Chapter Nineteen

VALDOSTA, 1873

HENRY HOLLIDAY SAT IN THE PARLOR OF HIS SAVANNAH STREET cottage, smoking a cigar. To any other observer, he might have seemed contentedly reposed, letting out long puffs of smoke then tipping the ash of his Havana into a waiting china ashtray. But John Henry knew his father’s calm exterior covered an anger barely restrained.

“To say that I am disappointed in you, John Henry, would be a lie. I am far more than disappointed. I am chagrined. What am I to say to all these good people in Valdosta who thought you were doin’ so well in Griffin?”

Though father and son were nearly of a height now, Henry was still heavier, more sturdily built than John Henry, and looked all the larger for it. His high cheekbones were sun-reddened, his forehead showing deep lines from working out of doors. His silvered hair was still as thick and wavy as a young man’s, his clean-shaven face still square jawed and handsome. And, under a heavy brow, his light blue eyes were still as cool as steel.

Looking into those eyes, John Henry felt like a boy again, in trouble for yet another hotheaded misdeed. “Tell them I changed my mind about Griffin,” he said uneasily, “and came back here to practice instead.”

“A man doesn’t change his mind, just like that. Not about business. You build a business, you stand by it, you stake your reputation on it. But you don’t just walk out on it. Irresponsible, that’s what they’ll say you are. Foolish.”

John Henry didn’t have to ask if his father thought him foolish too.

“I didn’t just walk away, Pa,” he said in his own defense. “I packed up my equipment and put it on the train. I closed the business, that’s all. I’ll just open up again down here, or go in with Dr. Frink, if he’ll have me.”

“He may wonder why you took such a sudden notion to leave Griffin. Did you get yourself into money trouble there, take on some bad debts? He won’t look kindly on that.”

“No, Pa, it wasn’t money trouble. I was makin’ out all right.”

“Carousin’, then? Did you spend too much time in the saloons?”

He couldn’t deny that charge as easily as bad finances. He had indeed spent more time than he needed to in the saloons in Griffin and Atlanta both, but that was just loneliness, not bad business.

“I did some drinkin’, but nothin’ to shame you.”

Henry took another draw on the cigar but blew it out fast, impatient for answers.

“Then what the hell brought you home like this? After all that talk of bein’ a man, makin’ your own way in the world and seein’ after Francisco’s children, I thought you’d finally managed to grow up some. Hoped you’d finally got some goals in life.”

John Henry took a slow breath before answering, trying to steel himself for his father’s coming rage. For surely, Henry would have something to say about his reasons for leaving Griffin.

“I did have a goal, Pa,” he said at last. “That’s what took me up to Atlanta in the first place. I had a plan to marry my cousin Mattie, and I reckoned bein’ close to where she was would make it easier . . .”

He had expected Henry to curse out a response or turn that cold stare on him in disbelief. But his father’s sudden laughter set him back more than any cursing could have done.

“Marry Cousin Mattie! Absurd! Close relations don’t breed well, John Henry. You should know that from livin’ on the farm.”

It was an echo of Rachel’s words the year before, and that only made his own anger rise. “We’re not animals, Pa!” John Henry answered hotly, feeling the color rise in his face. To debase something as beautiful and pure as the love he and Mattie shared . . .

But Henry laughed again, loud and hard. “We’re all animals, son. Especially men. The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be. Once you get a good woman in your bed, one who understands about things, you’ll forget all this foolishness over Rob’s little girl.”

“Like you forgot about my mother once you married Rachel?” He never would have spoken so rashly, but his father had goaded him into it.

“That is none of your business,” Henry answered quickly, and for a moment the clear steel blue of his eyes shadowed over. “You will watch what you say in regards to your stepmother, if you plan on livin’ under the same roof with her. So what happened to these fine plans of marryin’ your cousin? Did she have the good sense to turn you down?”

“She turned me down, but not for lack of wantin’ it. It’s her religion. The Catholic church won’t allow first cousins to marry.”

“Catholicism,” Henry said with disdain. “Your Uncle Rob had to convert to marry your Aunt Mary Anne.”

“As I would have done, if it came to that.”

“Catholic? You’d have turned Catholic? That would have broken your mother’s heart.”

John Henry flinched, then he said without thinking, “And since when did you ever care about breakin’ my mother’s heart? Marryin’ your lover before your wife was even cold in her grave . . .”

