My uncle just about choked on his coffee. When he recovered, he said, “Y’all want to do what?”
“We want you to take us to see our lawyer,” I repeated.
He leaned forward in his rocking chair, set his coffee cup on the porch rail, and said, “You talking about Mr. Alfred Jackson?”
“Yep, he’s our lawyer,” Poudlum confirmed.
“Wh-wh-why?” Uncle Curvin stuttered. “Mr. Jackson is an important and busy man. I’m not sure he’ll drop what he’s doing and talk to you boys.”
“He will,” I told him.
“And what makes you so sure about that?”
“After he invested our reward money from the bank, he told us if we ever needed his help to call on him anytime.”
“That’s exactly what he said,” Poudlum added.
I could tell my uncle was tossing all this around in his head because he got quiet for a few moments. Then he said, real serious-like, “This is something that’s real important to you boys?”
“Yes, sir.” I told him. “It ain’t just the Klan. It’s also about something that happened down the river. And I ain’t talking no more about it till we get to see Mr. Jackson.”
He got up from the rocking chair and paced across the porch a few times while he thought about what we had said, “All right, y’all get in the truck.”
When we had parked outside of Mr. Jackson’s office, my uncle got out of his truck and said, “Y’all wait here while I go tell Mr. Jackson y’all want to see him.”
We watched him limp up the stairs on the side of the Bank of Grove Hill, which led up to Mr. Jackson’s office on the second floor. We kept our gaze on the little landing at the top of the stairs, and he hadn’t been in there hardly any time before he reappeared on the landing and waved for us to come on up.
“Told him,” Poudlum said.
Mr. Jackson had a large room adjacent to his office with a big round table in it surrounded by polished chairs with leather seats. He called it his conference room.
He motioned us toward it and said, “You fellows take a seat. Now, do you boys want Mr. Curvin to sit in with us, or is this going to be strictly a meeting between us?”
“Uh, yes, sir. I think it would be all right for him to be here.”
He looked at Poudlum, who said, “That’s fine by me, too.”
“Very good,” he said as he also waved my uncle into the conference room.
When we were all seated, Mr. Jackson placed a pad of paper and some pencils in front of him, looked up and said, “Mr. Curvin seems to think you boys have had a troubling experience in the past few days down on the river. You want to tell me about it? Just start at the beginning and when one of you gets tired of talking, then let the other one take over.”
I started out about how we had walked down to the river and ended up camping that night at the mouth of the Satilfa and how we had caught a boatload of catfish.
“I’ll have to remember that spot next time I go fishing,” Mr. Jackson said. “Go on, what happened next?”
I related how we spied the Klan men going up the creek and how we had followed them and snuck through the woods and saw the Exalted Cyclops unmask himself.
“Wait a minute, son,” Mr. Jackson said. “Are you telling me y’all saw the leader of the Klan reveal his identity?”
“Yes, sir, we surely did.”
“Have you related this information to anyone else?
“No, sir, we didn’t because we wanted your advice before we did, or if we should.”
Mr. Jackson seemed lost in thought for a moment or two. Then he said, “Do y’all know of any reason why you shouldn’t reveal his identity?”
I was about talked out so I motioned for Poudlum to take over, who said, “No, sir, but we don’t know of any reason why we should, either. They chased us up and down the river and who knows what they would have done to us if they had caught us.”
Mr. Jackson took the time to tell Poudlum that he could tell that his new principal was going to make his mark at his school. Then he said, “The Klan knows who you boys are, so why shouldn’t we know who they are?”
Mr. Jackson had a way of putting things in perspective. Poudlum looked at me, I nodded, and he blurted out, “It was the Judge! It was Judge Garrison!”
Mr. Jackson’s pencil froze in his hand, and his eyes, above the glasses perched on the tip of his nose, flicked back and forth between Poudlum and me. My uncle’s eyes bugged out like those of a startled squirrel.
