Bootlegger’s Daughter

A Closed sign hung on the door, but Michael’s gray Ford pickup and De

As I pulled into a space next to the truck, a medium-sized dog trotted over, jumped up into the bed of the pickup, and gazed at us with friendly alertness. She was a black-and-tawny brindle, a Lab crossed with Doberman maybe, with a little touch of setter somewhere down the line. Her thin tail whipped the air as she welcomed us. I tapped my horn, countrywise, to signal visitors, and eventually Michael waved from the barn door that he’d be right with us.

Michael Vickery must have been a sore trial to his parents.

To his parents? Hell, he must have a been a sore trial to himself.

Down here where males are men and females are supposed to be their comfort and pleasure, it had to’ve been hard coming to terms with who and what he was. God knows he tried to play the role assigned to him by birth and sex because God also knows (indeed His spokesmen still thunder that message from every evangelical pulpit) that this state’s never been all that tolerant of open homosexuality.

Colleton County ’s no longer as provincial as it used to be. The Triangle’s gay community is too large and too deliberately visible for us to pretend it only exists in California or New York (or even Chapel Hill, long considered Sodom and Gomorrah South by most of the state’s conservatives). Oprah, Phil, and Dr. Ruth are on every television screen, so we even know that one doesn’t willfully choose to be a homosexual. That doesn’t mean that we don’t feel enormous sympathy for a neighbor if that neighbor’s child comes out of the closet, and it doesn’t mean there’s not a lifted eyebrow or salacious derision behind the same neighbor’s back.

Nevertheless, Michael Vickery and De

Back in the fall of 1972 though, even money and family prominence hadn’t provided the grudging tolerance now given. There’d been midnight drive-bys with drunken yells, hurled bottles, and some poorly aimed shotgun blasts. A couple of better-placed shots from Michael’s Winchester bought him back a little respect, and the night-riding pretty much stopped after Daddy let it be known up at the crossroads store that he didn’t appreciate that kind of ruckus in his neighborhood.

Michael was in his midforties now. He’d studied art at Yale, tried painting in Paris and sculpting in New York, and finally came on back home to Cotton Grove. Maybe he got tired of wondering in alien corn. Not that he’s ever struck me as a professional Southerner. Or an overly effete artist either. When he first came home to stay, it soon got around that he was going to dig clay out of the banks of Possum Creek and make ceramic statues. No one actually accused him of pla

“His sisters must of got his share of the family balls,” I heard Daddy tell Mother, but that didn’t stop me from mooning over him briefly that spring when Gayle was first born and I’d stop by to help Janie.

He was-still is-very handsome, with muscular arms and dazzling smile, and he seemed as macho as any guy in town back then. Certainly nobody I knew had the least idea that he was gay. I guess he was still fighting it because I know he was dating Pat Wiggins-sleeping with her, some people said- right up till he sent for De

The back of the Vickerys’ grounds edged Jed and Janie’s backyard, and whenever I saw Michael outside sketching, I’d grab the laundry basket and go hang out diapers. The end of the clothesline was only a few feet from the edge of their property and I could casually work my way down till I was within easy speaking distance. He was always friendly, but I could tell he thought I was just a lump, so I went back to giving Jed my full adoration.

“God, that’s such a waste,” Gayle sighed as Michael walked across the barnyard towards us. “How can such a good-looking hunk like that be queer?”

I had to smile, remembering my own astonishment when he first came out of the closet. Michael Vickery really does look like the answer to a maiden’s prayers: tall and trimly muscled, with strongly handsome features, piercing blue eyes, wavy brown hair that’s starting to go gray at the temples, and an air of reserve just begging to be shattered. Slouchy walk, tight end-he’s got it all.

De

Neither Mother nor Aunt Zell particularly liked Mrs. Vickery- “Evelyn Dancy Vickery,” Mother always called her, with that little ironic quirk her eyebrows took whenever she was secretly amused.

The Dancys had lived in Cotton Grove since the Revolution. Up until the postwar boom, they’d owned its only bank. Yet somehow, except for Dr. Vickery, who’d married in from Te

“They never let anybody or any thing touch them,” she said.

Normally I accepted her evaluations, but that winter there were so many snickers and ribald speculations going around about what Michael Vickery and his “New York fairy” were doing out at the old barn that it seemed to me pride might not be altogether bad if it could help such a sternly moralistic woman as Evelyn Dancy Vickery rise above what had to’ve been a personal Gethsemane. Everybody knew how much she adored Michael and how proud she’d been of his artistic achievements.

She might could’ve glossed over it if he’d stayed with his original fine-art pretensions-by the seventies, most of Colleton County understood that real artists had different standards of behavior-but no sooner had Michael emerged from the closet than he abruptly lowered his sights and started churning out commercial pottery. With a pragmatic eye for what would sell at craft fairs and decorative art shows, he developed stu