LUTHER BROUGHT THE OLD BUICK TO A STOP ON THE SHOULder of an empty country road a few miles southwest of the tiny town of Kendrick, Alabama. This was his second pass down the same weathered stretch of blacktop, having made a U-turn and circled back because nothing in the landscape seemed to match his memories. Now he pointed uncertainly to an overgrown field on the other side of the road. “I think that’s it,” he said.
“You’re not sure?” Adam sounded surprised.
“It’s changed,” said Luther. He reached over, popped open the glove compartment and retrieved his pistol.
“Why do we need the gun?” asked Adam.
“Ain’t no tellin’ what’s livin’ over in that grass. Now, come on.”
Luther pushed open the car door and stepped into the lonely road. He tucked the gun in the pocket of his jacket and for a moment, just stood facing the field. Steeling himself. Adam came up beside him.
“Ain’t been here since 1945,” said Luther. “Johan brought us and we stopped on the way to the trial. You was with us, in fact.”
“Dad wasn’t with you?”
Luther shook his head. “George was still in a hospital in San Francisco.”
Now Adam paused and Luther could tell he was working up the nerve for something. After a moment he said, “Uncle Luther, you mind if I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you not like my dad? Do you have a problem with him or something?”
Luther stared at his nephew, surprised. “George? No. I ain’t got no problem with him. He a good guy, he take care of my sister; that’s all I can ask. What make you think I don’t like him?”
Adam’s shoulders went up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just a feeling. Just something in your face when you talk about him.”
Luther tried not to grimace. He promised himself he would be more careful from now on. He’d never spent much time with his nephew, but he could see the boy was smart. He paid attention. And he knew there was something there, something he had not been told, even if he couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
“I like George just fine,” said Luther, striving to sound definitive.
“Okay,” said Adam. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”
“I ain’t mad,” said Luther. “Now, do you want to hear about your grandparents or not?”
“I want to hear,” said Adam.
“Then come on.” Without waiting for a response, Luther crossed the road and plunged into the field, Adam trotting to keep up. Grass scraped at their knees. Beer cans crunched under their shoes. “Used to be a driveway right about here,” said Luther. He pointed off to his left. “It’s hard to tell because everything is growing wild, but if this the right place, then the house be somewhere right over—”
And then he saw it. Or rather, what was left of it.
The structure maintained its nominal shape, but it would never be a house again. Now it was just a ruin, the blackened skeleton of his father’s dreams. Fire had torn holes in the roof, left jagged beams of wood jutting to the sky. Two walls sagged against one another like drunks staggering home from a bender. Grass was growing through the empty sockets where the windows had been. Incongruously enough, the front steps and most of the porch were intact.
“What happened?” asked Adam. “It caught fire?”
Luther shook his head. “Somebody burned it,” he said. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. “I guess they just couldn’t stand looking at it anymore. Maybe reminded them of what they did.”
He had no way to prove this was true, but it felt true and he decided to believe it. Doing so gave him a distant, bitter pleasure.
He moved closer then, stepped cautiously up on the porch and peered through the black rectangle where the front door had been. The floor inside was a carpet of grass and weeds. The sun probed through two jagged tears in the roof.
“This place,” he said.
And then he stopped, the memory too powerful to speak. Adam had the good sense not to prod him. After a moment, he tried again. “This place was your grandfather’s pride. They owned this land—in fact, they was some of the only Negroes to own property back then, and that’s only because my daddy worked like a demon to buy it. Always said a man got to own somethin’ in this world if he want to get ahead. He always preached that.”
Luther turned from the door and looked across toward a gnarled oak tree looming above the grass. “That’s where they killed him,” he said, with a nod of his head. “Killed them both, I should say.”
