This book is dedicated to Robert Nichols: poet, novelist, essayist, and loyal friend for five decades, who showed me the value, to any art and any artist, of perseverance.
In September 1959, a week or two after school opened for the year, boys were loitering in the morning sun on the front steps of Jubal Early High School, putting off going inside until the opening bell rang. We had already established our seats for the year. On the north side of the steps, the right side going in the door, sat guys wearing black T-shirts, engineer boots, and peg-leg jeans with switchblades in the hip pockets. Because they generally wore their hair long and combed into ducktails held in place by gobs of Butch Wax, we called them “greases.” I sat on the south side, wearing a flattop crew cut, brown oxford shoes, a plaid short-sleeved sports shirt, and khaki pants. I had a knife too—every boy or man I knew carried a knife—but mine was an Official Boy Scout Pocket Model, which was as much about screwdriver and bottle opener as about its cutting blade. The greases didn’t like me much, nor I them, but I had paid a price to sit on the same steps as those guys and be left alone. So I sat there every morning, always alone.
A boy I didn’t know came up the walk that morning. From a distance I could see he walked funny, with an unhurried swagger, as you sometimes saw young black men do in Charleston, West Virginia, or Richmond or Baltimore. This guy was white, like everybody who went to Jubal Early High School, but he had the walk. There was a rhythm to it, a little extra swing in each step, as if he were keeping time to music the rest of us couldn’t hear. At first I thought he had black hair, then as he drew closer I saw he was wearing one of those round French caps with no brim. I didn’t even know what to call a beret, then; I had never seen one before, except in the movies. The stranger also wore sunglasses, which nobody from Early did except when going to the beach once a year.
“I don’t believe this,” said Todd Powell to the rest of the greases.
The newcomer looked close to six feet tall, and skinny. Everything he wore was Continental style, fitted close to the body. His pants were rust colored and cuffless, and he wore a burgundy plaid sports coat. Only the principal and the few male teachers wore sports coats at Jubal Early High, but this was a teenager. Under the sports coat he wore a black turtleneck sweater. His shoes were black with elastic panels in the sides, pointed toes, and hard heels that rang on the concrete.
As he drew closer, Todd called out to him, “Hey, boy! You get those clothes off a dead nigger?”
The stranger didn’t look at Todd. Didn’t look away, either, nor did his slight smile disappear at the insult. As he came right past us you could see reddish-brown hair under the beret, and a hopeful attempt at a goatee on the pale skin of his face. The guy carried a case under his arm containing, we later learned, a clarinet, although Early High School had no band.
The school’s electric bell rang the one-minute warning, but nobody moved; neither did the stranger quicken his pace. When the bell fell silent, we could hear only his leather heels striking the concrete like an unhurried drummer building a platform for some fellow musician to launch a solo. As the newcomer put his hand on the door to open it, one of the greases broke the silence.
“Flaming asshole!” a grease said.
It was said low yet loud enough for the stranger to hear it. But the stranger didn’t acknowledge the insult, just sauntered on down to the principal’s office and enrolled himself as a junior. Jack Newcomb, I would later learn, was his name. He would be my classmate.
My first class was American literature and English, as it was for all juniors. I took my seat near the front of the room. Gina DeLancey sat across the aisle on my immediate right. She worked occasionally as a model, when a good clothing store in Roanoke or some women’s charity put on a fashion show. She was very tall for a girl, and everything about her was graceful; she had slender, tapered legs, yet she could jump higher than any other girl in our high school and was center on the girls basketball team. Her breasts were small enough not to get in her way when she was running or jumping, but big enough to be on a guy’s mind. Gina had clear skin that needed no makeup, full lips, and hair the color of a new gold bracelet; it reached to her shoulders, but that day she wore it done up in a French twist. Blond hair was a great asset in 1959. That day she was wearing a sleeveless light blue shirtdress that matched her big blue eyes.
Gina’s best friend, Ernestine Thomas, sat immediately in front of her, and they were chattering happily about something or another. Ernestine was a curly-haired brunette with a well-scrubbed look and a Mouseketeer smile; slightly over average height, she was wearing a colorful peasant skirt and a white flower-embroidered blouse that exposed most of her shoulders. It was cut just low enough to emphasize her big bosom without getting her scolded by a teacher. Ernestine was a straight-A student and a good soprano who sang solos in church; she was more popular even than Gina. But the two went together like knife and fork, to their mutual benefit. Ernestine was pretty by anybody’s standards, but because a person fell into thinking about her at the same time as the lovely Gina, he tended to stow thoughts of both in the mental drawer labeled “Beautiful.” Gina was fairly smart herself, but people thought she was a true brain, like her pal.
I had known Ernestine nearly all my life, all the way back to when we were in the Sunday school nursery at Early Southern Baptist Church. I had known Gina even longer; she was to me what people sometimes called a “kissing cousin.” That meant she was related, but distantly enough that it would have been all right to kiss, marry, fondle, or fornicate with her once she reached the age of consent, assuming she consented. But I had never so much as kissed her. As toddlers playing in the creek at a farm belonging to Ernestine’s grandmother, we had all three seen each other naked. Yet in our first two years of high school, I had barely spoken to either girl, and I was too intimidated by their beauty and popularity to join their conversation now.
Mrs. Weber called the class to order and reminded us that each student was supposed to recite some poem that day, from memory. Gina made the open-mouthed face of sudden and panicky recollection, leafed through her literature book to a page of poetry, and started moving her lips as she silently read the shortest poem. Mrs. Weber asked for a volunteer to recite, and Mary Lou Martin raised her hand.
Mary Lou was tall and wiry, the substitute center on the girls team, able to jump nearly as high as Gina. I thought she was just as pretty, but I had never heard anyone else say so. Mary Lou had a high forehead and very dark arched eyebrows over big hazel eyes, in a heart-shaped face with a narrow chin. Her neck was a little longer than most girls’, her nose straight and narrow. Her mouth was wide, with the upper lip straight but turned up at the corners, the lower one pouty, which created a slightly amused expression whether she felt that way or not. She didn’t have the blond hair associated with glamour; hers was very dark brown and shiny, and hung halfway down her back in an old-fashioned style. She wore a straight brown polished-cotton sheath skirt and a simple yellow sleeveless blouse, and she didn’t wiggle-walk to the front of the classroom, but just strode, all business.
She turned around and immediately started reciting. I guess everyone in the classroom had heard the words, or some version of them, sung as a song, but few of us actually knew them. In a town that believed it was named for a Confederate hero, this Union song was thought to be vaguely subversive. Now, hearing it recited with the pace, expression, and diction of poetry, was the first time I considered what the words actually meant.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
I knew, as soon as I heard the poem, I too would memorize those powerful words and remember them all my life. But not everybody reacted the same way I did.
“What the hell was that about?” said Todd Powell, loud enough that most of us could hear it but soft enough that Mrs. Weber could pretend she hadn’t. Everybody knew Todd kind of liked Mary Lou, but she didn’t encourage him, so I guess that was reason enough to make an audible wisecrack about her. Did I mention that I really didn’t like that son of a bitch? He was sitting in the back of the room with a couple of other hard cases, slumped forward over his desk with his legs wrapped around the chair legs under him, his jeans riding up and showing his black engineer boots.
“That’s not in the textbook,” Mrs. Weber said to Mary Lou. “Why did you choose it?”
“I wanted to learn a poem that had made something happen,” said Mary Lou. “I didn’t think a poem had to come out of the textbook.”
Mrs. Weber cracked a smile, which was a rare event. “It doesn’t, and I’m glad you realized that,” she said. “That’s worth an A.” She made a note in her grade book.
Mary Lou smiled at her success and strode back to her seat. I wished she would sit near me, but that just about couldn’t happen. Nobody sat in our corner except people who lived in town. Mary Lou sat in the far corner with the rest of the country girls and the overalls-clad mountain boys who rode to school on the bus. For all the chance I would ever strike up a conversation with her, she might as well have sat in France.
Just as Mary Lou sat down Jack Newcomb came in, having finished up his late registration in the school office. He gave a note to Mrs. Weber, who glanced at it and said, “Take any seat.” Jack saw immediately that our corner had the higher status and took the seat directly in front of Ernestine. He set the clarinet case and beret on the desk in front of him but continued to wear the sunglasses and the slight smile.
Gina waited until class was nearly over before raising her hand to recite. She had memorized a poem on the spot and did it properly, with feeling. It was “The Pasture,” by Robert Frost, only eight lines, but very pretty. Ernestine recited something very academic and challenging, and I did Kipling’s “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted.”
Jack just sat at his desk. He didn’t have to recite because he hadn’t been in class when the assignment was made.
Nothing else interesting happened all day. Rarely did.
= = =
At 2:30 p.m. I packed most of my books into my locker and took with me the couple I would need for homework. In the parking lot I saw Mary Lou, tall, dignified, and silent, among the giggling and jostling country boys and girls lining up to board the school buses that would carry them up the creeks and hollows. I watched her till she stepped into her bus and I could see her no more. There was no school bus service in town because even the most distant homes, in town, were barely a mile from school. Mine was one of the distant ones, so I did a lot of walking. By my age, almost seventeen, most kids in Early had been driving for months, but I didn’t yet have a license. Several of my peers drove past in their parents’ cars, but nobody offered me a ride. Gina blew past in her family’s new, black Ford Galaxie; it was packed front and back with Ernestine and several other girls. Gina waved but she didn’t slow down.
I didn’t stop at the drugstore for an ice cream soda, nor at the hardware store to covet fishing or camping gear, so it took me less than half an hour to get home, cutting across the wide front yard instead of bothering to use the brick walk. I felt grateful for the time of year: too late for me to have to mow the better part of an acre, but too early for the big maple trees to be dropping their leaves for me to rake. My parents had grown up on mountain farms, and when they moved to town they bought the biggest lot they could find, so there was plenty of room for a big vegetable garden, flower beds, and a chicken house. But our family had outgrown the dwelling, and they never got around to buying a bigger one. It was a four-bedroom brick bungalow, and after one bedroom was allotted to our parents, and one as a “company room” for frequent visits from their extended families, there were only two left for three children of two genders and significant differences in age and interests.
I stepped over three bicycles lying in front of the porch steps. None of my brother’s friends ever used the kickstands. When I came in the front door to the living room, Randy and his two buddies were lying on the carpet watching old Popeye cartoons. I’d been told that Randy, the youngest in my family, was a little more spoiled than other kids his age, but I wouldn’t have traded him. Yet these three boys seemed interchangeable to me. They were all nine years old and all had the blond hair that would soon go dark; they all wore pullover shirts without buttons and jeans with dirty knees, the jeans held up by web belts from their Cub Scout uniforms. They all wanted the same baseball cards and all expected to play for the Yankees someday. At nine, they hadn’t yet made the choices, good and bad, that would make them different from one another. They had their shoes kicked off and were so mesmerized by the TV they didn’t acknowledge me when I walked through the room.
I carried my schoolbooks into the little room that was set up as a home office for my dad and everybody else. My mother was sitting at the drop-leaf desk, typing on the big black Underwood. She looked like the schoolteacher she was, wearing a practical dark cotton print dress, low heels, reading glasses, and no jewelry except a wristwatch and her wedding and engagement rings. Her hair was dark brown and bobbed short in a permanent wave. She was one of the few mountain girls of her generation to finish college, and was ahead of her time in her attempts to cook healthy and get exercise, which to her meant gardening. It made her look younger than her forty-eight years. She appeared to be preparing a written assignment for her fifth-grade class.
She looked up and said, “Hello, Stony.” Then she waited.
I remembered there had been a time when she smiled when she greeted me. It was a long time ago. Now she just waited for news, prepared to deal with a principal’s conference, a week’s detention, or whatever other bad news I brought home.
“Are you going to be using the typewriter much longer?” I asked. “I have to practice for my typing class.”
“You’ll have to do it later,” she said. “I have to finish this work before I can start fixing supper.” This time she did smile, an apology for the realities of balancing home life and teaching.
I went up to the room I shared with Randy. There were twin beds on opposite sides of the room and a desk in between for doing homework and building model planes. To put my books on it, I had to step carefully over my brother’s toy cars and racetrack, which were littering the floor. All the toys were made of cheap plastic—so cheap that kids had too damn many of them.
I was hoping to practice the guitar. I was trying to learn a ballad. The verse I liked best went,
They hadn’t stood there but a minute or two,
When out of his knapsack a fiddle he drew.
The song that he played made the wild valleys ring.
Made me see waters gliding, hear the nightingale sing!
I wanted to play songs that could make somebody hear the nightingale sing. But my twelve-year-old sister and her friends were playing pop records in her room, and the walls were thin, so the words that actually went through my brain were about tan shoes and pink shoelaces. I won’t risk repeating them, because they might stick in your head and you’d blame me for putting them there. The song coming through the wall had at least four verses, and I hated each one more than the last.
I gave up the idea of practicing guitar, went downstairs to the kitchen, and took my father’s .22 rifle, a pump-action Winchester, from the nails where it hung over the back door. Then I took a box of fifty cartridges out of the dish cabinet. I closed the back door behind me and walked down the back streets and out of town, climbing the hills into the groves of oak, hickory, and maple. There was little game so close to town, but squirrel season gave me an excuse to be in the woods where it was quiet.
Some trees were just beginning to turn red or gold, but most were still green. Their shade made it cold in the woods for that time of year. I came into a power line right-of-way, cut clean of trees but full of tall grass. I lay down in the grass, which was high enough to cut any wind, and let the bright sun warm me. There were birds singing, and I fell asleep wondering if Mary Lou Martin, living up a mountain hollow among the trees, had ever heard a nightingale.
There was still plenty of daylight left when I got back to town. I had bagged no squirrels, and had unloaded the rifle and was carrying it with the action open, the butt resting over my shoulder like a baseball bat. This was a clumsy way to carry a rifle, but I hoped it would reassure people that I wouldn’t blaze away at a squirrel in their front yard and maybe shoot some family member by accident.
A red Chevrolet Impala pulled up to the curb beside me. It was one of the new ones with an engine in it big enough for an airplane. Jack Newcomb was driving it, and he offered me a ride home. I had pegged Jack as a pretty odd duck, but it was rude to decline a ride, so I got in. The car smelled of wax outside, and inside it smelled of new car. It was his father’s car, of course.
Jack asked why I was carrying the rifle, and I explained.
“Are you a good shot?” he asked.
I told him I was. I thought it was true at the time, but that was before I knew what good shooting was.
Jack said, “I have a ten-point buck rack at my uncle’s house in Petersburg. Got him at three hundred yards with my uncle’s Savage .30-06.”
I was impressed. “This last season?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” Jack responded. “About five years ago.” That would have made him no more than twelve when he shot that deer.
“I didn’t think you could buy a big game license till you were sixteen,” I said.
Jack didn’t speak for a second and then said, “Well, this was in North Carolina. Down near Wilmington.”
His hesitation made me suspect he was lying. Also, I knew people who hunted Carolina swamplands, not far from Wilmington, and they had told me everybody there used shotguns, even for deer. They’re supposed to be safer than rifles in flat country where there are no hills to stop a bullet. They say any of the nine big buckshot from one 12-gauge shotgun shell can kill a man out past a hundred yards, but not a mile away like a high-powered rifle bullet, such as a .30-06, might.
“Does your uncle’s .30-06 kick very bad?” I asked.
“Not too bad,” he said. “No worse than a 20-gauge shotgun.”
He was lying, all right. People bought little 20-gauge shotguns mainly because they didn’t kick as badly as bigger guns. By contrast, I had shot my own uncle’s .30-06 deer rifle just the year before, and it felt like the time Todd Powell hit me with his homemade wooden knuckles. Jack had been twelve years old when he supposedly bagged that buck. I guessed there were twelve-year-olds who could shoot a .30-06 well enough to kill deer at three hundred yards—but they would have remembered it kicking them like a mean mule.
“All my guns are at my uncle’s place in Petersburg,” Jack said. “Can I come shooting with you sometime?”
“Sure,” I said. “Pick a day.”
He said he’d get back to me. When I pointed to my parents’ driveway, he turned into it and let me out of the car. I saw no reason to reveal I had seen through his hunting story. He wasn’t the first new kid to tell me a whopper. When you start over where nobody knows you, you can make up a past that includes all you wish you’d done and leaves out the stuff you regret. I dreamed of some opportunity to do that myself.
But Jack seemed embarrassed anyway, as if he knew I didn’t believe him. Without a word, he started backing out the driveway. Then he threw the car into low gear and came forward again, so expertly that the car seemed to reverse direction without stopping, yet the gears never even scraped. Only a few of the best drivers—stock car racers and some state troopers, for instance—could do that. Jack could do other stuff besides lie, it seemed, and some of it was right cool. Once he had accomplished his driveway magic, Jack regained his air of confidence.
“Why don’t you come over and watch some TV tonight?” he asked.
= = =
Nobody in Early bothered to put street numbers on their houses, but I had no trouble finding Jack’s. The sixth house on the right going out Orchard Drive had always been rented to some middle-class family like Jack’s, either in town for a year or two with no intention of staying, or looking to buy some other house that suited them better. So, while the yard had a medium-sized silver maple tree and a few boxwoods, there were none of the flower beds and azaleas and serpentine brick borders that people establish once they put down roots. It was a well-kept brick house of two stories and three bedrooms, one of the smallest houses in a good neighborhood, but that was okay because Jack was an only child. There was a free-standing two-car garage and through its open door, next to the Impala, I saw a ’57 Chevy station wagon, an excellent car though not an expensive one. It was two-tone, sky blue and robin’s egg. Even in the limited light from the streetlamps, I could see it was waxed as shiny as the new Impala.
Jack’s mom—a pretty, middle-aged blonde, wearing a dressy dark-green suit—came out the door as I started to knock. She greeted me with perfect manners, and I knew she would remember my name. She shook my hand and excused herself to go to some meeting at the church she had already joined, and then drove away in the station wagon.
Jack stood with his father in the open doorway. Mr. Newcomb was a tall, stoop-shouldered man who wore a slide rule dangling from his belt in a sheath like a short sword; on the opposite hip he wore another short scabbard that held a black briar smoking pipe stem down, like a pistol in its holster. He wore a white shirt and a green knit tie like a desk worker, but when he gave me a firm handshake, his mitt was so muscular I could hardly get mine around his. I saw his knuckles bore the scars of a lifetime tinkering with machinery; old cuts had been permanently tattooed onto his knuckles by healing over before he’d been able to get the grease out of them. My father had hands like that, so I liked Mr. Newcomb immediately.
“I met your dad today,” he said. “He invited me to Rotary Club. He seems like a real capable guy.” He’d sized up my dad accurately; capability was one of his main characteristics. Though it was well after seven at night, Mr. Newcomb immediately excused himself to get back to work in his office.
“My dad works all the time, too,” I told Jack. “What does your dad do?”
“He’s an industrial designer,” Jack said. “They’re putting in some new machines down at the DuPont plant, and he’s figuring out what kind and where to put them on the plant floor. He’s going to redesign all the assembly lines, make it all more efficient. When he’s done, we’ll move somewhere else, to another job.”
“How long will it take him?” I asked.
“Two years at most,” Jack said. “This is the seventh school I’ve attended.”
The Newcombs had moved to town only that past weekend, but they were already settled in because they had learned to travel light. The living room had good Early American–style furniture, but no bric-a-brac. The den had comfortable overstuffed furniture and a bar, but the same lack of clutter as the living room. Jack turned on the TV and flopped down on the couch, saying nothing while he waited for the TV to warm up and eventually show us the black-and-white picture. I automatically reached for a magazine to leaf through while I waited. There was a current copy of some hot rod magazine, but no back issues of The Saturday Evening Post or Life like the ones that piled up in my own living room. It felt like watching TV in some motel lobby.
The show we watched was Peter Gunn. Craig Stevens played a tough detective who hung out in nightclubs and listened to jazz. Of course, there wasn’t much time for detective work in the twenty-odd minutes remaining after commercial breaks, so Gunn generally resolved the plot by shooting somebody with a snub-nosed .38 revolver. That night’s program was particularly interesting to me because I noticed that a minor recurring character was a beatnik jazz clarinetist. Now I had an idea why Jack wore a beret and sunglasses to school.
Another night we watched a program called, I think, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, whose central character was a high school kid who mostly chased girls. In this episode, the character noticed the style of earrings a girl was wearing, bought a pair just like them, and the next time he saw her asked, “Did you lose an earring?” Of course, the girl said, “No, I have both of mine.” At which point Dobie asked, “Want another one?” In the world according to television, that broke the ice and let Dobie start a friendship and possible romance.
A day or two after we saw that episode, I spotted Jack in the costume jewelry section of the dime store, shopping for earrings. I watched too much TV, God knows, but Jack took notes! And tricks like that actually worked for Jack. Within days I noticed Ernestine wearing an extra earring clamped to the collar of her blouse.
“Did you get that extra earring from Jack Newcomb?” I asked.
“Ye-e-e-s-s,” she replied, drawing out the answer. “I know where he got the idea, but I thought it was cute of him to try it.” Of course she knew, I realized. Only two TV channels were available in Early in 1959, so most everybody watched the same shows.
Pretty soon Jack was doing his homework at Ernestine’s house. I guess they were really doing homework and not playing parlor baseball, because Jack made good grades from then on.
= = =
The following Saturday afternoon, my father summoned me to ride with him to buy a few bushels of apples to store in our cellar. He bought them every fall from Mary Lou Martin’s father, who worked in a mill like most people around Early, but also had a small orchard on the tiny mountain farm where he had grown up. He had taken it over after his parents passed away. Dad liked Mr. Martin’s apples because they were tasty, old-fashioned varieties. He hated the modern commercial types that could be shipped without bruising but tasted flavorless as a raw potato.
Dad drove his old Chevy pickup truck out the main road toward West Virginia. He turned off just after crossing Sourwood Creek, and then followed a narrow two-lane road that paralleled the creek as it wound through rich bottomland past a few cornfields, pastures, and farmhouses. The pavement gave way to gravel as Sourwood Hollow became narrower. Nearly a mile after that, we finally came to the Martin place, the last farm on the last patch of arable land at the head of the hollow. The dirt farm road took us into the orchard, where we pulled off among the trees, into a tractor lane. We stopped next to a dozen or so baskets of fruit left there for sale to casual customers like Dad.
We each opened a door and climbed out. I could hear voices farther out in the orchard, and then through the trees I spotted a man I knew, Grady Penn, coming toward us carrying a basket. He was a black man who worked for my father, as a janitor at the knitting mill my father managed. Dad was pleased to see him there.
“Hello, Grady,” said my father. “Hope the Martins pay you better than I do!”
Mr. Penn laughed. Dressed in a plaid shirt and bib overalls, he had a clean-shaven face the color of a Hershey bar. He was of medium height and middle years, looked strong but had a little paunch. He was carrying the bushel basket in front of him, resting against that paunch, so the apples rolled around in the basket when he laughed.
“Not quite so much, but he pays me same as white men, and that’s worth something,” Mr. Penn said.
My father’s smile faded. “Now, you know I can’t do anything about that, Grady. Wish I could.”
“I know that, Mr. Shelor,” he replied, “and I know you tried.” He changed the subject quickly. “It’s an unexpected pleasure seeing you on the weekend. I’ll get Mr. Martin to sell you some apples.” He set down his bushel and walked back among the trees.
“What was that about?” I asked Dad.
Dad drew a deep breath and said, “I tried to give Grady a raise a while back, but the company said he was making top dollar for a janitor. Grady could run any machine in the plant—hell, he could build any machine in the plant—so I ought to promote him. But the company says I can’t ’cause he ain’t white.”
That surprised me. “The owners live in Connecticut,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like something Yankees would do.”
“It’s exactly what Yankees would do,” Dad said. “They didn’t come to Virginia to spread brotherly love and equality. They built mills down here because people here work cheap, and they know the way to keep white people working cheap is to make sure that niggers work cheaper. I mean Negroes.”
Mr. Martin came out of the orchard then. He was nearly six feet tall, with a sunburned complexion and wide-awake brown eyes. He was pushing sixty, but he still had all his curly brown hair and he looked strong enough to hunt bears with a fly swatter. He wheezed a little, though, enough to tell me he probably had first-stage silicosis. He had worked in the mines of West Virginia for years, but finally recognized the good wages there were an illusion in the inflated economy of the company town, where the miners were actually poor and mostly sick. He came back to the tiny farm where he had grown up and revived his parents’ orchard.
Mr. Martin and his wife also worked full time at the mill my father ran. They worked third shift, late at night, and my father worked days, so my father didn’t see them much. But Dad and Mr. Martin had known one another since grade school, and they shook hands warmly. When they fell to talking about apples, I wandered out among the trees, hoping to see Mary Lou.
About ten workers were scattered through the orchard, climbing wooden ladders leaned against the tree branches, picking into hand baskets and lowering them with ropes to the ground. A black kid, maybe a year younger than me, was at the foot of a ladder, receiving each lowered hand basket and tilting it gently onto the grass. Then, while the picker atop the ladder hoisted the hand basket and began filling it again, the kid took the apples from the grass and packed them into a larger bushel basket. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was muscular, like Mr. Penn. He gestured at my school khakis and short-sleeved shirt. “You gonna ruin those fine clothes, picking apples,” he said.
Mr. Penn scolded him from the next tree. “Roosevelt, don’t you tease the less fortunate. Not everybody’s been raised with all the advantages you’ve had.”
“Yes, Daddy,” answered the boy he called Roosevelt. Then to me he said, “I guess you’re one of Mary Lou’s admirers? She’s over yonder.”
Is it that obvious? I wondered. But I said, “I’m one of her classmates.” And I walked in the direction he pointed.
Mary Lou was about ten feet up in a tree. She wasn’t even using a ladder; she just wedged herself between the tree branches themselves as she picked the fruit with quick hands. Her long hair was wrapped up in a kerchief to keep it out of the way as she climbed. She was wearing tight jeans, probably because floppy ones would catch on the tree spurs, or maybe just because most girls wore them tight. Either way, I appreciated how they showed off her long, strong legs and her cute, muscular backside. Equally, I appreciated how her light blue blouse stretched tight over her pointy young breasts as she reached this way or that.
Yes, indeed, Roosevelt. I am an admirer.
I called to her and she flashed a smile but kept on working. As she filled each basket she lowered it to a young woman on the ground. This woman wore bib overalls and looked like an older, female version of Roosevelt, and she packed apples into a bushel basket as he had.
“Stony,” Mary Lou called, “if you’re going to be here a few minutes, could you take over for Susannah and let her go get a drink?”
“Sure,” I said.
The young woman smiled and walked away toward the springhouse on the hill behind the Martins’ house. “Can I bring you one?” she called to Mary Lou.
“Bring me a Sun Drop if there’s any left. And a Grapette for Stony.” Somehow she knew my favorite soft drink.
As I packed apples into the basket I tried to think of a subject for conversation with Mary Lou. Mostly I was thinking about how much I liked her, and I couldn’t bring myself to talk about that. I saw nobody else was around, so I asked her how her dad could afford to pay colored folks the same as white.
“He says it works out in the end,” she said. “The whole Penn family is here today. They all have other jobs, but they come here Saturday afternoons, every fall. And they’re orchard workers from way back, really know what they’re doing. They like working for him so they do a better job in less time than most people would.”
I said, “I hope it really works out that way.”
“He’d do it anyway,” she said. “Says it’s the right thing to do.”
I said, “He surely didn’t learn that in Early County.”
“No,” she said. “We used to live in West Virginia. It’s different where we lived. Colored people and whites didn’t exactly like each other, but they could work in the same mines. The coloreds had about as much money as we did, and could spend it in the same stores, so all the stores were kind of prosperous. None of this horseshit about having two different streets of stores, both starving for business.”
A pretty girl using a word like “horseshit” rocked me on my heels a little. In the clarity of hindsight, I realize Mary Lou was right, but at the time the idea seemed radical, and I needed to ponder a bit before discussing it further, so I turned the conversation toward school and the girls basketball team. Mary Lou had high hopes for the latter—hoped to get more playing time this year as Gina’s substitute —and had a lot to say about it.
Pretty soon I had filled a couple of baskets with apples, and Susannah came back with a round of soft drinks for us, the glass bottles dripping from the spring and their contents deliciously cold. Susannah put Mary Lou’s Sun Drop into the picking basket. Mary Lou hoisted it aloft, pulled a church key from her watch pocket, popped the cap off the bottle, and drank the citrusy cola without ever leaving her perch. It was a pretty thing to watch her throat move as she swallowed the liquid.
I thanked her for the Grapette, and Susannah for bringing it to me, and reluctantly headed back to Dad’s truck.
It wasn’t surprising Jack chose TV characters to emulate. Early’s youth often chose badly. Todd Powell, for example, was the son of a lumberyard foreman, and their Scotch-Irish ancestors had been cutting trees in these mountains for generations. Yet Todd dressed like an Italian-American street kid from New York. He wore black T-shirts with the sleeves rolled tight to emphasize the size of his biceps, and also to contain a pack of Camels in one sleeve. Because he had seen some tough youngster in a movie wearing a St. Christopher medal dangling around his neck, Todd wore one too, even though he and his family were Baptists, a denomination with no special regard for Catholic saints.
Our parents, though not uncaring, were too busy to rein us in. Early was too poor for much professional leadership so it depended on volunteers. Besides holding a demanding day job, Todd’s dad was an engineer on the volunteer fire department and was active in their church, which meant night meetings and choir practice. My father had similar commitments. When Dad got home from nine or ten hours running the knitting mill, he barely had time for supper before he went out the door to a training session at the fire department or to town council.
Every four years my father and his brother, who was a pharmacist, would argue over the mayor’s job, each wanting the other to run for the office because nobody else would. Once, Dad tried to duck his turn by intentionally missing the filing deadline. He stopped a loom at the mill and did some minor and unnecessary maintenance on it so he’d have lint on his clothes and hair, making it credible when he claimed to have been delayed by an emergency at work. He was a wiry man in good shape from his constant activity, so he parked two blocks away from the election department and sprinted to the door just so he’d be out of breath when he got there, and rushed in saying, “Oh, dammit, I’m too late!”
The clerk pointed at the electric clock and said, “You made it.” The clock was stopped at five minutes to five because she had unplugged it. Dad always said, “I didn’t get elected to that second term as mayor; I got elect-ricuted to it.”
The women were just as busy with their PTA and church work, book clubs, and Red Cross auxiliary. Nearly every teenager lived with two parents, or maybe stepparents, yet our worlds and theirs overlapped but rarely. We lived in parallel universes, kids apart from adults—the boys especially. I had no idea how my father dealt with the human problems of running the mill or the town council. And he mostly didn’t know how I dealt with the juvenile equivalents, except when I mishandled a problem so spectacularly that adult authorities brought it to his attention.
Our school history books were no help, either. Selected in Richmond, they presented role models who were nearly all old Tidewater aristocrats like Robert E. Lee. But Early lay far west of Richmond, almost on the West Virginia line. Early kids understood that nearly all of us were descended from hillbillies, not Tidewater planters.
Once my mother got a bee in her bonnet about getting us kids into the Children of the Confederacy, perhaps in the desperate hope I would become interested in history and pull up my grades. So she asked my grandfather, her father-in-law, for stories about any ancestors who served in the Civil War—the more aristocratic, the better.
“It won’t do to shake that family tree too hard,” he told her. “You might not like what falls out.”
I knew some of my ancestors trapped mink and raccoons for a living not so long ago. My great-great-grandfather had carried a Confederate musket, I knew, but Mom’s persistent research revealed he did so only because he was conscripted. It also revealed that some of his cousins crossed into West Virginia to wear the Union blue and plug a few of those stuck-up sons-a-bitches from Richmond. We dropped the idea of becoming Children of the Confederacy soon after.
Even the statue on the courthouse lawn was a suspect exemplar. Most people called it Jubal Early, after the Confederate general, but it actually represented some enlisted man, his likeness donated to towns all over the South in the 1920s and ’30s by a group of ladies seeking to reinforce public allegiance to the Lost Cause. Troops from my neck of the woods had been among the shoeless hordes placed under Jubal Early’s command after Stonewall Jackson got killed, but that was the extent of General Early’s relationship to Early County. The place was in fact named for an obscure settler, Samuel Early, distantly related to the general if related at all, who built a blacksmith shop and trading post hereabouts after the Revolution.
I myself had the dubious honor of being named Thomas Jackson Shelor. In a different time and place I might have been called “Tom,” an enviably masculine name, or even “Jack,” which seemed to me the best of all names, for it called to mind a dozen or more “Jack tales” old-timers had been telling for generations about a poor but brave and clever mountain boy who killed three-headed giants and outsmarted cruel kings. But no, my name was a third-generation hand-me-down originally bestowed on my great-grandfather to honor the Confederate general Thomas Jackson. And since the general was better known as “Stonewall” Jackson, my nickname also became “Stonewall” briefly, before being shortened to “Stony.” I didn’t like my nickname because wits often modified it to “Stonehead.” Unfortunately, “Stony” fit me all too well, evoking the stone silence that overcame me when I needed to think of something to say to a girl.
I sometimes blamed my name for the bad deeds of my youth. At other times I blamed the effective absence of my father. But nowadays I just blame myself for being an immature dumb ass. It didn’t help that until my growth spurt, I was small for my age. My name, size, and immaturity made me a target of a lot of teasing, and a little bullying. I didn’t distinguish between the two or take either well, so up through the ninth grade I got into a lot of fights. Enough that I got good at fighting. Eventually I hurt one guy pretty bad. He surely needed hurting, but it was something that hardly ever happened in Early, and it made me kind of a black sheep. It also got me arrested.
I spent my sophomore and junior years on juvenile probation, there to remain until my eighteenth birthday. My crime was unrelated to motor vehicles, but the juvenile court judge ordered I could have no driver’s license until he said so. He said I could hunt with a rifle or shotgun, because nearly everyone did, but I had better not be caught with any handgun, or with one of the switchblades nearly every other male teenager owned, nor liquor—including beer. Of course, I was supposed to stay out of fights. I had to show my every report card to the juvenile probation officer, if I could get the poor overworked guy to look at it. And I had to perform community service, ringing the bell at Early Southern Baptist Church for four services a week.
= = =
With the limitations of my probation, my reputation, and my personality, I neither dated much nor had many friends. Fortunately, that meant nobody I cared about laughed at me for hanging around with a guy who pretended he was a jazz musician from the Peter Gunn show. But I began to have my own reservations when Jack decided to become Peter Gunn himself. We were sitting in his bedroom one afternoon when he told me he had formed a detective agency.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “You need a license to be a private detective. Nobody’s gonna give a license to somebody sixteen years old.”
“Do you know how to get a private detective’s license in Virginia?” he asked. After a pause he answered his own question. “I wrote to Richmond to find out. All you have to do is apply for one and pay five dollars for it. I already sent in my application.”
I never actually saw that license, but I kind of believed he got one, because in his right hand Jack held strong evidence that the adult world was not as careful about such things as I had thought. The evidence was a .45-caliber, snub-nosed Webley revolver. You could mail-order a Webley for as little as twenty-four dollars if you signed a statement saying you were at least twenty-one years old, had never been convicted of a felony, and weren’t a drunk or a drug addict or mentally ill. I had never tried to buy a mail-order gun because I assumed someone would check that statement about my age, catch me, and I would soon be off to the reformatory I had so narrowly avoided in the past. But like my country-boy peers, I had spent many a school library period reading hunting-and-fishing magazines and drooling over ads for bargain-priced military surplus guns, so I knew about this one.
Webley .45s were British guns from World War I, high-quality and rather powerful. But they weren’t popular in the United States because they were odd-looking and bulky and required British ammunition that was hard to get. To make them easier to sell, some mail-order houses modified Webleys to shoot the same ammunition as a Colt .45 automatic. That cartridge was not only easy to get in the U.S. but even more powerful than the original Webley ammo. For marketing reasons, some importers also tried to make Webleys resemble the snub-nosed .38 revolvers carried by TV detectives. This was done by cutting the long military barrel down as short as possible. On a few pistols, Jack’s being one, they had gone even further, eliminating weight and bulk by grinding off any steel that could possibly be spared, such as the hammer spur, and the lanyard ring, and part of the butt.
Jack wanted me to teach him how to shoot. I guess he had forgotten that he had told me he already knew how. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t supposed to go near a pistol, because I didn’t want to explain why.
Of course, carrying a pistol without a permit was illegal for anyone, and permits were hard to get. But Jack figured laws didn’t apply to future private detectives, so he jerry-rigged a shoulder holster from the toe of an old bedroom slipper, equipping it with shoulder straps made from an old belt and a necktie. It was a good thing he had big feet, because even with so many parts chopped off it, the Webley was still bulky and barely fit into the slipper toe. When he put on his Continental-cut jacket over the gun and shoulder holster, it looked like he had a big tumor under his left arm. He put a box of cartridges in the pocket of his tight-fitting Continental pants and started for the door but winced with the first step. Bigger than a half brick, the box was digging painfully into his groin. He put the box into his right jacket pocket, but the box of fifty fat .45 cartridges was so heavy it pulled that side of his coat way down, which lifted the other side up. Finally, Jack emptied the cartridges from the box and put half of them in the coat’s left side pocket, and half in the right, creating a ball in the center of each one.
“It doesn’t look like I’m carrying ammunition, does it?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” I said. “It looks like you’re carrying hand grenades. Why’d you buy such a cannon, anyway? Even cops just carry .38s.”
“If I have to shoot a nigger, I want him to know he’s dead,” Jack said.
I didn’t approve of Jack’s apparent hostility toward blacks, but it was far from rare in Early. Who knew if he really thought that way or if that was just how he thought he should talk while living amongst us yahoos? I wasn’t going to waste a sermon on a counterfeit sinner, so all I said was, “Try not to shoot one.”
It was October and unseasonably warm, but it had been raining for days, and clouds still hung low over the mountains. I tucked the cuffs of my jeans into my hunting boots to keep them out of the mud I knew we would encounter wherever we went to shoot. Jack had on the pointy-toed Italian shoes, and his sunglasses. Now that he was a detective, he no longer smiled all the time, as he had when he was pretending to be a stoned beatnik jazzman, but tried to look serious instead. It was wonderful to me how he could get two disguises out of the same sunglasses. At least he’d gotten rid of the beret and the failed attempt at a beard.
Jack had the use of his father’s Impala that afternoon. There was an aftermarket turntable under the dashboard that played 45-rpm records, the first one I had ever seen in a car. He put the needle down on a record and it started playing “The Ballad of Thunder Road” as we headed out his driveway. It was the theme song from the most popular drive-in movie ever made. Everybody knew the lyrics, and I should have been smart enough to get out of the car when Jack selected that record. It’s all about driving too fast and being chased by cops, and in the last verse, getting killed.
