Peachtree Road (69 page)

Occasional vacant lots choked with the brown skeletons of kudzu vines broke the monotonous rows of shacks and tenements; I knew that in the summer whole blocks here would wear the virulent, poison green mantles of the kudzu, and would be the better for it. Smoke billowed from many crazed and tumbled chimneys, and I wondered if those houses did not have any other

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sources of heat. The wind down here, unbroken by any of the tall buildings that shielded the city’s heart, was truly brutal. All of the puddles I saw were solid with dun-colored ice. I saw few people in the residential neighborhoods, but the ones I did see were thin, underdressed children and old women.

Through each neighborhood ran a larger cross street with a shabby grocery store, a drugstore, liquor stores, pawnshops, and a cafeè or two. There were more people here, men mainly, teenaged and young and middle-aged, lounging in and out of stores and cafés, standing in frozen-breathed groups on street corners beneath shattered streetlights, shoulders raised against the cold, prowling eyes following us in the Lincoln as Glenn idled it past. I felt like ducking my head against the dead inexorability of those eyes, but Ben met them squarely and measuringly, and Glenn Pickens lifted a hand occasionally to someone he knew, and received in return a languid salute. I wondered if any of them knew who Ben Cameron was, riding by in the Christmas cold in his great black Lincoln. I had a feeling many of them did.

“Where are all the women?” I said, forgetting that I was not supposed to ask questions. I had not seen a single woman who appeared to be under the age of seventy since we had entered the Southeast.

It was Glenn Pickens who answered me.

“They’re all back where we came from, Shep,” he said, not turning his head. “They’re working in the kitchens in Buckhead.”

My face burned. I should have known that. I had walked into it. Beside me, Ben Cameron smiled, a half-smile.

Once, driving through Summerhill, he gestured toward a nest of streets to the right. More of the miserable little houses, as lunar and unpeopled as the others, huddled there.

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“That’s where the new freeway will go through, and where the stadium will go, we hope,” he said. “It’s the best site we’ve got, and the plans are complete for it.”

“Where will those people go?” I said. “The ones who live there?”

He laughed. There was no mirth in it.

“Good question. I’m sure they’d like to know the answer,”

he said. “Holy Christ. We can raise eighteen millions for a new stadium, and the housing authority can pledge fifty million to wipe out the slums in a decade, but they can’t seem to relocate a single black family whose home they knock down, or spend a penny on communities like Vine City or Buttermilk Bottom. We’ve got to do better than this. We’ve got to do a lot better.”

“I thought there was some public housing,” I said, despite the fact that I was pretty sure it was not to me that he spoke.

“Oh, God. Four. Exactly four public housing projects since 1936. We’re going to be mighty lucky if we get through this next summer without somebody literally lighting the fires under us.”

Glenn drove us through Mechanicsville and Pittsburgh, where I remembered calling for Amos and Lottie, and then over to Boulevard and up through Chosewood Park and Grant Park, with its prim green middle-class haven of the zoo and cyclorama, and across Memorial Drive and past the oasis of Oakland Cemetery. I took an involuntary deep breath of pure relief, back now on familiar and hallowed ground, and then we were heading east on DeKalb. We skirted the odd, half-familiar little linear enclave of Cabbagetown, which, though desperately poor as the other neighborhoods, was relentlessly all white, and the great, crouching jumble of Fulton Bag and Cotton that brooked over it, and then, just beyond it, Glenn Pickens turned down into another little neighborhood and stopped the Lincoln.

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“We’ll walk from here,” Ben said. “Better wrap that scarf your head, and take a gulp of this brandy. We’ve got a ways to go, and the wind’s picking up.”

“Where are we?” I said. I had never been this far east before, never ventured beyond the part of Cabbagetown that I could see from our family plot on its myrtle-shaded hill in Oakland Cemetery. This was literally the back of the moon to me.

“It’s called Pumphouse Hill,” Ben said. “The only water up in here used to be an old public hand pump on the top of that hill yonder. If you wanted to wash or drink or flush or douse your fire, you toted water from that pump.”

“Most people up here still do,” Glenn Pickens said. He had gotten silently out of the car and come up beside us, a covert-gray cloth overcoat pulled up around his ears. “City ran some water up here in the fifties, but not many families can afford it. I don’t think two thirds of the fire hydrants up here have worked for ten years.”