And in one muscular motion Henry rose from the chair and turned on him, hitting him hard across the face, and John Henry staggered under the blow.

“I could kill a man for less than that,” Henry said, his eyes cold with anger. And for a moment, John Henry believed that he might try. Then Henry drew a slow breath.

“Go to see Dr. Frink, then,” he said, and might as well have said Go to hell . . . “But don’t expect any help from me.”

John Henry almost broke then, feeling again like that boy who could never be good enough, cowering in the shadow of the great hero, Henry Holliday. Then he put his hand to his stinging face, took a breath and put his shoulders back, raising himself to his full height, and he looked Henry square in the eyes.

“I don’t expect anything from you, Pa. I don’t need anything from you.”

Henry nodded. “Then that’s what you’ll get, son. Nothin’. Find yourself another place to live. You’re not welcome in my house any longer.” Then he turned and walked from the room and never looked back.

Brave as John Henry’s words had been, there was nothing brave about the way he felt as he walked out into the shadows that steamy summer evening. For the first time in his life he was truly homeless, though his father’s house was only a few steps behind him. But Henry had thrown him out, and there was no turning back. So he stood in Rachel’s flowered yard, between the white-painted porch and the whitewashed fence, and wondered where he would go to now. Certainly, he couldn’t beg refuge of any of the townsfolk in Valdosta. Henry Holliday was a hero to them, a fine and prosperous member of the community. If Henry wouldn’t take his own son in, why should they?

He had never felt so alone, deserted by his past and his future both. So when the front door creaked open and Rachel stepped down from the porch to join him, he almost welcomed her company.

“He’s hot-headed, sometimes,” she said. “But I reckon you were always a little hot-headed, too.”

John Henry didn’t answer, though he had to agree with what she said. They were both of them hot-headed, stubborn men.

“Much alike as you are,” she went on, “seems like you’d get along fine. Maybe someday you will.”

John Henry shook his head. “Be hard for us to get along, now he’s put me out of his house.”

“So where you goin’ to?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” John Henry answered. “You got any suggestions?”

Of course he didn’t expect a reply. Common as she was, Rachel knew a wife’s place and wouldn’t go against her husband’s wishes. If his father meant him to be homeless, then homeless he would be. So he was surprised when Rachel took a breath and said in a voice hardly above a whisper:

“Your Uncle Tom McKey’s moved up here, you know. He’s come to be near his Sadie Allen, seein’ as they’re plannin’ on marryin’ and all. He took up that family land over on the Withlacoochee, down the old Troupville Road, built himself a nice little cabin there. I reckon you remember the place.”

He remembered it all right. He’d been there plenty of times, swimming in that bend of river near where the Withlacoochee and the Little River met. He’d been there with Mattie even, when her family had stayed with his during the last days of the War. That land had seemed like a green refuge to him then, far away from the troubles of the world. Maybe it could be a refuge for him again . . .

“I’d need a horse to get there before full dark,” he said aloud, thinking of the four miles between Valdosta and there. And once again, he was surprised by Rachel’s words.

“I reckon your Pa wouldn’t notice if one of his horses was to spend the night elsewhere. Not once I give him a glass or two of that bourbon he keeps under the sideboard. He’ll rant and rave awhile about you, then settle down for the night after that. If that horse was to be back by mornin’, I don’t reckon he’d notice it was ever gone.”

John Henry looked at her in astonishment. With her unruly waves of yellow hair and her untidy house dress, she still looked much like the young farm girl his father had taken to wife, and whom John Henry had spent the better part of seven years despising. Yet here she was, acting amazingly like a woman with a real concern for his welfare.

“Why are you doin’ this for me, Rachel? You know my Pa wouldn’t take kindly to it.”

“I ain’t doin’ it for you, John Henry, nor for your Pa neither,” she said. “I reckon I’m doin’ it for your Ma.”

Then she turned and walked back into the house without bothering to explain what she meant.

And though he didn’t stop to ponder on her words just then, he couldn’t help remembering them as he rode his father’s horse out the old Troupville Road toward the Withlacoochee River. Had he been wrong about Rachel all these years? Had she been more, after all, than just his father’s mistress, stealing away his mother’s husband and home? Then another memory came to his mind and stayed: his mother’s grave at Sunset Hill Cemetery, ringed with river stones and covered with flowers like a garden plot. Someone had watched over it all these years, washing the gravestone and turning the sad burial place into something beautiful. Someone had tended to the memory of Alice Jane, when even her husband seemed to have forgotten her. Rachel, he thought . . .

