Gloria was shaking again by the time she got back to her cramped room at Miz Lottie’s and burrowed beneath the quilt to cry, a slow unraveling. This guilt was a new feeling, enflaming her grief about her family’s dead and missing—a hot spear stabbing every pain she’d tried to bury. She saw Mama’s slack-jawed face on her deathbed pillow, where Gloria had sat and stared too long, wanting to look away and yet not able to, chronicling each missing movement and breath while Robbie wailed and kicked the wall and Papa paced the garden outside Mama’s window, saying, “Oh dear God. Oh dear God,” in a stranger’s helpless voice. Until Mama died, he had never stopped believing she would get better.
Papa had been good at everything outside of the house but almost nothing inside except to threaten a whipping. He could not make himself wash Mama when she was too weak to use the outhouse or the corner tub, so Gloria had wiped away Mama’s watery stool and seen to the folds between her legs. When Gloria had needed the back-porch Robert Stephens to help her, instead he had leaned on her—he had come home less than before, working longer hours (“We’ll need the extra money,” he always said), and moved his meetings farther away. A sob tore at Gloria’s throat as she remembered how she’d been robbed of school, which Mama had said was her only chance every day for the last three months of her life, her last words to her before her mind was gone: Don’t quit school. Go to college. When Mama was senseless with pain and medication, Gloria had begun lying to her, promising her she wasn’t missing class. Every lie to Mama haunted her now that Mama was gone. Gloria had been so good a liar that Mama had believed her. It was a new, loathsome idea: she could lie to her own dying mother.
Gloria wailed, her face hot in the pillow to stifle the sound.
Because that wasn’t even the worst. The worst—the worst—was how instead of freeing Robbie like she’d promised Papa, she’d ignored the advice from Mr. Moore and even John Dorsey, who had known better too but hoped to make up for a boy in Live Oak he couldn’t save. She had stirred up the courthouse, which meant she might have stirred up the town.
This day felt worse than Mama’s dying. She hadn’t caused Mama to die. If she and Robbie had stayed on Lower Spruce in Miz Lottie’s house, they never would have met a McCormack on the road. Thinking of Lyle touching her while Robbie watched with shock, then the way Lyle had pushed her up against his gate at night and rubbed his body against hers, made her remember the deputy on the road and the plans in his mind. She smothered herself in the pillow to try to contain her scream. Gloria only quieted when she was afraid Miz Lottie might come to check on her. She couldn’t stand the thought of adding a single ounce of burden to Miz Lottie.
“Hurry—check the back.” A man’s voice.
When she opened her eyes, the sky had dimmed through the sheer curtains and she heard a burr of voices from the living room—June and Miz Lottie, but also others witnessing trouble. Gloria sprang up and tottered to the doorway.
The living room was crowded. Except for June and Miz Lottie, all of them were peeking through the front window facing the road: Mr. and Mrs. Hatchett and Leroy Jenkins, the pastor’s brother. June took off running—full-out running—toward the kitchen the other way. Mr. Jenkins was heaving up and down with a wheeze at the window. He’d been running too.
“All of y’all get away from that window,” June barked, angry. “Get down low.”
“What’s going on?” Gloria said.
No one answered, which made the scene more troubling. Mrs. Hatchett took Miz Lottie by the arm to lead her to her couch. Miz Lottie looked tired, as if she’d been asleep too. “Gloria, go fetch Miz Lottie a glass of water. Go on.”
Gloria worried for Miz Lottie and wanted to demand to know what the fuss was, but the fear in the room was thick and urgent, so she turned to follow June to the kitchen.
“Truck down at the corner,” she heard Mr. Hatchett report. “Big red one.”
“Told you,” Mr. Jenkins said, still breathing hard. “There’s five, six riding in back.”
A strange truck in Lower Spruce might mean the Klan! In the kitchen, June was pulling down the blinds to block the jalousie windows in Miz Lottie’s rear kitchen door. He’d grabbed his shotgun from its hiding place behind the fridge, had it propped on his shoulder, finger on the trigger. Gloria’s heart clamored.
