Home In The Morning (22 page)

The green Ford Maverick was gone. Jackson saw this right away, processed its absence as a good thing, as a thing that meant maybe the worst had happened and all he needed to do was figure out how to take care of what was in front of him: Bokay unconscious, stuck in a smoldering heap of metal on an untraveled road in the middle of the night. He tried to waken him first, tried to pull him out. He couldn’t do it. He was too weak on a good day to haul a man that size. So he stumbled up the road looking for help, and thank God it wasn’t very far he had to go before he came upon a phone booth in the middle of nowhere. Why on earth there was a phone booth on a stretch like that without homes or stores or gas stations or buildings of any kind nearby, he did not know. Perhaps it appeared there for him that night, perhaps it disappeared the next day, he couldn’t say. He thanked God for it as if it were the miracle he perceived it to be and found it another miracle there was a dime in his pocket. He called his daddy and he told him there was an accident. He told him where he was and told him he
wasn’t too bad, there was someone who needed his help more than he, and then he went back to Bokay and sat like a fool next to the smoldering truck and waited for his father to arrive.

Daddy came. Looked him over. Said: Well, you’ll live, son. Now, why exactly are you and that devil Bokay alone together on the side of the road in a wrecked-up vehicle in the middle of the night? Jackson had no idea what he told him.

Somehow, they got Bokay out of the truck and into Daddy’s car. Then they went to Daddy’s office on Main Street. By this time, Bokay was awake, although he kept slipping back into unconsciousness then breaking out of it again. The first thing he expressed was concern over his truck, which was his livelihood, after all, and concern about who was picking up Katherine Marie from work later on. Daddy soothed him the way doctors do, telling him he needed a once-over and he was happy to do it for him, that Bokay was lucky to be alive and not to have killed his son as well, that if push came to shove, Jackson would go pick up Katherine Marie in the doctor’s very own car so he needn’t worry. And as Daddy found Bokay required at the very least taping of probable broken ribs as well as stitches for the gashes on the top of his head, his right knee, and left hip, this is exactly what happened once Daddy patched up Jackson’s more minor injuries and determined he was recovered enough from the shock and jostling he’d received to drive a car.

When Jackson got to the rest home, Katherine Marie was waiting outside looking for Bokay’s truck. Jackson called out to her from Daddy’s sedan and told her there’d been an accident, Bokay was hurt but not so’s he’d need a hospital, and he was there to take her to him. Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, she said, tears filling her eyes and voice. When she got in the car, she knocked into the door frame as she was unsteady on her feet and her eyes were clouded by fear. What happened? What happened? she said, and Jackson told her piece by piece because he
didn’t want to send her into some kind of hysteria. We were driving home, he said, and we were run off the road. Oh, no, oh, no, she said again in a voice he’d never heard from her before, a frightened child’s voice. Even when she was a little bit and her granddaddy was dying, he hadn’t heard her sound timid like that, so hollow, so small. It frightened him and he did everything he could to build her hopes up, reminding her how strong Bokay was and how Daddy said everything would be alright. You’ve got to believe me, don’t panic now, dear, please don’t. He concentrated more on soothing her than he did on the road, and he didn’t notice that green Ford Maverick around anywhere. He could not tell if it followed them or when it was exactly those two inside hatched their plan. He could only swear that when he pulled up to the doctor’s office and got Katherine Marie out of the car, he saw from the corner of his eye that green Ford Maverick racing off just as a bottle of Jim Beam with a flaming trail of cotton sticking out of it smashed through the front window of his daddy’s examining room.

Now, sometimes blind luck is as much a servant to evil as to good, and the room where Daddy was stitchin’ up Bokay’s wounds housed all manner of flammable materials, oxygen tanks and the like, so the whole thing went boom! and exploded into a fireball before they could even register what happened except that Katherine Marie and Jackson were blown backward with the force of the explosion. They rocked back and forth in the street on their knees, drop-jawed, watching the fire. Katherine Marie screamed and tried to run into the building, but he held her back. Then Bokay crawled out of the wreckage, his hair smokin’, his clothes in tatters. He dragged the doctor from underneath his armpits into the street and Jackson saw his father was on fire. On fire up by his hairline on the right and on fire on the same side by his sleeve. Both of them were bathed in blood. Jackson ran over, ripped off his shirt, and tried like hell to put the fire eating his daddy’s eye and arm out.

