Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [5]
Some kids were yelling, “Kill him! Kill him!” Others were quiet, watching like I was. Some of the girls covered their eyes or turned their heads away. Four cops plowed their way through us. The first one pulled his billy club and hooked it under the man’s chin and jerked him off Russ Bowman. The second and third cops pushed the man face-first into a desk, and a fourth cop was reaching for his cuffs and yelling at us all to beat it. “Beat it!”
On my way out with the rest, I glanced back at Bowman. He was on his knees, his hair in his face, his nose and split lips dripping blood. He was staring down at the floor like he’d been waiting for this and now it had finally happened; he looked relieved.
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MY MOTHER AND father were each the youngest children of their families, and they were both raised in southern Louisiana. Mom had one older sister. Pop had two. His father had worked for Gulf States Utilities Company, and when our father was old enough he’d sometimes drive out to a bayou and go surveying with him, his French father wearing high boots and a .22 pistol strapped to his belt for snakes. Pop’s mother was from a big Irish family in Lafayette. Her father was a state senator descended from the Irish statesman Edmund Burke. At one time my great-grandfather had been asked to run against Huey Long, but he refused because he feared Long’s political machine would try to soil his family’s name. His wife, my great-grandmother, was descended from Admiral Perry, Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, and Helene DeLauné, a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette who, on the day of the queen’s beheading, fled with some of the silver. Over the years, it had been passed down through the male family line. When I was in my twenties, I would pull one of these spoons from my father’s garbage disposal where it had slipped from the morning’s cereal bowl and been mangled. “Pop,” I said, “isn’t this shit valuable?”
“Not to me, son.”
OUR MOTHER’S father was Elmer Lamar Lowe, a man who’d never gone further than the third grade. At sixteen he’d been a foreman for a gang of gandy dancers, grown men laying railroad tracks under the sun, singing cadence as they swung sledgehammers and drove spikes into ties, fastening scalding iron rails that flashed brightly as they heaved the next length ahead of them. During the Great Depression, he was making sixty-five dollars a day setting bridge piers in the swirling depths of the Mississippi. He wore a diving bell suit, a thin air hose running from his helmet to the surface. A lot of men died doing this, but he went on to build power plants for big companies, bringing electricity to people throughout the south and even to Mexico. Our mother’s mother had Welsh, Scottish, and Apache blood, a family of rice farmers and mule skinners, men who used their mules and rope to haul boats of supplies along shallow waterways.
I knew little of any of these things until I was grown. Nor did I know that in the late fifties my father’s older sister Beth taught at St. Charles Academy, a convent school in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she was a lay teacher. One of her English students was the freshman queen and homecoming queen, Patricia Lowe, a honey-haired beauty who was smart and polite and had so much presence that when she smiled at you it felt as if no one had ever smiled at you before: my future mother. As a junior she was already engaged to James Wayne, a piney woods boy from Rapides Parish, but James was in the army, and when he shipped off to Panama, Beth pulled my mother aside one day and said, “You can’t marry James Wayne, you have to meet my brother Andre.”
My mother had already heard of Andre Dubus. She’d read one of his articles in the local paper where he’d argued for integration, something she believed in deeply as well. She said she would meet him and when he called that winter told him she was going squirrel hunting up in Rapides Parish but that she could see him sometime after Christmas. He seemed intrigued by that, this pageant winner off in the woods with a loaded gun.
As a student at