“They said there’s a truck,” Gloria told him, though he looked like he already knew.
“That light,” he said, pointing, and she flipped the kitchen switch off. The kitchen went dark, and the crickets chirped more loudly through the open windows, but there were no other sounds. The curtains glowed faintly with gray light. Gloria hazarded a peek from the window’s opposite corner: nothing was moving between Miz Lottie’s clothesline and the mango trees where her truck was parked. Even June’s work shirts hanging from the clothespins were petrified and still.
“What you doin’, Glo?” June said.
Gloria let the curtains fall shut. She’d forgotten about Miz Lottie’s water. “Sorry, I’m—” She reached into the fridge for Miz Lottie’s cold mason jar. Her fingers were shaking again.
“What I mean is, what you doin’?” Uncle June said. “You better decide. You gonna curl up an’ cry? You gonna go hide under the bed?”
“Is it the Klan?” she said, speaking her worst fear. “What will they do, Uncle June?”
“You done cryin’? Tell me yes or no.”
From the living room Miz Lottie’s phone jangled. Mrs. Hatchett answered, and she sucked in her breath from whatever she heard. Then she slammed down the phone. No doubt someone had called with a threat, or bad news. Miz Lottie asked who had called and Mrs. Hatchett said no one.
“I’m done crying,” Gloria said, although her eyes wanted to flood.
“All right, then, you carry Miz Lottie her water,” June said. “Real calm like. Don’t get her excited, hear?”
“Yessir.”
June spoke so quickly, she had to strain to hear him over her heart’s pounding. “Then you take her to her room. Make sure she’s clear of that window. Keep the lights off, or they’ll see you better’n you’ll see them. That old oak blocks her window pretty good, so you peek out from time to time. See what you see.”
Gloria nodded.
“Look for fires,” June said. “If you hear gunfire, try to see the muzzle flash.” Uncle June was telling her the things he would tell a soldier, she realized. “You know where Mama’s peashooter is?”
The laundry basket was in Miz Lottie’s room, on her bed. She’d carried it in herself when they returned from the courthouse. “Yessir.” Gloria’s slamming heart made the room seem dimmer. Papa had taught her how to shoot squirrels and rabbits with buckshot, but she wouldn’t trust her aim with a pistol. Shooting into the dark.
“Don’t even think about firing that gun at a white man unless you’re about to die first—not ’cuz you got scared an’ jumped.”
“Yessir.”
“But if you got to shoot, don’t shoot blind. Eyes open. And keep shooting. And all of us, we’ll get to the truck. I parked it out back. Tank’s full and I’ve got the key in my pocket. I been stayin’ ready for these SOBs. If you see me run for that truck, follow behind. No matter what, you get Miz Lottie to the truck. That’s your only job, even if you got to carry her.”
“Why don’t we just go now?”
“Too late now,” Uncle June said.
Outside, a vehicle’s tires growled across the road. A man yelled something Gloria couldn’t understand, but she knew the angry sound. The strange truck might be right in front of the house. “Remember what I said,” Uncle June said, hushed. “You squeeze that trigger by accident, they’ll burn down Lower Spruce. But they might anyway. So don’t fire it until we’re all done for. All you can do then is take a few of them too. God sorts out the rest.”
“Yes,” Gloria said, fully agreed. She wished the deputy from the road in Live Oak would come, a wish so fierce it sped her heart. But then she saw ashes—a heralding, not a memory—and her heart iced. There would be burning tonight. What would Papa do if he were here? Gloria knew the answer: he would run. Papa had run already. Running had been the answer for Robbie all along, and she’d been foolish enough to go to the courthouse.
“Go on,” Uncle June said. “Get Mama out of the front room.”
