3 Day Terror (5 page)

Ginny Lee Polk Ann Towers stepped over a clump of sticks, picked a long one out of the clump, and trailed it behind her in the dust.

She said, “Mister Jack nebber knew dat, did he, Dube?”

W
HEN
she first woke up she didn’t remember it. The sun was streaming into the room, and as she squinted around, growing accustomed to daylight, she noticed the dirty fingerprints on the lemon-shaded wallpaper, and in her mind, blessed out Ginny for not wiping them clean. Then as always, when this came to her attention, she felt grief-sore and sorry for little Johnny-Bob, sickened by his sad necessity to feel his way along the walls, and momentarily she worried about him, tried to wonder over his future, and for the Lord only knows how many times, tortured her mind’s eye with visions of her son being run over by a car he didn’t see, falling down staircases he couldn’t anticipate, tripping and bumping and being lost in a multitude of black places — with his small hands groping. And again, as always, it left her anxious and depressed, and more times than often, it was the way the day began; because she was an early waker, and once she did awaken, she was the kind who worried herself fully and finally awake.

Because she
didn’t
remember the fight with Chad right away, she dwelled on the more familiar anxieties, the routine ones — beginning with Johnny-Bob and ending with her dad’s health. The latter was always accompanied by the determined vow to drive out and see John Beggsom before another day passed, a promise she made to herself time and time again, and seldom kept.

For the past four months a new anxiety had joined the familiar ones, namely Jack’s position on integration in the Bastrop school system, and it was when she finally, sleepily, got around to that, during those slow seconds of gradual awakening, that she remembered. She had just pulled her arm from under the pillow on the huge double bed, where she had been lying on her stomach, her eyes studying the wall, when she looked down at her watch and saw the time, six twenty-five, and then recalled Chad’s good night.

“I’m sick of you!” he had said. “I always was sick of your father, and now, finally, I’m sick of you! Is that clear enough for you?”

Then he had rolled over on his own side of the bed, and ten minutes later, commenced to snore.

Cassandra Chadwick did not cry herself to sleep after that, she pitied herself to sleep, curled into a fetal position beside him, but not touching him, she comforted one breast with her hand cupping it gently, and indulged in implacable brooding on the ironies of her plight that Friday night at the beginning of autumn.

There were many more in Bastrop besides herself who said the same thing she did about Chad’s attitude on the Supreme Court ruling, the only difference being she said it to Jack, and they said it behind his back.

Said — like Senior Porter — ”Trouble is, Jack’s not a businessman, so he doesn’t have to worry. But a merchant knows that whenever there’s tension between the Nigraw and the white in a town as small as this, it’s going to hurt business. And a merchant knows when a law like the school law is passed, it’s just better to shut up about it.”

Like Gus Chandler — ”Trouble is, Chadwick don’t work with niggers, don’t know what makes them black apes tick. Now most niggers wouldn’t ‘uv paid no goddam attention to that law; woulda kept right on riding the orange bus over to Morrow to learn their wool heads how to spell cotton, and we wouldn’t be violating the law none at all. But Chadwick’s reminding ‘em they don’t have to cart their asses fifteen miles back and forth every day, and all they need is a little reminding. Just remind a lazy nigger he don’t have to do something often enough, and pretty soon it sinks in that he don’t have to do something. Chad’s turned the
Citizen
into a goddam nigger memorandum!”

Like Arnold Belden — ”Trouble is Chad’s an outsider. He’s from a big city in the midwest, and we’re a small town in the Deep South. Integration is just another issue with him; with us, it’s a tradition; and only someone born and raised down here can appreciate how we feel about traditions. When they’re broken, we don’t feel like sitting down on the back porch and reading in the evening newspaper that that’s just the way the ball bounces sometimes, we better clap hands and grin.”

Cassandra Chadwick had been sitting over a soda in Porter Drugs last night telling her husband what people were saying, and the fact that she had had to wait so long before she could had made it seem all the more important. It was something of an occasion — a turning point, really, when instead of turning away from a point in their marriage, they returned to an original point. For during the last few weeks, Cass had felt Chad come back, after a stolid summer’s absence, when little things were magnified to giant proportions, and larger things minimized to seem of no importance at all. And they had grown apart from one another, not with the kind suddenness of a violent split, but in the more painful languid way which nagged and never burst.

