The Sheriff raised the beer can up to his nose, sniffed it, and said, “If one a you’s not drunk, you git to drive the whole bunch a you outta here. Otherwise, you’re gonna walk.”
“Well now, hey, Sheriff,” said Channing, but his proudest weapon, insolence, had disappeared. He spat, but without the gusto of a moment ago.
“Filthy,” said the Sheriff, eyeing the arc of the brown spittle. “And ’at’s another thang. This ain’t your property to spit on.”
“Aw, Sheriff,” said Channing, “how can anybody”—innybuddy—“keep from—”
Before he could utter another word, Daddy, standing right beside Charlotte, said in a strange, low, even, toneless voice, “Channing, if you ever set foot on this property again, you gon’ git crawled. If you ever try to touch my daughter again, that’ll be the last time you got anythang left to want a woman with.”
“You threatening me? You heard what he said, Sheriff?”
“That’s not a threat, Channing,” said Daddy in the same eerie monotone. “That’s a promise.”
For an instant—stone silence. Charlotte could see Buddy and Sam staring at their father. This was a moment they would never forget. Maybe this was the moment the mountain code would take hold in their hearts, even now, in the twenty-first century, the same way it had in Daddy’s and his daddy’s and his granddaddy’s and his great-granddaddy’s in the centuries before. Her little brothers would probably glory in this moment, which would define for them without a word of explanation what it meant to be a man. But Charlotte saw something more, and that was what she would never forget. Daddy’s expression was almost blank, utterly cold, unblinking, no longer attached to the variables of reason. His eyes were locked on Channing’s. It was the face of someone out on an edge where there could be only one answer to any argument: physical assault. Did Buddy and Sam see that? If they did, they would no doubt come to admire their father all the more for it. But for Charlotte, those words—“the last time you got anythang left to want a woman with”—completed the humiliation of the dreadful event that was occurring.
Sheriff Pike was saying to Daddy, “Ne’mind all that, Billy.” Then he looked straight at Channing while seeming to still be talking to Daddy. “Channing’s not stupid. Like he said his ownself, he’s a high school graduate now. He knows from now on, won’t nobody have any truck with it if he acts like some damn-fool little boy. Right, Channing?”
Trying to salvage one last shred of impudent honor, Channing didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no, and he didn’t nod this way and he didn’t nod that way, and he gave the Sheriff one last look that didn’t signal respect and didn’t signal disrespect. He kept his eyes away from Charlotte’s father altogether. He turned tail and said to his comrades in a voice that didn’t say surrender and didn’t say hold fast, either, “Let’s go. I’ve had enough of this bullsh—” He said the word and didn’t say the word, and they retreated, managing to summon up their old swagger until they got beyond the septic tank and around to the front of the house. None of them spat, not even once.
Charlotte stood there with her fingers pressing into her cheeks. The moment the intruders disappeared, she bent over and surrendered herself to hopeless sobs that seemed to well up from out of her lungs. Daddy lifted his hands and tried to think of what to do with them and what to say to her, while the Sheriff, Otha Hutt, and Cousin Doogie looked on, paralyzed, in the age-old way, by a woman’s tears. Momma took charge and put her arm around Charlotte’s shoulders and squeezed until Charlotte’s head rested against her own, just the way she had always done when Charlotte was younger, and said to her, ever so lovingly, “You’re my good girl, darling. You’re my dear, sweet good girl, and you know that. It don’t do for you to waste one drop a tears on trash like those boys. You hear me, darling? They’re trash. I’ve known Henrietta Reeves all my life. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, and I can tell you one thang. They won’t be bothering you any more.” How eagerly her mother was seizing this chance to treat her once again as a child, a genius-in-embryo in the womb of Momma’s devotion. “You see the look on that boy’s face when your daddy looked him in the eye? Your daddy looked him deep down inside. That boy’s never gonna get fresh with you again, my little darling.”