The fire department came. The police. Daddy was out of his mind with pain and kept cursing the name of L’il Bokay Cooper. The next morning, when he was interviewed at the hospital, Daddy had no memory of anything at all, which caused the police to decide the first words he’d uttered after the event amounted to evidence. They drew up papers charging Bokay with arson and attempted murder. His supposed motive was revenge for the firing of Katherine Marie from Daddy’s household and medical practice the previous year. Jackson’s mama was in complete turmoil over Daddy’s condition and did not contradict their theory.

That afternoon, the police arrested Bokay for setting fire to the doctor’s office, convinced they had reason and not thinking any further no matter what Jackson or Katherine Marie told them. They roared into the village in four police cars, lights and sirens blazing at two in the afternoon. They ripped Bokay from the bed where he lay moaning while Katherine Marie applied ice packs to his burns. She tried to stop them, grabbing on to the backs of their belts with two hands. They pushed her into the dirt. Bokay howled like an animal but he was all trussed up by then and he couldn’t help her.

That left Jackson to set things right. He tried to tell them no one had fired Katherine Marie, she’d quit. Nobody listened to him. He was that yankified jewboy niggerlover to them all. Not only that, he was concussed. His testimony was considered untrustworthy. The day after that, the Hicks and Turner boys had the nerve to step up and give witness. They said they saw Bokay drunk and driving his truck off the road earlier in the evening, which bolstered the police claim. With no precedent, no rationale other than meanness, the police sent Bokay to Parchman to await completion of their investigation and probable trial.

Parchman Farm, a hell hole if there ever was one, as the Freedom Riders who spent some memorable time there earlier that same summer
found out. Those lucky boys got out for the most part in one piece. Bokay broke out, sure enough, not two weeks later, in the company of some militants he’d chanced to share his prison dormitory with. By the time he was reapprehended, he was living in a safe house in Natchez run by the Nation of Islam. The ACLU took up his defense and after many a high-profile battle, succeeded in freeing him on the grounds of false imprisonment that was further cruel and unusual. Only by the end of all that, he wasn’t Bokay anymore. He was Mombasa, founder of the Black Warriors of the African Jesus, the party he created to give black Christians a militant home. He had respect for the Nation, it wasn’t that, he felt gratitude for all their help in setting him free. And certainly he was done with going along, with yessum and nossir. He’d learned to stand up. He saw that his people needed leaders like those in the Nation. But he was a Jesus man through and through, no getting around it. After he was cleared, he came back to Guilford to collect Katherine Marie. He came with a busload of his Black Warriors of the African Jesus to cow the Hicks and Turner types into leaving his people alone. These were some of the biggest, meanest black men the town of Guilford had ever seen, and there were a lot of them. The kluckers left the village alone, alright. As long as the Warriors stayed in town.

When Jackson finished telling Stella the story of his Freedom Summer, he slumped in his chair, as finished with his story as he intended to be. He was exhausted. He’d taken his time and told her what he had to say leisurely because, betrayal or not, it felt good to tell and he’d savored the telling like a fine meal. Stella came around the table and stood in front of him to nestle his head between her breasts. Oh yes, she said. The devil’s in the details, isn’t it? Don’t you worry. I’ll be more circumspect with Bubba Ray if it helps. Now, we don’t have to talk about him ever again. I understand better how you feel, I truly do. I’ll never tell a soul, too. You can depend on that.

They separated and went to sleep. In the early morning, Jackson’s dream, a particularly pleasant one featuring Stella and an airy swing made of feathers, was interrupted by a terrible racket followed by a host of ornate curses. Startled, he opened his eyes to the sight of Daddy dressed in a seersucker suit with a white shirt and open collar, no tie. A straw hat with a snap brim sat high atop his head. The very second Jackson awoke, his father let out a new curse, leaving his son to wonder who on earth the man was so angry with.

By the Lord God of Jacob, may you slide sideways down a rocky slope to hell in a flat-tired wheelbarrow!

Daddy dry spit twice in the air as punctuation, then rifled through the side drawers of his rolltop desk with his damaged hand, the gloved fingers strumming like spider legs over the tips of color-coded files.

And after that, he continued, may the spiteful wife of Samael crawl under the fiery gates like the cockroach she is to torment you with tiny bites of her sharpened teeth on your nekkid backside just before you set on a splintery bench to await recitation of your sins!

