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Excommunicados
By Charles Haverty University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 Charles Haverty
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-386-2
CHAPTER 1
Crackers
The happiest moment of my father's life was finding his name on President Richard M. Nixon's enemies list. Of course, there were reams of such lists, organized by category and subcategory of enemy, with qualifications broad enough to admit anyone from Gregory Peck to Groucho Marx, from the National Cleaning Contractors to the NAACP. What qualified my father was what came to be known in his personal mythology as the "Quaker Letter." The day after the Kent State shootings, he'd sent a letter to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue asking how the president could square his Quakerism ("that trademark Gary Cooper/Friendly Persuasion pacifism") with his actions in Southeast Asia and Northeast Ohio. Frankly, the Quaker Letter was nothing to write home about and wouldn't have earned my father a place on anyone's enemies list had he not closed by asking whether, as a Quaker, the president didn't believe that he would ultimately have to answer for his actions. Within a week, a couple of grim-faced Secret Service agents shoehorned their way into my father's office and peppered him with an hour's worth of questions — about his conscientious objection (Korea), his Freedom Riding (Alabama), his anti-war activities (Vietnam) — though what they really wanted to know was exactly what he'd meant by "answer for."
It wasn't until the disclosures made in the course of the Watergate affair that my father learned that he'd made the list. This was in the summer of 1973, in St. Louis, Missouri, four months after moving out on my mother and me and into his girlfriend Tricia's apartment. We didn't see much of him then, but he telephoned every Sunday evening. Still, I remember that summer idyllically, hours stretched out on the cool tile floor in front of the television, watching the Watergate hearings and eating Pepperidge Farm gingerbread men between sips of sugary iced tea. I tuned into the hearings faithfully, compulsively. Part of me believed that this would give my father and me something in common, something to talk about on Sunday nights, while another part of me needed someone to hate. My father hated Nixon — really hated him, had always hated him, hated him since Alger Hiss and Helen Gahagan Douglas and the Checkers speech — whereas I was simply shopping around for a villain, and Nixon et al, happened to come along at just the right time. I was sixteen years old, and my sense of righteous indignation was in full flower.
Of that summer's cast of characters, the figure who best embodied my sense of moral outrage was the seventy-six-year-old Democratic senator from North Carolina, Sam J. Ervin Jr., chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices, more popularly known as the "Watergate Committee." Jowls flapping, eyebrows twitching, he put all the president's men in their place, quoting the King James Bible, the Constitution, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain. He was the grandfather I wished I had.
My own grandfather, my mother's father, died close to midnight on July 16, 1973, in Little Rock, Arkansas — the night of the day Alexander Butterfield, deputy assistant to the president, testified on national television as to the existence of the White House taping system, the real beginning of Nixon's end. The call came, as such calls usually do, in the wee small hours of the morning. My grandmother's sister Grace phoned. My grandfather had gotten up in the night to go to the bathroom and a coronary felled him like an oak. On the way down, his head caught the corner of his nightstand, splashing blood all over the bedroom, though he was probably dead before he hit the floor.
My grandfather was a Southern gentleman: innocuous, garrulous, forever deferential to my grandmother. He chain-smoked Camel cigarettes and laughed a lot, a lifelong smoker's cottony laugh. He loved dogs but never owned one, as my grandmother was afraid of them. I never saw him angry, never heard him raise his voice. Once, when I was very young and had put a nickel in my mouth out of boredom or for attention, he said, "Spit that out: a nigger might have touched it," though he didn't seem angry so much as afraid.
After the phone call, my mother and I packed hastily and set off in the dark. It was a six-hour trip, and neither of us spoke until she pulled the car over outside of Poplar Bluff and asked me to take the wheel. I had a learner's permit and didn't like to drive, but I drove the rest of the way to Little Rock. My grandparents habitually bemoaned the influx of Negroes into their neighborhood, and as we turned down their street, a cluster of black mothers and children were gathered around an ambulance parked in their driveway. At first I imagined that the body was being removed only now and drove on past the house to spare my mother the sight of her dead father. But she cried, "Oh, Daddy," and flung open the car door. She sprinted down the sidewalk and across the front lawn as if she could save the day, reverse time, running with long, fluid strides, jumping a lawn sprinkler, a coiled hose, an upended wheelbarrow, graceful as a track star.
I parked the car on the street and walked past the group of gapers and up the driveway. Inside, I found my grandmother lying face up on the kitchen floor. With her eyes shut and her arms at her sides, she reminded me of some peace demonstrator prostrate on the steps of the Pentagon. Aunt Grace and a pair of paramedics stood against the kitchen counter.
"She's in shock," one of the paramedics offered.
"No, she's not," Aunt Grace said. "She's playing possum. She's been doing this since she was a little girl. It's her way of not dealing with the hard things."
