Read Online Outer Banks by Russell Banks - Free Book Online Page B

encouraging his son to hunt alligators in the swamps with Negroes.
    â€œBut he’s only a boy, ” I would plead.
    â€œA boy’s only a small man,” he would explain to me.
    I was no less concerned over Rex’s enthusiasm for Bif’s adventures in sports—Little League baseball, Pop Warner football, playing for two or three different teams at a time, day and night, throwing, batting, and kicking balls, sobbing exhausted and disconsolate whenever his team had failed to humiliate the other.
    6.
    When our third son was born, I named him Rory, after Rex’s father, and determined to protect him, if possible, from the several influences of his father that I was fast learning to be frightened of.
    As aspects of his whole personality, Rex’s fierce competitive pride, his love of sports and danger, and his occasional, dark fascination with solitude did not in any way alarm me. But in our sons, one or another and sometimes several of these aspects became dominant, intimidating, and, eventually, I feared, killing the milder, sweeter traits which, in Rex, made me love him—his tenderness, his shyness, his naiveté, and his insecurity.
    Immediately, it seemed, Rex sensed my protectiveness toward Rory, and he subtly undermined me, encouraging and thereby instilling in his youngest son yet another negative aspect of his own personality.
    â€œYou’re like your mother,” he would tell him. “All emotions. Now, your mother is a wonderful woman, and I’m pleased that one of my sons is like her, so don’t go thinking I’m putting you down, son.”
    But of course poor Rory thought his father was rejecting him, so the only emotion he allowed himself to feel with passion was anger, raging, explosive anger, even as a child.
    7.
    Thus it was with deeply mixed emotions that I watched my husband in his Air Force major’s uniform stride down the steps of our blue mobile home, cross the pebbled driveway to the white convertible waiting for him at the curb, pausing a second at the sidewalk to give Bif’s soccer ball a friendly boot into the goal in the side yard. And then, flinging his flight bag into the back seat, he jumped into the low-slung car without opening the door and signaled to the lieutenant to take off, which, with a great roar of exhausts and squealing of tires, the lieutenant did.
    Little did I know that I would never see my husband, my beloved Rex, again. If I had known it, or even had suspected it (I was so enthralled with the man that I imagined him winning the war quickly and returning home in a season), I never would have allowed myself to feel the wave of relief that swept over me as he drove away. I did not then understand that feeling, and naturally I felt terrible for having it, as if I were an evil woman. Rex had made my life possible. Without him, I had no reason for living. I knew that I loved him deeply. Why, then, did I feel this hatred for him?
    8.
    Happily, the feeling swiftly went away, and I began to miss Rex awfully. I stayed up late night after night writing long, amorous letters to him (one thing about my Rex, he was a marvelouslover). My days were busier than ever, taken up completely with the boys and my housekeeping.
    Then, one night late that summer, I was startled from my letter-writing by a telephone call from the Tampa hospital. There had been a terrible accident, the doctor told me, on the causeway between St. Petersburg and Tampa, and my mother and father, who had driven over to look at a new Golden Age planned community, had been killed. I quickly got my friend Judy from the trailer next door to baby-sit and took a bus to Tampa, as the doctor had suggested, to identify my poor mother and father.
    â€œYes,” I sobbed, “it’s they!”
    The doctor, a kind, handsome, young man with a blond moustache, comforted me by holding me in his arms. “There, there,” he said, “you’ll be all right. They went