The Long Journey Home (11 page)

John and I spent every available minute together. Mornings we ate at a university coffee shop, while “Sixteen Tons” or “Rock Around the Clock” blared from the jukebox. In the small room filled with cigarette smoke thick as fog, we ate glazed donuts, drank coffee, and talked. Then we were off to classes, he to Greek or comparative religion, I to French or a class called Art in the Dark, where we sat at long tables in the dark, drawing from slides of large, simple, black shapes on a white background that flashed for seconds on the enormous screen in front of us.

In the evenings John and I ate at Tony’s, a small restaurant in downtown Athens. We ate lots of spaghetti and meatballs and told each other about our families. He told me about how his parents had
run off together and gotten married when his mother was sixteen and his father seventeen. With a profound sense of nostalgia he told me how much he loved summers spent with his grandparents in Chickamauga, Georgia. He told me about going with his grandfather to his drugstore, or out to his farm, where he raised racehorses, and how sad he felt to leave his grandparents in the fall to go back to his parents in Athens, where his father was a student at the same university we ourselves now attended.

I told him I was from Cairo, a dusty little town in South Georgia—two blocks of stores, a movie theater, post office, courthouse, cotton gin, and jail, the kind of town you’d never stop in unless you needed to go to the filling station or—like me—grew up in and had to go home to visit. I told him about my father’s failed business and his failing health. I told him about my sister, Harriet, and about how my mother’s life was almost totally devoted to taking care of her. I told him about my sister’s spastic clenched fists and her seizures.

One night, John nervously announced that he had something to tell me and asked me to go with him to a more private place. I couldn’t imagine what dreaded secret he was about to disclose. We were silent as he drove to the outskirts of town, pulled off the road, and parked in the dark under a bridge. Then, his voice thick with shame, he told me that his father was a heavy drinker and had been a heavy drinker since John could remember. He told me about the many times his father was late picking him up at his military school in Atlanta. As a young boy, he’d waited alone until almost dark before his father would finally arrive, often drunk, to drive him home. He also described how his father had kicked him in the ribs when he was a little boy trying to protect his mother from his father’s violence.

After telling me these things, John turned his face from me and looked rigidly ahead into the night as if he was afraid that I might reject him, as if I might find him unworthy because of his father.

It was very dark; there was just a sliver of a moon overhead. I looked at him. “Oh, John,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

Then we were in each other’s arms, John feeling the relief of acceptance, me imagining the vulnerable little boy trying to protect himself from blow after blow of his father’s terrible shoes.

One evening shortly before Thanksgiving I sat on a couch in the dorm lounge, listening to a new song on the TV: “Teach Me Tonight.” I was waiting for John to pick me up for a date but was completely absorbed in listening to every word of the song when John arrived.

“I’m listening to this new song, ‘Teach Me Tonight,’ ” I said when he arrived. “I love it.”

John ignored my statement. “Let’s go now,” he said impatiently.

“After this one song.”

“I have something to tell you,” he insisted.

“In a minute, John. Just a minute.”

Teach me tonight
.

It was raining as we ran to his car. I expected him to drive us someplace, but the key dangled from the ignition while he took something from his pants pocket. Nervously, he cleared his throat as he fumbled with it.

The rain grew harder, beating down on the roof.

“I’d like you to wear my fraternity pin,” he said. He’d just gotten it that day. In college at that time, being pinned was the first step toward becoming engaged.

“I’d love to wear your fraternity pin, John,” I said softly.

John leaned over and pinned it on my sweater. His hands trembled as he struggled with the tiny clasp while trying to not touch my breast.

“I love you, John,” I whispered. But for some reason I couldn’t understand, I cried as I said it, the hard rain plastering fall leaves all over the windshield.

I still have the photograph that I took one day of our shadows side by side and stretched out long before us on an asphalt highway near Athens. Though I didn’t realize it consciously then, that picture captured the fact that the relationship would bring out the shadow sides of both our personalities. The road in the photograph stretched out as far as we could see, disappearing in the distance where the hills of North Georgia rose.

Our conversations were often about our families. John said that I was the first person he’d been able to really talk to since his Grandfather Elder died of a heart attack when he was twelve. Since that time he’d been lonely for a real emotional connection. When he kept telling me that he didn’t know how he could live without me, I felt both flattered and uncomfortable. Something about him felt immature, even though he was a few months older than I was, had held summer jobs for many years, had had his fling with drinking in high school, had dated several girls before meeting me, and was already student minister to two small rural churches near Athens.

A minister. I was pinned to a ministerial student. As an adolescent girl in the Southern Baptist Church, I’d often fantasized about becoming a missionary myself. Girls could be missionaries, not ministers. But I had to dismiss my fantasy because I was already as addicted to cigarettes as my father was. As long as I continued to smoke, I felt unworthy of being a missionary. I’d tried to give it up many times. Then I’d give in and reach for another cigarette, sucking the smoke deep into my lungs and exhaling with a sense of great relief and miserable failure.

I was not good enough to be a missionary.

Now there was John, who didn’t smoke or drink, and who didn’t even say the word
damn
. John, who stood in the pulpit Sundays preaching like he was a young Billy Graham. John, who would soon begin to insist that I stop smoking. Aside from the fact that I was strongly addicted to nicotine, my smoking became a focus for the power struggle beginning between us.

John was intensely jealous of my absorption in painting and drawing. His jealousy came at a time when my confidence in my art had been greatly diminished. At FSU my freshman year, Edmund Lewandowski, the head of the art department, had expressed great faith in my work. “Margaret,” he’d said. “You and I are both reaching for the highest star, and we’ll both get there.”

