Safe from the Neighbors Read Online Free Page A

think he prevailed, though in fact I don’t remember. What I do recall precisely is the moment when I once again heard that word.
    “It’s
public
land, James, and I’ve got to do this for me and my family. If I can’t expand, I can’t borrow. Banks lend on the basis of how many acres you’re farming. Benighted as that kind of thinking may be, that’s how they are. You know that just as well as I do. In the end, what’s going to ruin us all is labor costs. Time’s coming when we’ll be paying folks six dollars a day to chop cotton. Only answer I see’s increased mechanization, but who’s got the money to buy new equipment?”
    My father, as I have said, was a tall man, a shade under six-foot-four. He eventually put on a lot of weight, his belly began to pull his back and shoulders forward, and when he walked he always looked as if he were just about to step through a low doorway. But at this point in his life he was still thin. Lanky, people said.
    Though a couple inches shorter, I’m no midget. So I can tell you that when a tall man’s unwilling to meet a shorter man’s gaze, he’s got three options. He can look past the crown of theother guy’s head, as if he were studying the horizon. Or he can glance from side to side, like he was on the witness stand and trying to avoid the eyes of the DA. Or else he can stare at the ground—knowing just how pitiful it looks when somebody his height does that.
    My father availed himself of all three, first pondering a distant Texaco sign. Then cutting his gaze from left to right and back. Finally hanging his head, his cheeks turning from pink to red to purple while Eugene and I stood silently by, aware that something had just changed between our fathers but not fully understanding what it was.
    “No hard feelings, I hope,” Mr. Calloway said. “I sure won’t have any, regardless how it all plays out.” Then he offered his hand.
    For a moment I thought my dad would refuse to shake it. There was plenty I didn’t know, but I intuited that refusing to grasp a man’s extended hand was a decision of enormous import, one with the power to alter lives—of the four of us standing there, and of my mom, Eugene’s mom and his sister, Maggie.
    What I couldn’t imagine was the degree to which certain gestures—shaking hands, smiling and saying good morning, opening a door for another person, slapping somebody on the back or throwing your arm around his shoulder—could hide, for a time, the riot that raged inside.
    It was almost as if my father willed the blood to flow out of his cheeks, his color returning to something near normal. He raised his head, reached out and shook Mr. Calloway’s hand. There in the lot outside Sturdivant’s Barbershop, on a sunny September morning in 1962, he said, “Arlan, we just won’t let it come between us.”
    And at that Mr. Calloway grinned and slapped Dad’s back.

B Y A CERTAIN POINT , sex between Jennifer and me had become—to risk a pun—grindingly predictable. This development coincided with the growth of our daughters, whose bedrooms were across the hall from ours. When they were small, they fell asleep early. We still had our evenings left, and usually made the most of them, having a drink or two on the couch while watching a movie, then heading off to bed, where things progressed pretty much as they had in the backseat of my old Galaxy on various back roads in the vicinity of Oxford. But as the girls grew older, they were the ones who stayed up, listening to music, talking on their cell phones or banging around in the bathroom, and this made Jennifer reticent. If I touched her suggestively in bed, she’d usually whisper, “Let’s wait till morning.” But when morning came we’d be in a hurry, and if we did make love it was often rushed. After a while it turned into more of a duty, and I think both of us stopped looking forward to it. Finally, we more or less quit.
    I imagine similar circumstances prevail for many