“You’re not telling all you know, Nadine.” That was Aunt Rose, though her voice had an edge I’d never heard before. “That is all I know,” Nadine whined. “If Sidney knew I was over here …”I
could tell she wasn’t kidding. Lillian jumped in at that point to say it was too cold to stand out there on the porch.
In a minute the three of them were sitting in the living room, which Miss Eula calls the parlor.
“What’s the trouble, ladies?”
“She says Dashnell called out to her house threatening to blow up the county.”
“Why would he call her house?”
“She won’t say,” Lily cut in.
I knew why. I knew about the arsenal they kept hidden someplace in the woods. Kids in Prince George grow up dreaming about it. They spend whole summer afternoons on their bikes trying to find it. We had all heard that Nadine’s husband, Sidney, was the official Keeper of the Arsenal Key. I remember one time when I was about ten. Me and three friends stood in the back of the hardware store not three feet behind Sidney trying to figure which key on his chain might unlock it and how we could snatch it without him catching us.
“I know nothing.” She was lying. She was also too addled to maintain her veneer very long. She didn’t really want to. Lily sat her down.
“Let me get this clear, Nadine. Dashnell is fixing to blow up the county. But you don’t know anything about it?”
“That’s right.”
“Then how do you know Dashnell is fixing to blow up the county?” Rose chimed in.
“He called Sidney.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” You could see by the way she set her jaw that she did. I figured I’d cut through some of her net.
“Dashnell thought Sidney had access to the arsenal?”
“Sidney don’t know nothing about no arsenal.”
“What’s Dashnell planning to use to blow up the county?”
“I thought I heard him to tell Sidney dynamite.”
“Where would Dashnell get dynamite?”
“I have no idea.”
“What the
hell
do you want?” That was Miss Eula, waked by the commotion, still pulling her bathrobe over her slip as she came into the room. At that moment, in that light she looked maybe a hundred and nine and mad as hell.
“I just thought you should know.”
“You obviously think you’re talking to pack of damned fools, Nadine.” Miss Eula was beet red with disgust.
“Never mind, then!” Nadine tried, starting for the front door as if she had been greatly aggrieved.
“Set down.” It was turning into Miss Eula’s show. It was something to see. “Set!” She said it with such force that all of us sat immediately. It was as if she had some private score to settle with Nadine. Everything got quiet. Then I spoke up.
“Let me get this straight. Dashnell Lawler called out to your house and spoke to Sidney. He wanted access to the arsenal, the collection of guns and such that the Order keeps hidden somewhere in these parts?”
“Is that what he was talking about?” Nadine tried to sound convincing. Miss Eula let loose a string of bile that we couldn’t exactly follow, words to the effect that Nadine could leave off her cow eyed innocence, she wasn’t running her mouth with that coven of hypocrite churchwomen up at Winn Dixie now. Whatever it meant, it worked. Nadine’s face relaxed and her eyes returned to normal.
“Sidney is a good man. He’s too easy led and sometimes gets pressured by some of the other men into doing things he doesn’t want to do.…” She was coming down to it now. The upshot of what she said was that Dashnell had gotten into the arsenal and taken an undisclosed amount of dynamite. With the second largest civil rights demonstration in history only hours away, it wasn’t hard to put a finger on his intent.
Nobody bothered asking the fool woman why she hadn’t gone straight to the police. She was scared Sidney would be exposed for the Klucker garbage he truly is. Lily made Nadine a cup of tea and I called the sheriff’s office. Then I called Hez, but he said with every able lawman in the state on patrol and the eyes of the world on Prince George, he didn’t see where we had much to fear from a
drunk redneck and a stick of dynamite. I had learned a lot from Hez in the preceding days. Most of it boiled down to thinking before I spoke. Still, I knew he was wrong about this. Like all vermin, these Kluckers are experts at hiding. You can’t underestimate that. James Earl Ray had shot Martin Luther King and killed a whole movement. Dashnell held James Earl Ray up as a knighted saint, a hero who had offered himself as sacrifice to a noble cause. This was Dashnell’s once in a lifetime chance to have the eyes of the world on him. He’d cheerfully blow himself up with a hundred innocent people to achieve that. He’d burrow into the ground or hole up in a hollow log or crawl into the trunk of a parked car and wait for his moment of evil and glory.
