SEVENTEEN

Yellow stripes split the two-lane blacktop in a blur racing backward toward Birmingham. Ahead the road ran through fields of crops and rock and harsh red clay, hacked from pine forests and marked by stunted oaks. Amidst a sprawling cornfield the sun-blackened figure of a farmer hoed patiently. Now and then I passed desultory civilization: junkyards, stores, trailers, road-houses, Baptist churches and cemeteries—the small towns whose people lived, died, hunted, prayed, made love and whiskey, and were carelessly killed in a sun so hot it took the stomach from you at midday. Vaporous heat rising thinly from the road lent the landscapes a cruel, shimmering beauty. Birmingham had ceased to exist.

After an hour or so I passed a blue sweep of lakes nestled in low piny hills and speckled with rowboats and a few shirtless men standing hip-deep with flyrods. Then bait shops began, then gas stations, a small sign marking the turn for Grangeville, two miles of bare asphalt, and I was there.

Past a few stores and a Church of Christ whose sign promised that “Blessed Are the Optimists,” the road stopped at the town square. It was surrounded by quaint stores and packed with shoppers strolling among side-walk stands. At its center was a green rolling lawn shaded by oak trees. From their midst the bell tower of the county courthouse rose to a painted gold spire, gleaming in the sun as it had when the black woman and small boy had stood outside, waiting.

I parked and began walking toward a corner phone booth at the end of the crowded sidewalk, weaving among stands and people there from long tradition: Grangeville Trading Day, held for eighty years the first Thursday of the month. Parents and children ambled among handmade quilts and factory-made junk while vendors watched with studied indifference. A sidewalk fiddler in wire-rimmed glasses sawed vigorously and on the grass boys chased a small black dog past shade trees where men sat whittling with keen-edged knives. Their seamed faces spoke of lives spent in harsh sun and the older ones were strikingly the same: sharp chins and noses, spectral eyes, flat cheekbones with cheeks so gaunt they were like grooves. They talked and whittled with utter lassitude, like the fallout from a hundred years of inbreeding.

I got to the phone booth and went through the directory. Then I approached one of the old men, whittling in overalls, wood shavings curled at his feet. “Help me find something?” I asked.

He spat a brown stream of tobacco juice and looked up with a surprising smile that lacked several teeth. “Might could.” The words were guttural and half-swallowed. “What you looking for?”

“Montgomery Street. Luther Channing’s place.”

His smile inverted. “That’d be the old Hargrave place,” he said flatly.

“How do I get there?”

He looked me up and down, then pointed. “Take Main and turn left at the third street. Big, shadowy white house on the right. Only one like it.”

“Thanks.”

He spat and looked away. I went to the car.

Montgomery Street was lined by maples and haphazard small-town architecture, mainly tan brick houses built close to the street. Two blocks down the right side was a lawn several acres deep with a straight drive running between a quarter mile of parallel oaks. I turned, driving across their shadows until I spotted the white frame house at the end, concealed by more oaks. When I finally parked, I saw that the house was three antebellum stories. Its wide, shady porch had stairs at both ends, and in one corner two empty gliders hung facing each other. Five whitewashed steps rose to it between lilacs a soft mauve color. The grounds were still save for a single orange butterfly jittering among the lilacs. I went to the front door and knocked.

After a moment there were footsteps on the other side of the door. It was opened by an old man with eyes a shocking, opalescent gray.

“Yes?” he demanded.

“Mr. Channing?” He nodded. “I’m Adam Shaw, a lawyer from Birmingham. If it’s all right, I’d like a moment of your time.”

“Without calling? What about?”

“The Grangeville case, partly.”

His eyes glinted. “I’ve talked about that once in forty years, and not to a stranger.” He poised to slam the door.

“Also about Lydia Cantwell,” I added quickly. “You saw she was murdered?”

His hand stopped. “Go on.”

“Just that it may have something to do with your case.”

“What’s your interest in Lydia?”

“I represent Henry Cantwell. The husband.”

I looked past him as he scrutinized me. Through the hallway was a dark living room: two chairs, a lamp, and a standing clock, all antiques, as neatly arranged as if no one lived there. There was something deadly about it: Channing lived in a museum. The clock ticked behind him.

“I’ll listen,” he said at last and stepped onto the porch, slamming the door. “Out here.”

He pointed toward the two gliders, moving toward the far one. He was a tall man and his walk, straight and gliding, held the last vestige of youthful grace. But his vulpine face was ravaged. Two red scrapes on his cheek looked like skin cancer, with a white mark beneath them where more had been removed. Lank, white-yellow hair hung lifelessly over his forehead and to his collar in back. In his linen suit, he looked like a well-bred version of the whittling men, in worse health. I wondered who the suit was for.

