Herbert beams as if Michelle Pfeiffer had told him she wanted to run away with him. True love. It took her only fifty years to find it.
“Sweetness, why don’t you go put the meat on the grill while I visit with my brother for a few minutes? He looks too serious for this to be purely a social call.”
With a beatific smile on his face, Herbert takes the plate of meat and disappears out the kitchen door to the backyard.
“Herbert must worship you,” I say, amazed that a grown man would allow himself to be called “sweetness” in front of another living human being.
“He does,” Marty says happily.
“God knows why.
When I met him I was a hundred pounds overweight, drank too much, and felt sorry for myself twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. Now look at me!”
I do. Relaxed and calm, Marty hasn’t looked this good since she was a senior in high school. I hope Amy will do for me what Sweetness has done for her. With her short dyed-blond hair cut in a pageboy, Marty, who is two years older than I am, looks almost pretty. Her blue eyes, not as deep-set as my own, along with a small nose and generous mouth are her best features. She is flat-chested, like our mother, and is wearing a man’s blue workshirt (Herbert’s, I presume) and a pair of Bermuda shorts that reveal a decent pair of legs.
“Fantastic,” I concede.
“What’s his secret?”
“Unconditional love,” Marty says, opening her refrigerator
“I thought only dogs and newborn babies got it. I have no idea why he loves me so.”
I lean against the kitchen counter and take the Miller Lite she hands me. Determined to lay Lucy Cunningham’s comment to rest, I blurt, “Speaking of love, do you remember any stories about our paternal grandfather having fathered a child with a black woman in Bear Creek?”
Marty takes her own beer and sits down at the kitchen table. A solid oak, it came from a tree off land owned by my more reputable maternal grandfather, who was a physician.
“So that’s what this visit is about, huh?”
I sit down across from her, taking a “tiddy,” as Marty has long called the rubber container that fits over aluminum cans to keep them cold. I sum up for her the context of Lucy Cunningham’s visit and our brief conversation on the subject.
“Do you know what she’s talking about?”
Marty, in the manner of older sisters, used to get an expression on her face that was half grimace, half sneer, whenever I said something particularly stupid. Forty years later it reappears.
“What utter, pathetic crap!” she says, and pauses to sip at her beer.
“She saw in the paper you represented that psychologist, remembered some old gossip, and thought to herself, have I got a white man by the tail! I bet you a dime to a doughnut they haven’t paid you a fifth of what this case is worth. Am I right?”
I twist my own can in my hands.
“That isn’t all that un usual.”
“Don’t you see?” Marty shouts, though I am less than three feet away.
“She’s guilting you, Gideon! They want you to work for nothing, and that’s how they’re doing it.
You owe us, whitey. Hell, that’s all they’ve been saying for the last four decades! Do yourself a favor, okay?
Don’t get sucked back into all that shit that’s going on over there. The best thing you and I ever did was to get the hell out of eastern Arkansas and never to go back.
Your problem is that you’ve always let yourself get messed up with this race crap. Listen, our childhoods have taken us both thirty years to get over. That’ll never change. You can go over there a million times and never straighten things out. Just be glad you’re free, and stay out of there.”
The anguish in my sister’s voice is real.
“Did you ever hear talk about Granddaddy Page?” I ask, wondering why I never asked her. Actually, now that I think about it, we weren’t around each other much in those days. She worked at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, during the summers while she was in college, and since I spent the school year at a Catholic boarding school in western Arkansas, by the time I saw her at Thanksgiving I must already have buried it.
Her mouth dry after her speech, Marty swallows a mouthful of beer and wipes her lips with the back of her hand.
“Among a hundred million other pieces of crap, yes, I heard it. When I told Mother, she said he owned some rent houses over in nigger town. One day he went over to collect the rent and stayed more than five minutes and that was enough to get the talk started. All of a sudden he’s some nigger’s daddy. God, Gideon, for a lawyer, you’re so naive!”
I remember why I do not get along with my sister: she has all the sensitivity of a tree frog. Most educated people in central Arkansas are civilized enough not to refer to African-Americans as “niggers.” Marty prides herself on being politically incorrect at all times.
“Mother always tried to keep things from me,” I say, my voice suddenly bitter. I’m angry, but I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m mad at my mother. She never told me Daddy wouldn’t get well again. Marty always knew things I didn’t.
Marty puts down her beer can.
“She coped as best she could. Bear Creek wasn’t exactly a picnic for her with Daddy the way he was and you acting like such a snot.”
As my sister busies herself with making a salad, I ponder what she has said. In fact, she is mostly correct. I was on my way to becoming a small-town punk after my father’s suicide at the state hospital. The monks and brothers at Subiaco Academy chewed at me night and day the first year until I began to straighten up, and I actually began to like the place by the time I was a senior. Marty, I conclude, is probably right on this, too, but I don’t have to fall for it. Lucy Cunningham is trying to get something for nothing. Considering how poor eastern Arkansas is, it is understandable. Growing weary of my sister’s name calling I say, “I take it you don’t call the blacks who shop in your store ‘niggers.”
” Marty points at me with her knife.
“Don’t start that phony liberal crap with me,” she says, her voice immediately warming to the subject.
“If they didn’t act like niggers, I wouldn’t use the term, but good God, why are they so self-destructive? How many of the men support their children? Where are their families? All these damn gangs and senseless shootings they don’t care whether they live or die anymore. Blackwell County has as high a murder rate as New York City, did you read that?”
“Things seem to be getting worse,” I admit, draining the last of my beer. There was an article this week in the Democrat-Gazette about school bus drivers and the anarchy that reigns before the kids even get to the classroom.
The violence, intimidation, and profanity were shocking, and the article, without mentioning the ethnicity of the students, left no doubt about their race. One poor driver lost it fifteen minutes into her route and headed straight to a police station.
“Worse?” she chuckles bitterly, spearing an onion.
“They’re committing suicide. You know, desegregation was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Schools have been fully integrated for a quarter of a century, and they’re still not catching up. Of course, they blame it on whites. They blame every problem they have on racism, and all whites want to do is to get their kids a halfway de cent education and keep their children from being mugged. Even some of the blacks who have money send their kids to white private schools. They hate niggers, too” Despite myself, I laugh, irritated that I am doing so. I say soberly, “A lot of the motivation by whites to get away is just plain discrimination, and you know it.”
Marty again jabs the knife at me.
“Why shouldn’t we be able to discriminate against people who turn the schools into a battle zone? You know the schools weren’t like this when it was only white kids. Below a certain economic level, it’s a whole different culture. Jesus, Gideon, if two come in my store and start jib bering that nigger talk, I can’t understand ‘em.”
I crush my beer can in frustration. It is hard to argue with the substance of what she is saying. At a bus stop