He crossed what had been the yard, paused before the tree as a penitent before an altar and touched a hand to the rough bark of the trunk. Just over his head, a heavy bough jutted off at an angle. “This branch,” said Luther, pointing. “That’s where they did it. Me and your mama watching from the door yonder. And Floyd Bitters …”
He stopped. About a hundred miles south, at West Haven Rest Home down in Mobile, they would be serving lunch to the old people right about now, he figured. And in a room a few doors down from where Johan Simek sat quietly losing his mind, some nurse or orderly would be spooning porridge into the mouth of a wasted old man who, before he was rendered feeble and mute by cerebral hemorrhage or some similar misfortune, had come into this yard and destroyed nearly everything Luther loved. The world, he told himself bitterly, made no sense.
“Who is that?” asked Adam.
Luther started. He had forgotten his nephew was there. He said, “Floyd Bitters was a county commissioner. He the man who led the mob that night. Came here into the yard and killed your grandparents.”
“Why did he do it?” asked Adam. “I’ve never understood that.”
“He did it ’cause he could,” said Luther. “He did it ’cause he a evil motherfucker.”
Luther turned and saw Adam’s uncomprehending stare. “A hog,” he said. “He did it over a hog.”
“I still don’t understand.”
Luther gave him a bitter smile. “That just mean you ain’t crazy,” he said.
He went back across the yard and sat on the steps. He grunted, they creaked. Everything getting old.
After a moment, Adam sat beside him. There was a silence. Then Luther said, “They didn’t want you to be no man. Not if you’s a Negro. If you’s a Negro, they expect you to be a boy, to be a nigger. They expect you to do all that duckin’ your head and yassuh bossin’, all that smilin’ when ain’t nothin’ funny and scratchin’ when don’t nothin’ itch. Some colored men, I guess, were so beaten down they could do that with no problem. Some of ’em, they plain forgot they was just supposed to be pretendin’. After a while, it come natural to ’em. That might not be a fair thing to say, but that’s the way it always seemed to me.
“But your grandfather … ain’t none of it come natural to him. Man had a natural dignity, a natural stick up his ass, if you want to know the truth. And when I seen him smilin’ and duckin’ his head, I could always tell how hard it was for him to do. I could always tell he really cussin’ they asses out in his mind. He’d give me this look and it be like this secret between me and him. Always surprised me white folks couldn’t tell he was puttin’ ’em on.”
Luther regarded his nephew. “If my father had any real sense,” he said, “he would have taken us out of here. He would have gone to New York, Chicago, Detroit. But he decide he gon’ make his stand here in Alabama. He not gon’ let these crackers run Mason Lincoln Hayes out of town.”
The thought of it made Luther smile a sad smile. “Guess that’s where I get it from,” he said.
Luther lit a cigarette, fanned at a fly that was buzzing around his head. “So while he yassuh bossin’ and smilin’, he also workin’—and I mean, workin’ hard. Seem like I hardly ever saw him as a child, ’cause he was always gone to one job or another: porter, barber, farmer, janitor, mechanic, you name it. The first war come and he volunteered for that and went to Europe for a year. Say he an American, good as any other American, so he got a duty to fight in America’s wars.”
Luther shook his head at his father’s foolishness. “Your grandmother, her name was Annie Chisholm before it was Annie Hayes, she had me to take care of—Thelma didn’t come along till a few years after Papa got back from the fighting. But Mama also taught at this schoolhouse they had for colored, kept house, tended the crops. So they was both busy—industrious, you might say.”
Luther sucked hard on the cigarette. Exhaled a blue cloud, fanned again at the fly. “All that workin’, they did well. They prospered. Some of my clothes was even store-bought, right out the Sears catalog. That was a big deal back in them days. In fact, we all was dressed right nice whenever we went to town, though that wasn’t very often, since Papa didn’t like bein’ around white folks all that much. Still, whenever we did, you could tell it pissed them off. They hated to see us like that: lookin’ good, doin’ good. Then Papa, he bought his self this old Tin Lizzie, and that only made it worse.”
He stopped when he saw the confusion on Adam’s face. “Tin Lizzie,” he repeated. “That what they called the old Model T Fords. He bouncin’ up and down these roads in that thing while most of them walkin’ or ridin’ mules. Something else they didn’t like him for. See, wasn’t no colored man s’posed to be doin’ well enough to have a car. They s’posed to been sharecroppin’ and scufflin’ and lettin’ white men cheat ’em out what they done earned. Papa, he didn’t have to ’crop or scuffle, nor be cheated. He did well—did better than most of them, to tell the truth—by keepin’ to his self and workin’ hard. So they already thought he was forgettin’ his place. Already said he was gettin’ uppity. Then come that business I told you about.”