By the time that verse played, Jack’s speedometer needle was somewhere north of 80 mph and the smile had crept back onto Jack’s face. There were no four-lane roads in Early County and few straight ones, and he went into curves at velocities I had never before experienced. He drifted the car expertly through each curve, but every time he went into another I thought I was facing doom. The car had seat belts, which not all cars did in those days, but I had neglected to buckle mine earlier, and now I was having a hard time doing it because the car bounced so much at this speed.
“Lord have mercy! Slow down!” I yelled.
“Hee, hee, hee, hee,” Jack giggled. This was not reassuring, for Jack sometimes giggled when I felt like screaming in terror.
The place we were going to shoot was maybe three miles from town, up an unpaved road. When we got there, I saw that the rain had turned the dirt road to mud. I would have suggested we look for a less muddy place if Jack would have looked for it at some reasonable speed. But I didn’t want to chance riding even another mile with him in such a reckless mood, so I told him this was the best place we would find.
Jack was afraid of getting his father’s car stuck in the mud, so we parked it on the shoulder of the paved road and walked up the unpaved one. In some places the road had been cut through clay hillsides, and there was no path to walk that wasn’t through rain-soaked clay. Once Jack hopped back on one foot to retrieve a shoe that had come off in the mud. As he bent over to pick up the shoe, the gun fell out of its homemade holster, and we had to clean the mud out of its barrel with the eraser of my mechanical pencil and a handkerchief. We had to clean Jack’s sunglasses too, because they fell off when he snatched at the falling gun.
Eventually we reached a flat and reasonably dry area beside the road; behind this flat rose a high clay bank that would safely backstop our bullets. Other people took target practice there, so there were many shot-up tin cans lying around. I selected a four-pound coffee can that had only .22-caliber holes in it, so we could distinguish any made by Jack’s bigger .45 slugs. I set it upright against the bank for our target.
Having my own pride, I had not told Jack that I had no pistoling experience except a couple of outings with a .32 Owlhead, an obsolete pocket revolver that was notoriously limited in power but pretty easy to shoot. I did not foresee what would happen if somebody fired a powerful .45 auto cartridge through a gun that had been radically shortened and lightened. And I didn’t know what would happen if that gun were fired by a skinny teenager with no firearms experience.
What happens is that when the kid pulls the trigger, there follow an impressive report and muzzle flash, a rib-rattling recoil, and the aforesaid teenager falls flat on his butt and throws the gun about fifty feet.
“The goddamn thing blew up!” Jack yelled. “Stay down! It might throw shrapnel.”
I cautiously approached the smoking pistol. “I don’t think it can blow up again,” I said. “It ain’t cocked.” I picked it up out of the mud. “I can’t see any pieces gone, at least none that weren’t gone already. I don’t think it blew up. I think it’s just a hard kicker.”
We cleaned the mud off the gun and Jack tried again, this time holding the gun with both hands and bending his arms sharply, on the theory that bent arms would take up the shock better than stiff ones. This was a poor theory, it turned out, because the recoiling pistol drove Jack’s fists back into his nose hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. When he finally learned to hold it with both arms outstretched and stiff, his whole body seemed to recoil with the pistol, so that his head snapped forward and his sunglasses came off with every shot. But Jack was having fun now.
“Hee, hee, hee,” he giggled again. “Pick up my sunglasses, will you?”
The big tin can he was shooting at was maybe thirty feet away. “You’re hitting a little to the left,” I told him. “Aim a little to the right to compensate.”
“How much to the right?” he asked.
“About two feet.”
A hardware store in town sold .45 ammunition for about five dollars per box of fifty, which was fortunate, because if Jack ever had to shoot anybody he was going to need the whole box, and after that day he always carried that much. He also carried a homemade blackjack in his hip pocket, a set of handcuffs hung over the waistband at the back of his trousers, and occasionally a magnifying glass, a small flashlight, a bent briar pipe, and a pigskin pouch of tobacco. With all that stuff in his pockets, I suggested Jack wear suspenders, but they weren’t fashionable, so he wouldn’t. The getup did have one advantage: You didn’t notice the pointy-toed shoes anymore because the pants legs hung low and mostly covered them.
Jack claimed he was chief detective and I was the assistant, because my alleged authority as a detective stemmed from working under his alleged license. I didn’t remind him that nobody had actually given us a case. I didn’t challenge him because I had nothing to lose. Anything we did in the line of private detective work was just a game to me—a clever way of continuing to play, now that I had turned seventeen, the childhood cops-and-robbers game I had quit only when people told me I was too old to play pretend. And Jack made it easy to defer to his authority, asserting it only in private, and particularly never when we were around girls.
= = =
The girls were a big reason I put up with Jack. Just as boys who knew Gina DeLancey was beautiful began to think her friend Ernestine Thomas was also beautiful, girls who thought Jack was fun began to think I might be fun, too. And they did think Jack was fun. Girls in Early always found new guys interesting, I suppose because they so rarely appeared. Jack, however, had been a new guy at seven different schools, and he played the role like a star. Ernestine was the first to lay claim to him, on the strength of their homework connection, and that paid off for me.
Study hall in our long-outgrown high school was held in the school auditorium—a drab room of plywood seats and insufficient electric lights. The windows were twenty feet above the floor and cost more to keep clean than the school could afford, so there was always an atmosphere of winter twilight no matter what time of year it was. Not much actual studying occurred there, mostly socializing. Still, I was surprised when, just a few days after Jack and I went target shooting, Ernestine sat down beside me in that auditorium.
“Hi, Stony,” she said. “Jack and I are going to dinner in Bluefield Friday night. Gina would like you to ask her to double date with us.”
In Early, this was the way a girl could ask a boy for a date without losing her dignity, but it had never occurred to me that Gina DeLancey would ever need to ask for dates. She had always been popular. I barely had the social status to speak to her, and only because I was her second cousin. We had been friends from the cradle, through gap-toothed elementary years and backyard circuses and Halloween carnivals. But she had bloomed into the prettiest girl in the school or maybe even the county—a teenaged queen, while I had remained a commoner.
I managed some reply and, steeling myself for rejection, asked Gina out. Of course, she accepted with complete graciousness, because it was all prearranged. That Friday night, we drove to Bluefield, just across the West Virginia line. It was the nearest town big enough to offer both pizza and a first-run movie. We had a sausage-mushroom combination and saw North by Northwest. On the way home, Jack parked his father’s Impala behind the grandstand of the baseball field at the high school. In the back seat, Gina gave me my first French kiss. I can still remember the taste of her soft mouth, and every time I remember it, I also recall Ernestine’s simultaneous words from the front seat: “Ow! Your goddamn pistol is mashing my boob!”
Not long after that, my relationship with Gina took an unexpected turn. During a spell of agreeable weather, she and Ernestine had taken to walking home from school, and after that first date broke the ice, I often walked with them. Gina and I both lived some distance from the school, but Ernestine lived closer. Sometimes she walked all the way to Gina’s house so they could study together and gab for an hour or two. But the day I’m telling about, Ernestine went straight home so I had Gina to myself the rest of the way. It started raining hard about the time we got to the business district, and Gina ran for shelter. She stepped into the doorway of one of the closest buildings, a vacant brick storefront, and said, “Let’s go in here till it quits. My dad owns the building.”
Gina pulled a nail file from her purse and slid it behind the mailbox. A key dropped out, and she unlocked the door.
“I don’t think Daddy knows about that key himself,” she said. “But I saw the painters leave it there last week.”
Gina’s dad was a successful real estate agent and developer. His success gave Gina access to every material thing a girl could use in Early: a gasoline credit card, nice clothes, lots of shoes. But I didn’t envy Gina being his child. People said Mr. DeLancey was a hard driver in business, and I guess he was a hypocrite, too. He was a big shot in our Baptist church, which meant he was against drinking and smoking, but Gina had let it slip that he did both on the sly. Of course, he wasn’t the only one, and Gina didn’t pay him much mind. He also said it was sinful to dance, but Gina could dance like a gypsy, and danced every chance she got.
Right then, I was grateful for Mr. DeLancey’s warm, dry building. A year or two earlier, he had leased out the first floor for a café, but it had closed the previous spring, and now the space was being remodeled and repainted for a new tenant. Drop cloths and stepladders were lying around, but the workmen had left for the day.
The building had been a clothing and shoe store at one time, but that business went bankrupt in the Depression. A lot of the old stock had been left on the second floor, stuff that was out of date even in the 1930s and didn’t find buyers at the bankruptcy sale. It was still raining hard, so to kill time Gina showed me some of the merchandise. She showed me the first high-button shoes I had ever seen, and they had never been worn. She opened hatboxes and took out Easter bonnets that were more than forty years old but still looked like new. She put on a flapper’s beehive cloche hat and a knee-length straight-cut dark coat, mugged up a haughty frown, and sashayed down the aisle in her best imitation of an old-movie vamp.
“You’re too blond to be a vamp,” I said, laughing.
I asked her if there was more interesting stuff on the third floor, and she said she didn’t know. “The stairway door is always locked,” she explained.
“Maybe we can find the key,” I suggested.
We didn’t exactly agree to look for the key; we just walked to the stairway and started looking. I applied my detective skills, hoping to impress Gina. I thought there might be a key hidden under a mat, but there wasn’t. Then I saw an electrical switch where there was no reason to be one, and I noticed that the paint was chipped off the screws holding on its faceplate, as if those screws had been removed and replaced many times. My Boy Scout pocket knife had a screwdriver blade, so I took out the screws, and—sure enough—a key was taped to the back of the faceplate.
We opened the door and almost ran up the stairs. “I bet the really good stuff is up here,” Gina said. But we didn’t find more merchandise. Instead, we came up into a short hallway with an empty room on each side, each about the size of a small bedroom or office, each with an attached restroom. The hallway opened into a spacious room that occupied most of the third floor. Several floor-to-ceiling windows on the left side flooded the room with light even on this rainy day, and we could see a low podium or bandstand at the far end of the room. There were about forty old-fashioned wooden folding chairs lined up along one of the walls, and a rack of about twenty more stored in one corner.
“It’s a ballroom,” said Gina, pleasantly surprised. “See, the small rooms are dressing rooms for dance recitals and so forth. We could have our own dance here instead of in the school gym, and dance as close as we like.”
She grabbed me and led me around in a playful box step, holding me closer than allowed by the teachers who patrolled school dances with a six-inch ruler. Then she pulled away and did several ballet whirls and leaps, such as she could manage in a sheath skirt and penny loafers, smiling with pleasure, exulting in the abundance of dancing room and absence of supervision. As she moved, light refracted through the raindrops on the windows and played over her blond hair and clear skin like dappled forest sunshine on the face of some woodland fairy, and it was very beautiful to see.
Gina’s dance brought her to a curtain, which covered about six linear feet of the wall, floor to ceiling.
“This is odd,” she said, a little breathless, as she looked behind the curtain. “Why have a curtain if nothing’s behind it?”
I looked myself, just so I could agree that it was odd, but I saw something Gina hadn’t. As I pulled the curtain aside as far as I could, light from the windows across the room revealed three black lines in the wallpaper: two vertical ones intersecting with the third at the top and the floor at the bottom, forming a rectangle. The lines were actually cracks, and the wallpaper had been carefully fitted right up to each crack before picking up on the other side, so that the pattern of the wallpaper continued almost uninterrupted.
“I think there’s a door under the wallpaper,” said Gina. But there was no doorknob or handle to pull the door open. I pushed against the door and released it quickly, and a hidden spring-loaded latch, like those on a fine sideboard or corner cupboard, made the door spring slightly outward so we could catch the edge and swing it completely open.
We were looking into a garret under the building’s sloping roof. Light came from a couple of windows set in gables. On the rafters, which ran down the slope facing us, we saw briefcases hanging one above the other, five or six to a beam, about twenty-five in all. Each case hung by its handle, on its own big nail; glued to the rafter above each briefcase was a gummed label, about the size of a calling card. When we stepped closer, we saw that a two-digit number was handwritten on each label, no two numbers the same, as if a specific briefcase went on a specific nail. Some of the briefcases were very old, the leather cracking and the flaps curling up at the corners. Others were not so old, and a few almost new—the same styles you could buy in a luggage shop that year.
“What are these?” Gina asked. She opened one of the new briefcases and pulled out a long, flowing costume. It was white. “Dance costume? Choir robe?” she wondered out loud.
I saw the expression on her face turn from curiosity to horror before I saw what caused it. She pulled the costume to her chest, to keep me from seeing it, but by then I had seen. Seen the big, round, red patch with its white Baltic cross and a drop of red blood embroidered at the center.
The insignia of the Ku Klux Klan.
I opened a couple more of the briefcases and each had a Klan robe and hood.
Gina handled the robes mechanically, as if in shock. Slowly she asked aloud, “How could Daddy not know about this?”
Then Gina started to cry. “He does know about it,” she said. “He must!”
She walked into my arms and bawled like a five-year-old, her face turning red and tears pouring. I didn’t know how to comfort a girl. All I could think to do was give her my handkerchief. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes then buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed some more. I held her and stroked her hair.
Gina kept crying. “The Klan lynches colored people, don’t they? Daddy could go to prison if anybody found out!”
I despised all bullies, and especially despised the idea of the Klan. It seemed a particularly chickenshit outfit to me, its members so gutless they had to gang up to shove people around—and wore masks even then. But to comfort Gina, I found myself minimizing their poor character.
“I don’t think they kill anybody nowadays. I think they just try to scare people. If that’s all they do, maybe it’s not illegal.” I was talking through my proverbial hat; I didn’t really know what they did and if it was illegal.
Gina began looking for reasons her dad might not be involved after all. “Maybe the stuff was here when he bought the store,” she said hopefully. Then she saw the flaw in her reasoning. “But some of the briefcases are new! And he’s owned the building as long as I can remember.”
“Stony,” she sobbed, “promise me you won’t tell Ernestine. Don’t tell anybody!”
“I won’t, Gina,” I said. “Your relatives are my relatives, too. I don’t want to advertise this.”
“Promise! I would die of shame if it came out my family was part of this! My mother would die!” Gina trembled in my arms, still sobbing.
“I’ll swear it on any Bible!” I said.
I kept that promise for years, kept it to this day, long after Gina released me from my promise and told the story herself, which she did not do until her father and mother were beyond the embarrassments of this earth.
I dated Gina for a while after that, but because of that discovery in the ballroom garret our relationship changed. My role in her life became that of confidant. She began telling me things she formerly would have told only to Ernestine. Some of it was about other boys she dated, for we weren’t going steady. Now that she trusted me with her darkest secret, she seemed to enjoy revealing truths that could have hurt her reputation, at least for a couple of days. In truth, the confessions could scarcely be counted ugly. Popular though they were, Gina and Ernestine were square as honest dice. Based on the Confessions of Gina, I learned that girls who sang in the youth choir at our Baptist church smooched a lot and petted a little, but they did not do the deed. I doubt if Gina or Ernestine had ever shoplifted a Hershey bar.
Even if she had been wilder, and if our relationship hadn’t been so changed, I’m not sure we would have fallen to fornicating. I really liked Gina, but beautiful as she was, and much as I enjoyed kissing her, I did not lust for her.
All my lust was directed at Mary Lou Martin.
I can tell you the exact day that I first noticed Mary Lou in any detail. It was in the spring of 1954, the day after the Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and the headline on the newspaper I delivered before school said, “Court Opens White Schools To Negro.” When I got to school, my fifth-grade classroom was in an uproar. Some of the boys made me go back outside and get a couple of extra newspapers from the carrier’s bag on my bike, so they could read the story.
“It means niggers will come to this school,” Todd Powell said. Everybody believed this startling pronouncement, because even though he was mean, Todd was smart, and read the paper every day. “My dad says the first time they send a nigger here he’s sending me to private school.”
The words echoed and evolved through the classroom: “Nigger … with niggers … boys and girls, too.”
I was gossiping like everybody else and noticed Mary Lou, a tall country girl in dark pigtails and bib overalls, standing alone, not saying anything. I said to her, “Aren’t you worried about having to go to school with niggers?”
I was really surprised when she snapped at me. “You shouldn’t call ’em niggers. You think you’d like to be called that? It isn’t right the way it is now—we have a big school and they have a two-room school with two teachers for six grades. It’d be fairer if they did come to school with us.”
Todd heard that and called her a nigger lover. Mary Lou planted a solid left jab on his nose. While two other boys took Todd down to the boys’ restroom to stop his nosebleed with cold water, our teacher called the classroom to order and warned us, “It’s going to be a long time before we know what this does mean. I don’t want to hear of any fights about it. I don’t even want any arguments on it. Everybody is entitled to his opinions, and I want those opinions respected.”
The opinion I immediately respected was Mary Lou’s. The viewpoint she expressed was new to me, but seemed absolutely right on first glance, and it embarrassed me that a sophisticated town boy like me didn’t see this until it was pointed out by a hillbilly girl who probably thought you could remove warts by rubbing them with a grain of corn and throwing the corn over your shoulder to a chicken.
Todd didn’t take the lesson the same way I did. He remained an unreconstructed redneck, but Mary Lou had made an impression not only on his nose, but also on his young libido. He got kind of sweet on her after she punched him. I could name twenty-five things I disliked about Todd Powell, but I can’t blame him for that one.
The furor over Brown v. Board of Education happened only a few months after my first brush with the law. I had been the youngest of four boys who, after school on Jubal Early’s birthday, ran a Confederate flag up the school flagpole and padlocked the hoisting chain so nobody could easily take it down. We might have escaped unidentified if one of the older guys hadn’t attracted attention by firing a salute with a .410 shotgun. But Mary Lou’s example changed my viewpoint. That was when I quit using the word “nigger,” and that was when I started liking Mary Lou.
Of course, I never told Mary Lou how much I liked her. Barely spoke to her—mostly because of my shyness with all girls, but also because all of us kids from the actual town of Early chose to hang around with other kids from town. I didn’t see the hypocrisy at the time, but we hillbillies who had made it into town looked down on those still living in the hollows. We didn’t invite them to birthday parties, nor did they invite us to corn shuckings or whatever they did for fun. They were probably Baptists like I was, but they attended some “little church in the wildwood” rather than the impressive stone edifice where I had to ring the bell every Sunday and Wednesday.
Town boys never remarked on how strikingly pretty Mary Lou became as she grew into her teens. That was one thing I personally did notice, however, and when I got old enough to have sexual fantasies, Mary Lou starred in them.
The main fantasy opened with me out hunting on the mountain behind the Martins’ white frame house, which stood in the little apple and peach orchard at the end of the road up Sourwood Hollow. I would hear a faint cry of distress from the house. I would recognize the car outside, from a description broadcast on the radio, as one stolen by four escaped convicts. I would see the smashed-in back door and sneak in the same door with my dad’s pump .22 rifle. Quiet as fog I would slip up the stairs to an attic bedroom with roses on the wallpaper and golden sunlight filtering through gauze curtains onto a scene of terror. Mary Lou would be bound to her four-poster bed as the boss convict threatened her with a knife. He would see me, raise the knife to harm her, and I would shoot him between the eyes. I would quickly dispatch all four convicts, the last in desperate hand-to-hand combat with hunting knives.
With my bloody knife I would cut Mary Lou’s bonds. She would be beyond fright by then, not tearful but wide-eyed with wonder—beyond modesty as well, a rose-tipped breast peeking from the torn white nightgown, her lithe, strong legs bare.
She would surely say, under those circumstances, “How can I ever thank you, Stony?”
And I would say, “Well, Mary Lou, since you asked …”
= = =
One reason I put up with Jack’s nonsense was that I was actually learning something about police work from the Early County Sheriff’s Department. Around Thanksgiving, Jack and I just started hanging out there. I had never quite realized, before Jack showed me at the sheriff’s office, that you could just walk into a lot of places, ask questions, and get answers you really had no business knowing. Jack taught me that most people find their own work interesting and will talk about it till it’s past milking time.
The sheriff’s department was on the first floor of the Early County Courthouse. The courthouse was the fanciest building in Early, built around the turn of the century when the town was rich from coal, lumber, and the chestnut harvest. It was made of granite blocks three feet long and more than a foot thick. A few stone steps rose up to the double front doors. The hallway originally had hardwood parquet flooring, but it had been covered with low-maintenance asphalt tile in my own, less prosperous time.
The staircase that rose along the right side of the hallway to the second-floor courtroom retained its original magnificence, its turned oak balusters supporting a polished oak rail six inches wide. The walls of the staircase were covered with oiled oak paneling. At the top, the landing opened on one side into the oak-appointed courtroom and on the other into Richard Conway’s fancy office. Conway held the elected office of commonwealth’s attorney, the same position called a district attorney in most other states.
At the back of the hallway was a plain, narrow stairway used to bring in prisoners for hearings. If the architectural statement of the public staircase said, “This is the Temple of Justice,” the back staircase said, more honestly, “Don’t get your hopes up.”
The door to the sheriff’s office opened off the hallway near the bottom of the prisoner stairs, and inside that door splendor ended entirely. The sheriff’s office had been modified so many times that all the polished oak had been covered or replaced with pine or plywood or wallboard. Upon entering you found yourself facing a green-painted counter behind which sat a receptionist who was also the department’s daytime radio dispatcher, the one female deputy who doubled as a jail matron, and—on the second and graveyard shifts—one of the male deputies. Nobody went through the swinging gate in this counter unless they worked there or were invited or were under arrest. The office behind it was hot from steam radiators and cramped with desks and filing cabinets. Every inch of wall space was covered with wanted posters and circulars for stolen cars and announcements of this or that new state statute or regulation. Sheriff Aaron Taylor preferred to spend his time riding the county in a police cruiser and talking to political supporters, so the office was actually run by Really Big Ben, the chief deputy.
When he was in high school, Ben Agee was pretty tall and strong for his age, so people got to calling him Big Ben; then another guy moved to town for a while and told everybody he was himself called Big Ben. The new guy bragged a lot but turned out to be mostly a bullshit artist, so folks started calling him “Sorta Big Ben,” and our own original Big Ben Agee became “Really Big Ben” to emphasize that he was the genuine article. Sorta Big Ben didn’t stick around long, but Really Big Ben’s new nickname did. When Jack and I started hanging around the office, Really Big Ben was thirty, about six feet three, lean and muscular, and had thick wavy brown hair. He wore a tan deputy’s uniform like it was custom-made for him. He kept the uniform spotless. I knew him already because he had arrested me once. He had let me ride to the sheriff’s office without handcuffs, and he had given me time to quit crying before he took me inside to face my parents and my consequences. Because he had preserved my dignity that way, I liked him.
We were standing at the counter one Friday afternoon watching Ben sitting at his desk cleaning his big chrome revolver. It was interesting to watch, but cleaning a revolver was such a dirty, monotonous job that every officer hated doing it. Yet they had to do it frequently. Most deputies in Early County had seen combat in Korea or World War II, and as a result they hoped to never fire another shot at a human being. But deputies patrolled solo, and each one knew that if he encountered trouble, and guns were involved, he would likely fight alone while his adversary might have an accomplice or two. Being a dead shot was the main way a deputy could improve his odds, so each practiced religiously.
A deputy would fire at least thirty rounds every time he practiced, and the bullets were unjacketed lead, which left the revolvers very dirty. Ben pulled flannel patches through the barrel and six chambers of his gun, alternating dry patches and ones moistened with evil-smelling gun-cleaning fluid. He did this time after time until the patches finally came out as clean as they went in, and he had a pile of used patches two or three inches high. Then he used a toothbrush to clean the face of the cylinder and the back end of the barrel. After that he ran another dry patch through each chamber and the barrel, then did the same with a lightly oiled patch. Then he used a dry rag to wipe every brass cartridge from the gun and his cartridge belt, and then he pulled another clean rag through the belt’s cartridge loops.
“You polish the cartridges so the empties will come out of the gun quick if you need to reload fast,” Ben explained. “You clean the cartridge loops because brass corrosion builds up on the leather and can make the reloads hard to pull out.” He put six of the gleaming rounds into the pistol, returned the rest to the belt loops, then wiped the entire gun and put it in the holster. The whole job must have taken more than half an hour. “Glad that’s over for the month,” he said.
Now Jack said, “I’ll do it for you next time. I need to learn how to clean a gun the right way.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before Rudy Sexton, the swing-shift dispatcher sitting at the radio controls, jumped to his feet wearing a wide grin and said, “You don’t have to wait a month. Come on back here and I’ll let you clean mine.” He did a short-stepping, high-elbowed, intentionally comic run over to the gate, opened the hidden latch, and admitted us for the first time to the office space itself.
Letting people into the office who didn’t work there was against Really Big Ben’s rules. Ben was still sitting at his desk, smiling faintly, considering, I thought, whether to throw us out. Finally he said, “Stony, I’d hate to see you miss any of the fun Jack’s going to have.” He went out to his car, unlocked his shotgun from its rack, unloaded it, and brought it inside for me to clean. I noticed that his khaki uniform was dirty from the cleaning job and stunk of gun-cleaning fluid. As soon as he got me started on the shotgun, he went down the hall and put on a clean uniform from his locker. He came back in a good mood, expertly knotting the black uniform necktie without the help of a mirror.
After that, we cleaned a lot of guns. Every deputy was required to be proficient not only with his revolver and shotgun but also with a rifle if he carried one in his car, and most did. Officers were required to shoot qualifying scores with those weapons only once a year, but they practiced much more often—once a month or more. Most also owned and practiced with some small pistol, which they carried in a pocket or boot as a backup weapon, or when off duty. The department safe contained extra revolvers and shotguns, as well as a launcher that shot tear gas shells, two Tommy guns, and a Chinese burp gun, a war trophy from Korea, which the sheriff had confiscated in a moonshine raid. Besides those, the department had assorted rifles it had accumulated over the years and kept around in case the sheriff ever had to arm a posse, which had not happened in decades. All that extra hardware was almost never fired, but it nevertheless had to be periodically cleaned and oiled.
I didn’t mind doing it, not at the time. And once we had taken over that despised task, the deputies began looking for other jobs they could hand off to Jack and me.
The office’s only secretary or clerk was the female deputy who doubled as the daytime dispatcher and tripled as the jail matron when there were any female prisoners to deal with, so she never had enough time at her typewriter. Jack and I took over her backlog of paperwork, and with all that practice we were soon getting As in our school typing class. Pretty soon the sheriff’s department began using us the way police departments later used Explorer Scouts—as unpaid volunteers doing almost everything except actually going on patrols, chasing speeders, and arresting burglars. Most of it was paperwork, but I also learned how to photograph a crime scene (at least up to the crude standards of 1959), to run the teletype machine on which crime information was transmitted to departments throughout the state, and to reload ammunition. When Rudy Sexton went to the bathroom or took an on-duty snooze in his swivel chair on a slow night, I sometimes got to operate the radio. I even learned to take fingerprints, and once, when the cook and most of the deputies had flu, Jack and I cooked for ten prisoners. We didn’t produce good grub, but it beat corn flakes.
Sheriff Taylor came in the office in the mornings but was usually gone when we got there after school. He was a six-foot-tall fat man who, by privilege of rank and being an elected official, never wore a uniform. That winter his usual outfit consisted of black wool hard-finish hunting pants and a red-and-black plaid wool shirt with his badge pinned on it. You couldn’t see the badge, usually, because he wore a brown hip-length leather jacket over it. He wore black Wellington boots and a brown cowboy hat.
Another privilege of rank he had given himself was the gun he carried. The issued revolver in the Early sheriff’s department was a Smith & Wesson Heavy Duty Model .38 Special with a long barrel. The Heavy Duty was built to shoot the extra-powerful ammunition police might need to fire through auto bodies, so it was bulky and heavy to carry. In this sheriff’s department, Taylor alone didn’t have to carry one. When he took off his coat we saw a revolver so small it looked like a toy in the cross-draw holster on his fat middle. That seemed lazy to me.
= = =
An incident that happened after I started hanging out at the sheriff’s office made me dislike Sheriff Taylor even more. My father and I had a friend named Jim Hazlewood, an old man. He was a corn-fed, tobacco-chewing hillbilly who had served two prison sentences for moonshining. He had no sons, and his daughters had married respectable men, lived in other counties, and didn’t often get home to see him. Twenty years earlier, he had buried his wife in his front yard, as a lot of old-time mountain people did. Jim’s unique tribute to her was planting a dogwood tree on the fresh grave so that as long as he lived he could see it from a chair on his front porch, blooming every spring with its white blossoms shaped like crosses and the rust-colored stains on each petal, like the True Cross, all of it a reminder of the Resurrection to come. By the time my father started taking me up to Jim’s place, it was a big tree, full of bloom every spring, its branches seeming to shelter the gray granite tombstone beneath it. I hoped I would someday find a woman I would love as much as Jim had loved the one buried under that dogwood.
The last time Jim had been caught making whiskey, the judge noted that putting him in prison hadn’t cured his whiskey-making in the past, so this time the judge made a different proposal. He agreed to let Jim go free, on probation of course, if he personally promised the judge he would never make alcohol for the rest of his life. It was a great act of faith on the judge’s part, but once Jim gave his personal word, he kept it.
When Jim grew too old to farm, he let his place go back to brush to shelter quail, rabbits, and deer, and he let some people, including my father and me, hunt there. Because they were the only company he got, the hunters were important friends to him.
Some of Jim’s near neighbors were the Jepsons, who were famous moonshiners and poachers. I had gone to grade school with a Jepson boy, Buddy, who often used to sneak up behind one of us other boys and sucker punch him in the spine or kidney. It hurt so bad you couldn’t move for a minute or two afterward. Buddy would run away laughing. Once, when I was still hurting from a punch late one night, I crawled up beside my dad on the couch and asked him why Buddy would do that to me. I hadn’t ever done anything mean to Buddy.
“He does it ’cause he’s a Jepson,” my father said. “It’s just how they are. And they don’t like us Shelors. It’s best to just stay away from ’em.”
None of the Jepsons attended school any longer than they legally had to. Buddy never darkened the schoolhouse door on or after his sixteenth birthday, and the rest of us in his class were glad of it.
Once, when Dad and I were talking with Jim Hazlewood on his front porch, I asked him something or another about his Jepson neighbors. Jim, who was normally talkative, looked at my dad as if asking permission to answer. My father said, “Jim, can you still play that fiddle? Would you play ‘The Wagoner’s Lad’? And sing it?”
So Jim went in the house and brought out his fiddle. The instrument looked to be as old as he was, and it rustled when he handled it because he kept two or three rattlesnake tails in it, which was supposed to protect it from the damp. He tucked the fiddle under his chin, applied the bow, and sang in his old cracked bass voice.
My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay.
I’m loaded and ready, I’ll be on my way.
When Jim finished my father said, “Could you play that third verse again?” So Jim did. That’s the verse that goes,
I work for my living, my money’s my own,
And them that don’t like me can leave me alone.
My father had him play that same verse twice. And Dad said to me, “That’s a verse you should remember.”
Dad didn’t have to draw me a picture. I had long since decided to leave the Jepsons alone. But the Jepsons didn’t leave Jim alone. The winter I started hanging around the sheriff’s office, two of Buddy’s older brothers, Will and Ab Jepson, told Jim Hazlewood they wanted to put a whiskey still on his farm. The sheriff and the federal revenuers and the state ABC men kept their eyes on any land the Jepsons owned, but since Jim really had quit making whiskey and everybody knew it, the Jepsons reckoned nobody would think to look for a still on Jim’s farm.
But Jim refused, because that would have meant he could no longer let people hunt on his land, and the hunters were about the only company he got. The Jepsons put a still on Jim’s land anyway, hid it well, and operated it for several weeks before one of the hunters found it and told Jim. Jim didn’t report the still to law enforcement because the lawmen would have staked it out and tried to arrest the Jepsons. Jim had been to prison and didn’t wish that on anybody. So he tore up the still himself, shooting the boiler and cap full of holes with his .22 rifle. And he poured out the mash and broke a lot of new fruit jars waiting to be filled with liquor, just like the lawmen would have done.
Will and Ab Jepson went to Jim Hazlewood’s house and beat him up, and left him lying in the dirt in his front yard. As they were leaving, Ab Jepson saw Jim’s chain saw hanging on a big nail on the outside wall of the house, in the shelter of the front porch. He grabbed that chain saw, cranked it up, and cut down the dogwood growing on Mrs. Hazlewood’s grave. He did it right there in front of Jim, this old man who couldn’t do anything about it but sit in the dirt and cuss at them.
One of Sheriff Taylor’s deputies took a crime report on the incident; I know because I typed it from the deputy’s handwritten notes. Yet after a week had gone by, there had been no arrests. I asked Rudy Sexton why not. He made no answer at all until I asked him again, and then it was just one word. “Reasons,” he said. He wouldn’t even joke about it, which was unusual for Rudy. When I asked again, he pressed the transmission button on the department radio and made an unnecessary location check on the units in the field.
My father wasn’t mayor that year, and occasionally got to spend an evening in his workshop making furniture. He loved that hobby so much that this particular day he went down there in the basement and started working on the wood lathe without even taking off his good wool office pants or his white shirt. He did take off his necktie and his rings, a wedding ring and a Masonic one, so they wouldn’t get caught in the machine. He was happy there, watching a spinning walnut two-by-two melt away until there was nothing left but a beautifully proportioned table leg.
When I asked him about Jim Hazlewood’s case, he pulled the chisel away from the table leg but didn’t look up, just as Rudy Sexton had not looked up from the radio. I could see he didn’t want to talk about it, but then he did anyway.
“Sheriff Taylor and Rich Conway have an understanding,” he said. “Taylor and his men don’t make arrests if they have reason to believe Rich won’t prosecute. It’s supposed to save the taxpayers’ money. But it also allows Rich to talk people like old Jim Hazlewood into filing a civil suit instead of pressing criminal charges.”
“Why would Rich want him to do that?” I asked.
Dad looked at me over his bifocals. “They don’t call him ‘Slick Rick’ for nothing. In a small county like Early, a commonwealth’s attorney is allowed to also have a private practice. If Rich converts Jim’s complaint to a civil case, Jim has to pay a lawyer, and Rich will work it out so he’s the lawyer Jim pays. As commonwealth’s attorney, Rich’s job is prosecuting criminal cases, and he gets paid the same if he prosecutes a hundred cases a year, or none. He won’t make anything extra for actually prosecuting the Jepsons, so to Rich’s way of thinking, why do it?”
He laid down his chisel and turned off the lathe, then sat down on his high metal shop stool, hooking the heels of his wing-tip shoes on the rungs. Dad ordinarily carried himself erect, and he sometimes corrected me for hunching over at the dinner table, but now he slumped himself.
“Being commonwealth’s attorney is as thankless as being mayor,” he said. “If Rich brings a criminal case against any Jepson, then all the Jepsons—their sorry cousins and inbred cross-cousins and half their section—are going to vote against him in the next election, whether he wins the case or loses it. But if he just sues the Jepsons, he can keep most of ’em on his side. He’ll tell the Jepsons he talked Jim into suing for less money than he could have, and also tell them Jim could have sued them and sent them to jail, if Rich hadn’t talked him out of it.”
He turned the lathe back on, picked up his tool, and resumed cutting again. Dad was not easily angered, but I could see he was beginning to steam as he continued.
“Of course, Rich won’t tell Jim he could prosecute and sue both, and by the time Jim realizes he should have pushed for criminal charges, he’ll have already signed an out-of-court settlement that keeps him from doing that. Jim gets some money, Rich gets a nice fee and keeps most of his voters happy, and the Jepsons stay out of jail. Only trouble is, Jim don’t need the damn money, and Rich don’t earn it, and those Jepson boys should be hung, let alone go to jail.”
Dad shoved the blade of his chisel savagely against the turning table leg.
“Goddamn it, I’ve ruined this leg. And there’s nothing I can do about it!”
I wasn’t sure whether he meant he couldn’t do anything about the table leg, or about Rich Conway and the sheriff.
= = =
I saw other things I held against Sheriff Taylor. There was a state trooper named T.J. Thompson. The letters didn’t stand for anything; his first name was just T.J. Seeing Trooper Thompson from a distance, I had always thought he was a short, broad-chested guy, but when I finally saw him up close I realized he was about six feet two and big all over, even for someone that tall. His neck was short but wide as his head, and his pants were tight over the bulging muscles of his thighs.
The occasion when I first got a close look at him was when he brought in a prisoner to book for reckless driving and resisting arrest. Resisting had been ill advised, apparently, for the prisoner had a split eyebrow, a split lip that hadn’t quite quit bleeding, and his left ear was puffy and red. Trooper Thompson took off his right glove to take the pen and sign the complaint form that Rudy handed him, and when he dropped the glove onto the counter, it made an audible thump. That meant the gloves were the kind with a few ounces of granulated lead sewn into the seams. The prisoner was Vance Shelor, a distant cousin of mine I had seen at family reunions, ball games, the poolroom, and so forth. He was country as a wooden churn, but an outgoing, funny little guy. Now he was completely subdued, not speaking unless he had to answer a question, and barely audible then. He looked at the floor the whole time.
Once the trooper left and Rudy had come back from escorting this evildoer to his cell, I asked Rudy what could have led such a little guy to pick a fight with tank-sized T.J. Thompson.
“I don’t know,” said Rudy. “People just seem to pick on Trooper Thompson.” He grinned.
“Vance is going to need some stitches,” I said. “I saw at least three places where he’d been hit. If you have lead in your gloves, do you really need to hit a guy more than once?”
Rudy laughed. “Hey, you think that’s bad, you oughta see what he does to the niggers.”
Ben came in the door just as he said it, and he didn’t like what he heard. “Officer Sexton,” he said, “the word is Negro. And we don’t brag on Trooper Thompson’s methods. It’s bad enough we have to clean up after him. Did you call the doc yet?”
Rudy looked embarrassed. “No, but I’m going to right now,” he said, and he phoned Dr. Johnson to come sew up Vance Shelor’s eyebrow.
T.J. Thompson was originally from Southampton County, a place noted for its poverty and poor race relations, where Nat Turner had once led a bloody slave rebellion. T.J. had been hired as a deputy by a former Early County sheriff who was not so selective as Aaron Taylor. When Taylor got elected sheriff, he suggested that the world was full of better opportunities for a man of T.J.’s bulk and disposition, so T.J. resigned. A lot of people thought Taylor should have fired him outright, because then the Virginia State Police might not have hired him and sent him straight back to Early County—literally his old stompin’ grounds, as attested by some of those who got stomped.
I was one of those who thought Taylor should have fired him. I had been fighting bullies all my life, and the fact that Taylor had not only allowed a thug like T.J. to remain in law enforcement, but get a better job with less supervision, made my blood boil. I was still brooding on it a couple of weeks later, on a Friday night, when Jack and I happened to be in the sheriff’s office.
