One Mississippi Read online

  But once I got to school, I was the quarry. Each day began with homeroom torture from Red and his gang. Somehow Tim and I had become the answer to the bully’s prayers. He used all the time-honored methods — a fart sound when I sat at my desk, an elbow to topple my books to the floor, a chorus of boys chirping “Five Spot!” in cartoon falsetto. Red was a genius at slow torture of the drip, drip, drip variety. Once you made it onto his list, you could never feel safe. Two days or a week might pass without incident, you’d begin to breathe a little easier — then a foot shoots out to trip you, a hand slams open your bathroom stall, an elbow sends your lunch tray flying.

  It went on week after week. I wished to God I could be an anonymous brain/loser again. I hadn’t realized how good I’d had it when nobody knew me at all. Now everyone in the whole school was either torturing me or feeling sorry for me — poor Five Spot, the object of Red’s relentless attention. Now and then some kid shot me a furtive glance of sympathy, but once you’re singled out for the full bully treatment, no one sticks his neck out to help you.

  I had pitied and avoided other kids in this fix, like Rachel Bostick, the obese girl with hair on her arms, and poor Cissy Chappell, whose nose and receding chin provoked whinnies wherever she went. Never had I imagined myself as one of them: a pariah, an object of pity and contempt.

  It bothered Tim even more than me. He got a little quieter and madder each day. Something had spilled over inside him, some kind of corrosive liquid.

  Every morning, a new round of public humiliation. The other kids watched it happening and looked away; it was only one of many such campaigns under way in our school at all times. Torture was a time-honored Minor High tradition, along with gossip, flirtation, school spirit, and seniors cutting class on Friday afternoons in the spring.

  Red Martin was an excellent linebacker. No one would stop him from doing anything he wanted to do. The only way it would ever stop was if Red got tired of us and moved on.

  In the meantime I refused to let him ruin my life. I did my best to ignore him.

  Tim wasn’t able to do that. He took every sideways glance from Red as a frontal assault. I could never convince him that his furious reaction only encouraged the bully. He fumed, he seethed. His face flushed every time Red came within forty feet of us.

  We talked about it at night on the phone. Tim wanted only one thing: revenge. He wanted to do something awful to Red. Blow his car up. Burn down his house. Fill his locker with dead animals. Tie him up, shoot him in the eyes. Drag his body down a dirt road. “County Road 43 is real long and bumpy,” he said. “I think that would do fine.”

  We moved through school like a pair of shadows, trying to be invisible. The worst day was Thursday, mandatory assembly in the auditorium. With no seating chart, Red and his friends were free to sit where they wanted, which meant they sat directly behind us.

  We started sitting up front under the watchful eye of Mr. Hamm.

  Tim hunched over his sketch pad, shading in the bricks of a turreted castle. I studied the shapely legs of the Red Cross lady onstage as she stood before the easel with the half-red thermometer showing how much blood they’d collected so far. Something wet touched my ear —

  I turned. That was Red’s spitty finger. His pals started up snorting.

  “Cut it out, Red,” I said, loud enough to draw a look from Mr. Hamm.

  A minute went by, then I felt Red’s fingertips touching the bare spots on the back of my head.

  “A perfect fit,” he whispered. “Oh, honey, come home with me after school!”

  His gang tittered.

  I knocked his hand away. “Stop it, Red!”

  “Boys!” Mr. Hamm said. “Can we try to act like adults, please? Even if we’re just little children? Miz Prentice, please continue.”

  Something poked me in the butt.

  I reached back to wrest it away. A rolled-up newspaper. A tee-hee from Red’s gang of Munchkins.

  Tim stared straight ahead, his mouth set in a grim line. If Red wanted to poke at me like a fourth-grade bully, I could slap his hand away and go on with my life. Tim couldn’t do that.

  “County Road 43,” he said softly.

  Mr. Hamm aimed a quizzical expression over my head. I turned to see a man in a Smokey hat and uniform, and another man in civilian clothes, strolling down the aisle of the auditorium toward us.

  Cold sweat sprang from my pores.