“Speak up,” he said harshly.

“I’m sorry. I was wondering if Mrs. Cantwell used to live here.”

His eyes riveted me, as though he knew of their effect and used it. “She did,” he said finally. “When she was Lydia Hargrave. I bought the place after her mother died. She didn’t want it.”

I could see why, though, looking at the shady grounds and flowers in orderly plots, its air of perfect unreality seemed to match Lydia’s. “You’ve kept it up nicely,” I said.

“Someone had to. Is that what you came to say?”

“No. I wanted to ask about one of the defendants. Moses McCarroll.”

His voice, rough and old and hollow, held a note of malice. “What about him?”

“I wanted to know about the trial, and what happened to his family afterwards.”

“Don’t know much about the last.” He crossed one leg in a seeming act of will. “You find that strange?”

“I’m trying to imagine myself in your position.”

“Understand something, then.” He coughed, phlegm rattling in his throat. “The two nigras weren’t the issue.”

“I suppose that depends on your point of view.”

He held a handkerchief close to his mouth and spat into it. “Where you from?”

“Cleveland.”

“And raised very right-minded, I’m sure. The one thing more certain than that you didn’t know any southerners is that you didn’t know any blacks.”

“I’m not arguing. I came to ask you things, not tell you.”

“All right.” He looked at me sharply. “Driving through here, did you look around?”

“Some.”

“Look very wealthy to you?”

“Just this place.”

He ignored that. “Forty-odd years ago it was worse. The soil had gone from bad to farmed-out. When the Depression hit, Grangeville was so poor that for a while you hardly noticed. Then the L & N shut down the railroad yard. Three hundred men lost their jobs. Stores shut, just flat closed. People starved. They’d sweated and prayed and had nothing to show for it except rain that washed away the topsoil. One farmer hanged himself in his barn. Lucy Vines—the one with those two nigras—turned whore because of it.

“I’d been at law school and came back young and full of ambition, looking to lawyer awhile and then run for state senate. What I found was a town full of angry people and half the legal work in foreclosures where people hated your guts. So I got on at the prosecutor’s and started going to meetings, just listening and being seen. And what I heard was anger.

“I hadn’t been prosecuting six months—a couple of chicken thieves and a farmer who shot his wife for fornicating and admitted it—and then Roy Cobb found that nigra in his barn, rutting on Lucy Vines. Roy was a man of settled opinions, and right then and there he fetched his shotgun and ran all three of them into the courthouse: Lucy, the nigra, and his brother. It was blazing hot, nothing but fat, lazy flies coming through the windows and the usual bunch sitting on the steps that there’d been since the yard shut down. When they saw Roy prodding the two blacks and Lucy she began screaming rape. News got out fast. Pretty soon a whole crowd of those blank-eyed morons were on the front steps howling for the nigras and some rope, all crazy and excited. Might have done it, too. The nigras were something they could reach out and touch.”

He spoke with dispassionate savagery: the McCarrolls seemed hardly to exist and his compassion for the townspeople was mingled with contempt. “What stopped them?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, suddenly absorbed in a black fly that had landed on the glider. It crept nearer his hand. Two inches, then one. The fly stopped. Seconds passed. Channing was perfectly still. The fly turned and began marching back across the cushion. Channing watched narrowly. Two inches, three inches, four … I felt a foolish relief. With a sudden snap Channing’s palm smacked down and closed. Then, slowly, he brought his fist to chest level and opened it. The smashed fly dropped on the porch. Channing’s eyes were like clear ice.

“We’ve talked enough,” he rasped.

I stared at the fly. “You haven’t told me anything.”

“Why should I? What are you to me?”

“I’m nothing to you. I’m just here.”

He turned toward the grounds. Afternoon shadows were moving toward the house and sluggish winds wafted the scent of lilac. Channing’s long fingers rubbed silently together. There was no sound except the glider creaking under his weight. “George Naylor was the prosecutor,” he said abruptly. “He sat there, sweat dripping down his three chins, mumbling, ‘We never had no nigra problem,’ which wasn’t surprising since we’d never had any nigras except the McCarrolls. By then the lawn was covered with townsfolk and farmers in overalls making that low, ugly mob sound that’s not like anything else. Our moon-faced sheriff, Bohannon, is pacing in front of George’s desk whining that he can’t hold back the crowd. ‘I know these folks,’ he keeps saying. ‘They’re my friends.’ George stares at him without answering. Finally he sucks himself up and steps out on the porch. The sound gets even lower, like some animal. George has this high-pitched voice; I can barely hear him trying to ask the mob for trust. ‘Just give us the rope,’ a voice yells back. ‘Before you do that,’ George pleads, ‘stop and think if being part of a mob isn’t the lowest thing a man can do. If you men let the law just handle this we’ll try these nigras in two weeks.’ I remember thinking two weeks was pretty fast. But after George promised that, they just milled around without rushing the jail. Finally he came back in, sat down sort of heavy, and said, ‘We’ve got work to do, Luther.’ ‘Then you’d better find out what your case is,’ I answered.”

