After work I swing by Rainey’s house to eat dinner and get the scoop on Shane Norman and his Christian Life church. Until this past winter, my girlfriend’s religious beliefs were as indecipherable as my own, but after having had a benign lump in her breast removed, Rainey, to my surprise, and not a little to my dismay, has gotten that old-time religion. As I pull up in front of her modest frame house, I try to rein in my feelings on this subject, as it is becoming a sore point between us.
A lukewarm Episcopalian (God only knows what they believe) until her conversion, Rainey now talks about “Biblical inerrancy If she weren’t serious, I’d be sorely tempted to laugh at her.
Just a few years back we had our own Scopes mon key trial in Arkansas, a highly publicized battle in federal court over whether public school teachers should be required to teach “creation science,” thanks to a bill pushed through the Arkansas Legislature by the fundamentalists. Gleefully, the media, smelling a circus, sent reporters from all over to yuck it up at our expense as the ACLU brought in Stephen Jay Gould, the heavy duty Harvard rock sniffer, to testify about the probable age of the earth. Mercifully, the federal judge, a Methodist ruled there was a lot more theory than science put on by the attorney general, who was obligated to defend the statute with his own out-of-state scientists. Our AG, to his everlasting credit, had the good sense and political courage not to appeal.
When I remind Rainey of the trial, she gets an irritated look on her pretty, pixieish face and says, as usual these days, that I’m missing the point. She argues my worldview (so-called “logic” supported by scientists who are forever changing their theories) is culturally determined and can no more be “proved” than what’s in the Bible.
Perhaps to serve as a buffer between us during this pricklish period, Rainey has invited my daughter, Sarah, to dinner with us and has already picked her up and brought her to her house. The less time Rainey and I spend alone these days the better we seem to get along.
There was a time when it seemed we were on the verge of getting married, but at crucial moments one of us, as Paul Simon says, slips out the back. Jack.
Sarah, a high school senior and a daily reminder of her mother, who was a devout Catholic, comes to the door and whispers, her lovely face woeful, “We’re having soup, salad, and corn bread Virginal-looking (I can only hope on that score) in white sweats, she lets me give her a brief hug. Though we do not always under stand each other these days, we remain affectionate, usually forgiving each other our respective generational baggage.
“Good,” I say, meaning it. Rainey’s soups are a meal in themselves. I follow my daughter through the living room and glance at Rainey’s numerous bookshelves, wondering if I will begin seeing religious works in this eclectic stew of a library. My girlfriend is a reader, and last summer was on a kick when she zipped through the novels of a woman named Jane Smiley and pronounced her the greatest living American novelist. Other seasons she gobbles serious nonfiction works like chocolate-chip cookies. Thick tomes on Freud, Arabs and Jews, and racial discrimination are regular additions to the McCorkle collection. How an intelligent, well-informed woman can regress to such a narrow view of life’s meaning is beyond me. Does a brush with death numb a person’s mind to such an extent that she can swallow a book whole and not taste the indigestible parts? It seems so transparently childish I am amazed that Rainey can’t see what she is doing.
I catch a whiff of curry as I enter the kitchen behind Sarah. Rainey, in Lee jeans and a man’s workshirt, is peering into her refrigerator, which is covered with notices of do-gooder happenings: tickets for a silent auction for the Battered Women’s Shelter, a note asking for volunteers to work in the food tent for an Arkansas Advocates for Children amp; Families benefit, a reminder of the next meeting of an AIDS care team. Rainey, a social worker at the Arkansas State Hospital, apparently can’t get enough of human suffering. Maybe this new religious venture is a natural step, but before she gets on the boat and heads for Calcutta to work with lepers fulltime, I’d like to make love to her just once. Charity begins at home, I have reminded her.
At various times in our tortured two-year relationship we have acted like passionate pre-sexual-revolution teenagers who stopped at necking on her couch, or best friends who have taken care of each other in our darkest moments, but never lovers. Watching her hips tug against soft denim as she reaches down for a bottle of salad dressing, I am reminded again how sexy this woman still is at the age of forty-two. Tendrils of frizzy red hair hang past her elfin ears and frame her full mouth, which today is painted pink, like the azaleas soon to bloom in her front yard. When her eyes, this moment the color of blue-corn tortillas, flash with anger or delight, my heart pumps a little harder.
“Smells great,” I say, edging over to the stove for a look.
“Sarah cooked it,” Rainey says, grinning, as she turns around to face me. Her smile tells me that she adores my daughter; no surer way to a father’s heart. She has been good for Sarah. Having raised a daughter of her own, she is content to enjoy mine, and Sarah’s selfconfidence has blossomed with Rainey’s praise and encouragement Over the last two years their friendship has grown as steadily as Rainey’s favorite oak, which I can see budding outside the kitchen window. Rainey and I would surely be married by now if our own growth were as inevitable. If I dropped dead, I’d want Rainey to take Sarah. I have a sister, but we aren’t particularly close.
We all laugh at this obvious lie. Nothing Sarah and I cook is more exotic than hamburger meat drowned in AI. sauce.
“I made the salad,” Sarah says with a grin, taking Rainey’s teasing better than she would if it were coming from me.
“Dad,” she adds solemnly, looking at my striped tie, “you dress like you’re the manager at McDonald’s.”
I look down at my shirt. It is a decent enough Arrow.
Orange stripes go with the tie. My pants, from Target, are gray.
“What’s wrong with that?” I sputter. I thought I looked pretty good today. Sometimes I don’t match.
Rainey surveys me.
“The one downtown,” she says, nodding at Sarah.
“What’s wrong with that?” I say. I know who they’re talking about. Clean, polite, efficient, he always looks presentable to me.
“I take that as a compliment,” I say, preparing for the worst.
“I’m sure you do,” Rainey says, winking at my daughter.
“You’re a lawyer!” Sarah exclaims.
“You ought to wear suits.”
I do sometimes, but if I know I’m not going to court, I can’t bring myself to wear one. Suits I associate with weddings and funerals.
“Having to go to work every day is bad enough,” I say, knowing my defense is falling on deaf ears.
“I’m not going to make it any worse.
That guy probably makes a fortune.”
At the dinner table I move our main topic of conversation from my clothes to the Razorbacks, which is appropriate given the season of the year. How will the Razorbacks do in the NCAA basketball tournament? In the legends that surround the Kennedys, one that has stuck with me as the myths have accumulated is the story that among his other accomplishments, old Joe, the father of a president, an attorney general, and a U.S.
senator, insisted that his children discuss world affairs at dinner. If table talk about geopolitics is a requirement of greatness, my daughter and I are doomed to the sticks.
