“Pull ‘em off of barstools, buy ‘em out of jail, haul ‘em away from their tractors and their flea-bitten mules and have ‘em down by the King’s monument at seven o’clock Saturday morning.” He passed several hours like that. Then he went home.
Frances, the family housekeeper for fifteen years, was threatening to quit. Moena was back there in the kitchen determined to earn her keep by making supper. So far she had ruined a French porcelain skillet trying to bake corn bread in it and shorted out the microwave oven. Cheryl was in the breakfast room cooling Frances out when Hez got home. He made himself a good stiff drink and went to inspect the damage. Moena was frying okra.
“Mama, Frances does the cooking.”
Moena was almost fit from trying to make sense of the electric stove anyway. She’d burned up the first batch and now the second was turning to greasy green cornmeal covered mush.
“Quickest way on earth to make somebody mad is try to do them a favor,” she muttered, dumping sizzling green slime into the sink.
In seconds the room was filled with steam and the smoke alarm was screaming.
“If this is what money buys, I don’t want none.” Hez fanned down the alarm with a newspaper and switched on the vent fan. The cloud thinned.
“Come on back here and visit with me.”
Hez settled Moena into his recliner and poured her three sips of peach brandy.
Moena sat down in the breakfast room with him. She immediately started complaining because Cheryl had wallpaper hung in the kitchen. Moena had never seen such foolishness. When she had swallowed her brandy, Hez poured her another two fingers.
“Get you a good slow sip, Mama. I got something to tell you.”
Moena drank. A little amber liquid dropped down one side of her mouth. “Dereesa dead?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. Dereesa will be on in a day or two.”
“What you got to steady me with brandy to say?”
“Saturday … on Saturday … I’m going to
Prince George.”
“Prince George County, Alabama?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What for?”
“A march.”
Moena let out a gasp that pulled all the air out of her. She drew in a breath. She laid her head down on the table and said, “Lord, come for Thy world!” She shook with laughter from her head to her feet. That started Hez laughing.
“Prince George County, Alabama, on a march?”
Hez was laughing so hard that he could only nod. Moena was slapping the wall.
“Not scared of nothin’, are you?”
“Too stupid,” he giggled. Their laughter subsided. The old woman pursed her lips.
“You’re doing a right thing,” she said. “It’s a fool thing, but it’s a right thing.” Then she drained her glass and handed it back to him for a refill.
“Don’t be so stingy this time.”
T
he panels of café curtain over the sink were frozen as stiff as wood when I pulled them back to see if I’d left the truck lights on. I slammed the thermostat in the hall with my fist and the furnace screamed. I spread the county newspapers on the kitchen linoleum and brought James Edward in. He’s a stupid dog and he’s old and he doesn’t much care for me. His nose was wet, and he tried to run back outside six or eight times, so I figured he had been all right in his nest of rags under the steps. I trudged through muddy ice to the mailbox. There was an unsigned postcard of the Prince George County courthouse.
Die, Nigger Lover!
That warmed me up. The phone was ringing when I get back inside the trailer.
“You Lawler?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hezekiah Thomas down in Birmingham.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping we could do a little something for each other.”
Silence.
“It says here in my evening paper you’re planning a demonstration up there in Prince George.”
“Yeah.”
“Highly commendable.”
“Thanks.”
“Idiotic. You know it’s idiotic, don’t you, boy?”
“Why?
Hezekiah laughed out loud at that. He told me later it was because he took me for a naive kid. He wondered if I might even be up to something. No question there were many white people of goodwill out there. But he’d been tricked before. Accepted an invitation to a barbecue once and then found himself in the middle of nowhere at a Klan rally. Ran ten miles through fields with dogs after him that time.
“Are you a
native
of Prince George?”
“Yes, sir.”
Silence.
“Well, if you’re a native of Prince George, then you don’t have to ask why it’s idiotic—if commendable.”
“Yes, sir, I have to ask why it’s idiotic. The whole problem is everybody else is scared to ask why. But then I’m not afraid of anyone, especially these fools up here.”
“You’re braggadocious too. Look here. There’s a Ramada Inn at the 1–20 Sherman exit about halfway between White Oak and Birmingham.”
“I know it.”
“Suppose you meet me there tomorrow night at eight.”
“Why?”
“How many of your friends and neighbors do you expect at your Harmony Festival?”
“Couldn’t say.” I could very easily say. I was expecting me. Period.
“Well, son, I’m working on a busload. You be there.”
The minute I heard Hezekiah’s voice, I knew who he was. Hezekiah Thomas was on Birmingham TV News ten times a year. Mostly because he was mad about something the city council or the mayor had done. I remembered last summer during the drought Hezekiah was out in the ghetto streets with wrenches turning on fire hydrants for the kids to splash in because the mayor had ordered the public swimming pools drained as a water saving measure. I remembered Hezekiah yelling that the mayor should order his rich
friends to empty their pools if he was serious about conserving water.
It was a thrill to talk to a famous person like that. I’ll be honest. I didn’t much care for his patronizing, take-over attitude. This was my battle. It belonged to me, not some preacher who’d been on
60 Minutes
. I couldn’t see losing several hours’ pay just to drive down to the Ramada Inn and tell the man to butt out. I slapped the dog on the back a couple times and then he walked out into the cold. Just before I climbed into the truck, I had a shuddering sensation.
Vaguely the idea rose like an old locomotive beam burning through fog or a swirling star that stops suddenly and crystallizes into a sapphire.
Hezekiah had said he was working on a busload.