Mr. Jackson’s eyes finally rested on me, and he said, “Both of y’all real sure about that?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him. “We remember him from the trial of the bank robbers.”
He sighed deeply and said, “I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me. Did you boys get a look at any more faces?”
“No, sir,” Poudlum continued. “It was right after that when one of them snuck up on us, and we almost got caught.”
“That would have been the Klexter,” Uncle Curvin interjected.
Mr. Jackson jerked around to face my uncle and said, “The what?”
“The Klexter. He’s the one who circles the outer area of a meeting looking for any interlopers.”
Mr. Jackson turned back to Poudlum and said, “Did he get a clear look at y’all?”
“No, sir, but several folks had seen us coming to the river so it didn’t take them long to figure out it was us.”
“How do you know they figured out it was y’all?”
“They came to our camp two times, and we figured out they thought somebody had sent us to spy on them.”
“Was it the same ones both times?”
“No, sir, the first time it was Herman Finney and his daddy.”
“What happened?”
“We lied, told them we hadn’t been doing nothing but fishing. We felt like we could get away with it because we left our camp at the mouth of the Satilfa in the middle of the night, paddled up the river past the ferry and made camp up there, like we had been there all night.”
“What happened next?”
“While Ted was telling them all that, I eased down to the bank, and loosened the plug on their boat.”
“And?”
“And Mr. Henry told us later that the boat had sunk, motor and all, and they had to swim for it.”
Mr. Jackson stifled a chuckle, looked at my uncle and said, “You hear that, Mr. Curvin? They sunk the boat, motor and all.”
He turned back to us and said, “You mentioned they came to your camp two times.”
Poudlum gave me a look, and I took over. “Yes, sir, but the second time we didn’t talk to them. Mr. Finney and the Night Hawk was at our camp when we approached it at night, and we held back and listened to them.”
“The Night Hawk, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you didn’t see anyone else unmasked at the meeting. How did you know he was this person you call the Night Hawk?”
“It was on account of his boots.”
“How’s that?’
“We saw his boots under his robe at the Klan meeting, and they had silver toes on them. And the man with Mr. Finney standing by the fire at our camp had those same boots on.”
“Why do they call him the Night Hawk?”
“Uh,” my uncle interjected again, “he’s the one who conducts new members through the ceremony.”
Mr. Jackson paused, looked inquiringly over the top of his glasses at my uncle, and said, “Are you familiar with all the titles of Klan members, Mr. Curvin?”
“Well, uh, most of them,” he confirmed.
“Do you mind if I ask how you came into possession of such knowledge?”
“No, sir, I don’t mind. People talk, and I make it my business to know things, and besides, they ain’t as secret as they claim to be and would like to be.”
Mr. Jackson took off his glasses, turned directly to face my uncle and said, “Are you sympathetic with their cause?”
“I make it a policy to mind my own business,” Uncle Curvin answered. “But when anybody starts messing with these here two boys, I don’t care who they are. They ain’t no friends of mine.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Mr. Jackson said as he replaced his glasses and turned back to us and said, “Now, boys, tell us who the Night Hawk is.”
I swallowed hard and thought about it for a moment or two, but I trusted Mr. Jackson’s judgment, and I knew Poudlum did, too, so I just said it.
“He’s the county solicitor, Mr. Danny Pierce.”
Mr. Jackson tossed his pencil down on the conference table and shook his head back and forth as he speculated, “My God, is the entire court system members of the Klan?”
Uncle Curvin showed no emotion at my revelation.
We went on to tell Mr. Jackson and Uncle Curvin about our catfish dinner with Mr. Henry and his wife and how we had been run out of the quarter in the middle of the night by the Klan.
“Despicable behavior!” Mr. Jackson said.
We went on to recount the events of having to hide under the ferry when the men left the two boats they intended to use to search for us the next morning, and how we had taken them down to our camp at the mouth of the Satilfa, set them on fire, and sunk them.