“The best thing that ever happened to the Hogs was moving to the Southeastern Conference,” Sarah pronounces buttering corn bread that is soft as cake.
“Playing Kentucky, LSU, and Alabama has got to toughen you up a lot more than blowing out TCU and Texas Tech.”
I bite into cucumber and lettuce and chew.
“I miss playing Texas,” I say after I swallow.
“God, we hated them.” How boring my life would be without the emotions of resentment and envy.
Rainey, who is not a sports enthusiast but keeps up out of necessity, asks as she squeezes lemon into her iced tea, “Doesn’t it seem strange that even though nearly all the players are black, people still care as much as they did when they were white?”
“We only care if they win,” Sarah observes, looking to me for my response. My daughter is at the age where she challenges almost every utterance out of my mouth.
My relationships with other women, the way I practice law, and my treatment of Rainey (who sometimes seems more like a saint than a woman to my daughter) are all put under a microscope and rarely seem to pass inspection.
I sip at a goblet of Cabernet red wine I picked up at Warehouse Liquor. Ever since “60 Minutes” aired that piece about how the French develop relatively little heart disease, I have religiously drunk a couple of glasses for dinner and have escaped criticism from the two women in my life. Knowing I will get Rainey’s goat, I say, “If they win, we don’t care what color they are. That’s what makes this country great. Winning is everything.”
Rainey, dainty as the first time I had lunch with her at Wendy’s (she had a salad that day as well), dabs at her mouth with a cloth napkin she insists is ecologically correct, despite the energy expended to clean it.
“We’re great all right,” she says sourly.
“All the wealth in this country, and millions of people don’t even have health insurance. With the cuts in Medicaid, I wonder how people live as long as they do.”
Content to be a white American middle-class male, I savor the taste on my tongue. God, wine tastes good with a meal. If the French weren’t such snobs, they could still civilize us.
“Genetics,” I say, undercutting my excuse to guzzle more booze.
“I’m beginning to think your body gets a certain number of years no matter what you do to it.”
“You don’t believe that!” Rainey practically snorts, shaking her head.
“That would sound too much like fate.”
The truth is, I don’t. Life will continue to be one random accident until, sooner or later, we peel a little too much off the ozone layer.
“Did you tell Sarah I’m working with Chet Bracken on the Wallace case?” I ask her, moving the subject along. She is spooning her soup the way my mother taught me forty years ago in eastern Arkansas: move the spoon through the soup away from you as if it were a Feris wheel and then bring it to your mouth. You don’t look so greedy that way. Manners. An overrated virtue to people who don’t have any.
“I would rather you breach your client’s confidentiality Rainey says dryly.
Sarah puts down her fork, and says in a high voice, “You told me once that Chet Bracken was a brilliant thug.”
I look at my daughter and remember that is exactly what I said. What goes around comes around.
“I meant some attorneys believe that about him,” I backtrack, “but there’s never been any proof he’s ever done one thing unethical.” Losing ground with Sarah, I turn to Rainey.
“Did you know he’s a member of your new church?”
Rainey sips her tea.
“There’re only five thousand members at Christian Life,” she says, giving me an un usual deadpan expression.
“I haven’t met them all in the last four months.”
I managed to keep Bracken’s secret that he has cancer a total of two hours before I told Rainey, which is probably a record for me. I deposit information with my girlfriend faster than a squirrel stores nuts for winter.
Rainey keeps her mouth shut, which is more than I can say for myself.
Sarah has consumed about an ounce of soup. She’d rather have red meat any day. She moves the spoon around in the bowl.
“What case?”
I explain briefly about the Wallace murder and my client’s connection with Christian Life.
“I figured Rainey could fill me in, since she’s started going to her church.”
No longer feigning even polite interest in her food, my daughter pushes back from the table.
“That’s my dad,” she says to Rainey.
“What’s a person for except for him to use to help win a case? And you’re even fixing dinner for him!”
I raise my eyebrows to warn Sarah she is going a little far. Still, we have had this discussion before. My argument is that defense attorneys aren’t given many weapons, and you have to make do with what is at hand. She says that lawyers like me hurt innocent people in the process and then act as if it couldn’t be helped. Worse, according to Sarah, I seem to be more alive right before a trial and during it than at any other time. I seem to enjoy it too much. She’s right. I do.
Rainey nods, apparently having made peace with her self long ago.
“This way I can exercise a little influence over him,” she says, as if I were not sitting across from her.
“If you’re not willing to help him, he won’t listen at all.”
I roll my eyes and pretend I don’t know what they’re talking about. In fact, not too many months ago I stashed in this very house a witness who needed to disappear for a few hours. She spent the night, and Rainey deposited her at the courthouse to testify the next mo ming
“So tell me about Christian Life,” I say to Rainey, who nods as if she expected me to play dumb.
“Only if you won’t make fun of it,” she demands, her lips pursed, daring me to make some smart remark.
“Why didn’t you ask Chet Bracken?”
Sarah, who has not missed Sunday Mass in months after not going for a couple of years after her mother died, nods in agreement. At least I have a clue as to why Rainey has gotten religion. With Sarah I have no idea. Church seems to be a woman thing, mostly, is all I can figure.
“I promise I won’t make fun,” I say, meaning it. Rainey can be a big help if she’s willing to poke around for me.
“Actually, I would have felt kind of weird asking Bracken,” I admit. If Chet had started telling me about how Jesus Christ had changed his life, I would have tried to crawl under my desk. I can handle that kind of talk better from a woman.
“It’s not like you think, Gideon,” Rainey lectures me.
“It’s not hellfire and damnation.” Rainey turns to Sarah, who is listening respectfully.
“Your father has this image of a Jimmy Swaggart praying for money and promising to heal people. That’s absurd! What Christian Life is about is helping people to accept the belief that God broke into human history two thousand years ago.
Christian Life starts with a person just as you are right now, faith or no faith, and invites you, invites me, to witness the changes in the lives of the members of its congregation. People who are just starting are assigned church families. They are not blood families just groups of about fifteen to twenty people who become your Christian Life family. It’s incredible how persons in your family have changed their lives. Most of them weren’t what anyone would call bad before. They lived ordinary, typical lives filled with the normal boredom, despair, and the sense of meaninglessness that accompany twentieth-century existence. Now their lives are truly God-centered, and they have a joy in their lives that is just thrilling to be around.”
While Rainey is speaking, I am tempted to slurp my soup. When she gets started on Christian Life, she positively glows. It is hard not to be jealous. I never have been able to generate this kind of excitement in her.