I called Hez back three times over the next hour. His office had shut down for the night. I tried his home, but the machine kicked in and the message tape was full. The sheriff’s men showed up a few minutes later. I called their office every few minutes for the next two or three hours. No one knew anything. No one ever does in Prince George County. The night was racing past. I had to do something. I slipped on my jacket, got into my truck and went to join the hunt.
M
other got short with Nadine that night. I felt sorry for her. I know what it is to live with a man like Sidney. I know what a painful thing it is to endure thoughts you can’t express for fear of the back of his hand. I’ve been intimate with all those torments and I would still be if fate hadn’t intervened. It went all through me to watch that poor woman quake as she talked to the highway patrolman. Sidney would break her arms if he found out.
Heath called the sheriff’s office every fifteen minutes for the next hour. They claimed they were out looking for Dashnell. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the most terrible thing I ever experienced was about to take place. Mother pulled on some clothes and went back into the kitchen and started cutting biscuits. Lily and I half played a game of hearts.
Somewhere in there we got the information that Dashnell had been arrested and charged with murder that morning. All the Klavern members questioned had signed statements promising to testify against him. This was a whole lot more than evil Klan business as usual for Dashnell. This was him against the world. There was going to be blood on the road in the morning.
Lily threw her hand down in disgust, “Y’all, we ought to be out there looking for him.” I failed to see the wisdom of that. Dashnell
was armed and surely drunk. He’d have no qualms about shooting any one of us sober, much less in that condition. I said as much.
“They’ll find him,” Heath said, biting into his thumbnail. Lily fussed at him to quit that. Heath called the sheriff’s office again. This time they had news. Someone had tipped them off as to the whereabouts of that arsenal. The sheriff’s deputies had found it broken into and guns and dynamite was missing. By now there was a steady stream of patrol cars and searchlights rolling up and down the road. In fact there were so many lights it created a kind of blue gray, false dawn. Now and then we’d hear a group of searchers passing quickly on foot. Mother had gone out onto the porch without her coat. I went to bring her back inside.
“Get on in this house before you catch your death, Mother.”
“I’ve lived this night before,” she says. Then she followed me back into the house. I’d really like to know what all was said at our house that night. There was all kind of strange sentiment expressed. Voices and faces blurred. I kept trying to pray. Lily and Heath kept snapping at each other. The only calm one was Mother and she kept saying it over and over: “I’ve lived this night before.”
Lily said if they didn’t find Dashnell, then Satan and an army of machine guns might as well meet those marchers. The results would be the same. Heath had his coat by then. Lily asked him where he was going. He said he was going to find Dashnell. Lily called him a damned fool. She was drowned out by the noisy passing of a National Guard convoy. I counted twenty trucks piled with soldiers. Before Lily could resume, Heath was standing in the door.
“Y’all keep away from that march unless you hear back from me.” He was gone. Lily went half crazy cursing him. It was easier to let her rave on than to try to make her hush.
“Now see here,” Mother cut into her ranting. “That reverend can’t call off his march. That reverend knows if he calls off his march, the sheriff and them will call off their search for Dashnell and a lot will have passed for naught.”
“Mother, that’s for the want of sense! Saving people’s lives isn’t for naught.” Everything I ever held on to was crumbling. It felt like the house was rolling back and forth. My mind would run off on
tangents the length of a football field, but when I came back around and looked at the clock, sometimes only twenty or thirty seconds had passed.
After eternity I could see daylight running a low dark pink streak behind the trees across the road. I imagined that down in Birmingham marchers had already begun lining up for their bus ride up to Prince George. You could smell death. You could almost touch it. Lily caught a radio news report. There was a search for an armed terrorist in Prince George. So far march leader Reverend Hezekiah Thomas was not available for comment.