Ben frowned. “That’s the city’s bailiwick, not the citizens’”

he said. “There’s no excuse for that. I’m going to get on Dan Roberts’s ass when I get back.”

“We stay on Dan Roberts’s ass,” Glenn said. “To be fair, it’s not all his fault. Kids pound the mains open the minute the crews leave in the summer, to get cool in the spray, and then he’s just got to get a crew back up here and fix them all over again. He does the best he can. He hasn’t got that many crews.”

“Well, I’ll get on his ass anyway, just to set a precedent,”

Ben said. “No sense waiting till January second for that.”

We Walked down the first street in Pumphouse Hill. We had not gone three houses in before I began to wonder if I was going to be able to bear this. As wretched as the other neighborhoods had been, Pumphouse Hill made them look nearly palatial in comparison. I had

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never seen anything like it. The tiny houses were all decades older and in far worse repair than in the other neighborhoods, some without whole roofs, most without one or more windowpanes, all made of unpainted, rotting, green-scummed wood. Virtually no electric lights burned here, though light poles and power lines yawned and drooped, and few of the chimneys had smoke coming from them. In Pumphouse Hill I saw no people, not even the old.

The unpaved street was thick with filth and unspeakable things. I was, for the first time that day, glad of the subfreez-ing temperatures; the stench would have been unbearable if the excrement that lay clotted in ditches and under windows had not been frozen. At front and side doors, frozen garbage and refuse and piles of frozen, rotted vegetables lay where they had been tossed. I saw several newly dead dogs and cats, not crushed by automobiles, but simply lying stiff and banal and hopeless, as if they had fallen and frozen to death in the night. Once I stumbled, and caught on to Ben Cameron’s arm, and looked down to see what I had steeped on. It was the crushed and frozen carcass of a rat the size of a small fox terrier. I felt the gorge risk, thick and sour, in my throat.

There were no more than six or seven streets in Pumphouse Hill; it occupied an area of perhaps no more than four city blocks. But the human misery and degradation on them was enormous, immense; it filled the world; smote my heart and my tongue to silence. I remembered a letter Sarah had written me last spring, about a trip she had taken to Naples and the literal communities she had seen dug out of the bomb rubble, left when Mark Clark took his troops up Monte Cassino. Pitiful, terrible, heartbreaking burrows dug in rubble, each with a family living in it like some mutant, subterranean species, wild and wretched, she had said.

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Screaming their hate at whoever passed. Pumphouse Hill reminded me of that letter. We walked up and down each street, only the sound of our footsteps scrunching on the ice-bristles in the red clay, and the whistling wind, and the occasional thin yelp of a dog breaking the radiant, terrible, sun-frozen silence.

Only once did I bring myself to speak.

“Is there anyone down here? Does anybody live here?” I said. I had seen no one, literally, since we started out from the Lincoln. I realized that I had spoken hopefully.

“Oh yeah,” Glenn Pickens said. “Lots of folks live here.

They’re all inside in bed.”

“Bed?” I said stupidly. Did he mean they were making love, or sleeping? Ill? What?

“Yeah, bed,” he said. “You’ve heard of bed. It’s where the folks up here go to keep warm, when they can’t pay the electric or gas bill and they can’t find firewood. You can always pile on another dog or young’un.”

Once again I reddened. We walked the rest of the terrible, blasted frozen neighborhood in silence. When we got back to the Lincoln and climbed into it, I was shaking with cold and shock. Under the shock, far down, was a profound anger.

“Why did you take me up there?” I said to Ben Cameron.

He poured brandy into coffee and handed it to me. He looked for a long time into my face, his gray eyes opaque.

“I thought you ought to see it firsthand,” he said. “Your family owns it.”

The wave of revulsion and rage that swept me then knocked me, literally, against the backseat of the car.

“I don’t believe you,” I said through stiff lips, my ears ringing as if someone had fired an elk gun hard by them.

“My parents…they couldn’t…they couldn’t 542 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

possibly know it was like this. They can’t…they wouldn’t…”

“They can, and they do,” Ben said, and I knew that he was telling me the truth. It was as if I had always known, or rather, that the blood and bone of me had known about Pumphouse Hill, even though my brain had not.