Friday nights at the sheriff’s office were full of anticipation, like the moment before dropping a line into a really good fishing hole. The weekend stretched luxuriously ahead of Jack and me, with no homework to do until Sunday night. The deputies, even the normally work-averse Rudy Sexton, seemed more lively than usual, because Friday night started what was the most dangerous part of the week, and the best—the part with the action, if there was going to be any. Whether it was breaking up a fight, writing a speeding ticket, or keeping order at a basketball game, Friday night was when a deputy did his stuff. Deputies washed their cars before coming to work on Friday, and they wore newly pressed uniforms. They were ready to go.
This particular Friday night started slow, with nothing to do but enjoy the anticipation. At 6:30 p.m. the basketball game was just about to start, and the kids who drove too fast were all at the game, their cars safely parked for a while. Even the mill workers who had started drinking soon after the quitting whistle blew at four were still merely mellow; the fights probably wouldn’t start for an hour or two. Really Big Ben, usually the busiest man in the department, had little to do for a while. He minded the office and the silent radio to allow Rudy Sexton a supper hour at the nearby diner where his wife was cook. When Rudy came back, Ben would go on patrol. He was already wearing his pistol and his Texas homburg deputy hat, but for now he sat at the radio desk with his feet on the typewriter, reading the newspapers from Bluefield and Roanoke, circling and clipping items he wanted other deputies to read. Chain saws stolen in the next county might turn up in Early, and an upcoming stock car race was sure to require extra traffic enforcement, what with all those fans high on gas fumes and hero worship. I dared to hazard a question.
“Ben, why don’t you run for sheriff?” I asked.
Ben stared up from under the brim of his hat with a look as fierce as if I’d suggested fornication with his bird dog.
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” he said. But then he answered the question anyway. “I work for Aaron Taylor. I like him. He made me his chief deputy, and I’m not going to double-cross him.”
I looked to Jack for support, but Jack had an expression on his face that said, “You’re in this alone.” The only movement he made was to shift his weight from one buttock to the other so the radiator he was sitting on wouldn’t burn him. Otherwise he was still as a plaster frog. So I pressed the issue.
“I think you’d make a better sheriff. You’re already the sheriff for practical purposes. All Sheriff Taylor does is play politics, mostly with Rich Conway.” I was showing off a little, acting like I understood the politics between Conway and Sheriff Taylor, though all I knew was the little my dad had told me in the basement workshop.
Ben stared at me for a minute, his brow furrowed like a plowboy’s shoe. “Isn’t that what a sheriff does? What makes you think I’d be better?”
I said, “Well, it’s obvious. You’d do something besides suck up to Rich Conway. You’re actually interested in law enforcement.”
Ben answered, “So is Aaron. When I first came on the department, he was chief deputy and he was real good at it. He liked the job. But when the sheriff’s job came open, he had to run for it or see some dumb peckerwood get elected. And Rich Conway comes with the job. Whoever is sheriff has to play along with him, because if you don’t have a prosecutor with you, you don’t convict. And Rich is gonna be prosecutor a long time because you have to be a lawyer to run for the job. There aren’t but four other lawyers in Early County. Two couldn’t get elected, and the other two don’t want the job.”
Jack spoke up now. “So why doesn’t Sheriff Taylor just quit? He could go back to farming, or go be a deputy somewhere they let you do a good job. Or try for chief of police somewhere.”
Now that we were talking to him, Ben put away the paper and took a rag from his desk and started polishing his brown Wellington boots. “Who’d be sheriff then?” he asked.
“You,” Jack said.
“No guarantee of that,” Ben responded. “Rich would surely run his own man, and he might win. But say I did get elected. I’d have to be the same kind of sheriff Aaron Taylor is. We’d lose a good deputy, namely me, and I might not be able to replace myself. Good policemen mostly want to work where the pay and the politics are more attractive.”
Jack said, “So why don’t you go there yourself?”
Ben quit rubbing at the invisible smear on his boots and looked straight at Jack and, alternately, me.
“Early County’s my home. Born and raised here. I got a couple of good deputies because they want to live here, and that’s the reason Aaron Taylor works here, too. If you’re going to risk your neck carrying a badge, you might as well do it in a place that matters to you. You can’t help Early County by working in Bluefield.”
Jack jumped off the radiator, turned and looked out the window as if he’d felt somebody behind him. “There they are now,” he said. I went over to the window and saw Sheriff Taylor and Rich Conway standing across the street that ran alongside the courthouse, beside Conway’s car. Conway wasn’t so fat as Taylor, but a little taller, and he wore a dark three-piece suit, which almost nobody else did in Early. He reached for the inside breast pocket and took out a silver flask and passed it to Sheriff Taylor, who took a drink from it. Rich took one too, and then held the flask up and peered into it like he was using a telescope or looking for the last drink. Both of them laughed.
Jack said, “You don’t judge anybody until you’ve walked a moon in his moccasins, I guess.” I felt ashamed of myself for what I’d said about Aaron Taylor.
“Maybe I did misjudge ’em both,” I said.
Ben came over and put a hand on my shoulder, and the other on Jack’s.
“Oh, you were about half right,” Ben said. “About half of ’em are going to be bastards no matter how long you wear their shoes.”
= = =
The next Thursday was Christmas Eve, and my friends and I went caroling. Bundled against the bitter cold, a dozen girls and boys walked up and down the residential streets, stopping at every house that displayed a porch light, where we sang a couple of the old familiar carols we had known all our lives. Mostly we sang a cappella, but that year Jack brought his clarinet and accompanied some of the songs. I had heard his stories about sitting in with famous jazz bands. I doubted any of those bands would have taken a gig south of the Mason-Dixon line, and I was pretty sure those stories were fabrications. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear him play the instrument pretty well.
Gina had talked Ernestine, who was the better singer of the two, into preparing a duet version of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” The rest of us kept quiet as they sang, except for Jack, who played a clarinet solo between their verses.
The girls were dressed similarly, wearing warm knit caps, gloves, and heavy woolen coats. Gina’s blond tresses looked particularly beautiful spilling over a collar of dark fur. Ernestine’s knit cap was red, and her dark curls peeked out charmingly from beneath it. I don’t think I will ever forget how they looked in their youthful beauty, standing at somebody’s front steps, the gentle glow of the porch light illuminating their faces as their lips moved in perfect unison. And I will not forget that when they sang the verse about hate being so strong as to mock Christmas, there were tears on Gina’s face.
I’m sure she was thinking about those Klan robes in the attic and how much her father knew about them.
One afternoon in early spring, I went into the sheriff’s office to hang around and maybe look at one of the confiscated girlie magazines Sheriff Taylor kept around “for evidence.” I hid the magazine in a stack of reports I was pretending to type and made the typewriter sound busy by repeatedly typing the first eight lines of the Gettysburg Address, something I could do by memory without looking at the keys. For years afterward, even when I no longer needed magazines to know what girls looked like naked, sex seemed incomplete without the accompanying sound of a wide-carriage Smith Corona.
Sheriff Taylor himself was there that day, a rare circumstance. He was minding the radio because the combination secretary–dispatcher–jail matron was off seeing an obstetrician. Sheriff Taylor sat in front of the silent radio in his plaid shirtsleeves, bulging over the arms of the swivel chair, so fat that if he had stood suddenly the chair might have come up with him. It was as if cigarettes made him fat, for he smoked one unfiltered Pall Mall after another, filling an ashtray in two hours. But he also made telephone call after telephone call to his contacts, people like storekeepers in rural sections of the county. He asked about good fishing holes for the coming season, which farmers were about to plant what crops, and how business was going. Skillfully he guided the conversation, and gradually he extracted the information that one J.E. (for Jubal Early) Jepson, though not visibly employed, suddenly had plenty of money for gasoline and fuel oil, and was buying a lot of crushed grain. Crushed grain was used for livestock feed, but it could also be used as mash for distilling liquor. Stills often ran on fuel oil, and gasoline, of course, carried whiskey to market. Sheriff Taylor had heard from another sheriff that a lot of moonshine seemed to be coming from the direction of Early County lately. Now Taylor had a good idea who was making it.
The sheriff’s detective work was interrupted when Really Big Ben walked in, slammed the gate in the rail, threw his hat on his desk, and plopped into his chair. “Aaron, can I borrow a Tommy gun for about twenty minutes?” asked Ben.
“Sure, Ben,” replied Taylor without even looking up. “Let me know if you shoot anybody important.”
Ben said, “I was thinking about sticking it up Rich Conway’s rear end and riveting his head to his hat.”
“Rich Conway don’t wear a hat,” Sheriff Taylor reminded Ben. “I take it he had another unexpected visit?”
“You take it right,” said Ben. “I went down and took the report myself. Get this, Aaron: Now he wants us to put a man on his place, full time, for as long as it takes us to catch his burglar.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Sheriff Taylor, looking up from the list of notes he had made during his phone calls. “Is he serious?”
“Do wild bears shit in the woods? Of course he’s serious!”
“That’s all I need,” said Sheriff Taylor. “I got so many men to spare I’m here looking for a still by telephone ’cause I can’t get out of the office, and he wants somebody down at his place full time.” He lit another Pall Mall, sucking on it so fiercely that half an inch of the cigarette glowed red.
I hadn’t moved a muscle, having learned at a tender age that when adults uproar, the young better blend into the background. But then Ben started staring gloomily at the wall I was trying to blend into. After about forty-five seconds, he realized I was not a wanted poster.
“Stony,” he said with surprise. Then he added, with a delight he had never before exhibited toward my presence, “Stony! Stony, get Jack up here. I got your first case for you.”
Sheriff Taylor spun around in the swivel chair and held his palm up to Ben like he was stopping traffic.
“Now wait a minute, Ben,” he said. “I ain’t having any of this.”
But Ben argued, “Aaron, it’s the best thing we can do. It isn’t our responsibility to put a man down there. What an ordinary wealthy citizen would do is hire a security guard. Except in Early, there aren’t any guard companies, so he’d probably hire a boy to watch the house. And if we send Stony and Jack down there, we can at least tell him we sent somebody.”
Sheriff Taylor said, “We could send—”
Ben cut him off. “Aaron, I don’t want to run off good deputies by making them do chickenshit favors for a politician they don’t like. And if the boys don’t work out, we can send one of the men then.”
Sheriff Taylor said, “But if they get in any trouble down there, we’re responsible.”
Ben said, “No we aren’t. They’ll work, if at all, for Rich Conway. If they get in trouble, it’s his trouble. Come on, Aaron, give it a chance!”
Ben came across the room and bent low, like a football player in a huddle, his hands turned out palms upward, in a gesture that implied begging. He was almost on his knees before Sheriff Taylor’s swivel-chair throne. After a long pause, Sheriff Taylor exhaled a great cloud of blue smoke. “All right,” he said. “Stony, you call up Jack and both of you go down and deal with Rich’s burglar. And tell Jack to leave that goddamn pistol home. If I catch him carrying that gun, I’ll throw his ass in jail.”
Early was laid out rather like a baseball diamond. If you considered the courthouse home plate, then Main Street, with the churches, the school, and the newer businesses, ran from home to first. Most of the upper-class and middle-class houses were on side streets that intersected the baseline before you came to second. All that part from home to second was called Upper Early or New Early. Lower Early, the original town site, lay on the baseline from second to third, along the river bottom. At the upstream end of the town site there was still a low dam whose impounded waters had long ago powered the mills. Now that the mills ran on electricity, the mills were located farther down the river bottom, lined up along the railroad that hauled their raw materials and products. The important street here was called River Road, which used to be Early’s main thoroughfare.
At about third base, River Road intersected with Steep Street. As its name implied, the street climbed a steep hill. Originally it completed the baseball diamond, connecting River Road to home plate, but the lower part of Steep Street had washed away in big floods before I was born and had never been repaired. Pedestrians still picked their way up the lower, ruined part of the street on muddy footpaths, but motor vehicles could not. The upper part of Steep Street, closer to home plate and Upper Early, was a business and residential district for the town’s small Negro population. Most blacks in the county lived on their own small farms outside of town, or sharecropped, but many came to Steep Street to shop or go to one of the two beer joints or one of the two churches. Dr. Johnson operated a clinic on Steep Street two days a week; the rest of the week, I guess, only white people got sick and they visited his regular office on Main Street.
The only residences in Lower Early were worker housing owned by the mills and a few fine old homes belonging to founding families. Rich Conway’s house was one of those old homes. It sat inside the diamond, on a hill overlooking River Road and the railroad and the river itself, above the reach of even the big floods that now came every decade or so. By the time I was a teenager, small floods were coming every year, as the uplands were timbered off and retained less and less water. Floods had forced most of the old businesses from River Road to higher ground in Upper Early. There was room for other houses on Conway’s hill, but the house sat alone, rather grand in its isolation, though it now overlooked a nearly ruined neighborhood. Around the two sides of it, and along the back, was a small wood full of game that nobody hunted because Rich Conway had posted his land with NO TRESPASSING signs.
I don’t know how old that house was, but it had been the Conway place for generations. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Rich’s forefathers had paid for it by selling scalping knives to the Shawnees. Rich’s father had been a banker—the kind you used to see in Western movies, twirling his moustache and carrying foreclosure papers. Now that the old banker was dead, Rich’s brother ran the bank and Rich ran the courthouse.
As Jack and I climbed the concrete steps through the four-foot-high retaining wall that kept the Conways’ yard from washing into the street, we saw Andy Byrd raking under the shrubbery, pulling out the leaves and paper trash that had blown in there during the winter just ending. Andy was Rich’s grandson, about fifteen years old. He was from one of the rich suburbs of Washington, D.C., but had lived in Early with the Conways for about three years, ever since his mother, Rich’s daughter, left her wealthy husband. She had run off to Europe and apparently intended to stay there as long as her money held out. She sent Andy to the home where she had grown up, in Early. Rich had no sons, and it looked like he was trying to raise Andy as one.
I knew Andy well because he sang in the church youth choir I had quit only recently. We had stood elbow to elbow in the tenor section until my formerly reliable voice began bouncing unpredictably between bass and baritone. Andy had also been in my Boy Scout patrol. His laziness was well known, and I wondered how Rich had persuaded him to rake those leaves.
“I see Rich is finally getting some sweat from you,” I said, laughing.
Andy wheezed a little, because he wasn’t used to the work. “H’lo, Stony. Jack.” Wheeze. “Gotta earn some money,” he said, not stopping his raking. “Grandpa cut off my allowance.”
Jack said, “I never had an allowance.” This was untrue, but Jack said it to take the conversation where he wanted it to go. “So being broke, we came to see Rich about earning some money.”
Andy grinned with perfect, braces-straightened teeth. He was tall for his age, not shaving yet, but so handsome he was almost pretty. He had blond hair cut flat on the top and long on the sides, swept back like duck wings. His eyes were big and blue, and his skin had not yet grown its first pimple. People liked him before they knew anything about him. He always treated his elders as equals—not just Jack and me, who were only a little older, but also people in their twenties and thirties. It was an aristocratic habit, that is, condescending.
Andy’s white teeth flashed an ironic grin. “I don’t expect you’ll want to work for him once you find out what he pays,” Andy said. “Forty cents an hour.”
I whistled. Even in Early, boy labor usually earned at least fifty cents an hour.
“You can make more than that anywhere,” I said.
“Yeah,” Andy answered. “But he says I gotta finish our yard before I go working for somebody else. Hey, maybe he’ll pay you to help me so I can finish today.”
“We quit working in yards,” Jack said. “We’re going into investigation.”
Andy quit raking for the first time since we’d been there. “You’re shitting me,” he said. “You guys aren’t but a couple of years older ’n me. You can’t go on the sheriff’s department.”
Jack said, “Don’t need to. We’re private investigators.”
Andy leaned on his rake and seemed to consider Jack’s statement, then said, “Well, I don’t believe you can catch the guy that’s been robbing us ’cause I couldn’t and I live here. That’s why Grandpa cut off my allowance.”
Jack asked about the burglary we knew had happened that day.
“Yeah,” Andy said. “I was up in my bedroom watching out the window in case anybody tried to sneak in, and he slipped right past me and lifted Grandma’s antique punch bowl right off the dining room table. Hell, how’s he expect me to watch the damn house when it’s got doors on all four sides and half the damn windows don’t lock?”
Somebody said, “Andrew, profanity suggests a lack of breeding. I don’t like to hear it from you.”
Jack and I looked up to the porch. Rich Conway stood in the shadow of the porch roof, not noticeable until I looked, but then his bright eyes, like Andy’s, caught and held me.
He was tall, about six feet two, strong in his shoulders and back. More than thirty years earlier, he had been a good college wrestler. Now he was heavy from drinking every night. He wore suspenders, which gave him something to grab hold of when he wasn’t wearing a vest yet needed to seize something in a gesture of studied consideration. I had seen suits cut like those he wore in my uncle’s old pictures from college, taken about the same time Conway was there. Yet after taking the trouble of having his suits tailored to a style thirty years gone, Conway wore the suit coat mostly to take it off and carry it flung over his shoulder. He did that to show he was a shirtsleeves kind of guy, in a town where most other people really were. The suit coat he carried now was the same shade of gray as the sky before a snowstorm. His hair was that color too, but I guess it once had been blond like Andy’s. Like his grandson, he wore it long and swept back on the sides, but his was wavy on top. Unlike other aristocrats I had met, or any of his cronies in the courthouse gang, Conway chewed tobacco, and when he smoked, he used a corncob pipe.
Jack and I went up onto the porch. “Ben Agee told us to see if we could help you,” Jack explained. “We’re doing private detective work, and Ben figured you needed some. A deputy’s always got to be going off to bust up a fight or something, but we can be here as long as it takes. We’ll catch your man.”
Conway heard him out. You couldn’t exactly say he listened politely, because it isn’t polite to make no expression at all when somebody else is talking. Rich Conway did smile a little. Since that was the same expression he most always wore, it amounted to none.
When Jack finished, Conway said, “I thank you, boys, but we’d better not do business. You aren’t of legal age and have no powers of arrest. If the sheriff’s office can’t catch a thief, I doubt you can.”
Jack started again. “You know as well as I do, Mr. Conway, anybody can make a citizen’s arrest. But that shouldn’t be necessary anyway. Once we find your thief, we’ll let the sheriff’s office make the arrest.”
Conway said, “Well, I know you’re both good boys, but at your age you can’t expect to be taken seriously.”
Jack snapped to his full height and said, “Down in Richmond they didn’t seem to think I was too young to send me a detective’s license.”
Conway was shaking his head from the moment Jack opened his mouth. “Thank you, boys, but no,” he said.
Yet that very night, Jack called me up and said, “Let’s go down to Rich Conway’s. He got hit again, and he wants to hire us.” A few minutes later Jack picked me up in his dad’s Impala, and we drove down into Lower Early and up the hill to Conway’s house. This time Conway had plenty of different expressions, starting with pure rage.
“He took my goddamn TV set!” Rich fumed. He paced rapidly back and forth across his living room, measuring his steps so he could always turn before the wall brought him up short. “That set was worth $750. I went to the kitchen to fix a milkshake and when I came back the TV was gone.” He pointed to marks pressed into the carpet showing where the big console TV had lately been. Beside those marks was an old black-and-white television, a table model sitting directly on the rug.
“What made it worth $750?” I asked.
Conway growled, “If I tell you it was worth $750, it was worth $750, boy.”
Then my own fuse burned down. “Listen, Mr. Conway, if we’re going to work for you, don’t call me ‘boy.’ And when one of us tries to get some information out of you, don’t try to make us feel like we’re out of line for asking!”
I had mouthed off like this before, to teachers; it was something I couldn’t help. Since this always got me into trouble in the past, I figured I was fired from my first detective job, and so I started for the door. But then Conway called me back.
“Stony,” he said, “come back. I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t understand your question.”
When I turned around again, Conway wore the same small smile I had seen that afternoon, but I could see the pulse in his temples throbbing, his breath coming in short gasps like he was having an asthma attack. I knew he was angrier over this little thing than most men would be if they caught somebody peeing in their kitchen sink. But in those days I believed that if an adult apologized, he intended to treat you better in the future, so when Conway offered to shake hands, I shook.
“The television set was a color set,” Conway explained. “Even with depreciation it was worth $800.”
I noticed that the “depreciation” had raised the value of the set fifty bucks in about a minute. But it didn’t matter; the main thing was that the set was valuable. Color television was still new in 1960, and so expensive that some places that sold TVs didn’t even stock color models yet.
“Is there anything unusual about this burglary, other than it happening while you were in the house?” Jack asked.
“Hell, yes,” said Conway. “Don’t you see? That black-and-white set wasn’t in here before. It was in the garage. He left the old set right beside where the new one was. It was even turned on to the same program!”
We figured the thief turned on the old set and turned up the volume as he turned down the volume of the new one; that way, nobody would notice the sudden silence when he unplugged the new one to carry it off.
Pretty soon one of the deputies, Bobby Lee Lawson, showed up and took a crime report from Conway. In the meantime, Jack and I followed a set of wheel marks on the carpet, which ended at the hard floor of the porch. “Must have used a dolly,” Jack said.
After the deputy left, Conway told us about each of the previous burglaries. At first the thefts had involved only money. I knew from my father that Rich kept a lot of cash on hand to back his closest crony, William Pinchbeck, in some of his deals. Pinchbeck owned a small soft drink bottling company but also ran an unlicensed and therefore illegal pawn business. Given his influence, Pinchbeck could have obtained a license easily, but Virginia law required the sheriff to inspect a licensed pawnbroker’s premises and records regularly to make sure no stolen property was being trafficked. Such an inspection eventually would have embarrassed Pinchbeck, and by association, Conway. Since opportunities sometimes came their way late at night, after the bank closed, Rich always had hidden cash at home. After some of those stashes disappeared, a couple of hundred each, Rich started locking all his spare cash in his car trunk. So then the thief took a fine, double-barreled Parker shotgun.
“I could have cried over that,” said Rich. “Hell, I did cry. I hadn’t used that shotgun in fifteen years, but it was my father’s, and you can’t buy those old engraved Parkers for almost any price today. Since then we’ve been lucky. He’s taken only things we got recently. A coin collection, a punch bowl, but nothing that belonged to our families. But now Mrs. Conway and I just live in fear. It would break her heart if they took something that belonged to her mother.”
I thought of the soft, pretty woman he called, after the custom of Early’s older families, “Mrs. Conway,” as if being married to her he still didn’t know her well enough to call her by her first name. Mother of his one daughter, Mrs. Conway loved him despite what people said about Rich and a long list of secretaries and female clients. But maybe she hadn’t heard the stories, because nobody would want to hurt Mrs. Conway by telling her one—not even to get at the son of a bitch she married.
Jack said, “Can’t you get the heirlooms out of the house?”
Rich shrugged helplessly. “How? Where do you store a grandfather clock or a dining room suite? Almost everything we have is heirloom. This is how we live. But I can tell you who’s behind it. I had a Negro girl working here. Susannah Penn. I always thought she was honest, because she’s Grady Penn’s daughter, and he’s one good Negro. She worked here since before Andy came here to live—what’s that, three years? But it had to be her, so I fired her. Only I guess she had a key, because it kept on happening.”
I said, “Mr. Conway, have you changed the locks?”
Rich shook his head. “I thought about it, but I didn’t really think it would help. There’s too many ways into an old house like this. Four doors. Lots of windows, and pretty soon it’ll be summer and we’ll have to leave the windows up, and they can cut screen wire and just come on in. Besides, how do I know the girl I got now isn’t letting ’em in?”
Jack said, “Fire her.”
Rich lifted his arms in a gesture of martyrdom. “But the next one would be just the same. And a white woman can’t keep house alone. Lazy and no-count as they are, you got to have a colored girl; a white girl just won’t work like the colored one, and you can’t afford to pay a white girl anyway.”
I said. “Speaking of wages, we better get our financial end straight.”
Jack brightened up. “That’s right, Mr. Conway. We need $10 a day each.”
For a minute I thought Rich had gone to sleep, because he just stood there, not moving, his smile frozen. Then I noticed that all the blood had drained from his face. He started tugging a beard he didn’t have. After a while he said, “When I was a boy I worked in a sawmill for ninety cents a day when I could get it and hoed corn for sixty cents when I couldn’t.”
I did not believe he had done either; his family had been rich for generations. Jack just accepted this ridiculous assertion to carry forward the conversation. “Yeah, but sawmilling and hoeing corn don’t involve bothering somebody that’s now got a double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun,” Jack said.
Jack and Rich dickered until they came up with a sliding fee. If we didn’t catch the thief in a month, we got no money at all. Rich would not budge on that. But the quicker we got results, the more we would get paid. If we caught our thief within a week, and got all the property back, we could make $700.
Seven hundred dollars! That would buy a good used car with $200 left over. I knew grown men who worked for forty dollars a week.
For $700, I would have put a T-shirt on a live wildcat.
= = =
The very next night I rode a bicycle out to Grady Penn’s house. I had put friction tape over the reflector on the back fender to make the bike harder to see, and the headlight hadn’t worked in a long time. Even so, I hid the bicycle in some weeds a little way from the house and walked the rest of the way. I had a cork and matches in one pocket, a packet of cheap hot dogs in another, and in a third my father’s nickel-plated .32 Owlhead revolver. Dad never seemed to remove this gun from its hiding place and was probably unaware I knew it existed, so I could borrow it from time to time, on the sly.
The Penn house sat in a little hollow at the foot of Flint Mountain, facing south. Smart farmers planted shade trees south of the house so that the same sun that came through their leafless branches in winter, to warm the home, would be blocked by their leaves in hot summer. Grady Penn’s shade trees were walnuts, splendid ones because they grew on the edge of the creek that the road followed up the valley. I knew that was why they were splendid because of a song I’d heard; it sounded like a hymn but was considered vaguely radical. It came from a Bible verse. I just now looked up the verse, and it says: And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
The creek flowed wide and shallow there, in rich bottomland soil without rocks, and it made almost no noise. To get to the house from the road I had to cross the creek on a bridge the Penns had made by sawing logs into half-round beams, laying them across the creek with the flat side up, and nailing stout boards across them.
Under such a bridge there is always a clear spot on the bank where people sit in the summer to enjoy the shade when fishing, or in the winter to stay out of the rain while waiting for a school bus. I went under there so nobody would see the flame when I burned the cork to blacken my face and make me harder to see. While I was under there, two of Susannah Penn’s younger brothers walked across the bridge and on toward the store about half a mile away. Those country general stores stayed open till 9 p.m. or so, while everything in Early closed at 6 p.m. sharp.
I slipped up close to the house, fed the wieners to the dogs to make friends, and went around to the side where I could look into the front room. I had never looked into a black family’s home before, and I can’t remember exactly what I thought I would see—maybe a den of thieves counting Rich Conway’s money. What I saw instead was Susannah and her boyfriend watching television with her grandmother. I was used to seeing black men and women in muddy bib overalls and plain work dresses, but Susannah was wearing a skirt and sweater like white girls wore, and a nice necklace of cultured pearls. Her boyfriend had on slacks and an argyle sweater-vest with a white shirt and necktie. I might have been looking in on Ernestine Thomas’s living room; her hair was as dark as Susannah’s, and her grandmother’s as white as Susannah’s grandmother’s. Except for their skin, these black people looked like my friends. They were middle class.
The old-fashioned room was like one in my grandfather’s house: walls of narrow vertical planks with a bead milled onto one edge, painted white; darker wood wainscoting halfway up the walls so dirt wouldn’t show from children’s grubby hands. At one end of the room was a fireplace, now fitted with a stovepipe connecting the chimney with a heating stove. The Penns were a large family so there were a number of chairs and couches, mostly unmatched but comfortable-looking.
One of those couches was in the way so I couldn’t see the television, and therefore couldn’t tell if it was Conway’s. I stuck around anyway, telling myself I would just wait to see if any other clue might indicate Susannah was our thief. But besides that, I stayed for a prurient reason. I had grown up hearing legends about the athletic nature of sexual intercourse between blacks, and I thought that sooner or later the old woman would leave the young folks alone. Pretty soon the grandmother did head off to bed, and the show commenced. But I had taken my kid sister to movies that were sexier than this. All the action was around what we used to call “first base,” with some well-fielded attempts to steal second.
After a couple of minutes Susannah sat up and shook herself.
“I’m sorry, Henry, I just don’t feel like cuddling tonight,” she said. Henry stood up and walked around for a minute, keeping his back to her. He had an erection, didn’t want her to see it, and was trying to walk it off.
“Henry,” she said to his back, “we’ll go to a drive-in movie tomorrow night. That’ll be better.”
Henry turned around, a little embarrassed. “Well, Susannah, I’m a little broke right now. I had to buy a lot of parts yesterday. Couldn’t we do something else?”
She said, “I’ll pay for it.”
Henry shook his head. “I ain’t gonna let a woman pay my way.” The male ethic in that statement reminded me who he was. I recognized Henry now as the hardworking man who ran a fix-it shop in one of the old storefront buildings on Steep Street. My father patronized him rather than his white competitors because when Henry fixed something it stayed fixed. My father also claimed Henry was unusually honest, but then Susannah said something that changed my mind about that.
She said, “Let’s go anyway, Henry. It ain’t like it’s really my money. Since Mr. Conway fired me, we might as well have a good time with his money.” She smiled and pulled her purse from behind the couch, opened it, and took out a folded bun of bills big as a plug of tobacco.
Henry didn’t want to take any, but Susannah pressed a twenty-dollar bill on him, and in a minute more they were necking on the sofa again.
I heard water running in a tub somewhere else in the house; someone was drawing a bath. Just then the two boys I had seen walking to the store came in the front door, laughing at how they had caught Susannah and Henry making out. They hugged and pretended to kiss each other, and when one grabbed the other one’s knee Susannah raised her fist like a hammer and ran at them. They fled, still laughing, to the next room.
I took advantage of the hubbub to slip around the corner, looking for another window I could peek into to see if I could spot a punch bowl or something else that had been stolen from the Conways. But I had forgotten something important. Though most rural families around Early had installed indoor plumbing in the last ten or twelve years, they also kept the old backyard privies, as spares to use when the indoor facilities were occupied. And so I suddenly came face to face with one of the boys who had come home from the store.
I was just seventeen years old, which is to say dumber than an oyster, and instead of running like a spooked tomcat as I should have, I pulled my father’s pistol and said, “Make a sound and I’ll plug ya!”
The fault of this strategy was that Susannah’s brother was even younger than me and just as reckless. He instantly brought his fist down on my wrist like John Henry’s hammer, which made me drop the gun, then he whipped out a jackknife and tried to cut my head off. Stumbling backward to avoid the slash, I saw the glint of my gun on the grass to my right and dove for it. Somehow I snagged it and I rolled onto my back. I pointed the gun up at this game little guy, who was still coming at me with the knife.
My God, he’s gonna make me kill him! I thought. But when he saw I had the gun again, the boy ran away toward the house, screaming, “Night riders! Night riders!”
I ran too, hard as I could toward the creek. I thought I recognized the kid as Roosevelt Penn, the boy I had met the previous fall when the Penns were all working at the Martins’ orchard. I hoped he didn’t recognize me in my burnt cork, but that wasn’t my immediate concern. I was praying that nobody in the house got hold of a firearm before I crossed the bridge.
I was on the bridge when I heard Henry yell, “Stop, or I’ll kill ya.”
If I just got across the bridge and turned to the right, I would have the bushes along the creek and the big walnut trees between me and the gun. But Henry fired just as I leaned into the turn, legs and arms pumping hard. Most of the expanding pattern of shot passed directly in front of me. I felt shotgun pellets hit the heel of my clenched left hand, stinging like I’d caught a hard line drive to third. I expected another charge to catch me solid, so I poured on more speed than I knew I had in me. No second shot came.
I knew Henry would be looking for the lights of a car and the sound of a motor, and I had neither, so I grabbed the bicycle from the dead weeds where I’d hidden it and rode hard, putting my full weight on each pedal alternately to accelerate as fast as possible. Luck blessed me with light traffic, but at the first sign of headlights I rode the bicycle over the shoulder, dropped it flat on the creek bank, and fell beside it, panting and whimpering with the pain of my wounded hand. Several cars passed, a couple at very high speed as if coming from town on some important errand, but I was scared to show my face, and nobody came looking for me over that bank. I waited a long time.
While I waited, I wondered what the hell I was going to do about the shotgun pellets in my hand. I couldn’t see a doctor because a doctor would tell my parents, and maybe the law. I was still on probation! I realized I would have to fix the wound myself. With the fingers of my unwounded hand, I could feel three small holes, and I could feel two small pellets buried in the meat, but not too deep. I thanked God the Penns’ scattergun hadn’t been loaded with buckshot. These were smaller pellets, probably for rabbits or crows. I’d seen rabbits run off after somebody winged them like this, so I figured the wound wouldn’t kill me. My main concern, as I washed off the blood and burnt cork in the creek, was how to get home and in bed without my parents noticing the damage.
My father was at some meeting or another, but Mom spotted me through the open door of the office, where she sat in the lamplight grading papers. “Stony, you’re coming in pretty late,” she called.
“Yes ma’am,” I said.
Then she saw my muddy clothes. “What in the world happened to you?” she said.
“I hit a slick spot with my bike and I crashed,” I lied.
“Well, I hope you aren’t hurt,” she said.
“No,” I lied again. I was holding my wounded hand against my thigh trying not to whimper with the pain. She didn’t believe me, but she had lived her whole life with mountain men who wouldn’t admit they were hurt, because doing so betrayed weakness. She took my word for it, as she took theirs.
“Take a bath before you go to bed,” she said. “You have a smear of something black on your face.”
In the upstairs bathroom I peeled off my clothes and ran the bathwater loud, then sat on the toilet lid to examine my hand. When I got a good look, I decided the worst threat was blood poisoning. But my tetanus shots were up to date, and I could stave off infection by taking some antibiotics I had left over from a bout with strep throat. I dug two of the pellets out of my hand with an X-Acto craft knife and tweezers dipped in alcohol. They were #4 size—rabbit shot. They would have gone in deeper had I not been out of good rabbit range when Henry fired. Even so, trying to dig out the deepest pellet proved too painful, so it’s still in there to this day. I bandaged the hand the same way I had plenty of times before, when I really had cut it falling off a bicycle, and I stuck to my story with everybody but Jack.
“You should have waited till I could go with you,” said Jack the next day. “I could have gone tonight.”
“If there’d been two of us to shoot at, he’d of probably killed one,” I told him.
“There wasn’t any reason to be any shooting,” he growled. “I swear, you could fuck up a wet dream.” He derided my incompetence, but what I think really got his goat was that I had stolen an adventure. He was mad because I got shot instead of him! Of course, I wouldn’t let him forget it. I described the incident in detail when we walked to school together, and again after school on our way to the sheriff’s office.
“What kind of knife did he pull on you?” Jack would ask.
“A big switchblade,” I would answer. “When he snapped it open, it sounded like slapping a ruler on a table. Hell, he didn’t need any switchblade anyway. He was a strong son of a bitch.”
In fact, the boy who had pulled the knife was shorter than me, and the knife was probably a regular pocket knife. But a person had to exaggerate to get Jack’s full attention and make him understand how scary, and how genuinely dangerous, an experience had been.
Aside from the hand hurting like concentrated hell, I felt really good. I had solved our first case in twenty-four hours, got shot in a fashion I would survive, and expected to tell Mary Lou about it someday. Who could predict what form her sympathy would take?
We did not plan to tell Really Big Ben anything more than the fact that Susannah had the money. But the second I told him that, Ben stood up, grabbed each of us by the arm, and dragged us into the interrogation room, the only private place in the office. He made us sit on opposite sides of the table while he paced, alternately threatening us and cursing as he recited most of the details I had purposely omitted from my account of the previous night, just like he’d been there himself.
I had encountered the third degree before from my parents, but never from a six-foot-three professional lawman wearing a uniform and a pistol. Within a very few minutes I confessed the few points Ben did not already know. At the end of it, Jack dared to ask, “Ben, how did you know about it?”
Ben answered, “Because when somebody shoots at a prowler, they damn near always report it to the police. And the Penns did. The second I saw you come in with those bandages I suspected, and when you told me Susannah Penn had the money, I knew. You went up there where you had no damn business going, carrying a pistol you had no damn business even having. They think the Ku Klux Klan is riding, and the word is out all through the Negro community, and they’re scared, jumpy, and buying shotgun shells by the case. And the worst of it is, that actually does stir up the Klan! You know those jackasses are always looking for trouble!”
Jack said, “I didn’t think there was a Klan around here.” I had not told him about the Klan robes in the garret, because I had promised Gina I would not tell anyone.
Ben said, “You’re a Southerner for God’s sake. Where’d you ever live there wasn’t a Klan? Mostly they stay quiet around here, but they were already riled up ’cause some colored college kids down in Greensboro want to buy a hot dog at Woolworth’s. Now you’ve got each side thinking the other one’s about to attack! You’ve set up a powder keg and lit the fuse.”
He sat down in a third chair, at the end of the table so Jack was on his left and I was to his right. He bit his lip and shook his head. Then he started chewing me out again.
“Furthermore, you damn near shot a sixteen-year-old boy,” Ben said.
Jack said, “Sixteen-year-old?”
I said, “I told you he was strong, not old. Ben, I wouldn’t of shot him. And I did get the evidence I went after.”
Ben said, “You didn’t get any evidence, you damn nitwit! All you got was them saying something about Rich Conway’s money. They could be talking about the money he paid her that she saved up. And the fact they called the sheriff about a prowler indicates they may not feel guilty about anything.”
“Ben,” I said, “please don’t make us drop the case.”
Ben shook his head. “You’d sooner or later kill somebody. Or more likely get killed. I can’t let that happen.”
Then Jack said, “Ben, we aren’t going to live tame even if you pull us off this case. We might get killed doing something else. You might as well let us try to collect our fee from Conway and maybe do something worthwhile.”
Ben stared at Jack and drummed his fingers on the green rubber top of the interview table, the only furniture in the room besides the three hard chairs. A few minutes earlier, when I had walked victoriously into the office, the $700 we could earn had loomed in my mind like a pirate treasure. I had pictured it as a bushel basket of money, all in ones, money that could buy a car, take girls to nightclubs—anything. Now the bills began to blow away in the wind, out of my grasp.
“Ben,” I pleaded, “I promise you nothing like this will happen again.”
Ben sighed and stood up. “Stony, I promise that if it does, your ass is grass, and I’ll be the lawnmower. I mean it.” He started to leave the room but as he did he reached over and put his hand under Jack’s armpit, feeling through the jacket for the pistol. For once Jack didn’t have it on him, which I guess defused Ben’s anger a little.
“That goes for you, too,” Ben told Jack. Then he added, “Keep me posted.”
The door closed behind him. My clothes were sweaty and my stomach was in a knot. I felt like a wrung-out mop.