Trying to conceal my irritation, I ask, “I don’t get the connection between their lives and a literal belief in the Bible.” I look at my daughter, who is listening intently.
Mass, unless it has changed, is pretty much a cut-and dried affair in the Catholic church.
“What happens if you let it,” Rainey says, her voice soft and fragile, “is that God, working through your family, gives you the courage and will to believe that the Bible is His Word. It’s simply through His grace that you come to accept the Scriptures.”
I realize I have begun to resent the amount of time Rainey spends at Christian Life. In the last couple of months she has been up there at their huge complex for part of four or five days of every week. Christian Life is like a separate city within Blackwell County, but that’s the point. A way of life, she says. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Christian Life is a cult, but Rainey flatly maintains there is nothing unusual about its doctrine or its leadership. Because of its size, she says, they break themselves down into “families” which nurture people like herself.
My daughter, who has never been shy before around Rainey until tonight, clears her throat and asks, “And you believe the Bible now word for word?”
Rainey smiles.
“About ninety percent of the time I do. To help new members, they use the familiar metaphor of a trip. Joining Christian Life is like taking an unexpected journey. When you first begin it, you don’t have the right clothes; you’re anxious about what you’re leaving; you’re nervous about your destination.
After you’ve been on it long enough, you learn how to be comfortable. That’s where I am right now-I’m learning how to be comfortable.”
I take my spoon and press it hard against the table, trying to contain my frustration. I’ve felt Rainey slipping away from me for months. Christian Life sounds like a day-care center for adults. All you have to do is check your brains at the door. Yet she has told me that a number of Blackwell County’s movers and shakers are members now, including a number of attorneys who are partners in the biggest firms in the state. “Tell me about Shane Norman,” I mutter.
“What makes him so great?”
Rainey’s eyes light up at the mention of Christian Life’s principal minister.
“I’ve actually met him only once,” she says, giving me a rueful smile that is becoming familiar, “but as a preacher the man radiates peace.
Even the Sunday after Leigh was charged, you couldn’t tell the turmoil he must have been feeling.”
I lean back in my chair so exasperated with her I can’t eat anymore. I would be glowing a bit myself if five thousand people were showing up every week to hear me beat my gums.
“Maybe he was at peace because his church raised half a million dollars for her bail by the next day.”
Rainey gives me an indulgent smile.
“Think how you would feel if Sarah were charged with murdering her husband. You’d be bananas.”
I am capable of murder, but Sarah is not. She feels guilty if she accidentally steps on an ant. I start to make some asinine crack, but catch myself. Rainey will clam up if I’m not careful.
“You’re right,” I say.
“So have you heard any stories about Leigh’s marriage while you’ve been there?”
“Don’t ask her to snoop on her own church!” Sarah yelps at me.
“It’s not right!” She glares at me as if I had demanded that Rainey stake out the women’s bathroom at Christian Life.
“It’s okay, Sarah,” Rainey says.
“He’s just trying to find out the truth about what happened.”
I nod, ridiculously pleased that Rainey is defending me.
“All I’m trying to do,” I tell my daughter, “is get some information.” At seventeen, Sarah is an idealist. I don’t begrudge her this unrealistic phase in her life. I must have gone through one myself to run off and join the Peace Corps after college. Still, people like my daughter can be a pain in the butt, especially if they are charged with a crime. In my last big case I defended one who almost drove me crazy.
Sarah shakes her head.
“You just want to hear some thing,” she says, “that will make Christian Life look bad. You’re mad Rainey’s never home anymore when you call her.”
A child shall lead us.
“I have to confess,” I say, glancing at Sarah before I turn to my girlfriend, “I’m a little suspicious of anyone who’s made to sound quite so wonderful. He never turns out to be the superstar everybody says he is.”
Sarah’s voice takes on a high-pitched tone that signals she is mad enough to cry.
“You’re just like the media,” she says to me.
“Always criticizing, always looking for the dirt.” She pleads with Rainey, “Don’t tell him anything.”
“Sarah,” Rainey says, coming around the table to stand behind Sarah’s chair and rub her shoulders as if she were a child who needed calming down instead of a spoiled, sulky teenager, “it’s okay. Your dad knows he’s got a standing invitation to get involved with me out there any time he wants.”
Her dark eyes flashing at me, Sarah says, “The only reason you’d go is to get evidence for your case.”
I stand up, wondering what I have done to my child.
In conversations before, Sarah has accused me of using people, but she has never been so angry or so blunt.
“I don’t think,” I say, throwing my napkin on the table, “I’d make it to the inner sanctum in the three weeks left to trial.” I head for the door.
“Let’s go home if all you are going to do is jump down my throat.”
As I knew would happen, tears start down my daughter’s cheeks. I still know what buttons to push. There may come a time when “guilting” her won’t work, but practice makes perfect.
“I’m sorry, Rainey,” she says in a choked voice.
“I am, too!” I call from the door, waiting for Sarah.
Sometimes she acts about three. I’m almost as mad at Rainey as I am at Sarah. I’m willing to bet my fee in the Wallace case that Rainey has been talking to Sarah about her coming to Christian Life. I don’t mind her trying to proselytize me, but Sarah is another matter.
Damn it to hell, who does she think she is? Sarah is my child, and I don’t want anybody trying to feed her a load of crap. There is enough out there anyway without some right-wing nuts brainwashing her. Who the hell is Shane Norman anyway? In an earlier life he probably was some fly-by-night con artist who figured out that peddling salvation was an easier way to make a living.
I may not be a genius or a saint, but I know bullshit when I see it. From the Crusades on down, with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, Christians who were sure they had a lock on the truth have murdered thousands of people. I’d rather my daughter’s brain not be one of their victims.
“It’s all right. Call me later,” Rainey says, hurrying to the door.
I nod curtly, as Sarah runs ahead of me.
Sarah and I ride in an angry silence until we turn into our driveway.
“You can be so closed-minded,” she says, as she shuts the car door, careful not to slam it, knowing I will explode if she does.
“Just because you don’t believe anything doesn’t mean other people can’t.”
Banging doors, yelling, any behavior except “Yes, sir” or “No, ma’am” uttered with a respectful tone minus a snide expression were forbidden to me and my sister, Marty, when we were growing up in eastern Arkansas. Even when my father was at his craziest, we went around smiling like slaves who were working up their nerve to ask for permission to marry someone off the plantation. Only in the last couple of years have I realized how much I intimidated Sarah when she was growing up. I have begun to lighten up, but I am afraid she will always be a little intimidated by me.