And for the first time, the thought of her didn’t make him feel sick inside.

Tom welcomed him without question, as he always had, and John Henry let him think the unexpected visit was nothing more than a social call. Bad enough to be thrown out of his father’s house without having to admit as much to anyone else—even family as close as his Uncle Tom. And thankfully, there was so much to be done on Tom’s new place that there wasn’t much time to ask or answer many questions, anyhow.

The homestead was a stone’s throw from the Withlacoochee, near the bend in the river that John Henry had called his swimming hole. Tom had cleared an acre or so of the woods away and built his cabin facing the water. Behind it was a well-house and outhouse, a kitchen garden already in cultivation, a nearly completed barn, and even the start of a buggy house, though John Henry couldn’t see the need for something as fancy as a buggy out there in the woods. Wouldn’t a spring wagon be enough for trips to the general store in Valdosta?

“The buggy’s not for bringin’ supplies around,” Tom told him. “It’s for Sadie, once we get married. She likes to be up and doin’ all the time, restless like. With the buggy, she can go off visitin’ in town whenever she likes.”

“So why live away out here then? Why don’t you buy a place in town instead?”

“I like the peace and quiet out here. I like bein’ close to the water. I’d like my boys to grow up swimmin’ in that swimmin’ hole someday—and we’re hoping for a houseful of ‘em, eight or nine maybe.”

“Then you’re gonna need a bigger cabin, Tom.”

“This one’ll do for now. But I sure could use your help gettin’ this buggy house finished up. The runabout arrives next week, so I’ll be needin’ a place to put it.”

“But why buy the buggy before you even get married?” John Henry asked, as Tom had told him the wedding was still a year or two away.

“Your Pa got me a deal on it, before he sold the buggy business and opened the furniture store. Glad I went ahead and ordered it when I did. Took seven months to get here, as it was, but I expect it’ll be worth it. It’s a pretty one: black with a gold stripe down the side and real Morocco leather upholstery. Set me back a bit, I can tell you.”

“I guess that explains the straw mattress on the bed. Won’t Sadie be expectin’ feathers?”

“She will, and she’ll get ‘em, too. Now your Pa’s got that furniture business, I reckon I’ll be orderin’ a bedroom suit next. But for now, you and I will have to share what’s there—I’ll put the mattress on the floor for you and sleep on the ropes myself. Best I can offer company for a while.”

“It’s plenty, Tom, and I appreciate your hospitality,” he said, though it was hard to hear Tom’s happy plans for the future when his own plans had come to nothing. So he was glad when the talking stopped and he could pour himself into work instead. Though John Henry had little experience as a builder, Tom was a patient and able teacher, and they worked well together. Still, he wondered if Tom’s building techniques were a little out of the ordinary: where another man might have used a handsaw to cut the soft pinewood for the buggy house, Tom sliced into it with the monstrous knife he’d carried off to War with him.

“The Hell-Bitch has her uses still,” he said with a grin as he handed the knife, swamp oak handle first, to his nephew. “As I recall, you figured she was for throwin’. But fifteen inches long and two inches wide don’t throw well. You just cut with her.”

John Henry took the knife in his right hand and turned it over, feeling the weight of the thing and admiring how both sides of the blade were still sharpened to a shine.

“Shame you only use her for slaughterin’ hogs and cuttin’ wood,” he said. “Your Hell-Bitch is a fightin’ weapon if I ever saw one.”

“She is, but I’d rather not be in any fight where I’d have to use her. Hand-to-hand is dangerous fightin’. Mostly, both men get hurt. If it came to a fight, I’d rather pull a pistol than a knife, anyhow. And I’d rather aim a shot-gun than a pistol.”

“You can’t aim a shot-gun,” John Henry remarked, “unless you’re aimin’ at a deer. The pellets just scatter all over, you know that. Better stick with the pistol, if it comes to a fight.”

It was just conversation to pass the time while they worked together, but it was pleasant enough talk, and kept his mind distracted from his troubles. But when Tom called the day’s work to a halt and darkness gathered around the homesite, John Henry’s misery came racing back.

