“The law doesn’t make much difference between a killer and his accomplices when punishments are handed out,” I said for the pleasure of watching her retch.
“Dashnell acted entirely on his own,” she shot back.
It wasn’t funny. But I had to laugh. I’m hypocrite enough to know another one when I see her.
“We were all there that night,” I said. “We all knew what was going to happen. None of us did a damned thing to stop it. If the law doesn’t burn us, the devil will,” I said. I was actually enjoying it a little.
“You and Dashnell may have known,” she says. “You and Dashnell may have planned it. More power to you.” She muttered something about the sanctity of the white race like I was a pure fool. I had to hold back from saying any more. I’d said too much. I’d give her too much information if I kept on.
“Marjean,” I says, “there’s not but one thing to do and that’s keep our lips pressed together and let it blow over. They won’t ever prove a thing unless one of us spills our guts.”
She asked me what I’d say if they came asking me about it. I said absolutely nothing, and she went off relieved. She went off thinking she and Jake could nail Dashnell to a burning cross, and if Dashnell’s neck didn’t satisfy the law, she figured on offering them mine. That was exactly what I wanted her to think. You don’t tell a declared enemy what you’re planning to do next.
I don’t care for Marjean. But I despise Jake. In the first place, I don’t like his looks. He’s kind of regular looking, red faced and dishwater blond, and starves himself thin, though he’d never admit it. He wears those shiny cotton khaki pants like the fraternity boys and the landowners wear. He’s always got them pinched in to show off his waist and they’re always a half size too small. Jake has a white toothed smile that fools people. He makes an effort not to sound like a redneck when he talks, which isn’t much. He doesn’t want to get caught expressing his ignorance or taking responsibility for it. He also beats the fire out of Marjean.
Another thing. When he does talk around me, it’s usually to say something ugly about Dashnell. I quit defending Dashnell to myself a long time ago. But a man like Jake will tolerate a man like Dashnell because it gives him somebody to look down on. If Jake hasn’t come out and told the ABI that Dashnell got drunk and shot that man, it’s because he’s out getting the others to corroborate it first.
I have no doubt that preacher down at Birmingham is the one who pressed the ABI for an investigation. But there’s only one person
up there on that lake who could have put them on track. That’s Glen. Glen was up at my house feeling like a duck out of water with all of them talking about what they was going to do. He’s the only one who didn’t go with them up to Jake’s. It sickened him and he went home. I’ll bet you next week’s supper Glen Pembroke had a chat with the ABI.
After Marjean left, I went on in the house and called Glen to tell him to watch his back. He didn’t answer. Mother was already asleep. I went on up to my room and I wrote down everything I could remember about that night they shot the man on the lake. In the morning I picked up the phone and got information for Yellow, Alabama. I reached Mrs. Smith as she was on her way out to the market. She remembered me right off. I didn’t waste words. I told her about the investigation. Then I begged her, if she had any information or knew where it might be found, to please let me know. She said that she would, but I didn’t much believe she meant it.
I
couldn’t wait to tell Lily what I’d done. I knew she’d see that I had truly changed. I had taken an action directly counter to the ball of fear in my gut. It would make all the difference. Mama had the number down there in Galveston where she’s staying. I had to worm it out of her. Mama and Daddy have their minister praying that I’ll put Lily behind me. They hope if Lily stays gone long enough, I’ll turn my affections elsewhere. I lied and said that I needed to talk to her about the divorce. I made up some bull about having seen an attorney who told me, if Lily cooperated, we could do it on the courthouse steps.
Lily was real sweet at first. She sounded genuinely concerned about me and the kids. I told her what all I’ve done to the house, and I could tell she was really impressed. She asked me if I was planning to let her see the kids, and I told her anytime she liked. She said money was tight and she didn’t know when that might be possible, and I said there would be a first-class ticket waiting for her at the nearest airport whenever she wanted to come home. She said she appreciated it, but she wouldn’t take advantage that way. I told her the advantage was all mine, and then I couldn’t help myself. I begged her to come home, broke down and cried like a two-year-old.