She knew she could pinpoint the problem in two incidents, and in both matters she had been to blame; but in both, too, she had never been more herself. That was the wall between them.

• • •

The first had been at the beginning of June, out at the Legion picnic on the fairgrounds. It had been Jack’s idea to take Johnny-Bob with them instead of leaving him with Ginny; and it had been the first time Johnny-Bob had played with any other children than the Scott twins from next door, or the Gaynor girl from down the street. After they had spread their blanket behind the long picnic table, facing the sandpile and slides and swings, Chad had stood up, taken Johnny-Bob by the hand, and walked him over there. Johnny-Bob was three, with a face peppered with wild brown freckles and cut across with a wide grin, rust-colored hair sweeping his brow. Some of the children playing in the sandpile were about his age; others were older — six, seven and eight.

Cass watched Chad say hi to them; watched them look up and then look at Johnny-Bob, all grins still — and imitating his father.

“Hi!” he said.

They answered him — some of them. Some kept on with their holes and castles, ignoring him.

Cass heard Chad say, “Want to sit down, John? There’s sand there. There’s a sand pile.”

The child swung his hand free from Chad and squatted, touching the ground with his fingers, gradually sitting in the sand.

A small boy across from Johnny-Bob was watching carefully.

“Is there a pail?” Johnny-Bob asked.

“No, but you can dig a hole to China, can’t you?” Chad knelt and began to help him.

Then the small boy spoke up. “What’s wrong with him? Don’t he see nothin’?”

Chad said, “Johnny’s blind,” in a matter-of-fact tone, continuing with his digging. Johnny-Bob scooped out some sand and let his fingers sift it, laughing.

“No kidding,” the small boy said. “Can’t he see my hand?” He leaned over and waved it at Johnny-Bob’s face.

“Nope, he can’t,” Chad said.

By this time all the children were staring at Johnny-Bob; all had stopped what they were doing.

“Does he knew he’s blind?” one girl asked.

“He knows the word blind, but it’s hard for him to comprehend the meaning, because he never saw, like we do.”

Johnny-Bob kept on digging.

“I could help him with that hole,” the small boy said.

“See if he wants some,” Chad grinned.

The small boy hesitated; then he hopped over beside Johnny-Bob. “Want some help?”

“Sure,” Johnny-Bob answered, looked in the direction of the voice. Again the small boy waved his hand across his face, but Johnny-Bob looked away, back down at his digging. Then the boy put a tin shovel in his hand.

He said, “That’s a shovel.”

Someone from a swing nearby yelled at the boy, “Davis, c’mon and swing.”

Chad was standing now, starting to walk away. He told Johnny-Bob, “I’ll be right by. Give a holler if you want me, fellow.”

“Okay,” Johnny-Bob said.

Then the boy in the swing shouted again for Davis, and it all began.

Davis yelled, “Hey, c’mon and see the blind boy. He’s blind, Simpson!”

Chad was walking toward Cass leisurely, lighting his pipe.

Cass sat forward, clutching her pearls at the neck of her silk blouse, watching what was happening. Other voices joined in at the sandpile: “C’mon and see the blind boy!” and before too long, a score of hopping, shouting, boys and girls of all sizes were crowded around Johnny-Bob. They were watching and pointing and calling — until suddenly Cass could stand it no longer. She leaped to her feet and ran — heedless of Chad’s calling, “Cass, come on back here! Stop!” And when she reached the spot where her son was, surrounded by gaping eyes, she shoved them aside brusquely, yanked Johnny-Bob up by the arm, then stooping to pick him up, carried him away in her arms, tears rushing from her eyes.

Afterwards, when her moment of panic was over, after Chad had sent Johnny-Bob to return the tin shovel to the boy named Davis, after they had driven home silently on empty stomachs — Johnny-Bob had been let out to play in his own sandpile in his own backyard, and Cass had taken a book out on the sun porch to watch him — after long hours, when Chad finally came out and pulled up a hassock beside her, what he said made sense. That Johnny-Bob would have to face that sort of experience if he were to grow up in Bastrop and not off in some school for the blind; that he hadn’t been hurt one bit by the shouts or the stares; only Cass had; and that Cass had to stop making so much of his blindness or she’d hurt him more than anyone ever could.