“Good Lord,” my uncle said with a toothless grin. “That makes three boats y’all done sunk. If y’all had been out on the river much longer, they wouldn’t be no boats left on it.”
“We did sink one more,” Poudlum volunteered.
“Huh?” Uncle Curvin said in wonder.
“Yes, sir, we sunk your boat later on. The one we had when you picked us up belonged to two bootleggers and a murdering slaver.”
When Poudlum said that, I thought my uncle’s and Mr. Jackson’s jaws would drop off as they stared at us in disbelief.
Mr. Jackson recovered first and said, “I take it this situation you’re referring to now didn’t involve the Klan?”
I took it upon myself to clear up the confusion. “No, sir, it didn’t. After we set them two Klan boats on fire and sunk them, we intended to paddle on down to the bridge at Jackson and meet Uncle Curvin the next morning, like Mr. Henry had advised us to do.”
I looked at Poudlum for some help, and he didn’t miss a beat. “But that night and the next day it rained cats and dogs for what seemed like forever.”
“Yeah, that storm and the aftereffects is what kept me over in Choctaw County longer than I had planned,” Uncle Curvin interjected.
Poudlum continued, “Well, the rain finally let up, and we loaded up the boat about dark to paddle on down to Jackson and meet Mr. Curvin. But when we got out on the water, we found out the river was swelled up like a dog tick, and it just grabbed us and took us downstream with it.
“We was at the mercy of the flooded river, and we finally give up trying to use our paddles and let it take us. And it took us all right! It took us way on down the river past Jackson, and we woke up the next morning lodged in a tree top that had fell into the river. That’s when Silas, the bootlegger, pulled us out and him and Dudley locked us up in a room full of whiskey with no windows.”
“Slow down,” Mr. Jackson said. “Why did they lock y’all up?”
“Because they wanted to sell us down the river to Mr. Kim for two hundred dollars, who was gonna take us down to Mobile and put us on a big ship to China to serve as cabin boys. Sounded like being sold as slaves to us.”
“Now hold on, Poudlum,” Uncle Curvin said. “You sure you boys ain’t making up a little bit of a yarn about bootleggers and slavers?”
Mr. Jackson held his hand up with the palm out to my uncle, indicating he was interested in hearing more from Poudlum. Then he said, “There has recently been a great deal of alarm down around Mobile about young boys disappearing. This could have something to do with that. What happened after they locked you boys up?”
“We whittled our way out,” Poudlum continued. “Took a long time, and we wore some blisters on our hands doing it, but we cut right through the floor with our pocket knives and got out that way just before Silas and Dudley busted down the door that we had stacked the boxes of whiskey against.”
I could tell Poudlum had grown weary, so I picked up the story from him and told how we had been recaptured when we first encountered Mr. Kim, along with Silas in a motorboat.
“How did you know this Kim was Chinese?” Mr. Jackson asked. “Did he just look that way?”
“Yes, sir, plus he had a long skinny moustache, wore a strange black shirt, and had his hair plaited into one long pigtail down the middle of his back.”
“I assume you boys escaped again?”
“Yes, sir, while Silas and Mr. Kim went to make a last whiskey run before taking us down the river, Poudlum tricked Dudley, and then we overpowered him after Poudlum tossed some ground-up hot and dry pepper in his face.”
“Where in the world did he get hot pepper flakes?”
“He keeps it in a little snuff can and he was pretending to get himself a dip, but instead of doing that, he tossed the pepper in Dudley’s face.”
“And did that incapacitate him?” Mr. Jackson asked.
I wasn’t exactly sure what that word meant, but I had an idea so I said, “He fell down on the floor blinded, choking, and gagging.”
“May I ask how Poudlum came into possession of a snuff can full of ground-up hot pepper?”
“Why, he keeps one in his pocket.”
“Whatever for?”
“Well, mostly in case we run up on a bad dog, which we have been known to do. However, in this case it worked on a bad bootlegger.”