“Where’s Waymon?” Gloria asked. June and Waymon were not Miz Lottie’s biological children, but she had raised them both since the time they were Robbie’s age. While they were gone for the war, at times Gloria had wondered if Miz Lottie would worry herself to death. June was kin, and Waymon had found his way to her somehow. They both talked about how she cut switches from her yard to keep them in line as if she’d done them a great service, just like Miz Lottie said her mother, in her slave cabin, had cut switches to beat her children because she said it was better if it came from her instead of Massa.
“Waymon can take care of himself,” June said. “Go, Gloria. Hurry.”
Miz Lottie walked slowly, so Gloria tried to take her time walking with her despite her anxiousness. Gloria flicked off the bare bulb in the hallway, and the house beyond the kitchen went dark except a faint glow from the windowless bathroom. Gloria held Miz Lottie’s slightly trembling hand as she led her through the dark. She knew the house from memory enough to reach Miz Lottie’s open doorway. Her room was an inky cavern.
Miz Lottie had so many clothes that two racks of dresses lined her bedroom doorway to make a path to her pink canopy bed, a long-ago retirement gift from Councilman Powell, so high she needed steps to climb to it. The bed was more regal than the bed where Ma Ma said Miz Lottie had kept Ma’am’s feet warm. Gloria led Miz Lottie through her collection of memories to her bed. “Where’s my water?” Miz Lottie had sworn she didn’t need more after two sips, but now she sounded panicked. Gloria had kept the mason jar, knowing better. “I’ve got it.”
Miz Lottie drank in thirsty gulps, her hands struggling with the jar’s weight, so Gloria helped her steady it.
“Do you need your heart pills?” Gloria said. “They in the bathroom?”
Miz Lottie shook her head. “Stay here,” she said. “With me.”
Outside, a white man was shouting. He was too far to make out his words, except niggers. “Is Waymon in the kitchen with June?” Miz Lottie said. “Did he come back yet?”
“Yes,” Gloria lied, the easiest thing to say. Uncle June had said to keep Miz Lottie calm.
Headlights swept across Gloria’s face through the open blinds, as if God wanted to shine a light on her lies. And Miz Lottie knew: Gloria saw it in the flash of her wide, probing eyes. Gloria rushed to the window to close the blinds like Uncle June had told her to. The headlights were coming from the back, not the road. Who was driving in Miz Lottie’s yard?
Once the blinds were closed, Gloria rushed back to the bed to find the laundry basket, feeling for the ribbed wicker. She banged her ankle on Miz Lottie’s steps to the bed, but she barely felt the pain while she looked for the gun.
“Gloria—” Miz Lottie said sternly. “Is Waymon here or not?” More angry shouts outside.
“No, ma’am.” Gloria did not want her dying words to be a lie.
“What?” Miz Lottie’s voice rose in alarm.
“Waymon’s not here. Not yet.”
“Then why’d you say…” But Miz Lottie did not finish, anguished. Worse than a rebuke. Gloria wished she could take back the truth when she heard Miz Lottie’s whimpering sob.
She had seen Miz Lottie weep only once, at Mama’s funeral. Miz Lottie’s crying twisted her insides with shame and dread.
Gloria wrapped her fingers around the butt of the .22. She didn’t have the time or light to check the chamber, so she went to the window, led by the moon.
“This loaded?” Gloria said, hoping Miz Lottie could hear her over her crying.
“Five shots. Bullets in my closet, top shelf, in my hatbox.” Miz Lottie held back her sob. “You see anybody?”
Gloria looked for movement in the shadows. “No.”
The silent hulk of Miz Lottie’s truck waited in the moonlight, ready. We should have run. Gloria saw herself in the truck in another time, racing the truck along the railroad tracks past rows of slash pines, Miz Lottie beside her. Racing toward—
—the woods. Someone waiting in the shadows.
“Where’s Robert Stephens?” In the backyard, a stranger let out a yell.
Gloria almost dropped her gun when her knees buckled in fright. The voice sounded not farther than ten yards away, maybe fifteen. Instinct made her pull back from the window, but she remembered Uncle June saying to watch for fire. She peeked out again, trying to see past the tree. Glass broke from the other side of the house, probably the living room window. Out front, Mrs. Hatchett screamed and her husband told her to stay down. Someone was out back; someone else was at the front. Maybe the house was surrounded. Cold facts came to Gloria, lining up.
