In any event, Muffin wasn’t aware of Clemmie now. She was inside her past.

  SIX

  When Tommy finally drove home, Christaphine prepared for her Monday evening library board meeting. She was from the mountains of Virginia, and very much an outsider, although as Tommy Nearing’s wife and Tommy Senior’s daughter-in-law, she had been warmly welcomed. She’d been thrilled to be asked to serve on the library board because she was so young and inexperienced, and although she was a great reader, basically she knew nothing. She was unsettled to find that board members were quitting as fast as they could because the time had come to integrate the library.

  The Colored Library consisted of two small rooms that backed onto the beautiful, spacious rooms of the regular library. The entrance to those two rooms was through the head librarian’s office, so the real patrons, the white ones, never even knew about it. Only staff ever went in there.

  The Colored Library had its own book collection, which Muffin had never seen because the board had discarded every book prior to her arrival in town. She had seen only the empty rooms. Colored people, of course, could not enter the library; they went to a window on their side of the building, invisible to white patrons who parked out front, and they knocked. The colored drinking fountain was out there, too, as a kindness. If a librarian were free and felt like it, she would find a book for them and pass it through the window. The coloreds had no way of knowing what was in their collection because they had no card catalog, so Muffin couldn’t quite picture how it worked.

  The Ferris librarian, realizing that none of the coloreds’ books were in good enough condition to add to the permanent collection, had completed the first step in merging libraries: wholesale discard. Or perhaps, Muffin thought, but didn’t ask for verification, the library board didn’t want books with Negro fingerprints mixed in with the white books. Her own village in Virginia had never had the slightest problem with integration. Of course, it had been entirely white, which made it easier.

  It had been a year since the discards; a year during which no colored person could borrow a book. The librarian, a woman of courage, wanted to set a date for opening the doors of the real library to coloreds. Many Carolina towns had already opened their libraries, often without announcements or signage, just easing silently into integration.

  In Ferris, that date would be far off.

  Her father-in-law had instructed her to vote against setting any date at all. No library in his town was going to admit a colored. They weren’t smart enough anyway. When she said she planned to vote in favor of opening, Tommy’s daddy said gently that the only the reason sweet little Christaphine had been put on the board was to vote against it. The board understood that she would obey her father-in-law; that’s why they wanted her.

  She had not even turned twenty-one. She didn’t want to think about hard things. She wanted to learn how to bake and knit and keep a lovely home for Tommy and, above all, have babies. But what she had was a library board meeting. Where she would have to vote for the wrong thing. Because surely it was wrong to keep half the town from reading.

  When she asked her husband to back her up, Tommy was as amazed as if she had suggested diving to the Titanic. “My daddy told you what to do,” he said courteously, because he was always courteous, just like his father. Then he walked away from her, because that was how Nearing men ended conversations with their women; they finished and they left.

  The libraries had been separate? Their book collections had been separate?

  Clemmie had known about separate schools and segregated restaurants, but she had never pictured libraries refusing readers. She had even forgotten the noun colored because its usage had been eclipsed over the years by African American and now Black. She thought of Gale. Given her age, she must have been insulted and hurt by people like Tommy’s family. Clemmie didn’t want to think about it. She preferred civilized thoughts about civilized people, and now Muffin was going to tell a story about savagery.

  Whose? Her husband’s? Her in-laws’?

  Or Muffin’s own?

  But the library board meeting was canceled. Christaphine didn’t have to choose after all. It wasn’t canceled because the vote not to integrate was in danger; nobody still on that board would vote in favor of integrating.

  It was canceled because MacBurton Ward announced that he was coming to the meeting. No surprise, since he had attended the last week’s school board meeting, at which the school board announced the merger of one black and one white elementary school. This was solely to pacify the feds. That particular colored school was the one bulldozed prior to the arrival of the outside agitator, and the town had built an addition (using federal funds, which was a hoot) to the grade school where the white trash lived. It was a pretty good plan, Tommy Senior said, because white trash could be counted on to fight back. Baseball bats, rocks, whatever it took. The merger did not involve busing because kids walked to school. To be sure, the colored kids would have a long walk, but that was just more footage for the white parents to line up.

