Uncivil Seasons (41 page)

I said, “One thing we were talking about was how Mr. Cadmean had given you his vote of confidence over at the city council.”

“Was I saying that?” Cadmean threw up his old hands in innocent openness.

“I appreciate everybody’s vote,” Cuddy said.

Cadmean grinned. “Some votes count more than others, that’s a sad fact of democracy.”

“Umm,” said Cuddy.

Mr. Cadmean puffed up his lips. “Well now, you think you deserve this job?”

Cuddy said, “I know I do.”

“I’m as smart as you are, son.” Cuddy had started back up the sloped aisle toward the double doors when Cadmean added, “I want you to bring my Baby over to see me again.”

Cuddy turned. “I don’t know if I would even if I could; but I can’t. Briggs’s not going to be around for a while, soon as her term’s over. Seems like she said she was going off west somewhere to look at a telescope.”

“Well, shit, son!” Cadmean roared. “Shit! Don’t let her get away! Women are truly the wonder of the world, they’re Eldorado and the mouth of the Nile. But you got to remember. Not a one of them has got a lick of sense. I married four of them, and two of those got a pack of coyote lawyers to gouge through my pockets. And there were some others I woke up in time
not
to marry. Women are going wrong. I swear, they’re getting to be just about as hoggish as men, plus all of them are just as crazy as loons on top of it.”

Cuddy blinked and sun flashed through the blue. “You old bastard, if you hadn’t believed all that bullshit, maybe you wouldn’t have had so much trouble with your women.” He waved the clipboard at me. “Meet you back upstairs, General Lee. We got a lady thinks she saw somebody suspicious hanging around the Arboretum.” The oak doors closed behind him.

As Mr. Cadmean shambled over to my chair, he held out his gnarled hand. “Good man, Mangum. Come on. Between my arthritis and your leg, we ought to be able to keep up with each other.”

“I think we can manage,” I said.

And so we walked back through the courtroom and out onto the black and white marble floor of the rotunda. Cadmean turned at the doors to look up at his varnished portrait. “Shit,” he whispered. “I was old then. If there’s one thing I can’t stand the thought of, it’s the world going on its merry way without me in it.”

“You want it to come to a halt when you do?”

He grinned. “That’s exactly right.”

“Well, that’s something else you can’t do anything about.”

“What was the first something?”

“Acquiring your daughter’s affection.”

From the middle of the patterned floor, he circled back to me. “Justin, you don’t want to waste your time. Don’t waste it trying to hurt my feelings. Don’t get yourself believing I care whether you want to listen to my stories or not. There’s always somebody who does. Always will be.”

“’Til they dig your hole. Or are you planning to keep talking from the grave?”

He chuckled. “Could be. Keep your ears peeled. Hunh! You sure were something in that donkey head, son.”

I pushed against the brass filigree of the door bar. I said, “What if Rowell hadn’t made that nolo contendere plea? What if there’d been a trial and we’d subpoenaed you? Would you have perjured yourself?”

The pink lips pursed against his forefinger. “There wasn’t a trial,” he said.

“But if there had been?”

The old stiff fingers squeezed my shoulder. “Son…son. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ Hunh?”

Outside, the afternoon sun glowed red on all the buildings. I stood with the old industrialist at the top of the broad stone steps that were guarded by empty antique cannon, fired last in 1865 for a lost dream and a cause undefendable. Beside me a long sigh rumbled from Cadmean before he spoke. “I’ll tell you this, Justin. Sometimes I think when I think about my Baby looking up at those tired old stars of hers, what if it was my privilege to be up there, looking down? What do you think I’d see? Hunh?” His sulfurous, low-lidded eyes gazed down over Hillston. “Well, I’d see a little tiny ball of slime, wouldn’t I? And nations of bugs crawling crazy all over it. And I bet up there I’d be able to hear something I’ve always suspected. God laughing His damn head off like a scorching wind. Am I right? Take care of yourself, son.”

I stood there, watching him carefully descend the gray stone steps one by one, watching him stiffly pull himself into the backseat of the waiting limousine and with a wince of pain tug shut the door.

All he couldn’t do was make his child want to spend a night under his roof. All he couldn’t will, with the powers of influence, was love. Just as Joanna couldn’t will it, not even with sorcery, or revenge its loss with death.

