“Damn you, boy, you could have killed both of us!” his father bellowed, reaching down and picking up the shotgun, both barrels still spewing smoke.
In that moment, Calvin saw an opportunity and seized it. Throwing the noose from his neck, he ran as if a world-class sprinter. Any terror he’d previously shown was gone, or at least irrelevant, for this race. Perhaps the sound of that shotgun held healing qualities, allowing him to run as he did. Before Leroy could reach into the sedan and reload the shotgun, Calvin had disappeared into the darkness, crashing through the thicket— possibly on his way home, more likely to some safer, other place.
The shotgun blast had alerted the half-dozen or so cowboys sleeping in the bunkhouse about a hundred yards away. The first to arrive at the front yard was a sleepy-eyed cowboy named Harrigan. His hair was twisted in knots—what was not matted down was sticking up and pointing in every direction. He had on a pair of overalls that he held up by the waist. Upon seeing him, Leroy ordered him to wake up the rest of the boys and saddle the horses. He wanted them to follow his sedan down the road as he chased after Calvin. Harrigan made his barefoot sprint back to the bunkhouse, shouting out to the others to saddle up.
Bo’s father then turned to him and grabbed him by the collar, dragging him along as he stretched out his steps in long strides to the sedan. Bo’s feet lifted from the ground; only his toes skipped along the dirt as his shirt bunched up into both his armpits, as if it were a harness.
“You’re coming with me, boy. You’re going to help me find that thieving colored, and when we do, I’m going to hang him on the nearest tree I can find.”
Bo sobbed uncontrollably as he sat in the front seat of the sedan, while his father retrieved the rope from over the limb. Leroy rolled it up around his thick arm.
Bo’s mom was heading toward the sedan. “Let him go, Leroy,” she said, in a final attempt to stop the one-track train that was her husband.
“Get back in the house like I told you, Annabel. This is none of your concern.”
He jumped into the black Ford sedan, headlights piercing the darkness, as he drove like a lunatic across the bridge, behind the barn, and through the woods. The dirt road on the other side of the bridge led to their pasture, which eventually joined Clover Town—the pasture that Calvin would have to cross, hundreds of acres wide and as many deep. The grass was ankle-high and shimmered under the late-evening full moon, which shined brightly over the vast patch of pure green. If Calvin had crossed the pasture, he would easily be seen.
His father was ranting, and the intensity of his anger frightened Bo. The youngster could not control himself and cried.
“That’s enough of that, boy!” his father yelled as he reached out and shook Bo several times before letting go and slapping his own thigh loudly. “Be a man! This is what men do to protect their property. A thief ain’t any good to anyone. Especially colored thieves.”
Bo immediately stopped crying; his father had never put his hands on him before. Usually when he was angry, he would use his powerful voice, the same voice he used to scream at cowboys and ranch hands across the pastures. Whenever Bo heard that tone in his father’s voice, Bo understood he’d reached the limits of his patience. Still, the worst thing his father had ever done was make him walk home without his horse as punishment for upsetting him while out working the livestock. He never laid a hand on him. Until now.
When his father latched onto him with his massive hand, his fingers drove into his flesh and Bo could feel the physical power of his anger. Bo suddenly had a sense, probably just a fraction, of Calvin’s terror.
All the cowboys from the bunkhouse met up with the sedan after a short time, telling Leroy that they had seen nothing between the thicket and the pasture. They surmised the accused had gotten into Clear Creek and made his way off the property.
Father and son drove back to the ranch house. As they emerged from the thicket, their lights illuminated someone walking on the road, not far from where Calvin had fallen when he’d tripped trying to escape these same lights a short time ago. This time, it was Annabel, carrying a burlap feed sack in her arms. When she saw the lights of the sedan coming up the road, she stopped and turned to face them. Leroy slowed the sedan and hollered out the window, “What in tarnation are you doing out here, woman?”
She walked over to the door and threw the sack into her husband’s lap.
“Take a good look at this and tell me what you see,” she said, spitting the words through tears and red anger. She screamed, “Tell me what you see, Leroy?”
“Where did you get this?” Leroy asked as he fumbled through the sack of canned goods, a wrapped ham, and other food items.
“This is what Calvin was stealing. Food! Leroy, it’s food from our kitchen. You should be ashamed of yourself. If you’ve ever in your life been ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed right now.”
“What are you talking about, Annabel?”
“You’re just like your father, cruel and insensitive. A man who steals food from your kitchen is desperate, not a thief.” With that, she turned in disgust and headed back to the house.
“Annabel!” Leroy shouted after her as she walked into the darkness toward the porch light. She did not respond, her body language clear as she swung her arms and marched with her back straight, shoulders squared. Bo and Leroy had both seen that walk before. Annabel was serious, and it wouldn’t be easy to stop her from getting what she wanted.
Leroy drove past her and stopped the car in front of the house. When he opened the door, Annabel was approaching the porch, only a few feet away.
“Boy, get up to your room,” he ordered.
Bo sprung from the car and into the house, making a beeline for his bedroom. His window was above the front porch, and he could hear every word his parents said, even as they tried to speak in low voices.
“That man didn’t come here to steal from us; he came here to ensure the survival of his family,” his mom said. “There is no worse pain than being hungry, and for a father of two, there’s no worse pain than seeing your family go hungry.”
