Before the old man finally gave up on it-before he finally gave up on just about everything-he used to haul me out hunting with him the first few times he went out each season. Something was supposed to happen out there in the woods, I guess, with just the two of us, a father and his son, men of a different size observing these ancient rituals together, but it never did. I’d already learned to shoot, with bottles heeled into a hillside out behind our house, and that was the part I was interested in. So I’d just walk alongside Dad with my old single-shot.410 cradled in the crook of an arm and carefully pointing to the ground as he’d taught me, in early years daydreaming about friends and would-be friends in the neighborhood and next weekend’s get-togethers, later about the things I’d begun discovering in books, with the twin plumes of our breath reaching out into the chill morning and reeling back, Dad every so often (it seemed always a continuous action) shouldering his.12-gauge, firing, and tucking dove, quail or squirrel into the game pocket of his scratchy canvas coat. After a couple of hours we’d stop, find a tree stump and have coffee from his thermos, wrapping hands around nesting plastic cups for warmth. On extremely cold days he brought along a hand warmer the size of a whiskey flask; you filled it with alcohol, lit the wick, slid on a cover and felt sleeve, and it smoldered there in your pocket. We’d pass it back and forth the way men pass around bottles of Jim Beam at deer camp, like athletes toasting a victory. But neither of us was an athlete. And neither of us would know many victories in his life.
I remembered all this, something I hadn’t thought of in many years, as I drove up I-55 through mile after mile of unfenced farmland stretching to the horizon, past refurbished plantations, crop duster airfields and country stores selling everything a man could need, Gas, Food, Beer: this long sigh of the forever postcolonial South. I pulled off for coffee at truckers’ roadside stops and Mini Marts where people seemed uneasy, even now, at my presence, despite (or just as easily because of) my dark suit, chambray shirt and silk tie. Attendants at gas stations watched me closely from their glassed-in pilot-houses. When I stopped for a meal at The Finer Diner near Greenville, two state policemen, bent over roast beef specials in a booth by the door, repeatedly swiveled heads my direction, conferring.
Paranoia? You better believe it. My birthright.
In the town where I grew up, there was one main street, called Cherry in my little rubber-stamp town, Main or Sumpter or Grand in a hundred others like it. At one end of this street was a cafe, Nick’s, where my father and I in stone darkness Saturday mornings heading out to hunt would order breakfast on paper plates through a “colored” window leading directly into the kitchen (the only time I recall anyone in the family ever eating out), and at the other, ten blocks distant, a bronze statue of a World War I soldier, rifle with bayonet at ready, which everyone called simply the Doughboy.
For a period of several months when I was thirteen or so, every Saturday night, like clockwork, someone managed-no simple task, with city hall and the police station right there on the circle-to paint the Doughboy’s face and hands black with shoe polish. You’d go by every Sunday morning and see one of the black trustees from the county jail up there with a bucket and rags, scrubbing it down.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Some said because the smartass nigger responsible had graduated from high school and, good riddance, gone up North to college. Some said because Chief Winfield and his boys had caught him in the act and done what was only right.
And my father, from whom I never before remember hearing a racial complaint, this man who called the children of white men he worked for Mistah Jim and Miz Joan, said: “Lewis, you see how it is. Here we raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs-even fight his wars for him-and he still won’t acknowledge our existence.”
We were sitting on the steps of the railroad roundhouse across from Nick’s eating our breakfasts one of those lightless early mornings, maybe the last before I stopped going along. Steam rose off eggs and grits in the cold air; our paper plates were translucent with grease.
“You know those Dracula movies you watch every chance you get, Lewis? How he can never see himself in mirrors? Well, that’s you, son-that’s all of us. We trip across this earth, work and love and raise families and fight for what we think’s right, and the whole time we’re absolutely invisible. When we’re gone, there’s no record we were ever even here.”
For years I thought of that as the day my father began shrinking.
Now, years later, I remember it as one time among many that he was able momentarily to rise out of the drudge of his own life and offer an example-to give me sanction, as it were-that in my own something more might be possible.
It’s a terrible thing, that I could ever have forgotten these moments, or failed to understand them.
Oddly connected in my thoughts with all this as I Mazdaed into pure Faulknerland, Oxford, Tupelo, was a night Clare and I met, early on in our friendship, at a Maple Street pizzeria and went on to the Maple Leaf for klezmer music, impossibly joyful in its minor keys, clarinet beseeching and shrieking, stolid bass and accordion plodding on, half East Europe’s jews dying in its choruses.
Here’s what I think in higher flights of fancy. Once there existed beings, a race, a species (call it what you will) who truly belonged to this world. Then at some point, for whatever reason, they moved on, and we moved into their places. We go on trying to occupy those places, day after endless day. But we’ll always remain strangers here, all of us. And for all our efforts, whatever dissimulations we attempt, we’ll never quite fit.