I stood there until from behind the stone balustrade, I heard the voice of Sister Resurrection, as always, faithful at her station by the house of law. She began to speak suddenly, as if she’d been listening to the old man whose bones, like hers, were brittle, and whose eyes were as ancient and as hard. I heard her before I saw her, so her sharp, impatient chant came up to me in the warm sun like the keen of a ghost too haunted to wait for the dark.

“The time is come. How long, O Lord? God fixing to melt the mountains. Make a path. God fixing to overthrow Pharaoh. Joseph’s neck in a collar of iron. Cut it loose. The blind shall see the mountains tremble. Make a path for the anger of the Lord. Praise Him!”

Around the corner of the cannon the small figure of rags came marching, her hair snow wool and matted with bits of earth. The filthy sweaters hung fluttering to her knees, and she had again her wood, handmade cross in both small black hands. Leaning on my cane, I made my way down the steps to where she stood, still speaking. “God Almighty’s sick and tired. He gonna loose the Devil’s chains.”

I touched her arm, and she spun to face me. I said, “Mrs. Webster, God knows I don’t have any right to ask you this, but don’t you believe there’s any chance for love at all?”

The clouded black eyes blazed out at me like a sudden flame. “
I carrying it!
” She spit the three words up at my face, and then thrust forward her crossed sticks of wood. “You want it? Take it.”

Startled, I stepped back and said, “No, ma’am.”

Clouds passed over the eyes like smoke, and she turned away and began again to prophesy.

Of charity, what kin are you to me?

—
Twelfth Night

I don’t know about Will Rogers, but I grew up deciding the world was nothing but a sad, dangerous junk pile heaped with shabby geegaws, the bullies who peddled them, and the brokenup human beings who worked the line. Some good people came along, and they softened my opinion. So I’m open to any evidence they can show me that God’s not asleep at the wheel, barreling blind down the highway with all us dumb scared creatures screaming in the back seat.

My name’s Cuddy Mangum. I don’t much like it. Short for Cudberth, by which I suspect my mother meant Cuthbert, though I never called it to her attention. Everybody’s always known me as Cuddy. Cudberth would have been worse. Or Cud.

A few years back, at the start of the eighties, I was made police chief here in Hillston, North Carolina. If you ever read a story by Justin Savile, you know that, but chances are you’ve got too cute a notion of who I am. Justin’s loved me for years without a clue to my meaning. He sees things personally. Me, I look at the package, and the program. According to Justin, I’m somewhere between young Abe Lincoln in cracker country and the mop-up man on Hee Haw. A kind of Carolina Will Rogers without the rope tricks. And Justin’s always adding to his portrait. He never read a book without looking for everybody he knows in it, and it didn’t take him long to find me chasing after a dream like Gatsby, wearing some buckskin moral outfit Natty Bumpo left behind. I’m not saying his views aren’t flattering. But if my arms had had the stretch of Justin’s imagination, I could have bounced through the state university free, playing basketball, instead of slapping concrete on the new sports arena for four years to pay my way.

Justin and I are natives of the same tobacco and textiles city in the North Carolina Piedmont. But his folks shipped him out of Hillston early, off to some woodsy New England prep school, then to Harvard, where his imagination got away from him for a while, and they had to lock him up in a sanatorium near Asheville. I saw it once; it looked like Monte Carlo. Afterwards, they smuggled him into law school in Virginia, but he ran home to Hillston and threw them into a hissie by joining the police. I’ve heard his reasons. They’re all personal.

I didn’t have near enough the imagination for the first place I was shipped after college, and after too long a while slithering through rice paddies in the Mekong Delta, I crawled back to Hillston as fast as my psychic state allowed. I wanted a master’s degree from Haver University, and I wanted to get to know my wife, Cheryl. It turned out she’d made other plans with a fellow I used to like. She was my last living family, if you want to call her that. My folks are dead. A long time ago, my sister Vivian’s boyfriend, going drunk into a curve at eighty miles an hour, smashed them both through a steel rail on Route 28. He survived, and died in a motorcycle accident three months after he got out of traction. His parents still owed University Hospital over twelve thousand dollars. For his personal motto in the Hillston High yearbook, this boy had them write, “I want to live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory.” That year, six different East Hillston guys had this same motto. Vivian’s boyfriend was the second to get his wish.