“I believe in something,” I respond weakly. We covered this ground last summer. Since religion has become important to her, it upsets her that I don’t share her preoccupation with it. I unlock the door, and we are greeted by Woogie, a genetic disaster with his long legs and beagle body and head.
“Rainey asked you to visit Christian Life, didn’t she?”
I turn on lights in the den while Sarah reaches down and pats Woogie’s head.
“What’s wrong with that?”
I might as well sell the house and get a motel room.
“You’re supposed to be Catholic. Your mother would be spinning in her grave if she knew you were going to join the Moonies or whatever this group is.”
Sarah’s jaw tightens.
“God, Dad, you’re impossible,” she mutters.
“Rainey wouldn’t join something weird.
Besides, you don’t know anything about Moonies any way, and you know Mom wouldn’t think it was the end of the world like you do.”
I throw myself down on the couch and watch Sarah stroke Woogie’s graying muzzle with her knuckles. I’d even rather she be serious about a boy than get involved with a group like Christian Life. First Rainey, now my daughter. Why isn’t it enough for the women I love to get up and go to school or work and then come home and plop down and watch the brain drain or even read a book? Life is complicated enough without getting heated up about whether some supernatural force is “breaking in” to human history.
Freud, if I remember my freshman psychology course at the University of Arkansas a hundred years ago, said that God is a wish and a pretty infantile one at that. An obvious conclusion if you think about it, given the rest of his psychology. As children, we can’t get enough of our parents; as teenagers we can’t get far enough away;
and in marriage we look for them all over again. If he was correct, we aren’t left with a particularly appealing portrait of the human psyche. But ever since the first ape saw his reflection in a pool of water, he has demanded a more grandiose explanation of his existence, Sigmund Freud notwithstanding. It is surprising he wasn’t strung up by his tongue. If I tried to say something like that, the women in my life would burn me at the stake. Fathers, I have learned in the last couple of years, aren’t supposed to commit heresy. Our job is to pay the bills and keep our mouths shut.
“Do you want me to help you pack your bags?” I say, knowing how pathetic I sound.
Sarah’s expression softens and she comes over to the couch and sits beside me.
“That’s what you’re worried about,” she says.
“You’re thinking you won’t see me anymore.” She pats my knee as if I were a child being comforted by his mother.
So, Rainey has been talking to her. I look around the den and realize how much Sarah has made it her own since her mother died. A year ago she persuaded me to buy an almost brand-new recliner for peanuts at a garage sale, and after my best friend Dan Bailey burned a hole in the coffee table before Christmas, she found another one at an antique shop and shamed me until, on New Year’s Eve, I broke down and bought it. Last winter a friend got her interested in ceramics, and now every flat surface in the room has some bizarre, gnome like figure crouching on it. Not great art, but I don’t know what’s good unless I can read a label or a name. I’m not a visual person, as Rainey charitably puts it. I pull off my jacket and lay it beside me.
“These groups can suck you in,” I warn, “and before you know it you’ve become psychologically dependent on them.”
Great, I think. I’ll have to pay somebody to kidnap her and then deprogram her.
“It’s a church,” she laughs, “not a concentration camp where they brainwash you. Rainey wouldn’t be involved in anything like that.”
“I should tell you that Chet Bracken’s dying of cancer I say, abruptly changing the subject.
“That’s why he’s asked me to help him. It’s a secret though.”
Sarah’s face softens, as I knew it would.
“How much longer does he have?” she asks, her voice immediately anxious. Her mother’s death was sheer agony.
He’s going down fast,” I say, milking this moment for as long as I can.
“He’s afraid he won’t be able to do the trial.”
“Has he got a family?” Sarah asks, biting her lip.
“I don’t know a thing about him,” I say, regretting I have told her. Why did I? Leverage, obviously. I know where my daughter is vulnerable. She was only thirteen when her mother died, and she still hasn’t gotten over it. I’m pathetic, I realize. I didn’t take this case because I’m sensitive to cancer victims. And yet, Chet’s revelation has touched something in me. He has absolutely nothing in common with Rosa except that he’s a fighter, too. Maybe there are more connections here than I am permitting myself to realize.
“That’s so sad!” Sarah says, staring past me.
“Isn’t he young?”
You asshole, I think miserably.
“Yeah, he’s young.”
With a somber expression now on her beautiful face, she goes to her room to do her homework, leaving me to sit in the den wondering why I’m so afraid of change. If I come down on Sarah too hard, she will resent me even more than she already does. Did Rosa go through some kind of religious rebellion when she was a teenager? She never mentioned it, or I wasn’t paying attention. Regularly as clockwork, she went to Mass in Colombia and then here, so it never was an issue. Until her mother died, Sarah never missed, either. It’s easy to have a perfect attendance record if you have no choice.
After Rosa’s death there was nobody to go with her, because I sure wasn’t about to go thank God for taking Rosa away from my daughter at the beginning of adolescence
I stare blankly at Leigh Wallace’s file and think I should have faked it and taken Sarah to Mass these last few years. If I had, she wouldn’t be so vulnerable now to the garbage that comes out of these fundamentalist churches. Who am I kidding? What could be more fundamentalist than the Catholic church? Abortion?
Women in the church? The difference is these people at Christian Life take themselves so seriously. I never cared what Rosa believed as long as she agreed to use birth control. How she rationalized her faith didn’t concern me so long as she did what I wanted. Guilt settles down around me like an occupying army as I remember how much pressure I applied to my wife not to have more children after Sarah.
I had just gone to work for Social Services as a case worker and was making next to nothing, but Rosa wanted to stay home and raise our child. I knew that would lead to more kids and told her that she had to face the fact that I was never going to be rich. How could that be? Wasn’t this the United States, where everybody who wanted to work hard became a millionaire Reality set in after a year, and she went back to work as a nurse. After ten years of marriage on a state salary, I told her I wanted to go to law school at night.
Thrilled by my display of ambition, she began to talk about the two more children we would have after I passed the bar exam. Weren’t all lawyers rich in the United States? Poor Rosa. She’d still be working the night shift. For the hundredth time, I wish she were here to deal with her daughter. Our relationship has been on a roller coaster lately. Woogie, who never changes, nuzzles in against my thigh. I rub his left ear gently. At moments like this, I think dogs are at the top of the evolutionary chain.
