The Edmunds family clearcut everything around their house to make it look bigger, until it loomed. It was, I knew even at age seventeen, a statement house, and it was a statement I hated. For all of my complaints about my father, and I have many, we shared a distaste for pretensions. Rather, he had distaste. I felt disdain. Disdain drives action.
I could not have articulated what specific thing I sensed, what small shift I unconsciously noticed in him every time we passed that house. Perhaps no more than some slight increase in tension along his forehead. Some inexplicable uneasiness that rose in him whenever we were in the presence of any of the Edmunds family. Or, worse than uneasiness, weakness.
There were three Edmunds kids. Trey, the third in his family to be baptized Clancy Earl Edmunds, was five years older than us. Unlike his dark-haired siblings, his hair gleamed so blond it appeared transparent. He played basketball and was one of two white kids on the high school team. Basketball games were civic events in our small town. Even Baptists and Catholics sat side by side. Not so much whites and Blacks. They kept their aisle apart.
In today’s world, Melissa, the only Edmunds kid who went by her given name, would be more than just the pom-pom waving kind of cheerleader. Lithe movements and quickness revealed her natural athleticism. She looked like a younger version of her mother, the same dark eyes, fair skin, gently curling hair, thin face, pretty. Her appearance was more Irish than mine, despite our names. When she chose to deploy it, she radiated tremendous warmth. Even in passing it bathed you with a feeling of special understanding. But her face could veer from that brightness to cutting severity with unnerving speed. She commanded affection and respect. Perhaps she knew me as her brother’s classmate, only a year behind her in school. Probably she never really noticed me at all.
Last, my age, was small, wiry, Ed E. A nickname some girls, and even some teachers, thought cute. He possessed that tense meanness of undersized boys, which either disperses with age or sharpens as they stunt into small men. He was not stupid, though he was not particularly bright. Clever. Because girls were so enamored with him he also had the attention and envious respect of many boys. Though from the first time I remember meeting him something about him made me wary. He sensed this. He recognized it as an exploitable weakness. At his hands I suffered from countless small acts of aggression, my pencils broken or pushed from my desk, flicks to the ear, even running after me at recess to punch me on the arm. He enjoyed laughing as he walked away from me. I had no capacity to stand up to this, even though I could physically look down on him. He would have destroyed me in a real fight. My biggest problem was that we both knew this. I lost before anything even started.
Finally, my family. My father worked as a structural engineer for a local architectural firm. My mother took care of me and did volunteer work. We were loyal, regular church-goers. They had a small cluster of friends, mostly other people who had not grown up in that insular town. We never saw my father’s family. On occasion we visited my mother’s parents back home, up north in Alexandria, and occasionally they visited our house. Old oak and sweetgum tress shaded our front yard and from the road it could not be seen directly. Due to a lazy neighbor, kudzu had begun its steady destruction of our back woods. My prevailing memories of that house are of the color green, and of the bright smell of air that has recently passed through leaves.
My parents took pride in how they let me handle my own problems. They told me, on the rare occasions I complained, to ignore Ed E. If I ignored him he would go away, they said. If I ignored him long enough he would simply grow out of it. These things did not happen. I got some relief from him in junior high school when they separated us by academic ability and he got shunted into a lower track. We still rode the same bus, so I had to see him, be confronted by him, every morning, and every afternoon. I prayed for him to be sick, and when he was, gave thanks. I offered worse prayers, too, although those went unanswered.
Things shifted further in high school. I scarcely saw Ed E. He played football, or, more accurately, he practiced with the team. No kid his size could get much game time, and he certainly was not going to earn a varsity letter. I ran cross country and track with the other kids who possessed discipline but no coordination. Once he encountered me in the hallways after our respective practices and said he remembered how slowly I used to run away from him in elementary school. He said he guessed maybe I’d be better at it now. I got brave. I tapped the huge G on my letter jacket and smirked and kept walking. My heart beat so hard I could feel it through my neck and ears. I knew it was dangerous to leave him behind me, though nothing happened that day.