“You mean the hog?”
Luther nodded. He blew out a last stream of smoke, crushed the cigarette butt beneath the toe of his work shoes.
“The hog,” he said. “Where Papa got it, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t remember the thing myself, but Gramp used to say it was black as a crow at midnight. Weighed seven hundred pounds if it weighed one. He said, half the time, he wasn’t sure if we was gon’ be eatin’ it or it was gon’ be eatin’ us. Turned out to be neither. That man I told you about, that Floyd Bitters, he got it in his head he had to have that hog. But Papa wouldn’t sell it to him, see? Said he was gon’ butcher it to feed his family. And the more he say no, the more that man push. ‘Mason, I got to have me that there hog,’ he say. ‘You name your price.’ It’s like he can’t accept that he ain’t gon’ get what he want—especially if the one tellin’ him no is some Negro.”
Luther didn’t speak for a long moment. He pulled in a breath.
Lord, this was hard. Harder, even, than he’d thought it would be. And he’d thought it would be hell.
Was Floyd Bitters done with lunch by now? Had someone fluffed his pillows or led him to the bathroom? Was he lying there watching television? Was he taking a nap?
“So what happened?” asked Adam.
Luther sighed. “What happened is that one day, your grandfather forgot to bow and scrape. You know that poem, ‘We wear the mask that grins and lies’? Well, he let the mask slip, let them white men see that he thought he was a man, too. He in town this one day with Gramp and ol’ Floyd Bitters ask him one time too many to sell him that damn hog. And he says, with just a little edge in his voice, ‘I done already told you, Mr. Bitters, he ain’t for sale. I’m gon’ hold on to him. Butcher him for my family.’”
“That’s all he said?”
“Yeah. ’Cordin’ to Gramp, at least. That’s what he told me, years later, when I start askin’ questions like you doin’ now. And he say Papa knew right off he done made a mistake, talkin’ to this white man like that. And he start tryin’ to put the mask back in place. Duckin’ his head and sayin’, ‘Oh, suh, I’se sorry. Ain’t meant to be so peckish. Got this corn on my foot and it done put me in a right frightful mood. You know how it is, suh. Nigger can’t take no pain.’
“But Bitters and them other white men, they ain’t buyin’ it. It’s like they seein’ for the first time who he really is, and they ain’t liked it one little bit. This was August of 1923. I was nine years old. Your mother, she turned three that October. But see, even though we ain’t nothin’ but children, we could tell somethin’ was wrong when he got home. The next few days, there was all this tension in the air, all this worry and fear. Mama and Papa and Gramp huddlin’ together all the time, talkin’ in these low, scared voices. Even Thelma could feel it. Them few days, seem like she just cried all the time, wanted to be picked up, wanted to be held. But Mama was snappish and short-tempered, even with her. When I asked Papa what was goin’ on, he told me mind my own business, stay in a child’s place.
“Whatever he was mad about, I could tell it wasn’t me. I could tell he was scared. And that scared me. When you a boy, ain’t nobody in the world bigger than your daddy. So when you see somethin’ big enough to scare him?”
Luther didn’t finish the thought. He couldn’t. He fished another cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket and lit it. His hands shook. He glanced over and saw Adam seeing this.
“Uncle Luther …”
Luther ignored it. “They come for ’em three days later,” he said, blowing out smoke. “August 28. It was a Tuesday night. Been hot and sticky all day. Now it’s dark and it’s still hot and sticky. Me and your mama, we shared a bed. I’m wide awake. She kickin’ me in the ribs like she always do. Gramp snorin’ on the other side of the room like he always do. It’s a peaceful night. And then: bam! bam! bam! He come bangin’ on that door.”
“This Floyd Bitters.”