Chet bracken’s “farm” is really no more than a few acres in the western part of the county. Though trees abound in central Arkansas, there are none around the structure that must be chet’s residence, unless I am badly lost. As I come upon an honest-to-goodness log cabin, my mind serves up pictures shown to grade school kids of the pioneer experience at its hardiest: isolated huts hunkered down in the sod against the prairie wind. I have unlocked and relocked a second cattle gate and traveled, as directed, seven-tenths of a mile, so either I am about to surprise some unsuspecting family or I have for once followed directions to the letter. I pull up in the gravel driveway and think that I would plant some shade trees. Yet, perhaps Chet doesn’t see the point. As exposed as this house is (despite the gates), I doubt that a young widow would want to stay out here by herself. I check to make certain I have Leigh Wallace’s file and walk up the steps to the front porch, realizing that I am making all kinds of assumptions about Bracken’s family. For all I know about him, he lives with his mother.
A boy of about seven comes to the door to answer my knock.
“I’m Trey,” he announces solemnly.
“Are you Mr. Page?”
“That’s me,” I allow, smiling at this boy whose jug ears seem to confirm his lineage more persuasively than any birth certificate.
“Is your dad home?”
“Yes, sir, he’s out back,” Trey says seriously, offering me his tiny hand to shake. Trey’s jeans are not totally clean, but his right hand is neither sticky nor grimy to the touch. For a child his age he has a surprisingly strong grip. I can imagine his father lecturing him to look the other person in the eye and, if he’s a man, to squeeze his hand as hard as he can. The business of becoming a little Chet is about learning to deal from strength. The intimidation can be learned later. Yet, perhaps this isn’t fair. This child has learned his manners, no more, no less. Still, it is unnerving to be greeted so firmly by a kid who barely comes to my waist. He leads me through the house, and though it is clean and picked up, it is difficult to imagine that a woman lives here.
The living room is square like the main area of a lodge, lacking only deer antlers over the enormous fireplace to convince me that Chet uses this structure as a clubhouse for hunting and not as his principal residence. On the walls are pictures of ducks, geese, and other wildlife.
The furniture is functional and sturdy. As much money as he has surely made from criminals, he could have three or four places like this scattered around the state.
“Mom,” Trey solemnly introduces me as he leads the way into the kitchen, “this is Mr. Page.”
Turning from the stove is a rangy, plain woman with short, graying hair, who is wearing an apron over bib overalls and a red long-sleeved jersey. She is stirring something on the stove that gives off a gamy scent.
Given this rustic setting, I wouldn’t be surprised if she announced we were eating bear meat. Anything smaller than an elk wouldn’t seem fair competition for Bracken.
She smiles pleasantly at me and says, her voice country but pleasant, “I’m Wynona Cody, Mr. Page.”
Bracken’s marital status, unclear before I came, still appears muddled. Is this his mistress or just a liberated woman?
“How are you?” I ask, wanting to dig, but realizing the ground probably won’t be hard at all in a few weeks. High-visibility lawyers like Bracken, who are always in the news with their clients, only seem to be all work and no play. Despite all the gossip about him. Bracken has kept his private life well hidden. I wonder what his “family” at Christian Life knows about him.
Wynona stirs the pot on the stove.
“I hope you like Brunswick stew,” she says, laying a blue lid over the pot on the stove.
Squirrel meat. I haven’t had any since I was a boy in eastern Arkansas.
“I remember my mother fixing it,” I say, nodding. I remember how the meat used to stick to my teeth.
“Trey,” she says, “take Mr. Page out back to talk to your dad and then come back inside. I won’t be ready in here for a while.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Trey seems disappointed, but there isn’t a lot of give in his mother’s voice. Behind the friendly smile is a hint of steel. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be Wynona who taught Trey his hand shake. I follow him out a door off the kitchen and see Bracken sitting out on a deck that runs the width of the cabin with his feet up on a rail. A cooler is at his feet, and a beer is in his hand.
“Dad,” Trey says casually, “Mr. Page is here.”
It sounds a little shocking to hear Bracken addressed so lovingly. Nervously, I clear my throat and look beyond Bracken to the woods no more than fifty yards away. The sun is about down now, giving the dense growth to the rear of the cabin a forbidding look.
“Pull up a chair. Page,” he says gruffly. He smiles at Trey, who grins and shoves his hands in his pants.
“Trey, show Mr. Page how you can shoot.”
Leaning against the wall is a .22 rifle that Trey lugs to the railing of the porch. He is too short to cradle the stock against his shoulder, so he steadies it under his arm and begins blasting at a tin can near the edge of the forest. The metal jumps as if it has acquired a life of its own as Trey sprays it around the shorn grass. Bracken watches with obvious satisfaction. I wonder what it would be like to have a son. I wouldn’t trade her for anything, but Sarah has always been more than a match for me. Though Rainey disagrees, I have little to teach her except what to avoid when it comes time to choose a mate. Since her mother died, I haven’t been the most consistent of fathers too many nights I left Sarah alone while I went prowling around bars after lonely women who were eager to scratch a similar itch.
“He can sure pop ‘em,” I say admiringly.
“Can he try?” Trey asks, stopping after firing five rounds.
I haven’t shot a rifle since I was twelve. My dad (before he went completely nuts and before my mother confiscated his guns) and I used to shoot turtles and gar off the St. Francis River bridge about ten miles from town. I was a decent shot then, but today only manage to hit the can one out of five shots. I offer the rifle to Bracken, but he waves it away. How much pain is he in, I wonder. It is easy to forget that he is probably doped up right now. With only a little time left, how can he think about law at all? What is death like? My mind resists contemplating its absence. Bracken doesn’t have that luxury. If I were in his condition, I’d be tempted to say the hell with it and concentrate on keeping the cooler full. Other people are a mystery. Bracken may be spending the time he could be working on the Wallace case bargaining with God as if he were trying to cut a deal with a tough prosecutor. Given Bracken’s reputation for insisting on absolute control, I’d like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation. The door opens, and Wynona waves Trey inside. Bracken looks up and gives her a warm smile.
“We’re lucky we’re not counting on Page,” he chuckles, “to defend Leigh in a shooting match.”
She winks at the men in her life.
“Y’all practice all the time,” she drawls.
“Be another twenty minutes.
Come on in. Trey.”
Reluctantly, the boy walks into the house, and I watch while Bracken unloads the rifle and checks the chamber.
“Good kid,” I say.
“I thought he was gonna crush my fingers when he met me at the door.”
Bracken reaches down beside him and picks up a rag from the floor and begins to oil the rifle.
“It’s hard to explain to a boy his age you’re not going to be around much longer. They don’t get it. Take a brew if you want.”
For the first time, I feel some empathy for this man.
