Michael took hold of the discussion and I was relieved to hear him say that we had neither proof nor the means to obtain evidence. Our primary purpose wasn’t to solve crimes. He turned the topic to what we could do to demonstrate changing attitudes in Prince George County. He suggested we put together that Harmony Festival they’ve been talking about. He said it should be simple and symbolic, nothing to rile people, just a quiet walk around court square followed by a potluck supper. He was planning to do that with his schoolchildren anyway. Why didn’t we become part of that?
When did anything ever stay quiet and simple? Somebody said we could do it in observance of Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday. Another started talking about publicity. That’s when we saw the two men outside the window.
It was a warm early January night. We always get a spell of false spring right after the New Year to keep us holding on through the coming winter. Dark was falling. It was the first hint of lengthening days. There’s cedar woods on that side of the school. Someone stepped over to raise the window a little higher and he said he saw two figures crouching in the brush. We thought maybe it was kids. Michael went for a better look. He said it was two men and they had obviously been hiding under the sill listening to us.
Several of the men went out back behind the school. Lily went with them. When she came back inside, she said she had seen Dashnell and another man who looked like Jake getting into Dashnell’s
truck. She wasn’t sure it was Jake. The truck was unmistakably Dashnell’s.
Michael said that he had been followed and spied on for weeks. He didn’t see that it was much cause for alarm. He said he figured his long hair was enough to raise a certain suspicion among some of the locals. There were always several local teenage boys in Prince George County with long hair by that time. Even in Prince George County long hair had lost its subversive implications. Something at the back of Michael’s eyes told an altogether different story. Michael was scared to the bone. His school and his ideas were under clandestine investigation by the invisible empire, as Dashnell romantically refers to that bunch. He sat back, nervously glancing out the window throughout the rest of the meeting.
Dashnell had made a connection between my attendance at those meetings and my decision to leave him. It was beyond him to conceive that I had taken such an action wholly of my own volition. He assumed I had done it under group influence or duress. He can’t help it. Everything he does and says is for the direct effect it has on his bunch. He has no concept of independent thought. He was outside that window trying to understand the source of their power over me. His next step would be to try to conquer it. I had an instinct that the group would never understand that; so I kept quiet.
Lily took over the meeting, assigning duties for the Harmony Festival, a mighty big term for a little walk around courthouse square. She acted like it was the Rapture, assigning one to call the radio stations and another to put ads in area newspapers. Later we had a good discussion about similarities between Buddhism and Christianity. We broke up about ten-thirty. Lily volunteered to follow me home in her car. I let her.
I kept running it over and over in my mind. What if Dashnell had heard Lily telling the group that I knew he was involved in killing that black man? That pack of dogs he calls friends would kill us both and bury us so deep we’d never be found. The mess was getting messier and I had no idea what to do about it. Surely some law enforcement official in the state would be willing to listen to my story. They couldn’t all be in sympathy with the Order. Maybe that
preacher down in Birmingham who was calling for an investigation could help me. Maybe he couldn’t. There wasn’t anything to do except keep silent. There had to be something, but what? It flew around and around in my head like that all the way home.
Lily pulled into Mother’s driveway behind me. I walked up to her car to thank her for escorting me. I was about to ask her what to do, when she took my hand. “I left Glen today.” She smiled. “I’m living with Michael now.”
My first thought was completely selfish. Maybe that’s what Dashnell and Jake were investigating. My attendance at the discussion group was bound to be second fiddle to a piece of news like that. Maybe I was worried about nothing.
“Is that what you want?” I asked her.
“With all my heart.” She beamed. It was a convincing smile. I didn’t believe it. I don’t understand her. I don’t understand much of anything anymore.
Mother was turning a pineapple upside-down cake from a skillet when I walked inside the house. That took me back a long, long way.
I
noticed everything that afternoon. Everything seemed of one giant accord or purpose. The weather had been mild for almost two weeks, the surest sign I know of a coming blizzard. The January sun felt warm on my face. It turned the dust on the dashboard gold. The puddles on the blacktop were still edged with ice. I hadn’t felt this kind of newborn sun since before I went to prison. My foot went to the floor as I crested the hill. On either side, the naked limbs were silky, wet and blue. There was low mist in the encircling woods.
I had heard that Lily and Michael England were making plans to leave town. I wanted to see them before they left.
Somewhere a long way off in the woods I could hear a chainsaw. The wet pavement turned to clay as I crossed the railroad tracks. Suddenly I was slipping half sideways up a long stretch of rust clay road that cut between tall banks where the roots of trees and dead kudzu hung like a million sci-fi snakes.
My dog, James Edward, rode in the truck bed. He’s a toothless old pit bull I won in a poker game back in the dark ages of my drinking days before I went to prison. I was dead drunk when I accepted James Edward in payment of twenty-six dollars owed me. I was figuring to breed her. When I sobered up the next morning, I could see she was way past that. She also turned out to be a he.
Just this side of White Oak, I noticed the Miller farm was being
painted, house, barn and fence. I thought maybe Miss Eula Pearl had died and the place had been sold. I figured Miss Eula must be a hundred by now. There hadn’t been a drop of paint on the place since before I was born. Painted up, it was a lot bigger and fancier than I remembered it. Somebody had cleared about fifteen tons of brush away from around the front. It had turned into a big old wedding cake of a Victorian house. It had a side porch and an upstairs balcony I had never even seen. About half the picket in the fence was new. Aunt Rose and a hired man were slapping paint on it. I didn’t know whether to consider her Aunt Rose or not now that she and Uncle Dashnell were divorcing.
Miss Eula Pearl was alive indeed. She sat in her accustomed place on the front porch wrapped in a coat and a scarf, her hands resting on an aluminum walker. She waved at me. It was that old time country wave that doesn’t ask who you are or what your business is.