“Or your father does, anyway,” Ben Cameron went on.

“He has for years, because I’ve been after him that long to clean it up, and so have the others. I can only assume Olivia doesn’t know. I don’t believe she would permit it. Shep, I’ve known your father half my life; his backing made my campaign possible, and I owe him in ways you’ll probably never know about. But I swear I’d have him in court over this if it weren’t for Miss Olivia. I grew up playing with her when we visited in Griffin. Our families have been friends for decades.

We’ve led our entire adult lives together. So I really haven’t pushed this, and I’ve persuaded…some of the others…not to, either. Now, though, your dad is out of the picture, and you’re here, and it’s a different ball game. It can’t wait any longer. I’d have given you some time, because I know you’re unfamiliar with your father’s business, and everything’s in an uproar, but we’re out of time now. Glenn says there’s really bad feeling down here, and it’s getting worse, and with things shaping up the way they are around the South between the races, this has got to be remedied and remedied quick.

It could go up just anytime. I thought the quickest way to get it started was to show you.”

I said nothing, and then I looked at Glenn Pickens.

“I really didn’t know,” I said.

“I didn’t figure you did, Shep,” he said. His face was closed. “But you do now.”

“I do now,” I said.

We did not speak on the way home, and we did not PEACHTREE ROAD / 543

have lunch downtown or at the club, and the Lincoln had not stopped completely on the half-moon drive at 2500

Peachtree Road before I was out of it and running up the staircase to my mother’s room. I could hear myself shouting in my own ears, a crazy and faraway sound, as though, two blocks over, a madman raved, close to tears. I must have screamed at her for a long time. When I stopped, my voice was so hoarse that I could hardly whisper.

My mother looked up from the hand of solitaire she had laid out on her writing desk; she did not speak, but watched me attentively while I shouted and screamed, there in a pool of honeyed afternoon sunlight.

“It has never been your father’s property,” she said calmly.

“It is mine, and always has been. My daddy left it all to me, every bit, and said it would be my…my annuity, and I should just sit and let the money pour in, and never put a penny of my capital into it, and that’s just what I’ve done. Your father would have sunk half our assets into it long ago, but I’ve always remembered what Daddy said, and I would never sign it over to him, or let him pour the money that will soon be yours down that awful rathole. And don’t get haughty with me, my dear son. I don’t have any complaints from my tenants. God knows where they’d find lower rents in the entire city.”

I had to turn my back on her. I thought of the way she had lived all her life, and what the hopeless misery of those silent, invisible wretches in the cold beds of Pumphouse Hill had bought her, and how little of that misery would ever penetrate these creamy white walls, or her creamy white skin.

I thought of what it had bought me. I thought of my gentle, patrician grandfather Redwine, and of the trust he had left me, and of what had financed it. My head swam with shame, my ears rang with it, my veins ran with it.

Without turning back to her, I said, “You will let me 544 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

authorize Tom and Marshall Haynes to get started tomorrow cleaning that place up and getting some decent housing in there, or I will be on a plane out of here before nightfall. I mean it, Mother. As much as it takes, for as long as it takes.

Or I’m gone, and before God, I’ll never set foot in this house or look at your face again.”

“Sheppie…”

“Take your pick, Mother,” I said.

We fought it savagely back and forth like two wild animals all that afternoon and into the night, but finally she agreed.

I knew she would. For once I was glad of the sickly power over her that she herself had invested me with: that of the sovereign man, he alone able to validate her. I used it efficiently and with a ruthlessness born of horror at her and contempt for myself. Before we retired, she to her restored bedroom and I to the summerhouse, she had agreed to let me redeem, as best I could, Pumphouse Hill. I fell into a hollowed-out sleep thinking that I would call Ben Cameron first thing in the morning and tell him. With any luck, it could be livable by summer.

But it was not a day for luck, or for mercy. In the small hours of that morning, while my mother and I slept our separate sleeps of depletion, an arsonist’s fire howled through Pumphouse Hill, and the fire department, hampered by sixteen-degree temperatures and high winds and inoperable fireplugs, could do little. In the morning some hundred-odd homes were burned to the frozen ground, and eleven people were dead, seven of them children.