Chapter Seventeen

Walter had the night off again, or rather, he had discreetly taken a second job as the Brownes had been unable to pay him for nearly five months.

Margaret was concerned that he would leave them all together; on the other hand, she was secretly grateful for his increased absences. She could change Devin’s bloody bandages, and wash and dry them, without Walter ever having much of a chance to learn that Devin had accidentally been shot.

She was likewise responsible for more and more of the cooking now. Broths for Devin, who was still too weak for anything else; stews or casseroles for Kyle, who at seventeen was still growing and always seemed to be hungry; mostly mashed vegetables, and some of the broth, stew, casserole, or small salads for Mother Browne; and, for herself, whatever was left.

She was frighteningly underweight to be so near the end of her pregnancy, yet she felt the others in the family took priority. She worried constantly about the baby’s health, monitoring every little tweak, twinge, and kick.

Fortunately, Walter had introduced her to the only woman Negro doctor in Denver, Dr. Justina Ford. Dr. Ford gave Margaret full and excellent medical care in exchange for Margaret doing her mending. Probably better even than Margaret would have received from Mother Browne’s doctor,

who also hadn’t been paid in quite some time.

Kyle came into the kitchen, and sat right down at the table without saying anything. Margaret ladled out a large bowl of steaming hot rabbit stew—the butcher had given her two rabbits in exchange for the charcoal drawing of his storefront—and set the bowl and a spoon on the table in front of Kyle.

“It’s good to have you home early, son,” Margaret said, and sat down across from him. “How was your day?”

“Look, for the umpteenth time, I’m not your son. More important,” he said, shoving the bowl away, “what in hell is this slop?”

Margaret forced back tears. Didn’t he realize all she had to go through just to feed him? “Try it, Kyle,” she managed, weakly, “it’s pretty good, if I say so myself.”

Kyle let out a contemptuous laugh. “You eat it then.” He stood so abruptly that he caused the bowl of stew to spill over. Margaret cried out as the hot stew poured into her lap, soaking through her skirt and burning her thighs.

She looked to Kyle for help, but he was already on his way out of the kitchen and didn’t bother to look back.

And the doorbell was ringing.

She called out to Kyle as she rushed to the sink to splash cold water on her burns. “Can you see who is at the door? I have to go upstairs and change clothes.”

“Yeah, okay,” he hollered as he was about to go up the stairs, but detoured back down to answer the door. “I still need something to eat though.”

She was wringing the cold water out of her skirt when Kyle ran back into the kitchen.

“Hey, it’s Mr. MacDuff and Spud. They want me to go somewhere with them,” he reported, and dashed back out.

Margaret hurried after him, trying to compose herself on her way into the foyer. She caught MacDuff’s look of surprise when he saw her. She refused to be embarrassed.

She dried her hands as discreetly as possible, and offered her right hand to shake with MacDuff. “Good afternoon, Mr. MacDuff. What is this Kyle is saying about your wanting him to go somewhere? I’m not sure his father will approve. Kyle’s sort of on punishment.”

He slapped the backs of Spud and Kyle rather than shake Margaret’s hand. “I’m taking a few of the boys on a little ride through Five Points. Thought Kyle here might want to come along. Be a good education for him to see where the niggras live, in case, well, you know, just in case.”

Margaret noticed the flicker of dismay in Kyle’s eyes. She could also see in his eyes that he’d made up his mind to go. She had to think fast.

“That’s a wonderful idea, Mr. MacDuff. I’ll go along. I want to learn what my son is learning.”

“Stop,” Kyle mumbled under his breath, “calling me your damn son.”

Of course, Spud and Mr. MacDuff heard him.

Margaret stared at Kyle, dumbstruck that he would be so rude in front of outsiders.

Still, this was no time for her to show weakness. Kyle might not want her to act like his mother, but she was all he had. She wasn’t about to give up on him without a fight, no matter what vile things he said or did.