In a minute I passed the White Oak city limits sign. I’d begun my job at the 7-Eleven a couple months before. In fact, I was about to be made night manager. I had an hour until my shift started.
I had two reasons for going on this mission. I figured it might be the last time I ever saw Lily. I wanted to make some kind of a decent parting between us. We hadn’t spoken to each other in months. I also wanted to talk to this guy Michael. I wanted to ask him how a man who held a karate black belt could let himself be so intimidated by a pack of ignorant rednecks that he’d allow them to close down his school. I could smell Dashnell and Jake behind his troubles. I was willing to stand with him against them. Though the truth is I wanted to make an impression on Lily. I still had some tender hurting need to demonstrate my loyalty. I was hoping to talk Michael into fighting back.
The trouble had started a week before with an ad in the
White Oak Reporter
. It invited those interested to join a group at the Michael England School for a “harmony walk” and a picnic on the school grounds on Saturday, January 22. It didn’t specifically mention Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday. It might just as well have
announced a convention of international terrorists for all the local reaction it stirred.
People went nuts. Parents pulled their kids out of Michael’s school. Every bearded redneck in the county left a threatening message on the school answering machine. His discussion group and karate classes were disbanded. Those who weren’t diametrically opposed to a walk and a picnic on Doctor King’s birthday were afraid to continue their public association with Michael or his school.
Glen Pembroke had been on local radio that morning denying all association with Lily, Michael England or their unpatriotic ideas. Glen was pressured into that. He was trying to protect his children and his property from the Order.
I didn’t know when or how Lily had moved into the school building with Michael. I had seen Aunt Rose in the post office a week before. She told me Lily and Michael were planning to leave town together after school let out. The Order had apparently moved their plans forward.
Michael stood in the front door of the school and watched as I pulled into the parking lot. Lily’s Range Rover looked ridiculous next to his old Chevy II Nova. I couldn’t help but note the irony that Glen Pembroke was probably still making payments on it.
Michael was giving me the twice-over. I understood that. I was Prince George born and bred. He had good reason to doubt my earlier insistence on the phone that, unlike 98.6 percent of the rest of the people in Prince George County, I intended him no harm. I was a little hurt all the same. I thought surely Lily would have told him I was okay.
I shook his hand. It felt clammy. The back of it was covered with dark hair. He wore a silver ring, a snake that coiled up his finger into a ruby red eye. “Can I help you?” He didn’t bother with hello.
“How are y’all doing?” I felt stupid. “Look here, Michael, I don’t know what kind of support you’re looking for, but you have whatever I can give you.”
His eyes kept searching the thick scrub at the edge of the parking lot. He probably figured my visit for some kind of setup.
We started talking a little. He told me it had taken all the cash he
could raise to build his schoolhouse. He’d been operating close to the bone to keep up the mortgage, sometimes supplementing the budget with his dwindling savings account. He lost a third of his students the day after the ad about the festival went into the local paper. The rest of the kids were whisked away by their frightened parents over the next week. It had taken four days to destroy the dream he had worked fifteen years to create. I felt sorry for the man, but nowhere near as sorry as he seemed to feel for himself.
Several of the parents told him they were personally in support of Michael and his school, but they feared for their children and their local businesses. They had to publicly distance themselves. Most of the kids just didn’t show up. By that point, Michael could no longer vouch for their safety, as the phone threats were coming in two or three times an hour. Someone had also dumped a keg of nails on the parking lot.
His tone was almost whiny and his eyes never met mine for more than a second. Lily appeared in the door. I felt my heart flutter the old way a second. I smiled and she smiled back and it felt all right.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Y’all leaving these parts,” I said.
“Yes. Hallelujah,” she said.
“Good luck to you,” I said.
“The same to you,” she said before she muttered something about the cold and walked back into the schoolhouse. If Michael minded any of it, he didn’t let on.
Michael England and I stayed outside in the parking lot while the day began to fade. I reiterated my offer of support.
“I appreciate that”—Michael smiled and I read it as genuine—“but you’re a little late.”
“Too late for your school, maybe, but I don’t see why the festival can’t go as planned.” It was definitely a case of figuring things out for yourself as you talk. I’m nobody’s joiner and people around Prince George County know I’ve been in prison. I have extra reason to avoid courting their displeasure. Still, there it was rolling off my tongue in the evening chill just as if it made sense.
“I have a lot of teaching left to do in my life.” Michael smiled again. This time, it made me uneasy. It was more pose than smile. It was cold. “I can’t do much teaching with a bullet through my head.”
“I thought you were supposed to be a black belt.”
Michael said he’d take on any man with his hands in the broad daylight. His black belt wouldn’t offer much protection if a bullet came through a window after dark.
“You mean on account of your Harmony Festival, or are you referring to Lily’s husband?” I had my nerve to ask such a personal question. As far as I knew Michael and Lily had never admitted the nature of their relationship to anyone.
“She came to me after the trouble started. She had nowhere else to go.” He was telling the truth and covering up a lie at the same time.
Michael eyed the horizon warily. He pointed out that it would be dark soon. Another night of sitting by the window with the gun, he said. Lily had to see a lawyer on Thursday. She wanted to file for custody of her children. They were planning to leave town immediately after that.
“They sneak around in the night because they’re cowards. They’re more afraid of what you’re teaching than you ought to be of them.”
I’ve heard of people seizing a moment, but it was like that moment was seizing me. I didn’t know what Michael England had taught in his school.
“If you run away, their ignorance wins.”
That set him off on a personal defense. He rambled on about how I hadn’t been threatened fifty times day and night for the last several weeks. I had no idea how long he had saved the money to build his school. I was so much a part of the fabric of the place I couldn’t understand.