Right now, Buddy. Stop. You shut up.” She jerked around toward me, her eyes afire. “You shut up too. You don’t talk like that in my house ever again, you hear me?”
We ate supper in silence until I asked what was going to happen to Jackie’s body. Daddy wore no expression when he told me William Addison was going to fly up to Virginia with it.
“I want to go.”
“That’s just asking for more trouble. You going to stay here, out of sight.”
I couldn’t abandon Jackie now. “Daddy, he was a good friend. I should go with the body, out of respect.”
“You need to be thinking about ‘out of trouble.’”
Mama gave him a hard look. “Buddy, if Tommy’s up to it, he should go. I’m going to go.”
Daddy pushed away from the table. “Tommy, I don’t understand what happened to you up there at Duke. Don’t you see how all these agitators have come into Alabama and just stirred everything up?”
“Been in all the newspapers,” I said.
“I bet it was.” My father’s eyes narrowed. “It’s just so damn ridiculous. The blacks around here have been treated well—especially here in Eden Rise. They haven’t been hung or beat up or anything like that. We never had any trouble all the time I was growing up. Honestly, I don’t remember a cross word between any white and any nigger. The blacks need to back off or we’ll have a damn race war.”
I took a deep breath. “Daddy, the whites here have asked for a lot of this trouble. I saw pictures of that beating on the bridge in Selma. There was no cause for that.”
“King just looks for places to get headlines,” my father shot back. “He doesn’t give a good goddamn about those niggers in Selma. He’s just playing to the cameras to raise money and get the federal government down here.”
My anger rose again to meet his. “King’s speeches are a lot easier to take than all the cussing of nigger agitators I been hearing around here my whole life. No wonder people around the country listen to him. No wonder they think Jim Clark and George Wallace are the hand of the devil. He’s right and they’re wrong.”
Daddy’s chest was heaving. “And I’m wrong too, boy?”
I nodded, knowing that what I said next would bring wrath. “Yeah, I think you are, Daddy, if you support what they been doing.”
Daddy’s face had turned a deep red and he was gripping the table. He exhaled, shook his head, and shifted his gaze from me to Mama. “Betty June, what did I pay to have our son go up to North Carolina and get turned into a nigger lover?”
As she stood up, Mama shoved her chair back from the table so fast it tipped over and slammed against the tile floor. She extended her arm and pointed her right index finger at Daddy.
“You’ll shut your nasty mouth, Buddy McKee, if you know what’s good for you. You won’t talk to Tommy like that in my presence.”
He stared at her. “Well, Goddamnit, I said he’s not going to that funeral and that’s the end of it.” He got up and we heard him slam his way out of the house.
Mama and I stared at each other for a long time. Cathy kept eating, her eyes on her plate. Mama came back and sat down. “Tommy, try not to let your daddy get you down. I’m going to take you to the funeral.” I couldn’t make a reply. “You have a headache, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes.” She brought me three aspirin and smiled sweetly as she handed them to me. She reached out and brushed my limp blond hair off my face. Her fingers were thick and the nails short, but their touch was gentle.
“Your Daddy’s better than what he just said, and you know it.” Daddy had been under a lot of pressure since he became probate judge the previous fall, she said, after my grandfather, Judge Tom McKee, had dropped dead in the courthouse just days before I left for college. Daddy had been appointed his successor. He wore the job like a scratchy new suit, Mama told me. Cathy nodded at that. Daddy had spent his life farming our family’s six thousand acres.
“Tommy, everybody in Eden Rise is just so scared. You wouldn’t believe what these men want your father to do.”
“Mama, he’s so hateful. You know what a racist he is.”
My parents had argued about race and politics since I was about fourteen, with George Wallace the first lightning rod. I’d been disgusted by him the moment I heard him speak at Boy’s State in June 1963—a bantam rooster at the podium, shifting from one leg to another to throw his chest out to the audience, waving his fist and denouncing one federal official after another, promising a “barbed-wire enema” to his old law-school buddy, Judge Frank Johnson. When the other boys cheered and rose to their feet, I felt scared. But Daddy had voted for him, much to my mother’s fury. He was a “dangerous little dictator,” she said. Not half as dangerous as “that troublemaker King” or “those goddamn Kennedys,” Daddy had shot back.
Mama had forbidden me from taking her side, but Daddy knew what I thought of his politics even before this awful night. The alienation between us had troubled me throughout my teenaged years. I wanted to return to the earlier time, when he would pick me up and toss me in the air, his big face entirely taken over by a wide smile and laughing eyes. We would go on long rambles around the farm when he identified plants and trees and animals and told me about those things in the natural world that we had to watch out for: weather and bugs and weeds. We were lucky to live in the prettiest place on earth, he told me.
That evening of the day after Jackie died, every time we put the telephone receiver back on the cradle the crank calls resumed. Finally Daddy phoned the sheriff to come over. Beneath Mac McCallister’s crew cut his big square face often wore a look of amusement that could instantly turn into a smirk. His spare tire made it hard to imagine that McCallister had been the great left-handed pitcher and quarterback at Eden Rise High that Daddy remembered.
“Buddy, ain’t much we can do. Ain’t got no equipment to trace calls. It’ll ease up, I bet.”
Neither of my parents were happy with McCallister’s indifference. As soon as he left, Mama turned to Daddy. “Buddy, all those phone calls weren’t coming all the way from Yancey County. That’s long distance. Some were local, and I think McCallister knows more than he’s letting on.”
Mama was right about McCallister. When George Wallace had appointed him after the old sheriff died, Granddaddy had said it was dangerous to let people like McCallister—the son of a drunk who operated a pool hall—have such an important job.
I was still tossing in my bed that night when I heard a thunderous crash, then loud shouts on the street and a vehicle roaring off. I ran down the hall and followed Daddy into the living room. I watched his eyes locate the bullet holes in the wall. For the second time that night, he summoned the sheriff, but this time the chief deputy came. He stayed only a minute but stationed two men in front of the house. Daddy’s farm foreman, Junior Jackson, soon showed up with one of the hands, Sam Ford. I helped them tape plastic over the window holes, relieved to be able to fix at least one broken thing, while Daddy paced in front of the house with his shotgun.
We were drinking coffee at four o’clock in the morning, not saying much, when the phone rang. I grabbed it. A young man said: “We told you nigger lovers to leave. You stay and we’ll burn that house down with you in it. You stay and we’ll