She looked quickly up the stairs, then back at MacDuff. She hoped Devin was awake and could hear her. She spoke as loud as possible without seeming suddenly odd.

“Devin, I’m going out for a while. Kyle is going too. We’ll be back shortly.” She didn’t wait for Devin to reply, and headed straight to the door. MacDuff was clearly stunned.

“Now see here, Mrs. Browne, me and the boys are goin’ on a little more than a hayride. If you’ll pardon my saying so, I don’t think it’s such a good idea for someone in your condition,” he said, nodding his head toward her advanced state of pregnancy, “to be along.”

Margaret’s hand was on the doorknob. She drew up tall and met MacDuff’s eyes directly.

“Mr. MacDuff, as my husband’s appointed representative while he is recovering from his illness, it is my duty to know as much as possible about his territory and anything that involves it. So don’t worry about me. I am a very strong woman totally capable of taking care of myself.”

With that, she opened the front door and walked out ahead of MacDuff, Spud, and Kyle.

But MacDuff might have won the hand. She gasped when she saw five more young men in the back of Mr. MacDuff’s pickup truck changing into Klan robes.

⟞ • ⟝

“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Browne, we’re on a schedule,” MacDuff said, “Could you hurry a bit to put on that robe?”

MacDuff had handed her the long white Klan robe the minute they’d gotten in the truck, yet it was still folded on her lap.

Kyle was sitting in the bed of the truck along with his new friends and Spud, but she could feel him glaring at her through the back window.

At last she held up the garment and pulled it on over her head. How ironic, she thought, aside from the Klan emblem, it looked so similar to a choir robe. She struggled to raise herself, and pulled the robe the rest of the way down, tied the sash, and donned the hood.

She glanced in the truck’s rear-view mirror. Two more old trucks were pulling up behind MacDuff’s truck, the bed of both trucks filled with more young men in robes.

MacDuff was more dangerous than Devin realized.

⟞ • ⟝

A rainstorm had been threatening all day, but the clouds had grown darker and more ominous during the fifteen-minute ride from Capitol Hill to Five Points. It was only dusk as the three trucks turned onto Welton Street, but streetlights were already lit.

MacDuff, who was driving the lead truck, slowed the speed of the truck until he exactly matched the pace of a well-dressed Negro man walking up the street.

The man seemed not to notice the trucks, or the trucks’ hooded passengers, even as MacDuff blared his horn at him. He just kept on walking and whistling as carefree as when they’d first driven up beside him.

MacDuff scowled. “So this damn nigger wants to play high and mighty, huh? Well, I’ll show him high and mighty.”

MacDuff put his arm out the window and gave Spud a hand signal to stay close.

Margaret wanted to scream for the man to look out but knew she couldn’t. If she did, MacDuff would accuse her of being a traitor and make a report to Dr. Locke, and that was the last thing she could afford to have happen. She had to force herself not to look away as Spud drove up on the sidewalk and nudged the back of the man with the truck’s bumper.

Yet, for some reason, the man still didn’t turn around, even with both of the trucks’ horns blaring at him.

Kyle leaned out the truck window and shouted at the man. “Maybe you oughta be a smart nigger and move out of the way. That is, unless you wanna be a dead nigger.”

Suddenly, the man ran. He went about half a block and ducked into a locksmith shop’s doorway.

Spud hit his brakes and screeched to a stop right on the sidewalk. MacDuff drove up beside Spud. Everyone in the two trucks, except Margaret, was howling with laughter.

“Bet that nigger won’t ignore us the next time,” MacDuff said to his backseat passengers.

“Ain’t that the sure enough truth,” said Kyle.

Margaret just sat quietly, praying that this would all be over soon. As she looked out at the buildings in front of her, she was startled to realize that she recognized them. Her body went cold.

MacDuff and Spud drove back into the street and started blaring their horns again. This time, the trucks in front of them pulled to the curb and let the two Fords pass.

As they continued slowly down Welton, MacDuff asked, out loud, “Who’s ready back there?”