“Gloria?” Miz Lottie said, still a whimper. “You smell kerosene?”
“No, ma’am.” But the entire room might smell like kerosene. Gloria’s nose was plugged with her own hot breath as she panted by the window.
“You tell me the truth,” Miz Lottie said. “I can’t smell anything. I was in my bed, an’ I thought to myself, ‘Who’s that fussin’ outside? Who’s out there yellin’ to raise the dead?’ ”
“You mean now?”
“My mama say, ‘Lottie, you smell that kerosene? They pour it to make the fire burn quicker.’ They’ll pour it on your skin, you give them a chance. Then you’ll be blacker’n black.”
Miz Lottie was talking out of her head and white men were circling the house. The world folded in on itself, and Gloria held her breath until her dizzy feeling passed. She’d almost forgotten the lesson she’d learned from Mama’s illness: people seemed fine until they weren’t fine at all. Just like towns. Like Gracetown.
Gloria watched the truck, waiting to see if Uncle June would start shooting or give her a signal. To keep from being afraid, she felt herself wanting it to happen. The nozzle of her gun tapped lightly against the edge of Miz Lottie’s closed window.
“You’re not in old times with your mama anymore, Miz Lottie.”
For a moment, Miz Lottie was silent, mulling that over. “Don’t die in no fire,” she said. “Any way but that.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Gloria whispered, not sure what she was promising. She was just glad Miz Lottie sounded in her right mind again. Maybe the broken window had taken her mind back to the old days, like Waymon sometimes jumped when he heard loud noises since the war.
“They don’t care who it is—man, woman, or child,” Miz Lottie said. “Once it starts—they don’t care. They’ll treat you like you ain’t from the same God as them. Like they the devil.”
Gloria thought of the hard-eyed deputy on the road who wanted to drag her to the woods. “I know, Miz Lottie.”
“If you gotta run, go on and run,” Miz Lottie said.
“Uncle June said—”
“And I’m telling you: Don’t wait on me. Please, Gloria—please, child.” She was begging. “It’s bad enough Waymon’s out there. They burned it all—my grandpa’s house. His barn. I was a child—I was fast, and so was Mama—so we lived. We ran to the woods and hid. That’s what you’d better do. You only live through it if you’re quick.”
“They’re not going to burn us,” Gloria said.
“How do you know that?” Miz Lottie hissed, both a whisper and a shout.
Gloria didn’t know how she knew, but she did. She saw fire—plumes of black and gray smoke and excited golden flames—but the fire was not destined for Miz Lottie’s. A fire was burning somewhere else. Was Robbie on fire somewhere? The Reformatory?
But no. That didn’t seem right either. That fire had been in 1920. This one was new.
“I just know it,” Gloria said. “Same way I always know. Mama used to ask me things.”
That satisfied Miz Lottie. She went back to her quiet whimpering over Waymon. She’d told Gloria that whites had remarked to her that Waymon had “changed” since the war, how he unnerved people as he paraded to church in his Army uniform every Sunday. Waymon said he liked to remind people he had shed blood, and he might shed blood again.
“Is Waymon all right?” This was the first time Miz Lottie had ever tugged on Gloria’s knowing like Mama used to.
Gloria tried to know about Waymon, but part of her didn’t know how to try. Her flashes came on their own. The harder she tried, the less she knew. “I can’t see that now. I can’t see everything.”
Another window broke. It might have been the window in Gloria’s room—right beside them, where she had been sleeping until only minutes ago. Gloria peeked through the blinds again, toward the truck. Still no Uncle June, no headlights, no engine. But the light-colored shirt at the end of the clothesline was flapping unnaturally, coming to life.
Gloria peered more closely, trying to see. Was her eye fooling her?
