Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [28]
“I’m sure she wouldn’t make it a habit. This was a special occasion.”
“It makes no difference. Carolyn doesn’t belong at Thirteenth and Prospect any more than you or I do. Those people resent us.”
32 Summer in Georgia
In July of that year a weekly news magazine printed a photograph of a lynching. The Negro was chained to a tree. He was naked to the waist and his back was crisscrossed with the marks of a lash. Around him stood a crowd of whites. Mrs. Bridge, when she saw this picture, was stunned; she carried the magazine to her husband and inquired in a faint, bewildered voice: “What on earth makes people behave that way?”
The picture irritated him because its publication was unnecessary, but he concealed his reaction. He studied the contorted body and the glistening black face. Then he examined the crowd. There appeared to be at least fifty men—mostly farmers, to judge from the overalls—armed with clubs and guns, and quite a number of boys. Most of the men were grinning. Several of the boys had struck comic poses for the camera. The photograph evoked a sense of the South: he could nearly feel the oppressive heat and hear the hoots of laughter and the jokes and shouts and lewd suggestions as the lash went whistling through the air and exploded against the Negro’s skin, the cheers and the clapping, the barking dogs, and the guns popping wildly in the pine forest.
Suddenly he remembered that his wife had spoken; he blinked, glanced up, and discovered her staring at him with a frightened expression.
“There are many fine people in the South,” he said. “What did this fellow do?” He placed his index finger on the Negro’s head. “Tell me, what was this fellow doing that he shouldn’t have been doing? I have spent a certain amount of time in the South. I once spent several days in Atlanta and I never met more courteous people.”
33 Underground
That was the summer a group of neighborhood boys dug a cave in one of the vacant lots. Douglas was not allowed to dig, presumably because he was too young to be granted such a privilege, but after the cave was finished he was sometimes permitted inside. Mr. Bridge did not altogether like this, and one Sunday he decided to have a look at the cave. He thought he could locate the entrance, because Douglas had described how it was camouflaged.
As he was walking along the street toward the vacant lot he began thinking about his own boyhood. He remembered how important it had been to have a cave, or a platform in the fork of a tree, or a shack to use as a clubhouse, and how necessary it was to keep the entrance hidden or locked. More time had been spent on locks and burglar alarms than on anything else. He had not thought of these things for a long time, and they began to bring back other memories. He remembered the farm near Joplin where he often went to visit his cousin Reed, and the odor of apples moldering in the orchard, the dried grapevine they tried to smoke, the dying fox they found one evening on the riverbank, the plump and stupid hired girl whose name was Lizzie or Tillie—so many years had passed that he was no longer sure of her name. The nipples of her breasts stood up like raisins beneath her dress. And he could see again his aunt and uncle seated side by side on the swing, gliding calmly to and fro, never speaking, never moving, while bats and barn swallows darted after insects in the summer twilight. Now and then an automobile could be seen bouncing along the dirt road to town, and the ragged sputtering of the motor carried clearly across the silent fields. All of this came back to Mr. Bridge like the unforgotten taste of hard green apples. A generation had passed. Not ten years, or fifteen years. A complete generation.