The thing was happening. People all the way down in Birmingham were reading about it. I flew down to the 7-Eleven and picked up a paper and there I was under “News of Local Interest.” It was my high school graduation picture, the same one they had used when I was sent to Folsom for robbing that bowling alley. It told where to meet and what time and said the purpose of the walk was to demonstrate that all people are welcome in Prince George County. I stood there reading it over and over, more thrilled than I’ve ever been in my life. I was still standing there by the news rack ten minutes later when the district supervisor phoned to tell me I was out of a job.
I
thought surely the highway patrol deputies would have so many accidents to tend to with the snow and the ice on the roads that they wouldn’t come. I gave myself the day off from worrying about it and hauled the library table up to the attic to begin stripping it. Then here they came, stomping snow and slush off their rubber boots outside the door.
They had me come back over the night the men planned it. I’d been over it so many times in my mind it was easy to recall in perfect detail everything that was said. What they didn’t expect, and I hadn’t fully realized until I told them about it, was Marjean’s confirmation that it was Dashnell who pulled the trigger of Jake’s gun. Apparently the officers had something that went with that because they asked me to repeat it several times.
They asked if I was mad at Dashnell and trying to get back at him for something—beating me, another woman, anything like that? I said I felt sorry for Dashnell because he was too thick to understand that pack he ran with had no regard for him. Easily led is easy prey. I said I had no deep-seated feelings about him one way or the other. My living with him had been mostly out of habit. My leaving had been inevitable. I guessed this thing with the man on the lake had been the last straw.
They were all nice fellows. One of them, the oldest, was a black
man. I had to chuckle a little when I thought of Marjean having to answer his questions, but only a little, because he had a military bearing. For all I knew he could make things hard on me or threaten me, thinking I had more information. I can’t imagine he felt too comfortable in the broad daylight up here in Prince George. Thinking back, he reminded me of a school principal we had here years back—unctuous was how Daddy described him.
Mama sat over in the corner by the pump organ listening, and I felt ashamed, not because of the events I was describing. I’d been over that with her. I felt ashamed of the things I was telling them about me and Dashnell, about his having been a habit and the way I saw him as ignorant and sad. Mother is well read. Daddy was an out and out educated man. Here I was admitting to these strangers that I had been untrue to my upbringing by marrying Dashnell. Mother didn’t dance any jigs at our wedding. It wasn’t her way to forbid you or predict doom, but she wasn’t thrilled about it. I overheard Mother to say when my cousin Estelle married that it was a sin to push a woman out like Estelle’s parents did. Mother saw nothing wrong with an old maid. I would rather have gone to hell in an oxcart than stayed single—back then. All the same, Mother put on a beautiful affair. You could say very fancy. She had a seven course supper afterwards in the Old Southern Hotel lobby. She let out her wedding dress for me and went through the motions of giving Dashnell my grandmother’s emerald and diamond rings so he could give them to me.
I never came back to Mother once and admitted that I had made a mistake, not even when I moved up home. I never told her that I had married Dashnell out of fear that I might never otherwise marry. Now here I was, in her earshot, telling strange men how stupid I had been.
I tried to tell myself I had never been safer in my life than when I was with those three men from the Alabama Bureau of Investigation and their loaded guns in Mother’s parlor. Another piece of me kept thinking they could decide I was their way into this killing on the lake. They could decide at some point to haul out their guns and take me in. I wondered who’d be there for me. Mother was too old.
Lily was gone. It confounded me that I had lived over half a century and accumulated so few friends. I imagined Marjean and the other women raising talk against me. I saw some desperate lawyer convincing Dashnell to say that I had gone off my nut and put them up to it or done it myself.
Of course that was only the fear in my heart raising its ugly head once again. I silently tried a little prayer that Michael England had taught us at discussion group. It calmed me considerably.
The ABI men hadn’t been gone three minutes before Lily called. I will always feel kindly towards Lily. This morning I had my own consternation and Mother was low. I wanted to get back to stripping my library table, but Lily went on and on. Michael had taken her to some church or place down there close to Houston, Texas. She said it was like being married to a monk. They have to sleep in a little tiny room on a mattress on the floor, and they’re both supposed to go off apart all day, her with the women, him with the men to work. She has to take a bath at a certain time, and then he gets his, and they eat supper in silence, and then they all gather together to chant.
She’s miserable all over again.
She was all in a spin about Glen. Would I please go by to see him? He sounded bad to her. I didn’t care how Glen sounded. I had this house and Mother and the ABI to think about. She didn’t get much of what she wanted from me.
“Lily,” I said, “I can’t give you what you want. I don’t have it.”
“Have what?” She sounded startled.
“You’re like some kid looking to its mama for happiness.” She didn’t like that. She got off the phone pretty quickly after I said that. I hung up the receiver and sat there a minute wondering, as I always do when I express the truth, if I should have kept my big mouth shut.
I
didn’t worry too deep about Marjean going cagey. She had always switched off like a light whenever Jake left the room. It was turning off cold. There’s not too many nights of the year where I don’t like to sit out at least awhile after dark. I’m generally a furnace, but not that night. I could see a shell of ice forming on the lake as I walked across the yards. I wasn’t worried about Jake at all. One thing I knew was Jake would never turn woman and run off and leave me holding no bag. Hell, I
knew
that. However, it did seem peculiar that he hadn’t come right on over and given me an update after the Alabama Bureau of Investigation boys left.
It started raining. There were holes of water in the ice on the lake and steam was rising from them. Now, believe this if you can, and if you can’t, then know it’s being told by a Christian. I got back up to my place and I sat a minute on the back steps, just long enough for me to feel that they were caked in ice. I was just fixing to get up and go in the house and get my keys and head on down to the café for some steak and eggs, and
this is the truth when a lie would work so much better,
I seen that nigger I shot, clean as daylight, that nigger in his boat gliding past, seen it so well I had to laugh because it was so real, I honestly figured it was Jake or one of them got up just like him and going past in a boat!