A shadow bobbed in front of the shirt, closer and closer. Rapid footsteps crushed twigs and leaves as someone, a man, was running toward her—right at her, as if he could see in the dark.
What was the point of yelling a warning? Gloria raised her pistol and backed up two steps, waiting for the window to break. She kept her hand steady on the trigger by remembering Uncle June’s advice: she couldn’t shoot just because she was scared. If he just threw a rock, she would not shoot. If he just yelled out epithets, she would not shoot. But if he had a gun, or tried to climb into the room, or if she saw fire—
“Let me in!” the man said at the window. He tapped hard, but not enough to break it. Gloria’s plans left her—trigger finger tightening—
“It’s Waymon!” Miz Lottie said.
Before Gloria could move, Waymon already had coaxed the window halfway up. When Gloria added her strength, the window squealed in its frame, raised high enough to let wiry Waymon through. Then they both slammed the window behind them. Waymon locked it.
“Goddamn crackers—one of ’em tried to come right out back,” Waymon said. He saw the gun in Gloria’s hand and snatched it from her. “Girl, gimme that ’fore you hurt somebody.”
Then he stumbled out of the bedroom, crashing through Miz Lottie’s clothes racks. Miz Lottie called after him, but his footsteps were racing to the front of the house.
Waymon smelled like smoke.
The Klan had burned down her cabin.
Gloria guessed before she saw the thin gray smoke rising out from the McCormacks’ way: her knowing sharpened and she fixed on a sadness that told her everything she owned was gone. But she had to wait through the night to hear the story because the cars and trucks never stopped their ruckus up and down the street. Gloria thought Sheriff Posey might come, but Miz Lottie told her he wouldn’t unless someone got killed—and maybe he wouldn’t come even then. They all agreed his deputies probably were the ones making the most noise. Gloria wondered if the deputy who had taken Robbie to the courthouse was outside with the rest of the angry white men.
When no fire came at Miz Lottie’s, Gloria slept beside her in her bed fit for a queen. At first daylight, Gloria woke beside Miz Lottie and walked past Mrs. Hatchett sleeping open-mouthed on the couch and went outside to join June and Waymon on the front porch. It was strange to see so many people milling early in the morning up and down the street in the sad sunlight, no one going anywhere, men in sleeping clothes in their yards or on their front porches at every house. Waymon had put on his Army private’s uniform, his Sunday clothes, and sat on Miz Lottie’s porch rails with his legs swinging, a sentry daring someone to trespass. Uncle June stood beside him with his shotgun in plain view. Across the street, Clyde Frazier, the barber, had his hunting rifle, and Mr. Hatchett paced his porch with a baseball bat over his shoulder.
Lower Spruce wasn’t ducking and hiding anymore. Let the Klan come, then.
The last of the whites were congregated near a truck at the far end of the street, about ten or twelve who looked like teenagers. A few of them had shotguns or hunting rifles. It felt like a standoff in a western picture, except everyone had been up all night and was too tired for shouting. Still no sign of the sheriff. But she saw the smoke’s haze to the east. She turned away, trying to ignore the acid twisting her belly. “What are they doing?” Gloria asked.
Waymon spat. “Wishing they had more nerve. Look at ’em. What we been so scared of?”
“We’ll see,” Uncle June said, watching.
Then Uncle June and Waymon shared a look, and Gloria figured what was coming. “Just say it,” Gloria said. “You think I don’t see the smoke?”
Waymon looked surprised, mopping his face with a handkerchief, and soot came off. In the daylight, she could see his hair was flecked with white ash. He nodded, glad she had guessed so he would not have to tell her.
“What happened?” she said.
“I was cutting grass over on Grove Street when this guy, Jake, grabs my arm and about pulls me off my feet. Looks scared like Mantan Moreland in King of the Zombies.”
“Just get to it,” June said.
“Jake says, ‘Klan’s headed down to your little cousin’s house.’ And I say, ‘Come on with me to see after her, then,’ and he just looks at me like I’m crazy. These scared country Negroes, I swear. I didn’t know if you was in that cabin or not, so I went as fast as I could.”