It made sense then; but even when she relived the moment, and remembered Johnny-Bob sitting there surrounded by children who stared at him as though he were a freak, heard their voices and the high cry, “He’s blind; c’mon and see!” she could not keep the panic from beginning inside of her again, and a stricken feeling invariably flooded through her, stunning reason….

The second offense had occurred in mid-July, that muggy afternoon when Chad was expecting a visit from an old Air Force buddy who was being driven up for the day from Mobile. About an hour before, Cass’s father, John Beggsom, dropped by in his pickup on one of his rare surprise visits.

Chad hated John, and the feeling was mutual. When he and Cass had chosen the name John for their boy, it was because it was Chad’s legal name, and he wanted a “Junior;” but it was also because he never remembered Cass’s father carried the same name. Chad always called him “that one,” “Beggsom,” “that bastard,” or “your father” — said like an oath of some kind.

Beggsom had been raised up in the Sand Hills, in the backwoods, in a dogtrot cabin. What brought him into Bastrop was a woman, Cass’s mother, whom he’d bought shoelaces from in the five-and-dime, down on West Tennessee, when he was passing through on one of his sales trips. Beggsom had a still up in a place called Blue Pill and he sold the same moonshine he made, coming out of the hills every two months to do it. When he fell for Angie Carmer, he gave up the still, used the profits from it, and years of savings, to buy a gas pump and a shed, and moved to the outskirts of Bastrop.

Beggsom hated three things most in this life — the law, the niggers, and the Lord — in that order. He was a medium-sized, square-built, unkempt fellow with a backwoods accent and a backwoods sense of humor that bordered on the vulgar; but he loved his own as violently as he hated what wasn’t his, and few people ever forgot the story of the night Angie Beggsom died in childbirth. It was known all over Bastrop that mere seconds after Doctor Walker lifted Cass from between her dying mother’s legs, John Beggsom drank a quart of whisky, one tumblerful after the other, in the dark of his front room, scowling and shouting at the four walls because he had loved her in a crazy way, and when — near dawn — a neighbor came to try to convince old John that he should sleep, Cass’s father was found on his knees on the linoleum in the kitchen, his big arms smashing through the air in fast, powerful waves, killing house ants with a hammer, crying like a baby.

If John Beggsom loved his own with an emotion too powerful for reason to penetrate and tame, his daughter loved
her
own with an emotion unchanged by its frequent exposure to reason. Whenever Chad began one of his tirades on Beggsom, Cass consoled herself with the thought that Chad had never known “close” family and checked her impulses to get up and holler herself red in the face at him, because most everything he said about her father was right; but she never said she liked John Beggsom. She loved him; that was something else.

So when Chad said, “Get your old man out of here before Tim comes. He didn’t fight a war to come back crippled and meet
his
kind,” Cass stuck to her guns. She said she wouldn’t make him go, she couldn’t, and Chad better not say one dang-dong word to him, or she’d go with him. She said Tim should understand he was a poor stupid old man, and she said she’d warn Beggsom not to say anything about the law or the niggers or the Lord. And it was while she was arguing with Jack just inside the screen door — with old John out in back under the crab tree — that a horn honked and Tim Ottley was there.

• • •

He was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down and without the use of his right arm; and there was a silver plate encased somewhere under the head of sparse brown hair. His round, sunk-in eyes were a matching brown, and solemn and wondering; and he talked in a slow, low tone, pausing for seconds between words, thinking over everything he had to say. He had been in hospitals for years; in rehabilitation homes for more years; and ultimately he had come back to Mobile, thin-haunted and search-worn. Most of what he had to say concerned his years of searching for some answer to himself and what he would do with that broken self, and about his decision to become a Presbyterian minister. He spoke of God’s work and God’s grace and the faith, and all through it, Cass held her breath, and Chad’s eyes darted nervously from Beggsom back to Tim Ottley.

Beggsom had been shifting his legs in the wicker chair set on the lawn, rubbing his chin with his stubby fingers, and fidgeting with a loose button on his short-sleeved blue shirt, the front of it stained with coffee, he’d spilled there. He had listened to Ottley, and nodded with his lips pressed together, and he had scratched his ear periodically and frowned, as though he were thinking over everything that was being said.