Until this moment, his intensity and my own unacknowledged envy of his success had made us seem like beings from different galaxies. His need to dominate our previous encounters has repulsed me in a way that might say more about myself than him. He is successful because he leaves nothing to chance. I don’t have his drive or single-mindedness. The fact is, I am flattered silly that he has asked me to help him, even if it means nothing more than sitting through the trial like a utility player on a team with an all-star infield. I lift the lid off the Igloo and pull out a Heineken. No light beer, but I guess there wouldn’t be much point.
“I don’t get it either. My wife died a few years back, and I still haven’t figured it out.”
Bracken pauses from his labors to take a sip from his can of Miller.
“Dying young is going against the grain, all right.”
Going against the grain? Well, I didn’t expect Chet Bracken to burst into tears. I want to ask him about what he’s personally getting from Christian Life, but now it seems an invasion of privacy.
“I read the file and copied it,” I say, withdrawing the Wallace folder from my briefcase.
“If Leigh had kept her mouth shut, they couldn’t have charged her because they wouldn’t have had any real evidence. All they would have had was a wife discovering her husband’s dead body and a neighbor’s testimony they argued the night before.”
Bracken shifts in the green canvas chair at the mention of the case. He nods, his plain face gloomy.
“We’ve talked to everybody who claimed to be at the church that day, and not a single one of them can testify she was there during the time she says she was. Worse, two people flat out contradict her story that she spoke to them.”
On Bracken’s property there is a garden off to the right of the cabin I hadn’t noticed until now. Maybe he does live here.
“You think she could have been having an affair and was supposed to be at the church and can’t bring herself to admit where she was?”
Bracken pokes his rag, which he has tied to a stick, down the barrel.
“Not at all likely,” he grunts.
“She and Wallace had been married less than a year, and the word is she was crazy about him. Her daddy complained she was spending too much time at home with him instead of being at the church.”
So if she thought he hung the moon, why would she kill him? At the edge of the woods, I detect some movement. I think I’d be nervous at night out here.
“Was Wallace a member?”
An ugly sound comes from Bracken’s throat.
“Not in good standing,” he says, spitting over the railing into the yard, which is blooming with yellow forsythia and pink redbud trees. A butane tank only a few feet from the deck is mostly hidden by dense shrubbery, out of which arises a birdhouse for martins.
“Shane Norman wouldn’t have let his daughter marry Wallace if he hadn’t joined his church, but right after they married, he quit coming much.”
A small gray rabbit hops into the cleared field and cautiously sniffs the shot-up can. I am reminded of the days when my father and I used to hunt rabbits when I was a kid, and I look to see if Bracken will load the rifle.
He yawns and looks down the barrel.
“Maybe Wallace was playing around,” I guess, “and she caught him at it.”
Satisfied with his job. Bracken props the rifle in the corner against the beam supporting the roof. My father never fired a shot without cleaning and oiling his guns afterward. I think those acts of maintenance somehow gave him as much satisfaction as firing the guns. When his schizophrenia and drinking got bad (eventually he hung himself at the state hospital in Benton), my mother took the guns and gave them to her brother, telling my father someone had stolen them. He had to know what she had done (burglary of the home of a white person in a small town thirty-five years ago was as rare as a comet sighting), but, probably as a result of his illness, he preferred the theory that a crime had been committed. Bracken glances in the direction of the rabbit which has tentatively hopped a couple of feet toward the garden.
“That’s more of a possibility,” he says, standing up and heading down the steps off the porch, “but we haven’t turned up a woman in Wallace’s past.
By all accounts he was deeply in love with her, too.”
The creature sees Bracken and scampers back into the woods. Bracken turns and says somewhat sheepishly, “Live and let live.”
I file away this story. Bracken, who chews up opposing attorneys for breakfast, won’t even fire a warning shot at a rabbit. Perhaps dying is having a mellowing effect on him. It occurs to me that I am going to have the experience of watching a man die. It is a sobering thought. Rosa’s death was not a good experience, but then I was too close. Maybe I can learn something at this distance. I follow him out to his garden where he shows me snow peas, spinach, onions, and broccoli Wynona and Trey have recently planted. He says the spinach especially will be delicious, as if he will be around to eat it. I want to ask him about his cancer but don’t dare. I have been too intimidated by this man to presume familiarity I don’t feel. Curiosity rather than sympathy is my dominant emotion, and though I’m beginning to warm to him, the myths about him shape my feelings to a far greater degree than this homey snap shot. Wearing beltless faded blue jeans that are far too roomy in the back (they are in danger of sliding down his wasted shanks to his knees if he jams his hands in his pockets one more time). Bracken confesses he doesn’t have the energy to do much more until the trial.
“I had to browbeat Leigh to get her to see you tomorrow,” he says, frustration working into his voice.
“She’s been about as useless as I am.”
Embarrassed, I study the ground in the growing dusk.
Only last year Bracken won outright acquittals in four first-degree murder cases in a row. His ability, the courthouse talk goes, has been exceeded only by his arrogance. Obviously, the specter of his own death has vanquished the Chet Bracken of legend.
“I’m a little surprised somebody in that church hasn’t tried to cover for her,” I say, voicing a notion that has recently occurred to me.
“They raised that bond money in a hurry.”
Bracken bends down to pull up a weed.
“I know Nor man, and he wouldn’t allow anyone to do that,” he says sharply.
“If she goes to prison, they’ll have ten members there for her on visiting day the rest of her life, but nobody would be permitted to lie for her no matter how much it would help. We don’t do things that way.”
We. It is hard to take seriously Bracken’s conversion.
If he’s so hot for it, how come he isn’t in church to night? Rainey was going. His sanctimonious tone sticks in my craw. Is he suggesting that I would suborn per jury? A decade ago, when Bracken was first making his reputation, the prosecuting attorney of Blackwell County claimed that he had bought a witness in a rape case but couldn’t make the charge against him stick. I can’t keep my irritation pushed down.
“Joining a church doesn’t make a person a saint.”
Bracken smiles as if I had said something funny. He pokes at his teeth with the weed he has pulled from the ground.
“I want you to talk to Leigh’s father, too,” he says mildly.
“You’re not going to get a feel for what I’m talking about until you do.”
“I’ll be glad to,” I say, inwardly groaning at the thought. It is not only the Jim Bakkers, Jimmy Swaggarts, and Oral Robertses who have given Protestants a bad name. During John Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. Catholics were suspect in Bear Creek.
Home during the summer from Subiaco, I was told more than once everybody knew the Pope would be calling the shots if he got elected.