“Baby, come home.”
Silence. I could hear her breathing, choosing her words. “Glen, I won’t ever be home.” Man, that went through me like a fistful of railroad spikes.
I told her about what Dashnell had said about her that afternoon in my yard, the names he’d called her and how I punched him out. It had no effect on her whatsoever.
“Glen, it’s broken, and nothing will ever fix it.”
That stopped me a minute.
“I can change, Lily.”
“It’s not
you
, Glen, it’s me, and I don’t want to change. It’s messy, but I can already see that no matter what happens, I can’t come back and torment you or myself ever again.”
Rain of tears, rivers, I begged like the hardest prayer I ever uttered.
“Stop it.”
I tried, but I couldn’t.
“I’m going to hang up now, Glen.”
“Wait!” I got myself a glass of water and drank it down slowly. It helped.
“Lily, are you sitting down? I called Montgomery and told the chief of the Alabama Bureau of Investigation about Dashnell and Jake and the others planning to kill that black man.”
She said that I was wonderful. She said she never in ten million years would have thought I’d do something that magnificent. She said she loved me for doing that.
“Now, will you just get on home here, baby?”
Dead silence. I couldn’t even hear her breathing. It seemed like she was considering her answer. When she finally spoke, she sounded sad and far away. She said she had to hang up. I kept begging her not to. She said that she wished me all the happiness in the world. One day when I met the right person, I’d have it. I still kept pleading with her not to hang up. She gave back the most terrible words I ever heard.
“Glen, I never loved you. Glen, I can’t manufacture the desire for you. I wasted years trying. Glen, please, let go of me. Maybe someday you’ll forgive me.” Then she hung up.
That night, for the first time since I found out about her and Michael, I let myself imagine her in his arms, her lying beside him, underneath and on top of him, him saying, “I love you” and her saying it back. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I imagined him inside her too. I imagined him pleasing her and her sighing and squealing and rolling away satisfied. I imagined it so clearly I began to see him through her eyes. I could almost worship those dark eyes and his hairy arms and feel his thick hair. I could almost know how she felt when he entered her and I could feel his pleasure when she took him in her mouth and ran her tongue all around him and he had no shame about it like I did. She sat down on him and he lay there, a sultan who claimed all her pleasures as his due. He turned her on her tummy and entered her from the back and she cried out her adoration of him, and it made me cry, and it flooded me with the desire to climb up in between them and feel their adoration, and it was awful for me when I came. It was cold and dark and empty. When I stopped breathing heavy, I could hear a stray mutt barking from the other side of the lake, miserable, alone, and cold. It hurt me, that imagined coupling of theirs, because I know it’s not imagined, and I see nothing but darkness ahead, and I hate them.
Later I heard footsteps on the gravel outside the bedroom window and Dashnell Lawler flashed into my mind. Sooner than later, those apes are going to figure it out. I looked out the window. It wasn’t footsteps. It was a miserable hard rain and it had ice in it.
There was only one way to make her understand that I couldn’t live apart from her. I had to go to her. I had to bring my Lily home. I dove into the shower. I packed a bag and I hit the road. It was rough going. The wipers froze up twice. I saw a couple rigs on their sides. But I made it twenty miles this side of Jackson, Mississippi, before I pulled into a little motel and slept. It wasn’t too bad. I did wake once from dreaming that they were naked and in the room and laughing and pushing me away. Mostly I slept. There was four inches of snow on the ground when I woke in the morning.
H
is half-sister Dereesa called at six o’clock on Sunday morning knowing full well Hez had his Saturday night whiskey to sleep off and that the phone wakes Cheryl and she only has Sundays to sleep until eight. She wasn’t on any of her high horses, begging money or moaning about her kids. She was plain spoken and to the point. Moena was down and bad. She’d had no feeling on her left side all Saturday and refused the doctor and wouldn’t let anyone call the hospital.