Soon after, Jack asked Ben how the Klan could operate if the sheriff knew about it. Jack did not outright endorse the “advancement of colored people,” but he didn’t like bullies, and the Klan were bullies.
“We can’t stop it because it’s not illegal,” Ben said with a shrug. “Some of ’em do illegal stuff, but belonging to the Klan is legal. Constitutionally protected.”
“Where does the Constitution say you can belong to the KKK?” Jack demanded.
Ben answered, “It says you can practice any religion, and some claim the Klan is their religion. It says there’s freedom of assembly, too, so they can hold their rallies and their Klavern meetings, or whatever they call them, and it guarantees free speech, even if what they say is mostly bullshit.”
I put in my own two cents’ worth. “Rednecks running around burning churches and hanging people.”
Ben said, “How many you know? I know a bunch of ’em, and they’re wrong as a milk cow in a mule team, but they at least think they’re right. Not like a holdup man who knows he’s doing something wrong. A lot of ’em have just that one blind spot, and on any other matter they’ll do the right thing. So I don’t burn bridges with ’em. Makes it easier to keep my eye on ’em.”
Then he looked at Jack and said, “They even claim to be an auxiliary to law enforcement. Like some other people I know.”
= = =
By checking the dates of the various burglaries, we discovered that most of them happened on Wednesdays and Fridays. The following day being Friday, we decided to watch the Conway house. As we headed there, I saw the bulge under Jack’s arm, and it upset me.
“Jack, we promised Ben!” I said.
Jack grinned. “You promised; I didn’t. And what you promised was that nothing like the other night would happen. And it won’t. You couldn’t make something like that happen again in a hundred years.” He smiled and hummed a snatch of “Basin Street Blues” to himself.
We couldn’t cover all the doors and windows of the Conway house from our two positions back in the surrounding woods, so we asked Andy to watch the front from a curtained window on the second floor. We sat for more than an hour in the wet woods. It was cold, but pleasant; the snow had melted off and the redbuds were beginning to bloom, the tips breaking out the color of raspberry sherbet.
But the initial pleasure of being in the spring woods soon turned into the most boring work I had ever done. I couldn’t read, do my homework, or anything else. We wasted three or four more days watching the house. Finally, as we trudged home one night, I told Jack, “I’ve had it. We’ve been watching for days and all we have to show for it is a frozen butt apiece. And time is costing us money.”
Jack looked at the dark sky. “Have you ever studied the stars?” he asked.
“I can find the North Star,” I said, pointing.
“You’re pointing west,” he said.
“Well, what’ve the stars got to do with it?”
He answered, “I just thought if you’re not using that telescope your father has in his den to study the stars, why not use it to study Susannah Penn’s house?”
The very next evening we climbed the hill across the road from the Penns’ place and focused my father’s Sputnik-watching scope on the door. Not too many minutes later, Henry drove up, Susannah opened the door for him, and through the open door we saw Conway’s color television.
Jack wanted to go get some shotguns and just walk in and make them turn over everything that was missing. “They aren’t but a bunch of niggers, and they aren’t going to tackle two white men with pump shotguns,” he said.
“That one the other night didn’t tackle me with a shotgun,” I reminded Jack. “He just used a good right hand and a pocket knife, but he sure tackled me. Anyway, I promised Ben I wouldn’t pull any more crap like that.”
So we went back to town and told Really Big Ben. He got a search warrant that very night and called Bobby Lee Lawson to help him serve it.
Bobby Lee had an acne-scarred face and crooked buck teeth, but he was smarter than ordinary people, and had memorized much of the Bible when he was ten. He also had been baptized and “saved” in an old-fashioned, fundamentalist way, which made him utterly fearless. If you believe your name is already written on the right side of God’s ledger, even the likelihood of your own death might not bother you.
We were there when Ben briefed him in the office. “Are you coming in with us?” Bobby Lee asked Jack and me; then he shot a questioning look at Ben.
“Oh, no, thank you,” I said, before Ben could yell, “Hell, no!”
I added, “If I’m gonna be a detective, the fewer people see me the better.” Especially, I didn’t want that kid Roosevelt, the one I pointed a pistol at, to see me.
But Jack said, “Ben, don’t you think it would be a good idea if we follow you out there and sneak around back before you knock on the door, in case anybody runs out the back? I don’t mean try to stop ’em or anything, just for us to be way back from the house and see who runs and what he’s carrying.”
To my surprise, Ben agreed.
We followed Ben out to the Penns’ house and took up our positions around back. But as soon as we knew Ben and Bobby Lee were inside, and nobody was coming out the back, we disobeyed our orders and slipped up to the house. I looked in the window and saw Bobby Lee with his back to the wall, right beside the door, smiling inoffensively but vigilant in case some unexpected trouble occurred. Ben was looking at the back of the television for the chassis number. In a minute he said, “This is Conway’s, all right.”
Susannah was on the sofa with Henry and her mother on either side of her, each holding one of her hands. Mr. Penn was standing behind the grandmother’s rocker, his hands on her shoulders, and the kids just scattered around. Nobody said anything until Ben straightened up, looked at Susannah, and said, “Where’s the rest of the stuff?”
“Rest of what stuff?” said Susannah.
Then Henry burst out, “Hey, you talk to me. I brought that set here. She nor her family don’t know nothing about it. But I don’t know what you mean ‘rest of the stuff,’ either.”
Ben said, “So what are you doing with Rich Conway’s TV set?”
Henry said, “When you tell me, that’s the first I knew it was Mr. Conway’s. A white man brought it into the shop. He say fix it by tomorrow. I think from the way he act, that set hot! But I fix it like he say, and he don’t come back. Well, I don’t want it around because I’m scared it’s hot, so why not bring it over and let my girl and her folks watch a color TV? I don’t think the man gonna come back ever, but if he do, I can come over here and get it for him.”
Ben had the little smile on his face he had when he didn’t believe people. “How did he act that made you think it was hot?”
Henry said, “The set brand new, should still be under warranty. Why don’t he take it back to the dealer? And if not a dealer, why me? Don’t many white people come to my place, and the ones that do are folks I know. ’Cept him. Then when Susannah walks in, he just turns and walks out, like he don’t want her to see his face. Don’t even wait for a claim ticket.”
Ben said, “Did you see his face, Susannah?”
“No,” she said. “But he drove off in a green-and-white pickup. Think it was a Ford. Mr. Ben, it happened like he said. The part I saw.”
Bobby Lee asked a question. “Don’t you have some money belonging to Mr. Conway?”
Susannah snapped, “I never stole a cent from that man. I work for him three years for twenty dollars a week, six hours a day and six days a week, and then he fires me and fixes it so I can’t get no more jobs—just ’cause he lost track of money I could of stole a hundred times over.”
“Let me see your purse,” said Bobby Lee. She snagged it from behind the couch and threw it on the floor at his feet. He opened it and pulled out the wad of money. “There’s $215 here. What’s an out-of-work housekeeper doing with that much money?”
“It was given to me,” Susannah said, quietly, her hand in front of her mouth.
“Who gave it to you?” Ben asked.
She wouldn’t say. Ben and Bobby Lee tried to bargain with her first, then suggested she could go to jail. They threatened to arrest Henry for receiving stolen property. But she wouldn’t say where she got the money.
Then, while Bobby Lee watched the family, Ben searched every room of the house. He opened every drawer, looked under every bed, in every cabinet and shoe box. He didn’t ransack the house. He put everything back very carefully, but he couldn’t have missed much. Then they served warrants on Henry’s shop and his house, and searched his car. All they came up with was a work order for the TV set, with no name on the order and, in the trash, some broken tubes he’d replaced, which indicated somebody had dropped the TV set or at least bumped it pretty hard. Henry had offered to show them both those things before they even mentioned a warrant. So they took the TV set but didn’t take Henry, or Susannah, or the money. They did tell them not to leave town or spend the money till the matter got straightened out.
Next day Ben let us go along when he took the television back to Rich Conway’s house and told him how the Penns got it. Rich should have been pleased to recover the valuable TV, but he was a hard man to satisfy.
“You don’t mean you believe that story of theirs?” he said to Really Big Ben, accusingly.
“Well, I believe ’em partway,” Ben said. “I believe ’em about the television set, but not about the money. Only thing is, I can’t be right on both. They either stole the TV and the money, or they didn’t steal either one. I brought the television back because I know it’s yours. But I don’t know yet if the money is yours.”
Jack spoke up then, out of turn. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Conway. We got this far. We’ll get the rest of the stuff. The TV set is about a third of the loot. I wonder if you’d consider this case a third closed and give us a third of our fee now?”
Conway smiled. “That wasn’t the deal, Jack. I agreed to pay so well only to inspire you to move quickly and diligently. You must recover all the property to get paid. And you must do it pretty soon.” His mood had changed completely, from anger to sly content. He was happier not to pay us than he’d have been if we returned all his property.
As the four of us—Jack, Bobby Lee, Ben, and I—headed down the walkway to the street, Jack turned and extended his arm toward the Conway house, pointing a finger, leaning into it, his other hand clenched and extended behind him, a dramatic gesture like a sorcerer in a comic book. In a mighty, solemn voice he spoke a terrifying curse: “May your favorite program be replaced by The Pinky Lee Show!”
We weren’t getting anywhere with Rich Conway, so we figured we’d talk to Andy. That Sunday afternoon we met up in his room in the front gable of the house. It was a room full of a smart kid’s hobbies. There were good airplane models and good books. There were a couple of birds he had stuffed himself. He had two aquariums, no water in either. A pretty, harmless garter snake lived in one of them, and in opposite corners of the other, a couple of big black widow spiders, which he raised on captured insects.
It had occurred to Jack and me that new and expensive possessions might indicate that Andy had stolen the cash, but we didn’t see any. He had a custom pool cue inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a high-quality recurve hunting bow hung on the back of the door, but they didn’t look new.
Jack was sitting on Andy’s bed and I was standing by the door. Andy was sitting backwards on his desk chair with his arms crossed on the hard back and his chin resting on his arms.
“Susannah helped raise you for three years,” Jack reminded Andy. “You must know her pretty well. What do you think she would of done with the stuff if she took it?”
He replied, “Sold it, I guess. To tell you the truth, Jack, I don’t much think she took it.”
I was surprised. “Why, if not her, who could of?”
Andy answered, “Anybody in town. The locks on all these doors open with skeleton keys, and you can buy them at a five-and-ten.”
Jack said, “She’s still the best suspect.”
Andy was sitting up straight in his chair now.
He said, “You think that because you don’t know her. I do. She doesn’t steal.”
As we left the house I commented to Jack, “He’s awful sure.”
Jack said, “Maybe he’s right. If he’s so damn sure she didn’t take it, why don’t we go ask her who she thinks did?”
I wasn’t happy about going back out to the Penn house, but I figured if I wore clothes altogether different from the ones I had worn the other night, and if I tried to talk in a deeper-than-usual voice and didn’t wear any burnt cork, they might not recognize me.
As Jack drove the Impala up the rough dirt driveway to the Penn place we could see seven or eight black children in the almost bare-dirt front yard, playing softball. I recognized only one, Roosevelt, who looked to be the oldest and was throwing easy pitches to a batter who looked like a younger version of himself. Then a woman on the porch stood up and yelled something at the children. They all turned to look at us, then went away, variously into the house, behind it, and toward the small barn well away from the house. The woman stayed and continued working at some project. When Jack drove into the yard and parked, we could see it was Susannah Penn herself, filling the compartments of cardboard egg cartons with soil, which she took from a galvanized bucket with an old iron tablespoon. The cartons would go in a cold frame and start garden seedlings, I guessed. We asked if we could talk to her for a minute.
“About what?” she asked, wiping her hands on the leg of her bib overalls. Then without waiting for an answer she said, “I can’t make you out. You’re too young to be cops but you look like ’em anyhow.” She gestured toward me and said, “I’ve seen you before but can’t remember where.”
I said we had met the previous fall in the Martin orchard. I introduced myself and Jack, politely, and let Jack take it from there. Jack said, “We work for Rich Conway. We’re private investigators. We think maybe you didn’t steal from him. But if you told us where you got the money, we could go on and leave you alone.”
Then she said, “Who are you really? I don’t think you do work for Mr. Conway.”
“Call him,” Jack said. “You want me to call him for you?”
Susannah stared for a minute, then said, “Yeah. Come on in if you want to.”
We sat in the living room on a couch. There was an old black-and-white TV where Rich Conway’s color set recently had been. From the phone on an end table, Jack called Conway at his office. Jack said, “Susannah Penn wants to speak to you about our case,” and he put the telephone in Susannah’s hand.
She asked, “Mr. Conway, do these boys really work for you? Can I tell ’em where I got the money?”
I was five feet from the phone but I still heard the answer. “Of course you can tell them where you got the money! What the blue hell do you think I’m paying ’em to find out?” He sounded drunk. She hung up on him. “I don’t have to take that when I don’t work for him anymore,” she said.
“Okay, I don’t know why he ain’t told you, but I got the money from that crazy old bugger himself. From Rich Conway. He sent me $200 through the mail, along with a note saying he was sorry he fired me, and telling me if I kept my mouth shut about getting the money, he’d send me a little more from time to time until I got a new job. But he didn’t sign the note, and anybody could of written it, so I can’t use it to get no new job. I threw that note in the trash.”
Jack and I chewed on this information for a minute before I asked, “Then will you tell us who you think robbed him?”
Susannah shook her head. “They ain’t done anything to me. I ain’t going to put on them the kind of trouble Mr. Conway put on me, without knowing for sure they did it.”
Back at Jack’s house I opened Sun Drop colas while Jack called Rich Conway. The conversation was short. “I never gave that girl that money,” Conway said. He sounded apoplectic. “I never sent her any letter. She’s lying and I’m going to have her arrested.”
“Please, Mr. Conway, just bear with us a little longer,” said Jack. “We’ll nail ’em. But please don’t have her arrested yet because I think she might lead us to the right people.” Finally he got Conway to agree.
Jack hung up the telephone and sat down in the breakfast nook. “I wish I believed she would lead us there,” he said. “The real reason I don’t want her arrested is I just don’t think anymore that she did it. If she was slick enough to pull this off so long without getting caught, she’d have a better explanation for where she got the money, right? Maybe she got it somewhere illegal—bootlegging, prostitution, something like that.”
I said, “But Jack, if she were doing that she’d still have a better story. Why would she tell us Rich Conway gave her the money when she knows we’re gonna ask him? Makes no sense. Jack, is it possible somebody really did send her that money through the mail? Somebody who felt sorry for her, and somebody with enough money to do it?”
Jack said, “Mrs. Conway is nice enough to do it. And I imagine she’s got some money of her own.” He got up and spread peanut butter on saltine crackers while I thought about Mrs. Conway. He made six cracker sandwiches for each of us, carried them to the breakfast nook in his bare hands. We ate them before either of us spoke again.
Finally, I said, “I think she would of got Susannah another job instead. That’s what Susannah needs more—and wants more. And Mrs. Conway could do that. White women will fight over good hired girls! All Mrs. Conway had to do was tell one of her friends why Rich fired her, and add, ‘Why, Rich won’t have her in the house but I jes’ don’t believe that good little gal stole anything, and I do hope she gets a good job soon.’ Susannah would of had a job the next day.”
Jack nodded slowly, again and again. He sipped his soft drink. Then he said, “Maybe the thief sent it. Because he felt sorry for getting her fired.” He mulled that over then continued, “So who’s the thief? We know it ain’t the new hired girl, because it started before she got there. We decided already Mrs. Conway wouldn’t send the note, so it wasn’t her. The only other insider is Andy.”
I asked, “What does a kid that young do with nearly $2,000 worth of stuff in two months?”
Jack said, “Fenced everything but the cash, most likely. Which means he didn’t get nearly full value. Counting the cash, maybe he had $1,000 or $1,200, if that. And he gave some of the cash to Susannah.”
“So, what does he do with even that much?”
Jack said, “Well, I don’t know. But Andy’s the best idea I got now, and we gotta do something. We’ve lost nearly two weeks. The most we can make now is $525. If we don’t catch somebody in the next three days, it drops to $350.”
= = =
We decided to look into where a person might go to sell stolen property. The most obvious fence was William Pinchbeck, but we dismissed him as unlikely because he was one of Conway’s cronies. Other possibilities were a farmer who lived outside town and a young man, new in town, who had a junk shop in Lower Early right on River Road, near its intersection with the path leading up the washed-out portion of Steep Street. Jack went to check him out, and when he parked by the back door of the junk shop, he saw a green-and-white Ford pickup like the one driven by the man Henry said left the television set at his fix-it shop.
If Andy was our thief, the junk shop would have been easy for him to reach. It was just down the hill from his house, and Susannah probably walked by it every day on her way to work. The fence might have seen her and feared she had seen him. That would explain why he spooked and rushed out of Henry’s shop when Susannah walked in. It would also explain why the thief never came back for the TV set.
Then we told Ben what we had found out, and what we thought about it. We thought we had it all figured out. All we needed was for Henry to identify the junk shop owner and Ben to serve some warrants, and we’d be in the money.
But Ben didn’t want to do it. “We can serve a warrant,” he said, “but let’s wait. I don’t think we would find anything now. We’ve been watching this new guy, and we think that when he buys something hot, he takes it right out the back door, puts it in his truck, and takes it somewhere else to hide it or sell it. He certainly won’t have any of Conway’s stuff there if he thinks Susannah recognized him.”
I said, “Time’s running out on our fee, Ben. Couldn’t we at least try it?”
Ben said, “Look, I’ll serve a search warrant if you guys want me to. But it’s an all-or-nothing move. It warns the fence he’s under suspicion. If you don’t catch him red-handed, he and the thief just lay low awhile, and you don’t meet your deadline. It’s your money, so I’m going to let you decide whether I go for that warrant.”
Jack bit his lip. Then he turned to me. “He’s right, Stony. We gotta wait.”
So we went back to watching the house, but this time we took turns and we didn’t tell Andy. Nothing happened on Monday, but on Tuesday, Andy left the house at 7 p.m. That seemed all right because choir practice was at 7:30, but I followed him anyway, just to be thorough.
As soon as Andy got out of sight of his front door, he cut back into Conway’s private woods. I had no idea why. I didn’t know how to follow somebody in the woods at night without being heard, so I could only wait and hope Andy came out. In a couple of minutes, Andy emerged riding a beat-up old bicycle. That was odd, because Andy owned one of the best bikes in town, an imported three-speed Raleigh, yet here he was riding a junker he had taken from a hiding place in the woods. Furthermore, it looked like he meant to take the back way to the church, via River Road and the dirt trail that led into the bottom of Steep Street, where the street itself was washed out. This was the quickest way, but a muddy, miserable route this time of year.
That would also take Andy past the fence’s shop, so I wondered if he was going to choir practice at all. I followed as quickly as I could, but I was on foot and couldn’t keep up with the bike, and Andy was soon out of sight. When I came to the fence’s shop I looked around, but it was closed, and I saw no sign of the bike. I figured Andy really had gone on to the church, so I made my way up the muddy path and into the foot of Steep Street.
I had been on Steep Street in the daytime, when it looked poor but tolerably friendly. In the daytime, people waved at me from the doorways of businesses, and the street’s collection of old houses sat proudly behind their picket fences like an illustration on the sheet music for “Home Sweet Home.” But at night the place seemed more sinister somehow. There were no streetlights, and I couldn’t recognize the black faces in the dark. I felt out of place and scared, and a couple of times I stepped into an alley or vacant lot to avoid the lights of passing cars. I walked through the business district as quickly as I could, on the side of the street away from the cafés and hotel and the two beer joints.
When I emerged on Main Street I felt safer, and by the time I reached the church, I could hear the youth choir practicing inside. I didn’t see Andy’s junker bicycle, and supposed he’d gone elsewhere. I thought if he was still riding somewhere along the well-lighted main streets of the town, I might spot him from the belfry. I had climbed that belfry ladder many times on my court-ordered bell-ringing service, which included cleaning pigeon crap from the bell tracks. I figured I could climb that ladder in the dark.
But as I slipped around the back of the church, looking for an unlocked door I could enter unseen, I found Andy’s bike hidden behind some landscaping shrubs. That meant Andy was in the church after all, so I abandoned my plan to climb the steeple and thought about what the bike meant. Hiding it here, and hiding it near his house, and riding it through a scary backstreet when he didn’t have to—well, that meant Andy didn’t want anybody to know he was traveling by bike. Why he didn’t want people to know that, I couldn’t figure out.
The youth choir had been practicing a complicated, high-minded cantata to sing when Easter came around. After a few minutes they changed over to a spiritual:
Go, tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere.
Go, tell it on the mountain,
That Jesus Christ is born.
It was really a Christmas song, but young people liked its full volume and sang it at any season. We didn’t sing spirituals in the regular church service, but everybody loved them, so at choir practice the director would sometimes call for a couple to reward the kids after they put in a good evening’s work. Spirituals always signaled the end of practice. I hid myself and waited to see what Andy would do when he came out.
Andy came out right away and started walking toward the residential section of town, as if he intended to walk home the long way. The rest of the choir members came out after him—pretty girls and handsome boys, some of the latter flirting with Gina and Ernestine. The girls graciously brushed aside their admirers and got into Gina’s family car, the black Galaxie. Then, sure enough, as soon as everybody cleared out, Andy came sneaking back to reclaim his bike. He waited until there were no cars in sight, then quickly rode across Main Street and dove into the entrance to Steep Street. The short way home.
I ran to the nearby courthouse and called Jack from the public telephone beside the back door, and told him to pick me up in a car. I would start running down Main Street toward his house. He met me before I had gone three blocks, and we tore down the streets to Lower Early. We parked at the Early Bird Café, which had both an outdoor phone booth and a view of the street in front of the Conway house—the street Andy would come down. Jack telephoned the Conway house and asked for Andy, disguising his voice, but Mrs. Conway said Andy had not returned from choir practice.
“Choir practice isn’t over until nine thirty,” said Mrs. Conway. “He won’t get home until a little after ten. Who should I tell him called?”
Jack kept his voice young and high, and ignored her question. “Oh, ten is past my bedtime. I’ll just see him at school tomorrow. Good night.” He hung up and said, “She thinks choir practice lasts until nine thirty.”
“No,” I said, “it always lets out before nine. That means Andy’s somewhere else for an hour every Tuesday night. He’s probably somewhere up on Steep Street or on River Road.”
We left the Impala where it was because it was easily recognizable, then half ran up River Road, the town’s former main street. It was relatively wide, well paved in concrete fifty years earlier, but now it carried almost no traffic. Along the lower side of the street were the foundations of flood-ruined buildings; a few still stood, abandoned. On the higher side of the street were a few businesses, including the fence’s shop, and a few company houses for mill workers sat high over the road cut, well above the reach of all but the worst floods.
After about half a mile, River Road turned into a narrow dirt road, and the pavement made an abrupt left turn up the hill into what had been the bottom of Steep Street. But very shortly thereafter the concrete surface of Steep Street narrowed under a delta of mud; farther up the hill the concrete had been undercut entirely by erosion and now lay in a broken jumble, bypassed by a narrow bicycle-and-foot path—the same one I had taken earlier that night. Only this time, as we crossed the last stretch of smooth concrete, we saw the straight red-mud ribbon of a bicycle track. In the beam of Jack’s flashlight the mud track was wet and fresh. “That’s him,” Jack said.
We hotfooted it back down the hill following the muddy trail, which diminished rapidly as the mud got wiped off the tires. It was faint as a whisper at the bottom of the hill, where it turned off the pavement onto a narrow road that continued up along the river. Here the ruts the bike made in the muddy road were easy to follow; we didn’t even have to use the flashlight. Soon we came to a sprawling single-story wooden building set on a pier over the river itself. A lone light burned on a pole near the front of the building. A couple of old but pricey cars, a 1950 Cadillac and a ’51 Mercury, were parked outside. The bike leaned against the light pole, locked in place with a chain.
“What the hell is this place?” Jack asked.
“It’s the old boat club,” I explained. “Years ago, when the fishing was good up here behind the dam, they used to rent rowboats, or you could rent a place to tie up your own boat. Like a marina for poor folks. They would clean the fish you caught, cook them for you, sell soft drinks and bait. It closed down when I was six or seven years old. But now it looks like somebody might be living there.”
We stepped off the road into the bushes, caught our breath, and speculated about what was going on. Just about that time, the 10 p.m. whistle blew at the knitting mill to signal the end of the swing shift. A minute or two later Andy came out the door, unlocked his junker bicycle from the light pole, and rode away down the narrow, twisting dirt road, without a light, as fast as if it were daylight.
“That kid’s been here before,” Jack surmised. We followed him as fast as we could. But before we got to the end of the road, we saw the lights of a car coming our way. We ducked into the bushes on general principle. As soon as the car passed, another came, and then another.
“Why is all this traffic on a road to one old building?” I asked.
“There’s something going on up at that boathouse,” Jack said. “Look, Andy’s already ahead of us, and we know he’s probably going home because his grandma expected him a little after ten. Let’s go back to the boathouse and take another look.”
Back at the boathouse, we saw the vehicles we had met now parked under the dusk-to-dawn light. As we watched, several more came, each discharging one or two men, until there were ten or twelve cars and pickup trucks parked under the light. We began to hear loud jukebox music and shrill feminine laughter. It occurred to me this might be a “nip joint,” otherwise called a “speakeasy.” These illegal barrooms had disappeared elsewhere with the end of Prohibition, but selling hard liquor by the drink remained illegal in Virginia, so they still sprang up occasionally in the Old Dominion.
“They’re selling whiskey in there,” I said.
Jack looked at me with disdain. “Grow up, will you? Whiskey ain’t all they’re selling. Didn’t you hear those women laughing? And didn’t you notice that everybody who drove up is a man? They’re selling snatch, and Andy needs money to buy it!”
The scales of innocence dropped from my eyes. A whorehouse! An honest-to-God whorehouse, right here in Early, not a mile from my own door. And that fifteen-year-old twerp had become a steady customer before I had even lost my cherry.
I was furious.
Jack was talking quietly, but he was excited. “Now all we’ve got to do is get Really Big Ben to raid this place when Andy’s there, arrest Andy, and we’ve got him by the balls.”
We followed the dirt road back to the street and picked up the mud trail of the bike, following it back to where the trail turned off into the woods, where Andy hid his bike between choir practices. Then we walked on down the street and picked up Jack’s father’s Impala at the café where we’d left it. When I opened the door and sat down, I glanced up at the Conway house and saw a figure standing behind the dark window of the front gable. That was Andy’s window, and I didn’t need to see his face to know it was Andy, watching us.
I didn’t tell Jack that Andy had been at the window until we had driven away. As soon as I told him about it, he stopped the car. Jack snuck back on foot and watched. He saw Andy come out of the house, running silently in tennis shoes and carrying a flashlight. Andy followed our muddy footprints back up River Road.
“I don’t give a damn if he knows we’re onto him,” said Jack. “We’ll have him as soon as Ben raids the whorehouse!”
We ran into the sheriff’s office a few minutes later, full of excitement, and got Rudy Sexton to radio Ben, who was out on the highway. Ben came in and took us into the interrogation room, where we told him we’d discovered a whorehouse. Both of us were talking at once, so Ben had to calm us down and get each of us to tell it separately. The whole time Ben was grinning like a mule eating briars. Jack ended up, “Can we watch when you raid it?”
Ben sat for a minute without speaking. His elbows were on the bare table, and his hands in front of his mouth, with the fingers knit together. His hat was pulled low over his face as if he were trying to hide his eyes. I realized he was doing his best to keep from laughing.
“Maybe you can go along if you stay out of it,” he finally said. “But I can’t raid it soon. It’ll be a long time before I can.”
Jack struck his fist on the table in exasperation. “Shit! Ben, we have to get Andy to confess by tomorrow night or we lose another $175. If we don’t do it in two weeks, we don’t make a dime.”
Ben did laugh, then. “Somebody tell you there was big money in police work?” He laughed again, then got serious. “I’m sorry I can’t help you, but I can’t jeopardize the case I’m building on the whorehouse by moving too quick. We’ve known about the place for a couple of months, almost since it opened. But raiding a whorehouse isn’t that simple. You have to catch them in the act. And the only way you can do that is to have a plainclothesman go to bed with one of the girls himself. In a town like this, that is politically out of the question, and on top of that most of my deputies are married.”
“I’m not,” I volunteered.
“And I ain’t going to contribute to the delinquency of an already delinquent minor,” said Ben.
He continued, “We thought we could make a case on ’em for selling liquor, and we’ve raided the place a couple of times, but we haven’t figured out a way to get an alcohol sample for evidence. They built the bar shelves up over a big laundry sink. When the place was a boathouse, that sink was for cleaning fish, but these bootleggers filled the sink with big rocks. All they have to do is yank out the two-by-four that’s propping up the shelves, and all the bottles come crashing down and break on the rocks. Then a ten-gallon drum of water tips over the top of it all and washes the booze down the drain. If you knocked down that door with an ax and had a track star for the first man in, carrying a test tube, he still couldn’t get to that sink in time to catch a drop of that liquor before it flushed down the river. We’ll get ’em some way, but I ain’t yet figured out how.”
Jack said, “Well, think pretty quick! Time costs us money!”
Ben grinned. “Now you’re beginning to understand the realities of detective work. Another reality is that if you breathe a word of what I’ve told you about that place, or my plans for it, or what you found out yourselves, I’ll slowly remove the skin from you both in small pieces.”
He got up and started out, then turned around. He was in a good mood now.
“That was good work you did trailing Andy. Good luck on the rest of it,” he said.
Jack was as depressed as he ever got, despite the kind words. Outside, he put his hands on the roof of the big Chevrolet and looked across at me. “I feel so lousy I don’t even want to go home,” he said.
I said, “It’ll work out, Jack. Now that Andy knows we’re on to him, he might do something stupid.”
It was all we could hope for.
= = =
Andy lived up to my prediction. The following morning at school, Jack and I each found a little cardboard sign in our locker. At the top was a little row of letters in black, saying “DESIST,” and at the bottom another row said “BEWARE.” In between there was a skull and crossbones. The cards had been slipped through the vents in the locker doors. We laughed about the threats, and that afternoon lay in the woods, watching to see if Andy stole something else. But he didn’t, to our great disappointment, because that night made it two weeks, and we now stood to make only $350.
The next morning at school I noticed Andy carrying a lunch box. I had never seen him do that before, and at lunchtime I saw him eating in the school cafeteria as usual. That meant the lunch box he had brought to school contained something other than sandwiches, but I couldn’t figure out what.
My gym class was right after lunch. The padlock on my gym locker was unlocked; I supposed I had left it that way accidentally the day before. A glance showed my shoes and gym clothes were all there, so I undressed and was starting to step into my jockstrap when I saw something move. I threw the jockstrap against the wall and screamed, “Lord, have mercy!” There was a big black widow spider in it! Now I knew what Andy had carried in the lunch box.
Jack thought that was hilarious. But that very afternoon when he sat down under his favorite tree for another few hours of surveillance at the Conway house, he sat on the sharp edges of a broken glass bottle. It hadn’t been there before and in Conway’s private woods, it didn’t get there by accident. By the time he left the emergency room, Jack had enough stitches in his ass for a regulation baseball. I visited Jack that night at his house. He was lying in bed, on his stomach, drinking Coke through a straw and trying to think through the pink cloud of painkillers, swearing vengeance on Andy.
I kept telling him, “I don’t think Conway would pay us at all if we killed his grandson. Besides, you were mad earlier because I got wounded before you did. Well, you got wounded worse, so you’re ahead of me now.”
He said, “Well, it’s no use to be wounded if you can’t tell anybody where the wound is.”
I said, “Look at it this way, Jack. If you can get a girl to look at your scars, you’ll already have your pants down.”
He said, “Stony, we got to do something quick or he’s going to kill one of us.”
We got through the weekend uninjured, although I did find a broadhead hunting arrow stuck in the wood casement outside my bedroom window Sunday morning. I remembered that I had undressed with the lights on the night before, no doubt throwing a black shadow onto the window shade. I started carrying Dad’s .32 again; I was getting scared.
On Monday Jack came to school with a foam-rubber cushion to sit on. I was surprised to see him there when he could have stretched his injuries into an absence of three or four more days.
“I think I can wind it up,” he explained. “You make sure Andy doesn’t go home for lunch. If he starts to leave, intercept him. Start a fight if you have to. If I don’t get back here by the time lunch is over, you’ll probably find me in a bear trap down at Rich Conway’s place.”
Andy ate in the lunchroom as usual. He looked me straight in the eye and smiled. I smiled back, thinking of things that could be done to Andy with a blacksmith’s forge and Vise-Grip pliers. Just as the bell rang to send us back to class, Jack limped into the cafeteria and sat down with me.
“Who’s the best liar you know?” he asked.
“You are,” I admitted.
“Thanks, friend,” he growled. “Who’s second best?”
“Todd Powell,” I answered. “Todd has to lie some every day or he’ll get sick. Jack, what the hell is going on?”
He said, “You’ll act more natural if you don’t know, Stony.”
The next day Jack insisted we get to school early. We sat on the front steps in the same place I had been sitting the day Jack came to school for the first time. Now Jack sat beside me, but he had his foam cushion under his stitched-up behind. Soon we saw Andy park and lock his good Raleigh bicycle in the bike rack and walk up the front walk. He carried his books in his right hand. About halfway up the walkway he shifted the books to his left hand and gave his groin a long and masculine scratch. Very thorough. He smiled at us and I thought Jack’s face would split from the way Jack smiled back. He followed Andy to his first-period class, and I followed Jack. Jack watched through the glass panel in the door and saw that Andy was fidgeting in his seat.
“Today’s the day, Stony,” Jack said. “At the break before second period I want you to be in the boys restroom hallway. Anybody tries to sell you something, you buy it, whether you need it or not.”
At the end of the first period, and before the second, nearly every boy in Early High School crowded into the hallway leading to the boys restroom, because that was the only place on school grounds where smoking was allowed. I didn’t smoke often but I bummed a cigarette that day and lit it, to fit into the crowd. Soon Jack came in and leaned on the wall beside me. Andy was on the other side of the hallway, now carefully avoiding our gazes, because if somebody started a fight at Early High School, this was where he started it. I thought, Yeah, you little bastard. You do your fighting with a hunting bow when nobody’s looking. I was thinking about starting something with Andy when Todd Powell walked in carrying a one-gross carton of Sultan condoms.
“Anybody wanna buy some rubbers?” he asked.
He immediately found a few takers. This was something a guy could always sell, although most boys who bought them were only pretending they had any use for them, except maybe as water balloons. One of the first buyers was little Jerry Kent. He bought one pack.
“You better buy more than that,” said Todd. “There’s a lot of clap going around. Your dad would kill you if he found out you had that.”
Jerry said, “Why, he wouldn’t have to know it. All it takes is a little penicillin.”
Jack spoke up then. “Well, they can cure it, all right. But they got a state law that the doctor has to tell your parents and he has to tell the sheriff before he can treat you. I know he does it, too. Happened to somebody I know. Todd, you better sell me about three packs.”
Todd counted Jack’s money and said, “Yeah, if I started itching down there I would just go straight to my daddy and tell him first. He’s got a few connections and he could get me a doctor to treat it without telling the law, and I wouldn’t be in as much trouble. A guy’s daddy is gonna find out anyway. But you got to have it treated, and quick. Your pecker might drop off if you don’t.”
I stole a glance at Andy. He was staring straight at Todd and holding his groin with both hands, furtively scratching. I thought Todd was the scum of the earth, and I had good reasons to think that, but I bought three packs of rubbers to keep the conversation going. When I looked around, Andy was gone. I caught sight of him heading out the back door of the hallway.
Todd Powell said to Jack, “Am I doing all right?”
Jack said, “You’re a champ.” He took a handful more of the contraceptives without paying for them. “You can keep the money and anything more you make,” he said.
“Thanks,” Todd said with a smile. “You wanna buy any more of these, Stony?”
I started to buy some more and Jack said, “You don’t need those, you idiot. Come on. We gotta move fast or we’ll never see that fee.” We ran out to Jack’s father’s car as fast as Jack could move his stitched-together butt.
= = =
Jack parked the car as inconspicuously as possible in the food market lot and watched as Andy rode up to the courthouse, left his bike unlocked against the fence out front, and went inside. We followed, up the back stairs, and waited outside Rich Conway’s office. We heard muffled yelling from the inner office. When we heard the private office door open, we scurried down the steps and ducked into the sheriff’s office, but watched what was happening in the hallway.
Rich Conway marched Andy down the steps and out the door. Andy was definitely a prisoner. His face was red and tear-streaked. Jack crouched to watch them through the courthouse door.
“We got him! We got him!” he squealed. He jumped up and down, holding his sore butt with both hands.
The Conways walked down to Dr. Johnson’s office, up the stairs, and were back down within twenty minutes; Rich Conway did not have to wait for doctors appointments. Rich marched Andy back up to the courthouse, threw Andy’s bike in the trunk of his big Buick, and drove off toward Lower Early at a speed that wasn’t legal even in open country. We followed as quickly as we could. When we didn’t see Rich’s car in front of his house, Jack guessed correctly where it would be—in front of the fence’s junk shop. As we approached on foot, Rich Conway walked out and got into his car, where Andy was waiting. As he turned the car around, he backed into the side of the little building and made a hole in the brick wall, but Conway didn’t seem to give a damn. Didn’t even get out to look at the damage, just drove away. As soon as he left, somebody inside hung a CLOSED sign in the window, and a moment later we saw a green-and-white pickup come out of the alley beside the shop and drive away fast.
We followed Andy and Rich home and arrived in time to see Rich take off his belt as they entered the front door. We walked up the front walk and I started to knock. Jack caught my hand. “Not yet,” he said. “We don’t want to knock till Rich gets tired of whipping him.”
A couple of minutes later we heard the sound of a pickup truck downshifting from high to second and the squeal of brakes. A worried-looking little rodent-like young man ran up the sidewalk carrying a big cardboard box. From the front porch Jack said, “You can give that to me.”
The man said, “I’ll have the rest of it, what I still got, by tomorrow. Tell Mr. Conway I promise that.” He ran back down the sidewalk and drove away. In the box were an antique punch bowl and cups.
About that time we ceased to hear any sounds from within. It had sounded like somebody cleaning a rug with a carpet beater. Jack waited hopefully for a minute, and then said, “I guess you can knock now. I would have thought Rich could last longer than that. He must be getting old.”
I knocked. Mrs. Conway opened the door, and Jack asked to see Mr. Conway.
As Mrs. Conway turned away, Andy passed her to climb the stairs to his room. He was buckling his pants. He glared at Jack, and Jack smiled and lifted an erected length of middle finger. Andy slunk out of sight, scratching as he went.
