her dark little room and said virtually nothing. For the other visits, she allowed them to roll her around the grounds in a wheelchair, looking for shade from the August heat. She smiled occasionally but not often enough, said very little, and never strung together enough words for a complete sentence. So she listened as her children tag-teamed their way through the same long narratives. To break the monotony, Joel read articles from Time magazine and Stella read from The Saturday Evening Post.
The visits were emotionally exhausting, and they said little driving the long way home. After four trips to Whitfield, they were becoming convinced that their mother would never leave.
* * *
—
Early on September 3, Joel loaded his sister’s luggage into the trunk of the family’s 1939 Pontiac, and together they drove to the pink cottage for a farewell breakfast with Aunt Florry. Marietta stuffed them with biscuits and omelets and packed a lunch for the road. They left Florry in tears on the porch and hustled away. They stopped for a somber moment at Old Sycamore and said a prayer at their father’s tombstone, then sped to the train station, where Stella almost missed the 9:40 to Memphis. They hugged each other, tried not to cry, and promised to keep in touch.
When the train was out of sight, Joel got in the car, drove a lap around the square, then through the side streets past the Methodist church, and finally returned home. He packed his own bags, said good-bye to Nineva and Amos, and drove an hour to Oxford, where law school was waiting. Through a friend of a friend he had a lead on a tiny apartment near the square, above a widow’s garage, a cheap place rented only to graduate students. The widow showed him a tiny three-room flat, laid out the rules, which included no alcohol, no parties, no gambling, and of course no women, and said the rent was $100 cash for four months, September through December. Joel agreed to her rules, though he had no plans to follow them, and handed over the money. When she left, he unpacked his bags and boxes and arranged his clothing in a closet.
After dark, he walked along North Lamar toward the courthouse in the distance. He lit a cigarette and smoked it as he strolled past stately old homes on shaded lots. Porches were filled with the post-supper gossip as the families and neighbors waited for the heat and humidity to break for the night. Though the students were back the square was dead, and why wouldn’t it be? There were no bars, clubs, lounges, dance halls, or even nice restaurants. Oxford was a small, dry town, and a long way from the bright lights of Nashville.
Joel Banning felt a long way from everywhere.
Chapter 38
The lawsuit was over a deadly collision between a sedan filled with a young family and a flat railcar loaded with several tons of pulpwood. It occurred late at night on a main highway between Tupelo and Memphis, at a crossing that for reasons never to be known had been built at the foot of a long hill, so that the traffic coming down the hill at night could not always see the trains until the last moment. To avoid collisions, and there had been several, the railroad installed red flashing lights on both sides, east and west, but did not splurge on gates that descended and actually blocked the highway. The flat car was the eleventh in a long train of sixty, with two engines and an old red caboose.
The lawyers defending the railroad made much of the fact that any driver paying sufficient attention to the road could certainly see something as large as a flat railcar that was eighty feet long and stacked fifteen feet high with timber. They passed around enlarged photos of the flat railcar and seemed confident in their proof.
However, they were no match for the Honorable Burch Dunlap, attorney for the deceased family—both parents and two small children. In two days of trial, Mr. Dunlap attacked the men who designed the crossing, exposed the railroad’s lousy safety record, proved that it had been warned that the crossing was dangerous, discredited two other drivers who claimed to be eyewitnesses, and presented the jury with his own set of enlarged photos that clearly revealed a severe lack of maintenance by the railroad.
The jury agreed and awarded the family $60,000, a record verdict for federal court in