Bo heard the screen door creak open, but didn’t hear it slam shut.
“Let go of my arm now, Annabel. It’s time to get to bed. We’ll talk more about this in the morning.”
“No, we’ll talk about it right now. You pay your colored hands next to nothing for their backbreaking labor. They walk here to work every day, and they have been loyal to your family for years. They live in squalor with nothing, but they make do and show up here to work on time every day; some of them in their bare feet! And you sure can’t say the same about that bunkhouse full of drunken cowboys yonder. They can’t wake up on time to get to work, and they’re less than a hundred feet from the barn! When they do finally wake up, the coloreds are already here working. They are the ones that made this ranch what it is. You know as well as I do that it’s their sweat and muscle and loyalty that made you and your father rich.” Her voice was full tilt now. Mom was on a roll. “And if it weren’t for Mammy Dupree, you wouldn’t be walking this earth, Leroy Kelso. She wet-nursed you when your mother died of the fever six months after you were born. You owe your life and livelihood to people like Calvin. You have forgotten that.”
Bo stepped back from the window, momentarily stunned by this bit of history he’d not before known.
Back on the porch, having quietly closed the screen door, Leroy sat down on one of the benches on the front porch. He stared out into the darkness and quietly contemplated his wife’s words; all true. Still, he felt no remorse in his heart, only a sense of duty he felt entitled to enforce and a frustration with his inability to argue his wife’s point.
“Calvin would have never done this unless he was desperate,” Annabel continued. “And you want to hang him for being hungry, a hunger that you created because you are a bigot!”
“It ain’t like that, Annabel. I pay that man,” he reminded. “He gets an honest wage. If he needed more money, he should have asked me for it instead of stealing from me. He probably had somebody else with him that we didn’t see, and he made it off into the woods. Calvin was probably just the last man out of the house and got caught.”
“You’re a fool, Leroy. Don’t matter who it was or how many, this involves family—children—being hungry. Now I haven’t checked the house yet, but I’m sure nothing is missing except your heart. You’re not just a bigot; you’re cruel, and you treat the colored labor like slaves.”
The word touched a nerve. “Don’t you ever use that word here again! Slaves have never been on this property. My father and I have always paid freed coloreds to work this land.”
Annabel turned her back on him and made her way into the house without another word. She let go of the screen door and it slammed shut behind her.
Leroy paced to the far end of the porch and sat down on the edge of a rocking chair. His hands were shaking in visible anger at what had transpired.
He chewed the side of his cheek—a nervous habit formed years ago—and considered all that happened: the betrayal of an employee, the lack of spine in his only son, and the fact that his own wife took the side of the thief. Sure, everything she’d said was true. His daddy had taught him everything he needed to know about running a ranch and being successful. But he’d taught him nothing about compassion. His mother had not been there to nurture that foreign emotion in her son’s heart. His brother and sister had both died at young ages due to illness. Life on the ranch had been extremely difficult, especially for the only child left to follow in the footsteps of a heartless, hard man. Still, he wasn’t one to whine about his lot in life.
Mammy Dupree had essentially been his mother. A round, brilliantly dark woman, she’d nursed him to health and adulthood. As a baby, Leroy had slept in a small wooden crib propped up on the far side of the kitchen during the cold winters and in the same crib on the back porch during the summer. The first day he crawled from the crib on his own signaled the end of his childhood. From that moment on, his father carried him on horseback or wagon everywhere he went in the fields. Leroy never had the opportunity to play with the other children; they were colored and he was the son of a rancher who knew nothing but work.
Leroy could only hear his own learned hatred and entitlement drumming in his ears. His daddy had always been a whole lot more worried about himself and his ranch than about helping others. Compassion had not been a factor in any of his thoughts or actions. He’d treated people poorly in general, whether black or white, only seeing them as a means to an end. But the black hands definitely had been treated worst of all, animals included. And Leroy carried that ranching legacy with him to this very moment.
He sat in the darkness of the porch long enough to convince himself that the entire situation was misunderstood by Annabel and that his way was the best way.
In his room, leaning far away from the side of the window, to see but not be seen, Bo held his breath so as not to move even the air. He watched his father walk from the porch to the small, wooden garage-like structure next to the house where the sedan was kept. Through the blur of the window screen, Bo could make out his father’s silhouette as he entered the building and emerged from it with a bottle of what Bo knew was whisky, his father’s drink of choice. He put the bottle to his lips and turned it up. The whisky bottle glistened under the glare of the moon. His father took a pull and started walking, as if into the moonlight, finally sitting down on a tree stump. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, the red embers illuminating his face each time he took a drag. Occasionally he would sip from the bottle, and then return it to its perch next to him on the stump.
Bo had seen this routine before; his father usually drank alone, like tonight. The ritual seemed to soothe his father. After a short while and another cigarette, he returned the whisky bottle to its hiding place and headed to the house, grinding his last cigarette in the dirt at the foot of the steps. He stepped inside the house. Bo heard not another word.
The following morning the local sheriff was informed of what happened. Calvin Mercer was nowhere to be found. He’d made good on his promise to the rancher who’d wanted to hang him. He vanished, leaving behind his young wife and two children. A short time after that, his wife and children also disappeared from Clover Town. Everyone assumed that the whole family moved far enough away so that no one could find them, especially Leroy Kelso.