One afternoon the second week of spring ball, the linebackers were settling into our seats in the linebackers room for film when Coach Hightower strolled in.
—McGerrin, he said. You get your head checked after Furling knocked you out at Stefan Knows?
For all the time we spent together, players and coaches fundamentally occupied separate worlds, and there could be a considerable delay when it came to a coach learning about something that happened among players. This explains how it had taken Hightower until the end of March to pick up on the enmity burning between Chase and me since the middle of November.
Chase’s face reddened.
—He didn’t knock me out, Coach.
—Ain’t what I heard. Furling, you got anger issues?
—Sometimes, sir.
—Sometimes, Hightower repeated, doing his delighted shoulder shake as he turned off the lights.
From then on, Hightower took every opportunity to pour gas on the flames of our rivalry. And though I’m sure he told himself his heckling was equal opportunity, he bullied Chase far more than he did me. Evidently Hightower was still angry about Chase’s debacle in last year’s Purple and Gold Game.
—Hips down, McGerrin! Furling ain’t playing like a fucking retard!
—Goddamn I bet your mama wishes she just went with the coat hanger.
During Team period, there was one phrase all second- and third-string players longed to hear from their position coaches: “Stay close.” If a coach called out the magic words, you were to sprint over and stay clipped to his hip as he paced back and forth on the sideline, at the ready for the moment he grabbed you by the back of your jersey and shoved you onto the field to spell whatever player was ahead of you on the depth chart. By rights, Coach Hightower shouldn’t have told me to stay close until Chase had gone through the majority of his reps with the starting defense—but Hightower was telling me to stay close from the very start of Team period, making it so that whenever Chase looked over at our coach he would also see me.
At first I thought this was no different from what Hightower had done in camp—that I was just being used as bait to motivate Chase. But Hightower’s patience wore thinner every practice, and by the third week of spring ball he was regularly grabbing the back of my jersey to send me out to run with the ones. I would usually get only a snap or two before Chase replaced me. But when I returned to the sideline, Hightower would pat me on the helmet and say:
—Like what I’m seeing out there, son.
On Wednesday night of the last week of spring ball, Reshawn and I were sitting in the computer cluster in Stager Hall when Jamie called Reshawn’s cell. He stepped out to take it, and fifteen minutes later he hurried back in, sitting at his desktop computer and opening the webpage for the Obituaries section of the Savannah Morning News. I read over his shoulder.
Eula “Lala” Bigmore died April 2nd at the age of 75. She earned her undergraduate degree from Georgia Southern University and her JD from the University of Georgia School of Law. After graduation she went to work for her father at Peach Holdings, LLC, and following his death took over management of the real estate company. Eula was responsible for changing the company’s focus to owning and managing low-income units, a decision that would make Peach Holdings one of the most profitable businesses of its kind in the Southeast. Eula never married and was fond of saying she was “wed to her past,” as she had a great enthusiasm for collecting Big-more family heirlooms and other relics. She is survived by her three younger sisters, Clyburne Holt (and husband Gary), Lucinda Smythe (and husband Moses), and Faye Anne Whiting (and husband Francisco), as well as nine nieces and nephews and eleven great-nieces and great-nephews. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Georgia Historical Society.
Reshawn gave me the substance of Jamie’s phone call. “Lala” turned out to be only one of Eula Bigmore’s nicknames. Another was “Queen of the Slums,” and the real insight of her decision to go into low-income housing was that there was tremendous money to be made building, buying, and running rathole housing developments with the help of state funding. She would keep those developments an inch above liveable so they could be rented by Savannah’s poorest, and her company would evict many of those tenants with a ruthlessness born of the knowledge that Georgia state law fell squarely on the landlords’ side. The profits she reaped allowed her to buy not only the grand Regency-style house where CSK’s essay was discovered but houses in Savannah’s historic Victorian District, Ardsley Park, and the Thunderbolt neighborhood, three additional mansions Lala had used as little more than annexes to store her idiosyncratic collection. Her younger sisters had had no idea about the other houses, and were now engaged in a battle over them—because, for all the maneuvering they’d done to remain in good stead for the will, and for all their big sister’s legal acumen, Lala died intestate.
Jamie had called Reshawn from Palo Alto, where she was on a visit