  Nobody said what the white parents would line up for.

  The biggest problem down the road gripped Tommy Senior and his brother, Ev, and they discussed it constantly. What would happen when the feds demanded to have the colored high school closed down? When they were forced to merge high schools? What about, say, football? White high school football players sharing a locker room, showers, practices, and games with colored? It didn’t bear thinking of.

  Supposedly Ev had stomped away from one of the brothers’ shouting sessions, gone to his used car dealership, and taken out his rage on a black employee. Supposedly Ev snapped the man’s forearm. The man’s “crime” could have been anything or nothing. He might just have uttered the word football.

  “I didn’t ask for details,” said Muffin to Clemmie. “I didn’t want to know. I never wanted to see Ev in action. I was afraid of him. Everybody was afraid of him.”

  Clemmie had once been afraid of a man. The memory of her helplessness left her trembling for the black man so helpless that he had to allow his white boss to break his arm.

  National pressure to integrate was intense, said Muffin, which simply built the fury in Ferris. How dare you interfere? These are our tax dollars, our schools, our decisions. And we’re not white supremacists. It’s just that coloreds—they’re not up to it. They’re good enough for fields and factories. Not for sitting next to our children, pretending they can learn like real people.

  Northern newspapers described southern towns as “facing high racial tension.”

  “If they’d stay out of our bidness,” Tommy Senior said, “there wouldn’t be any tension.”

  And now this scrawny, arrogant city boy MacBurton Ward planned to attend every meeting of every town board. Where, said Tommy Senior, he would quote. Publicize.

  Twist.

  The boys were meeting at Christaphine and Tommy’s house that Monday night, and Tommy had expected his bride to be away at her library board meeting. Her presence was not welcome. Tommy told her to set out the desserts that Stefanie, their help, had baked, and then go visit a girlfriend. She asked if she could stay in the bedroom, knitting. Tommy frowned, but finally said, “If you watch TV.” They had two televisions, an extraordinary indulgence, but Tommy didn’t like to miss anything.

  She knew that watching TV was for noise. She was not to overhear anything. And she didn’t want to hear anything. That was also the role of wives: not hearing.

  After years of fading away, in 1964 the KKK was experiencing an impressive resurgence. There were billboards on the highway advertising membership, even giving the phone number to call if you wanted to join. Tommy Senior said everything was infiltrated these days, and probably the only people to call that number now were FBI. So the boys didn’t join the KKK like their fathers, but got into ROWP, Rights of White People, one of several alternates. ROWP and the KKK and Ferris and everybody else faced a deadline: President Lyndon B. Johnson had proposed a nationwide “civil rights” bill and the vote was coming up.

  “Rights?” Tommy Senior kept saying. “Give them rights and we’ll lose ours.”

  Clemmie had never lived in the South Carolina Muffin was describing. Her experience was with the great, good heart of the South: kinder, warmer, and more courteous than anywhere else she had lived. Certainly more willing to work to defeat racism than the northern states she had known. She had wept over the slaughter of that Bible study class at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and stood in awe of the parish as it continued to extend love.

  Muffin was softening the real adjectives and nouns of that grim time and place where she had landed as a bride, omitting what Tommy and Ev would really have said about their black neighbors, and Clemmie was grateful. But even in the omission her home felt stained, as if she would have to repaint after Muffin left.

  Christaphine had set out dessert plates and forks and napkins and lined them up beside the pecan pie and the pineapple casserole. She perked coffee, although nobody was going to have coffee, because Tommy had picked up enough six-packs for an army. When he got there, Tommy’s cousin, Haven, who was even younger than she was, told her how pretty she looked, and Tommy’s buddy Daniel said she looked like a million bucks, and Tommy’s friend Webb said, “Pecan pie!”