He told her how he’d borrowed a friend’s car and driven out in time to see two or three trucks turn off McCormack Road to the rutted dirt path that led to her cabin. He’d parked behind a fallen tree and gone the rest of the way on foot. The trucks had parked at the front of the cabin, so he’d gone around back and whispered her name, tapping on the windows. Trying to rouse her.
“I saw this on the wall and snatched it through the window,” he said. He picked up a small gold-tinted picture frame he’d been keeping beside him on the railing. Mama and Papa’s wedding photo had been on the nail next to the stove. The frame’s glass was cracked, but the photo was untouched. Mama had a laurel wound into her hair and Papa’s hair and moustache were styled like Nat King Cole’s. Waymon must have carried it with him through the woods and through Miz Lottie’s window and had kept it with him to give to her when she woke. Waymon had never done such a kind thing for her.
Gloria hugged him. When soot rubbed off on her, she wondered which room the ashes had come from. Which memory was touching her lips?
“That’s all I got, sorry, cuz,” Waymon said.
Gloria nodded, trying not to think of her bedroom, or Mama’s clothes, or Robbie’s toys. And the other photos, lost. Thinking would make it real. She’d promised Robbie she would bring him home, and now she had no home to bring him to. She pulled clear of Waymon’s smoky scent. “Then I got the hell out of there. I stayed hid while it burned in case they’d leave—thought I could go in and save some things—but they stayed to watch. All of ’em took bets on if you were hiding and you’d come running out on fire. ‘She’ll come through that window.’ ‘No, it’ll be the door.’ I tell you, if I’d had June’s gun—”
“We’d all be burned up,” Uncle June said. “Or swinging from a tree.”
“Red McCormack finally drove out, told ’em to go home ’fore they burned down his turpentine farm. He was madder’n a hornet. He had a truck, made ’em douse it with water.”
“Dumb as hell, setting a fire so close to McCormack land,” June said, shaking his head.
“Did he ask after me?” Gloria said.
“Nah—they just said, ‘Nobody’s home.’ But I didn’t know my own self ’til I saw you.”
They fell into a hard silence, all of them realizing how close she’d come to dying. What would the men have done to her if she’d tried to escape? Or if they’d seen Waymon? Gloria let herself remember Mama’s bookshelf behind the dinner table—her Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Lewis Carroll, and Anna Julia Cooper books, some of the pages marked with old receipts, grocery lists, mementos. Gone. Gloria would remember one shelf, one cabinet, at a time. That was as much as she could let herself think of it. Already, her stomach was withered.
Uncle June reached over and tousled Gloria’s hair like a boy’s and Gloria ducked her head away. “We can’t take none of it with us,” he said. “That’s what I’m always tryin’ to tell Mama.”
“Shoot—one match and Mama’s house would go up like the Fourth of July,” Waymon said, peeking over his shoulder at the window, not wanting Miz Lottie to hear.
“Mama all right?” Uncle June asked Gloria, already moving on from the fire.
Gloria nodded. “Sleeping.”
“Then we blessed it wasn’t worse.”
“Aw, shoot,” Waymon said, peering down the street. He jumped down from the porch.
At the intersection down the street, Sheriff Posey’s car was pulling up beside the pickup truck. His sheriff’s car had a gold stripe across the side that made it noticeable from a distance, shiny in the sun. His lights and siren weren’t on.
“Took his damn time,” Uncle June said.
“He’s prolly the one sent these crackers out here,” Waymon said. He whistled to the neighbor and pointed toward the sheriff. Up and down the street, the men lowered or hid their weapons. Grudgingly, June set down his shotgun across Miz Lottie’s empty porch rocker, out of sight from the road.
Sheriff Posey wanted to run for governor one day, or so Miss Anne said, and he comported himself as if he already had the position. He wore a dark suit and tie, with only his gray Stetson as his police uniform. He walked down the street instead of riding in his car, touching the brim of his hat as he passed one house and then the next on the way to Miz Lottie’s. The Hatchetts’ big-bellied yellow hound followed him, sniffing after his two-toned boots.