Luther nodded. “Floyd Bitters,” he said. He made his voice rough, puffed it up with peckerwood authority to approximate what he’d heard that long ago night. “Mason! Come on out here, boy! We know you in there, boy!”
“And then again, bam! bam! bam! I thought his fist was gon’ come through the door. Woke Thelma up. Woke Gramp up. He fumblin’ for his glasses, askin’ what’s goin’ on. Then Papa and Mama come down the hallway tellin’ us it ain’t nothin’. Tellin’ us go back to sleep. But I know he lyin’ ’cause I can hear in his voice how scared he is.”
Luther looked at Adam. “Like I say: you don’t never forget it when you see your father scared.”
A pause. A long drag on the cigarette.
Then Luther said, “Mama beggin’ him not to go out there. And he tellin’ her he ain’t got no choice. He don’t go out there, they gon’ come in here. And sure ’nough, you hear the voice from out on the porch. “Mason, get your black ass out here!”
“Floyd Bitters,” said Adam.
“Yeah,” said Luther. “Floyd Bitters.”
Probably lying in a soft bed at the rest home this very minute, drooling on himself while I Love Lucy reruns played on TV.
“So what did your father do?”
“What else could he do? He went out there. Mama told him to take his gun, but he said that would just make things worse.” Luther sucked his teeth. “Don’t know how they could have got any worse, though. He open the door and there he is—Big Floyd, they called him, ’cause he stood a good six foot five with a big ol’ belly sloppin’ over his belt. I wasn’t nothin’ but a boy, but I swear, lookin’ up at him was like lookin’ up at a mountain. He standin’ there, staggerin’ from a half-drunk bottle of whiskey in his fist. And behind him in the yard, where you see all this grass growin’ now, it was nothin’ but white people with torches and guns, howlin’ and laughin’.”
“White men,” said Adam in a disgusted voice, as if he wasn’t half a white man himself.
Luther smirked. “Wasn’t just men,” he said. “Women and children, too. I had a white boy I used to pal around with, Jeff Orange. Me and him used to hunt mudbugs down to the swamp. He was out there with his mother and his sister and his father.”
Adam gave him another stare of utter incomprehension. Something about it made Luther angry. “This was entertainment to them,” he said. “Fun for the whole family.”
Luther held Adam’s eyes till he felt heat on his fingers and saw that his cigarette had become a teetering tower of ash. He tossed it down, stomped it out, pulled out another and lit it.
“My Papa,” he said, behind a fresh exhalation of smoke, “he out there pleadin’ with them white men, grinnin’ at ’em, tellin’ him he ain’t meant no harm. He wasn’t tryin’ to disrespect them. Yassuh boss, nossuh boss, and all that shit.”
Luther studied the smoke curling off the cigarette burning between his fingers. “But it was too late for that,” he said. “Floyd, he wasn’t havin’ it.”
Luther transformed his voice again, filled it now with a peckerwood’s wounded propriety. “Offered this nigger good money for that there hog. But he too good to accept a fair offer. Come talkin’ to me like he was the white man and I was the nigger. He as much as said to me, ‘You gettin’ on my nerves, Big Floyd. Shut up and leave me alone, Big Floyd.’ This nigger as much as said that to me. Are we suppose to stand still for that? Is that what we’re lettin’ this country come to? Are we gon’ be the niggers now and let the niggers act like they’re white?”
Luther fell silent for a moment. He sat there smoking, remembering, gathering himself to give this boy what he had asked for, what he deserved to have, and yet, what hurt so much to give. Finally, he said, “Big Floyd, he grabbed Papa then. Papa pulled back from him, and that only made him madder. He grabbed him again with one of them big hands of his and yanked him out of the house. And them white men came up, right here on this porch where we sittin’, and they all took hold of him. Grabbed his arms, grabbed his legs. One of ’em had a fistful of his hair. And they took him off. His feet didn’t touch the ground. I always remembered that.”
He glanced over at Adam. His nephew’s eyes were nearly invisible behind the sunglasses, but his mouth gaped and his chest was still as a stone. Luther gave a rueful chuckle. “Breathe, boy,” he said. “Story gets a whole lot worse.”
