It had been Pete’s idea to move Bell to Nacogdoches so she could jump two grades and enroll in the new integrated high school out here as a senior.
“Jump grades?” Darren said.
“Your mother was brilliant,” Pete said, nodding. He tapped his cigarette against the metal arm of the chair, sending a rain of gray ash onto the porch floor.
“My mother?” Darren said, as if Pete had said she flew clouds for a living.
He’d never heard his mother spoken of this way. He leaned against the porch railing, trying to read the knowing smile on Pete’s face as his uncle said, “You too young to appreciate the promise of integration, what it dangled in front of us, the doors we were all sure it would open. And did, for a while. Of course, Texas was slow as molasses with it. Your mother was already taking classes past her grade level, might have made valedictorian at Lincoln, the colored high school where we grew up, but that was with old books falling apart, castoffs from the white schools in Houston or Tyler or Dallas. The Texas Department of Education would ship whatever they had lying around and left over to the colored schools. We was the last stop before the trash bin.”
Darren got a sudden image of Sera Fuller’s belongings tossed in a dumpster behind a sorority house. It rattled him still, the lingering question of where the girl was.
“Your mother and me,” Pete went on, “we was the two always trying to walk a straight line, more so than our brothers, more so than either of our parents. Never got in trouble, never had no run-ins with sheriff’s deputies. And Bell, like I said, she was real smart, all As. On every little committee they had. She could have been somebody. A teacher, sure. That was the lane for black folks back then. Office job somewhere, if you were lucky. But maybe she could have even gone past all that. She could write, she liked science, wasn’t nothing that girl couldn’t do.” Darren remembered then his mother saying that Sera Fuller had reminded her of herself at that age, a thing that at the time he couldn’t imagine, flat out didn’t believe was more than a line. But here was her older brother saying Darren’s mother had been a keen student, a girl with a bright future for herself. “I wanted to get her to a better school,” Pete said, ashamed to admit he thought that white meant “better.” “It’s what we was all told was gon’ be better for all of us. So, yes, when I heard they had finally integrated the high school in Nacogdoches, I got a job here, doing any old thing I could.” He took another drag on his smoke. Darren waited through the exhale. Mainly because he didn’t know what to say.
Pete had described such an act of uncomplicated generosity that Darren kept trying to turn it on its side, to see it from another angle, a way that Bell had played Pete or the other way around. It was all Darren had ever known about the Callis family.
This story matched none of the tales he’d heard about his mother’s family from the uncles who’d raised him, William and Clayton. Clayton, especially — who held the whole lot of them, but Bell in particular, in contempt, ever pressing upon Darren the necessity of spiriting him away as a baby. But Pete was now painting a story of sibling love and devotion, of the sort that Clayton and his twin brother, William, hadn’t been able to sustain when both had been alive. They’d had an irreparable rift, first over a woman — Naomi, who had chosen William over Clayton (and then, in a messy East Texas soap opera, returned to Clayton years after William’s death). The second and final rift between the brothers was over the fact that William chose to become a Texas Ranger. A career in law enforcement was something that Clayton, a black criminal defense attorney, couldn’t abide. The brothers were not even speaking at the time of William’s death, in the line of duty; had not in years looked into the truest mirror of themselves. The break between the two father figures in Darren’s life had cleaved his world in two, further compounded by William’s sudden death years later. The one-two punch of it had broken Darren’s heart. It was after William’s death that bourbon became a daily companion. His mother might have given him his first beer. But the break between his uncles and the loss of the man he looked up to more than any other had poured Darren his first whiskey. And now he was learning that Bell had quit booze so she could take care of the big brother who’d tried so many years ago to take care of her — to give his sister what, as he said, they all thought was the best that the country had to offer. A white school, clean books. A future where your government was on your side, wanted the best for you and yours. He looked at his uncle Pete, smoking in silence, as Darren ran through the pieces of Pete’s story of sacrifice. Sweeping floors, Bell had said.
Worth it, Pete said now.
“Got what job I could out here at a lumber mill. Till they shut down, merged with a company out to Georgia and such.”
Darren again read the name on Pete’s ancient T-shirt: HILL LUMBER CO.
The name tickled something in the back of Darren’s mind.
Both men grew quiet as another car passed on Lanana, its lights sweeping across their faces. Darren felt something had been swirling in the back of his throat since he’d arrived at Pete’s, a heady question that had lodged there, begging to be asked.
“Did you really meet my father?”
“Duke?” Pete smiled.
He tossed the cigarette onto the porch floor and stubbed it out with the toe of one of his slippers. They were gray and brown, worn almost flat at the heels. “Told you you look just like him. Not the height. That you get from me and your mama’s side. Every Callis I ever knew was tall. But it’s in the face, your eyes. They bear down, intense-like, just like your daddy. And it’s a light behind ’em too. Plus it’s just a feeling I get off of you. Duke, he was a good kid, lot of promise, and he had a good heart. Some of that I can just feel coming off you, son. Same as I saw in your daddy.”