Conway came to the door with the belt in his hand. Jack handed him the box and said, “We accepted delivery of the punch bowl. The gentleman will be bringing the rest of your stuff back by tomorrow,” he said.
Conway didn’t even thank us. He said, “Jack, Stony, I’m glad you came here. I’ve decided I don’t need your services anymore. I’ve resolved the situation myself.”
Jack protested, “But Mr. Conway, Andy didn’t confess just out of the blue. We tricked him into doing it.”
Conway said, “Confess? Nobody said anything about confessing. I just recovered the property myself.” He smiled his sweet smile and closed the door.
Jack kicked at the door and winced with the pain that shot up into his stitched-up buttock. I knocked on the door until my knuckles were sore and was looking around for a rock to throw through a window when Bobby Lee Lawson drove up, in uniform, and walked up the sidewalk. “I’ve had a complaint about you trespassing here,” he said. “You’d better leave.”
I said, “That son of a bitch cheated us!”
Bobby Lee said, “So you say. But if he did, you’d better discuss it with Ben or Sheriff Taylor. Leave and you can settle it later. Guys, I don’t want to arrest you, but if you stay here, I’ll have to.”
Back at the sheriff’s office, Ben took us once more into the interrogation room. We told him Conway was getting his property back but wouldn’t pay us the $350 we had coming.
Ben said, “Hell, I hadn’t anticipated him doing this to you, but that’s why they call him Slick Rick. I can’t do anything to help you. It’s a civil matter, and you don’t have a snowball’s chance of winning a civil case against Rich Conway.”
Somebody knocked on the door and called Ben to the telephone. When he came back, he was smiling again. “Hey, you guys, that was Rich Conway. That fence told the esteemed Mr. Conway he sold Mr. Conway’s esteemed Parker shotgun to an esteemed pawnbroker in Roanoke for $200. He wants me to drive over there and see if that gun is still in the store. Told me to serve a warrant.”
Ben paused a moment to let that sink in, then continued, “Getting a warrant in another county is an awful lot of trouble. Will you two just go over there for me and tell the man, if he’s got it, to give it back? Then call me and tell me if he has it.”
We drove straight to Roanoke, chewing our nails. It’s a long way from Early to Roanoke, and Jack kept the big Chevy at more than 75 mph most of the way.
Roanoke is full of pawnshops, but Ben had given us the name of the right one. The pawnbroker was a young man but dressed old, wearing a plaid shirt, and suspenders holding up black pants; a gold chain emerged from his watch pocket, and he wore a diamond ring on each hand. He was overweight and his hair, already thinning, was combed straight back. There were two gun racks in the shop: one in the middle of the floor, from which you could pick up a common or cheap gun and look at it anytime you liked, the other behind the counter, where the expensive firearms were kept.
“Could I see that double gun with engraving on the chambers?” I asked.
The owner said, “Can you afford it? It costs $500.”
Jack said, “We can afford it.” The owner handed him the gun. Jack turned it over and read off the serial number. It was Conway’s, all right. Then Jack looked up and said to the owner, “This gun is stolen, and I work for the man it was stolen from. You can either let us have the gun now or explain it to the police.”
The shop owner pursed his lips and said, “I’ll let you have it for $300. That’s what I got in it.” We knew he’d paid only $200.
“Uh-uh,” Jack said. “We’re not paying anything.”
“How do I know you have any right to that gun? You get out of here or I’ll call the police myself!” He reached for a phone on the counter behind him.
“Then they can explain it to you,” Jack said. “We’ll wait for ’em.”
The shopkeeper drew back his hand from the phone, and his shoulders sagged in defeat. “Take it,” he said, and waved both hands limply toward the door.
We got into the car, drove a zig-zag route away from the store until we were sure we were not being followed, and then called Ben from a telephone booth. We each had one ear next to the receiver.
“They didn’t have it, did they?” Ben said.
“They don’t have it now,” Jack said into the phone, smiling.
Ben said, “Well, I guess I better serve that warrant anyway, just so I can tell Rich Conway I did. Thank you for the help.”
We took the engraved Parker into a gun store. I let Jack do the talking. He asked $350 cash for the gun, the amount Rich owed us. The gun dealer pulled out a wallet so fast it probably burned his backside.
“You could of got more,” I told Jack as we drove away.
“It’s more fun this way,” Jack said.
A minute later, as we cruised out onto the road back to Early, Jack burst out, “Hey, do I get to take expenses off the top before we split the money?”
“I guess so,” I said. “What expenses did you have? The doctor bill for stitching up your ass?”
Jack shook his head. “No, Dad’s insurance will take care of that. But I had to buy that gross of rubbers for Todd Powell to peddle. And I had to pay five dollars for this stuff to make sure I had enough.” He reached into his sports coat pocket and pulled out a small straw-colored envelope. The printing on it said “Juckpulver Itching Powder.” You could buy the stuff from the Johnson Smith novelty catalog that was advertised on the back of comic books, or in novelty stores.
Jack continued, “I watched the Conways’ house long enough to know they hang laundry on the clothesline every Monday. I needed enough of this to put some in every pair of boy’s undershorts on the Conways’ line. I have quite a bit left over, though. You think we might use it next Monday on Rich’s?”
Three days later, Conway was madder than Daffy Duck.
I was coming out the door of the sheriff’s office when he came in. Rich grabbed my arm without saying a word, and I could no more break that grip than I could a pro wrestler’s. The man was strong, even after his years of debauchery. He pulled me back into the sheriff’s office, where Sheriff Taylor sat at his desk.
He said, “Aaron, I want you to lock this little shit up. And the other one too.”
This scared me plenty. Those hillbillies in the cells didn’t like us town boys. And they really didn’t like any who worked for their jailers.
Taylor asked, “You have a charge?”
“I’ll think of one,” said Conway.
The sheriff said, “Rich, do think a minute. These ain’t just some hillbilly kids. Stony’s uncle is the mayor; Jack’s dad’s got money and he’s new here and doesn’t know how things are. People like that can make more trouble than it’s worth.”
“I guess I can handle the trouble,” said Conway.
“Then you better make it good and legal,” Taylor said. “You sign a complaint on each of them, and I’ll turn them over to the juvenile court.”
Conway said, “I want you to just put him up in that cellblock until he decides to tell me where the hell my father’s shotgun is. And that son of a bitch Ben helped them steal it. I want his badge!”
Taylor stubbed out his Pall Mall in the ashtray. It was so full that a cloud of ash rose.
“Rich, you wanted a special detail assigned to watch your personal house to catch your personal thief, and we gave you one, and they caught him. You got everything back but a shotgun. Fact is, I don’t care rat shit about your daddy’s Parker shotgun, and I sure as hell ain’t locking up any boys or firing any deputies over it!”
From there the argument escalated so quickly that I couldn’t follow it all. It covered a lot of verbal ground; if it had been a fistfight it would have rolled down the courthouse steps and down Steep Street, through Lower Early, and on out the highway toward Roanoke. These were politicians, and men from a time earlier than my own, so they avoided name calling, but the tone of their voices made cussing superflous. There were accusations and allegations, words like “backstabbing” and “split ballots,” veiled references to women, and even a couple of first names. Soon both men were red in the face and slamming their fists into their open palms and yelling so loud that the windowpanes rattled. Finally Conway left and Taylor sat back down in his chair panting. But at least I wasn’t in jail.
Neither of us said anything for a minute. Finally I said, “Thank you for standing up for me, Sheriff. If you ever need a favor, help of any kind, you ask me.”
And Taylor said, “I need help right now. I think I’m having a heart attack.”
He slid out of his big swivel chair, careful to use no more energy than absolutely necessary, eased his backside down onto the floor, and lay down. He clutched his chest and began to whisper the Lord’s Prayer.
= = =
Bobby Lee’s patrol car was a Ford station wagon that doubled as an ambulance. He had a big engine in it and kept the tank full of airplane fuel for chasing moonshiners. He ran it wide open all the way to Roanoke, where they had the best hospital in western Virginia. Dr. Johnson was in the back holding an oxygen mask on Sheriff Taylor’s face and sticking him with needles full of medicine. They pulled him through, but just barely. A few days later, when my dad and Jack and I went to see him, he sent Jack and Dad out of the room, and told me to stay.
I started crying—I already had cried a good deal—thinking that he had nearly died standing up for me. But Taylor said, “Stony, it wasn’t even over you, or the shotgun either. That argument was coming no matter what you did, and we should have had it sooner. Hell, you probably saved my life. If I’d waited till my heart got any worse to have that heart attack, I’d be dead now.”
So I began feeling better. Not all right yet, but better. He said, “What I called you in for was to tell you to keep it quiet about the trouble you had with Rich. If nobody knows, he might drop it yet. But if word gets around, his pride won’t let him.”
The moment he said that, I knew it wasn’t over with Rich Conway. I’d told nobody but my dad and Ben and Jack. I could count on Ben and Dad, but Jack would never keep his mouth shut. It wasn’t in Jack to do it. He swore he would—he probably believed it himself. But eventually he told Ernestine. He told her on a Friday night, I think, in a car parked on a hill overlooking town. By Tuesday it was going around school, and soon grown-ups were laughing at Conway.
It really made more trouble for Ben than it did for Jack and me. The doctors told Taylor he couldn’t go back to work, so he resigned, creating a midterm vacancy. As the highest-ranking deputy, Ben was appointed acting sheriff until there could be a special election, and the circuit court, under some persuasion from Rich Conway, put that off until November, when there would also be a presidential election. That gave Conway and his allies time to organize a campaign for their own man against Ben, if Ben chose to run.
Before he even left the hospital, Sheriff Taylor extracted a promise from Ben that he would run. I was surprised to learn Ben had agreed to it on the spot.
“I thought you didn’t want the job,” I reminded Ben.
“I don’t have much choice,” he said. “If you think Conway’s a pain in the ass now, what’s he going to be like if he gets his own man in as sheriff? And what if that man is T.J. Thompson? That’s who Conway will put up to run!”
The thought filled me with horror. As a state trooper Thompson had a boss somewhere whose existence probably discouraged Thompson’s worst impulses. But as sheriff he would be a constitutional officer, accountable only to the voters, with three years to run amok before the voters could get rid of him. Meanwhile, he would mete out rough injustice exactly as he saw fit. I took comfort in the fact that Ben would be in effect the incumbent in the sheriff’s race, and would probably win. Ben was good at his job, and folks liked him. But that didn’t suit Rich Conway, so he set out to make Ben look bad.
Conway made sure the board of supervisors didn’t let Ben hire an extra deputy to replace himself, now that he was busy acting as sheriff. Then he got a couple of his friends to cook up excitement about too much overtime being paid to the deputies, so the supervisors limited overtime to two hours per deputy per week. Before that, some deputies had worked ten to twenty. Ben had to stop assigning deputies to basketball games, which made a lot of citizens mad at him, and a couple of deputies quit because they couldn’t make ends meet anymore.
The remaining deputies were spread so thin that a burglary might go uninvestigated for days. What this meant for Jack and me was work. It was no longer a matter of Ben and Sheriff Taylor tolerating us would-be policemen; now Ben absolutely relied on us to do everything that could legally be done by someone not a sworn peace officer. Ben even put Rudy Sexton, the swing-shift dispatcher, back onto the road as a patrolling deputy; he drove out every afternoon the moment Jack or I could get to the sheriff’s office from school and take over the radio and telephones. Rudy always made sure to stop by Rich Conway’s office, talk him up a bit. Everybody was playing both ends against the middle, trying to stay on the good side of everybody.
Meanwhile, Rich Conway was riding around the county, buttonholing anybody who would listen, saying, “Ben just can’t seem to hold onto a good deputy.” Some folks were believing it because they were gullible. Others believed it because they wanted to; word reached Ben that the Klan, ever ready to meddle where it had no right, intended to fill the void of manpower by enforcing the law in its own way. Ben needed to keep that from happening on his watch.
We spent so much time at the sheriff’s office that we put Jack’s original plan, to operate our own private detective agency, on the back burner, where the fire went out under it. The Conway caper was not only our first case, but our last.
Late afternoons in the sheriff’s office were slow and boring, so for distraction I started doing all my homework. My grades took such an upturn that my father started paying me a little to work for the sheriff. And the juvenile court finally let me get a driver’s license.
On the few days we weren’t at the sheriff’s office, Jack and I roamed the back roads in my dad’s pickup, stopping at the country stores to talk about what a good sheriff Ben would make. I don’t know that we did him much good, but it was fun. I was still new to driving legally, and Jack was relatively new to the county, so we were getting out into places neither of us had ever been before—places that had earned names like Bear Cave Mountain, Bullwhip, Benediction, Starvation Hollow, Tory Town, and Secesh Station.
On one of those trips I drove past the road that ran up Sourwood Hollow. Jack pointed at it and said, “That road looks interesting. Let’s see where it goes.”
“I already know where it goes,” I said, and kept driving. When I thought about it later, I couldn’t decide if I was ashamed to let Jack know I was sweet on a girl “from a holler,” as some would have said, or if I didn’t want Mary Lou to learn my best buddy was a polished-up bigot. All I knew at the time was that I didn’t want to take Jack up Sourwood Hollow to her house, or anywhere near her.
“So where’s it go?” Jack asked.
“To an apple orchard,” I said.
= = =
In early April, after trout season opened, Jack and I made it a point to fish up and down the river from the old boathouse—the illegal bar and brothel that Ben wanted to raid. Ben still hadn’t figured out a good way to get a liquor sample for evidence. We were kind of doing reconnaissance but didn’t know exactly what to look for.
“We’ll just go up there by the whorehouse to get the lay of the land,” I told Jack, and he threatened to shoot me for the pun.
We were also interested in catching fish, and where the boathouse was, upstream from the dam, was the only part of the river that required a boat to fish properly. Since the rivers were so small in that mountain country, and offered so few opportunities to use boats, there were only a few in town. The one we borrowed was the smallest wooden boat I had ever seen—a six-foot pram with two square ends. It fit in the bed of my dad’s pickup with room to spare, and we had no trouble, between the two of us, getting it launched.
We were fishing maybe fifty yards upstream from the boathouse one afternoon when Jack said, “I’ve got it.”
I thought he had a bite, and it was about time.
“Trout?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’ve got a way for us to get that whiskey sample. Try not to be too obvious, but look at that boathouse. The lowest part of the pier is, what? Maybe a foot over the water?”
I looked, and nodded.
Then he said, “This boat sits only about eight inches out of the water.”
It was true. The old boat was made for working on the absolutely still water of swamps and farm ponds, with just one grown man in it. Overloaded as it was with two teenagers, the bow rose only eight inches from the water and the gunnels even less.
“We’ll just run this boat under there one night, very quietly. One of us will be in the boat. Ben raids the place. They dump the whiskey down that pipe just like they always do. Only this time somebody’s going to be down there and grab a sample when it pours out.”
We went right back uptown to the sheriff’s office and told Ben what we wanted to do.
“It’s a great idea,” Ben admitted. “But there’s a problem with it.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
Ben looked at Jack. “I don’t think you can keep your mouth shut. You’ll tip our hand.”
Jack flushed in anger but he turned his face down to the floor. We all remembered that he’d said he would keep quiet about besting Rich Conway, and hadn’t done it. The silence was painful.
Ben broke it. “Still, it’s a plan. The quicker we do it, the less time you’ve got to forget yourself. I want you guys to take that boat down to the river, put it back in, and fish until nearly dark. Then tie up the boat out of sight, upstream of the boathouse. Chain it to a tree, padlock it, and don’t lose the damn key. Then go home and wait till I send for you. Both of you be at Jack’s house. Each of you wear a wristwatch. Dress warm.”
We did as he said. I let my parents think I was going to watch a late TV program at Jack’s. About nine that night, Bobby Lee Lawson came by Jack’s house and got us. He was wearing olive-drab Army fatigues and driving a beat-up old black Chevy I had never seen before. It looked like a mill worker’s car, the sort that might be parked outside the boathouse after the swing shift got off work. There was a carton of thirty-minute road flares on the back seat.
We drove to the parking lot behind the school and stopped. In a little while Ben drove up, walked over, and shone his flashlight into the car. If anybody had seen us it would have looked like Ben was checking out some kids he’d caught necking up there. What he was really doing was giving us our assignments.
“I’m sorry, Jack, but it’s got to be Bobby Lee in the boat,” Ben said. “I want a law officer to seize the evidence, because it’ll stand up better in court.” He could see Jack was disappointed. Jack’s jaw was clenching, and he was about to say something, but thought better of it.
“But I want both of you guys to go up the road with Bobby Lee and help him get the boat launched. At exactly 9:55 I want Jack to drive this old car down the road, back past the boathouse. There’s a little pullout one tenth of a mile down, where the road is narrow. Jack, you pull the car into that spot and wait until you see me come past you, up the road to the boathouse. I’ll be driving my regular cherry-top.
“I’ll park where you can see me, near the boathouse. If and when I start into the joint, I’ll turn my flashlight on for just a second, twice. Then I want Jack to pull the Chevy across the road and block it. Light two road flares and put one on each side of the car right away, so nobody runs into it. Then lock the car, take the keys and a bunch of flares with you, hustle down the road about fifty yards toward town, and put out another flare, then another one fifty yards toward the boathouse from the car you drove. Get into the woods and don’t come out except to replace the flares, or if you see police cars coming. If you see that, it means I called for backup, and if that happens, you gotta move the car out of the way quick.”
Jack seemed satisfied with his assignment, and he relaxed a bit.
Ben continued, “Stony, I want you to stay behind three minutes after Jack leaves in the car, then walk downriver from the place you launch the boat. Hide near the boathouse. When you see me get out of my cherry-top and flash the light twice, you come over and get in my car. All I want you to do is watch—and radio for backup if you have to. You radio if I yell for you to do it, or if I shine the light toward you and cut it off and on twice. Shooting is real unlikely, but if you hear any, don’t wait for any other signal. Radio right then, radio ‘Shots fired,’ tell them where we’re at, and get them to confirm they understand it. Then get out of the car, haul ass for the woods, and get behind a tree thick enough to stop bullets.”
So off we went, Jack and Bobby Lee and I, down to the river. Bobby Lee got his gear out of the trunk. He put on a heavy wool jacket and a hunter’s shotgun-shell vest over that. In two of the elastic shell loops over his left breast he had a couple of empty test tubes with corks in them—one to catch the liquor sample and a spare in case he broke one; the rest of the loops held ammunition. He had a shotgun on a sling over his back, and he was wearing his service revolver in its regular duty holster. He had also brought a pair of bolt cutters in case the bootleggers had been smart enough to surround the pipe with chain-link fence.
Bobby Lee was a tall, solid man, and with all his gear the boat rode low, but he made us put a couple of big rocks in the bottom of the boat so it would ride still lower and slide under the pier without hitting it. He’d brought a life jacket but once he saw how little room there was under that pier, he decided not to wear it.
Bobby Lee was one of the two or three bravest men I’ve ever known, one of the smartest, and he was armed to the teeth. But if somebody in that boathouse realized he was down there and decided to empty a pistol through the floor, none of that was going to do him much good.
“Bobby Lee,” I whispered, “how come it’s just us four? I’m proud to be in on this but don’t we need more cops?”
Bobby Lee said, “Yeah, we sure do. But you two and me are about the only ones Ben can count on these days. So we can’t let him down, hear me?”
He pushed out into the river, and with those words any thought we’d had about slipping in for a bigger share of the action were gone.
“We better do exactly what Ben told us,” Jack said, and I agreed. He stuck out his hand and we shook on it, the first time we ever did that.
I had been a lonely person most of my life. But when Jack drove away and I stood my appointed three minutes on that pitch-black riverbank, I felt a loneliness deeper and darker than the river itself. Before that moment, I’d have been nervous in the dark even with the little revolver in my pocket, but now I felt a larger unease. I was beyond the fear of something happening to me. My fear was that I would do the wrong thing. I intended to do exactly what Ben had ordered—call for backup if necessary, and run. But what if I missed Ben’s signal? And what if the backup officers didn’t come in time? What if Bobby Lee ran into trouble? What if I panicked? I didn’t want to let anybody down. Hell, one false move could get Ben or Bobby Lee killed. My new responsibility weighed heavy on me, and I wished I had never asked to be involved.
I walked down the road and hid near the boathouse where I was supposed to. I heard a mill whistle blow ending the two-to-ten shift, and shortly after that several cars came up the road and parked by the boathouse. Men went in, one to three from every car. Pretty soon Ben also drove up and pulled his cruiser in beside the customers’ parked cars. The jukebox was playing “Stagger Lee” so loud I could make out every word. The music did not calm my nerves, for the lyrics were about somebody getting killed in a saloon I imagined to be much like this one. In the boathouse, liquor would be flowing. I knew even before he gave the signal that Ben was going in. He blinked his flashlight toward Jack, got out of the car with an ax in his hand and walked quickly toward the building. I ran to the cruiser and climbed in the passenger side, grabbed the microphone off the rack, and sat ready to press the button. I rolled down the windows so I could hear Ben call for help, if he did.
The door to the boathouse was on the side, away from me, but I heard Ben knock. I saw light pour over the pier, then cut off as somebody saw Ben’s uniform and slammed the peephole shut. I heard three loud BANGS. They were spaced out evenly, like somebody was delivering carefully aimed shots.
I pressed the mike and yelled into it, “Officer needs assistance! Shots fired! At the old boathouse off River Road. Ben and Bobby Lee are in there. Repeat, shots fired at old boathouse off River Road. Ben and Bobby Lee need backup right now!”
I heard Rudy’s voice on the radio. “What unit made the emergency transmission? Stony, is that you?”
“Yeah, this is Stony,” I said. “I’m in Ben’s cherry-top and this is not bullshit! Get some people down to the boathouse off River Road. Ben and Bobby Lee need help! I gotta go now.”
I heard more BANGS and thought if I ran for the woods one of the bullets might drop me before I got there. I ran down the bank instead, thinking maybe I could slip under the pier and hide there. That brought me past the door, and I looked up to see Ben swing the ax one more time and the butt went BANG against the door. I realized I hadn’t heard shots at all. I’d screwed up, just like I feared I would. Then the door caved in and Ben ran through it. He didn’t even have his pistol drawn.
I tried to stop running and skidded, fell on my back so hard the wind was knocked out of me. I wasn’t a foot from the river—my feet were actually in the water. I could see the long shadow of the boat and Bobby Lee under the pier and thought, At least Bobby Lee’s where he’s supposed to be.
Then there was a great smashing of glass from inside the building, and the sound of a tub of water being dumped. A stream big around as a firehose’s gushed from the floor of the boathouse straight into Bobby Lee’s boat. The boat sank like a torpedoed freighter, taking with it Bobby Lee, test tubes, shotgun, bolt cutters, pistol, backup derringer, blackjack, a Japanese switchblade, handcuffs, flashlight, two extra rocks, and—we later counted—fifty-two rounds of ammunition in three calibers.
I waded into the river, fighting to catch my breath again after the fall, reeling from the stench of so much liquor poured out at once, hoping to stumble into Bobby Lee or the boat. I didn’t even have a flashlight. I was sure Bobby Lee was a goner.
Then in the near-darkness I saw a hand sticking out of the water like the hand of the Lady of the Lake in that movie about King Arthur, but instead of a sword it was holding a test tube, its mouth firmly covered with a thumb. And then Bobby Lee trudged out of the dark river, like some well-armed Creature from the Black Lagoon. He was holding aloft a sample of bootleg alcohol, all the evidence he needed.
= = =
The following week, Ernestine and Gina dragooned Jack and me to help them decorate several dozen eggs for the Easter egg hunt the church would hold that coming Saturday. We wore our oldest jeans because this was going to be a messy job, and the girls tied their hair back out of the way. In the church kitchen we boiled the eggs and dunked them in dye and vinegar. Mostly we dyed them in solid colors, red or deep blue or green. A single egg was dyed gold and the child who found it won some extra little prize and was supposed to have good luck for a year.
We quickly got bored with dyeing egg after egg in the same few colors, so we began dipping one end of the egg into one color and one end into another, making them two-toned. And we had heard you could decorate eggs with crayon if you did it while the egg was still hot. Ernestine went into the church nursery and came out with a lot of used, broken crayons in the tin can where they were stored. I picked up a hot egg with a potholder to protect my hand, and tried to draw a bunny’s face on it with a black crayon. But I botched the drawing; it didn’t look like a rabbit at all. I tried to fix it but each effort failed worse than the last, despite my efforts to rub out the errors. The still-hot eggshell accepted the wax readily, and soon the egg was completely black.
“Stony, what in the world are you doing?” Ernestine asked.
I shrugged and thought up a smart-ass answer. “We made one golden egg for good luck,” I said, “so there ought to be a black one for bad luck.”
Ernestine’s mouth fell open in shock. “What a terrible thing to say!” she exclaimed. “Imagine telling some little four-year-old he’s bound to be unlucky!”
Jack intervened with his own brand of humor. “He was trying to put a face on it,” he ventured. “But all niggers look the same. It’s just a nigger egg!”
Gina snapped, “That’s not funny, Jack!”
Jack shrugged, a half-hearted apology.
Gina took the black egg and a white one that had been boiled but not yet dyed. She took both to the sink and ran water over them while she peeled off the shells. Then she held one in each hand; they looked exactly alike. She thrust the eggs toward Jack. “Which one’s the nigger egg?” she asked.
Jack said, “Hell, I don’t know. It was just a joke.”
Gina remained in a bad mood most of the afternoon.
“Dismissed,” said Judge Miller calmly.
“Dismissed?” Ben’s voice thundered across the courtroom as he leaped to his feet.
Judge Miller pounded his gavel on the bench.
“Officer, if I see another such outburst I will hold you in contempt of court.”
He went on, “I believe firmly in the separation of powers. It is your job, Officer, to find sufficient evidence to bring offenders to trial. It is the job of the commonwealth’s attorney to decide whether you have done so. Mr. Conway has decided you have insufficient evidence in this matter, and has moved for dismissal on that basis. I have no choice but to honor his request.”
Bobby Lee Lawson had kept his seat, but I could see his face growing red and dark as a baked ham. All his courage at the boathouse had gone for nothing. Rich Conway had decided not to allow Ben a victory. That dismissal was the result. Of course, there really was plenty of evidence. But Conway was an elected official and answered to nobody but the people, and the only way the people could speak was by voting against him in an election more than three years away.
The boathouse already had a new door and it reopened that very night. But that wasn’t the end of it. The next Friday, at 4 a.m., a tractor drove up the dirt road to the boathouse. It was an ordinary Ford farm tractor, with a plow attached. And in a short while, before anybody bestirred himself to find out why a farm tractor was being heard at such an hour, it had turned the first fifty yards of the boathouse road into a muddy field you could have planted in root crops. The only road-legal vehicle you could have driven across it was a Jeep with snow tires. A couple of mill workers were still at the boathouse when this happened, and since they weren’t driving Jeeps, they had some explaining to do when they arrived home without their cars.
It wasn’t an official road, so the county wouldn’t fix it. The guy running the boathouse had to pay somebody to grade it level and pack it, but he’d lost his weekend business, and the grading had surely cost him money. Everybody remembered that Ben had grown up on a farm and was a good hand with a tractor. But if you asked him about it he would give no direct answer. He’d just laugh and let you draw your own conclusions.
That was the sort of thing you could do only once though, so Jack and I set to plotting. And a couple of weeks later we heard reports of boathouse customers being kicked out of their beds by angry young wives demanding to know why that damned bumper sticker was on the family car. The stickers were hand-lettered, and they said, “BOATHOUSE BROTHEL: Bad liquor & fine women.”
But that was also something you could do only once. We had cut into business at the boathouse, but Ben couldn’t close it. He called it a draw.
= = =
In my government class in early May, we learned about a new law that President Eisenhower had just signed. It was supposed to make it easier for black citizens to vote, since a lot of places in the South had found ways to keep them from doing it. I didn’t think it would have much effect on Early. Early had never been plantation country, so there weren’t a great many descendants of slaves living there, and while I wouldn’t have put it past Conway and his courthouse gang to try to keep them away from the polls, their numbers didn’t seem worth the trouble. My impression was that blacks in Early chose not to vote because the candidates didn’t offer them enough to justify paying the poll tax year after year.
But 1960 was different. It was the year of a presidential election, and that was shaping up to be a hot race between Vice President Richard Nixon, a Republican, and a Democratic senator, either Jack Kennedy of Massachusetts or Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Even a few votes could make a difference. And there was our own sheriff’s race between the decent officer, Ben, and a racist bully named T.J. Thompson.
One afternoon, when I happened to walk into the courthouse through the front door, not the back, I saw two black men and two black women leaving John Yates’s law office on Main Street. The men were wearing Sunday suits, and the women were dressed real businesslike. Each of the four was carrying a piece of paper. As they turned down the sidewalk, they waved the papers at two or three white guys watching them from the other side of the street. The white guys didn’t appear to like that. It took me a couple of days to put together what this meant. Yates’s legal secretary was a registrar of voters—there were several in the county—and the papers being waved were probably voter registration receipts. They were being waved at people who didn’t like blacks registering to vote.
After that I saw black people registering every day I cared to look. Other folks saw it too. These onlookers were always white guys, watching from the street and parked cars. They smoked cigarettes, never spoke, and stared intently at those leaving the law offices, as if trying to memorize their faces. I figured they were Ku Klux Klansmen.
The news of so many blacks registering was the apparent inspiration for a Klan rally. The organizers rented a cow pasture outside of town and set up a stage and a revival-style tent, in case it rained. I guess they had help from an affiliated state or national organization, because they set up more folding chairs than could have been found in the whole town of Early, and they brought in the Grand Dragon of somewhere and the Pileated Kornhole of somewhere else as speakers. This rally was billed as a recruitment event, and they drummed up a big crowd, but I thought most people went just for the spectacle and to see who else was there. That’s why I went. I saw Mr. DeLancey, Gina’s dad, dressed in what you’d call business casual today, khaki slacks and a polo shirt, looking noncommittal, just like any other rubbernecker. Todd Powell was there with Jerry Kent, both occasionally nodding their heads and applauding. I saw Ab and Will Jepson with a few others I took to be their inbred relatives. There were lots of people I didn’t know, mostly men who looked like mill workers and poor farmers.
Nobody was wearing a mask, though the guys on stage wore white satin robes and pointy white caps that looked like Klan hoods but left the wearer’s face exposed. One speaker said, “Lots of people think little nigger babies are cute. Well, I’ve seen lion cubs and they’re cute too, but when they grow up they’re real dangerous.” And there was the usual allegation that “outside agitators” were behind any unrest among the black population. Klansmen weren’t the only ones selling that story; I had seen respectable state officials quoted in newspapers saying the same thing.
I think it was the same speaker who said the U.S. Supreme Court had “tied the hands of law enforcement.” That got my attention.
He added, “When law officers can’t enforce the law, the Ku Klux Klan will do what the lawmen aren’t allowed to. If you’re willing to stand up for white families and white neighborhoods and white businesses, if you’re willing to protect white women from insult and outrage, just step up tonight. Before you leave tonight, just speak to any person wearing a robe, tell him you’re stepping up, and we’ll be in touch.”
They passed a hat and a surprising number of people dropped in folding money. Then they set a big cross on fire. It was maybe twenty feet tall and was made out of telephone poles, and as it burned everybody sang “The Old Rugged Cross,” the same hymn we often sang at my Baptist church. Same words, different context. I found myself singing it too, because I had been taught that it’s an affront to Jesus not to join in a hymn, but this time I wondered if Jesus really approved.
I don’t know how many people joined the Klan that night. The major effect of the rally, I think, was that it made more black folks take the trouble to register to vote. One woman came in a wheelchair and claimed to be 102 years old and born a slave. I met one of Roosevelt’s brothers carrying a big family Bible, hoping the registrar would accept a birth entry in a family Bible as proof of his age and identity.
“Sammy, I thought you were just a year or two older than Roosevelt,” I said. That would mean he was too young to register to vote.
“I’m not Sammy, I’m George,” he said. Then he opened the Bible to show that George had been born in February 1938, which made him 22. He had a report card that showed he started the first grade in 1945. I thought George lived in Philadelphia. If George hadn’t set me straight, that day, I’d have sworn he was Sammy.
I never saw any of those famous “agitators.” Didn’t even see a garden-variety Yankee become active in politics. Whatever trouble was to come, we cooked it up among ourselves in Early County.
= = =
One day I was humming as I came into the sheriff’s office. Rudy looked up from his seat at the radio and snapped, “Don’t you hum in here!”
I had never seen him in such a bad mood, and then I realized what I’d been humming.
Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man.
He robbed the Glendale train.
He robbed from the rich, and he gave to the poor;
He’d a hand and a heart and a brain.
I said, “I don’t mean anything by it. It’s just a tune.”
Rudy said, “I been booking robbers and burglars nearly ten years, and I ain’t seen one that gave diddly-squat to the poor.”
I knew at least six old songs about outlaws: “Billy the Kid,” “Railroad Bill,” “John Hardy,” “Wild Bill Jones,” “Jesse James,” and one about Robin Hood. I didn’t know a one about some brave deputy, and I wondered why. The TV channels were full of shows about people like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, who were supposed to be heroic lawmen, but nobody much learned their theme songs, while everybody knew “Jesse James.” I didn’t understand it then and still don’t.
And another time I was in the sheriff’s office on a Sunday afternoon when Wesley Holt, the justice of the peace, came in, still wearing his clothes from church. JP was a part-time job, and Wesley was a former deputy who had become a middle manager at one of the mills. It was Ben’s day off, but he had stopped in after church for some minor reason, and he was wearing civvies too. He was seated at his desk looking for a reminder note he had written himself when he saw Wesley. He frowned.
“Tell me you’re not bonding out Frosty Sutphin,” Ben said.
Wesley shook his head and looked grim. “I could tell you that, but I don’t like lying to you on Sunday.”
Ben struck his fist on the desktop. “Ain’t she ever gonna learn?”
He started to say something more but Wesley, looking into the hallway, shook his head sharply and lifted his finger to his lips. Ben shut up and in a minute a woman walked through the door holding some twenty-dollar bills in her hand. She had on a dress that was made for church but looked inexpensive. Her makeup couldn’t hide the black eye and fat lip. She would not look anybody in the face as she walked to the barred counter window where the JPs stood to make bonds. She spoke so softly that I never heard the words. Wesley Holt accepted the money and wrote a receipt, then looked to Ben without speaking, cocking his head in the direction of the jail door.
Ben came over and said, “Mrs. Sutphin, how many times you going to do this?”
Wesley said, “Ben—”
Ben held up two fingers to cut him off. “Mrs. Sutphin, I know more about this stuff than most people.”
She still wouldn’t look at him, but she did answer. “I have my cross to bear, and I’ll bear it. Thank you for trying to help, but you can’t.”
Ben blew his breath through his lips in exasperation, and then went into the jail. In a minute he came out holding Frosty Sutphin by the arm. Frosty was nicknamed for his prematurely white hair and beard; he was about forty-two, a short but powerfully built farmer still wearing the bib overalls and long-sleeved underwear shirt he’d been arrested in Friday night, and stinking of whiskey sweat.
He looked at his wife’s eye and seemed about to cry.
“I’m sorry, Ruthie,” he said.
“You always are,” Ben said before she could answer. “And you always do it again!”
Ben was supposed to maintain control of a prisoner until the prisoner had sworn an oath to come to court when he was supposed to, or forfeit the bond, but Ben just walked out the door, his fists clenched at his sides. And when Frosty Sutphin had given his oath, he and his beat-up wife walked out arm in arm. They looked sad and scared, like they were both in trouble and danger, and each was the other’s only comfort.
I went home and got out of my church clothes and did homework, but I felt kind of downhearted. I tried to practice guitar, but the only tune that held my attention was “The Brown-Eyed Boy.” It’s about a girl being in love with an alcoholic. I did learn to play it that afternoon, but it didn’t lift my spirits.
I phoned Jack to see if he could think of something fun to do, but he wasn’t around. A little before 6 p.m., I walked up to the church to ring the bell for the BTU to meet—that’s the Baptist Training Union, the youth group I belonged to. Gina and Ernestine were usually there, and sometimes Jack, so I enjoyed BTU and nearly always attended, but that day I just walked back home, even though it meant I had to come back at 6:45 and ring the bell again for the evening church service. I did ring it, but I skipped church. I just went home to feel sorry for my loneliness.
My mother met me at the front door and looked at me strangely. “Ben Agee is on the phone. He wants to talk to you.” Ben had phoned my parents a time or two when I was in trouble, but he’d never before called me personally.
I went into the office and picked up the phone from the desk.
“Stony, I want you t’ give me a ride,” Ben said. His voice was thick, and I thought he might be sick.
“I guess I can do that,” I said. “From where to where?” My mother was leaning against the office doorjamb, her arms crossed, looking at me.
“I’m at Rakes’s Store,” he said. “I’ll be lookin’ for you.” He hung up without giving me a chance to say anything more, which wasn’t like him.
I put the phone back on the cradle and said, “I need the pickup. Ben needs a ride.”
Mom said, “I don’t think you should go. He sounded drunk.”
I said, “I never heard of him taking a drink.”
She said, “Then why’s he need a ride? Have one of the deputies go get him.”
The keys to Dad’s pickup were on the desk. I took them and pushed past her.
“Stony,” she called, her voice rising in a warning.
I said, “I don’t know why he wants me to come get him, but there’s got to be a good reason, and I owe him.”
I didn’t wait to argue with her, just took the truck without permission. A minute out of my driveway I thought about how to get Ben’s car home, if he was too drunk to drive it. I went by to see if Jack was home yet. He was, and I asked him to ride with me.
“Why don’t we take my car?” Jack said.
“I’m already in trouble for taking this one, so I want to at least drive it,” I said.
Rakes’s Store was about ten miles out of town, a regular country general store except somewhat disreputable. It sold beer, which most didn’t, and was said to sell it on Sunday, if you were a known customer, despite the blue laws against Sunday alcohol sales. And there was usually somebody around who would sell you a bottle of liquor out of his car trunk. It might be moonshine or it might be store-bought gin or bourbon with a tax stamp on it, but Early County was dry with respect to hard liquor, so selling either one was illegal any day of the week. Like most country stores, Rakes’s Store had a big feed room where crushed grain was stored, supposedly to sell for livestock feed. But everybody knew a lot of the grain would become fermented whiskey mash. At Rakes’s Store the feed room also hosted, most days, an illegal poker game.
Ben was in the parking lot sitting on the hood of his personal car. It was a well-maintained green-and-white 1953 Mercury, a nice car for a guy who didn’t make a lot of money, and a model renowned for its ability to go like a bat out of hell. He called it his “courtin’ car,” and the women he dated were said to like its aging elegance.