As Adam obeyed, Luther took another long drag from his cigarette. “So anyway,” he said, “they got your grandfather out in the yard and your grandmother, she start screamin’ at this big monster who done come to her front door and took her husband. ‘You doin all this over a hog, Floyd Bitters? You’re doing this over a goddamn hog?’
“Mama didn’t cuss, but she sure cussed that white man that night. And something about it almost seemed to reach that mob. I remember the yard went still, like maybe they was really thinkin’ about it, like they was wakin’ up from a bad dream. You could see on they faces, they almost askin’ themselves, ‘What the fuck we doin’ out here in the middle of the night, about to kill a man over his own goddamn hog?’
“Mama, she kept at ’em. Papa yellin’ for her to get back inside, obey what he tellin’ her. But she kept right on. ‘You want the hog that bad? Then you take it! You can have it! It’s all yours. Just leave my husband alone, you hear me? You give him back to my children and me.’
“She almost had that mob convinced,” Luther said. “You could tell. Floyd Bitters could tell, too. He said, ‘You better go back inside. I don’t want your damn hog no more. I just want him.’
“But Mama, she wouldn’t back down. Papa yellin’ at her to go back in. Gramp prayin’ to Jesus, me pullin’ at her nightdress. She ignored it all. Stood there in front of that giant man and told him he was nothin’ but a coward. You could tell she was gettin’ to him, gettin’ to all of ’em. Floyd, he speaks to her in a low voice, like it’s just him and her. ‘Last time I’m gon’ tell you, bitch. Listen to your old man. Go on, get back inside, ’fore you get yourself hurt.’
“I think he thought that was gon’ be the end of it,” said Luther. “I think he thought she would back down. But Mama whispered right back at him, ‘I will haunt you the rest of your life for this. Do you hear me? The rest of your miserable damn life. I don’t care what I have to do or how far I have to go. I swear before God, you will never know a second of peace.’”
“That’s why he took her?” asked Adam.
Luther shook his head. He dropped his cigarette, crushed it out, and blew out a last stream of smoke. “No,” he said. “He took her because she spat in his face.”
“What?”
Luther nodded. “Uh huh.” He touched an index finger to Adam’s left cheekbone. “Right there,” he said. “And then she punched him in the nose.”
“What?”
Another nod. “Your grandmother was a little woman, stood about five foot two. She had to get on tiptoe to do it. But she clocked his big ass, landed a punch that would have made that Cassius Clay fella proud. Blood gushin’ everywhere. First he looked shocked, like he couldn’t believe it had happened. Then he looked crazy. I mean, crazy. He reached out and grabbed her by her head, palmed it like a basketball and pulled her. Mama went flying out into the yard. And that’s when …”
Abruptly, Luther stopped. To his horror, he found himself blinking back tears. Tears. He turned away so that Adam couldn’t see and cleared his throat. “I was holding on to her, you see. Had hold of her nightdress. And when she went flying off the porch, I went flying, too. Landed right at the feet of that monster. I’m nine, remember. Small for my age. And he’s this big giant of a white man. He reaches down, all the way down and …”
Luther stopped. He shook his head. “I pissed myself. You believe that?”
He tried to read Adam’s face. Couldn’t. He shook his head again, laughed to cover his shame. “I don’t know why I’m tellin’ you this. Ain’t never told nobody none of this. Well, except for Johan. I did tell him, the day we met in that drunk tank when he agreed to be my lawyer.”
“Uncle …”
Luther waved him off. “Let me finish,” he said. He inhaled a lungful of air to steady himself, blew it out. Then he pulled out a cigarette and held it in his hands, turning it over and over without lighting it. Another glance at Adam, which was a mistake. He couldn’t say this part while facing the boy’s honest horror. So Luther looked away.
“He pulled me up till we was facin’ each other. Mama and Papa both goin’ crazy. ‘Get your hands off him! Leave him alone!’ And Floyd Bitters grins and he says, ‘Look like I done caught me a pissy little nigger cub.’ He laughs and they all laugh and then he flings me away like a piece of trash.”