Channing still looked away, voice edged with disdain. “We went down the hall and had the sheriff bring in Lucy Vines. She sat on a stool, slack-mouthed and not looking up, saying the McCarrolls had raped her—the boy, anyhow. George asked about six different ways if that were true. Lucy wouldn’t budge. When she’d left, George just shook his head and mumbled, ‘Jesus Christ.’”

“I guess Lucy couldn’t have said anything else.”

Channing turned to stare at me. “Well,” he said coldly, “she could have confessed to whoring with nigras.”

He spoke with contempt, I thought for me. “What about the McCarrolls?” I asked.

“George and I went to look them over. The one that’d had the girl—Lucius—was shaking. Moses stood with both hands on the bars asking in this deep nigra voice to see his woman and boy. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I told him. ‘You want them lynched, too?’ Big tears came rolling down his face, and he said, ‘But I didn’t do nothing.’ ‘Then you’re better off here,’ I answered, and after that he shut up.”

My stomach felt tight. “How did he get convicted?”

Channing folded his arms. “What’s that have to do with Lydia Cantwell?”

“I think she may have been killed because of how her father dealt with the McCarrolls. That’s what I’m trying to learn about.”

For once someone didn’t say that Grangeville was a long time back. “John Hargrave was an idiot,” he said flatly. “Handsome in an empty way but vain as a peacock. Even of Lydia: when she was only seven or eight he’d parade her around the courthouse in braids and ribbons just to see you smile. She was pretty, too, even then. But that was Hargrave. He looked at you as if your face was a mirror, like he didn’t really see you except to wonder how he should feel about himself that day. Hadn’t been a judge but one month when he hangs a painting of himself in the courthouse. Let it out he was going to be governor. Three years later he was gone and so was the painting. Only thing he’s remembered for is this.

“Morning after they brought the nigras in, Hargrave came to George looking very serious, especially about himself. He sat in front of George’s desk and told him in his pompous way that if he and George wanted to stand tall in Monroe County they’d better give this nigra case their best. He didn’t have to explain his meaning. George just stares at him, sweating. He’d already turned on the ceiling fan and it had blown half the papers off his desk, but George kept wiping his forehead. Finally he answered, ‘I understand, Judge.’ Hargrave gets this peculiar look in his eye, kind of far off. Doesn’t say a word more. Just nods and smiles.

“When he’s gone, George just sits there with the fan blowing his silly flowered tie in all directions. After a long time he mutters, ‘Biggest case since the monkey trial,’ sticks on his hat, and goes home.

“He didn’t show until the next afternoon, with purple hollows under his eyes and hair hanging down his forehead. For two weeks he didn’t say anything that wasn’t business, even about Lucy. She came in to prepare her testimony eating an ice cream cone. George snapped at her to throw it away, not like him at all. Then he drills her on her story and after she’s got it down and he’s told her how to dress, he throws her out and starts fussing over the next detail. It was the most overprepared rape case in human history. None of that helped. Come the trial, George was a sight.

“The thing was won from when Hargrave appointed C. W. Baxter to defend, who’d been drunk ten years and just wanted to get back to the barn without losing friends. But the court was jammed with townsfolk and Yankee reporters who’d come down by train, and all that plus the heat started making George a little sick.

“Except for Hargrave we were all in suspenders. It was so hot that even with the windows open my shirt stuck to me, and after a spell the crowd settled down to breathing and fanning themselves with this kind of low whoosh. First day they pick a jury of impartial white men and then George puts on Lucy, wearing pigtails and a dress buttoned to her Adam’s apple. She swore she’d been raped, real firm like she’d been practicing with George, looking everywhere but at the nigras. On cross Baxter hardly touched her.

“It was going like George planned, except I noticed he was looking worse and worse—almost pasty. They got to where Baxter called Moses to say he didn’t do it. Hargrave starts watching real close. The whole trial he’d been playing judge, fresh black robes every day and hair pomaded just so, but he hadn’t had much to do. The nigra begins telling his story right along, looking straight at the jury, about how he went looking for his brother and found him with Lucy. Then he gets to the part about Lucy being a whore. Hargrave frowns at George, waiting for him to object. George doesn’t say a word. The nigra’s still talking when Hargrave bangs his gavel. ‘Miss Vines is not on trial here,’ he says, very stern. Baxter starts arguing sort of feebly that the testimony goes to whether there was rape at all. Hargrave orders him to sit down. So he does. All this time the nigra is just watching.”