“Well, they must have a thousand men out there looking for him,” Lily says, putting on the television to catch the early news. There wasn’t a word about Dashnell. But they showed hundreds and hundreds of people gathering at a line of Greyhound buses that stretched as far as you could make out. There were a lot of children and mothers in that crowd. I felt like I had swallowed a bushel of scrap iron.
They switched to the front of the bus line where Scenicruisers were already beginning to pull out for Prince George. “I’m calling down there to that television station and warning them about Dashnell,” I says.
“You’ll do no such of a thing!” Mother laid her hand on the telephone. Lily came and laid her hand on Mother’s shoulder. “These people have to be warned, Miss Eula,” she says a little too kindly. Mother won’t sit still for being talked to as if she’s senile. Mother pulled that cord around her hand a half dozen times and jerked it from the wall.
“You’ll bide and you’ll let destiny take its course,” she growled. “Nothing you say or do will make the slightest difference.”
Suddenly it was as if the room had five corners. Nothing made sense. Heath had gone off to find Dashnell despite the fact that a thousand others were already searching. The reverend had refused to call off his march even though it meant untold numbers of innocent people might be killed. Mother was jerking the telephone out of the wall.
Lillian was staring out the living room window … I told her not worry about Heath. Then mother sighed.
“What is it, Mother?”
“I don’t know, baby girl.” I couldn’t say when she last called me that.
Then we stopped; listening hard, and Mother said, “The angels are coming.” It was faint and it was far away, but it was singing and it was sweet and you had to believe if only for a second, that the Kingdom was coming home.
I
t was drizzling. The rain came in strings that made slush piles on the hood when it dropped off the windshield wipers. I had to drive slowly. There were search parties carrying flashlights everywhere. A state chopper had landed in Miss Eula’s lower pasture and three men were struggling to untangle the leashes of a half dozen bloodhounds. It felt like some devil’s parade out there. I lost track of how many different local and state and military guys stopped me and searched the truck. I was beginning to think Hez had been right. If Dashnell was within fifty square miles, he was done for.
I kept thinking, he’d probably been planning this for some time. Those Kluckers are like rodents when it comes to burrowing themselves in. Like most cowards, Kluckers hide deep. I remember once when my grandfather’s barn burned to the ground. The ashes were barely cool before the rats swarmed up out of the cool ground below to feast on the seared carcasses of the mules.
Still I was afraid that some commanding state police officer would decide that Dashnell wasn’t in these parts and call off the hunt. I had visions of hundreds and hundreds of innocent people walking arm-in-arm into sudden hellfire. I saw heads ripped off shoulders and bloody arms flying. After a while it became clear that it was useless to search from the truck. The other vehicles and the searchers were in my way. I pulled over and felt the left side of the
truck mire down in the muddy shoulder. I started searching the low brush that sloped down into the woods at the side of the road. I knew I was covering ground that had been examined by hundreds of other eyes in the last few hours. I’d work a quarter mile of undergrowth on one side of the road, then I’d work my way back on the opposite side. I’d get back into my truck and fight mud until I moved forward to a new starting point and began the process all over again. After about forty-five minutes I left my flashlight in the truck. The sky was dark purple gray and there was pink mist in the woods. The tree limbs were already beginning to glisten with ice. There would be half an inch on them by noon. It was dreary, hopeless work. My hands and feet burned with wet cold.
Hell is a damp Alabama February night. I worked my way around a curve to where the road inclined sharply down towards Potts River Bridge.
At first I thought the singing was the cold or my tired mind inventing comfort. My eyes were bleary and every shadow, every voice in the distance, seemed like an echo from the dark and troubled past. There were no words yet, only voices far and dim. It was spitting snow. The sun in the east was still below the clouds and it gave an intolerable luminescence to the wet, leafless trees and the red mud and cracked asphalt. It illumined all the ugliness.