On the path to Taney Park, Professor Emerald perceived through circle lenses the purple beaded body of a Mardi Gras casualty. Though he stood rather below the trees, his dark eyes lurked among them like ravens. Concentration knit his white cotton eyebrows to a single fiber, creasing the soil of brown skin from which they’d grown.
In this way, the professor studied the tangle of holiday leftovers with the same particularity he’d applied to an Easter egg in 1958. His father, a lanky man with a complexion like tobacco and an affinity for seersucker suits, had a reputation for tucking those dyed pagan ovals in places too high for child hunters to reach. But in his sixth year, long after the other children had retired their festive humors and churchgoing outfits, a young Professor Emerald spotted an olive-green egg nesting quietly in the crocodile-green windowsill of his second-floor bedroom.
Amused, and nearly smiling, the professor heard the campus belltower pound its noontime song. Bidding farewell to the beads, he returned the Easter memory to the pleasant side of his mind and crossed the street. He wondered vaguely if the carrots he’d been eating in his wife’s vegetable soup had at last sharpened his eyes. Fifty years ago, his mother had sworn by carrots, and now, at age seventy, Professor Emerald swore by his mother.
A grainy bread sandwich, assembled habitually that morning, rode by itself in a brown paper sack clutched by the professor’s left fist. Toted by his right was a cane prescribed by a physical therapist to soften the steps of his daily walk to Taney Park. After falling last December and spending Christmas in the hospital, his daughter had pled with him to forego the half-mile he traveled through campus to his picnic spot. The cane was a compromise.
Professor Emerald’s journey from his post at the law school to the famed local park was sprinkled with its usual suspects. Undergraduate students ran late to class, or else meandered on purpose to achieve lateness. Locals stood under bus stop awnings to escape the sun or the rain. Some, to the surprise of the rest, waited for the bus.
The occasional out-of-towner marveled at the branches and their mossy underarms. “The tour guide in Charleston said these trees were ex-clusive to the Carolinas!” A man with sunscreen unrubbed on his neck once remarked to the professor while paused at a crosswalk. “You folks could sue!”
Taney Park jutted from the northernmost border of the newly expanded college campus. For decades it belonged not to the school but to the city. Its high concrete arch still bore the imprint of a metal sign which hung for some twenty-seven years. Professor Emerald knew the sign well, first from its oppressive effect on his childhood summers, and second from its current position in his office among other memorabilia from a time no longer remembered by most. He considered them conversational pieces and told his stories to the students who stopped by, when they asked.
Passing through the entrance, the professor observed that the old park was empty. This, he thought, had a starving effect on the open landscape, as though it were hungry for something, or else someone. The sound of his shoes on the grass fell heavier, his breath more penetrating against the springtime heat. Professor Emerald took his usual seat at one of the crumbly wooden benches placed at intervals around the lovely duck pond in the heart of Taney Park. The water was home to more than forty ducks, all of which had striking orange heads with bodies that appeared to be greying.
A sophomore boy with binoculars around his neck had once squatted near the professor’s bench and read aloud, nasally, from his ornithology book: “Aythya Americana.”
Professor Emerald acknowledged the Aythya Americanas floating in harmony on the surface of the pickle-colored water and remembered a similar, if not less harmonious, scene observed by his group of eleven-year-old friends in the summer of 1963. The water was blue then and held in a massive bowl of white tiles. From under the concrete arch, their eager young eyes could see the splashes and hear the guiltless laughter of the other children their age. In the summer months, those distant pale bodies, pink from the sun, were at their greatest contrast to the smooth, bare, black stomachs of the ones they kept out.
“You boys ain’t allowed in.” A pimply young man with red hair towered over the group of rising sixth graders with towels folded under their arms. “Same’s yesterday, same’s tomorrow.”
Similar interactions repeated nearly every day of July and August. “We oughta quit tryin’” was the sentiment on every one of their lips at least once, but it was always the prevailing will of the group to pressure the pool staff into admitting them, or at least weaken the stiff white arms at large.
Once, Clary Thomason’s father accompanied them, purportedly to lend the adult support which was hailed as pure gold in the currency of adolescence. That Mr. Thomason was old enough to be the ginger bouncer’s father would have been persuasive, but-for the fact that Mrs. Thomason worked as a maid for the parents of the head female lifeguard. In the end, they were laughed away by all, and Mr. Thomason didn’t come out of his house for a week and a half.
The next summer seemed more promising. In July, the law required integration, and the boys were prepared to gloat at the gate and take their first dip in the Taney Park Pool. Then the news began to spread, and it was a foul, whitewashed thing. The pool was closing for good. By the start of school, plans were drafted to gut the facility and replace it with a pond for ducks.
Professor Emerald could recall with some exactness the sobs of his mother one evening to his father: “Better the animals have a place to swim than our little boy! We shoulda known. We all shoulda known.”
Removing his sandwich from its paper bag, the professor took a small bite and gazed out at the calm water. His eyes lingered for a short while on the plaque memorizing the pond and its donors. It was the same stump which used to balance a diving board.
Professor Emerald sighed. The appetite which had so pierced his stomach at the start of the lunchtime break had faded to its familiar antipathy. He sat for a moment with the bread limp between his fingers and seriously contemplated throwing himself into the pond. At last, he stood and trudged with his cane to the edge of the water.
He tossed the whole remainder of his meal to the lily pads like a frisbee and watched as the carrot-top ducks paddled toward it. They swarmed the soggy victim and ripped it between themselves like murderers or rescuers, or both. When they’d finished, the ducks swam their separate ways, and Professor Emerald went his.