“Shouldn’t y’all be gettin’ ready for work?” Sheriff Posey called out as he walked. “Kinda late in the day to be out on the front porch, ain’t it?”
No one answered him.
The air was already hot before 7:00 a.m., so Sheriff Posey was sweating by the time he reached the end of the street at the edge of Miz Lottie’s grass. He folded his suit coat over his arm.
His face looked as if he were smiling even when he wasn’t. A face where you couldn’t guess his age. The broken living room window was staring right at him, but he ignored it.
“They’ll be looking for you at the mill any minute, J.W.,” Sheriff Posey said to Uncle June.
He did not greet Waymon or speak to him, and Gloria was glad. Waymon had bowed his head to hide his glare, but he might say anything. Gloria kept quiet too.
“Can’t leave my godmama’s house with hooligans breaking windows up and down the street,” Uncle June said. “We’ve got property damage all up and down. They were shoutin’ and raising a ruckus all night.”
Sheriff Posey glanced back at the pickup truck and the gathered white men and boys as if he had just noticed them. “Don’t you worry none about those fellas back there,” he said. “I’m sending them back on home.”
“You send ’em home, Sheriff, an’ we’ll go to work all right,” Uncle June said. Gloria wondered when the sheriff would say something about the fire.
Sheriff Posey sighed. He took off his hat and rearranged it on his head. Gloria understood why he was nicknamed “Bird”; he was fidgety, his eyes skirting here and there. “From what I can gather… lots of folks are wondering why Robert Stephens hasn’t been brought to justice. That was a nasty business, what happened at Pixie’s. But here we are, a year later—and no trial. If you could help us find him, I’m sure they’d settle down.”
Now he was looking straight at Gloria.
“He didn’t do what they say—everybody knows it.” Gloria had been afraid to say it to the judge, but Gloria was too weary to be afraid. She had lost Papa, Robbie, and her home. What else could they take?
“That’s what the trial’s for,” Sheriff Posey said. “She’ll say her side, he’ll say his.”
Waymon chuckled beside Gloria, almost out of her hearing. No jury in Gracetown would side with Papa’s word over a white woman, even if half the town knew she was lying.
“We ain’t seen Robert Stephens since he left,” Uncle June said. “Might be in New York.”
“I hear Chicago,” the sheriff said.
“Then you know better’n I do, suh,” June said.
“He might be out in California,” Waymon said. “Lotsa folks go out there too.”
Sheriff Posey gave Waymon a sour look. “War’s been over for five years, boy.” Miz Lottie was right: few things riled white men more than a black man in an Army uniform. Maybe it was knowing they might have killed white men overseas, even if they were Nazis. Or the white girlfriends in France so many Negro soldiers had stories about.
“Yessir,” Waymon said. “But looks like a new war’s comin’.”
Sheriff Posey’s lips formed a tight line and his face got redder. Before he could say anything, Uncle June said, “Papers say Korea’s heating up.”
“Then both of you go on and re-enlist,” Sheriff Posey said. “Anyway, you should all think real hard on getting out of Gracetown ’til this business with Robert Stephens is settled. Take this gal and the old woman too. Nights will get a whole lot quieter for everyone in Lower Spruce.”
None of them answered. Mild voice or not, they knew the sound of a threat. Gloria was so angry that her teeth clamped tight. Sheriff Posey backed up a step, as if he could see Uncle June’s shotgun waiting on the rocker. Or the little peashooter in Waymon’s pocket.
“By the way,” Sheriff Posey said to Gloria, “I’m sorry to report there was a fire last night. Looks like your daddy’s house got burned to the ground. Nothing but ashes left. Thank goodness you were here—safe and sound. I’m guessing maybe you left something cooking on the stove? Those grease fires get out of hand fast.”
