The next day was the last in Alabama for Y.F. and McGinty, and it was then that occurred the small mishap upon which hinges this entire story. A minuscule tragedy, especially in light of the magnitude of joy still hanging in the air, but a tragedy nonetheless in that it pointed out a mysterious flaw in the scheme of—what? Of everything. But I am getting ahead of myself, as my suitor in the college bar did not do. In a few words he sketched for me a picture of that last morning after the party, when the volunteers, bleary-eyed and hungover but still euphoric, were set to cleaning up. When the school had been swabbed down and every empty bottle collected, the White Boys had one more task: to transport the pulpit lectern from the school auditorium back to Tinley Temple AME. They set out driving an ancient flatbed truck, and a few minutes outside town met with a slight mishap.
It is easy to imagine the two in the cab of a dinosaur of a truck out of a Walker Evans photograph. Behind them on the flatbed, lashed with a clothesline in McGinty’s special bowline hitch, lay the tall lectern Y.F. drove, McGinty propped his feet up in the passenger seat, both talking eagerly about the election and the party. Then a lurch, Y.F. struggling with the archaic clutch, as the old truck gave a fierce jerk to the right and took a lumbering bound into the drainage ditch. The boys catapulted onto the dashboard, realizing simultaneously that they were unhurt; the engine gave a series of elephantine shudders and stalled; and at the same time there was a rumble and a splintery crash as the pulpit lectern, bursting free from its clothesline bonds, tumbled off the flatbed and onto the blacktop. There followed, one imagines, an almost reverent moment of silence.
When they’d said fuck! about a hundred times and scrambled out of the cab, Y.F. and McGinty found the lectern lying in the road. It was hard to believe that so short a fall could have caused so much damage. The impact somehow had been perfectly angled to split the varnished pine boards that made up the sides, and the whole thing, still attached by nails, but with strips of raw wood showing, lay collapsed as if flattened by a giant thumb. The White Boys stood there for a second, digesting the fact that they’d smashed up part of Reverend Basnight’s church, a central part, one that famous men had been clutching and making speeches over just the day before. And because five minutes earlier they’d been adrift in pure exaltation, the wreck took on an apocalyptic significance. It seemed to Y.F. that the lectern was the pulpit itself, the heart of the church and of the people who had sheltered him for two months. And the accident had resulted from a kind of violence he’d had inside of him without even knowing, like some dupe tricked into carrying a briefcase that held a bomb. The thought of telling the news to Reverend Basnight, and watching that angular brown face lose its glow of triumph and harden into grim exasperation, was unbearable. As was the thought of the others, of Nicolette. Y.F. didn’t say, but I am sure the two boys had tears in their eyes. They were not many years out of childhood, after all.
Anyway, that was the moment when I fell in love with your father. As he sat in a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, telling me the story, and also seven years earlier, when he stood on a road in Alabama beside a broken pulpit from an African Methodist Episcopal church. Don’t ask me why, but it’s a fact. There was something that caught my heart—abruptly, the way catastrophes and miracles occur—in the picture of the two White Boys standing and staring at what looked exactly like the ruin of all good intentions. And in the image of how they must have picked up the pieces, tried to start the truck, kicked at weeds, and then begun jogging miserably back to town.
Of course the story doesn’t end there. That same afternoon they got the truck out of the ditch, and the pulpit to a carpenter in Barreville. The carpenter was a Tinley Temple member who promised to rebuild it free of charge. To their amazement no one was angry with them—not even Reverend Basnight, who actually stretched his Byzantine mouth in a dry smile and joked that even the Liberty Bell was cracked. And Nicolette said nothing but slipped Y.F. a piece of pink stationery inscribed with her address. It was only Y.F. and McGinty who were crushed: all their gorgeous sense of accomplishment had collapsed like a card castle, and suddenly they couldn’t wait to get home to California. Late that night, without saying good-bye to anyone, they took off out of Tenlow County, racing as if the Klan were after them. It was strange how it turned out, that the only white men who scared them in