My mother knelt beside her. "It's Mouse, Mother," she said. "Mother, it's Mouse." My mother's name is Marjorie, but her parents had called her "Mouse" since she was small. I backed out of the kitchen and into the living room, the curtains drawn tight against the sunlight, the candy-striped upholstery encased in plastic. The paramedics moved my grandmother onto a stretcher, with Aunt Grace following close behind.
After the ambulance left, I pulled the car into the driveway and brought in our bags. My mother made some phone calls in her parents' bedroom, while I watched the Watergate hearings in the den across the hall. Herbert W. Kalmbach, the President's personal attorney and campaign fundraiser, was testifying to his role in the payment of "hush money." My mother sat on the edge of the stripped mattress with a pink princess telephone in her lap. Though I couldn't hear what she was saying, I gathered from her gestures that she was talking to my father. Right from the get-go, my grandparents had been the weak spot in my parents' marriage, and the South, in general, became my mother's Achilles' heel. To my Coney Island father, his in-laws were anti-Semites, racists, crackers. In the course of an argument about her parents — and eventually about anything — my father would lapse into a Foghorn Leghorn drawl. For years, my mother had tried valiantly, but unsuccessfully, to obliterate any trace of a Southern accent from her voice.
Now she stood in the doorway. "Please turn that off." I lowered the volume with the remote control. "I'm going to the hospital to see Grandma. Your father says that he's going to try to fly down Thursday morning for the funeral."
"Fly? Why can't he just drive?"
"Because he's your father is why. He'll drive back up with us after things start to settle down a bit. Maybe Friday." My gaze strayed back to the television screen. "While I'm gone, I want you to stay here and look for important papers."
"Important papers?" I said. "What important papers?"
"A will, insurance policies, whatever you can find. Whatever looks important. I don't know. I've never had a father go and die on me before."
Once she'd left, I turned the volume back up and continued watching until the committee broke for lunch. Then I moved to the desk. At the bottom of a deep drawer, under a pair of golf shoes flecked with bits of dried grass, I found a steel cash box. I removed the box and lifted its hinged lid. On top was a pair of long cardboard envelopes, each marked "Will" in Gothic letters. I slit open both envelopes with a Mr. Peanut letter opener and skimmed the wills. His and hers: everything to the other, or, if both had died, to my mother.
Then I shuffled through the contents of the cash box, where I found an envelope stuffed with negatives. When I held the flimsy strips of film up to the window, I saw my grandparents' lives in black face. There was a photograph of my grandfather as a young man, looking very much like me, standing before a lake with a woman I didn't recognize, the breeze billowing her skirt, a blur of boats passing in the distance behind them. I found a snapshot of myself at age six, dressed in an elf costume for a class play. I found a tinted studio portrait of my grandmother as a young woman. On the back, she had sketched a lopsided star, and below the star she'd written in her tidy script, "A simple star to wish upon. Lucy."
Near the bottom of the box I found an envelope yellowed with age. It was addressed to Miss Lucy Shawcross, Talbot Teachers' College, Talbot, Missouri, and bore an unpostmarked two-cent stamp. I opened the envelope and shook out an old postcard. The front of the postcard was a sepia photograph, a crowd scene. It might have been a family reunion with its mix of formal and familiar: boyish men and mannish boys all gussied up in their Sunday-go-to-meeting shirts and ties, assembled on a courthouse lawn, sharing the shade of a buttonwood with a jolly, easy intimacy. The frame could hardly hold all their faces, dark under the bleached-out sky. The figure of a black man — a boy, really — hovered over the crowd, his head tossed back at an impossible angle, arms at his sides, assuming an attitude of prayer, of attention, of ascension, the soles of his feet almost touching the top of the tallest man's head. A noose was tucked into the crook of his neck, the rope all but lost in the scribble of branches. A cross was marked in blue ink above the head of another young man — my grandfather — and my own horsy visage squinted back at me across half a century. On the back, he had dated the postcard August 3, 1920, and scrawled in the same blue ink, "This was made in the courtyard in Pollet, Arkansas. He is a 16 year old Black boy. He killed Earl's grandma. She was Florence's mother. All OK and would like to get a post from you. George."
The telephone rang and I jumped. It was a man from the funeral home. After offering his oily condolences, he said that my mother had left his office without his asking her to choose a suit of clothes for her father to be waked and buried in. Through the window I watched a gaggle of black kids in swimsuits run back and forth through a lawn sprinkler. I hung up the phone and slipped the postcard back into its envelope. I stuck the envelope in the book I'd brought along for the trip — Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. — and went back to watching the Watergate hearings.
My mother returned around four, looking wilted and lost. I handed over the wills.
"Why are these open?" she said.
"I was just making sure."
"Why did you have to open your grandma's?"
"I told you. I was making sure."
"Well, that doesn't look good, does it?"
"Did Grandpa have a lot of money?" I said.