The boy sitting next to Kyle hollered, “I am! I am! Let me do it.”

MacDuff braked. Spud had to swerve to avoid hitting him. Margaret felt queasy all over again. They were parked in front of the same church in which she had taken refuge that awful night. The night that she had found out that …

No! She mustn’t think of that night ever, ever again.

She tried to listen as MacDuff gave the boy instructions, only his words seemed to blur as she watched a young Negro boy and Negro girl walk up the church’s steps, then pull open the church’s heavy wooden door and go inside the church.

A banner above the church door announced:

Annual Summer Revival
Saturday, August 16th
All Welcome!
Soul Food Dinner Immediately Following

Margaret felt panicked as she tried to remember the day’s date. Finally, it came to her; it was Wednesday, August 13th.

She had never felt so relieved. The Klan Caravan to Golden was the Saturday after the church’s revival.

She strained to hear the music and singing coming from inside the church, but her attention was distracted when the boy in the back suddenly got out of the truck.

He ran up the church steps and went inside. Within moments, he ran back outside.

As soon as the boy jumped in the truck MacDuff sped away with the other trucks following closely behind.

“Man, you should’ve seen them niggers’ faces when I held up that pop bottle and threw it at the altar,” the boy said, panting. “They was yellin’ and screamin’ like the place was really on fire. Too bad it wasn’t nothing more than root beer in that bottle.”

MacDuff’s guttural laugh caused chill bumps to rise along Margaret’s arms and across the back of her neck.

She turned around to look at the church, but with the quickly widening distance between it and the trucks, as well as the onset of evening, all she could see was a faceless crowd running out of the church and gathering in the street to shout at the two Fords.

⟞ • ⟝

Rowena decided to drive around the lake one last time. If she didn’t see Devin’s car, he was one white man gonna get a piece a her mind.

She never understood why he insisted on them meeting in City Park anyway. It was like playing with damn fire as far as she was concerned. Especially now that it was getting toward the tail end of summer, ‘cause everybody and their grandmamma was out trying to catch themselves a breeze.

And that was all she needed … the wrong people to see her with an ofay. He should’ve been worrying, too, about the wrong people seeing him with a colored woman. To hell with it, she decided. He hadn’t even showed up. She turned on York Street and headed home.

Still, the thought nagged at her, something about Devin not being there didn’t add up. He hadn’t even been so much as late all the other times. She decided to do like she always did, follow her instinct.

After all, it wasn’t like Grant Street was on the north side of town, and it was almost dark. No one would even see her drive by his house.

She remembered the night he’d shown the house to her. They had parked practically in front of it and he had pointed out each window, describing each room down to the knickknacks.

Not that she had wanted to know all that, but afterward, for some reason, he was kinder to her. He said that in a lot of ways, she was the best thing that had ever happened to him, because he could be his true self around her.

She hadn’t said anything back to him, but she could have said the same thing about him. He didn’t even laugh when she told him she wished she could have gone to one of them colleges.

When she arrived at York Street, she turned left, then kept driving before turning onto Fourteenth Street.

She was at Grant Street before she knew it, continuing to the twelve hundred block.

She decided to park at the far end of the block, just in case. If anybody looked out their window and saw her, they’d likely think she was just a maid.

Devin’s house was in the middle of the block. It reminded her of the English castles she’d seen in the picture books at the library. Huge, made of big gray blocks of stone, and about as home-like as a witch’s den.

It was noticeably dark, especially because all the other houses had various lights on. She had only one thought.

If no one was home, this was her chance to get inside and see the place for herself. She walked around to the back of the house. As expected, the service door wasn’t locked.

She went into the Browne’s kitchen as easy as if she was entering with an engraved invitation. She could just see it; their creamy white stationery with the name “Mrs. Rowena Johnson” written on the envelope; but not in this century.

The whole place was as dark as a cave. She had to wait for her eyes to adjust. Was that rabbit stew she smelled?