The nights were the hardest, out in the woods. While Tom slept on a blanket thrown over the ropes of his single bed, too tired and content to be uncomfortable, John Henry tossed and turned on the straw mattress pallet on the floor. Mattie! Mattie! His heart cried out for her, his whole being ached to be with her. How could he live with this emptiness? How could he live and watch her with some other man someday, some good husband who would love her and hold her and give her children . . .

The thought of it turned his stomach, made him want to scream and flail at the awful fate that had made his only love his own cousin, closer to him than any other woman could ever be, too close for them to ever be together. And then that cruel fate took a name and he cursed God for making them cousins, for making Mattie a Catholic so that she could not marry him. Cruel, contemptuous God who sat in holy judgment against the dearest, sweetest emotions John Henry had ever felt. Did it please God to see him suffer so?

Then he remembered that simple faith that Mattie had always had, childlike belief in God’s grace. Without that faith, she wouldn’t be his beloved Mattie, and he almost laughed at the awful irony of it. If her faith didn’t mean so much to her, if she could turn away from it and marry him without the blessings of the priest, he would have loved her less. It was her strength that made him lean on her, made him love her so desperately. It was her strength that denied him her love.

He hardly slept at all, those nights at Tom’s cabin, and each new day as Tom arose rested and ready to start to work again, John Henry was more tired than the day before. The tiredness brought back the cough that had plagued him in the winter and spring, and the cough made it even harder to sleep. And by the time the buggy house was nearly done and Tom was ready to ride into town and collect his long-awaited runabout, John Henry was worn down to exhaustion.

“Why don’t you stay here and get some rest?” Tom said as he packed a saddlebag and put on his town clothes. “I’ll be gone overnight. I usually try to stay over and go to church with Sadie whenever I get into town. And I don’t suppose you’ll be wantin’ to pay a visit on your Pa, anyhow . . .”

He didn’t need to say more, for like his sister Alice Jane, Tom had a way of knowing what was troubling John Henry without ever being told.

“I don’t reckon Pa would appreciate my comin’ around,” John Henry replied. “I don’t reckon I’ll be visitin’ with him ever again, if you want to know the truth.”

“Only if you want to tell it,” Tom said. “I know there’s been bad feelings all around, ever since your Pa remarried. And it don’t help that Henry’s not one for talkin’ much. But that don’t mean he don’t love you, John Henry. Some things just take time, I reckon.”

“I reckon,” John Henry said, though he took no comfort in the thought. Time hadn’t fixed anything with Mattie, only made matters worse. He didn’t see how an evening’s visit with his father would repair the rift between them. “I guess I’ll stay here and get some sleep, like you said. You go on and have a good visit with Sadie, show her that pretty new buggy.”

But as Tom rode away down the old Troupville Road, headed toward Valdosta, John Henry had a sudden urge to run after him. Tom had been his comfortable companion these hard days, and without him the woods were going to seem mighty lonely. For while he had never minded being alone before, now the quiet seemed to settle down on him like a pall, and he feared he was about to become melancholy. There was a medicine to ward off the melancholy of course, the same spiritus fermenti that doctors prescribed for coughs and such, and Tom happened to have a bottle or two tucked away in his dish cupboard. And though John Henry knew that drinking alone was a sign of a weak will, he didn’t see how he had much choice. Under the circumstances, he could either drink alone to try and push away the despair, or succumb to his misery completely. Besides, a little whiskey might help him to sleep . . .

But sleep was long in coming that night, even after he’d emptied his little silver pocket flask and downed most of one bottle and contemplated starting onto another. Filled with whiskey as he was, he lay on the straw mattress pallet on the floor in a drunken half-wakefulness remembering all the sorrows of his life. In his twenty-one years, he’d lived through more than most men would see in a lifetime, and now it all seemed to come back to him at once: the horror of War and the humiliation of Reconstruction, the frustrated anger of the boys who called themselves Vigilantes and the murder of their hero, the Captain; the failed retribution of the Courthouse bombing; the arrest and imprisonment of his friends and his own unworthy escape from punishment; the long, awful death of his mother; the disloyal remarriage of his father. And round and over and through it all, his doomed love for Mattie who could never be his. When he finally slept, the memories turned to nightmares.