In 1931 my daddy walked into Hillston barefooted. The first big building he saw was Cadmean Textile Mills, so he took a job there sweeping floors. His folks worked a farm fifteen miles outside the town. They didn’t own it, and they couldn’t feed him. After forty-two years on the Cadmean line, he didn’t own the house he died in. He did own a long series of large cheap cars loaded with chrome that he buffed with a shammy rag on Sunday afternoons. I don’t know if there was anything else he loved. Any dreams he kept, he kept private. Mama never learned to drive the cars. She had bad teeth and a purplish birthmark across her right cheek that she covered with the palm of her hand, and she was shy about going anyplace except the East Hillston A&P and the Baptist Church of the Kingdom of Christ. By third grade, I’d stopped asking her for help with my homework. Her tongue would stutter struggling to decipher the big printed letters, and a thin line of sweat would rise just above her lips, and her birthmark would blush purple.

I didn’t have the best thing, which is class. Here in the South that means an old family tree, with all its early rough graspy roots buried deep down in the past where nobody has to look at them. And I didn’t have the second-best thing, which is looks—because the hard fact is, resembling young Abe Lincoln is no asset at a high school sock hop. But I had the third thing, which is brains. So I was lucky enough to learn how to see where the light was, and where to look around for the switch. I don’t mean moving out of East Hillston, but I mean that too. I’ve got a job that makes some use of my brain, and is some use to other people. I’ve got eight walls of books. I’ve got a new white Oldsmobile my daddy would have just admired. I own a condominium in River Rise, west of town, so big I haven’t had time to furnish half of it. It’s big enough for love to have some space, because let me tell you, love likes a lot of room; it’s hate that does fine when it’s cramped. I’ve got so many former neighbors to prove that fact, it comes close to breaking my heart.

Justin Bartholomew Savile V is a Liberal Democrat, a group just about abandoned by everybody except the upper classes. Justin’s father (J.B.S. IV) was the kind of Virginian who’d name his son J.B.S. V; his hobby was running Haver University Medical School. Justin’s mother is a Dollard. Well now, Dollards. For a couple of centuries they’ve sat slicing up the pie of the Carolina Piedmont and passing the pieces around to each other with polite little nods. “Why I don’t mind if I do, thank you so much.” Justin’s great-great-grandfather Eustache Dollard was one of the state’s best-remembered governors (mostly because his daddy had led a charge into the Wilderness against the Yankees without bothering to see if anybody was behind him), but also because Eustache had chiseled his name into a hundred large-sized public buildings, including the state penitentiary. From what I’ve read about the governor, Dollard State Prison’s a fitting memorial.

Like I say, Justin loves me. Once he even came real close to getting himself killed, leaping between me and a bullet. He didn’t think, his genes just jumped forward like they thought they were back in the Wilderness. So I keep that in mind, his body stretched over me, soaking my hair with blood, when I think about another time, the day I came to see him in the hospital. It was the look in his eyes when I told him the Hillston city council had just made me chief of police, and consequently his superior. That look was there for just a blink before pleasure took it over. Oh, it wasn’t envy or jealousy or distaste. It was a look of pure unvarnished surprise. See, it hadn’t—it couldn’t occur to Justin that some East Hillston wisecracking white trash, with a mama so ignorant she’d named him Cudberth by mistake, could walk so far off the line as to embody the Law. Lord knows what innocent notions Justin has of Abe Lincoln’s political savvy. Now, personally, he was happy for me, and proud of me. He loved it when I taped my poster of Elvis up behind my desk. If I’d called him on that blink of surprise, he wouldn’t have had a clue to my meaning. And the God’s truth is, Justin Savile’s the kindest man I ever met.

My friend Justin’s blink is sad proof of the power of the package and the program, the same ones that are walking a black man named George Hall into the gas chamber at Dollard State Prison on Saturday unless the governor changes his mind. So me, I’m for a new program, not to mention a new governor. Like George Hall, I can’t rely on kindness.

I was over in Vietnam trying hard not to get killed when the death penalty went out of fashion back home. That was 1967. At the time some kind folks thought we had us a moral revolution going that couldn’t slip back; it was racing along the road to glory, chucking war and racism and sexism out the windows like roadside trash. These sweet Americans could no more imagine a backward slide than Romans could imagine their Forum was going to end up a cow pasture in something called the Dark Ages, much less a big litter box for stray cats tiptoeing through the condoms and cigarette butts.