“I’ll start locking up now,” he says gloomily.
“I won’t have any more business tonight.”
I had forgotten how early people in small towns eat at night. Fifteen minutes later I follow him to his house and realize I could almost close my eyes and get there, so familiar is my old neighborhood.
Nothing in my memory is more vivid than a few select moments in my childhood.
On nights like this if our homework was done, we played kick the can until bedtime. Though I can’t see the honeysuckle, I can smell it.
Inside he flips on lights, and tells me to have a seat while he disappears down a hall, presumably toward the bathroom.
I look around the room, curious about what I will find. I can’t ever remember being here.
Mother must have suspected he was homosexual and discouraged me from coming here. Since I was such a flop as a science student, he probably wasn’t interested in me anyway. On his walls are reproductions of what I call “trick art.” It looks like a bunch of white ducks flying one way, but if you stare at it long enough you realize a flock of black ducks is headed in the opposite direction.
Only the baskets and stands of fresh flowers around the room indicate a sensibility that fits my idea of a gay man. His furniture is, I realize, probably a collection of antiques, though I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if any of the desks, tables, and chairs are simply junk or fine pieces of furniture. Knowing Mr. Carpenter, they’re the real thing.
“You want a beer?” he asks from the doorway. Even without his apron he still looks like a baker or delivery man in white pants and shirt. I nod, and he heads into his kitchen, leaving me to wonder again why he has stayed in Bear Creek. Surely he would feel more comfortable around others who are like him. But as soon as I think this, I realize (not for the first time in my life) that assumptions have always been my worst
enemy.
When he returns with a beer for me, and a glass of what smells like sherry for himself, I ask him why he is still here. He sits down on a love seat across from me and takes off his shoes.
“Too much standing for an old man,” he says apologetically, before adding, “I was seventy-three when mother died at the age of ninety-five in the room behind you, and then it didn’t seem to matter anymore.” He points with his thumb over his shoulder.
“I never was out of her sight except for two weeks every summer, but for some reason I couldn’t stand being away from her. Don’t ask me what that was all about,” he says, warning me away from psychoanalyzing him.
“It’s too late for me to worry about. Most humans aren’t capable of any more than playing out the hand genetics and our upbringing have dealt us. Look at the blacks around here. You wonder how they get out of bed. What could be more disheartening than knowing the people around you consider you genetically inferior? Did you read The Bell Curve?” he demands, his voice harsh and accusing as if he were back in the classroom.
I shift in my chair, trying to get comfortable.
Too many buttons sticking into my rear.
“I just remember reading something about it,” I say.
“It didn’t really say anything new about I.Q.” did it?”
Mr. Carpenter gives me a look that takes me back to my junior high days when I gave him an answer that revealed how limited my potential for understanding science was.
“And nothing new will be said until they can quantify what goes on in a person’s brain,” he says in an imperious tone.
“What is worthwhile is the authors’ opinion about what this country is going to look like in the future. There’s going to be a technological elite, and then a giant black underclass that’s going to make the current racial situation look like a minor irritant. Nobody wants to face it. In my opinion, the Delta has already returned to pre-Civil War days, but without the slavery. The whites here who can afford it have their own schools, their own culture and entertainment, basically their own society. If they had their way, they’d close down the federal government except for an army that wouldn’t venture off American territory. You think things are bad now? I’m glad I won’t be alive to see what’s coming.”
I nod, thinking of Beverly’s tirade. I’m afraid he’ll go on all night on this subject if I let him. I ask how well he knew my physician grandfather.
Without missing a beat, Mr. Carpenter assures me, as he did the morning Angela and I had breakfast at the Cotton Boll, that he was an intelligent man.
“My mother was the one who really knew him. A fine man who worked himself to death. She said he was one of the leaders of the Klan around
here after the First World War. Did you know that?”
I squint at this old man, who is beginning to seem crazier by the minute.
“That can’t possibly be right,” I say, wondering if he is kidding me or even has my grandfathers confused.
“He wasn’t that type of person at all.” Granddaddy Page may have been susceptible to that kind of racial violence, but my mother’s father most certainly could not have been.
Air. Carpenter grins broadly and slaps the back of the couch.
“Don’t get your nose too out of joint. If you knew your history after the First World War, you’d realize the Klan back in those days wasn’t a redneck organization. They had thousands of members and elected their own people to the Legislature. Some of the best men in Arkansas were members. Lawyers, doctors, businessmen, planters. It was probably as much a reaction to the war as anything. Besides blacks, they were against Catholics, foreigners, and for keeping the country lily-white and isolationist.
Pat Buchanan would have fit right in.”
“How do you know for sure my grandfather was a member?” I ask, furious at this information.
He doesn’t mention homosexuals, but I suspect they were on the enemy list, too. Clearly, this old man enjoys unsettling me.
“Like I say, my mother was a great admirer of his. I can’t prove he was, but look in a college yearbook from the times and you’ll see it wasn’t something a man was ashamed of.”
He brings his mouth to his glass, but hardly touches the liquor in it.
“You knew my mother pretty well, didn’t you?” I ask, realizing now they were almost the same age.
He nods vigorously.
“A Southern lady if there ever was one,” he pronounces.
“She shouldn’t have ever married your father. She should have found someone with money who would have taken care of her all her life.
That’s what she expected to do.”
This comment pisses me: my father couldn’t help his mental illness. I don’t want to shut him up, however. I ask, “What do you mean?”
Mr. Carpenter takes a tiny sip of sherry.
“She never coped a single day after he died. She wasn’t trained to make a living. If your daddy had left her rich, she could have managed, but the way I remember it,” he says, slightly embarrassed, “she kind of went to pieces after he died.”
I shift uneasily in my chair. I don’t remember it that way at all. I was
the one who had problems and ultimately had to be shipped off to Subiaco to get straightened out.
“People took advantage of her,” I contend.
“Oscar Taylor foreclosed on the pharmacy.”
Mr. Carpenter winces the way he did when I would give a wrong answer in class.
“Well, I think he carried her for almost a year before he did anything.
And then all I think he did was let her sign it back to him and didn’t actually foreclose and go after any deficiency. That building stood vacant for a couple of years before he got anybody in there.”
“I think you’re wrong,” I say, shaking my head.
“She called him a son of a bitch when she got the letter telling her he was foreclosing.”
Mr. Carpenter studies the reddish liquid in his glass.
“See, I remember all that because your mother and I were friends. I liked her, but she kind of felt people owed her special treatment because her daddy was a doctor. The way I remember it, all she got was a letter from Oscar saying that since she couldn’t sell it and was a whole year behind on the payments to sign it back over to him. She was angry, but I thought he had gone the extra mile. He didn’t want to humiliate her by filing suit. Finally, she signed it back over, but she stayed mad