Now that I’m starting to get old I get to thinking about what makes folks do what they do. I’ve seen good people do bad things and bad people do good things. I have trouble these days figuring out who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy.

Like Clovis Troutman. The FBI said Clovis Troutman was the most dangerous man in South Carolina so I reckon he was supposed to be a bad man. He headed up what some called the Maoist wing of the Ku Klux Klan. They called it that because Clovis thought the mainline Klan was a revisionist movement; not really serious. So he organized his own unit. I doubt that he ever did anything to hurt a black person except big talk. But words can be mighty hurtful, that I know.

Back in the sixties, when I first met Clovis, there was a real Ku Klux Klan whose members said “nigger” and often did some reprehensible things. And there was a real FBI that hated communists, bank robbers, and car thieves and whose chieftain probably said “nigger” too. Especially when he was harassing Martin Luther King, Jr., making allegations against him, tapping his telephones. Things like that. All in the name of Americanism—creating a national mood in which communists could be hated both constructively and decoratively.

Speaking of the FBI and why folks do what they do, I’ve heard that their head man didn’t speak well of “queers” either, though now that he is safely dead it is written that he had male lovers and sometimes dressed in drag, neither of which bothers me so long as he didn’t betray others, and himself, by abusing and insulting those similarly inclined.

And that reminds me of something else. I also grew up thinking Democratic senators spoke for God, though even as a child I wondered about Senator Bilbo. Now we have Sam Nunn to conduct long hearings, go on television, and issue press releases to make the military, and thus the country, safe from gays and lesbians, while a veteran “right-wing extremist” like Barry Goldwater tells the President, Congress, the Joint Chiefs, and the nation that such nonsense is UnAmerican. What Goldwater realizes is that people like Nunn are as sure to move us toward a national mood where it will be as safe and fashionable to hate “fags,” and even commit mayhem or murder to prove one’s masculinity and patriotism, as it used to be to hate “pinko commies.” And he is right, because the fulminations of Pitchfork Ben Tillman, Tom Watson and Cotton Ed Smith led directly to the later racist antics of Ross Barnett, Orval Faubus, and George Wallace.

But back to Clovis Troutman. The FBI used to follow Clovis Troutman around. They even had an agent assigned to watch him. That was the agent’s only assignment. Just keep up with Clovis Troutman.

I met Clovis one night in a motel room with a journalist from Jesse Helms’s television station. It was when the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was investigating the KKK and some of us had the alien notion that even those in the Ku Klux Klan had certain First Amendment rights. The three of us sat around most of the night, singing sad country love songs, drinking bonded whiskey, talking about baseball and telling family stories. (“Family values” had not yet had its brief moment in the politic sun. It was just that the three of us were devoted to our families and some people get sentimental when they are mildly in the grape.) The one Clovis talked of most was his only son, R.J., a physical duplicate of his daddy, though the boy didn’t grow up to think like him. But when he was a boy—at home, work, fishing, hunting, and Klan rallies—they were inseparable. Over the years I got to know Clovis Troutman and his family pretty well.

Clovis’s mother was part of the household. Had been for seventeen years, a filial fidelity uncommon in today’s environment. Clovis hated a lot of things and one of them was nursing homes. So his mother remained as a family member.

When she died Clovis sent for me to come conduct the service. Both he and I were of low church traditions and we called it, “preaching the funeral.” A bronze casket was shipped in from Atlanta. Twelve dozen red roses covered it. There was an all-night vigil which rural folk in that county still call, “settin’ up with the dead.” Clovis cried a lot and when it came time the next day to close the lid forever, he—exhausted from grief and lack of sleep—fainted, almost knocking the coffin from its bier.

When an elderly black man who lived on the Troutman family farm died, Clovis had him buried in a bronze casket, also shipped in from Atlanta, with another twelve dozen roses as a pall. Some of the neighbors saw that as strange behavior but didn’t say much about it. (Clovis was always armed.)

I had recently had a similar duty for a black neighbor about the age Clovis’s mother was at the time of her death. Except for changing the names and a few statistics the same obsequies seemed appropriate for both occasions. The beauty and glory of a wrinkled face, the sunshine of temperament, the interlocking branches of family, a pardoning Creator who marks the fall of a sparrow; neighbors, the land, community, the loud, triumphant shout of heaven’s welcome (de mortuis nil nisi bene).

The agent still kept close tabs on Clovis but apparently never caught him in any federally forbidden devilment. One night someone broke into Clovis’s house while the family was at the picture show, went through all his papers but didn’t take anything. It is said the agent sort of faded away after that.

Clovis developed Buerger’s disease several years ago, an affliction occurring more often among Jewish males than Klan principals. The last time I saw him, he was in intensive care with a respirator that breathed for him. Unable to talk, he scribbled on a little chalkboard, “Don’t forget.” I knew he was referring to the request he had made of me years earlier. Three days later we buried him on a sandy hillside, next to his mother.

Last summer I was called by a colleague of RJ.’s who said I should fly over as soon as possible. A few years earlier I had officiated at R.J.’s marriage to a comely young woman named Floreen. They had twins, boy and girl. The little boy, at age four months, had just died in his crib. The caller said R.J. was distraught and unable to speak with me about details.

At Clovis’s mother’s funeral the pallbearers had been eight members of the Ku Klux Klan, neatly dressed in paramilitary uniforms. At Clovis’s own, his widow made it clear that she wanted “no mention nor reminder of all that Klan mess.” For his grandson, four young people bore the tiny body to rest at the feet of the grandsire the child never knew. Two of the pallbearers were men, two were women. Two were black. The other two white. They were the paramedic team that had tried vainly to resuscitate a li'l' bitsy baby in a Carolina doublewide.

As I was walking to the rented car to drive to the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport R.J. walked along beside me. I embraced him and was about to open the car door, when he said, “I think you remember what my Daddy’s favorite possession was.”

I told him I remembered. It was a little nickel-plated, pearl-handled derringer that he always carried in his pocket. Even to his mother’s funeral.

R.J. held me in another long and emotional embrace, then said, “I thought about this for a long time last night. Here. I want you to have it. I know Daddy would too.”

I don’t know why but sometimes I think about all these things: Clovis Troutman, a Klansman who didn’t like nursing homes and fainted at his mother’s funeral and who had an FBI agent that followed him around; an old black man who could share a eulogy with an old white woman; bronze caskets and red roses; pallbearers for a little baby and a handgun as oblation; a Democratic senator and a rightwing extremist. Sometimes I try to sort it all out.

The wind bloweth where it listeth....