Get fresh. How completely Momma misunderstood! Channing’s behavior once he and his sidekicks got here—it was irrelevant. That they wanted to hurt her in this way—that was what mattered. Looks, boys, popularity—and what good were looks if you had failed so miserably at the other two? And Daddy’s solution to the problem—his mountain man’s promise—to castrate Channing if he ever dared approach his little girl again—ohmygod! How grotesque! How shaming! It would be all over the county by nightfall. Charlotte Simmons’s great day of triumph. She couldn’t stop crying.
Laurie came over, and Momma let her take over the consoling for a moment. Laurie embraced Charlotte and whispered that underneath Channing Reeves’s supposed good looks and cool personality was a cruel bastard, and everybody in the class knew that when they were honest with themselves. Oh, Laurie, Laurie, Laurie, not even you understand about Channing, do you? She could still see his face. Why not me—Channing—
Miss Pennington was a few yards away, looking on, not sure it was her place to step in and do something or say something that might be construed as maternal. When Charlotte finally pulled herself together, the guests tried to continue the party, to let her know they weren’t going to let four drunken louts spoil things. It was no use, of course. There was no breathing life back into this particular corpse. One by one the guests began saying their good-byes and slipping away, until it became a general exodus. Momma and Daddy were heading around the house to where the cars were parked along the road. Dutifully, Charlotte was following them, when Miss Pennington came up from behind and stopped her. She had a sort of live-and-learn smile on her broad face.
“Charlotte,” she said in her deep contralto, “I hope you realize what that was all about.”
Crestfallen: “Oh, I think I do.”
“Do you? Then what was it about? Why did those boys come here?”
“Because—oh, I don’t know, Miss Pennington, I don’t want—it doesn’t really matter.”
“Listen to me, Charlotte. They’re resentful—and they’re attracted, intensely attracted. If you don’t see that, I’m disappointed in you. And they went out and got drunk enough to make a spectacle of it. All they got out of that commencement was that one of their classmates is exceptional, one of their classmates is about to fly out of Alleghany County to the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, far above them, and there’s always the type of person who resents that. You remember we read about the German philosopher Nietzsche? He called people like that tarantulas. Their sole satisfaction is bringing down people above them, seeing the mighty fall. You’ll find them everywhere you go, and you’ll have to be able to recognize them for what they are. And these boys”—she shook her head and gave her hand a little dismissive flip—“I’ve taught them, too, and I don’t like saying this, but they’re not even worth the trouble it takes to ignore them.”
“I know,” said Charlotte in a tone that made it obvious that she didn’t.
“Charlotte!” said Miss Pennington. She raised her hands as if she were about to take her by the shoulders and shake her, although she was never demonstrative in that fashion. “Wake up! You really are leaving all that behind. Ten years from now those boys will be trying to sound important by telling people how well they knew you—and how lovely you were. It may be hard for them to swallow right now, but I’m willing to bet you even they’re proud of you. Everybody looks to you for great things. I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t. I started to tell you when we were in Washington, but then I figured it would be a mistake, because I ought to wait until you graduated. Well…today you graduated.” She paused and smiled her live-and-learn smile again. “I think I know about what most students think of somebody being a high school teacher, but it never has bothered me, and I’ve never tried to explain how mistaken they are. When you’re a teacher and you see a child achieve something, when you see a child reach a new level of understanding about literature or history or…or…anything else, a level that child would have never reached without you, there’s a satisfaction, a reward, that can’t be expressed in words, leastways not by me. In some way, no matter how small, you’ve helped create a new person. And if you’re so fortunate as to find a student, one student, a single student—like Charlotte Simmons—and you spend four years working with that student and seeing that student become what you are today—Charlotte, that justifies all the struggle and frustration of forty years of teaching. That makes an entire career a success. So I’m not going to let you look back. You’ve got to keep your eyes on the future. You’ve got to promise me that. That’s all you owe me—that single promise.”