Supper that night was shepherd’s pie, one of his mother’s favorite money-saving dishes. Wendell didn’t much care for it—he didn’t like his vegetables mixed up with his meat, as a rule—but he had no interest in calling attention to himself by complaining.
He’d expected a fuss as soon as he came in the front door. It was late afternoon by then, and his dad’s truck was in the drive, the engine’s slow clicking as it cooled a signal that he had just gotten home.
Well, this is it, Wendell had thought. Surely word had gotten around town and over to the mill about the cabin burning down and some white boy in the bucket line. No doubt the story about the deputy sheriff who wouldn’t investigate had made its way to Main Street and all the way up to Burger World. Everybody in town would know that Wendell Crow was in cahoots with the colored. Folks were probably thinking he was the next Stanley Arnette. Why don’t you move to the Bottom, you love them colored so much? they’d say the next time they saw him.
But he’d been greeted with the usual lack of excitement when he walked into the house. His mother was in the kitchen fussing at Rosemary about how it was her job to fold the laundry and she ought to do so without being told. Missy was sitting at the kitchen table drawing a dress pattern for her favorite doll. “Wash up for supper, Wendell,” his mother called as he walked past, “we’re eating in twenty minutes,” but that was it. Nothing in her voice made him think she had anything else to say to him.
His dad was sitting in the front room reading the afternoon paper. Wendell steeled himself. Maybe his mother was leaving it to his dad to deal the blow. He could already imagine the scene: the paper slowly lowering, his dad peering over it with narrowed eyes, asking him, “Son, is there something you’d like to tell me about?”
The paper rattled, and Wendell’s stomach hopped. What would his dad’s number one objection be? He couldn’t remember him saying one thing or another about the Bottom or about the folks who lived there. Would he be like that deputy sheriff, say that Wendell needed to learn his place, which wasn’t in no colored newspaper office, that was for damned sure?
“I’m thinking about riding up to Covington come Saturday,” his dad said from behind the sports page, and his words were so ordinary and unexpected that Wendell took a step back. “I’ve been needing a few things for the truck. You want to ride along?”
“S-sure,” Wendell stammered. He waited, but his dad went back to the paper, so Wendell headed up the stairs to his room, wondering when the blow would fall and feeling nervous that it hadn’t already.
• • •
Now he poked around at his shepherd’s pie, trying to make it look like he was eating. Even if shepherd’s pie had been his favorite meal of all time, he wouldn’t have had an appetite for it. His stomach felt pulled tight with nerves. How’d he get himself into this mess? If he’d just stuck to his routine and not gotten tangled up with that jerk Ray Sanders, none of this would’ve happened. He wouldn’t have felt guilty, wouldn’t have felt like he had to help Callie out, wouldn’t have ended up in Mr. Renfrow’s office with a sheriff’s deputy who was going to blab all over town about how Wendell Crow was friends with a colored girl.
Wendell grabbed a roll from the basket and tore it in two. He didn’t even know why he’d said him and Callie were friends. He didn’t have friends who were girls and he didn’t have friends who were colored. Nobody did. That was the thing. There wasn’t nothing wrong with being colored. He liked Callie and Carl Jr. just fine, but that didn’t mean they were friends. They went to different schools, lived in different neighborhoods. There wasn’t anything to tie them together.
Of course, there were people like Mr. Renfrow who thought whites and colored should mix. “Read this,” Mr. Renfrow had said when Wendell asked him about the broken window, handing him a torn page from the newspaper. Wendell had started to read it, but that’s when Deputy McAllister had shown up. So he’d folded the piece of paper and stuck it in his pocket. He hadn’t read it until he was halfway home, after he couldn’t run anymore and had to stop to catch his breath.
The thing was, the editorial made sense in a way. Wendell believed in things being fair. He thought it was wrong that Deputy McAllister wasn’t going to investigate who had broken Mr. Renfrow’s window or burned down the cabin, especially because there was no doubt in Wendell’s mind that Ray Sanders was the culprit. In fact, it made him mad that Deputy McAllister wasn’t going to do anything. Made him mad too when Mr. Renfrow said if a white man walked into the room and killed them all, he might not get prosecuted either.
“Why aren’t you eating, Wendell?” his mother asked, and Wendell shoved a forkful of hamburger into his mouth to make her happy, but he hardly paid attention to what he was chewing on. He was too busy trying to grab on to the thoughts rolling around in his head. What Mr. Renfrow had written—that everybody’s taxes, white and colored, had paid for the new pool, so everybody should be able to use it—well, that was fair on the face of it, he had to admit. But Wendell couldn’t see it happening. Nobody would let it happen. All sorts of folks who never had a bad word to say about the colored, they’d be as against it as the others.
He looked up at his dad. His dad was a prime example of life not being fair. Why, his dad could tell you anything you wanted to know about politics or how the government worked or why a situation was this way and not that. But he’d never be president or even mayor or city councilman. He was a mill worker and the son of a mill worker, and people like him never got to be president or mayor. That wasn’t fair, but that’s how it was.