“Did Wallace keep a gun in the house?” I ask, wanting Bracken to focus on the murder itself.
Bracken leads me back to the deck.
“Leigh claimed he didn’t own one, and the cops can’t prove he did, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve got three guns in this house that were given to me.” Apparently exhausted by our excursion to the garden. Bracken sinks gratefully into his chair.
Seated again, I watch the rabbit bound into the cleared ground and head for the garden. Bracken doesn’t even bother to wave his arms.
“As circumstantial as the case against her is,” I point out, “maybe we could get a good deal for her.”
Bracken reaches for another beer.
“The sticking point is her father-he doesn’t want her to have to spend a day in prison.”
I finish my beer but decide against another one. How can a father believe his daughter is capable of murder?
Sarah won’t even kill one of Woogie’s fleas. Bracken’s hand shakes slightly as he brings the can to his mouth.
“He thinks it’s just a matter of time before some evidence turns up that takes her off the hook.”
Wishful thinking is the only thing the brain is good for, according to my friend Dan. If not for that ability, there wouldn’t be any reason to get out of bed most mornings. Trey bounds through the door, then, almost standing at attention, says formally, “Mr. Page, would you like to wash up before supper?”
I can’t resist smiling at this kid and then remember what it is about him that is so unnerving. The child is being raised the way I was thirty-five years ago in the Delta. Form was substance, and substance form, and God pity the white middle-class child who didn’t intuitively understand that.
“Show me the way. Trey,” I say, but turn to Chet.
“Where were you raised?” I ask, guessing his answer.
“Helena,” he says, pushing himself up from the chair.
“About a mile from the bridge.”
The bridge that leads to Mississippi, he doesn’t have to say. I nod.
“I’m from Bear Creek.”
“I figured you had to be from over there, too, with that accent,” he says, the barest hint of a smile on his face. We’re practically brothers. Trey leads me through the kitchen past his mother setting the table and down a hall whose walls are covered with photographs. I pause and look at what has to be a picture of Chet in a Little League uniform. He is holding a bat in a kind of corkscrew stance that reminds me of Stan Musial.
“That could be you,” I say.
“Yes, sir,” Trey says, not missing a beat.
“You want to see the glove my dad played with?”
“Sure,” I say. We pass the bathroom, which has been temporarily forgotten, and he leads me through a door at the end of the hall on the right. I haven’t been in a boy’s bedroom in years, but they haven’t changed much except for the video equipment. Trey goes to a closet and pulls out a glove whose leather is so dry and cracked it is almost painful to the touch.
“Dad played third base,” Trey informs me as he hands me the glove to try on.
“Did you know that Brooks Robinson was from Arkansas? My dad says he was the best ever.”
I cram my fingers into his glove, remembering my days as a ten-year-old shortstop for Paul Benham Insurance The first ball ever hit to me went between my legs. Every time we lost a game I cried afterward.
Bracken probably went home and drove his fist through a wall.
“He was incredible, all right.”
“Trey!” his mother calls.
I slip the glove off and hand it back to him. Carefully, he lays it back in the closet. One way or another this kid will remember his dad. And his memories will be a lot different than most of ours.
Bracken says the blessing before the meal, but his wife and child do the talking. With the stew, Wynona serves biscuits and salad, and I eat until I’m bloated. As usual, I talk about Sarah and the travails of raising a teenage daughter who attracts boys by merely clearing her throat. It hits me that after a decent interval Wynona will be looking for another mate, and I wonder if Bracken feels bad when he thinks about her in the arms of another man. He seems content to listen, allowing his wife and son to carry the conversation. As I talk and am drawn out by Wynona (she titters sympathetically at my tales of paternal incompetence), I notice that Bracken is, in fact, content, period. Without a shred of self-pity, his homely face, reminding me, now I realize, of a young Ross Perot, is hoarding memories of his wife and son for the rough times ahead.
“I would have had Chet invite Sarah,” Wynona says, “if I had known about her.”
“That’s okay,” I say, wondering what Sarah would have made of this family, “she’s studying for a math test.”
Actually, it is only a quiz, but she rarely begins to settle down before ten. She is on the phone, I would be willing to bet. Ever the little gentleman. Trey chews with his mouth closed and does not grab for food not within his reach. His table manners are better than my own. He asks, “Do you like being a lawyer as much as my dad?”
I chew, and signal with my hand that I will answer after I have swallowed. I have never thought one way or another whether Bracken enjoys his profession. With his success, how could he not? On the surface, he seems too obsessed, too relentless to be having fun. Yet, from experience I know the competition in trying a case acts like adrenaline, producing a high unlike anything else.
“If I were as good as your father,” I say, finally, “I probably would.”
“He says he’s going to heaven when he dies,” Trey says, talking about what has to be bothering him.
“Are you saved, Mr. Page?”
I look around the table, hoping to be rescued, but see I will get no help from his parents. Judging by their expressions they are as interested in my answer as their son. I guess I don’t believe in a heaven, so the theological implications behind this question hold no meaning.
I want to claim this is a private matter, but children, like schizophrenics, have little trouble in crossing over boundaries that deter the rest of humanity. The silence is growing awkward, so I fill it by saying, “I’ve been baptized.”
Like a professor who won’t let a student off the hook with a general answer to a specific question. Trey asks again, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” His face is as open and friendly as if he had asked about my favorite baseball team. Yet there is a rote sound to the words, as if he has been practicing them.
Feeling trapped and resentful, I push back from the table, telling myself that it is not this child’s fault. His parents should know better than to let him conduct an inquisition. If I have to endure a religious litmus test given by a child in order to work on a murder case, I’ll pass.
“When I was about your age. Trey,” I say, trying to sound friendly, “my mother told me it was rude to ask questions about politics or religion.”
Trey’s face reddens, as if he is stung by my refusal to answer him, and he looks at his father for confirmation.
“Nobody’s trying to embarrass you. Page,” Bracken says.
“It’s a sign Trey likes you.”
This child is worried about my soul and whether his father and I (I must seem about to die to him, too, since I’m older than his father) will be friends in heaven. I have an almost overwhelming desire to lie to please this child, but I am irritated by his parents’ behavior. I look at Wynona’s bland face, hoping for a last-second rescue, but it isn’t coming. Finally, I say, “I don’t know what I accept. Trey.” As brutal as it sounds, even this is a lie.
I don’t accept anything. And if his father weren’t dying, he wouldn’t be going to church either, I am tempted to tell this kid, but don’t. I feel myself blushing furiously.