He chuckled in a particularly nasty way, tickled by his own wit, then fell to muttering while he slammed and opened drawers one after the other. At last, he found what he sought.

Aha! Here it is. Alright. Alright. You can suck a little ice on your way into the pit, then.

Daddy. Daddy. What are you doing? asked Jackson. Unaccustomed to his father’s rants, the display before him alarmed. His father looked up, squinting his good eye. He noted his son’s presence with an expression that was likely a kind of surprise from which all shame or self-consciousness was absent. He smacked his lips the way men twenty years older than him did before speaking and spoke.

Son. Jackson. I have an important meeting today. I am settin’ down with the board of the White Citizens’ Council to see about address of my grievances. I intend to pressure the chairman with this if I have to.

He waved a manila file with a bright blue tab around. A handful of lab reports escaped and fluttered to the ground, but Daddy ignored them.

As you are a lawyer in larvae, perhaps you’d like to accompany me.

Yes, Daddy. I would. Just let me get dressed and all.

Daddy studied his pocket watch. He sat at his desk, opened the file, and held X-rays up to the light. Without looking away from them, he said: You got half of an hour, son. Then I’m going with or without you.

His nerves charged, Jackson duly washed up and put on the best clothes he’d brought with him: the blazer, chino pants, and an oxford shirt. It seemed to him his daddy was setting out on a rash and temperamental adventure. Mama’d told him that Daddy’d been expunged from the Council rolls in the spring of ‘62, an event that amounted to a bitter pill for the old man. It did not matter, she’d said, that they’d dropped all Jewish members at the time in reaction to that gaggle of Yankee Jews who, the previous summer, bussed their commie hides into quiet, peaceful neighborhoods and stirred up trouble unprecedented since the War of Northern Aggression. Daddy took it personal. He figured he’d been dropped because of his infirmity and him a martyr to the violent notions of Mobissimus Cooper or whatever it was L’il Bokay called himself these days.

Knowing all this, Jackson was distressed. No doubt Daddy needed protection from both the Council and his own distemper. Accordingly, the good son wrote Stella a note on his whereabouts in case she wasn’t yet up and about. Daddy seems quite upset today, it said, and I think it not wise to let him go out alone. I will be back as soon as possible. He was tempted to tell Stella more concerning the whys and wherefores but decided against it, thinking if she knew what was going on, she might insist on tagging along, thus ensuring disaster in a situation loaded with enough intimations of catastrophe without her participation. He stuck the note in an envelope, sealed it against prying eyes, and ran
upstairs to stick it under Stella’s door. It was not until he’d gone into the kitchen for coffee and a piece of bread that Eula, who’d arrived to put up breakfast for them all, told him, no, it was Saturday, it was nine fifteen in the morning, the doctor had no appointments. He just liked to get dressed up and take a stroll with his paperwork most times in the morning of a Saturday.

He sure do talk up a storm while he’s at it, too, she said. Don’t mean nothin’. Nobody pays mind to his Saturday morning conversations, Mr. Jackson. If you don’t mind my sayin’ so, I believe he goes on like that because he misses being busy. It’s hard on a man like him to have so little to do.

You best be ready, son! Time to go. Time to go.

Daddy had arrived at the kitchen door. He now clutched two files, the blue-tabbed one and another tabbed in red, clutched them tightly under his arm between the sling and his jacket. He followed Jackson’s eyes to the folders, tapped them one after another with his free hand.

The chairman, he said. His wife.

He cackled.

I’ve got ’em good, son. Eula! Tell Miss Missy we’ll be back before lunch. I have not forgotten the party over to Mickey Moe’s this afternoon. Not at all.

Father and son walked half the morning away, strolling through every part of Guilford familiar to them with the exception of the village and the street that housed the offices of the White Citizens’ Council above Uncle Izzy Joe’s hardware store. Until the last moment, Jackson held out the curious hope that Eula was mistaken, that Daddy was scheduled for a confrontation with those in whose service he had been fiercely faithful but who had rejected him. While the fulfillment of his hope would represent a perilous enterprise, it was preferable to its alternative. After their third circumvention of the White Citizens’ Council offices, he accepted the truth. They were not walking anywhere
but in circles. Daddy was engaged, not in a battle royal, but in a futile fantasy, the product of a broken mind.