Somebody said something like all that is required for evil to prosper is the silence of good men. I count myself one of those. Too many of us stayed good Germans, a term I first heard in Eighth Army, Chosin Reservoir, 1950, staying quiet when a heinous thing is about like Hitler. The rest only knew him for a coward in the Guard, just now in the worst face-to-face you could pull on him. On race matters I remained quiet. You can’t overestimate the difficulty of my Guard command, largely filled by boys sympathetic to the rioters but serving John Kennedy much against their instincts. We heard this was a police action at Ole Miss, but there were eventually thirty thousand troops in town, tents everywhere, a way station for the movement of troops to south Florida during the Cuban missile crisis. Wild boys or insurgents from the Klan of neighboring states were dropping railroad cross ties into the windshield of Army Reserve troop carriers from the overpass on Jackson Avenue. Still, I sent the order down that if any live ammo was discovered off their belt clips there’d be hell to pay. We were pure bayonets regardless of provocation, just like the federal marshalls who were trapped inside the Lyceum with Meredith courtesy of a bulldozer driven against its door by the apostles of the lunatic General Edwin Walker, who led the assault himself with a goddamned cavalry sword. It was a miracle no more than three were killed, among them James’s father, a man I never put eyes on.
Our governor was Ross Barnett, a purebred mule-faced jackass rabble-rouser, about states’ rights and sovereignty, but when I was a young captain I did not think he was such a bad sort. He was our jackass, was the issue. Nevertheless I dressed my command and told them their asses belonged to the federal government and me, rough as it was. You had to keep an eye on them. You never knew what mean little bastard would break ranks and try to make a name for himself.
I told this to James at Smitty’s café just south of the courthouse and looked into his kind Canadian face, a face that had mesmerized me into this revelation over a good breakfast, eggs, country ham, redeye gravy, grits, the best big light biscuits. He ate the same as me, listened courteously without interruption. Then I saw the new look to him and knew that if the point of this story was that I killed his father, he would kill me on the spot with still the courteous look. It had been a long time since I had killed a gook or two. Not very long for him. Iraqis, the church organist.
The man was courtly. He out-captained me. We were just talking acquaintances, then, I don’t know how he did it. Suddenly when I got to his man in the tree that night nearly half a century ago, of all things I thought of the Lord. I mean Our Heavenly Father. I leave the Lord alone since Korea and hope He’ll do the same for me. You have to hand it to Him, He’s done a damned pro job of evaporating these last centuries. I can’t tell you the bodies, the pain. What was that about? Well, we turned South Korea Christian, and now our labor gets shipped off to them, Zenith TV and all. But it’s not worth one gut-shot private, one lance corporal from Wyoming with a sucking chest wound. What Lord? What wondrous ways His works to perform?
The secret spoke itself like a tired bad ghost walking out of my throat.
Then for a while I didn’t see him, only heard about the acts. I had peace for half an afternoon. But then my hands were bloody. My calm had a frown on it. Yes I’m going funny. This peach schnapps ain’t doing it for me.
He made love with Goodie with a writhing ardor she’d not experienced, perhaps, ever.
“For the love of God, thank you,” she whispered. She put on her kimono and white slip-on keds. Her body was remarkable. Without exercise except for five minutes of work and standing an hour around machines that would have perfected her in a Baptist hospital gym. Or remarkable because he stared at her as through a magnified pipe, and straight past her to their familiar replicants in a museum of devolution until the final sullen corpus, his man, stood at age twenty with the Ml Garand in his hand, a clip of live ammo snuck into its chamber, all the auto fires and tear gas and flares in the air, students shouting curses from as deep in them as the very heart of rot in Old Dixie. Punk Guardsman, punk city cop, his conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ and belting out hymns, earning thereby the right to walk among free men, even preach to them, the low son of a bitch. But he must have felt a bona fide hell at his shoulders these years, or something right around the next door he opened, especially after the firebombing of the little church where he had stood recently. Was the man his man, or was the man himself? What a stupid meditation.
He left two days later for the archives in the attorney general’s office in Jackson, three hours southward. The sunroof of the Mazda Miata was open. On the CD box was Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy. This sound like the reunion of a battalion in steel walls. Intense moments in Iraq, his sick mother. He needed more hate. Soon he was not rightly human. He could imagine himself howling on the street corner of a burning city. His eyes were wide. Purpose, what purpose did he serve against the lassitude of grief that filled his mother and himself all those years? Their avoidance of the topic and word Mississippi.
He found himself speaking aloud in French to his dead mother Celestine. In your hands how does the finish of this vendetta feel? He asked her. He recognized that all the earthly goods he’s heaped on Goodie, Teresa more now, woman of tears, were meant for his mother. He’d just bought her a new car, Saab SUV sculpted like a space shuttle. These days, like millions of the talentless, she’d developed pretentions to art photography. This black wagon would hold her leather and canvas cases. You were nearly a saint, Mother, and I deserted you, he spoke. Now “Hey Joe” by that Mozart of the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix, grabbed and dragged him to Iraq, lolling beside the 105 as he watched men burn in their T-34s on the red horizon. Allons enfants to this good hell.
Unsolved, said the state. Unsolved means all senses hover, loom, linger, harken. Nobody, however, knows a thing for sure. But I do.
So his Teresa sleeps as his nightmare it moves across the meadow, hooves in wet clover, toward the charred ruins of the little church. Canarsis’s piano still stands, only half consumed, only half dead. The man, a sixty-four-year-old tattooed deacon and lay preacher. Destiny run toward him. James had the.38 and the wheeled propane and napalm flamethrower in the car.
Now in the cold January twilight he looked the man full in the face and told him to walk. The man had a round white ordinary face, more youthful than James expected. He held a pistol but James told him to throw it away and the man complied.
“Let’s walk to the pier where they found Jimmy Canarsis and saved him. You may have heard about his success on the concert circuit. He began at the Castellow Ford Center. Then Memphis, Philadelphia, New York.”
“Yeh. Why are you speaking these words?” asked the man, whose name was Dee Gale.
“Because Canarsis is so beautifully different from such sorry jackasses as us. Wouldn’t you like to have lived in complete innocence and made as much of your gift as he has, nearly burned to death?”
“You the man who burned the church?”
“Well, I did not finish. You seem to want something remaining in it, too. You came back to the charcoal. What would that be? Your pilgrimage?”
“It had a good true spirit to it, that giant boy on a piano that seemed like a kid’s toy measured to him. He brought God down from heaven with his music.”