Neither of my parents would have praised this newfound display of arrogance. Humility remained a cardinal virtue for them. But by that time I could contrast our small house, our modest circumstances, with my father’s intelligence and realize he lacked some indefinite attribute crucial to success. He did not back down, exactly, from challenges. He just stepped aside. And in thinking about him I came to recognize that I had inherited the same weakness, which I came to view as a frailty to be conquered, overrun with something exemplary, like pride, or honor.
I could have looked a couple of years ahead, when I would be gone from that city, probably even the state, elsewhere in college. I could have known that Ed E’s limitations would trap him in that town for the rest of his life. I could have seen our futures diverging to my advantage. And it was not as if my entire life was linked to his. But circumstance provided me with an opportunity I would not necessarily have sought. Three things occurred in short succession, three unexpected things aligned.
The first happened in the darkened east block hallways, between opposing rows of metal lockers, only a few days after I’d tapped my letter. Ed E. lingered just outside my first period classroom. I went right close to where he stood. I intentionally looked over him, past him, so I didn’t see it coming, the up-angled punch to my stomach. His fist slammed my breath away. Outrun that, he said. A teacher right across the hall, Mr. Cleveland, an enormous man with an unkempt beard, he saw the whole thing and when I looked to him for justice or at least acknowledgement he simply shrugged, said boys will be boys, and went into his room and closed the door. After those few terrible, breathless moments, in which I irrationally thought I might die, I finally drew a breath. It flared red into my lungs. It felt like hate.
Perhaps a month later, after the end of cross country season, my parents set me to cleaning out the far corners of our attic. They had saved everything, as people who worry about money do, boxes of children’s books, my old toys, even wedding gifts they had never used. I also found the cabinet filled with family papers, signed tax forms, which I studied, mementos, certificates, diplomas. The great surprise was a manila envelope containing a series of letters between my father and Clancy Earl Edmunds, Jr. The earliest had our old address from Alexandria. I read them in sequence, with Mr. Edmunds introducing himself, referencing a mutual acquaintance, and encouraging my father to come work for him, urging him to head south, to better weather and lower taxes. There were signed contracts, a congratulatory welcome letter from Mr. Edmunds to my father, and so on. But then the final letter, dated only two months after my father’s start date, included Mr. Edmunds’s official request for my father’s resignation. I found no copy of my father’s response, if he had written one. I had known none of this. Until then I had thought my father had always worked at the architectural firm. My parents had never told me this story. They should have. At seventeen I was old enough to have been told.
Later on I asked my father about this, cautiously and indirectly. Why had they moved here, so far from home? He told me it had been an opportunity he could not refuse, a chance to make their own way in a new place. He told me he had never regretted it for a second. I waited, and waited some more, thinking if I gave him a little more time he might offer something else, something more true, more substantive. Why are you just sitting there? he finally asked. I don’t know, I lied.
I have my own kids now. I know how you make the best decisions you can for them. You let them learn how to toughen themselves. You protect them from those things that you should, you expose them to reasonable risks, to build character and strength. Would I tell my children if such a thing had happened to me? It’s an impossible question to answer. Understanding my father’s weakness kept me wary, and ensured that I would not allow his history to repeat itself in me.
I have heard it said that luck is the residue of practice. In my case it was the dregs of non-confrontational patience. Until late the following spring I had been on one path, a course out of there, free from that entire life, unbeholden, but also unassuaged, some needling desire for revenge poked within me. A single warm afternoon allowed me and perhaps even forced me to address that. I got caught behind a wreck on my way home. To avoid the stalled traffic I turned down a winding side road, following the contours of the earth or long-vanished horse trails, for all I knew, tracing serpentine routes. As I continued I remembered, without consciously thinking about it, that it was a Black neighborhood. More dogs were chained to metal stakes behind linked fences, more trash piled in the ragged yards, all signs of how poorly they’d been treated. So my glimpse of Melissa Edmunds’s car, tucked behind an old pickup truck, came as a surprise.