He ate another bite of shepherd’s pie and listened to Missy explain how her doll was going to a fancy tea party and Rin Tin Tin was going to be there, wasn’t that something? Wendell was starting to get the feeling that nobody knew a thing about the fire. The fact was, if the cabin had burned down two weeks ago, before he’d met Callie, before his dad had even told him about it, he might not have known about the fire either. Maybe if he’d been down at the river and seen the smoke, but even then, what was that cabin to him? He wouldn’t have known that runaway slaves had been hidden away there, or that his dad and his brothers had played there as boys, or that some kid named Jim had carved his name in the wall.
So why would anyone in Celeste care, when that cabin had probably meant less than spit to them, even if they’d known it existed? He bet Deputy McAllister didn’t even care enough to tell his boss. It was a story that didn’t matter to anybody but the colored down in the Bottom, which made it a story that didn’t matter at all.
Rosemary cleared the dinner plates and returned with a bowl of pudding from the refrigerator. “I made this from a mix,” she said proudly. “It’s a little waxy on top, but I don’t think that matters, do you?”
“I’m pretty full,” Wendell said, pushing his chair away from the table. The funny thing was, his stomach finally felt like it was starting to loosen up a little. The tight feeling wasn’t so tight. He felt like he had things thought through pretty well. Word wasn’t going to get back to his parents, life wasn’t fair, he was sorry about the cabin and Mr. Renfrow’s window, but there wasn’t one thing in the world he could do about it.
“I’m going out with King,” he said, and when his mother said she wanted him home by dark, he nodded and headed for the back door. He was always home by dark. It was hard to see a snake on the path after the sun went down.
It wasn’t all that late yet, maybe closing in on seven, but the racket in the woods was gearing up. Crickets, katydids, bats, frogs, mockingbirds, and mourning doves. King’s ears stood at alert, twitching left and right, and his nose sniffed the air every five seconds. Wendell liked this time of evening best, when the heat loosened its grip on the day, and cool air seemed to rise from the ground.
He took in a deep breath through his nose and could smell the smoke from the fire, though the scent was softer now, not as insistent as it had been earlier. Would the fire have traveled if people hadn’t been there to put it out? It hadn’t been a particularly dry summer, but maybe that didn’t matter. Wendell supposed it was a good thing he’d been walking down to the river that morning, and now he felt sort of bad that he couldn’t tell his dad he’d helped to put a fire out.
But he couldn’t. He was already working on a story if word got out about him being in Mr. Renfrow’s office, and it wouldn’t have anything to do with the cabin in the woods. Maybe he’d say he was pretty sure Ray had thrown the rock through Mr. Renfrow’s window, and Wendell felt it was his duty as a good citizen to let Mr. Renfrow know. I have a respect for private property, he’d tell anyone who asked, no matter who it belongs to.
As they got closer to the river, King started to whine. Man alive, Wendell hoped Callie wasn’t hanging around, playing private investigator. What was left to find out, anyway? She knew just about everything there was to know. Knew all about Ray Sanders, knew about the boy who drowned, knew about his dog—
Buddy. Wendell had heard Buddy barking in the woods that morning, so it was probably safe to say he hadn’t burned up in the fire. That was canine instincts for you right there, Wendell thought. When a fire was burning, you headed for the water.
King’s whine hit a higher pitch. Wendell stopped to listen for voices above the insects and birds, but the only other noise was the water singing its way over the rocks. When they reached the spot where the woods opened to the riverbank, he looked left and right as far he could see in either direction, but nobody and nothing was there.
King splashed into the water, his whines deepening now and changing into a full-throated howl.
“Where are you going, boy?” Wendell called, panicked, because he’d never seen King charge into the river that way. What if he got caught in the current? Wendell would have to go in after him, and there’d been some big afternoon storms over the weekend, so the water was full of itself, breaking hard against the rocks. He thought about Jim, imagined Jim’s foot slipping on a rock, imagined his body being carried away by the water. Only takes a second to go under, Wendell’s dad said whenever they came fishing down here. Watch your step.
It hardly took King any time to reach the other side of the river, and Wendell saw how he could make it over if he kept to a ragged line of rocks that spanned the water. He took off his shoes and socks and set across, feeling for the rocks with his toes, moving slow. By now King had moved ten yards up the bank, and his howling had ceased. Wendell was halfway across when he saw King lie down.
“You okay, boy?” Wendell asked King as he made his way onto the shore. He walked slowly toward his dog, making soothing noises. “You okay there, boy? Everything okay?”
King whimpered as Wendell got closer. At first he thought that King had pushed himself up against a big rock, like something was hiding under it that King just had to have, a muskrat or a toad, but now Wendell could see that King was lying next to the body of the old yellow dog. He could see that the dog was dead.
“Poor old dog,” Wendell said. “Poor old Buddy.” He leaned down and put his hand on the dog’s head. “But you lived a good, long life, didn’t you? You were a good dog. I bet you’re with Jim right now, jumping and leaping, spry as can be.”
He sat down next to King and gave his scruff a good rub. “I guess it was his time, don’t you?”
King put his nose on Wendell’s knee. There’s nothing better in this world than a dog, Wendell thought, and he guessed that was why he was crying, and he guessed he’d just sit there until he stopped.