He woke in a sweat, the summer sun glaring in through the cabin windows and turning the place breathless as an oven. It was late morning, maybe, or early afternoon, and hot as hell already, but it wasn’t the heat that had awakened him. From somewhere outside the cabin came sounds that shouldn’t be there: voices talking, getting closer.

He rolled over and reached for his valise, pulling out his pistol, the walnut-gripped Colt’s Navy revolver Uncle John had given him as a coming-of-age gift. Hands shaking, he loaded two chambers just to be safe and ready to frighten away whoever might be trespassing on the McKey property. But ready as his pistol was, John Henry himself was still so hung-over that he could barely stand without swaying, and the swaying made him so sick he thought he might retch.

He staggered to the door of the cabin and out into the hot summer sun, looking around for the source of the sound, and didn’t see at first where it was coming from. The clearing around the cabin was still undisturbed, the barn and the buggy house closed up as Tom had left them. Then the sound came again, more distinct this time, and his eyes followed it across the bend of the river to the far side of the swimming hole. There in the green shade of the overhanging trees, a gang of colored boys was stepping into the water. They were stripped naked, skinny-dipping like young men did, and laughing as they splashed in the shallows. Behind them, their homespun clothes hung on bushes along the sandy riverbank.

It should have been a pleasant picture, those careless colored boys sneaking out for a Sunday afternoon’s frolic. But to John Henry, it seemed like a sacrilege. This was his swimming hole—his and Mattie’s. He had brought her here that long-ago summer when her family had stayed with his at Cat Creek. He had watched her walk down into the river, the sun glinting off her auburn hair and the water making her cotton dress cling to the curves of her body. He had laid beside her here, in the grass along the riverbank, feeling an urge to touch her in a way he did not then understand. And all at once, his passion for her and his pain at losing her swelled up inside of him, spun together with the frustration at his useless life, and came flooding out in an anger he could barely control. He raised his pistol and without bothering to shout a warning, fired one shot across the river.

Unsteady as he was, the shot went over the heads of the boys swimming there, but they heard it whistle past, and ran yelling for the riverbank.

“Y’all get out of here!” John Henry screamed hoarsely, “damn you, get away from our land!” His whole body shook with the words, so hard he didn’t think he could fire a second shot if he had to. But as long as the boys cleared out the way they were told, he wouldn’t need to find out.

But one of the boys seemed not to understand, or care, that he had been justly ordered out of the water, and he stopped where he was and looked back across the river to where the shot had come from. Then, standing there naked in the water, white teeth gleaming in his dark face, he started to laugh.

It was the laughter, coming like a challenge, that made John Henry’s liquored blood rise, reminding him of the laughter of the guard at the Courthouse the day the carpetbagger had come to town, the day the Yankees had taken his friends away to prison, the day his father had slapped him hard across the face and called him a shame. And all at once, the pistol in his hand seemed to take on a life of its own, rising to the challenge and firing a shot square into the colored boy’s laughing face.

The other boys heard the shot, saw their companion spin around, watched his blood flood into the river as he fell, faceless, into the water. For a moment, neither the boys nor John Henry moved, as the smoke of the gunpowder rose up into the air and wafted across the river, lazy as a summer’s cloud. Then one of the boys screamed, ran toward the water, put out a hand as if to raise his fallen friend, then turned and raced into the woods, naked still. His companions, grabbing for what clothing they could reach from the bushes, ran after him into the trees.

In the still shadows of the swimming hole, the blood of the dead boy was turning the green water to crimson red.

The pistol dropped from John Henry’s hand as he fell to his knees in the dirt.

“Oh my God!” he whispered, more a desperate prayer than a curse. “Oh my God, what have I done?”

“Looks like you’ve killed a man,” Tom McKey said heavily, stepping up behind him. In the yelling and the commotion of the last few moments, John Henry hadn’t heard his uncle drive up in his new buggy, fresh back from church in Valdosta. “So I reckon we’ve got some plans to make.”

“Plans?” John Henry said, bewildered. “What kind of plans?”

“How to get you gone before the sheriff hears of this. Lucky for you, it’s Sunday, and the law won’t want to be bothered with a colored boy’s killin’ just yet. That gives us a little time, anyhow.”

And when John Henry didn’t move, frozen like a dreamer in an awful nightmare, Tom grabbed hold of his shoulder and yanked him to his feet.

