“Heath, it’s kind of cold out here and I’ve got some packing to do.” Not even a thank-you for stopping by.
“Don’t call off your festival, please.”
Michael shook his head. That riled me. The man was either too
ignorant or too scared to appreciate what I had just offered. There I was stepping over some ancient and forbidden line, pulling away from my own people on blind faith, and here he was wiggling his toes and wishing I’d go away and leave him to cower inside that schoolhouse with Lily.
It had been an inspired thing to come into this ignorant little town and shine a little light on things. Michael’s lack of courage in the face of adversity made me wonder just how much he believed what he taught. I suppose you won’t ever get an even opinion of Michael England from me. He was taking Lily away. I had the sinking feeling as I stood there watching him walk back towards that school that Lily would live to regret the day she met him. There was nothing I could do but climb back into my truck and move on.
If I think back on it, I half caught a figure crouching in the undergrowth at the side of the parking lot as I circled around towards the road. They must have run back through the woods and down the hill behind the school and gotten into the truck. There were three of them sitting in it at the crossroads by Miss Eula Pearl’s peanut stand when I stopped for the intersection. It was full dark by now. I could see them in the rearview mirror, their heads covered in those damned white hoods. I had about a mile stretch of open fields on either side before I’d reach the next house. I slammed the pedal to the floor, but my truck is twenty-six years old and it wasn’t built for speed. Theirs was small and new.
They got up beside me in less than a minute. One of them leaned out the side window and aimed at my left front wheel. I felt the tire explode and then a bullet sailed past my face and shattered the window on the passenger side. Just before they pulled ahead of me, one of them hollered, “You keep away from that faggot communistic nigger lover and his whore concubine or the next bullet will land between your eyes!” Dashnell. I was fighting a skid on a long wet curve. The back of the truck was swinging towards the shoulder and bits of broken glass were flying in my face. I was trying to straighten her out in order to miss a concrete bridge rail up ahead. I was looking at death at that moment, but I was seeing red, swirling, boiling, burning red. The wheel slid through my fingers and the
truck spun slowly around and the tailgate slammed into the side of the bridge.
I took several shards of glass in my right arm. My forehead banged into the dashboard, but I was unconscious of anything except the rage that had turned pure white and hissed in little comet tailed circles all around me. Looking in the back of the truck, I saw James Edward sitting there like nothing had happened.
I climbed out of the truck and I moved forward into the darkness with the first clean taste of God’s intent for me that I have ever known. Suddenly I knew why that crazy black man had turned himself into a bull’s-eye out there on the lake. Those three men in that truck had scared me. They had turned a full grown man like me into their terrified prey. They had ruled my corner of this world with fear longer than I had memory. That fellow out there on the lake had made a clear choice. He had decided against fear. He had somehow summed up his life and chosen a brief but full existence over a lifetime of cowering. He went up there and pitched his tent knowing full they’d come after him. He would rather die than suffer the empty existence of a man who bows before evil. They took that poor man’s life, but he kept his soul. I was walking up the hill on the road in the dark and the rain had begun. It was a road I had traveled a thousand times. But that night I knew for the first time it was going to lead me to places I had never allowed myself to imagine. That night I felt the sure, warm breath of the Living God on my back.
T
ry as I would, I couldn’t get his widow out of my mind. I thought about her all through the Christmas season. I wondered how it was for his children, if they cried trimming their trees. I thought I’d lose my mind my first Christmas after Carmen died.
I came to know his widow despite the fact that I had yet to lay eyes on the woman. She became part of every day. She was with me when I prayed in the morning and she was there when I switched out my bedroom light in the evening.
As time went on, I began to see the wrinkles of sorrow etched into her face. I’d drop my shoulders and feel hers slump. I’d see prime rib on sale and catch myself thinking, “I’ll have to be sure and tell her about that.”
She became something mystic and sanctified, as pure as a candlelight. I had a dream about her: All my family for generations back sat at the dining room table waiting for her to be seated in the place of honor. She refused to be seated. We followed her into the back pasture. Suddenly she rose into the heavens. The abandoned graves opened up and the long sleeping souls followed her into the air.