Channing paused in a seeming trance from the rhythm of his own recall. I loosened my tie. Between Channing and the pictures I’d studied I could see the courtroom. Behind the railing sat twelve white jurors in shirtsleeves. One fanned himself with a long flyswatter. A table full of reporters took notes behind the bank of typewriters they banged at recess. From his hand-carved bench Judge Hargrave peered sternly down at Baxter, half-drunk already, his courage used up. “What happened then?” I asked.

Channing rasped scornfully. “After that, cross examination should have been easy. But George can’t do it. He whispers to me, ‘Think you can take cross, Luther?’ His eyes are yellow at the rim. You can hear a pin drop. I freeze. They’re all waiting. Then someone coughs. Before I know it I’m on my feet walking over to the nigra. ‘You were there,’ I say, ‘weren’t you, Moses. There, with your brother on top of Lucy Vines.’

“He was so black he looked almost purple. ‘Well, sir,’ he begins, ‘I was just tryin’—’

“‘To rape a white girl?’

“‘No, sir.’

“‘But you didn’t stop it.’

“‘No, sir, but—’

“‘Didn’t try to pull him off.’

“He blinks. ‘I just got there.’

“‘And you were just watching, weren’t you, Moses?’ His mouth falls open. Almost whispering, I say, ‘Watching—and waiting.’

“He stares at me. Before he can answer I turn my back and say, ‘That’s all, Judge,’ sort of floating it over my shoulder while I look at the jury.

“But they’re all looking past me. Behind, the nigra’s stood up and starts shouting, ‘I been here all my life and never had no trouble. You all know me—got a wife and boy. What I want with that girl? You listen to me, Lawyer Channing.’”

Channing paled as though transported. “I turn and he’s pointing at me. Right quick Hargrave shouts for the sheriff. Two deputies slap cuffs on the nigras and take them off while the newsmen and photographers are scurrying and taking pictures and scribbling notes. All at once half the folks in town are up slapping me on the back.” Channing’s words were bitter. “But that didn’t last.”

“How do you mean?”

His eyes turned sharp with malice. “Oh, it lasted for the trial. George pulls himself together to sum up. Hargrave did the rest. He instructs the jury that if Moses had been there and not stopped it they should find him guilty. They took one hour. Then the sheriff brings the two nigras in handcuffs back in front of Hargrave. He looks past them at the crowd, making a speech on how the law protects the purity of southern women, every posturing inch a judge. Then he asks if the defendants have anything to say.

“Moses sort of gathers himself, standing up slow but straight. ‘We didn’t rape that girl, Judge. You know that.’ He talks real deep and quiet, so each word drops like a stone. ‘If you punish us who are innocent, if you take me from my wife and boy, then in his own good time, and his own way, the Lord will punish you and yours.’ Hargrave turned white. Then he sentenced both nigras to death.

“It didn’t go bad until afterwards. George and I are on the courthouse steps in a crowd of reporters when someone asks him what he thinks about both nigras getting the electric chair. For a minute George looks fish-faced. Then he gives this sick grin and says, ‘Maybe we’ll get special rates.’ It got real quiet, and the smile died on George’s face like he’d heard himself. It was stupid, George blustering to cover how he felt. He had no dignity, never did. The Birmingham papers crucified him. And some of it slopped onto me.”

“In what sense?”

Channing fixed me with an angry glare. “It was over before I knew it. Every time I wanted the senate nomination they had someone else. ‘It’s not your time yet,’ they’d say at the meetings. Took me a while to see it never would be my time. They were ashamed, damn them. I was just there when it needed doing and afterwards the bastards shunned me for it. Oh, they never said right out what it was, but you could feel it—they’d never warm to you. George left office and died. Hargrave was almost comical. He thought he’d be a hero, but when he tried to get backing for governor the party laughed in his face. It near to broke him; the vain stupid fool wouldn’t look you in the eyes. He even stopped bringing Lydia downtown, so for a while I hardly saw her. Funny thing is it was all for nothing: everyone but him could see being governor was never in the cards. Two years later he died on the bench probating some farmer’s estate. They passed me right over, didn’t even ask if I wanted it. Just hung those two nigras like a millstone ’round my neck and walked away.