  Red said, “What’s the matter, Five Spot, see a ghost?” Then he turned in his seat and saw something worse than a ghost: a Hinds County sheriff’s deputy.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Hamm,” said the man in shirtsleeves. “We’ve got a warrant for a Dudley Ronald Martin. Is he here? Dudley Martin?”

  Oh my God. Dudley was Red. Red was Dudley. Dudley! Ol’ Five Spot could make good use of this information. Oh well hello, Dudley, lookin’ swell, Dudley. . . .

  Currently Dudley looked terrified. He rose halfway out of his seat. For a second I thought he was going to try to dash out of there, but his shoulders slumped. He sank back down in his seat.

  “Come on, son,” said the tall cop.

  “What’s the charge?” Red said.

  “Assault with a deadly weapon,” said the cop, “leaving the scene of an accident with injuries . . . you want to hear the rest?”

  “I didn’t assault nobody,” Red said. “This is fucked up.”

  “Don’t use that language with me!” The cop jerked Red’s arm behind his back.

  “Red,” Mr. Hamm said, “go with these men. I’ll call your daddy. Go on, son. We’ll get this straightened out.”

  Red’s friends shrank back to let them by. He tried to wave off the handcuffs. “You don’t need those, man! I said I’ll go with you.”

  “Procedure,” the cop said. “Turn around, put your hands behind your back.” He snapped Red’s wrists together and walked him up the aisle.

  “I didn’t hit her,” Red said, loud, so everyone could hear. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Tim was the first one to put his hands together. He began clapping slowly, deliberately. Others joined in. A swell of applause rose as the cops led Red out of the auditorium.

  Mr. Hamm said, “Stop! Boys and girls, everyone be quiet!” The clapping broke into pockets of derisive laughter. “I just want to say, Red is a fine young man as well as an excellent football player, and I’m sure this is all a mistake. He didn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Bullshit!” came a shout from the back. One of the black boys.

  Now it was the white kids’ turn to grow quiet.

  “Mr. Hamm, why you stick up for him?” That was J. T. Lewis, a black stringbean basketball player. “I didn’t hear you sticking up for Arnita Beecham when he run her over!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Red’s been walking around free all this time,” said Leon Barber. “Arnita still in the hospital! You think he’d be walking around free if she was white?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Mr. Hamm. “This is not the place to have that kind of discussion.”

  J.T. cried, “You say Red didn’t hurt nobody. How you know that? Was you there?”

  “Sit down and be quiet, J.T.,” said Hamm. “Miss Prentice has come all the way from Vicksburg to share her important information with us.”

  The Red Cross lady looked terrified, what with cops and handcuffs and shouting, but she tried plowing ahead with her presentation. She didn’t get far. The muttering grew to a chant: Arnita. Arnita. Shoes tapped the floor in time to her name.

  “Isn’t this fun?” Tim said in my ear. “Did you see Red’s face?”

  “Dudley’s face, you mean.”

  He laughed. “God, don’t you love that?”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said.

  “Aw, Eeyore, you’ve always got a bad feeling. Lighten up!”

  Miss Prentice fled the stage. Hamm called for order, too late. Black kids were up out of their seats, yelling. Nervous white kids were streaming out of the auditoriu
m. It was one kind of shock to see the star linebacker handcuffed and taken away, quite another to find that our black students — the well-behaved twenty percent of our school who stayed quiet and kept to the back of the auditorium, the classrooms, the bus — were not so quiet now. They were angry and loud. This was new.

  That afternoon I rode over the river to find Mrs. Beecham in her yard, whacking a rug with a broomstick. She wore her hair bound up in a polka-dot kerchief, like Mammy in Gone With the Wind. “Musgrove! You’re late!”

  “Assembly went long today. The police came in and arrested Red Martin.”

  “Is that right.” Her stick went smack! on the rug.

  “Yep. They put handcuffs on him.” I dragged the latest gallon of paint from under the steps.

  Mrs. Beecham said, “Did they say what the charge is?”

  “Assault with a deadly weapon. I don’t understand it. Are they saying he had a gun?”