Unlike Professor Lewandowski, who had been my consistent inspiration, I saw Lamar Dodd, head of Georgia’s art department, only once. That was when I showed him a portfolio of my paintings and he gave me a scholarship. I didn’t talk with him again after that interview. At Georgia I got no special attention. While Art in the Dark trained both my eyes and my hand, it gave nothing to my spirit. And I didn’t know a single other art student well enough to go out for coffee with and talk about art. I ached for FSU, but everyone who’d really mattered to me had also left.

Given the lack of support and my loss of confidence, it didn’t feel like a huge sacrifice when I gave in to John’s insistence that I change my major from painting to education, so that I could teach while he got his degree in theology. I agreed to do as he wished and pushed thoughts of being a painter from my conscious mind.

I continued to talk with John about philosophy and theology, but he became angry when I didn’t accept some of his theological beliefs as my own. During one heated discussion about predestination and free will, he slapped me hard across the face because I disagreed with him. Stunned and frightened, I asked him to take me back to my dormitory. As soon as he parked his car, I opened the door and walked quickly to the safety of the building. John came rushing behind me, apologizing, begging me to stop and talk with him. I walked hurriedly through the lounge and up the stairs to my room.

Later that night John called and asked me to talk with him.

I said no.

The next evening he came over to the dorm and called me on the house phone, begging me to come down and talk with him for just a few minutes. He told me that he was horribly sorry about slapping
me and needed my forgiveness. If I would only come down to the lounge for a few minutes. Please.

“For a few minutes,” I agreed, “but I’m not going out with you again.”

We sat across from each other near the housemother’s office.

Of course he said he was sorry. He didn’t know what had gotten into him. Of course he said he would never do it again. Then he begged me to go out with him one more time.

“No.” I was afraid to go out with him.

“Only to talk,” he pleaded.

“No.” I was afraid I would give in to him.

“I love you. At least do this one thing for me.”

“No.”

“Please, Margaret.”

He drove us to Posse’s Barbecue Drive-In several miles from town. We sat in the parked car and talked. He wanted me to come back to him. He reminded me of how he had talked to no one but me since his Grandfather Elder died when he was just a twelve-year-old boy. He couldn’t live without me. He would kill himself if I left him.

I steeled myself against his pleas. “No,” I said, “I can’t continue this relationship.” I was not going to give in to pity. Or to guilt. I had to get away.

“I’m not going to come back to you. I can’t.”

He grew quiet. Then he began to mutter nonsensical sentences. “The old yellow dog jumped over the stile,” he said. And “Catsup is spilling out of the airplane.” Then he stared out the front windshield, saying nothing. I felt afraid and puzzled.

He started the car and headed back to town but took the long way. The dirt road was desolate. Fields of corn spread on either side, and there was an occasional shack, dimly lit and set back from the road. As soon as we were at some distance from the restaurant and traffic, and alone on the road, he began to mutter other nonsensical phrases, so nonsensical that I couldn’t even then hold them in my mind.

Again he grew quiet.

After a few miles of silence, he suddenly slumped over the steering wheel as if unconscious. I struggled to get control of the wheel, then pressed my body close against his so that I could reach the gas pedal and brake. I drove the rest of the way back to town with him stone silent beside me, his head knocking against the glass of the closed window every time I went over a bump.

When we arrived at the house in which he had rented a room, I was able to rouse him and walk him to the door. He swayed from side to side as he walked and had a strange dazed look in his eyes. I drove his car back to my dormitory.

The next day he claimed to remember nothing of his behavior the night before. But he still insisted he would kill himself if I left him.

I stayed. I stayed because I didn’t know how to leave. I stayed because I cared about him. I stayed because I was terrified that he really would kill himself. I stayed, hoping that come summer, I could persuade Mother and Daddy to let me drop out of college and go to art school like I’d wanted to do from the beginning.

My sister, Harriet, died of pneumonia in late February. She was only nine years old.

“It’s a blessing,” Aunt Bama said when she and Uncle Earnest came to Athens to drive me home for the funeral. I didn’t smoke cigarettes in front of them, so I was glad when we stopped at a filling station. I squatted over the toilet and peed, then stood and lit a cigarette, sucking the smoke into my lungs and expelling it into the small airless room with its dirty sink and stench, while Uncle Earnest and Aunt Bama waited in the car, the attendant pumping gasoline and cleaning the windshield of smashed bugs and bird droppings.

“A blessing,” my aunt had said almost as soon as they had picked me up at the dormitory. I took another drag from the cigarette and threw it into the toilet. My sister’s death a blessing? A relief, she meant, like peeing. Now Mother could go back to teaching. My aunt talked constantly as my uncle drove in silence. “A blessing,” she repeated until the drive was finally over and I was standing in my front yard in my mother’s arms.

“It was either her or me,” Mother said, her face colorless and drawn. “I’d reached the end of my endurance.”

When I went into the house, I walked through the living room and stood at the door to the dining room looking across at my sister’s bent arms and clenched fists rising from the coffin. When I walked closer and looked down at Harriet’s body, I saw that her hair had been brushed away from her head and arranged around her face like a halo. It looked grotesque.

“Please brush her hair down like she wore it,” I said hoarsely to the undertaker and turned away quickly, smelling the scent of the funeral wreaths that didn’t mask the odor of formaldehyde. I felt like I might vomit.