“Wasn’t no grease fire,” Waymon said. “Ask Red McCormack. Might be he saw Mister Earl and some swamp boys out there last night.” He didn’t say Klan, but he didn’t have to.
Sheriff Posey froze, surprised. He wasn’t used to answers to his lies. He turned to scan the street, where everyone was posted on their porches or by their windows. Miz Lottie and Mrs. Hatchett were awake now, listening by the living room’s broken windowpane. Sheriff Posey suddenly busied himself with wiping his shoe in the grass. Gloria hoped he’d stepped in dog shit.
“Y’all heard me, now,” Sheriff Posey called out. “It’s time to get dressed and out to work.”
No one moved or answered him. He hadn’t come to hear their complaints about broken windows or threats keeping them up all night. He hadn’t come to promise justice for the fire.
Sheriff Posey went on, his voice angrier. “If I come back and see y’all here in an hour, I’ll have my deputies run you in for vagrancy. See how you like it when you get locked up like her brother. And locked up is where he’s gonna stay—until someone helps us find his daddy.” He spoke more loudly so the crowd of whites could hear at the end of the street.
Gloria was so angry, the world went red. Then Sheriff Posey turned to look at her—and winked. A true politician, he was performing for his audience.
“Be smart,” Sheriff Posey said, gentler. “I’ll see he makes it to trial and the trial’s fair.”
Sheriff Posey took his time during his long walk back to the intersection, careful not to show fear. As he walked, he signaled to the waiting white men and boys at the end of the street. Most of them climbed into the truck, and a few walked to their cars. A chorus of car doors slammed just out of sight.
“Fool,” Miz Lottie muttered from the window. “Ain’t fit for a badge.”
“You shouldn’t have named Mister Earl,” Uncle June chided Waymon. Mister Earl, who ran the tack and feed, was Klan to his bones. Negro farmers drove to Marianna or Quincy when they needed feed, fearful Mister Earl might poison their stock.
“But I did it, huh?” Waymon shrugged. “He’s the sheriff, ain’t he? Fighting crime?”
“Now you sound like a damn fool.”
Slowly, as the whites left, neighbors waved at June and went inside.
Gloria had not moved since Sheriff Posey’s wink, rigid with anger. But she realized she was grateful to him for confirming everything she had learned yesterday: Gracetown would not free Robbie. She could stop wasting her time with lawyers and judges.
Gloria waited until she saw the sheriff climb into his car, and then she said, “Uncle June, you worked at the Reformatory. Didn’t you?”
Uncle June’s jaw tightened. He wasn’t proud of his time at the Reformatory. He’d never told her what he’d done, but she felt something near his mind almost as bad as his war memories. Worse, maybe. “Few months,” June said, voice low.
“So you know how boys would run sometimes.”
Uncle June looked at her. “If they wanted to get whipped, shot, or ripped up by dogs.” Knowledge of things he’d done flared quietly, but she didn’t want to know. Not yet.
“But those boys… they didn’t have help, did they? They didn’t have someone who worked inside once who could tell them how to go. Or someone to drive them away once they were out.”
Waymon let out a joyful hoot, patting Gloria’s back too hard. “You sho’ is kin to Robert Stephens. I’ll say that much.”
June glanced back at Miz Lottie. If he was looking for an objection in her face, he didn’t find one in Miz Lottie’s steely eyes. “Told you,” Miz Lottie said to June. “She’s just like Bob and her mama.”
June turned back to Gloria. “Naw, I guess they didn’t have nobody helping them like that.”
Gloria gazed at the smoke rising where her home and family had once lived. For the first time, she understood the liberation of having nothing left to lose.
“We’re gonna help Robbie run,” Gloria said.
“ ’Bout time,” Waymon said. Maybe he and Uncle June had argued about it already.
Uncle June glared at the morning, making sure the last trucks at the end of the street had driven away. “It won’t be pretty. We can’t count on no one else. We sure we’re ready for that?”
“Damn right,” Miz Lottie said.
Deciding was that easy. But the rest, Gloria knew, would be, oh, so hard.