  “No. If you run over somebody, your car is considered a deadly weapon.”

  I spilled a pool of pale green paint into the tray. “Also leaving the scene of an accident, and something else. I forget.”

  “They wish it was an accident,” she said. “They’d like to cover it up. They didn’t want to arrest him. But there was one problem with that. Arnita remembers.”

  My heart started banging against my ribs. “She does?”

  “That’s why they came and got him today,” she said. “They said they couldn’t do anything without a witness — well, now they’ve got one. She remembers. Don’t sit there and tell me you can’t make a case against him! Hell, you had him in jail the night it happened — and let him go! But he plays football, his daddy’s some kind of a deal at the Baptist college. You watch — they make a show of arresting him, then a month or two from now they will very quietly drop the charges.”

  “Did Arnita say he ran into her?”

  “Ah, Musgrove.” She grinned. “How you coming along on that wall in back? You nearly done with that first coat?”

  “First and only coat,” I said. “I’m just counting the days till I’m done. Do you know I have to spend my whole weekend cutting grass at our house so I can come over here all week and paint your house?”

  “Good for you,” she said. “Keep your mind off the girls.”

  The only girl on my mind was Arnita. I’d stretched out the painting job, taking longer than was really necessary on the eaves and trim, knowing she’d be home from the hospital any day. I balanced the paint tray up the ladder.

  Mrs. Beecham said, “Red Martin tried to follow her home from Charlene’s. He was drunk. He was trying to get her to go with him. When she wouldn’t, he knocked her off her bike. And took off.”

  “That’s what she says?”

  “Why, Musgrove? Did you see different? I always thought you might have been there that night. For sure you know more than you’re telling.”

  I flung down my paintbrush. “I’ve told you a million times, I was not there! I’m painting your stupid house for free — what else do you want?”

  “Okay, watch out!” She harrumphed. “Ol’ Musgrove gettin’ pissed off now. Watch out!”

  “Well? Stop accusing me of stuff!” I picked twigs off the brush.

  “Musgrove, I got good instincts,” she said. “Some folks are just not born to be liars. If you could see yourself. Your poor ears go just as red . . . it’s like the truth is just a burden weighing on you.”

  “Why are you so hateful to me?” I said. “What the heck did I ever do to you?”

  “Hateful, how?”

  “Even to my mom — she went to all that trouble to make you a cake, and you threw it in the garbage!”

  She peered at me. “Ahhh, you been carrying that? You could have just asked. That was a lemon cake, Musgrove. I’m deadly allergic to lemons. I swell up if I even touch one. I had to get it out of the house.”

  I didn’t dignify this with an answer. I’d seen her drink plenty of lemonade. I hammered the lid back on the paint can. I didn’t need any of this. I would get on my bike and ride the hell out of here.

  “You know, Musgrove, I think you are a good boy, I surely do. A hard worker too, especially when you’re scared. And you are scared. Every minute of the day.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Something working on you,” she said. “You’re even scared of me.”

  “Not scared. But you do make me mad.”

  She made a face, me being mad. “How’s that?”

  “You’re always testing me. Always.”

  “I thought we might do a bit of digging and put in some flower beds,” she said. “Wouldn’t that look good, a whole bunch of zinnias going all the way around the house? Plenty of good sun for it. Zinnias like the sun.”

  “Miz Beecham, I offered to do you one favor. You’re starting to take advantage of me.”

  “Starting?” She laughed. “I been taking advantage for a while now. But you just keep showing up, don’t you? You surely do. What power I got over you? I’m just some old cullid woman, yassuh I jes’ works cleanin’ de house for de nice white folk like yo mama and daddy. My husband, he the janitor in yo white chillun school. Now how come is a white boy like you over here doing these favors for us?”

  I thought it over. “I guess I like painting the house. Nobody ever asked me to do anything this big by myself.”

  “What did I tell you? Stick with me, we’ll get you straightened out. You want some lemonade?”

  “No thanks. I’m allergic to lemons.”

  She grinned. “Too bad for you.”

