She isn’t going to have to cross examine her lover about her affair with a murder defendant. Knowing this case is going down the tubes, I drive back to Blackwell County. Riding through the interminable blackness, I wonder why I thought I knew what I was doing when I took this case. A simple matter of hubris? But arising from what?
Was it that Southern white male arrogance that kicked in the moment my mother gazed on me at birth and assumed she would die happy? As I swerve unsuccessfully to avoid the remains of a skunk, it occurs to me that Paul Taylor and I may not be much different.
The next day I drive out to Hutto, on the western edge of Blackwell County, to pay a visit to my sister’s clothing consignment store, which she, deaf to pleas of political correctness, has named the Wigwam.
Hutto, a small town growing bigger almost daily due to white flight from the county’s metropolitan areas, is so unlike Bear Creek it is hard to imagine they are in the same country.
With its multiple car dealerships, real estate offices, and bustling retail downtown area, Hutto displays a business vitality any chamber of commerce president would be proud to pitch to a visiting Yankee
industrialist seeking to squeeze labor costs.
A former sixties hippie turned nineties entrepreneur, my sister has cashed in on the conservation movement in clothing: I understand it’s thought smart now in some circles to wear a second-hand skirt. Our mother must be turning over in her grave. Marty, I’m told by a clerk who accepts my word that I’m her brother, is in the back, and I’m pointed to a door in the rear of the store marked private. I knock, and hear my older sister’s voice commanding me to come in.
I open the door and find her behind a desk hunched over a computer, wearing dollar-store reading glasses identical to my own and an old-fashioned eye shade that makes her look like a clerk out of a Charles Dickens novel. Surrounded by papers and what I figure are boxes of clothes, her work area is as messy as Dan’s.
“Gideon, aren’t you doing your Christmas shopping,” she asks, without missing a beat, “a little early this year?”
I smile, never having been known as much of a shopper. Despite pledges to get together more often, we haven’t seen each other since Christmas.
“How’s Woogie?” I answer, inquiring about my old dog who was exiled to Hutto. With Sarah due home for the summer in a day or so, and with me living in a new neighborhood, Woogie can make a fresh start. It doesn’t appear that Amy is anxious to return Jessie, despite her promise to do so.
“King of the road,” my sister says, leaning back in her chair.
“He’s a roamer, but that’s okay. You want him back?”
“Not today,” I say.
“You got a minute?”
Not too long ago, Marty would have rolled her eyes and groaned aloud at this imposition. Now, happily married for the first time in four or possibly five tries, she has mellowed just a bit.
“Love trouble, job trouble, or Sarah?” she asks. We never seem to talk unless I have a problem.
“Just more family history,” I say, taking a seat on a metal folding chair she points out for me.
“Not another nigger in the woodpile?” she says, grimacing. Last year she had counseled me unsuccessfully to ignore the allegations concern y ing our paternal grandfather’s sexual exploits.
“Not yet,” I say, knowing if I wanted to aggravate her I could tell her Mr. Carpenter’s story about our maternal grandfather being in the KKK.
Not that it would really bother Marty, whose contractor husband is so right-wing he thinks Phil Gramm is another Fidel Castro.
“What do you remember about the Taylors when we were growing up?”
Marty pushes up the sleeves of her gray sweatshirt.
A true native of the Delta, it is never warm enough for her.
“That I would have liked to have gotten in Paul’s pants if he had been a little older,” she says, smirking at me.
“He was a cutie.
Remember when he used to stay at our house. I kept hoping he would come try to crawl in bed with me. Of course I was so fat back then he couldn’t have gotten in my bed with me if he had wanted to.”
My sister will say anything, and I laugh, despite myself. Since her marriage, Marty has slimmed down for the first time in her life. She has claimed she was a virgin against her will until she was twenty.
“After Daddy died,” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant, “didn’t the Taylors drop Mother socially? Paul quit coming over; she didn’t go out to Riverdale.”
Marty frowns and shakes her head.
“Don’t you remember? After Daddy died, she went to hell,” she says, “which was understandable for a while.
But Mother thought she was a Southern belle.
When things got tough, instead of climbing down off her high horse, and figuring out how to survive like the rest of the human race, she stayed in her bedroom and felt sorry for herself. It didn’t do any of us any good: If Oscar hadn’t loaned her the money to send you to Subiaco, which
she never paid back, you would have turned into a little thug. I was a mess, too, but that was mostly my own fault.”
I can’t believe my ears.
“The Taylors paid for me to go to Subiaco?” I yelp.
“How come you knew and I didn’t?”
“You probably did, but you wouldn’t be a lawyer if you didn’t believe your own shit smelled good. But maybe you didn’t. You were spoiled rotten from the word go. Mother always acted like somebody had told her that you were supposed to be the next Jesus Christ,” Marty needles me.
“She was bitter as hell in those days. She went into a snit that lasted the rest of her life when Oscar finally wanted the building back.
When he offered to lend her the money to send you off to a private school, she acted as if it was the least he could do.”
Like a balky window being wrenched open an inch to try to catch a breeze, my brain yields a fragment of a conversation with Mother about how Oscar was probably going to charge her interest. Until now all I have allowed myself to remember was her resentment, which became my own. Why have I had such a need to rearrange our past? I no longer really trust anything I think I know.
“You remember Paul got granddaddy’s land just by paying off the taxes?”
I ask, hoping to confirm at least one fact.
“Sure,” Marty says, pushing a button on her computer.
“But that was only fair. They had got y ten fed up with Mother by then. She really let things go after Daddy died. If you recall, I was off in San Francisco part of that time being Bear Creek’s only contribution to the drug and macrame industry. I suspect the Taylors felt they were entitled to something by then. I’d be surprised if Mother ever paid a penny back on the loan.”
I feel dazed by what I am learning and shift uneasily in the hard chair. Am I so out of touch with reality that I don’t even know the difference between right and wrong?
“You don’t remember the Taylors as being predators?”
My sister laughs.
“Who have you been talking to, Gideon? Are you going to give me a sermon on slavery? Sure, they owned slaves, and when the Civil War was over, they exploited the blacks and the white sharecroppers. Then, when they couldn’t do that any longer, they kicked them both off the land and farmed with machines.
While the rest of the country was slaughtering Indians and herding them onto reservations, Southerners were doing their thing with blacks.
But if it weren’t for people like the Taylors, you wouldn’t have the United States.
“Anybody with drive in this country is eventually seen as evil by people like you because humanity doesn’t come in equal little packets like Sweet’n Low. Fortunately, this country doesn’t reward the weak, stupid, or lazy. It protects them too much, but the truth is, we’re talking about subsistence when we’re talking about welfare, so it’s a silly debate as far as I’m concerned. If a welfare system is the price of free enterprise, I don’t really care. Just keep giving people like me and my husband a chance to compete economically, and the United States can afford people like you.”