Who am I to question the sincerity of Bracken’s conversion? He obviously is already a changed man. The old Bracken wouldn’t have any more let a rabbit into his garden (planted or not) than he would permit a prosecutor to badger one of his witnesses. Just because I’m in capable of change doesn’t mean the rest of the world has the same problem.
“It’s okay, Gideon,” Bracken says, calling me by my first name for the first time.
“That’s what we’re taught to do at Christian Life,” he says, laying a napkin beside his plate.
“But that question is supposed to come much later. Since my cancer was discovered, Trey understands there isn’t much time.”
As I sit there trying to sort through my feelings, the phrase “end times” rings in my brain. The world may be ending soon for everybody (it is for his father), and if his kid can’t stop that, at least he can make sure we are ready for it.
“I know it’s hard to be asked that,” Wynona says, her voice gentle, “but it would be confusing and dishonest to get on to him.”
I push my knife around on the table.
“Oh, I’m not upset.” But I am. Nothing is more obnoxious than someone pushing religion on you, especially if it’s an innocent kid. And with Rainey bleating on about it last night, I’ve had enough door-to-door salesmen to last a lifetime. The arrogance of it. Trey is watching me as if an ax murderer had declared himself. Still, I feel a grudging admiration for him. Even with your parents egging you on, it can’t be easy being a little Billy Graham. My own failures with Sarah stand in stark relief.
This kid is practically an evangelist; Sarah was lucky if I dropped her off at the front door of the church. It wouldn’t have killed me to attend Mass more. It’s not as if I were developing a cure for cancer and was just too busy to tear myself away.
Bracken begins to clear the table.
“Would you like some blackberry cobbler,” he asks cheerfully, “and some coffee?”
“Sure,” I say. How can I be rude to someone who’s dying? Wynona springs up to help him, leaving Trey and me to stare around each other. It is as if I had farted and everyone was determined to ignore it. How odd this all is, I think. After Bracken dies, what a story I will have to tell. Chet Bracken stories are legion, but nobody will be able to top this one.
Again, blushing furiously. Trey asks, “Maybe you can come to church with us this Sunday.”
I look at the boy, astounded that a child so young would be this relentless. His eyes are somewhere on the middle button of my shirt. Doubtless, his parents have overheard him, but it is as if we were discussing base ball cards. Opening the refrigerator freezer. Bracken says, “Come on and go with us. It’ll make your investigation go easier.”
Extremely uncomfortable now, I lift the crystal water glass to my lips to give myself time to think. What can it hurt?
“Actually, I’ve already been invited,” I fudge, adding specificity to Rainey’s open invitation, “by a friend to attend your church this Sunday, so maybe I’ll see you there.”
“Who?” Trey asks, a little suspiciously. This is too easy. Yet his parents let him continue as if I were a prisoner of war in a country that knew nothing of the Geneva Convention.
I tell them about Rainey, but, not surprisingly, in a church with a cast of thousands, they have not heard of her. Wynona has a way of listening sympathetically, and I tell more about Rainey than I intended, managing only to leave out my consternation that she has joined Christian Life. No matter. As she fills my coffee cup, she re marks, “You must feel she’s deserting you because she’s gone so much.”
“Exactly,” I say, glad that someone understands.
“She might as well put her house up for sale.” Wynona reminds me of someone’s grandmother. I wonder how she and Bracken hooked up. A plain Jane if there ever was one, she wouldn’t have caught Bracken’s eye on a crowded street. Since she is perhaps a decade older than Bracken, she surely thought she had a husband for the rest of her life. As Julia, my secretary, says, “Even if you can find one halfway decent, he’ll wear out so fast and die you won’t even remember what he looks like.”
Chet, who has said little during the meal, sits back in his chair.
“There’s only one cure for that. You’ll have to start going, too.”
Damn. I look at Wynona, who nods.
“She probably can’t tell you what it means to her. When you first start getting to know your family, there’s a kind of glow.
That’s how me and Chet met. Trey and I were assigned to be part of his family when he began coming regularly six months ago.”
My head spins to look at Chet, who gives a confirming nod and a sheepish grin. I guess I should have figured, but I’d never heard about Chet having a wife or family before. With those ears. Trey couldn’t look any more like Chet if he’d had plastic surgery.
“How long have you been married?” I ask, incredulous.
“Three months,” he says, beaming at his bride. The kid calls him Dad, and Chet and Wynona look as if they have been married forever. Everyone seems happy. How can they stand it? The Lord’s will? I suppose if you believe it’s all for a purpose, you can endure anything, although I can’t quite buy that.
As Wynona clears the table and does the dishes with Trey, we take our dessert and coffee and adjourn to the square, lodge like room to sit in front of the huge fire place and continue our discussion of the case. Chet gets a fire going easily, and yet it is obvious that he is tired and is not able to concentrate as I ask him questions about the case. Talk to Leigh tomorrow is his only ad vice. I drive home wondering if the only reason I was invited out to dinner was to have his kid browbeat me into going to church. Bracken is preparing for the next world; I’ve still got to live in this one.
As I drive I am thinking how hard it is to know an other person. Chet Bracken the lawyer is one hundred and eighty degrees opposite from Chet Bracken the man. He was positively docile tonight. Was it the cancer Clearly, he was exhausted. After dinner it was as if he were waiting for me to take charge. Perhaps that’s what he really wants but is too proud to say it. Yet nobody was too proud to put me on the spot about religion. My skin crawls as I remember the kid’s face. Are you saved? And they let him get away with it! Why am I reacting so strongly to this incident? It seems a matter of bad taste. Almost a matter of class differences.
It hits me that I am reacting as my mother probably would have. Nice people don’t get in your face like that. It wasn’t as if she were the Queen of England, but for the first time in a long while I remember that she and my father, before he went crazy, considered them selves and their friends far above the ordinary residents of Bear Creek. Her father had been a doctor, and she saw herself as a member of the eastern Arkansas aristocracy, with its disdain for emotional outbursts and theatrics of any kind. This wasn’t so bad, actually. She and her friends weren’t taken in by the demagoguery of Orval Faubus, who, as governor, on the pretext of preventing violence incited the state to wage a guerrilla war against school desegregation. How much of my mother’s sense of who she was would have rubbed off on me if Daddy hadn’t gone nuts and become a source of embarrassment? Yet perhaps tonight I saw vestiges of her emotional fastidiousness in my reaction to Trey. I know nothing of Chet’s background, but in any case, he is way beyond a feeling of distaste for what is socially and aesthetically incorrect. Death, or the fear of it, I realize as I hit the outskirts of town, will do that to you.