  Mom said how odd that I would do all this work for Mrs. Beecham, when at home I wouldn’t put a plate in the sink without being nagged for an hour. I reminded her the whole thing was her idea. If she didn’t want me mixed up with the Beechams she should never have taken me over there. “I don’t know how she does it,” I said, “but the second she starts ordering me around, I forget how to say no.”

  “You never had any trouble with that word in my house,” said Mom. “Just explain to her you have other things to do. Twice now Daddy has come home and found the yard uncut when he specifically told you to cut it. I’m tired of being caught in the middle of you two. It was my idea to help these people out, but my goodness, there is a limit. If I have to call her, I will.”

  “No. Don’t. I’ll tell her.”

  Walking out of English the next day I found Lincoln Beecham waiting for me. I was used to seeing him in his blue jumpsuit, pushing a dust mop down the hall, or sitting in his janitor’s closet with the door open, listening to his radio. It was Mr. Beecham’s job to clean up after eight hundred kids. His face was solemn, his hair silvered from many years of this work. He was never home in the afternoons when I was painting his house. He always went straight from school to the hospital. “Young Musgrove.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Understand you been doing the work at our place,” he said. “Like to thank you for that.” He looked uncomfortable saying that many words in a row.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Beecham.”

  “We bringing her home tomorrow. If you was to come around four, you might hep us take her out of the car. She ain’t walking all that good yet.”

  “Sure. I can do that.”

  “Wife said you might.” He nodded, and let me go.

  7

  DISORDERLY NOISE FLOODED out of the band hall, drums rat-a-tat-tatting like machine guns, horns and saxes blatting, flutes shrilling, Jimmye Brashier honking away on her bassoon.

  The band hall didn’t look magical, but it was the only place in school where actual magic was made. The first time I heard these wild jumbled noodling sounds pouring out the doors, I wanted to be a part of it. I was the Mighty Marching Titans’ mallet-instrument specialist, a talent I brought with me from Indiana. In concert band I played xylophone, vibraphone, bells, chimes. In the marching show at football halftime, I carried the glockenspiel, the lyre-shaped arrangement of chrome bars — the easiest instrument in th
e band, except for cymbals.

  I didn’t care about playing an instrument. I just wanted to be in the band. If you weren’t jock-popular, which I never would be, band was the coolest thing to do in high school. While everyone else had to suffer in the classroom, you got to go outside and march around and make a big noise. You got to perform at all football games, home and away, which made for interesting bus rides on Friday nights in the fall.

  The best part was that sometimes within the concrete-block walls of the band hall our noise came together into actual music, and left us all flushed with pleasure.

  Bernie Waxman was probably the only Jew in Minor, except for his wife. To us his Jewishness made him exotic. He was the only teacher who let us call him by his last name without the “mister.” (I had found a few teachers at Minor who really knew their subjects, but none of them cared as much as Waxman.) Band was his obsession: he walked, drank, slept, ate, and breathed Band. He had a big head of curly black hair, dark eyes, big trumpet ears that scooped up every sound in the room. If a third-chair clarinet missed a note, Waxman heard it. He would wave us to a stop, chewing the tip of his baton while he figured out what was wrong. By this time in the band year, that baton was nibbled halfway to the quick.

  The first chair in the flute section was still empty, in honor of Arnita.

  Waxman charged out of his office tap-tapping a nervous rhythm in his palm, and stepped up on the carpeted box supporting his podium. “Okay, germs and germies, let’s go! Places, places. ‘King Cotton.’” Whack! His baton cracked against the rim of the music stand.

  We were heading for the climax of the band year — our journey to Vicksburg in May for All-State Band Competition, which we referred to as Contest. Contest was a huge deal to Waxman, and by constant wheedling and rehearsing he had turned it into a huge deal for us. Band practice grew more intense by the day. We marched our marching show until we could have done it backward. We played our concert pieces dozens of times, refining them phrase by phrase. A jaunty Sousa march, the moody “Incantation and Dance” by John Barnes Chance, and “A Tribute to Stephen Foster” — we played them in our sleep, we heard them in our dreams.