I turned around at the next intersection. I drove slowly by. I could see nothing through the house’s dark windows. I parked two or three doors up the road, in front of a vacant lot, and watched in the rear view mirror. I have no idea how long I planned to wait, but after only a few minutes Melissa came out the side door, followed by LaVelle, who I recognized from the basketball team. They were talking, smiling. I slouched in my seat to keep them framed inside the mirror’s face. Before she got into her car she leaned up and kissed him on the lips. After I saw that I sat up and drove away. I had forgotten the accident, so I got caught back in that traffic, which provided me with a true excuse when my mom asked me why I was late.
I now possessed something, something of value, something to address our lost honor, with weight enough to balance those invisible scales I monitored within myself.
For several days I simply considered my options. I drove by at the same time of day, moving slowly, to see if her car had returned. And it had, tucked into that barely hidden space. A nearly indescribable feeling surged within me, a pressure of warmth, of confidence, of control so great it compressed my breathing. I can still feel it. It is not a bad feeling. Quite the opposite.
Perhaps I would have done nothing, perhaps I would have lost my nerve, perhaps I would have been distracted by something else, despite my lurking desire to inflict some meaningful revenge. Sometimes I actually envisioned a real scale, with tiny grains of sand on it. The pile of grains that represented my knowledge, of my pending departure, of Melissa’s transgression, or Ed E.’s lack of prospects, all that on one side, precisely countered the weight of all the cumulative humiliation I, we, had suffered at the hands of the Edmunds. Balanced, balanced precisely, balanced precariously.
Leaving track practice the next day, trapped in a line of cars, all the kids trying to depart through the same single-lane exit, waiting, idling, windows down, yelling at each other as teenage boys do. The football team finished their spring drills and started passing through our cars on their way to the locker room. People started honking. Guys flipped us off and banged their pads against our bumpers. Ed E., though, trailing the group, paused beside me. I watched him. At that moment, safe inside my car, I felt no particular concern. He ducked his head, and his chin tucked into his chest, his eyes bulged, and for a moment I actually thought he was choking, and for a moment I actually felt some anxious sympathy for him. Then he spat an enormous mouthful of phlegm on my passenger window. He laughed, thumped my hood with his hand, and waved. The sickly mess slowly eased down the glass.
That did it. I drove directly to where I knew Melissa would be. I saw her car. I continued on to an isolated gas station. Wind smeared the spit and snot in a nauseating viscous pattern across my window. I fished out a dime from the change in the ashtray and went to the payphone. I found the Edmunds’s home number in the tattered phone book. I dialed. It rang once, twice, three times, four times, and then Mrs. Edmunds answered. Hello? she asked.
You know where Melissa is? I asked. I exaggerated a drawl, an unnatural accent to me, and raised my voice an octave. She’s sleeping with a nigger, I said. I gave the address. I could hear her cough and then try and say something and so I said, loudly, you had better write that down. You had better tell Clancy about it, I told her. I repeated the address. Then I hung up, gently setting the heavy black plastic receiver into its shining silver cradle.
For a brief moment I felt as if I had done something wrong, though of course I had done nothing illegal. I hurried to my car and drove home. I hosed off Ed E.’s spit, and then rinsed off the dust, the red dust from the crummy roads out where Melissa had been, the hint of gray dust from the gas station’s gravel parking lot. I coiled the hose and put it back. I got my books, my gym bag. I went inside, like I did every weekday. Perhaps I was fifteen minutes later than usual. Nothing that anyone would notice.
The next afternoon Ed E. passed me in the empty stairway beside the chemistry labs. He feigned a punch and I flinched. Pussy, he called me, the ess sound more sibilant than hissing, one word, impotent and flailing. But he did not hit me. I immediately realized why. He was not going to touch me, not there, with no audience. He would gain nothing from it.
By then I could possibly have fought him, I had developed enough meanness, perhaps even to a draw. But that had become unnecessary. I had already realigned everything, obliterated the need for a fight. It’s disgraceful, I said, calmly, about your sister. I heard all about it. Disgraceful, I said again, and then I said the word a third time. Disgraceful, truly sickening. He stood stilled, blinking, quivering. I walked past him, though even then I did not quite dare to brush his shoulder.
