Don't You Ever by Mary Carter Bishop

Author:Mary Carter Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

13

We Get Acquainted

Ronnie turned thirty-six in 1971.

That year, I wrote “See Ronnie” in my datebook more than sixteen times. But I didn’t go. On my 1988 calendar, I wrote his name in capital letters, with stars. I still didn’t go.

I was busy, and it was hard to hear about my tenderhearted mother being so cruel to him.

My guilt mounted, and finally I started seeing him again. I went to the barbershop four more times over the next year or so. As soon as I came through the door, he’d launch into a rambling gush of story fragments and observations. He jumped from subject to subject—local pizza joints to British royalty, Vinton politics to camera lenses. He lectured me. He’d saved up insights to share with me. He was desperate to talk.

He threw college-boy words at me—“elitist,” “fatalist,” “utopia”—and urged me to study fifteenth-century English history as he had. Only then could I fully comprehend Virginia’s pompous past. Yet his knowledge about all that seemed spotty, like a quilt missing squares. Not surprising for an eighth-grade dropout whose early schooling kept being interrupted. Still, he possessed an eager mind.

He’d visited the graves of our grandparents in country cemeteries. He’d researched the blue-blooded owners of Keswick’s oldest farms. Studying the backgrounds of people from his past helped him figure out where he fit in. “That’s how I found myself,” he said with pride, to underscore that he had put himself in context, and nobody had helped him.

He didn’t come right out and say it, but I could tell he was proud of me. He’d been following my newspaper stories. I’d won national awards and was a Pulitzer finalist for a series about how exterminators were poisoning and defrauding people. “You’re the only one of us who’s amounted to anything,” he told me between haircuts. Sad as that statement was, at least he considered himself to be in the family “us.” Every time I saw him, I wanted to cry, but not in front of him. To do that would make me more a part of his life than I was comfortable with, at least not yet.

I did what I’d learned to do as a journalist: I listened. By then, I’d been a reporter more than twenty years. I’d written about colorful strangers of all sorts in several states and cities. Ronnie was the greatest enigma of them all.

He’d lived in Virginia all his life, yet he didn’t sound all that Southern. He boomed on and on in a cynical Godfather patois. Everything was a caper. Everybody was on the make. Men were jokers, cats, and bozos. Women were sirens if they were good-looking, squaws if they weren’t. Ronnie didn’t drive his car. He wheeled his unit.

Then one day he told me that in his first barbering job, the immigrant businessmen nearby mentored him. They were from Northern cities. They became the fathers he needed; they left their imprint on him, I could hear it.

“I think the Democrats are going to nominate Jesse Jackson,” I announced to him cheerfully one day in 1988.

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