"He had enough."
"How much is enough?"
"Can we not talk about money?" she said. "It's vulgar."
"I don't believe in inherited wealth."
"What are you? A communist?"
"Did you know that one percent of the population in this country owns forty percent of the wealth?"
"Oh Lord," she said. "You sound just like your father."
When I told her about the call from the funeral home, her expression darkened. She crossed the hall into the bedroom and stood before her father's clothes closet. She yanked the light chain and passed her hand over the shoulders of his suits. Then she turned around to face me. "Oh, Geoffrey." She covered her mouth with her hand. "What do I think I'm doing?"
* * *
It only occurred to us the next morning that I hadn't brought the appropriate mourning clothes; instead, I'd packed my suitcase as if I were going on vacation. After much convincing, I returned to my grandfather's wardrobe and chose a suit to wear to his wake. The suit was a size too big — they were all too big — and redolent of mothballs. I removed the postcard from my book and slid it into the jacket's inside pocket. As my mother drove us to the wake, I kept my hand tucked Napoleonically under my lapel, fingering the edge of the postcard.
The funeral parlor was furnished like my grandparents' living room, but without the plastic covers. I had never been in the presence of a dead body, and as I approached the casket, all sudsy with flowers, I expected to see some trace of my grandfather's final agony, but he wore the same bland expression he'd carried through life, and I got used to it in no time.
I moved among my grandfather's people like a secret assassin, the postcard ticking in my pocket like a hand grenade. I scoured the face of every mourner for any flicker of resemblance to the faces in the photograph but found none. At nine o'clock — closing time — the minister announced that there would be a brief service for family members, and after a short series of perfunctory prayers, Aunt Grace approached me, a camera in her hand.
"I need you to do me a little favor," she said. "Your grandma is going to feel awfully guilty about missing all of this. Awfully, awfully guilty. That she didn't see him. That she didn't say a proper good-bye. Someday she's going to want to know what she missed. I know my sister and I'm sure of it. And when she does, she'll have these pictures." She offered me the camera.
"What are you asking?" I said. "Are you asking me to take pictures? Pictures of the dead body?"
"That dead body is your grandfather." The honey had drained from her voice. "Your grandmother was married to that man for fifty-two years, and the last time she saw him he was lying facedown in a puddle of blood. Now, these gentlemen here have gone to a lot of trouble and expense to make him look presentable, and you're the only man around here and you will act like a man and you will take this camera and you will take those pictures. Do you understand me?"
I did as I was told. But for my grandfather and me, the parlor was now empty. I used up the entire roll of film. Long shots. Close-ups. Through the flowers. A study of his folded hands. The corpse-eye view of the room. After twenty-four shots, I rewound the film. I popped open the back of the camera, ejected the film cartridge, and put it in my pocket alongside the postcard.
That night, asleep in my grandparents' guest room, I dreamed of the postcard: men mugging for the camera; women, my grandmother among them, stirring pitchers of iced tea and buttering corn on the cob and carving up watermelons; and above them all, the boy hanging from the tree. Then the tree became the black oak behind my grandparents' house, its branches reaching into the neighbors' backyard, and the hanged boy dangled over the heads of the children running through the sprinkler.
I woke to a drilling rain. The gutter that ran above the window had rusted, buckled, and broken so that water gushed down the glass, casting a flickery shadow on the wall. It was a quarter past two, and as I lay there in the dark, I thought of my grandmother playing possum in her hospital bed. There was a squeak under the sound of the rain and a crack of light at the bottom of the door. I wanted to talk to my mother, to show her the postcard. I got out of bed and opened the door. Down the hall, she knelt in the doorway of her parents' bedroom, scrubbing the hardwood floor with a wet rag. She looked up at me, blew a wisp of hair off her face, and without a word, returned to her task. How could I tell her? I couldn't.
Instead, I went into the bathroom and, still stupid with sleep, studied my grandfather's things. I washed my hands with his soap, passed his comb through my hair. I lifted the head frame off his electric shaver and tapped a mustache's worth of stubble, fine as ash, into the palm of my hand. In the mirror, I saw my grandfather's face, the face in the postcard, while on the other side of the door, my mother continued scrubbing the floor, the knees of her nightgown ruddy with his blood.
* * *
When my mother and I arrived at the church the next morning, my father was smoking a cigarette on the church steps, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder. Last night's rain had scoured the sky a brilliant blue, scratched with swirls of cirrus. My father smoked like no one else I've ever known. Placing the cigarette between his pinkie and his ringless ring finger, he would close his hand and draw the smoke through his fist — a youthful affectation, which by the age of forty-two had become habit. He had entered the sixties with a crew cut à la H. R. Haldeman and come out the other side with his hair grown long and wild and prematurely gray.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Excommunicados by Charles Haverty. Copyright © 2015 Charles Haverty. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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