Even in those days before cell phones, before the internet, it was still a small town, and news jerked along its own network. Our phone rang that night, and I heard my father answer, and then pause to listen. I sat at the kitchen table completing my pre-calculus homework. Sin, cosine, tangents. Knowledge all lost to me now. I noted something unusual in my father’s tone, an unexpected heaviness, and I listened more closely. Yes, he said. I understand. Oh, absolutely. I appreciate the advance notice. Then he hung up.
My father called my mother downstairs. I felt a sudden jolt of worry that I had been caught. Though anyone could make an anonymous call. I had told no lies. My father came into the kitchen and looked at me, without accusation, I saw, but with something else. Sadness. Weariness. He sat across from me, and my mother sat beside him. What? she asked. What’s happened?
He reached across the table and touched my hand. He started to talk and then shook his head. There’s no easy way to begin a story like this, he said. So. I just learned that one of your classmates has been seriously injured, in some kind of riot. Apparently Clancy Edmunds’ daughter was seeing a Black boy, he said, and somehow her father heard about it. He took both his boys and a few others out to the Black boy’s house and found her there. He shook his head again. Oh my God, my mother said, and she put her hand over her mouth.
There was an altercation, as you might expect, my father continued. It sounds like the Black boy was pretty badly beaten. As it was happening, his neighbors turned out in force. They did a job on the Edmunds boy. He thinned his lips as he shook his head again, looked at my mother, and then looked at me.
Which Edmunds boy? I asked. The oldest, my dad said. Some unusual expression must have passed my face. If it reflected my feelings it would certainly have appeared strange to my father. I had nothing specifically against Trey. I was just sorry it wasn’t Ed E.
My father simply waited, watching me, for a long time, thirty seconds, even, and after I said nothing, he started talking again. The girl is fine and so is the younger boy, your classmate, he said to me, he’s all right. Apparently Trey drove back from college for this. It’s all going to be in the newspaper tomorrow. They called so I could fill you in, he said to me. To make sure you and your friends are prepared for school. It might be nasty. This is going to ruin some people’s lives, he said. He paused again.
I can’t imagine asking you to come with me to inflict violence on someone, he said to me. To do something so foolish and ineffectual. I mean, surely the moment Clancy left his house he had to know no good would come of this. Lord knows I have never seen eye to eye with that man, but to go and do something like this. And with that his voice faded away.
They’re not good people, I said. The Edmunds family. They’re not. They deserved this. My mother stared at me, then shook her head in very small movements, then looked down and away. Not my father. He dropped his chin to study me more closely. I knew what he was thinking. I knew he was trying to decide how to argue with me. It is probably best he didn’t try. Nothing he could have said would have changed my mind.
He was a good man, my father. I know that. I knew it even then. But I had learned something he had not. I had moved past him. I waited until finally he said, well, finish your homework and get off to bed. For the briefest of moments I thought there might be some repercussion for what I had said, perhaps even some meaningful consequence for me, though none ever came. I thought that my saying that aloud meant he would realize I had set this into motion, though of course there was no reason he could have ever guessed such a thing. So he only sighed and reached to squeeze my mother’s hand. Then he stood and left the room.
I heard him, later that night, talking to my mother. I can’t think of the right word, he said to her. Frustration? Anger? Disappointment? Maybe all of them. After all this time. He’s turned out to be just like his grandfather. Who he’s never even met. What more was I supposed to do? he asked her. All those Sundays in church, for nothing. All our kindness and care, talking about the right way to do things. He stopped talking then but I could picture him shaking his head.
He was still missing that crucial strength, the core of honor. He would never understand that I helped right the scales for him, too, since he lacked the capacity to do it for himself. Everyone got what they deserved in the end. Everything happened like it should have, and like I wanted. I don’t regret accelerating it. Fair is fair. Disgrace deserves revenge. Honor matters.