They wouldn’t have liked Ben now. Mom had been right about him being drunk. He was swaying backward and forward, holding a pint bottle of Old Crow bourbon between his knees. When he saw us, he slid off the hood and stood upright, still swaying. At least he got drunk on his day off, wearing civvies, I thought.
“’Preciate you guys doing this,” he said. “Didn’t want to ask no officer. Didn’t want anybody to say they handled it wrong.” He was right. Rich Conway would have said that, made an issue of it, no matter how well any deputy handled it.
Ben tossed his Mercury keys to Jack. “I’ll ride with Stony,” he said.
We started toward his home in the pickup truck. Ben lived with his mother in the farmhouse where he’d grown up, just a few miles from the store. Ben didn’t speak except to give directions on the country road, and sometimes he just pointed.
He took a drink of the whiskey and finally said, “Don’t let this stuff get ya, Stony.”
I said, “I don’t drink it.”
Ben said, “You don’t have to drink it. Can get ya anyway. Got me.”
I knew what he meant. Everybody knew.
He continued, “I made up my mind I should tell you. ’Bout my brothers an’ all. You know ’bout them?”
“Kind of,” I said.
Of course I knew. But I didn’t want to rub his face in his family’s troubles, so I said, “I never heard much.”
“I was away in the Marine Corps. I didn’t have to go. Should of been here. I could of stopped it.”
I said, “You’d of been drafted if you hadn’t volunteered. There was a war on in Korea.”
He said, “Maybe not that soon. Maybe I’d of been here that night.”
He continued, “Henry and Mark were real good boys. They was just fifteen and sixteen, but they’d do the right thing. And Daddy wa’nt no bad man hisself. But when he drank, he got mean.” There was a break in Ben’s voice like it was hurting him to talk. Of course it was hurting, not in his throat but his heart.
I said, “You don’t have to talk about it, Ben. I don’t need to know it.”
“Yes, you do!” he said, with emphasis I didn’t understand. “I ain’t bringing it up ’cause it’s fun! I’m bringing it up for a reason!”
He said, “So Daddy hit her that night. He’d hit her before, lots of times. But this time they stood up to him. Right there at the supper table. And they said, ‘Let’s go outside.’ ”
I knew what was coming and wanted to spare him the pain, so I tried to stop him talking.
“Ben, I don’t—”
“Yes, you do,” he insisted. “They went outside, and they pulled out jackknives. And they cut him up, thin as baloney the night before payday. Now they’re down in that Richmond pen, and they ain’t comin’ home.”
I said, “I knew that part.”
Ben said, “Turn this next right.”
I turned off the dirt road into a driveway and drove up in the yard, stopped under the locust trees about twenty-five yards from the house. I didn’t drive right up to the front porch because I didn’t want to drive over ground that had soaked up his father’s blood.
It was a story-and-a-half white frame house with a light bulb burning on the porch ceiling. I saw a woman look out the window. Ben’s mother. Ben made no move to get out. Jack drove up and parked the Mercury a few feet away and got out, then walked toward the pickup to give Ben the keys.
“Give us a minute, Jack,” Ben called to him through the open window, so Jack walked off a little distance.
“So, you know why I’m tellin’ you?” said Ben. “You of all people, tellin’ you what I hardly tell anybody?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know why.”
“’Cause you’re them, Stony! You try so hard to do the right thing, it makes you do the wrong thing. You think I let you hang around ’cause I need a juvenile delinquent in the office? You’re there ’cause the Lord give me another chance to keep a boy out of that Richmond pen!”
I said, “I appreciate you trying, but it ain’t your problem.”
Ben said, “I used to think that. Thought that when I went in the Corps. But I found out it is my problem. Early County’s my problem. You’re my problem. Frosty Sutphin’s my problem.” Then he looked at the bottle and said, “Whiskey’s my problem.” He took another drink.
I argued, “You don’t hardly drink whiskey, ’cept tonight.”
He said, “But it still got me, didn’t it? And my brothers didn’t drink it neither, nor my mother, but it got us all.”
Then he got out of the truck and flung the bottle, still about a third full, off into the kudzu. He took his keys from Jack and clapped him agreeably on the shoulder, then reeled off toward his haunted old homeplace and his poor old haunted mama.
When I got home my mother was still in a surly mood about my taking the pickup when she didn’t want me to.
“What was so important you had to stay out late on a school night?” she said.
“You were right. He was drinking too much to drive,” I admitted. And I told her about Rich Conway’s vendetta and the political risk Ben would have run if he’d called another deputy. But I didn’t tell her what Ben said about his brothers. For myself, I didn’t have to hide any of that story. But for Ben, I thought I should, even though he hadn’t asked me to. Damn sure didn’t tell her how worried Ben was about me screwing up and landing in prison. That was surely in the back of her own mind all the time—I could see that now—and I didn’t need to give her any more reasons to ground me. And no more reasons to lie awake worrying about me.
Instead I said, “He wanted to give me a temperance lecture.”
“Really! Well, I hope you took heed.”
“I’m already a teetotaler,” I said. It was a half-truth, and even half true only because I was rarely offered alcohol. But it put her in a better mood.
“You’re getting too big for your britches, running off without permission,” she said, and walked off into her bedroom.
In our family, that was called getting off scot-free with a warning.
In the first week after school was out for the year, Jack and I went up to Jim Hazlewood’s place to hunt. It wasn’t hunting season, but groundhogs did so much damage to farms that it was legal and encouraged to shoot them any time of year. Also, Jim knew how to cook groundhog and would be grateful if we bagged one for him.
Most important, the first week of June was the most pleasant time of year: shirtsleeve weather but not yet too hot, and the woods weren’t yet grown up with new weeds. Mountain laurel covered the hills with light pink blossoms. We put on hiking boots and jeans and T-shirts, packed sack lunches and candy bars and rain ponchos into a little war-surplus knapsack, and put a couple of .22 rifles behind the seat of my dad’s pickup truck. Thinking I might get in some target practice, I sneaked my dad’s .32 out of the house also, and Jack took his sawed-off .45, as usual.
Jim wasn’t home, but I had permission to hunt there any time. We parked my father’s pickup truck in Jim’s front yard and I looked at his wife’s grave, with its granite headstone. There was a good-sized dogwood stump on the grave with several vigorous sprouts growing from it, but the sprouts would never in Jim’s lifetime achieve the splendor of the tree the Jepsons had cut down. We paused there a moment and reflected on the pure mountain meanness in the Jepson brothers, who would cut down a tree planted in love and sorrow, before the eyes of the man who planted it.
That was what gave us the idea to leave Jim’s land and cross onto the adjoining Jepson property to see if we could locate a whiskey still. If we found one, we’d get Ben to raid it and some Jepsons might go to jail, which would constitute a bit of deferred justice for Jim Hazlewood.
There was also, I admit, a mercenary motive: You got a reward for turning in a still. A hundred dollars, I believe.
So we went. Like everybody in the mountains, we knew that a still would most likely be found near a creek, because you needed cold water to run a still. The Jepson place lay at the foot of a wooded mountain, and nearly every hollow had a stream of some sort in it, all feeding into one main creek that paralleled the Jepsons’ private dirt road. The main creek bed was only five or six feet wide but it lay in its own bottom, which was about two feet lower than the surrounding terrain, and quite level. On one side of the creek bed there was pasture; on the other, thick willows and laurel screened the creek from the road. We decided to walk through the pasture, where the going was easy yet nobody driving by could see us. We would follow the creek until we came to one of its tributaries, trace the smaller stream up the mountain until it petered out or left Jepson property, then cross a ridge and search back downstream along another branch. And we planned to keep doing that till we found a still.
We had gone along the creek a few hundred yards when I saw a rooftop peeking over the bushes. I gestured to Jack to stay low, and we peered through the bushes to see the Jepson home, across the creek but less than fifty yards away. It was a two-story house, that was probably a fine white frame dwelling five or six decades earlier, when distilling was legal and the most profitable enterprise a mountain family might try. Now the house was gray and sad from lack of paint; the porches sagged and most of the grit had weathered off the asphalt roof shingles. There were half a dozen cars and trucks parked in the front yard; only three had wheels. It was still very early in the morning and we saw nobody stirring, but there were several dogs in the yard—some kind of coonhounds, I guessed.
“This is too damn close,” whispered Jack. “I don’t understand why those dogs aren’t already howling!”
“The creek made enough noise they didn’t hear us,” I said. “And there’s no wind to carry our scent up there.”
It was only a little way more to the first branch, which was on our side of the creek and led away from the house. That streambed had deep laurel thickets on each side, which would make good cover, and the woods were damp so we could move through them quietly. But following the creek to the tributary would take us closer to the house and the celebrated smellers of those coon dogs.
In the right angle formed by the main stream and the branch, there was only open pasture. If we cut across this corner we wouldn’t be visible from the house, but anybody who happened up the road might see us. We decided to double-time across the field to minimize the risk of being seen.
“Let’s sit here a minute and catch our breath first,” I suggested. “If somebody does see us, we’ll need all we’ve got.”
It was a good plan, but as we rested, Jack, being Jack and seventeen years old, pulled out his pistol and started playing with it. I opened my mouth to suggest he not do that, but I didn’t get a word out before KABLOW. It sounded like a cannon and it echoed again and again off the sides of the narrow hollow. Every dog on the Jepson place started barking. I peeked through the bushes and every last one of them was looking straight toward the bushes that screened us. So was a woman standing in the front doorway.
“Haul ass!” Jack opined. He turned downstream, ready to run back to Jim’s place.
“No!” I said. “They’ll expect us to go that way. Cut across the field to the thicket. That’s the closest place we can hide!”
We dashed across the corner of the pasture, a matter of maybe thirty yards, and stepped across a low electric fence into the laurels. We were no more than ten feet past the fence when I looked over a laurel bush and saw a man on the other side holding a shotgun, ready at port arms, walking fast with his eyes glued to the path that led around that very bush to us. He didn’t see me but there was no time to do anything but step off the trail, motion Jack down, and whisper “Freeze!”
Both of us squatted, stock still. The guy walked right past us, and he wouldn’t have seen us except that just as he lifted his foot to cross the electric fence—the only moment when he was not making any noise at all—Jack giggled.
The guy with the shotgun turned and it was me he saw, not Jack. He swung the shotgun to cover me, cocking the hammer. As I tried to turn my rifle toward him, I realized I could never get it full around in time and that I was going to die in about half a second.
Then Jack did the only smart thing he had done that day. He put the muzzle of his rifle against the guy’s temple and said, “Don’t do it!”
And he giggled again.
I can still see every detail of that moment in my mind: the finish peeling from the shotgun stock, the guy’s blue plaid shirt and bib overalls with the legs rolled up wet with dew, the anger turning to surprise on his face, and the crazy grin on Jack’s. Of course, I can see his huge 12-gauge barrel pointed at me and my own rifle pointed uselessly in the wrong direction. And every time I see it, I feel the same fear gripping my heart as it did that morning, and I remember the odd thought that the fear was only temporary, for in another moment my heart would be torn away by a blast of shot. I suppose I will remember that moment forever, but we stood like that only a second.
I could see the guy thinking. If he shot me, Jack would kill him; if he shot Jack, I would kill him. Standoff.
So he lowered his shotgun and set it butt-first on the ground and said, “Howdy,” as casually as if we’d just walked up to him on the porch of a general store. “I know you. You’re Stony Shelor. Used to be in my class. Remember how we used to fight?”
Now I recognized Buddy Jepson, the same Jepson kid I had gone to grade school with. He was a year older than me but in the same class because he missed so much school. Some people thought he was dumb, but I knew that wasn’t true. He was country smart, snake fast, and wiry strong. He was also the dirtiest fighter I have ever known. I had never exactly been in a fight with him; rather, I had survived some of his assaults. These always came without warning over some offense his victim never knew he had committed. The first announcement of his presence was a sucker punch in the spine. If anybody managed to defend himself well enough to hurt Buddy, which I did a time or two, it didn’t teach him to leave that person alone. It just guaranteed he’d jump the same victim again.
“I remember,” I said. I pointed my rifle at the ground, and Jack did the same with his. But I kept my thumb on the hammer, ready to cock it if I had to. This was a mean, dangerous guy.
“What were you shooting at?” Buddy asked.
“Nothing,” I said, truthfully. “Gun went off by accident.”
“Well, all this land is posted. You can’t hunt here.”
“We’re not hunting,” Jack said. “Just hiking.”
“You’ll have to leave anyway,” Buddy said.
“Okay,” I said. “Where’s the property end going this way?”
“It goes a quarter mile up the hill from the big creek. But you go out the way you come.”
“Why?” I asked. “We go this way we’ll be gone all the sooner.”
Buddy didn’t know what to say to that except to reiterate, “Go back the way you come.”
“No, we’ll just go this way,” I said, still in a friendly way.
Now Buddy was mad. He tried a different tack. “I guess that kind of scared you when I pointed that shotgun at you.”
“Well, I know we startled you. A gun going off when you don’t expect it startles anybody.”
“Oh, I just thought I’d walk down and see what’s going on. It didn’t startle me.” He was hornet-mad but he forced a smile.
Jack said, “When that shotgun goes off I bet it’ll startle you. It’s still cocked.”
Buddy was standing with the butt of his shotgun resting on the ground. He looked down and saw the barrel pointed straight up, pretty much right at his head, with the big hammer pulled back to full cock. His face, red with anger, went white. He pushed his arm out straight so the barrel was pointing at the sky instead of himself, then carefully lifted the gun and eased the hammer down. He was shaken, but still wanted to show us who was boss.
“I see you got pistols,” he said. “Can you shoot pretty good?” He pointed at my dad’s .32 Owlhead; I was wearing it openly, in a belt holster, because I hadn’t been expecting anybody to see me all day. I realized then it had been a stupid thing to do when my probation terms said I wasn’t supposed to have a pistol at all.
“Just fair,” I said.
“Let’s see what you can do,” Buddy said. He leaned the shotgun against a tree, carefully propping the muzzle in a fork so it couldn’t fall. He put his hands in his pockets.
I wasn’t much good with a pistol, so rather than taking careful aim at some easy target and missing, I thought I’d have a better chance of looking competent if I named a difficult target, did a fast draw, and hit somewhere in the neighborhood. So I pointed out a knot on a fallen log, maybe ten yards away, and said I’d try that. It was about the shape and size of a lemon, a difficult target with a cheap old pocket pistol, even if I’d taken dead aim.
I whipped out the pistol and snapped off a shot from an FBI-style crouch, holding the pistol with my arm extended straight in front of me, about waist high, looking over its barrel but not using the sights. My shot drilled the knot almost center, maybe a quarter inch to the left. It was a pure lucky shot. I could have burned twenty more cartridges and not hit it so well.
“You’re a little off today,” said Jack. He managed to keep a straight face.
Buddy said nothing. He was looking at the hole in the knot with great respect. Ever so slowly he took his hands out of his pockets, and there was a .22 revolver in the left one. He cocked, took deliberate aim at the knot, and fired. He did it six times and his best shot just nicked the knot on the outside.
“We’ll go this way,” Jack said, pointing up the hill, and this time Buddy didn’t argue.
As we moved away I quietly told Jack, “This guy’s probably a back shooter. Stay far enough from me that he can’t get us with one shot. His shotgun’s a single-barrel so that’s the only way he’d try it.” Even so, I kept looking over my shoulder. About the second time I looked, Buddy had disappeared into the bushes.
We moved up the creek just as we had planned, got well off the Jepson property till we were pretty sure Buddy hadn’t followed us, then cut back and resumed searching for a still. We sneaked down one stream and up another the rest of the morning.
After we ate our sandwiches, we checked a stream that led downhill into a wide hay meadow. We knew no still would be located in such an open area, and though we had been reminding each other all morning to be cautious, nothing had happened since we left Buddy behind and we were getting careless. We were just cutting across the meadow when we saw a groundhog, and without a second thought both of us threw our rifles to our shoulders and fired. Jack had a Remington bolt-action repeater, and I had my father’s fast-shooting Winchester pump. I got off three shots and Jack at least one, the .22 Long Rifle cartridges making whiplash cracks as the groundhog ran toward the creek and disappeared in tall grass.
“Shit,” Jack said. “I forgot we were being quiet.” We ran toward the last place we had seen the groundhog.
“I hope he didn’t crawl off somewhere we can’t get him,” I worried. “I’d rather miss game than let it die slow.”
“Do you think he’s in the creek?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know if groundhogs swim,” I said.
Jack found the groundhog dead under a small poplar tree, a couple of feet from the creek bank, and bent to pick it up. “Anything’ll swim if you’re shooting at it,” he said.
The moment he said that, I hear a BLAM, and shotgun pellets ripped through the leaves of the poplar, just over our heads. I turned toward the sound and saw a poplar branch, big around as my finger, spinning in the air. No birdshot could have cut off a branch so big; that took serious buckshot. A 12-gauge shell held at least nine buckshot, each of the nine as big as a .32 pistol bullet and just as capable of killing a man. Jack never even straightened up; he just put his arms straight out and did a racing dive into the creek, the only time I have ever seen this done into eight inches of water with big rocks in it.
The shot had come from somewhere up the hill to my left, so I started shooting that way while I walked backwards for the creek. With an open-hammer Winchester pump I could hold the trigger down while I worked the action, and it sprayed lead like a machine gun, which I hoped would deter Buddy Jepson or whoever had shot at us. The tubular magazine held fourteen rounds and there must have been eleven left in the gun after I shot at the groundhog. About the time I fired the seventh of those, our enemy fired again and the shot raked the weeds in front of me. That time he moved a little and I saw his position, maybe seventy yards away in the brush at the edge of the meadow.
Then I saw him for sure, Buddy Jepson breaking the single barrel to reload, and I snapped off four quick shots at him, too panicked to take careful aim. He dropped the shotgun, though, and I thought he grabbed his right upper arm with his left hand. Buddy threw himself flat just as my rifle clicked empty. I turned and made a running jump into the creek. Jack was firing over the bank by now, working the bolt of his rifle as fast as he could. I sat ass-wet in the wonderful safe creek and reloaded. I lost more cartridges in the creek than I managed to get into the magazine. I had never been so scared in my life, yet I realized, even then, I had never felt so elated. I thought I heard Jack giggling, as he often did when things got dangerous, but I was mistaken.
It was me giggling.
We crawled on our hands and knees a long way down the creek, never minding rocks or the sand we were getting in our weapons, then half crawled and duckwalked to the other side of the laurel thicket where we had first encountered Buddy. From there we ran straight across the Jepson farm and didn’t stop till we were back in the truck at Jim Hazlewood’s place. I spun gravel leaving there.
Jack was feeling high as a Georgia pine. He was laughing and started beating on the dashboard with his hands, making up a parody of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Shotgun Boogie.” He sang:
Shotgun Buddy! All he need is one shot.
Look out Mr. Stony or he’ll leave your ass to rot!
“He got two shots and missed us both times,” I pointed out. But it still made me shiver when I thought about those nine big buckshot whistling through the air each time he fired, each buckshot as deadly as a pistol bullet. “The only reason I can figure he missed is that he was shooting at long range, and he’d never practiced that with a shotgun. He fired too high the first time, then overcorrected.”
Jack said, “And the only reason he tried it from so far away was ’cause he was afraid to get closer,” said Jack, a little more subdued now. “Because he’d seen you drill that knot on the log with your dad’s pistol.”
We both knew hitting that knot had been pure luck. So living through the day had been luck too. When I thought of this, fear clutched me like somebody had my heart in his hand and was squeezing it. I hadn’t been afraid that way even when the air was full of buckshot.
= = =
Of course, we worried about getting in trouble over it. By 1960, gunplay was no frequent occurrence even in the mountains, and certainly wasn’t tolerated. But I wasn’t sure I had actually hit Buddy, and even if I had, an arm wound from a .22 was very unlikely to kill him. The Jepsons wanted nothing to do with the law, so unless Buddy did die, and particularly if I had missed him clean, they might not even report the shooting. We decided that if the Jepsons didn’t tell anybody, neither would we, and this time even Jack kept his mouth shut.
That left Buddy himself to worry about: snake-mean, and a guy who had already tried to kill us. This didn’t seem to scare Jack as much as it did me. I asked why.
“Well, everybody knows not to mess with you,” Jack said.
I said, “In the last few months, people have messed with me using a knife, a broadhead arrow, a black widow spider, and two shotguns.”
He said, “All those were under exceptional circumstances. Nobody just picks a fight with you. You sit out there on the front steps of the school and all those grease characters leave you alone. You’re the only one they show any respect who’s not one of them.”
We were sitting at his kitchen table in the afternoon, drinking coffee. Early County kids drank coffee from childhood, usually cut with cream and sugar or molasses, but we were trying to learn to drink it like cops, black with no sugar. I stirred my coffee to avoid commenting.
“There’s nothing in there to stir,” Jack pointed out. “Isn’t it time you told me?”
“Whatever you’re talking about, you must of heard or you wouldn’t be asking,” I said.
“Well, we’re good friends now. We’ve been in a gunfight together! I should know why you did that other thing.”
I still didn’t want to tell him.
“Look,” Jack said. “Don’t you know that’s why I picked you for a running buddy? They said you weren’t scared of anything.”
I said, “I’ve been scared a lot of times, and lately it’s all been at shit you got me into.” But I decided I’d better clear it up, make it plain it wasn’t about being scared or not.
“Did you ever hear that Todd Powell slept with Gina?” I asked.
It was an indelicate question that caught him off guard, and he hesitated to answer. So I continued, “I asked you, so that makes it all right to tell me.”
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I heard it. But I find it hard to believe.”
“So does everybody that knows both of them. But people say it just the same, don’t they? More than two years they been saying it. First time Todd claimed that, he was just pulling somebody’s leg, just to hear himself say it. But before long I guess he believed it himself and was swearing it to everybody. And you know Gina’s my cousin, right?”
He broke into a huge grin and said, “No, didn’t know that. I guess it’s true about mountain boys and their relatives …”
When he saw I wasn’t smiling he cut the wisecrack short.
“You can marry your second cousin in any state of the Union and your first cousin in some,” I pointed out. “My dad and her mother are first cousins, so we’re only second cousins. But we are kin, and good friends all our lives, so I thought I shouldn’t let Todd say that.”
Jack said, “He’s a big guy to be picking a fight with.”
“Well, he wasn’t going to get any smaller,” I said. “He could of whipped me, but he didn’t even try. Every time I tried to hit him he just danced back out of range. And he kept telling me what a sweet f— … how much fun it was to have sex with Gina. Did this right out loud, in front of other people who all knew Gina.”
I was having a hard time talking about it, a lump rising in my throat as I remembered the humiliation and the slander on Gina, not really my sweetheart but my sweet friend from infancy, and my blood kin. Remembered the other boys laughing, and the dirty jokes they made about Gina. No way to end it, for the moment, but to walk away with them laughing at my back and behind Gina’s.
“So you couldn’t catch him?”
“Well, I caught him,” I said. “Half an hour later, I stepped out of that storeroom beside the cafeteria, and I had a new hickory ax handle I stole out of the vocational agriculture shop. I swung for the bleachers, and I caught him right in the strike zone, and it broke his left arm and two ribs.”
I stirred the coffee some more. “Those bastards still scare me—Todd and his grease buddies—but I guess they’re a little scared of me too. That’s why they leave me alone. But because I did that I’m on probation till I’m eighteen, and that’s one reason I can’t afford for anybody to find out about us shooting at Buddy Jepson.”
Our coffee had grown cold. Jack hadn’t taken a sip since I started the story, and now he sat for a minute wordless.
Finally Jack said, “Nobody could have believed a classy girl like Gina with a hillbilly hood like Todd Powell. Did you break his arm for lying about her morals or lying about her taste?”
“I didn’t break his arm ’cause it happened to be a lie,” I explained. “I broke his arm ’cause he talked about her.”
If it had happened when I was older, I would not have fallen to thinking that I was going to walk away without consequences after maybe shooting Buddy Jepson. But I was seventeen years old and had seen too many TV shows in which people did just that, so after a few weeks went by without anything happening, I kind of quit worrying about it.
That summer I had taken to dropping in at the pool hall almost every afternoon, shooting a few games while learning what I could. The pool hall crowd was mostly around my age or a little older and not seriously criminal, but you might hear who was selling stolen fender skirts or breaking the padlock on a gasoline pump to help himself. A growl from Ben to the proper party was usually sufficient to end these activities for a while.
The poolroom wasn’t much, just five tables and a sandwich counter. Pool was considered disreputable, and for that reason the storefront windows were covered with cafe curtains; you couldn’t see who was in there without walking up and pressing your nose against the window, which most people in Early were too dignified to do. It also had a back door opening onto a parking lot, so it was easy to get in and out unobserved.
I went in the front door about the usual time one Thursday and, as often happened, Andy Byrd goaded me into a game of nine ball. He carried a grudge against me for catching him stealing his grandparents’ antiques and cutting off his whorehouse money. He was seeking revenge at one to five dollars a game, and he usually won it.
I was two games down when somebody said, “Stony, there’s a guy here that says he’s your cousin. He said he’d wait for you outside in a blue ’55 Ford.”
“I don’t know which of my cousins drives a ’55 Ford,” I told Andy. “I better go see.”
“Well, you hurry back,” Andy told me. “You might still have a dollar I can win.”
So I went out the back door, to the parking lot, looking for a blue ’55 Ford. But I never saw it, and if there was one out there at all, Buddy Jepson must have used it to hit me blind-side. Or maybe he hit me with his favorite sucker punch to the spine.
It felt like a cherry bomb going off inside me, pain so intense I didn’t just feel it but saw the flash. As soon as I hit the ground, Buddy kicked my face with a work boot worn down to the nailheads, and when I got up on my hands and knees he stomped my right hand so hard I couldn’t clench it into a fist. Three blows into this fight, I hadn’t thrown one of them, and the other guy already had me groggy, bleeding, and paralyzed in my best hand. Then he let me get up so he could kick me between the legs.
“You pull that pistol now, peckerwood!” Buddy said.
I didn’t have a pistol on me, but I knew he had one or he wouldn’t have said that. He wanted me to try it with the nerves in my hand stunned, clumsy and slow, so he could shoot me in “self-defense.” I kept my hands away from my pockets and kicked his shin hard as I could wearing a sneaker.
By then people were coming out of the pool hall. Buddy turned sideways, kept his eyes on me but pointed his finger at the onlookers, sweeping it from right to left to cover everybody. “This is personal. You stay out of it!” he said.
The onlookers made it worse. I’d won and lost plenty of fights, and the worst part of losing for me was never the pain but the shame of people seeing it. And this time I was hurt so bad, and was so outraged at being given absolutely no chance, that I was crying even as I hurled myself back against him. I couldn’t make my right hand close into a decent fist so I’d lost my right cross, and after the kick in the crotch I couldn’t move quick enough to land a left hook. About all that I could deliver was a left jab, which had always been my weakest punch. But I couldn’t stop myself from going after him, I was so furious. Buddy grabbed me in a headlock and ran my head into the brick wall. When I fell again, he kicked me in the ribs and I heard them crack. But I got up again and landed a couple more jabs with my left, about one for every three times he hit me.
Gradually the crowd began to voice disapproval. “That’s enough, Buddy,” and, “Don’t do nothing to get on a chain gang!” And I heard Andy advise him, “Hey, whoever you are, leave some of him for next time!”
Eventually Buddy grew physically tired of his efforts, knocked me down once more, gave me one more kick in the stomach. Then, as a last indignity, he spit on me before walking away.
It was Andy Byrd, of all people, who held me upright while I staggered half a block and up the stairs to Dr. Johnson’s office. I wasn’t too proud to thank Andy, and he said, “I’m just doing it ’cause it’s fun watching you bleed.”
The doctor wouldn’t let me talk any more until he got through patching and x-raying, and that took more than an hour. That gave me time to think up a story for Really Big Ben and my father, who were both waiting right there with questions as Dr. Johnson pulled the final stitch tight and said it was okay to talk now.
“It was just a fight,” I said. “He said he could whip me and I said he couldn’t.” My words sounded thick and odd, and I hoped the grown-ups would attribute this to my swollen lips and stitched face, rather than the fact I was lying.
They didn’t fall for it.
“Stony,” Ben said, “did you know that Dr. Johnson is required by law to report any gunshot wounds he treats? He treated Buddy Jepson for a bullet wound on the third of June. And as quick as Buddy heals up, he comes straight to town and tears you a new asshole. I do not believe this is coincidence.”
It certainly wasn’t, but I realized immediately that if Buddy had told who shot him, I would have been in trouble a lot sooner than this.
“He didn’t say I shot him,” I said, so sure I could state it as fact, not a question.
“No,” Ben confirmed. “Said it was a hunting accident, and he never saw who shot him. But I can generally tell when somebody’s lying. He was lying. And I think you are too.”
My father moved in. “Ben, what happens to Stony if he admits to a shooting?”
Ben said, “Maybe time in reform school. Maybe even try him as an adult depending on how it happened. The judge is going to consider that he’s been doing a good job for me. But he’s also going to consider that time he broke Todd Powell’s arm. This would be the second violent crime.”
I stuck to my story and finally Ben threw up his hands and said, “Okay, that’s all for today.” He let the spring-loaded door slam behind him and stomped down the stairs.
My father drew a deep breath. “Stony,” he said, “I don’t know what happened, and I’ll hire the best lawyer in the state if you need one, but I want you to tell me the truth before you dig yourself in any deeper.”
And I repeated, “It was just a regular fight. Buddy said he could whip me, and I said he couldn’t.”
I had hoped to spend the next day in bed licking my wounds, but my father came home from the mill at eleven the next morning. He made me get up and get dressed, and he drove me way up in the mountains and out a dirt road that eventually narrowed to a path that was just two parallel wheel tracks. My bruised kidneys and cracked ribs hurt with every bump we drove over, and my sprained neck hurt every time I moved my head. The doctor had given me pain pills but they weren’t helping much.
Dad stopped the truck at an old family cemetery. A couple of dozen headstones stood inside a low ornamental wire fence, the grass and shrubs inside tended like a garden in the middle of a field rough with the stubble of new-mown hay. My right hand was still puffed up from being stomped and wouldn’t work, so I had to open the passenger door with my left. I could barely walk from the truck through the gate. I needed a crutch but didn’t have one, and Dad wasn’t lending a hand.
The headstones had Shelor names on them. The particular one my father led me to also said, “Murdered by a Jepson.” It was dated 1924. My father would have been sixteen that year.
“I never told you about this,” my father said. “Maybe I should of.”
I said, “I heard things.”
“What did you hear?”
“That we killed the man that killed this one.”
“They do say that, don’t they?”
“Isn’t it true?” I challenged.
“That particular murdering Jepson just didn’t come home one night. Nobody today knows what happened to him. And a Shelor boy, that maybe had something to do with it, he moved to Colorado. Then after a while, all of a sudden, his letters quit coming. The boy that went to Colorado was the son of the man in the grave there. He was my cousin and my good friend, just two years older than me. And I never seen him again.”
“Did he just go on the lam or did the Jepsons go to Colorado and kill him?”
“Does it matter? We lost him either way.”
I got steamed. “All my life, you’ve told me feuds are only in movies and comic books. Now you tell me they’re real and our family had one. A bad one. You lied to me about that all my life!”
Dad said, “I didn’t want you taking up the fight. Your buddy Jack thinks it’s fun to carry a pistol. You try carrying one every day for three, four years! To school. To church. Dodge every deputy you see ’cause he might catch you with it. Sleep with a Winchester .30-30 under the bed and grab it every time you hear a creak in the house frame.”
I said, “Are you going to tell me what it was about?”
“A woman. A brandy still. A dog. Nobody knows which story is true, and I don’t care anymore. Whatever started it wasn’t worth a life, let alone three.”
Then he asked me again, “Did you or did you not shoot Buddy Jepson?”
So I said, “Does it matter? He’s gonna keep hating me either way.”
= = =
Ben would question me again, because he knew about the feud and, acting as sheriff now, he wanted to do everything he could to keep it from boiling up again. Even if that meant prosecuting me. But I stuck to my story. Being on probation I could not afford to admit shooting somebody. Besides that, there were three other reasons. First, I figured there was no hard evidence against me or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to get me to confess. Turns out I was right about that. I eventually learned that the bullet had passed clear through Buddy’s arm, which meant it hadn’t been recovered and couldn’t be linked to my rifle. It also meant Buddy had a clean wound that healed quickly, which explained why he was well enough to stomp me the same month he got shot.
The second reason I lied was that the truth might hurt Ben’s chances of being elected sheriff. Everyone knew I worked at the sheriff’s office, and Rich Conway would be happy to use me against Ben.
The third reason was that I had decided to murder Buddy Jepson.
I didn’t tell anybody that, of course. Not even Jack.
Being a responsible adult, my father had disarmed me as soon as he heard about the shooting. At least, he thought he had. He locked up all the hunting guns in our house, but he didn’t lock up his .32 revolver because he didn’t realize I knew that gun existed. I also had access to the disorganized locker at the sheriff’s office where about a dozen old rifles and shotguns were kept in case it ever became necessary to arm a posse of deputized citizens. That hadn’t happened since the 1930s, when it was rumored that John Dillinger planned to raid the Bank of Early, and that had been a false alarm. Not one of those guns was worth twenty-five dollars, so nobody paid attention to them, and I had discovered that the department’s property records didn’t list all of them.
So one quiet night, I carried one of the unlisted rifles out of the sheriff’s office and hid it behind the seat of my dad’s pickup. The one I took was a beat-up German military Mauser rifle, heavy as a sack of monkey wrenches. I chose it because there were probably dozens like it in Early County, brought home as war trophies; they were common enough that if a deputy happened to see this gun again, he wouldn’t recognize it as one from the department locker. Besides, it shot big 8mm cartridges, easy to get and capable of dropping an elk or a moose, and no Jepson shot with one would ever again come to town and kick my ass.
I hid the rifle in the woods near the Jepson house and lay out there nearly every day for a week or more, every time I could give plausible reason to be absent from home or the sheriff’s office. Twice I had the sights on Buddy, and twice I flipped off the safety. The first time I didn’t shoot it was because I was scared of getting caught. I thought my plan through again and decided I wouldn’t be caught.
The second time, I got the sights lined up on Buddy’s spine, where the straps of his overalls crossed each other, picking that spot because that was where he liked to sucker punch other people. Just as I flicked off the safety, Buddy stepped back into the house. I kept the sights centered on the door, and when I saw movement in the doorway again, lit bright by the morning sun, I started to squeeze the trigger. Then I saw hands above the gun sights, carrying a two-gallon thermos jug, and the hands were too slender to be Buddy’s. I looked up at the face above them and saw a woman, her face drawn into a worried frown. I took my finger off the trigger and my heart started pounding and my breath came short, because I’d nearly killed her.
Even today I sometimes see that woman in my dreams, and I wake up soaked with sweat and with my heart pounding. I remember every gray strand of her hair coming loose from the bun in which she wore it. I remember the flowered pattern of her blouse, made of pretty blue-gray feed-sack cotton, and the gold wedding ring on her left hand. She was thin, as mountain women tend to be even if they’re well-to-do, and she looked too old to have a son Buddy’s age, but I realized immediately his mother would look old. She lived a hard life of isolation, watching the road for revenuers, writing to sons in prison, knowing this one, probably her youngest, would probably go there too. A sadness washed over me, not just the sadness of Mrs. Jepson’s life, but the sadness and shortness of all human lives.
Buddy walked back out of the house then, and right across my sights, but by then he couldn’t have been safer in church. I couldn’t shoot him, not then, not after realizing that the bullet in his heart could as well be a bullet in hers, that a bullet in anybody’s heart was one in somebody else’s. And from that moment I knew I could never kill Buddy, nor anybody, in cold blood. At the time, it wasn’t a comforting realization, and I began sobbing with frustration.
Buddy had driven up to the house that day in an old black flatbed truck with stake sides that allowed him to stack stuff high in the back, and it was filled almost to the top of the stake sides with sacks of feed grain. He took a few sacks of feed off the truck and carried them into a shed, then he brought out a tarpaulin, covered the rest of the load in the truck bed, and called toward the house.
“I’m goin’, Mama.”
The woman came out again with a lunch box and handed it to him. I couldn’t hear what she said to him, but she kissed him as fondly as any mother would, and I began to feel marginally better about not killing Buddy.
Then he got into the truck and started driving away. Only then did I realize what that meant. Buddy had driven sacks of grain to the farm, now he was driving most of that grain away. The few sacks he had put in the shed were for their few animals; the rest was going to be used for mash, fermenting it to make liquor.
I left the rifle in the thicket and for all I know, it’s still there, rusting away. I hotfooted it down that sunken creek bed, running parallel to the creek and the truck on the road, screened from Buddy’s eyes by the growth on the bank. It was some of the hardest running I ever did, but since Buddy was taking it very easy on the rocky road, I was able to catch up. As soon as he turned a bend away from the house, I splashed across the creek and into the road itself. If Buddy had looked in his rearview mirror right then I would have been in serious trouble, but since he was on his family’s private road, I figured he wouldn’t have reason to look. I ran right up to the back of the truck, caught hold of the tarpaulin, and pulled myself up into the vacant place he’d made by removing the few sacks of feed at the Jepson house.
If I could find out where he was taking the grain, I would have him by the short hairs. It had to be about whiskey, and if I could connect him to a still, I’d have my revenge and no blood on my hands. The difficulty would be getting through this without my blood on his.
The truck bumped out of the Jepson’s private road, down the gravel road to the main highway, and turned south, away from Early. We ground up a mountain and on for miles on roads I no doubt had traveled before, but I had trouble figuring out where we were going because I was looking out from the back of the truck, which told me only where we had been. I got very sick and drowsy from the carbon monoxide blowing back up under the tarp, and I was afraid I would die under there.
After quite a while, we turned onto a good gravel road. The truck stopped within a few hundred feet, and Buddy got out. I hadn’t expected this to happen so soon. I had been counting on him taking several progressively worse roads before he stopped, which would make him slow down enough for me to slip out the back and just trail his tire tracks the rest of the way—wherever he was going. Now, if he came to the back of the truck and started to unload, he would see me. I could assume he was armed, and there might be other people around, too. If shooting started I did not like my chances with a five-shot .32. I longed for the Mauser rifle, but I couldn’t have run fast enough to catch the truck if I had kept it. I drew the little pistol and waited.
Then I heard a sound, a metal gate opening. Buddy got back in the truck and drove slowly forward. I knew he would stop again about thirty feet farther on. This time he would walk behind the truck to close the gate, and then he couldn’t help seeing me. I didn’t have time to turn around and make a dignified exit. I just pulled myself headfirst over the end of the bed and landed on my hands, elbows, nose, and knees, in that order. It was about a four-foot fall onto gravel-covered hardpan, and it cut me up considerably, but I didn’t feel it then, I was so scared. I scrambled for the ditch on the right side of the road—didn’t even take time to check for snakes before I lay down. I just made it before Buddy had the truck stopped and walked back to shut the gate. And he did glance into the back of the truck, where I’d been thirty seconds before.