Adam said, “Jesus.”
Luther finally lit the cigarette. He gazed at his nephew through the haze of smoke and shook his head. “Still ain’t the worst part of the story,” he said.
He let a silence intervene, sat smoking quietly for a while, his hands still shaking. Birdsong drifted down from the old oak tree. Insects in the high grass made a rhythmic, rasping noise.
Lord, this was hard.
Adam said, “Uncle, you ain’t got to talk about it if you don’t want.”
Luther glanced at him, then away.
“They took their time killin’ ’em,” he said, finally. He crushed out the cigarette. “Must have took two hours, at least. And they had fun doin’ it. All of ’em. All them good white people, right here in our yard. First they beat them. The whole mob of them, stompin’ and kickin’ at two people, lying there on the ground. Children leaning through to make sure they got their licks in. Mama and Papa covered with blood. Then somebody pulls out a machete—”
At this point, Luther saw his nephew cringe, but he continued right on.
“—and he says, ‘Who wants some souvenirs?’”
Luther shook his head. “People laughin’, children raisin’ their hands, we standin’ in the doorway, watchin’. I hear Mama and Papa start screamin’ in pain just as Gramp close the door. He say, ‘Y’all don’t need to be seein’ this.’ And he probably right. Hell, I know he was right. He took us back to our room. He holdin’ hisself like if he don’t, his body gon’ fly apart. And he rockin’ back and forth and cryin’ out to Jesus. But Jesus ain’t there. Even I can see that.
“And after a moment, I tell Thelma come on, and we go down the hallway to our parents’ room and we get up there on their bed and look out the window. By this time, Papa lyin’ on his back, holdin’ up his right hand.” Luther held up his own hand as illustration, fingers splayed wide. “And he ain’t got nothin’ but bloody stumps where his fingers and his thumb used to be. Jeff Orange, the little white boy I told you about, one who used to hunt mudbugs with me, he’s got Papa’s pinky finger and he’s laughin’ this demented laugh.”
Luther stopped. He blew out another lungful of air.
“And Mama …” He paused, had to clear his throat. “Mama, she’s on all fours, they done stripped her almost naked. And these men done gathered around her. ‘Where you goin’ honey? Ain’t so feisty no more, is you? Wow, get a load’a them tits.’ That’s what these motherfuckers doin’ while she crawlin’ in the dirt”—he pointed to a spot in the yard—“right there.”
“Some white bitch got jealous then and kicked her in the face. Kicked her so hard, she flopped over on her back. She lyin’ on her back in the dirt. And that’s when she see me and Thelma, watchin’ all this from inside. And my mother”—he felt his voice growing raspy; he coughed it clear and pushed through—“my mother, she smiled at me then. My beautiful mother, she all busted up, all bloody, teeth broken, one eye swole shut, nightdress ripped to rags, she smiled at me, like to say, ‘It’s okay, baby. Mama be all right.’ You hear what I’m sayin’? She been tore all to hell, she near ‘bout dead, and she worryin’ about me.”
Again, Luther paused. He thought about lighting another cigarette, but didn’t. Smoke couldn’t take this away. Nothing could. His head came around and he glared at his nephew. “I hope you gettin’ all this,” he said. “I hope this answer your questions, ’cause I ain’t never tellin’ this story again, you hear me? Ain’t never tellin’ it again.”
Adam nodded. His eyes, still barely visible through the green tint of the plastic shades, were wide. Luther clamped a hand on the boy’s forearm by way of a silent apology. “Almost done,” he said. “Almost done.”
“They went then and got the rope. Made hangman’s nooses and put ’em around Mama and Papa’s necks. Tied their hands behind them. Some bitch start whinin’ then that she never got no souvenir, so somebody cut off Papa’s right ear—just like snippin’ a rose from a rose-bush—and handed it to her. She holdin’ it up, grinnin’ like Christmas morning.”