I put the man’s obituary in my Bible. “Smith, McCarthy, Jr., 58, an apparent suicide. Survived by his wife.…” I am not spooky, but there was something to that. “Two sons, McCarthy III, 21, and
Nicholas, 24….” It gave the address as 111 Foxglove Road, Yellow, Alabama.
I had pictured the house wrong. I had fixed it about as nice as our second house in Birmingham. That was from how Mr. Smith was dressed in his boat. I had taken him for a dentist or a college professor, but not after I saw his place. It was a little one story bungalow, thirties style, with a rusted screened porch and shrubs as big as the ones I’ve been hauling away from the front of Mother’s house. It wasn’t shabby, but the paint was faded and the chairs on the porch were those old metal round-backs they sell at the dime store. There were three black ladies sitting behind a four-foot-tall mother-in-law’s tongue, which was probably bought at the same dime store where she got the chairs and long about the same time. It was sad and a little shadowy. The place had the feeling that a life had been lived there and then it had passed on out of it.
I could see her, Mrs. Smith, the dreaded woman from my dream. She had the same slightly sanctimonious air I had picked up from her husband that morning on the lake. She was tall and too thin with long grayish white hair that she kept a little blue with a rinse. She wore large round glasses and she kept folding and refolding her long hands at her side as I drove past. She had the air of a high school music teacher.
At the end of the driveway, I could see Mr. Smith’s boat leaning against the side of the house. It had several bullet holes in the side clean as glass. I drove past other, better kept houses. I turned around and headed back towards Mrs. Smith’s.
I was shaking like a leaf as I stood outside the screen door. I could see how badly it was rusted. One of the three ladies, a plump, pleasant-faced woman with a Bible in her lap, spoke.
“Can we help you?”
She must have thought I was selling something. I tried the screen, but it was latched. None of the three stood up to let me in.
“Mrs. Smith? I’m from over in Prince George County.” I told her my name and that I was sorry to hear about her husband and wondered if she needed anything.
“Money,” she said in a voice that could have easily been taken mean until the other two women giggled.
“You’re mighty sweet,” she said by way of showing me that she was teasing a little. Still no one got up to let me in. “I don’t need a thing, honey.”
“May I sit with you ladies a minute?” I could feel the perspiration rising up under my collar. I hadn’t slept much the night before. At first I was restless and then a thunderstorm had waked me deep in the night. I hoped that they couldn’t see I was shaking. My eyes weren’t quite used to the shade and there was a giant purple spot turning in one corner of the porch. It gave me the willies. Mrs. Smith rose and unlatched the screen door.
“Sit here, ma’am.” The third lady shoved a chair at me a little quickly. She was heavier and a little older than Mrs. Smith but she bore her a strong likeness. I felt like the preacher turning up uninvited in the middle of a family fight. Could I say I needed her to forgive me for being there the night Dashnell and the others plotted and carried out Mr. Smith’s murder?
The heavyset lady was Grace. The other was Hoagie, Mrs. Smith’s sister. Hoagie had moved back home to live with Mrs. Smith after Mr. Smith was killed. She’d lived up north someplace. So we talked about that. How down here at home in Alabama at least you could have a garden and you could afford a decent piece of beef more than once a week and on like that.
“I’m so very sorry about Mr. Smith,” I said pouring heavy molasses onto the polite talk. The three women looked at me, obviously waiting for me to say something else.
“I’ve never been in a dark person’s house before,” I said. It sounded so pitiful and stupid that all three women giggled and I had to laugh right along with them. That eased me some.
“You come out of a church?” That was Grace. Maybe she thought some church up in Prince George had taken up a collection, guilt money. But it must have looked odd to them, this strange white woman making a condolence call and nothing in her hand for the bereaved.
“No. I just came.”
Mrs. Smith went and got me a glass of iced tea.