I lay in the ditch a while after he drove away, trying to get over the sick feeling from exhaust fumes and fear. When I began feeling better, I studied what I could see, just from there in the ditch. Low, red clay banks rose on both sides of the road, and there were woods at the top of the banks. The banks themselves and the edge of the woods were thick with green weeds and brush. The gate and the fence had a NO TRESPASSING notice on each post.
This would not be a big property—mountain farms seldom were—so I had a good chance of finding Buddy again. I decided to stay off the road as much as possible, just follow alongside it but in the woods. That was safer, but it meant I had to be careful of snakes, and that slowed me down a lot. I had to stay out of sight. There were fallow fields to cross, and they were grown up with weeds and briars, but the growth was so low I had to cross them mostly on my hands and knees. I told myself I would never go into the woods again without a pair of tough leather work gloves.
It was the thirstiest work I had ever done. I had started that morning with a canteen of water but had emptied it long since, and the field-crawling was largely done in the open sun. When I finally stumbled across a creek, I drank until I was nearly sick, not caring if it ran downstream from somebody’s hogpen.
Under those conditions, it took me hours to find the truck. When I did, it was parked beside an old-fashioned barn built of mud-chinked logs at the edge of a field. The barn had no windows, but it was easy to slip up on the blind side opposite the door, find a place where the mud chinking had fallen out, and peek between the logs.
There was electric light in there, and I saw Buddy and two other men carrying buckets of mash to a still that seemed to be made from a 250-gallon fuel oil tank laid on its side. They poured the mash into what looked like half of a fifty-five-gallon steel drum welded onto the flat top side of the tank. The shape of the tank and the drum together resembled a submarine, and I later learned that’s what this kind of still is called. The mash looked like hog swill and it smelled, even outside the barn, like a compost pile gone sour. It looked like making a dishonest dollar was unpleasant work.
But I didn’t dwell on that. I knew as much as I needed to.
I made my way back to the highway, walked around the first curve, and stuck out my thumb. A black, souped-up ’55 Chevy pulled to a stop. A couple of boys my age were in it.
When they got a good look at my briar scratches and layer of dirt, one of them said, “Jesus, what happened to you?”
“I was hitching,” I lied. “Guy I was riding with tried to queer me and I made him let me out, but I couldn’t catch another ride and I had to spend the night in the woods.”
“It’s two in the damned afternoon,” said one of them.
“I got kind of turned around in there,” I said. This was not a very plausible story, but it was the best I could think of on the spot.
It turned out I was in Tazewell County, and these boys were going on into the county seat, so I got all the way there on the one ride. I asked them to drop me at the courthouse.
The Tazewell sheriff was a pure mountain type, tall and skinny but strong as hickory in middle age. Ben in twenty years, I thought. The second he saw me, covered with dirt and sweat and blood from my cut hands and knees, he asked me into his office, gave me a seat, and told a deputy to bring in two coffees. I was bone-tired, and the coffee woke me up enough to explain what I knew.
“There’s people out there right now making liquor,” I said, finishing the story. “I don’t know but one of them—Buddy Jepson from Early.”
“Is that one of the Jepsons?” asked the sheriff.
“It is,” I said. “New generation, same business.”
He grinned broadly, picked up his phone, and within an hour we were in his patrol car roaring back up the highway to the farm. Despite the haste and the complicated logistics of getting a search warrant and assembling a caravan of his own deputies and state ABC agents, he found time to buy me two sliced-pork barbecue sandwiches, and I made short work of them.
“You stay in the car and keep your head low, and nobody will ever have to see you,” he said.
“I want him to see me,” I answered.
So the lawmen went in and caught them all. I walked up to Buddy while he was handcuffed to the door handle of a police car.
“I reckon I still owe you something,” I said. And I spit on him.
He lunged at me so hard I thought either the door handle or his wrist would break, but I stood just out of his reach and laughed.
= = =
It was quite a successful raid. The haul was three moonshiners, a 250-gallon still, nine big plank boxes of working mash, about fifty gallons of finished whiskey, Buddy’s truck, and all the grain Buddy had hauled in that day. More important, there were some two hundred gallons of commercial sugar syrup, the kind used in soda fountains, and there were dozens of brand-new one-gallon glass jugs.
“This is part of something bigger,” said the Tazewell sheriff. “Sugar syrup and new jugs are hard to get unless you’re tied in with some regular manufacturer—maybe a cannery or a soft drink company.”
A soft drink bottling company suggested William Pinchbeck, Conway’s crooked buddy in Early, I guessed. Buddy wouldn’t admit that, but the Tazewell sheriff said he knew it was true as quick as he put the question to him. The ABC agents went to Early to get a warrant to search the bottling plant, but Wesley Holt, the JP, refused to issue one, saying they didn’t have probable cause. Wesley made the legally correct call, I guess, but it must have been frustrating for the lawmen, and by then, of course, Pinchbeck had notice that trouble was brewing, and could do what he pleased with any evidence of complicity.
I called home late that afternoon and told my mom I was okay and would explain later. I made it home about ten, and both my parents were waiting to hear my story. But they took one look at the dirt and blood and Dad said, “Can it wait till morning?”
I said it sure could. But I slept till noon the next day without even taking off my clothes. Then I got up, took a bath, pulled the ticks and briars out of me, and shaved. I put on clean clothes and went to the sheriff’s office to bask in my glory.
I was telling Bobby Lee Lawson about it. Of course, I never admitted that the blow I had struck for the law had begun with my lying in ambush to murder Buddy in cold blood. I also downplayed the illegality of my trespassing on the farm in Tazewell County, though I didn’t think that mattered much. There was a general understanding that an informer in a moonshine case did not have to say how he got information, only that he had it.
Ben came in while I was talking. He stood listening quietly, and asked me to repeat the parts he’d missed. I thought he was going to be really proud of me. But then he made it clear he wasn’t.
“So now you’re going to send Buddy Jepson to prison,” Ben said.
“He won’t go to prison.” I laughed. “It’s a first offense.”
“He will if he doesn’t squeal on the main guys who put up the money. And he won’t.”
I countered, “Well, doesn’t he have it coming, then?”
Ben said, “It wasn’t even a Jepson operation. His daddy and most of his brothers and uncles are in prison, and the family needs money. He must of gone to work for somebody else—everybody thinks it was Pinchbeck but they can’t prove it—and Buddy’s too Jepson to talk. So he’s going to take the fall for the big guy, mostly because he licked you in a fight over trouble you started yourself!”
I started to say something but Ben cut me off.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I can’t fire you because I’m not paying you, but I don’t want to see you in this office again.”
Everybody was mad at me. When I told my father what had happened, or a version of it, he was as pissed as ever I saw him. “It took thirty-six years to get a little peace with the goddamn Jepsons and you went and stirred it up again,” he yelled.
Jack was pissed because I had not included him in this adventure. Well, I couldn’t very well have taken him along on a murder errand, could I? But I could never tell him that was what I had in mind for Buddy Jepson.
Even Gina was upset at me. She usually had a kind word for me when I felt down, at least when I called it to her attention, but not this time. She was kin enough to know about the Shelors’ old feud with the Jepsons, and was appalled that I might have revived it.
“You could make excuses all day and I’d still wonder why you had to go and let Buddy know it was you that told on him,” Gina said. “I’ll always be your friend, because you’ve always been mine, but by God you’re making it hard!”
One of my favorite gospel songs had always been “Lonesome Valley,” but only that week did I begin to understand what Woody Guthrie meant. Buddy Jepson had to walk his valley by himself. Nobody else would do it for him. And nobody else would do it for me, either.
I could understand my father’s anger, and Gina’s, even Jack’s, but I did not feel Ben’s was justified. I didn’t think I’d done much wrong. I did have to admit to myself—though I would not admit it to Ben or anyone else—that I wouldn’t have gotten stomped and Buddy wouldn’t have got shot, or arrested, if I had not trespassed on the Jepson farm. Ben was right, I started all that. But in my mind, trespassing was a minor infraction compared to the ruthless and unprovoked assaults Buddy habitually committed on random victims. As far as Buddy going to prison—well, when I thought about all the humiliation he’d put me through, I didn’t care if they hanged him. And if I had any second thoughts about that, I didn’t entertain them for long. I couldn’t swallow that much pride.
Ben wouldn’t have me at the sheriff’s office so I took a job in Harlow’s Garage. Dan Harlow was a kind man who would give a break to a kid with no marketable skills. I started out washing cars, then graduated to grease monkey and pumping gas and driving a tow truck. I learned a little about fixing cars.
Most people called Harlow by his last name. I personally put a “Mr.” in front of it, because he was a friend of my father’s, and I always had respected him. Mr. Harlow had curly gray hair sticking out from under a striped cap, like a railroad brakeman’s. He always wore greasy striped coveralls, but he carried a gold 21-jewel Elgin pocket watch, fastened to a buttonhole with a gold chain, and he kept a Browning .25 automatic pistol, with mother-of-pearl grips, in his cash drawer. Both the watch and the gun were covered with engravings of leafy vines and such, and there were gold inlays on the dark blue pistol. Mr. Harlow didn’t have fancy tastes, but he had a soft heart. When somebody was broke but needed his car fixed to get to work, Mr. Harlow would find some way to fix it. He had taken the pistol in trade for a new differential, and the watch for rebuilding a transmission.
Otherwise he was a plain man, and Harlow’s Garage reflected it. It was a wooden structure on the old highway outside of town, built out over a hillside. The garage doors opened on the parking lot so you could drive a car right in, but if you went around back, the garage floor was about seven or eight feet off the ground. Hog wire was nailed between the support timbers all the way around the building, and there was a locking gate. We used that space under there to store used auto parts, crates of soft drinks, and other stuff that was worth stealing but not worth a lot of trouble for a thief.
There was a three-by-ten-foot hole in the garage floor, between some of the heaviest floor beams; there the floorboards had been taken up, forming a grease pit where you could stand to work underneath a car. But the pit was hardly used anymore because Mr. Harlow had finally bought a hydraulic grease rack to lift the cars straight off the floor, which was a safer and more versatile arrangement. Now the hole was covered again with boards, though the boards weren’t nailed down. We could still remove the boards to use the grease pit, but seldom did unless the lift was occupied by some other job in progress. Mostly we kept the tow truck parked in the bay where the hole was. We had two other service bays, a wash pit, and a little office where we kept the cash register and business records, and sold soft drinks and snacks and sometimes fruit that Mr. Harlow had accepted in exchange for a grease job or oil change.
I met some new kinds of people that summer. The garage was a hangout for the kind of folks who went to stock car races instead of church on Sunday, and the kind that spent Saturday night up some back road, parked with a girl and a bottle. There were small-time gamblers, and slick salesmen who always had a proposition for you. The high school grease crowd, Todd Powell’s bunch, hung out there sometimes, and country girls stopped for gasoline on their way to or from summer jobs at the mills. I had to talk to them all, just in the course of business, and began to feel more at ease with them.
It was a custom for teenagers to take their limited business to places that employed other teens, so my few friends—mostly Jack, Ernestine, and Gina—started buying their gasoline at Harlow’s, and occasionally having a car washed, lubed, or tuned. A few of my other classmates stopped in too, including, to my great joy, Mary Lou. She had a summer office job at the mill where her parents worked. Since her shift was in the daytime, she could drive the family car to work and be home in time for them to take the same car to their jobs on the graveyard shift. It was her responsibility to keep the car filled with gas, because gas stations would be closed when her parents drove by at night.
I was delighted every time I saw her, and always made sure to check the oil, the radiator, the battery, and the tire pressure in her car. Mary Lou was always friendly and patient while I performed these not-always-necessary tasks, and I realize now she must have understood I was doing them just to prolong her presence. That was something Southern women often did, graciously accepting male admiration without actually encouraging it. But at the time I understood none of this, and blundered through the encounters almost without speaking except to tell her how much money she owed Mr. Harlow.
The garage was on the road that ran past Susannah Penn’s house, the same road I’d ridden out on my bicycle the night that her boyfriend winged me with the shotgun. Susannah drove past several times on the way to a new job; Mrs. Conway had helped her find one, once Andy’s confession had cleared Susannah’s name. She started stopping once in a while to buy gas. She drove an old Ford, two-tone blue with a lot of chrome. And the engine hummed like a sewing machine.
About the third time she stopped, Susannah asked me if I could get her brother Roosevelt a job at the garage. I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t know if he’d figured out I was the one who had pulled a gun on him that night. If he did figure it out, he might try to cut me again.
“I’m the lowest man on the totem pole here,” I said. “Why do you think I could do that?”
“I just thought you might try. To make up for bringing the sheriff down on me.”
I hadn’t thought she would know Jack and I were responsible for that. I guess she put two and two together.
She went on without waiting for a response, “Listen to that engine. Roosevelt’s the one tuned it.” She turned the ignition key and the engine came back on, sounding good as a new car’s.
“I’ll talk to my boss,” I said.
So I got Mr. Harlow to talk to Roosevelt, and Mr. Harlow hired him to wash cars, sweep up, and such, even though it was obvious Roosevelt knew more about cars than some of the guys who were doing mechanic’s work. Mr. Harlow was afraid that letting a black guy work on white people’s cars might be bad for business.
Roosevelt took the job seriously, though. He showed up every day in clean, pressed work pants and shirt. He wore an olive-green color, well chosen because axle grease didn’t show on it. He always wore his belt buckle more on his left hip than in front, so it wouldn’t scratch any paint when he leaned over a fender. I wore mine the same way to protect the finish of my guitar. When he washed a car, Roosevelt wore galoshes, but the rest of the time he wore high-topped work shoes. He polished his work shoes, which almost nobody else did. Roosevelt’s personal dress code single-handedly improved the garage’s image.
What’s more, Roosevelt was handsome—only about five feet seven, but perfectly proportioned and muscular for a seventeen-year-old. His skin was the color of bright tan dress oxfords, and just as free of blemishes. He had high cheekbones and a straight, sharp nose, which suggested a little American Indian blood. His very curly black hair was always neatly trimmed and was parted with a cosmetic razor cut on the left side. Even white people liked looking at him, and seemed to enjoy talking with him. Mr. Harlow saw Roosevelt was getting popular, and soon had him waiting on customers, pumping gasoline, checking oil, and selling fan belts.
One day we had a visit from two guys I didn’t know. They parked a late-model Dodge pickup truck away from the bays and got out. They were both wearing suits, which didn’t seem right for guys driving a pickup, or for the August weather.
Roosevelt walked over and asked politely if he could help them. I was coming right behind him.
“We need to talk to somebody white,” one of them said.
Roosevelt started to say something, but I spoke over him. “Get Mr. Harlow,” I commanded.
Roosevelt went into the bay where Mr. Harlow did the most serious work. In a minute or two Mr. Harlow came out, alone, wiping his hands on a shop rag and wearing a false smile. “Let’s go into the office,” he said. All three men went into the sales room, and Mr. Harlow closed the door to the parking lot and the other one to the garage. Normally, both remained open during business hours.
After a few minutes the visitors came out, walked past me without looking at me, got into the truck, and drove away. Mr. Harlow came out of the sales room and watched them go. He was carrying something flat under his arm.
“Who were those rude bastards?” I asked.
“The Klan,” said Mr. Harlow. “They want me to fire Roosevelt and to put this up.” He showed me what he had been carrying under his arm. It was a sign, commercially printed on heavy cardboard, and it said in big red letters, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”
I said, “You’re not going to do that are you?”
“Oh, I guess it won’t hurt to meet ’em halfway. I’ll put up the sign.”
And he did. And right under it he put another sign that he had printed himself. It said, “And we recognize your right to mind your own damn business.”
Mr. Harlow didn’t fire Roosevelt. In fact, he started letting him do real mechanic’s work. A few of the customers did tell me, at first, that they didn’t want “some damn nigger” working on their cars. But once they heard an engine that Roosevelt had tuned, they changed their minds. They wanted their own engines to sound like that and wouldn’t have cared if Fidel Castro had done the work. Turned out Roosevelt was good for business.
I was trying to set some ignition points one day when Roosevelt got to looking over my shoulder and chuckling. I found setting points a tedious trial-and-error task. I repeatedly measured the critical gap between the points, turned the screw that locked the points in position, and measured again to find they had somehow slipped closer together and I needed to do it all over again. I turned the air blue with curses every time this happened.
Finally, Roosevelt said, “If you aren’t too proud to take a suggestion from a colored boy, I can show you an easier way to do that.”
“So show me,” I growled, frustrated.
From the wheeled tool chest beside the car Roosevelt took a different screwdriver than I had been using. He took the feeler gauge from my hand, looked at it to make sure I had the right thickness of blade already extended, and slipped the blade between the points. Then he slipped the screwdriver blade into the twin slots that adjusted the gap between the points, twisted it ever so gently until the feeler gauge could slide in and out, but just barely. He held it in exactly that position and used a second screwdriver to tighten the screw that locked the adjustment into place. He stepped back and handed me the feeler gauge.
“Check to make sure I got it right,” he said.
I did check, and he had. Dead on the nose, first try.
“Okay, how’d you do that so easy?” I asked.
“I used a screwdriver that fit. I believe you just used the first one that come to hand.”
“That’s all?” I questioned. I sounded a little amazed.
“Sad but true,” Roosevelt responded. “Now, don’t go pulling a pistol on me or nothing like that.”
When he said that, I knew he had figured out it was me he tangled with in his backyard that night. He never said so, and neither did I, but it broke the ice between us. I understood completely why he’d tried to kill me, and I would have done the same in his shoes, and so he seemed more human to me than any other black person had ever seemed. We became friends. He was the first black friend I ever made. I didn’t know any other white kid, back then, who had one.
= = =
Gideon Early was fast company, but not a bad guy. He was short and muscular, good looking, with a blond ducktail haircut and blue eyes that never seemed to blink. He was uncommonly well groomed, wore spit-shined shoes and, most of the time, a sports coat, which hardly anybody else did. But when he brought his red Thunderbird in to be lubed and washed, it often would be muddy right up to the double headlights. There would be empty Canadian whiskey bottles in the back seat, poker chips, playing cards, old hamburger wrappers, and loose rounds of pistol ammo, because firearms were one of his major hobbies. There was also a fine red wool blanket in the back seat, the kind customarily used when courting girls by starlight. I wondered what it was doing there, because Gideon was about thirty-one years old and had been married for years.
Gideon had the car chassis greased every week or two, which meant he drove at least a thousand miles in that time, selling insurance, which was his day job, and chasing poker games, which he did at night.
Gideon was the first person I’d ever met who played chess, and sometimes, after the garage had more or less closed, he would hang around and teach the fundamentals to a few of the guys who had time on their hands that summer. We had no chess set at the garage, but there was a checkerboard, and the checkers were marked on the back with symbols representing the queen, king, knight, and so forth. We used lug nuts for pawns. Roosevelt was the best of us beginners. I was just fair.
One evening Gideon was talking about the different powers of the different pieces.
“A mistake you can make,” he said, “is treating a diagonal attack by a queen the same as an attack by a bishop. The attack’s the same but the attacker isn’t, because she can do a lot of other stuff as well. You can’t fight her the same way. That’s what we did wrong in Korea, tried to fight Chinese light infantry the same as we had the North Koreans, who were mechanized. And they damn near ran us out of Korea before we wised up.”
I loved soldiers’ stories and tried to draw one out of him. “What outfit were you with?” I asked.
“I wasn’t there,” he said. “But I should of been.” The question had put him in a bad mood.
I wouldn’t learn until later that he’d grown up wanting to be a soldier. What else would you expect from a boy with the last name of a Civil War general and the first name of an Old Testament warrior? Gideon knew more military history than a Gettysburg tour guide. He had been valedictorian of his class at Early High School—Ben’s class—and he’d been lined up for an appointment to West Point. But when he went for the physical, the doctor told him he had TB and classified him 4-F—ineligible for military service and, of course, the Point. He overcame the illness, in time, but not the 4-F classification or the disappointment.
One night I was just closing the garage when the telephone rang and somebody reported a wreck out the road past Grady Penn’s place. I only occasionally drove the tow truck, but I couldn’t get ahold of the regular driver, and they’d said they needed the wrecker fast. Knowing from experience that people tended to call tow trucks and forget to call an ambulance, I called the dispatcher at the sheriff’s office, and he rolled both an officer and an ambulance. Jack was finally over being mad at me, and happened to be at Harlow’s with his dad’s Impala to give me a lift home. He knew enough about cars to help me hitch the wrecker to a damaged one, and even tow it if he had to. So I had him follow me out to the wreck.
The caller had got his priorities mixed up, just as I feared. The car was down in a ravine and could have stayed there till Christmas for all the harm it would do. Yet Jack and I and the wrecker, though the least needed, were the first responders to the scene. We hustled down the bank to see what we could do.
The car was Gideon’s red Thunderbird, and Gideon was lying on the seat out cold.
I knew enough to take his pulse. It was good and strong, and he was breathing okay. We put the blanket from the back seat over him, to prevent shock, and didn’t move him. But that’s about all the first aid I knew, and Jack knew less.
Jack said, “The only thing we can do for him is clean the car.”
“Clean the car!” I said. “What for?”
“So he doesn’t go to jail,” Jack said. “Smell that whiskey?”
So while I used the radio in the wrecker to make sure there was an ambulance coming, Jack searched the car. It was a good thing he did. He found six unopened fifths of liquor in the trunk—more than a gallon total was illegal—and two opened ones in the cab, which was even more so. Off Gideon’s person he took a lightweight .45 automatic and its shoulder holster, cutting the shoulder straps so he wouldn’t have to move Gideon. He found a couple more pistols elsewhere in the cab. Jack threw everything in the trunk of his dad’s car and drove away to hide it, just a couple of minutes before Trooper T.J. Thompson showed up looking to bust somebody.
Thompson walked down the bank with a big flashlight, and before he even asked whether I had called an ambulance, he searched the cab for anything illegal, such as whiskey bottles and pistols. He got real suspicious when he didn’t find any.
“Did you clean this car?” he asked. He shone the big flashlight straight into my eyes.
“No, I didn’t do nothing to the car,” I said. Didn’t have to lie; Jack did the cleaning.
He kept the light in my face. “You’re Mayor Shelor’s boy, aren’t you?”
“He’s not mayor this term. My uncle is.”
I couldn’t read his face through the glare of the flashlight. There was a long silence. Finally he said, “Hmmph.”
He lowered the light, turned his back, and tried to wake up Gideon. In a minute Gideon did sort of come to. I thought about the first night I saw Trooper Thompson up close, at the sheriff’s office, when he brought in the reckless driver. He had worked that man over real good. But the ambulance arrived just then, so Gideon got to the hospital with no more injuries than the ones caused by the wreck.
Under Virginia law back then, they couldn’t force Gideon to take a blood alcohol test, so I guess he didn’t take one, and even Trooper Thompson didn’t conduct field sobriety tests on guys who were barely conscious. But Thompson charged him with drunk driving anyway, because in those days an officer could make that charge based just on the officer’s opinion. So Gideon hired John Yates, who was the best lawyer in Early County. Yates argued that Gideon’s incoherence at the scene was not the result of intoxication, as Trooper Thompson testified, but of Gideon’s injuries. Gideon was only convicted of careless driving, a minor infraction.
But that all came later. In the meantime, the hospital released Gideon after a two-day stay, and the day after that Jack and I went to his house, carrying all the stuff from his car in my old Boy Scout duffel bag.
It was a nice, modern brick house on about five acres a few miles outside of town. Gideon’s wife, Kate, came to the door. I knew her a little; she taught girls gym and math at Early High School, where she had gone to school herself. She was a petite, dark-haired beauty, and lots of the boys at school were more or less in love with her.
“We brought some things we took out of Gideon’s car the night he ran off the road,” I said. “We didn’t think we should leave them there.”
“I guess I should thank you,” she said. Her smile looked like it came from courtesy, not happiness. “Come in.”
Gideon was sitting at the kitchen table with his best friend, Johnny Wilson, who had been the basketball star in their class and was now a custom cabinetmaker with his own workshop out on his family’s farm. They were drinking beer. Gideon had a concussion, I’d already been told, and shouldn’t have been drinking, but he was. He was in a good mood, and it got better when we opened the bag and showed him that all his guns and liquor had come back to him.
“I thank you. I didn’t know who got the stuff, and was wondering where it had got to,” he said. “I can get more whiskey, but I’m sentimental about those guns.”
He took up one of them, a big cowboy-style revolver with a funny-looking grip. “This one’s really rare. A Colt Bisley. The angle of the grip fits your hand better than most of those old Colts, and the hammer’s better shaped for fast shooting. Some people call it the gunfighter’s gun.”
He gave us each a beer and led us through the house, showing off his firearms. I had never seen so many in one house; there must have been forty or fifty. Most of them were lever-action Winchesters, or derringers, or Colt revolvers—guns you’d see in Western movies. That kind of surprised me because I had been thinking of Gideon more as a military man. But the house was full of True West magazine and books with names like Triggernometry, all about Western gunfighters.
Gideon said he’d let us shoot some of the guns when he got all right. So the next week he took us out into a deep draw behind his house, where there were hills on three sides to stop the bullets, and showed what he could do with a gun. And that was damn near anything. He could lay a pop bottle on its side with the neck facing toward him, and from fifteen feet away with a .38 revolver he could shoot right down the neck and break the bottle without breaking its neck. Johnny Wilson was there that day, too. He wasn’t in Gideon’s league, but was better than fair with his own M1 carbine, probably because he had experience with carbines in the Marine Corps. Kate was there, too, and she had her own single-action Colt. Gideon had taught her to shoot, and she drilled a rolling beer can five shots out of five. She did it with a look of nonchalance, even boredom.
I asked Kate why they spent so much time with guns, and was surprised to learn that even Gideon hadn’t always been a shooter.
“When we were in high school, he’d once in a while shoot a couple of rifles his dad brought back from the war,” she said. “It was part of wanting to be a soldier, but not the main part. Then when he found out he couldn’t do that, and he was sick, he read those Western magazines, and he started talking about buffalo hunters, and Indian fighters, and how the best gunmen were all civilians. One of the best, Doc Holliday, even had TB like Gideon did, and I guess that captured his imagination.”
I had watched enough TV Westerns to have a general impression of Doc Holliday’s character and temper, and both were bad in my opinion.
“I try to share his interests,” she said. It sounded like “try” was the active word, and maybe she wished he’d share a few of hers.
Gideon had taught some of the deputies how to shoot. Ben and especially Bobby Lee, who had been his classmates, he had taught quite a bit. After we saw what Gideon could do with a gun, Jack, who was still on good terms with Ben, asked him why he didn’t make Gideon a deputy.
“I could have used him when he thought he was Jubal Early,” Ben said. “But I can’t use somebody who thinks he’s Doc Holliday.”
= = =
Gideon had offered to teach Jack and me to shoot pistols, which was like Chet Atkins offering us guitar lessons, but after that first day, we only went back once. That second time was a nice day, but Kate didn’t go out to the hollow to shoot with us. She and Gideon both looked unhappy, as if they’d had some dispute just before we arrived. Gideon was usually fun, but this day he wasn’t, talking only of stances and trigger pulls, bullet weights and calibers. It was like he spouted the information to avoid talking about anything else, or perhaps even thinking about it. We practiced a while with a .22 revolver Gideon had, but Jack was showing no improvement in marksmanship, nobody was in the mood, and we pretty soon made excuses about having to get back to town.
It was easy to see the Earlys weren’t right for each other, but neither Jack nor I knew why, exactly. Ernestine shed some light on the relationship about that time. She and Gina had invited Jack and me to have a cookout at a picnic shelter the DeLancey family owned at a fishpond near Early. The shelter was just a roof over a flagstone floor about the size of a backyard basketball half-court. Its main virtues were electric lights and four walls of screen wire to keep the bugs out. The roof was vented so we could barbecue in there, and as long as we kept the fire going, no bugs came in the vent. It was just after sunset and I had done a credible job grilling hamburgers. The girls had brought a salad and a homemade coconut cake, and Gina had brought a small jelly jar surreptitiously filled with rum from her father’s own secret supply. We had spiked our soft drinks with the rum and were sipping these after we finished the meal. Jack had brought out his clarinet and had finished an unhurried and mellow-sounding jazz piece. Then he sat down with the rest of us at a picnic table. As the day died away, we were relaxed and easy with each other, watching the glassy surface of the pond. Every so often a bass or bluegill seized a bug, and the pond would ripple, then settle.
Kate’s name came up in the context of her coaching the girls basketball team, and that led either Jack or me to mention our having visited the Earlys’ home.
“I don’t think I ever met a couple more mismatched,” I said. “I wonder why they got married in the first place.”
Ernestine was sitting across from me, next to Jack. Gina was to my right, catty-cornered from Ernestine. Ernestine gave Gina a quizzical look, and Gina, after a moment, slowly nodded. Giving permission.
“They had to get married,” Ernestine said.
I was still naive enough to be shocked. “Them? She’s a school teacher!”
Ernestine laughed outright. “You think we go to a Catholic school? Our teachers aren’t nuns!”
Gina said, “She was probably a nice girl. But things happen.”
Ernestine told Jack and me the story as the girls had heard it. Kate had been very popular in high school and had dated several boys, but she liked Johnny Wilson the best. Neither of them was in much hurry to get married. Kate was going to teachers college, and Johnny was going into the service, so they thought it could wait until he came back. But Korea dragged on longer than expected.
Theirs was an understanding, rather than a formal engagement, so it was okay for Kate to date other boys, such as Gideon, while Johnny was away. She became pregnant, which was not okay in the bluenosed Early County of 1951. So she married Gideon. She lost the baby before it was born, and they never had any children afterward.
“Would you marry a guy you didn’t really love, just because you were pregnant?” I asked.
Ernestine said, “Most girls do love the boy, at the time. Anyway, what else was she going to do?”
“Well, what about an abortion?” Jack asked.
Ernestine paused a moment, then said, “I want to make it clear that neither Gina nor I could get into that situation, all right? But girls talk about this stuff all the time, just in a theoretical way. And we’ve figured out nobody in her right mind would have an abortion.
“Say you manage to find somebody willing to do the operation—he’s not going to show you his medical degree, because it’s got his name on it, and what he’s doing could cost him his medical license. Chances are he’s not a great doctor, or he wouldn’t be doing abortions at all. He may not even be a doctor. All you really know about him is he’s willing to do something illegal!” She slumped back in her folding chair, shaking her curly head at the thought.
Gina said, “So Kate’s choices were to marry Gideon or go live with Aunt Sally for a few months. Maybe Kate didn’t have an Aunt Sally. So she married Gideon.”
Jack said, “I’m surprised Gideon agreed to it. He doesn’t seem to like being tied down. Stony, you think you’d do that in the same situation?”
I was surprised Jack put me on the spot like that.
“I … I … don’t know,” I stammered.
Gina took up for me. “Of course you would, Stony! You’re an old-fashioned gallant. You even defended my honor once, and I won’t forget that!” She leaned over to her left, placed her blond head on my shoulder, and gave me a teddy-bear hug around the waist.
“I didn’t think you knew why I did that,” I said.
“I knew ten minutes after it happened,” she answered. “I’m pretty sure we won’t always be this close, Stony, but it’s going to be a lucky girl who lands you!”
It was about the kindest thing anybody had ever said about me, and every time I taste coconut cake, I remember the words and the pretty young girl who said them.
Johnny pulled a full hitch in the Marines, kicked around the West Coast for a while, and came home to stay about the mid-fifties. Gideon and Kate were lifelong friends with Johnny, and when he came home it was natural that he would socialize with them. Looking back, you can imagine how it might have gone then, after the wreck. Kate tried to get Gideon to quit drinking so hard, and rambling so much, but that didn’t work, and there was tension between them. Johnny would maybe drop in to see them, and Kate would invite him in because she was expecting Gideon home just any time, and then Gideon wouldn’t show up for hours—maybe not even the same night, if he was winning at poker. And here Johnny was: a nice guy, handsome, steady, usually sober, and the man Kate probably should have married in the first place.
My mom once told me that people misbehave in Early about the same as anywhere else, but they can’t keep it secret as long. When Jack told me Kate’s friendship with Johnny had reportedly become an affair, I told him to shut up about it, because there would be hell to pay if Gideon found out. For once, Jack swore later, he did not tell another soul.
But Gideon did find out, some way or another.
Any sensible man in Johnny’s situation would have left town that night. But Johnny wasn’t a sensible man, he was a Marine. What’s more, he had been decorated after the long fighting retreat from Chosin Reservoir. A man who backed up slow when the whole Chinese army was trying to kill him would not turn and run from one mad Virginian. No, Johnny tried to make an orderly retreat, as the Marines had done in Korea. He began methodically dismantling his woodworking shop and packing it up for a move to Lynchburg, where Kate had gone as soon as things with Gideon went sour. And he started carrying his M1 carbine in his truck.
Twice Gideon went out to that shop, looking for revenge. Drunk both times, he demanded that Johnny come out and fight him with guns, fists, or anything else. Johnny just lay inside the shop with his carbine—he had dug a slit trench in the dirt floor—and waited him out.
“You aren’t getting a fight out of me,” he’d call out. “But if you come toward me carrying a gun, you’re getting a .30-caliber ball through your shin!” And they’d yell back and forth till somebody in the nearby farmhouse summoned Really Big Ben or Bobby Lee, who would show up and talk Gideon into leaving.
It looked like the situation would blow over. But on his last trip out of Early with a load of woodworking machinery, Johnny stopped at Eubank’s Store to buy gasoline. He got out of the truck just as Gideon came out the door carrying a soft drink and a fried apple pie. They saw each other at the same time.
Johnny yanked open the truck door. Gideon probably didn’t know whether Johnny was going to drive off or grab the carbine, but he didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt. Gideon dropped the food, pulled out his .45 automatic, and shot Johnny five times before Johnny hit the ground.
Gideon walked over and checked for Johnny’s pulse, but of course there wasn’t any. He told Mrs. Eubank to call the sheriff’s office and then he drove toward town.
Ben didn’t know what Gideon might do in town, armed and having just killed a man. He called Bobby Lee Lawson in off patrol and headed out of town the way Gideon would have to come in. Ben had barely enough time to set up a roadblock just outside town, less than a hundred yards up the road from the garage, where I was working. I’d been out front putting a battery advertisement on an A-frame sign when I noticed Ben’s cruiser parked sideways across the center line, the cherry-top flashing red. Then Ben got out and started lighting flares.
“Hey, something’s going on out here,” I called to the guys in the garage. Mr. Harlow and Roosevelt came out of the service bays. Just then Gideon’s Thunderbird came up the road toward town. Gideon must have seen the roadblock, because he pulled off into Harlow’s parking lot and got out of his car. He had taken off his sports coat, and under his left arm we could see the shoulder holster with the .45 automatic in it. There was a smaller pistol, a revolver, in a holster on Gideon’s left hip, though Gideon was right-handed.
Gideon walked over to Mr. Harlow. I didn’t yet know what was going on. I thought the roadblock was because of some wreck, so I backed out the tow truck, fixing to drive it wherever they were going to tell me to.
“I won’t be seeing you again,” Gideon said to Mr. Harlow. “Thought I’d say goodbye.”
Mr. Harlow didn’t have time to say anything back before Bobby Lee Lawson drove up fast from the same direction Gideon had come. As Bobby Lee was braking, Gideon drew the .45 and shot out a front tire. Bobby Lee’s station wagon almost rolled over but settled back on its three tires and a rim, then skidded over the road bank just past the garage. The second it stopped in the cornfield below, Bobby Lee dove out the passenger window and Gideon pegged a couple more .45s over his head.
“Keep your head, Bobby Lee,” Gideon called. “Stay down there!”
Bobby Lee did stay down, at least for the time being. But Gideon made no effort to keep Bobby Lee from radioing Ben, who was close enough anyway to see some of the action from the roadblock. By then I had jumped out of the tow truck and taken cover behind its hood. The truck’s engine was the only thing at the wooden garage I was sure would stop a .45 slug.
I saw Ben standing behind his car, pulling the radio mike out the window and talking into it. He put the mike back and began walking toward the garage, leaving his car where it was, parked across the road, blocking any traffic from town. He didn’t take a shotgun or rifle out of the police car, didn’t draw his pistol. It took forever for him to reach the garage. Gideon could have killed him at any time. There were target sights on his pistol, and I had seen him empty the whole magazine into a man-sized target at more than fifty yards.
When he finally got within a few feet of him, Ben just said, “Gideon, give me the gun.”
Gideon said, “You’re going to have to shoot me to take it.”
“That’s what you want, I know it, but it’s one thing I ain’t gonna do,” said Ben, and he kept walking toward Gideon. Gideon raised the gun toward Ben, shoulder high as if shooting on a target range, and Ben froze. So did Gideon. They were both as still as paint on a wall.
Then Gideon’s .45 seemed to explode in his hand. It literally disintegrated. Gideon spun in a complete circle, and as he came around he was already drawing the other pistol with his left hand, something he’d said gunfighters learned to do in case their gun hand was disabled. But by then Ben had closed the distance between them, and he lifted Gideon clean off the ground with an uppercut. Gideon came back down on his feet, but his knees buckled; he kept right on falling, and Ben twisted the second pistol out of Gideon’ s hand as he fell. He had cuffs on Gideon in about two more seconds.
The .45 was in pieces. Bobby Lee had used a rifle to drive a .30-06 slug right through the .45’s slide, just back of the chamber. Of course, that wrecked the mechanism so bad the gun couldn’t fire.
“We wouldn’t have tried that with anybody else,” Ben explained. “But Gideon has the steadiest pistol stance I ever saw, and I knew if I could make him hold that stance a second, Bobby Lee could hit that pistol with his rifle.”
“That was risky, though,” I said.
“No, Bobby Lee couldn’t miss,” Ben said. “Gideon taught him to shoot.”
But that was a conversation I had with Ben a long time later.
What I did at the time—the very day after I saw Gideon get hauled off to jail with a broken gun hand, looking at a fifteen-year prison term in a best-case scenario, leaving Kate to walk that lonesome valley, mourning not just one man but two—I went down and talked to John Yates, Buddy Jepson’s lawyer.
I told him I was the informer who led the Tazewell sheriff to Buddy Jepson’s still, and that I did it for revenge, and would say so on a witness stand. I knew that some people would call me a snitch the rest of my life for it. But I hoped if a jury heard me tell that story, they might let Buddy off on the worst of the charges, and the judge might give him a lighter sentence on the others. Yates thought it might be as little as three months on a road gang, and probation.
I asked for something in return, and I got it.