“One man’s dead, John Henry,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure another one lives. Now go on inside and brew some coffee to sober you up while I get that poor boy’s body out of the river. His parents shouldn’t have to find him like that.”

But Tom McKey already realized what John Henry was too stunned and scared to know: that whether the boy was found floating in the river or buried in a shallow grave, once word got around that a killing had taken place on the Withlacoochee, law men and curious folk from all over the county would be coming to the McKey land, looking for the killer.

“It ain’t slavery days anymore,” Tom tried to explain to him. “Back then, you killed a colored, you only had to deal with his master, or pay the price of him. We’ve been reconstructed now. A black man’s life is equal to a white man’s, in the law.”

“But they were trespassin’ on our land . . .” John Henry said in weak defense, still not believing what had happened. Surely, it was just some bad liquor dream he was having and he’d wake from it soon enough. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

But Tom went on talking as though it were all too real.

“The river ain’t ours, John Henry, and you know it, only this stretch of land alongside of it. But there’s land the law around here can’t catch you on, and that’s where we’re headed, fast as I can get us out of here.”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“I’m talkin’ about Banner Plantation. Georgia law won’t follow you down into Florida, not for a colored boy. Equal law don’t mean equal justice, lucky for you. Now finish up that coffee and pack up your gear. Too bad your first ride in the buggy has to be for such a cause.”

“The buggy? You’re comin’ too?”

Tom looked at him somberly. “I doubt you’d make it there on your own, the way you’re lookin’ now. Besides, you took to a dangerous road once to help get me safely home. I reckon it’s my turn to do you the same favor. I just wish you and your Pa were on speakin’ terms. Was a time, once, when Henry got you out of a fix like this without hardly anyone noticin’.”

But John Henry shook his head and looked up at Tom with terrified eyes. “No Tom, I never was in a fix like this before.”

Tom didn’t even bother answering.

Alone on horseback, John Henry could have made the ride to the McKey plantation in just a few hours. But in a buggy with a horse already winded from the trip back from Valdosta, the drive took until well past dark. But at least there was only a crescent moon that night and no bright moonlight to show off Tom’s new buggy. With its shiny black paint and that bright gold stripe down the side, anyone seeing it racing across the Georgia state line would surely have remembered it.

John Henry knew that Tom was taking an awful chance, driving him down to Florida. Tom had nothing to do with the shooting, and could have just walked away from the whole thing. Helping his nephew escape from the law would make Tom an accessory to a killing, if the courts ever got wind of it. And the fact that Tom had taken the Hell-Bitch along for the ride, out of its scabbard and slid down between the leather seat cushions and the wood frame of the buggy, showed he knew what kind of danger he was in. For even after he’d delivered John Henry to Banner Plantation, Tom would have to find cause why he himself shouldn’t be suspected of murder. It had happened in the river alongside his own property, after all, and within clear sight of his cabin.

“At least I went to church, Sunday mornin’,” Tom said to his older brother Will that night, as he explained what had caused their unexpected visit. “The whole Methodist congregation can vouch for that, and Sadie’ll say I spent the rest of the afternoon havin’ supper with her family. Lucky for us all, I didn’t make any big show of leavin’ Valdosta when I headed back out to the river. Hopefully, nobody noticed me go.”

“I reckon we’ll find out soon enough about that, once the law starts lookin’ into things,” Uncle Will replied. Though he’d been fast asleep when Tom and John Henry arrived, he was wide-awake now, and considering the situation. John Henry was sorry to have caused him the trouble. Uncle Will was still not entirely healed of the wound he’d taken at the Battle of Malvern Hill during the War, though Uncle James McKey had done his best to repair the damage, and Will had a continuing kidney ailment that left him weak much of the time. And now, sitting in the oil lamp shadows of his parlor, he looked far older than his thirty-six years, with his pale face drawn and his sandy hair turning to gray.

“Let’s not tell the sisters about this,” he said quietly, nodding toward the bedroom where Aunt Ella and Aunt Eunice were sleeping. “You know how women can talk, and this needs to stay as quiet as we can make it. So who was this boy who took the bullet? Is his family well known around town?”

Tom shook his head, “I didn’t see him before John Henry fired. The other boys were gone before I got a good look at ‘em. And after, there wasn’t much left to identify.”