“I just feel so terrible. It was such a waste, such a stupid, terrible waste.” The ladies nodded. But then Grace said, “It was all his foolishness,” and the other two nodded at that as well.
“You don’t mean Mr. Smith’s?” I couldn’t help but say. All three nodded. “The man was murdered in cold blood.”
“He was warned,” says Hoagie.
“Told over and over again,” Mrs. Smith said. “You go off up into Prince George and stay after dark, you won’t come out alive. It’s a known thing.”
“I must have heard them say it fifty times.” Grace came back in.
“Heard who?”
“His boys, Carty junior and Nicky, I don’t know who all else.”
“But he had the civil right to be there!” I was getting mad. This wasn’t what I’d expected.
“There’s no civil right in this world to replace Mr. John Common Sense.” Grace again.
Wasn’t that the kind of talk that had driven me to leave Dashnell? Here were these three ladies talking like it was meant to be. Then I realized they were shining me on a little. I noticed them eyeing me, watching to see what I’d say, watching me because they had no earthly reason to trust me or think anything of me except that I was a part of Prince George and to them Prince George was in accord, one united finger pulling the trigger that killed Mr. Smith. I studied Mrs. Smith. She was quiet. But going deeper her look seemed to say, “Lady, you took my husband; you ain’t getting nothing else from me.”
Or maybe I imagined that.
Maybe, like me, for the most part these women had other things to do besides change the world. Maybe like me they tried to kill off that part that
sees,
to silence that voice that
knows,
to concentrate on the other, almost bearable portion of life that carries the days with it.
“The boys feel the most bad.” That was Mrs. Smith. “They gave him the boat a year ago last Father’s Day.” They liked to have had a fit when he told them he’d been fishing up in Prince George.”
Grace and Hoagie let go a litany to each other, but meant for me. You only get one life. It’s best to go along with what you have to and go around the rest, have a few things you want in between, and pray it’s better for the next generation.
Was it at Sunday school down in Birmingham that I heard someone say that? Or was it Daddy? Whoever said it, they left out one part. You can get swallowed up by a thing trying to go around it.
“What of his killers?” I regretted that immediately. How would I know it was more than one unless I knew who had done it?
“They have their God and their King to reckon with.” That was Grace. I didn’t like Grace. Beyond her soft features she had beady eyes. She reeked of perfume and her hosiery and her underwear rustled when they crossed her legs. She kept running her pudgy fingers down her sides as if trying to contain herself. She looked at me and smiled and said, “You see, we’re not prejudiced.” That flew in my face.
Grace looked at her watch. It was a Lucien-Piccard and it was covered with diamonds. “Let me get on down the road,” she said. In a minute she was gone. That left Mrs. Smith and Hoagie and me—feeling like a bigger fool every minute and trying to find some halfway decent way to make my own excuses and go. Hoagie said she’d better start supper and I was face-to-face alone with Mrs. Smith. Obviously the two women had excused themselves hoping I’d do the same. I had the distinct impression that if I left and drove back by in twenty minutes, the three of them would be sitting there on that porch.
“You’re not the first from Prince George to feel bad about it.”
At last we were getting down to whatever we were going to get down to. “I sure hope not,” I said.
“I had cards, dozens of them, and more than twenty-five hundred dollars inside them. Two people from Prince volunteered to pay for the funeral. I won’t eat all the food that came over from Prince George in the rest of my life.”
There I sat empty handed.
“Well, then, why wasn’t the thing properly investigated if so many people feel bad about it?” I asked.
She said they had tried to get something going out of Birmingham. A minister down there had written the governor, but she wasn’t at liberty to go over to Prince George and see about it. She might not get back alive. She had to accept what she couldn’t change.
“When is it going to change?”
“I ask the Lord my God,” she said.
“What if I knew who done it?”
She laughed. She said if I knew who’d done it, then I’d be like a thousand other people up at Prince George. She said that half the cards she got weren’t even signed. She said food appeared on her front steps in the night with no name on the bottom of the plate.