East is East

Abercorn wanted to hear about the incident at the store—and he wanted more too on that first night on Peagler Sound: What did the Nip look like? how tall was he? did he attack without provocation?—and Saxby obliged him, all the while tinkering with the engine, checking the starter plug, the spare gas tank and the coil of the starter cord. Right in the middle of the store incident, just as Saxby was getting to the good part—how the Japanese guy bundled up his junk food and lowered his shoulder like a fullback and shot past him out the door—Abercorn interrupted him. “You know—could I ask you something?” he said.

Ask him something? Wasn’t that what he was doing?

“Something personal, I mean.”

Saxby fiddled with the engine. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“It’s your accent. I mean, I’m from L.A., and everybody down here sounds like they just stepped out of Dogpatch or something—no offense—but you don’t have it. You are from around here, right?”

It was a question he’d been asked a thousand times, and the answer was equivocal: he was and he wasn’t. He’d been born in Savannah, yes, and he was heir to half the island, even if he did talk like a Yankee. But the reason he talked like a Yankee was that he’d spent half his life—the formative half—in New York and Massachusetts. That was his father’s doing. Grandfather Saxby wasn’t even cold yet in the grave when Marion Lights uprooted Septima and her year-old son and moved them up to Ossining, New York, on the Hudson River. The family had from time immemorial owned a controlling interest in a big antiquated factory there that produced yeast, margarine, gin, vodka and the callowest whiskey known to man. Till Marion came along, the family had been content to manage the place from afar, but he had different ideas. He gave over the administration of the Tupelo Island estate (which was then called Cardross, after Cardross Lights, founder of the original plantation that had managed to survive intact through six generations of Lights, drought, flood, capricious cotton prices, carpetbaggers, boll weevils and a host of ravenous developers from the mainland) to a wily old former overseer by the name of Crawford Sheepwater, and moved north to become a Captain of Industry.

Saxby was staring at Abercorn, who’d paused to glance up from his notebook and frame the question, but he was seeing his father, that willful and supremely depressed man. Or at least he became depressed as the years of his exile wore on and he didn’t exactly unseat the Rockefellers, Morgans and Harrimans. In the beginning he was almost manic with enthusiasm—when Saxby was six, seven, eight, he saw his father as a whirlwind, larger than life, a Pecos Bill or a Paul Bunyan. He was a flushed face over dinner, a set of tweed shoulders to ride on, a lover of trains and odd jokes. Saxby, he would say, in his rich deep Southern Gentleman’s tones,

you see that dog out there?, and he’d point to a shepherd or beagle cavorting across the lawn and Saxby would nod. That dog’s from Ohio, Saxby, he would say, and no matter how many times he’d heard the joke—and he never got it, not till his father was long dead and gone—Saxby would say, How do you know?,

and his father, in the tone of a professor addressing a room of veterinary students, would reply, Why, because he has an O under his tail.

And then later, just before he locked himself in the back pantry of the big gray-and-white Victorian overlooking the Hudson, he would wander in and out of rooms, an antic gleam in his eye, and announce, no matter the situation or the company or how many times he’d announced it already, that “cunt was cunt.” That was his formula. He’d look up from his soup, glance cannily round at the guests and clap his hands together. You know what I say, he’d announce, pausing to look Septima in the eye, cunt’s cunt, that’s what I say. And then he locked himself in the back pantry when Saxby and his mother were out shopping and the maid had gone home, locked himself up with a bottle of the cheap whiskey he manufactured for the cheap drunks of this great country and enough Seconal to put his board of directors to sleep for a month.