  She went into the bedroom and turned on the TV good and loud.

  There was no such thing as a master bedroom back then. There were just biggish bedrooms and littler ones. The only bathroom, small with mint-green tiles, was across the hall. Eventually, she had to go to the bathroom. She stood at her door, listening, and then slowly and carefully opened it, tiptoed quickly across the hall and closed the bathroom door gently behind her. She tried to go fast in case one of the boys needed the toilet. When she was done, she crept back to her room.

  The boys were laughing the deep chortles of drunks who were pleased with themselves.

  The following morning was Tuesday.

  She had chosen Tuesday for her appointment because on Tuesdays, Tommy generally worked a ten-hour day at his daddy’s John Deere dealership. Christaphine would have loved to work there, too, but when she asked for a job, Tommy Senior just patted her bottom. He was a little bit handsy.

  After a breakfast of runny eggs with hot sauce, country ham, very dark toast, and grits sprinkled heavily with pepper—the only meal she cooked, because the help did the real cooking—Tommy said, “Fix me a bag lunch.” She wrapped two sandwiches and the last slab of pie in wax paper and lowered them carefully into a small brown paper bag.

  “Noon,” said Tommy softly. “We figure on noon.” They kissed goodbye, and since it was Tommy, the kiss lasted and almost required a bedroom, but he said he really had to run, which he surely regretted, but “Tonight, my darling Christaphine, I’ll be in a great mood. We’ll celebrate.”

  Two minutes after his pickup was out the driveway, she was out the driveway in her Ford Country Squire.

  SEVEN

  If she went to the Nearing family doctor here in Ferris, her mother-in-law would know immediately; in fact, would already know, even before Christaphine went, because Mother Eleanor was friends with the nurse. The concept of patient privacy wasn’t to arrive for many years, so the nurse would have phoned her up and said, “Eleanor, honey, little Chrissy’s coming in for a pregnancy test. You comin’ too?”

  No. She had to get the test elsewhere, and be alone for the heartbreak if she was wrong, and not have to discuss her failure yet again with her disappointed in-laws and husband. So she made an appointment with an out-of-town obstetrician. Rejecting Mother Eleanor’s doctor felt like sin. She couldn’t imagine explaining herself.

  The Ford Country Squire was as long as a truck and as heavy as a building, with big white eyebrows shading the headlights. Tommy had bought it for her right after their honeymoon, because it would have room for all their future kids. All that was required was for Christaphine to produce them.

  She focused on the drive. It wasn’t that far, really, but towns in the rural Carolinas were very separated. There was no sprawl, no overlap. You had a village, then you had country. A dozen miles on, you were in another world. Everybody was town-proud. My town is better than your town. It was why some towns gritted their teeth and pulled off integration with a modicum of trouble: they couldn’t bear to have ugly things said about or happening in their town. It was why other towns, like Ferris, were never giving in: they weren’t having their town standards lowered.

  She thought about the talk she’d overheard when she crossed the bedroom hall last night. She could do nothing about it. She had to stop worrying. But worry was almost blinding her.

  The boys won’t really do anything to MacBurton Ward, she told herself. They’ll scare him. Make him soil his pants. Make him cry and beg. And he will. City boys are weak. They’ll kick him out of the truck by the side of a road, drive away laughing, and that’ll be that. Because he’s white. “You kill a colored,” Tommy Senior had once said, “same as killing deer.” Which meant, Christaphine figured, that killing a white man was still murder.

  So she didn’t have to worry. Nothing would really happen to MacBurton Ward.

  Once she had argued with Tommy about ROWP. He got so angry so fast. He grabbed her shoulders as if to shake her. Then he pulled back, walked away, and didn’t come home that night. What would he do to her if she called somebody to warn them about the plans for MacBurton Ward? Except…who would she call? The police in town were Tommy Senior’s best friends.