“John Henry?” Will asked, turning toward his nephew, “did you know the boy?”

John Henry thought back to that awful moment when the liquor and the anger overcame him and his pistol seemed to fire itself, but couldn’t remember anything but sound and smoke and the boy falling faceless into the water. “I don’t know, Uncle Will. I don’t think so . . .”

Will sighed and sat back in his chair, considering. “Not knowin’ him makes it more difficult, I reckon. Can’t quiet his family with money, if we don’t know who they are. Don’t know who to watch out for around town, either. What about Henry?” he asked, turning back to Uncle Tom. “Does he know about this yet?”

“I doubt it,” Tom said. “I didn’t dare take the time to stop by and visit with him.”

“Well, we’ll have to get word to him first thing in the mornin’, have him do what he can there to put an end to this. Henry’s a powerful man in Valdosta. Surely he’s got some influence with the law . . .”

“Pa won’t help me,” John Henry said. “He told me he wouldn’t ever come to my rescue again like he did over the Courthouse trouble. He said I’d be on my own, next time I got in a fix with the law . . .”

He’d expected his uncle to have some sympathy for him in the face of his father’s neglect. But Uncle Will’s words put a whole new frightening light on things.

“This isn’t just your fix, John Henry,” Uncle Will said somberly. “It’s all of ours, seein’ as you chose to kill that boy on our part of the river. My name’s on that land deed, too, along with Tom’s. Supposin’ somebody decides it was me who happened to be there today, takin’ a look over things? Supposin’ somebody decides I’m the one who did the shootin’?”

“But you weren’t there!” John Henry exclaimed. “You’ve been in Florida the whole time, the sisters can prove that . . .”

Even in the shadows, John Henry could see the weariness in Uncle Will’s eyes.

“What a man can prove and what he gets accused of are two different things. Oft times, an accusation’s all it takes to ruin a man’s good name. So first thing in the mornin’, I’ll ride over to Belleville and send a wire to Henry, ask for his help. Though I’d rather take a hangin’ myself then beg anything of him . . .”

For the first time since the shooting, John Henry looked beyond himself to what he had done to his family. As Tom had said, Henry’s marriage to Rachel had left bad feelings all around. Now his uncles would have to throw themselves on Henry Holliday’s mercy to keep the McKey name clean.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Will,” John Henry said truthfully, “I am so sorry for troublin’ you . . .”

“Seems like it’s killin’ that boy you ought to be sorry for, John Henry, not the trouble that’s come after it. If you’d have kept your head this mornin’, none of this would have happened. I fear Alice Jane was right in what she used to say about you.”

“My mother? What did she used to say?”

Will paused a moment before answering, then sighed. “She feared there’s too much tares in you, John Henry, and not enough wheat. I reckon maybe she was right.”

Tom drove back to Georgia that same night, taking advantage of the darkness and borrowing one of his brother’s horses to make for a speedy ride. He left his own winded horse with Will, but he left the Hell-Bitch with John Henry in case any trouble should come down that way. And while Tom raced north before the sun, John Henry’s mind raced as well. Though there’d been no talk of what he was to do with himself while his uncles settled things in Valdosta, it was clear to him that he couldn’t stay long at Banner Plantation. Soon his Aunt Ella and Aunt Eunice, his mother’s unmarried younger sisters, would awaken and wonder what had brought their favorite nephew for a visit. He could lie, of course, and tell them he had just wanted to come and see them all. But that wouldn’t explain why he couldn’t go back to Georgia for a while. And if the worst came, and Tom and Will couldn’t get things settled after all, he might never be able to go back to Georgia again . . .

He sat down heavily on one of the straight-backed chairs in the parlor and stared at the family pictures lining the walls: silver frames around unsmiling faces, his McKey relatives all looking back at him somberly—Uncle Will, Uncle James, Uncle Jonathan who’d gone west to Texas . . .

Then suddenly he remembered the last time he’d been to visit Banner Plantation, when Tom had told him about his inheritance. There’d been something wild in him that night, when all he could think about was getting out of Valdosta, away from his restlessness, and heading west to Texas like his Uncle Jonathan McKey had done. Texas—

The thought of it settled down on his mind like an endless summer day. Wide, wild Texas, where a man could get lost and not have to think, let his sorrows burn away under that hot western sky.

“Texas,” he whispered. “Texas.”