They were all used to Moena’s little bitty strokes. She might come in from the garden and sit at the kitchen table. A neighbor woman crying the blues to her wouldn’t even know she’d had one unless she saw her coffee cup tremble en route from the table to her lips. Pretty soon she’d steady herself and her cup and wipe that touch of hair under her nostrils and ask the lady to go out there to the garden and fetch her straw hat before the starlings pecked it to pieces. Afterwards, Moena might sit quiet for an hour or two on the porch, but she’d be back doing around the stove by suppertime.
She said they were wee mites of tremblings, and her time was nowhere close, and she said that’s what the angel had told her a hundred times. Hez was the only educated one in the family
and
religious in that deepest of the deep old way—that went more with
Haggar and Abraham and less with the historical Jesus—Hezekiah believed his mother when she spoke of angels.
So, when the call came, Hez left off his usual grumbling about the phone so damned early on Sunday. He gave up his weekly opportunity to wax his elocutionist, electric way for the bored old people down at Third Street CME Church. He called in a substitute preacher and he hopped the next plane for Charleston.
He went straight to the hospital and he held Moena’s hand. She wouldn’t talk above a whisper or take anything but water. While he was in the room with her, there were several old people in the waiting area who said that, if God intended a healing for Moena, then Hez would be the instrument. They still remembered how decades before as a divinity student, Hez had lifted his mother’s blindness.
The younger ones had an altogether different fascination for Hezekiah. His Birmingham church was still widely regarded as the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. The aged Eleanor Roosevelt had delivered one of her last public speeches there. Presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy, Doctor Martin Luther King, and dozens of other champions of freedom and equality had shared his pulpit. Like so many of his fellow clergymen, Hez had helped to lead and organize marches, demonstrations, boycotts and pickets from Louisiana to Washington, D.C.
“Mama? You know me?”
Moena nodded very slowly, so slowly he asked her again and she did the same thing before he would allow himself to accept that there was communication between them.
“Are you ready to go?” She drew a long, deep breath and her color was better for a minute. “Can you give me an answer?”
She opened her eyes. “I know my God and King.”
Hez pulled out his Bible and started to read to her passages Beauty B. had read to him when he was a boy down on Phelps Pine.
“ … The Angel of the Lord found her by a spring in the wilderness.…”
But while he read, she started turning her head side to side and he took that to mean “Stop.” In a minute she could talk a little and she
was saying that she came out of it best by moving her head back and forth that way. By four in the afternoon, she was fussing about the food, the itchy sheets and the poor television reception.
Hez tracked down the doctor on the golf course. It was much too cold and windy. But the doctor was the kind to stand out there on the fairway until he was frostbitten and then call his brother up north to brag about the mythological temperate southern winter. The annoyed man told Hez there was no scientific reason that Moena was alive, so he couldn’t guess on how long she’d be around or why.
Someone had smuggled in a roast beef sandwich and Moena had polished off the better portion of it by the time Hez got back to her room.
“What’d the doctor say?”
“You’re too mean to die.”
Moena spit roast beef. “You’ll get me to laughing at my funeral.”
“To hear your doctor tell it, you’ll be preaching mine.”
The banter went on. Hez couldn’t sustain it too long. He was hoping to make the last flight out of Charleston and they had some arrangements to discuss.
“You can’t stay here by yourself no more, Mama.”
She might just as well have left the room.
“Cheryl can come get you and you can try it up in Birmingham with us or we’re going to have to make some other kind of arrangements.”
“I’ll get one of them nurses to stay a few nights. Go on about your business.”
It was futile. She was entitled to live her last days as she saw fit. Why not pay someone to look in on her and keep her place decent and let it go?
“Okay, if you’re afraid of Alabama, then you’re afraid of Alabama.”
She chewed and swallowed and took another bite and then a sip of milk. She asked him to be sure the cat was fed before he left. Then she said a movie was coming on television. He asked which
one and she said she didn’t remember. He’d hit the nail strong and square.