the patronym Dabney is an illustrious one, but with the present Dabney, christened Vernon, the name had lost almost all of its luster. He should have gone to the University of Virginia; instead, he dropped out of school in the fifth grade. It was not his fault; nor was it his fault that the family had so declined in status. It was said that his father (a true scion of the distinguished old tree but a man with a character defect and a weakness for the bottle) had long ago slid down the social ladder, forfeiting his F.F.V. status by marrying a half-breed Mattaponi or Pamunkey Indian girl from the York River, which accounted perhaps for the black hair and sallowish muddy complexion of the son.