Finally, she began to be able to distinguish objects. The wood stove, the sink, the icebox. A doorway. She ventured onward into the front of the house.

“Wow!” was all she could say at the sight of the foyer’s chandelier. For a minute, she allowed herself to imagine that this was her home.

“But that tin man over in the corner is gonna be the first thing on the trash heap,” she said, laughing.

She tiptoed across to the library doors, carefully opened one and went in.

Directly in front of her was Devin’s desk, just as he’d described along with his Civil War collection.

She looked above the fireplace, for the portrait of Devin’s grandfather, the Colonel, but there was only an empty space the shape of a large painting, lighter than the rest of the wall, as if a picture had been there but was now gone.

Still, she’d seen enough of the Colonel’s type when she was growing up in Mississippi. Old white men sitting in their porch rocking chairs, wearing their faded confederate uniforms, talking about the war, with anyone who would give them the time of day, as if the whole thing was still going on and Lincoln hadn’t freed the slaves.

She knew the thought of a Negress wandering around freely in his inner sanctum would have caused the Colonel to have a heart attack.

She stopped at the mannequin and ran her hand down the buttons of the Colonel’s uniform. “I bet you’s turnin’ over in your grave now ain’t you? You hateful old coot.”

She left the library, respectfully closing the doors behind her and stood again in the foyer looking at—if she remembered correctly—the parlor.

Nothing of interest in there, she decided. She’d seen grand pianos before in the houses she’d cleaned to get the money to open her shop. Usually they were just expensive decoration that needed a lot of dusting.

No, it was upstairs that she really wanted to see, the private part of the house.

She put a hand on the stairway banister, listened for signs of anyone, then, hearing nothing but more quiet, tiptoed up one step at a time.

Upon reaching the second floor landing, she found it was even darker and scarier than the first floor. Nevertheless, the room she was looking for was either on this floor or the next one up. She decided to try the hallway to the left. As she waited for her eyes to adjust again, she thought about Devin.

She couldn’t exactly call him her man, but she had invested the prime years of her life caring about him. What could it hurt for her to know this little bit more about him?

As soon as she could see better, she walked down the corridor to what she believed was Devin and his wife’s bedroom. The glass doorknob felt curiously cold, but she went in anyway.

The sight of Devin, asleep on the chaise lounge with a blanket over him nearly took her breath away. She tiptoed near. He was snoring like a freight train.

Just as she bent to touch and wake him he moaned and shifted to his opposite side, causing the blanket to pull off of his shoulder.

“Oh!” she gasped, quickly covering her mouth to hold in a scream. His chest and shoulder were bandaged with wide strips of cloth, and in the area near his shoulder, was a dark blotch. She touched it lightly with her fingertips. Blood. Devin coughed and turned again.

She had to hurry and get out of here. Forget the rest of the house. Whatever had happened, she didn’t want any part of it.

She backed cautiously away from the bed to the open door, but saw that a light had been turned on downstairs. She had to hide. Fast.

She decided one of the bedrooms across the hall would probably be safest, at least until she could figure out what to do next.

She darted across to another door and chanced opening it. It was a large white-tiled bathroom. A shaft of moonlight beamed in through the open window.

She looked around frantically. Other than the claw-foot bathtub, generous porcelain sink and toilet, there was only a large white wicker hamper. She was desperate to find a hiding place, but something about that hamper bothered her.

She gently closed the bathroom door, tiptoed across to the hamper, set the hamper’s lid on the floor, and began sifting through and examining the hamper’s contents.

She found several damp, used towels and washcloths, a woman’s dress—practical; plain, front buttons, simple white collar and cuffs, no waist—a slip, brassiere, panties, and stockings, a woman’s long-sleeved cotton nightgown, and some bloodied strips of cloth tied together.

Maybe her instincts were wrong this time. More importantly, she needed to be finding a way out of this damn house without getting caught. She kicked a pile of the items in disgust.

“Ow!” she caught herself in time to muffle the whisper.