Luther pointed to the old oak. “They hauled the rope up over that there branch, then. They lift ’em up off the ground, Mama and Papa strugglin’ in the air. They let ’em hang like that for a few seconds, let ’em almost die, then they bring ’em down, let ’em lie there and get some strength back. Me, I’m watchin’ this and I’m thinkin’—really, I’m hopin’—this is the end. They done had their fun and now they’ll leave ’em alone. But like I told you, they just wanted to take their time with it. So they let ’em lie there a minute, then they haul ’em back up over the branch again, let ’em dangle there a few seconds. Then they let ’em down again. Up and back down, up and back down. I don’t know how many times they repeated this. I’m just sittin’ there in the window trying to figure it out: Why don’t they get it over with? Why they keep doin’ this? Why is this fun to them?”
“Sick bastards,” muttered Adam.
Luther nodded. “Sick bastards,” he said.
Again, he allowed silence to intervene. Then he said, “Finally, they got tired of that. That’s when they set ’em on fire. I think Mama was already dead by then. But I know Papa was still alive, ’cause I seen him throw back his head and scream.”
Luther faced Adam. “Pretty sure you ain’t never smelled human flesh cookin’ and you should be thankful for that. Wish I could explain to you what it smelled like. Best I can tell you is, it smell like evil. Like pure evil.
“Fire burned through the ropes and they fell. Sparks flyin’. White folks stayed in the yard, drinkin’ and laughin’ till the fire went down. Before they left, they got their guns and they shot what was left of Mama and Papa. They shot up the old Tin Lizzie, too, and turned it on its side. Someone took a picture of them all, posed around the bodies, grinning like fishermen do when they got a prize catch. Then, last thing they did, they shot the hog.”
There was a moment. The two of them sat there, just breathing. “Never tellin’ this story again,” muttered Luther. “Never again.” He stood and walked to the middle of the yard.
“None of them were ever punished?”
Luther shook his head. He didn’t feel like speaking.
“And the jury let this Floyd Bitters go free.”
Luther nodded.
“It’s been forty-two years,” said Adam. “At least they’re probably all dead by now.”
Luther whirled on the boy. Something angry sprang to his lips. But before the words could come out, he suddenly found himself on his knees in the high grass. To his horror, some wrenching, anguished sound was ripping out of him, some roar that fused rage and sorrow into some undefinable third thing. His face was awash with tears and he was pounding the ground with his fist. And he couldn’t make himself stop.
Adam was off the porch. He was frozen in surprise, and then he was stepping tentatively forward.
Luther managed to raise his hand. “No,” he rasped through his cries. “No!” Bad enough to be seen like this, humiliating enough to be seen like this. But it was unthinkable to also be touched, to be comforted.
Adam stopped, uncertain. Luther struggled to master himself. It was Adam saying that surely they were all dead by now, that was what had done it. Luther had been okay—or at least, had managed to make it safely—through the beating, the cutting, the rope, and the fire. But he could not make it through this boy saying with airy certainty that the murderers were probably all dead, when Luther had seen Floyd Bitters just Sunday afternoon, Floyd Bitters, who had escaped judgment all these years, Floyd Bitters, who was lying in a comfortable bed, probably sleeping at this very moment. Floyd Bitters, who was certainly alive, even if not quite well.
And wasn’t that always the way? White people never paid, did they? It was the great unspoken truth of American life. Beat a nigger, kick a nigger, burn a nigger, kill a nigger. Didn’t matter. They never paid for the shit they did. They never had to. Hell, that was the whole point of America.
Luther knelt there in the grass until the tears passed. He knelt there a long moment more. Finally, when he couldn’t avoid it any longer, he climbed to his feet, chest heaving and ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He kept his head down. Couldn’t look at Adam, couldn’t bear seeing the compassion on his nephew’s face. He said it again: “I’m sorry.”
“No need,” said Adam.
“It ain’t easy,” said Luther. “Bein’ here, talkin’ about it. Ain’t easy at all.”
“I understand,” said Adam.
And even that was more solicitude than he could bear. “Come on,” said Luther. “Let’s go. It’s two hours down to Mobile.”
He spun around decisively without waiting for an answer and plunged back through the grass the way they had come, leaving the blackened ruin and the old tree behind. He didn’t look back.