  Only days ago, three civil rights workers had disappeared in Mississippi. (“Come on,” snorted Tommy Senior. “They weren’t working.”) Last night, Tommy had laughed so hard about those missing “workers.” He hadn’t used his wonderful collection laugh; last night his laugh had been sly and vicious. She wasn’t exactly afraid of the four boys gathered in her living room, but she was.

  My daddy says people like MacBurton Ward should be shot, Haven said last night. His daddy was Tommy’s Uncle Ev, a man so rough that Muffin almost hid behind her husband or her mother-in-law when Ev was around.

  My daddy says shooting’s too good for ’em, said her Tommy. Happens too quick.

  When she finally arrived at the doctor’s office, she concentrated on parking the massive car. Then she concentrated on filling out her medical information sheet. Then she concentrated on getting through the exam. When he tells me I’m not going to have a baby, I won’t cry. I’ll say Thank you, sir, because I am a lady.

  The doctor said, “Mrs. Nearing, you’re so excited, your pulse is racing.”

  I’m not excited. I’m scared. Would Tommy and the boys really and truly…?

  She erased the isolated tree, the scary dusty lane, the tilting rock piles carrying the ghost of a house, and looked up at the doctor, a little girl trusting the man to tell her what to do next.

  “You’re going to have a baby,” he said, beaming. He gave her the due date and a sheet of instructions. His secretary made her next appointment. Everybody was laughing and happy for her, and she was happy, too, and when she got outside and was close to the station wagon, all she could see was dust and mud caking the wood panels, and she thought of the dust of that empty road, and the dark of that distant woods, and she thought, Noon.

  It’s possible that at noon, my husband will terrify a reporter and run him out of town.

  It’s possible that at noon, my husband will lynch him.

  You didn’t lynch white people. If the boys decided killing was what they needed to do, they’d shoot him, not hang him. But Tommy Senior had said that shooting was too good for MacBurton Ward, and Young Tommy obeyed his daddy.

  She wondered how those Mississippi people had gotten rid of their three bodies. She wondered how the boys would get rid of MacBurton Ward’s. But she probably knew. Way back beyond that oak was a deep woods where no doubt the boys had hunted.

  She drove faster.

  She tried to think of the joy of having a baby. Mother Eleanor wanted a girl because there was so much shopping and matching of colors and knitting of sweet little hats. But Tommy would be disappointed in a girl.

  Her heart raced like the V-8 engine. By now they’d have picked up Ward. By now they’d be driving down that lane. They’d be in their trucks. What would they wear? Street clothes? Sheets?

  Why had Tommy taken her and the Corvette out there Sunday afternoon? So she would know? So she would be part of it? So they would be linked forever in silence?

  She thought about God. Her pastor used to say to the youth group, If you have to keep silent about it, don’t do it.

  Lord, Lord.

  There would be a lot of guns. Every pickup had a gun rack. Tommy Senior and his brother, Ev, had taken Tommy and Haven hunting as soon as they were big enough to lift a shotgun. Hunting seasons marked out their year as surely as Thanksgiving and Christmas marked out hers.

  She thought of the doctor’s instructions. Stay peaceful and calm. No extra exertion. Be careful on stairs. Walk daily at a reasonable pace. Don’t get too much sun. Drink milk.

  She thought, My baby’s father will be a murderer.

  She actually screamed, and her own scream frightened her even more than she was already frightened. She rolled the window all the way down to let the wind whip over her face and through her hair and maybe cleanse her thoughts.

  I knew all along. Tommy wanted me to know. And also not to know.

  She was sobbing now, driving too fast to fish around in her pocketbook for a hanky. She used her sleeve.

  My baby’s father will be a murderer.

  She found the scary rural lane and ripped down it. The Country Squire hardly noticed the ruts that had threatened the Corvette. She had the windows open so she could breathe, but dust clouds swept through and choked her.