She’d kicked something in the pile hard enough to hurt her toes. She felt around for it, and held it up for examination. It was a man’s white shirt, tied in a knot around something, something that felt oddly like a gun.

She tugged at the knot until the shirt’s sleeves came loose and an old pistol clamored to the floor. She bent to retrieve the pistol, then straightened back up and smelled the pistol’s barrel. There was no mistaking that it had been fired recently.

She also gave the shirt a good once over. It had a hole at the top of a sleeve that was surrounded by a large dark stain. She smelled it too. More blood.

“That crazy bitch tried to kill him,” she said so loudly it made a slight echo.

A second later, the bathroom door swung open and Rowena found herself flooded in light, Margaret Browne staring straight at her.

“What in heaven’s name are you doing in my house?” Margaret screamed.

“Oh, right, Miss High and Mighty,” Rowena said, waving the pistol in Margaret’s face. “Like that’s what’s really eating you, Miss White Lady. Well, when I take this piece down to the police station it’s you what’s gonna have to come up with the answers. Or maybe if you just get out of my way and let me out of here peaceably, I’ll keep my colored mouth shut.”

“First of all,” Margaret said, as Rowena tried to bully past her, “you’ve got this all wrong. And second, I’m not afraid of you. You go to the police and you’ll get a rude awakening. Half of the police are Devin’s friends and associates.”

“Oh yeah,” Rowena said, and belted Margaret in the face with the butt of the pistol to make her move, “well I have friends and associates of my own.”

Blood spurted from the left corner of Margaret’s mouth. That side of her face throbbed with such pain, the only way she could remain upright was to lean against the wall.

Her head ached too, and she felt dizzy. The vision from her one good eye was blurred, and there was two of everything, including Rowena and the pistol.

Rowena was taunting her and waving the pistol back and forth in front of her face.

“You white folks think you can get away with any and everything. Except this time, it ain’t gonna be so easy, ‘cause here’s the evidence.”

“No,” Margaret pleaded and lunged for the gun as Rowena escaped into the hall. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She stumbled down the hall after Rowena who was already at the landing. Devin appeared at the bedroom doorway, and called to Rowena. “Stay out of this, Rowena, I’m warning you.”

“You warning me! I done stood by you, and helped you all these years, and you warning me? Both you ofays crazy.”

Margaret had crawled down the hall to Rowena, then managed to stand and put a hand on Rowena’s arm. “Please,” Margaret said, “we don’t want trouble. Leave us alone and we’ll leave you …”

Rowena jerked her arm away from Margaret’s grasp, causing Margaret to lose her balance. Neither Rowena nor Devin could move fast enough to prevent Margaret from falling.

She tumbled and tumbled to the bottom of the steps where she lay groaning on the floor.

“Oh Lord, have mercy,” Rowena cried and started to run to Margaret, but someone had grabbed and was squeezing her shoulder. It was Devin.

The foyer chandelier provided enough light for them to clearly see Margaret’s crumpled body.

“I think you better get out of here while you can,” he said in a strangely calm voice.

Rowena nodded almost imperceptibly, only rather than run, she slowly walked back down the stairs.

When she reached the last step, where Margaret lay nearly unconscious, Rowena simply stepped over Margaret as if Margaret were merely an inconveniently discarded doll, then hurried on to the front door.

Before opening the door Rowena paused and turned back for a last look at Devin. When their eyes met, the door opened against Rowena’s back and bumped her out of the way. Devin’s emotionless expression became one of pure hatred.

Rowena turned to find the reason.

“Walter!”

Walter didn’t answer. It was clear all he cared about was Margaret as he ran to her, kneeled beside her, and gently lifted her into his arms.

“Call Denver General,” he yelled up at Devin. “Tell them to send an ambulance, right away.” Blood had soaked Margaret’s Klan robe and there was a deathly stillness in the air.

“My baby,” Margaret suddenly wailed. “I’m losing my baby.”