“Hargrave was dead and so I got stuck here paying for what they’d wanted and he’d wanted to give them: to hang those nigras.” He jabbed a finger at me, voice rising to an angry blast. “For a hundred years we were all about nigras—hell, we choked on ’em. Got stuck with the tub-thumping trash while quality men like Richard Russell couldn’t be President, all because of the nigra. My God, the sheer waste of that—it took someone like Nixon to make Sam Ervin respectable. Now we’ve got civil rights and air-conditioning and all the sudden we’re a fit place for Yankees to live in. That’s the biggest joke of all—not long before this goddamned trial a mob of white men in Detroit lynched a nigra for sticking a toe on their beach. And now there’s riots in Boston and Yankee companies flocking here like lemmings to get away from snow and nigras. But that’s fine: now we’ve got civil rights. And a hundred years of our best men paid for their hypocrisy.”

Channing glowered with dammed hatred. In one terrible moment, I understood: his Grangeville was a white man’s tragedy, with Channing its Richard Russell. “What about the McCarrolls?” I asked quietly.

“They were executed.”

“I meant the wife and boy.”

“Don’t know,” he snapped. “Never saw them again.”

“You mean you saw them during the trial?”

“Outside, maybe.”

“Ever look at them close?”

His stare lit on the glider next to me. “What does it matter?”

“I was wondering if there was something unusual about the little boy—a discoloration in one of his eyes.”

Channing’s face was momentarily thoughtful. “I think there was.” Brusquely, he added, “I didn’t really notice. You want to know about the boy, check down at the courthouse.”

“I’ll do that.” I rose to leave. “Thanks for your time.”

Sitting, Channing seemed suddenly brittle and disrepaired. “Wait.” His upward look was furtive, almost shy. “You were talking about Lydia Hargrave. What’s the boy to do with that?”

“I think perhaps he knows about Lydia Cantwell’s murder.”

The coldness in his eyes had vanished. “You found her, Mr. Shaw, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“What—what was she like?”

“She was strangled.”

There was a long silence. Channing looked away to where I’d sat on the glider. In the shadows his face was almost yellow. “She was beautiful then,” he said softly. “I tried to tell her, right on this porch—explain how it was. She didn’t understand. Said she was leaving to marry someone else. ‘Please,’ I begged her. ‘Don’t go. Is it that I’m too old?’” Channing’s voice fell. “She turned her face. ‘You’re dead inside,’ she answered. I tried to stop her. She pushed me away and ran out into the darkness.”

I left him there.

The courthouse square was still crowded. I angled through mothers and children and vendors selling belts and lamps and old beer bottles, passing a bookstall. A lean young black with cornrows stood thumbing a worn copy of Soul on Ice, oblivious to the aching past where Luther Channing lived suspended in bitter memory, like a fly in amber. Three white girls with Cokes and lemonades slid chattering around him. The old men still whittled. I wondered which of them might have milled outside the courthouse forty years before. But it hardly mattered now; the ones touched by it were dead. Except for Channing and perhaps one black man, bound by Grangeville and a murdered woman.

I crossed the lawn, went up the courthouse steps and through its white pillars, inside. The corridors were dim and sleepy. On the way to the clerk’s office I passed the double doors of the courtroom. I hesitated, then stepped inside. The jury box was there, and Hargrave’s bench. But the room was dark and empty, the way only a stage or courtroom can be empty. It looked like nothing had ever happened there, or ever would. I backed out.

The clerk’s office had brown walls and a varnished counter with one swinging door. Behind that were a baldish man with three missing fingers and a strawberry blonde in her twenties. I spoke to the girl. “I’m Adam Shaw, out of Birmingham. I wonder if you can help me.”

She smiled all the way to her round blue eyes. “We can try.”

“I need some birth records from the early thirties.”

“Inheritance case?”

“In a sense. The family’s named McCarroll.”

“Don’t know them.” Her brows knit. “Family still here?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“White folks?”

“Black.”

“Ummm.” Her mouth made a little bow. “Let me check in the back room. But don’t get your hopes up. Sometimes the records weren’t that good.”

“I know.”

She went through a door behind her and closed it. The man frowned at me. I smoked three cigarettes, waiting.

I was stubbing the third when the girl came out, gingerly holding a single worn document. She laid it on the counter, turned toward me so I could read it.

It was a yellowed birth certificate. On May 4, 1930, it said, Moses and Jane McCarroll, Negroes, had a son. Otis Lee McCarroll.

“Is this what you were looking for?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so.”

Outside, I called Kris Ann to say I’d be a few more hours. A van full of teenagers waving beer cans careened around the corner, soul music trailing from their radio. I got in the car and drove south again.