Darren had never thought of himself as having a daddy.
Oh, he had a father, for sure. Someone had made him.
But no daddy had ever kissed him good night, no mother either.
“He would have got a kick out of you,” Pete said, reading his mind.
Darren felt a bloom in his chest, a rush of warmth spreading through his body.
“The truck, boots, and all that, shit-kicking these fools out here.” Pete reached for the pack of smokes on his leg but needed some help fishing out another with only one hand, help Darren wasn’t inclined to give. Pete sighed. “I wish he hadn’t gone there.”
“Vietnam?”
“I’d have gone for him if he’d have, if he’d… if he’d just asked me,” Pete said, verbally stumbling as he reached for words, emotion clogging pathways in his brain. “I could have gone.”
Darren nodded, though he didn’t entirely understand. “Did you get called up too?”
Pete grew quiet again.
He caressed the outside of the package of cigarettes, flipping the lid open and then closing it over and over, the sound a soft scratching in the dark, like a cat begging to be let in for the night. Inside, Darren heard the television. He wondered if his mother had settled onto the couch, her proclaimed bed for the night. He wondered if he would end up staying here tonight.
“Called up where?” Pete said, confused now.
Darren pinched his eyebrows together, no longer sure that he and Pete were still on the same road in their conversation, still heading in the same direction.
“Vietnam. Where my father was killed. You just said you knew him —”
“Of course I knew him,” Pete said. “Boy lived in this house for six months.”
12.
“OR MAYBE it was a few weeks he stayed here… or a few nights. I don’t always remember everything these days. But he was here, had to have been,” Pete said, his voice sounding strong, clear where his recollection was admittedly hazy. Darren suggested that the older man might be tired — or confused — and patted his knee.
Pete swatted it away, vexed at being treated like an overtired child.
“Naw, I remember them two.”
According to Pete, Darren’s parents had met at Lincoln High School in Coldspring, the only colored secondary school in San Jacinto County. Duke was two years ahead of Bell, and though he knew of her, had seen her around, something happened in his final year when Bell was bumped up two grades in English, and they were suddenly in the same class together. Duke liked the looks of her, always had, he’d confessed to her older brother, the only Callis brother to properly grill his little sister’s suitor. She was slim with sharp features, had skin the color of burned butter, and when she threw her head back laughing, the length of her neck was leonine and strong. But it was when he heard her talk, really talk — when he got to be in her presence for at least an hour a day, five days a week, in English class — that he felt his world start to tilt on its axis. It was the sweet, flute-like sound of her voice but also the no-nonsense way she talked about Steinbeck, a cat she claimed knew a thing or two about the real world, knew what it meant to be poor. “And we were,” Pete said. “Dirt poor.” No land, neither of his parents with more than a third-grade education because their parents had been sharecroppers and had them in the corn and cotton fields by age eight, everybody taking a row, so the family wouldn’t end each year upside down. Hard work that never led anywhere, except to a third generation that by then didn’t see the point of it. His brothers had all turned to a life of petty crime to get by, and as their mama’s and daddy’s bodies gave out after years of hard labor, with no safety net or savings, they too felt a rigged system no longer deserved or even demanded their respect. Pete’s brothers — Cleveland, John David, and Dwayne — started fencing and selling stolen goods to get by.
“Duke come from money, far as we was concerned,” Pete said.
But Bell never hid where she come from, he added.
In fact, when Duke took to asking could he walk her home after school, “she made a point to have him walk her all the way up to our raggedy door.” And Duke didn’t act like it fazed him at all. In fact, since he’d grown up in fields himself, picking cotton on land his people owned, mind you, he had tremendous respect for Bell’s parents, would never have faulted them for their fatigue, as he knew what farming did to a body, could imagine what it did to a soul if you were losing money faster than you had time left on the planet. Duke walking Bell home started to stretch into long afternoons of the two of them talking on her back porch, which looked out on a patch of dirt and an outhouse. She lit up his mind, he’d said, made him think a little differently about the way he’d been raised, the gifts he’d been given unearned, made him want to share his bounty. “Plus, my God, she’s pretty, man,” Duke told Pete. She was a shot of light right to the center of his soul. She’d lit a fire in him. “You’d have to ask her what made her fall in with Duke,” Pete said, looking up at Darren in the dark. “I just seem to remember he was there one day, and they was each all the other would ever talk about. I don’t know that I ever seen two young people fall in love that hard. And that’s what it was, Darren. Your parents were very much in love. Despite what all you mighta heard.” He meant from the two men who’d raised Darren, Clayton especially.