“I want peace between me and Buddy,” I said. “And if he asks you why, you tell him, ‘We both knew Gideon Early.’ ”
Ben showed both bravery and brains in taking Gideon Early alive, and you’d think that would make him a hero, but in politics, there’s always more than one way to look at anything.
Rich Conway, of course, pushed the other viewpoint. I actually caught him doing it once. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of the post office, with his thumbs hooked in his suspenders. He was talking to some guy who was wearing bib overalls and was of only average height, so Rich had to lean over a little to talk to him.
Rich had been offering the same baloney to anybody he could wrestle to a halt, but to make this yahoo think Rich was taking him into special confidence, Rich first glanced to both sides as if to make sure nobody would overhear, and then dropped his voice to say, “Ben should have seen that coming and headed it off!”
But I happened to be walking up behind him, and I heard it. It made me mad.
“So why didn’t you head it off?” I said, good and loud.
Conway started when he heard me, but in the little time it took him to turn around he’d already regained his composure and molded his face into an expression of amusement. In retrospect, I realize he already had his answer figured out, because the question was bound to come up from somebody.
He said, “Well, it’s my job to prosecute, and it’s Ben’s to arrest.”
“For what? Johnny wouldn’t have signed a complaint against his old drinking buddy just for trying to get him to fight,” I pointed out. “You can’t arrest without a complaint unless it’s a felony, and there wasn’t any felony till Gideon shot him.”
“Well, Aaron Taylor would have found a way,” Conway said. “And I think T.J. Thompson would have, too.”
“That’s right,” the yahoo chimed in. He nodded his head so vigorously the tobacco juice started running out his open mouth; he had to throw his chin up high to catch it. The brim of his nylon net cap fanned the hot air. “Can’t let technicalities get in the way when there’s a murder ’bout to happen.”
But this thinking, which Conway had introduced and encouraged, led somewhere I don’t think even he anticipated or wanted. It brought all those Ku Klux Klan robes out of the closet of that upstairs ballroom.
The idea was that since Ben wouldn’t act outside the law when something important needed to be done, then the Klan would do it. That’s an argument the Klan often put forward, casting itself as a kind of civic-minded auxiliary to law enforcement always at the ready. In my opinion, no lawman ever needs help bad enough to ask the Klan for it, but when the sheriff’s department was reduced to using seventeen-year-olds Jack Newcomb and Stony Shelor to help them, the argument found plenty of supporters.
It was a delicate matter for Ben. He couldn’t tell the Klan not to meet or hold rallies, because none of that was against the law. The Klan was also the only organized law-and-order lobby active in the county, and it would be foolhardy for a sheriff candidate to piss them off outright. But it was looking like it might come to that, what with so many black people registering to vote nearly every day, and the Klan growing restive.
I thought blacks should vote. Ever since I saw Mary Lou Martin stand up for her beliefs in 1954, the day the papers reported Brown v. Board of Education, I had been brooding about race. And I had come to the conclusion that segregation didn’t serve anyone well. Any fool could see that “separate but equal” was a charade; blacks almost always got the short end of the stick, at least in Early. But I figured the whites got a bad deal, too, because taxpayers and businesses had to pay for two of everything. If a white school wanted a new gymnasium, the neighboring black school should get some sort of gymnasium, too. There wasn’t enough money for that!
No wonder our schools were so crappy! Drama club? We never had one. Wood shop? Just a part-time program that only a few boys got to take, even though furniture making was one of the few economic opportunities available in the western part of the state. Play football? We didn’t even have a team. I figured ending segregation wouldn’t just be good for blacks; it would be good for whites, too. And for blacks to vote would be a step toward that end.
I’d talked to Mary Lou about it again, early that summer, in the Early Bird Café in Lower Early, back when I was still working for Ben. The place was empty when I’d gone in that morning to buy a milkshake, so I took a small table to myself. Then the first shift from the textile mills started coming in for lunch, all of them trying to eat and get back across the street to the looms in one hour. The place went from dead to booming in a couple of minutes, filling up with laughter and the clatter of dishes and the smell of short orders frying. Somebody dropped coins in the jukebox. Loretta Lynn started singing “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.”
Every other seat was taken when Mary Lou come in, so I invited her to take the other chair at my table. I suppose my ears turned red when I offered, but it would have been cloddish not to. She looked good. She had cut her hair some, maybe for the summer, but it still hung below her shoulders, loose and pretty. Her normal expression was one of mild amusement, but when she actually smiled, small perfect white teeth appeared, and her eyes locked with mine and seemed to laugh.
The other mill workers were all wearing jeans or bib overalls, but Mary Lou was dressed in a brown polished-cotton shirtdress, because she had an office job typing and keeping books for the mill. My dad said she was smart and responsible, and I knew she was a good student. Grasping for something to talk about, I asked if she planned on going to college after graduating the next year, and she said she wouldn’t have the money that soon.
“I’m thinking about West Virginia,” she said, “but I’ll need to work while I’m going to school, and it might be hard to find a good job there. Morgantown’s kind of a small place.”
I asked, “Why go out of state at all? It’s supposed to be cheaper if you go in the state where you live.”
“Same reason,” she said. “I need to work and it’s hard to find good jobs in Virginia.”
“Why do you think that is?” I asked.
“Daddy says it’s mostly because of Jim Crow.”
“Jim Crow” was what some people called segregation. I don’t know why they called it that, but the term meant keeping the principal races separate in everything. And races were kept separate, even in 1960. Train and bus stations had separate sections for “White” and “Colored.” So did movie theaters. Hotels and most stores—even most churches—catered only to one race or the other, not both. I knew what Mary Lou was talking about, but not what she meant.
“How does that make good jobs scarce?” I asked.
“It keeps wages low,” she said. “Most white people seem to think they’re too good to work with Negroes. So when white workers start saying they should make more money, all the company has to do is threaten to hire a few Negroes to work cheaper, and all the higher-wages talk stops.”
That seemed far-fetched to me. I said, “People wouldn’t fall for that, would they?” But then I remembered my dad had said pretty much the same thing about Yankee mill owners in the South.
“Why do you think there aren’t any unions to speak of in the South?” Mary Lou replied. “Daddy was in the union when he worked the mines in West Virginia, but he says no union would ever get off the ground here. It’d be hard enough to overcome the right to work law, but impossible to overcome the bigotry.”
She said this matter-of-factly, without ever looking up from her plate, and with her word on top of my father’s, I saw it was true. Guys like me generally worked for around ten dollars a day, fixing cars or cutting timber or stacking it in lumberyards, maybe running a cotton loom. Thousands of other guys—guys like Grady and Roosevelt Penn—could do these jobs equally well, but they couldn’t have most of them, so they were stuck with a whole class of other jobs called “nigger work,” for which they were paid no more than eight dollars a day, sometimes even less. The Penns couldn’t get the jobs reserved for us white suckers, and us white suckers wouldn’t accept nigger work. That limited the options for both races, so we could all be paid next to nothing. We had been falling for this scheme for ninety-five years, ever since Appomattox.
I wanted to continue the conversation, but Mary Lou’s order was served then, and with most of her lunch hour gone, she had to eat it and scoot. She stood up and said, “Thank you for sharing your table. I hope we do this again soon.”
I surely hoped so, but we didn’t. The opportunity was lost once Buddy Jepson beat me to a pulp and I launched the revenge mission that got me kicked out of the sheriff’s office. The rest of that summer I spent my lunchtimes eating from a paper sack at Harlow’s Garage.
= = =
I usually ate my sandwiches with Roosevelt, under a big willow tree beside the parking lot. I had come to respect him. Roosevelt was a great mechanic and getting to be a good chess player. His mind did not wander when he was at either task. In backwoods Virginia, board games were some of the only activities in which blacks and whites sometimes played each other, and Roosevelt was fiercely competitive at chess, as if the honor of his race rode on the outcome of the games. A lot of the other guys called him uppity. Well, he did have a high opinion of himself, and did not mind telling you. But I couldn’t hold that against him because I was partly responsible for it.
This is how I became responsible. Roosevelt was a hot-rodder, and so was Todd Powell. Todd had started the summer with a good job at a lumberyard, but he managed to get fired some way. After that, he and his crowd hung out a lot at Harlow’s, talking cars and tinkering with them. Like most of his clothes, Todd’s car was black, and he waxed the paint so shiny it looked like you could swim in it. It was a ’54 Ford two-door with a floor shift conversion and the words “Todd’s Rod” painted in front of each door. It was a nice car if you ignored the fuzzy dice attached to the mirror and the jackass attached to the steering wheel.
One time, when things were slow, Roosevelt had his own car at the garage and was tuning it. It was a cherried-out dark-green ’40 Ford with drag pipes, a good-looking car, and when Todd heard the way its big engine purred, he was really impressed.
“Why don’t you let me take this down to the drag strip?” he suggested to Roosevelt.
Roosevelt chuckled. “Anybody races this baby, it gonna be me.”
“I don’t think they’ll let you race down there,” said Todd. “You know what I mean.”
“Well, I guess you and me could race out there on the highway,” Roosevelt suggested.
Todd looked at Roosevelt like he had suggested something immoral. White guys didn’t race black guys. Especially not black guys who might beat them.
“Nah, you’d be out of your class,” Todd said.
Roosevelt took it without a word, but he was steamed.
After Todd left, Roosevelt said to me, “I believe I can take him. I got ’bout the same engine, carburetors just as good.”
I said, “He’s done a lot of it.”
Roosevelt said, “So have I. And I got one thing he may not. I don’t do any losing.”
He considered that some more, then said, “I mean, if you got a better car, and a straight, smooth road, you’re gonna beat me. But if we’re running side by side, come to a curve, and nobody knows what’s around that curve, the other guy’s the one gonna drop back. I ain’t.”
“Other people probably think the opposite,” I said.
“No, they don’t, not if they seen me race. I ain’t bragging, it’s a simple fact. I just got more guts than anybody here who races.”
Then he added, “Any colored boy, I mean.” He said it with an air of embarrassment, like saying “Excuse me” if he’d burped. He was honoring the social convention of not putting himself above any white person.
I probably wouldn’t have said anything if I hadn’t been reading seditious literature like Newsweek, and talking to Mary Lou, and gotten my head full of liberal Yankee ideas. Probably wouldn’t have said it even so, if we hadn’t been talking about a jackass like Todd Powell. But I jumped Roosevelt for belittling himself.
“What do you mean, ‘Any colored boy’ ? You can be braver than Todd. I expect you are.”
I meant to build him up, but I might as well have gone on about what a great boxer Joe Louis was. Of course Joe Louis was a great boxer; of course Roosevelt was brave. I had condescended to him, and he realized it before I did, and I guess he resolved he’d never do the shuck and jive again.
Half an hour later Todd was back at the garage, and Roosevelt asked him again to race. Only this time he didn’t walk up and ask it politely. He called out across the parking lot, where everybody around could hear it.
“Hey, Todd. You get that Ford running its best, ’cause mine never sounded better! She’s hungry and she’s a cannibal!”
It pissed Todd off so bad he agreed to race that night, and Roosevelt beat him exactly the way he said he would. Neck and neck down New River straightaway, and then in the first curve it was Todd who backed off, not Roosevelt.
Getting cocky had paid off for Roosevelt so he kept it up. And, God forgive me, I thought he ought to do it. I was only seventeen, and Roosevelt barely that, so neither of us saw where it was going to lead.
Todd wouldn’t let it alone after that. He called Roosevelt “uppity nigger” behind his back and sometimes pretty close to his face. Roosevelt didn’t have to call Todd names. He realized he could get under his skin just by being friendly.
“Good morning, Todd,” he’d say. “Car running good today? Got some new spark plugs we can sell you. Give you some more balls under there.” And he’d point at the hood of Todd’s car, but look at Todd’s crotch. I don’t think it was the taunt so much as treating him as equal that bothered Todd.
Once Roosevelt tried the same treatment on Jack. Jack just looked at him calm and mean, took off his sunglasses, handed them to me, and started walking toward Roosevelt. He wasn’t bluffing; he was going to whip Roosevelt or get whipped.
I stepped between them and said, “Hey, Jack, this guy works with me. Roosevelt, Jack’s my buddy. I can’t have this.”
It was a long, scary moment before Roosevelt turned around and went into the garage. He kept glaring back over his shoulder as he walked away.
“I don’t like that nigger,” said Jack.
“I do like him, and the garage needs him,” I said. “So do me a favor and leave him alone.” Later, I had the same conversation with Roosevelt about Jack.
One of the ways Roosevelt would get under Todd Powell’s skin was by talking about Mary Lou Martin. Todd had been sweet on Mary Lou for years. It’s hard not to like a pretty girl who gave you a bloody nose in the fifth grade. She was still stopping at the garage every few afternoons to buy gasoline from me. Soon Todd started hanging around her car, trying to make time with her.
When Roosevelt saw how Todd felt about Mary Lou, he took over servicing her car. Todd would be out there by the gas pumps trying to put the words on her, and Roosevelt would be right over the windshield, taking ten minutes to polish it and grinning right at her. Not flirting with her—even Roosevelt wouldn’t have done that in front of white guys—but distracting her from Todd’s act. Cramping his style.
He’d clean the headlights, the taillights, the chrome, check the radiator and maybe the battery. He’d have blacked the tires if she hadn’t been running whitewalls. Then when he was out of things to do, he’d lean on the gas pump and look at Todd and Mary Lou.
“Roosevelt, ain’t you got somewhere to go?” Todd would ask.
And Roosevelt would say, “No.”
Todd might have threatened him outright, but I was usually there, and Todd was still afraid of me. I didn’t much care that Roosevelt paid so much attention to Mary Lou; I figured it was just good customer relations, and to get Todd’s goat. It got to where people gathered just to watch Roosevelt making Todd mad. Finally, Todd gave up and quit coming around. The rest of us watched Roosevelt do his act one more day, but it didn’t amount to anything without Todd being there, so we quit looking.
= = =
Late the next Friday afternoon, Jack came to the garage and called me aside. He asked if Roosevelt was around.
“No,” I said. “He’s off this weekend.”
“Well,” Jack said, “the talk around town is that he’s dating Mary Lou. And it’s pretty ugly talk.”
I don’t remember what I said when Jack told me that, but the news pretty near laid me flat. I was probably more progressive on race matters than any of my peers, but I was years short of becoming a complete egalitarian, and the idea that Roosevelt and Mary Lou were spending time together shocked me. I couldn’t even figure how they’d managed it.
There weren’t many places they could go out together in Virginia. Movie theaters had separate seating areas for blacks, and I didn’t think a manager would even admit a couple of different races. Maybe they were going to drive-in movies, though I’d never seen people of different races in the same car at the drive-in, and I couldn’t imagine Mary Lou hiding in the back seat to gain admission. Or maybe they went to dinner at some black-owned café on Steep Street—maybe a darktown version of the café where Mary Lou and I had talked about Jim Crow!
Suddenly I realized I was mad—and almost overcome with jealousy and regret. Jealousy because Mary Lou was dating somebody other than me, and regret because I had squandered the opportunity to chat her up at the gas pumps—the same opportunity Roosevelt apparently had seized.
Jack wouldn’t let me alone about it. I am pretty sure he didn’t understand the pain it caused me, because I had hidden my feelings about Mary Lou from everyone. He kept talking about Roosevelt and Mary Lou because he wanted me to break them up. Jack didn’t want any race trouble while Ben was in a hard campaign for sheriff, no reason for the Klan to step up as “auxiliary to law enforcement.” We both had figured out which laws they wanted to “help” enforce.
Virginia still had miscegenation laws on the books in those days, but authorities seldom or never attempted to enforce them. If a couple was blatant about it, and there was huge political pressure to do something, a couple might be charged with fornication or unlawful cohabitation, but those laws applied to unmarried couples of all races, and I had never heard of anyone in Early County, white or black, being charged with such a thing. Discretion in amatory pursuits was the rule, expressed in the popular saying, “No fucking near the flagpole!”
I thought about how easy it would be for Mary Lou and Roosevelt to spend time together at her house after her parents went to work the late shift at the mill. My cheeks burned at the thought, but I took the high road with Jack.
“It ain’t our business that she dates a colored boy,” I told him. “She’s entitled to do anything she wants.”
Jack said, “I admit she has that constitutional right, and that we have no business to interfere in her sex life. But this is not the prevailing opinion in Early County! Some redneck sooner or later is going to interfere, and you better point that out to Roosevelt. If you said it, he might listen.”
I knew I should. But I was afraid that if I gave any warning at all, Mary Lou or Roosevelt might think I was bringing it up out of jealousy, and think the less of me for it. Worse, they might think my warnings were veiled threats, and that would be grossly offensive to both of them.
I decided to wait until Roosevelt brought it up. He would never come right out and say he was dating Mary Lou, but I thought he might say something I could turn in that direction. He never gave me any such opportunity, though. He was cool as leftover coffee. I even brought up the subject of dating once, and he mentioned going to dances in distant towns, implying he went with black girls, or stag.
So I told myself that some of Roosevelt’s own family would warn him. And I told myself that Roosevelt was too hardheaded to take the warning no matter who gave it, which perhaps was true, but did not excuse my silence. In the end, I didn’t warn him, or her, and I soon had cause to regret it.
= = =
It wasn’t two weeks after Jack told me about this romance that I got an evening call to go down to the garage, get the wrecker, and tow a car down to the sheriff’s impound yard. The impound yard was where they kept cars that were seized from drunks, or because they were evidence in a crime, or contained evidence.
I needed a ride to the garage, so Jack picked me up and he rode with me in the wrecker to where the car was. We found Trooper T.J. Thompson and Ben both waiting for us on the road bank, and about ten feet down the bank there was a burned-out 40 Ford with drag pipes. Ben told us nobody had been found in the car, and there weren’t any skid marks on the road. It looked like the car had been pushed off the bank and intentionally set on fire.
“That’s Roosevelt’s car,” Jack and I said almost together.
“I thought it was, but I can’t find Roosevelt,” Ben said. “I drove out to his house looking for him, and his family said he wasn’t home, but they’d been expecting him an hour ago. And I heard some white boys were mad at him. You know anything about that?”
“They say he was dating Mary Lou Martin,” Jack confirmed. “Todd Powell liked her but he couldn’t get anywhere. He doesn’t like Roosevelt.”
“Do you know if Roosevelt was with her tonight?” Ben asked.
“I wouldn’t think so,” I said. “Roosevelt worked later than he had to at the garage this evening, and he wouldn’t have done that if he’d been planning a date.”
Ben said, “Well, maybe Mary Lou knows where he is. Stony, I want you to go find a phone, call her, and ask her does she know.”
T.J. Thompson objected, “Hey, I need him to tow that wreck.”
Ben turned toward him and said, “Trooper Thompson, you don’t need a damned thing except to get your ass on up the road. This ain’t a wreck anymore. It’s a crime scene, and I’m taking charge of it.”
Thompson opened his mouth, thought better, and shut it. He turned and walked back to his car, taking his time to show his contempt, then drove away.
Ben radioed for one of the other deputies to secure the scene until morning, when the criminalistics technicians would look at it. The techs had to come from a distant state police regional office that served a number of counties, and Ben didn’t request them often or lightly. Asking for them meant Ben suspected something felonious had happened to Roosevelt. When the deputy relieved him, Ben said he was going to go look for Todd Powell and see if he smelled like gasoline. He told me later that errand had been a waste of time. Todd didn’t smell like anything except Butch Wax, cigarettes, and a dirty T-shirt, and he could prove he’d been home all night.
The closest phone I could get to was in the office at Harlow’s Garage. Jack and I parked the wrecker and hurried to unlock the office door. I fumbled around looking for a light switch before I found one on the desk lamp and turned it on.
“Please cut that off,” said Roosevelt. “People might see it and come looking.”
Roosevelt was sitting in the chair on the other side of the desk. His face was beaten puffy and one eye was swollen closed. The remnants of his dark-green work shirt were hanging off him in rags and were covered in black highway filth. Much of his white undershirt remained intact, and on it were bright red drops of blood. He must have snaked his way under the hog wire around the garage foundation, come in through the hole in the floor in the old grease bay.
He was holding a fancy little automatic pistol, familiar to me because it had come out of Harlow’s cash drawer. I moved slow and turned off the light. In the darkness I could still see the circular glint where the bluing had worn off the tip of the barrel, and the business end was still pointing at Jack. I felt Jack tensing himself to do something fast, and possibly final. I knew he probably had the snub-nosed .45 with him.
“Everybody take it easy,” I said. “No shooting!”
“Lay your gun on the desk, then,” Roosevelt said to Jack.
“Not likely,” Jack said.
I said, “Don’t anybody do anything for a minute. Roosevelt, we’re here to help you. Really Big Ben sent me here to call Mary Lou and see if she knew where you are.”
“Mary Lou’s number don’t work. I guess the line’s been cut. The same bunch that beat me up is going to her house, I heard ’em say. I’m going up there to get her out, and I need your car to do it.” He meant Jack’s car, his dad’s Impala.
Jack said, “I can’t let you have the car, but I’ll drive you there.” Then he added, “You can put the pistol away. I’m not gonna shoot you.”
“When did you start liking colored folks?” Roosevelt said, scornfully.
“I haven’t started,” Jack answered. “But Ben Agee’s trying to keep you alive. Stony and I kind of work for Ben, so that’s our job too.”
Roosevelt thought about it a few seconds and kind of laughed. It sounded like Jack’s giggle, the one that he made when he was half scared and half excited.
“Hee, hee, hee. I guess you could say you and Stony are the color guard.”
I thought Jack might shoot Roosevelt after all for such a bad pun, but both of them started giggling together, and Roosevelt lowered the little pistol into his lap. He turned the gun on its side in his palm and pushed upward on the safety lever, making sure it was in the upper, won’t-shoot position. I felt my heartbeat slow down to maybe twice normal, but I didn’t find the moment near as funny as they did.
I called Todd Powell’s house, trying to reach Ben, but he had already come and gone from there, so I started to call the sheriff’s office to ask the dispatcher to relay a message to him. But Roosevelt was dead set against that because everybody knew the Klan had offered its services as a police auxiliary, and he wasn’t taking any chances on a dispatcher he didn’t know. When a reckless teenager has an automatic pistol, he gets to make the decisions, so we went along with Roosevelt’s plan. A minute later we were in Jack’s car speeding toward Mary Lou’s house at the head of Sourwood Hollow. We had a blanket over the back seat to keep Roosevelt’s blood off it, and I was in the shotgun seat, wishing I actually had a shotgun. In fact, I had no weapon at all and no time to find one.
Roosevelt said the gang that beat him up wore hoods, so he didn’t recognize any of them, but he was sure they were a Klan wrecking crew.
“You’re lucky they didn’t kill you,” Jack said.
“They meant to, but I outran ’em,” Roosevelt said.
He heard one say they were going to “teach that white bitch a lesson” later. Even a wrecking crew wouldn’t want to tangle with a guy as strong as Mary Lou’s dad, so Roosevelt figured they would hang back until her parents left to work the graveyard shift at the mill. But it was now after ten and Mary Lou might already be alone.
Jack had the speed needle pushing 100 mph on the main road from town and then did 50 and 60 on the narrow road up Sourwood Hollow. I was worried about his speed, but I was also worried about Roosevelt, especially when he began humming to himself. It didn’t make sense he should hum music when he was beat up so bad and his girl was in danger. A few seconds later, he passed out. I reached over into the back seat, took the pistol out of his hand, and put it in my pocket.
“We have to get him to a hospital,” I said.
“We better get Mary Lou first,” Jack replied. “We’re almost there. She can go with us to the hospital.”
But that plan didn’t work. Mary Lou’s house was at the end of the road up Sourwood Hollow. After we passed the last house but hers, still half a mile before her house, we came around a curve and saw a car parked across the road maybe a hundred yards ahead; another car faced away from us. There were men standing around the cars, a couple of them holding what looked like pump shotguns. Jack skidded to a stop, threw his car into reverse, and backed toward the curve, faster than most people would drive that road front ways. One guy pointed a long gun at us, then lowered it, but nobody made any move to follow us. Well around the curve and out of their sight, Jack backed into a side lane and stopped the car facing out, cut off the lights, and said, “What now? We just have two pistols and they have shotguns.”
I said, “You can drive fast and I can’t. You get Roosevelt to a hospital, and I’ll try to get past ’em some way and help Mary Lou.”
I jumped out and closed the door. “Get going,” I said.
“Good fucking luck,” said Jack, and he broke into the same gleeful giggle I heard the day Buddy Jepson came after us with his shotgun. He headed the car out into the road toward the highway, accelerating like a dragster yet throwing almost no gravel. His sense of the road surface, and how much gas to give, was so good he never spun his wheels. He drove that dark gravel road, scared, better than I could maneuver in a parking lot at high noon.
= = =
I figured I didn’t have time to make half a mile through the thickets, and it was pretty dark, so I headed straight back up the road toward the Klan’s roadblock, figuring they would be looking for headlights, not people on foot. As I got nearer, I cut through the mountain laurels and headed for Sourwood Creek, which ran along just twenty feet or so from the road. I slipped over the bank and waded upstream, stumbling and falling on the slick rocks and biting my tongue to keep from crying out, until I thought I was past the Klansmen. The plan was dangerous, but I didn’t have time to think of a better one, and I guess the noise from the creek covered my passage. I got away with it, and once I was past the roadblock, I ran hard by starlight through pastureland and on through the Martins’ orchard, my soggy sneakers hurting my feet.
The house was white clapboard, maybe four rooms downstairs and two above, with a front porch running the width of the house. Not much house to raise a big family, but most families around Early had no better. At seventeen, Mary Lou was the only child still living at home, so she would be alone in the house once her parents left for work.
A front porch light was on, so I headed around back, staying out of its light, and found the back door open to cool the house. I eased open the screen door and walked in as quietly as I could. The little pistol was in my hand, held inconspicuously along my pants leg, ready to shoot, because I was afraid the Klansmen were already in the house. But Mary Lou was sitting alone in one of the front rooms, watching The Jack Paar Show on TV. She was barefoot and wearing a pink-and-white cotton nightgown. Her mouth dropped open when she saw me.
“Stony! Why’re you sneaking in my back door? And you look like a drowned cat!”
I said, “The Ku Klux Klan is coming up here to hurt you. They beat up Roosevelt. Do you have any guns?”
Instead of answering, she jumped up and ran to the front door and locked it, then to the back and locked it, too. Then she ran up the stairs and I followed her, trying to tell her more.
“I need a better gun,” I said. “All I got is this little .25 and just the six bullets in it.”
While I was saying this, she yanked a pair of panties on under the nightgown, so fast I saw absolutely nothing a Baptist boy wasn’t supposed to. She pulled on a pair of bib overalls, stuffing the nightgown into the overalls like a long shirt. She pulled on socks and a pair of high-top shoes, which she didn’t take time to tie.
Mary Lou didn’t say another word till she was down in the kitchen, grabbing stuff out of a pantry closet. She dropped a quart jar into a cotton-print flour sack and added half a bologna out of the refrigerator, a loaf of store-bought white bread, and four apples. She handed me the bag and said, “Carry that.” Then she went to the closet again and pulled out a single-barreled shotgun and a hunter’s vest with only five shells in the cartridge loops. She broke the shotgun and loaded it. She didn’t take time to put on the vest but carried it out the back door. She didn’t bother to close it behind her.
“Where do you think we should make our stand?” I asked in a half whisper as soon as we were out in the dark.
“We don’t make a stand,” she answered. “If we make one, somebody probably gets shot, probably us. The idea is to live through it!”
“They’ll burn your house!” I said.
“Maybe they won’t. Anyway, I’m not going to get killed for an old frame house.”
Mary Lou led the way up the steep hill behind the house. I had a flashlight from the wreck truck, but didn’t dare use it, and there was no path I could see, but Mary Lou never made a misstep. After I stumbled a couple of times she made me grab hold of her hip pocket, and we went on up the hill into the woods. I was very aware of her hip moving under my knuckles as I held on. Nothing fat or flabby about that hip; it was rock-hard muscle, and she was moving up the hill so fast I could barely keep up. We hadn’t gone any great distance before she lifted up the boughs of a big evergreen and stepped under them, pulling me after her.
“Sit down,” she said. “The ground is clean pine needles.”
Gradually my eyes got used to the darkness and I could see there was kind of a cave under the evergreen, where the inside branches had died and been broken off.
“Did you make this place for a hideout?” I asked.
“Kind of,” she said. She was speaking quietly, but the darkness made her voice seem loud and deep. “It was my playhouse when I was little. Sometimes I bring a boy up here. Tell me about Roosevelt,”
“The Klan ran him off the road and beat him up. They burned up his car. He got away and was trying to get up here to protect you, but I made Jack take him to the hospital.”
“How bad’s he hurt?”
“I think he’ll be all right,” I said. I really doubted that, but I didn’t want to add to her worries.
She said, “That’s Roosevelt. It’s a good thing boys have balls, ’cause they sure don’t have any brains.”
About this time, looking out the branches, we saw a car drive slowly into the Martins’ yard, its headlights turned off. A second car pulled in beside it. Several men jumped out of each, nearly all carrying long guns. Only then did the drivers turn on the lights, and in the sudden glare of the high beams we saw that all the men wore white hoods. Some wore white robes; others were dressed in war-surplus battle dress, or hunting camouflage, or jeans and western shirts. One of them fired a shotgun into the air and yelled, “Come out here, you nigger-lovin’ whore!” Then we heard the sound of the front door being kicked in.
“I shouldn’t have locked that door,” Mary Lou whispered. “Just gave ’em a reason to break it.”
We heard the distant sound of breaking glass and overturning furniture. Mary Lou wasn’t saying a word and I thought I had never met a woman so exceedingly tough. Then I heard her quietly crying. But I still thought she was pretty tough.
A minute later I heard her unscrewing the lid of the jar from the sack I had carried. She took a gulp, then she passed it to me. “Don’t spill it,” she warned. It wasn’t milk, and it wasn’t water. It burned my throat but it calmed my nerves.
They didn’t burn the house. They did throw the family’s clothes out the upstairs window, and one chest of drawers, which smashed to pieces on the ground. Then they trooped out into the front yard and set up a six-foot cross made of two-by-fours, and put a match to it. Wrapped with rags soaked in kerosene, the cross burst into flames all over. They whooped, and a couple fired shotguns into the air again. They left the cross still burning and piled back into the cars. One of the last ones in had a bra and a pair of woman’s panties—I assumed Mary Lou’s—knotted around the muzzle of his shotgun, and as they drove away he had them sticking out the window and flapping in the breeze, like a trophy, implying rape.
That made me as mad as anything else they did that night. And I thought, These are the same guys who sing “The Old Rugged Cross” so reverently at those rallies. That was very sad for me, how they’d taken that good old Baptist hymn that I used to love, and ruined it. To this day, when I hear that hymn, I no longer think of Christ’s sacrifice for mankind. All I can think of is redneck bullies, ganging up till there were a dozen of them, carrying shotguns and fire up a mountain hollow, to scare one seventeen-year-old girl.
= = =
Besides other injuries, Roosevelt had a pretty bad concussion, and the doctor said he was lucky Jack got him to the hospital quick. But he was out of the hospital in a week, and on the advice of everybody from his physician to Really Big Ben and Mary Lou, he decided to move to the more understanding states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Roosevelt had a grown brother he could live with in Philadelphia, where he could finish high school. Mr. Harlow wrote him a letter of recommendation as a mechanic.
Just to make sure the Klansmen didn’t get a chance to continue what they arrogantly called their “disciplinary action,” Ben himself drove Roosevelt to the railroad station in Roanoke, a city Ben chose because it wasn’t the closest or most logical place to catch a train, so anybody with ideas about ambushing Roosevelt wouldn’t guess where to do it.
Roosevelt’s traveling clothes were good slacks in a subdued plaid, tan oxfords, a white shirt, and a white sling and cast for his left arm. Several of his family were there, trying to act upbeat. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought Roosevelt was going back to college with a football injury.
Mary Lou was there to see him off also, and she looked like everybody’s hometown sweetheart. Nice navy dress with white polka dots, white silk scarf around her neck, white straw hat with a wide brim and low crown and a long navy ribbon for a hatband, white shoes with medium heels, bright red lipstick, her dark hair hanging loose below her shoulders. Her face and arms were suntanned, and she had a few freckles. She shook Roosevelt’s hand and said, low so only those standing close could hear it, “I’d kiss you again, but the first hundred times got you in trouble.”
“Well, it was surely worth my trouble,” Roosevelt said, laughing.
To my surprise, Jack heard that and didn’t even blink. He shook hands with Roosevelt, possibly the first time he ever shook hands with a black man. “I will admit you’ve got some backbone,” Jack said.
And Roosevelt said, smiling, “You saved my life. I finally got to where I could stand you.” He climbed on the train, found a seat, waved out the window with the arm that wasn’t broken, and the train pulled out. I never saw him again, but I heard he did all right.
Mary Lou had ridden to Roanoke in Ben’s police car with Roosevelt, but Ben asked if she would prefer to ride back to Early with her classmates. Everybody saw that would be safe enough; Ben was going to lead the caravan in his police cherry-top, and Rudy Sexton brought up the rear driving another police car, with Bobby Lee Lawson sitting in its passenger seat holding a Tommy gun. Bobby Lee could write his name with a Tommy gun. The Penn family followed Ben in their reliable old blue Ford. Jack’s car was next to last, and Mary Lou sat in the front seat, between Jack and me.
On the way home, Jack asked Mary Lou when she would be following Roosevelt north.
“We were just dating, not engaged,” she said. “Neither of us expected it to last. Besides, you can’t change Early by moving to Philadelphia.”
I was floored. “You mean you’re not going anywhere?”
She nodded. “If I leave, the bastards win. So I’m staying through my senior year, if not longer.”
Jack said, “Some will make it tough on you.”
“I know,” she said. “It would be a very brave boy who’d take me to the homecoming dance.” She turned and looked at me. “But I know one that brave, if he’ll ask me.”
Jack whooped with delighted laughter and beat a tattoo on the steering wheel as if it were a conga drum.
“I … I’m asking you now,” I stammered. Her red lips parted into a wide smile of perfect white teeth, dimples at each end, and she took my hand in hers and held it all the way back to Early.
Summer was over. We were seniors. We were busy. Andy Byrd went away to prep school, taking along his two-piece pearl-inlaid pool cue and a lot of my money. We made an appointment for further competition at Thanksgiving. When my own school year started, I quit my job at Harlow’s Garage, planning a mighty, last-chance effort to pull up my grades so I could maybe get into college. I favored West Virginia University because Mary Lou planned to go there.
My parents disapproved of Mary Lou.
Mom grasped at words to express why. “I’ve always liked her family, but she’s supposed to be kind of … experienced? And people say she was dating that colored boy that left town!”
My parents were probably more enlightened thinkers than most people in Early, but that was a low bar, and exceeding it didn’t put them on the cutting edge of social change.
But I stood my ground, so my mother began looking for reasons it might be all right. She used her school district connections to discover that Mary Lou was giving Ernestine Thomas a close race for valedictorian and had successfully coached previous boyfriends in math and English. Then she invited Mary Lou and her parents to dinner.
My mother and all us children spent a Saturday afternoon polishing furniture and washing windows, making the living room and dining room look like quality folk lived there. The reward, for my sister and brother, was being fed early and allowed to go with friends to a movie. I am sure my mother arranged this invitation.
Mary Lou was a knockout in the navy dress with white polka dots she had worn for Roosevelt’s send-off. Her mother had beautiful dark hair like Mary Lou’s; she was the same height, and still slender in her fifties. Her dress was probably bought for church or VFW dances—a shiny, powder-blue affair with a lot of extra material gathered around the shoulders. Mrs. Martin was carrying a pie. Mary Lou’s father wore a navy blue suit that didn’t fit him well. That was because his hard work at mine and mill and his own orchard had made him so muscular he couldn’t find anything that fit.
As we exchanged greetings in our living room, on what may have been the first wall-to-wall carpet they’d ever set foot on, Mary Lou’s parents stood shoulder to shoulder, visibly uncomfortable. My parents were people from the hollows, just like the Martins, known to the Martins all their lives, but at that moment the Martins were a couple who worked in a textile mill, invited to the home of the man who ran it. And while the idea of the invitation was to bridge that social distance, and our afternoon of polishing the place was intended to honor our guests, it seemed to backfire and make them feel even more out of place. Seeing the shining walnut bookcase and freshly ironed curtains unnerved them. The Martins probably thought we had servants!
My mother saved the evening by turning attention to the pie in Mrs. Martin’s hands.
“You didn’t have to bring anything,” Mom said, drawing out the sentence that way women do when they’re very glad you did bring it.
“We had a few apples,” said Mrs. Martin, shrugging apologetically, falling into her own required role in a ritual she instantly recognized. Of course they had a few apples. They had a few thousand. They grew apples as a cash crop!
“What kind of apples?” my mother asked, with the appropriate appearance of intense interest.
“Maggie Bowmans,” answered Mrs. Martin. Maggie Bowmans were an old-fashioned variety, no longer common, and among the earlier ripening, ready in September.
“Homemade pie from Maggie Bowmans!” my mother exclaimed. “We are eating this first!”
Just to keep them laughing, Mom served the whole meal backwards: pie with coffee, followed by beef roasted with potatoes, carrots, and onions, side dishes of collard greens and sliced tomatoes and biscuits, then tossed salad. By the time they finished up with what they called a “before-dinner drink” for the men, Mr. Martin’s suit jacket was hanging on the back of his chair and he was leaning over the table in his shirtsleeves, talking about raising apples, and my father, a farmer at heart, was grinning happily at everything Mr. Martin said. My mother and Mrs. Martin were in the kitchen washing dishes and swapping recipes.
Mary Lou and I went into my father’s dark little five-tree orchard and swapped kisses.
Mary Lou expected to be ostracized at school for dating a black boy, but she wasn’t noticeably intimidated by that prospect. “I have always been snubbed by the socially prominent,” she pointed out. “I reckon I can take another year of it.”
I was most worried about how Gina would act toward her. Gina could break a person socially if she chose to. Her multiple roles as school beauty, homecoming queen, star athlete, and best friend of the popular Ernestine would carry weight if she turned against Mary Lou. I couldn’t let that happen. Besides, Gina and Ernestine had been my friends since childhood, and it was important to me that they like my girlfriend.
I made a special trip to Gina’s house one afternoon to discuss this with her privately. She lived in one of the nicer neighborhoods, in a modern split-level house wedged onto a fairly steep and well-landscaped hillside. The only flat place on the property was the driveway in front of one of the only three-car garages in town. On a high post beside the driveway hung a regulation basketball goal board and net, where Gina practiced her dead-accurate jump shot.
She received me at the kitchen table. I had been there many times and she had always set out coffee or soft drinks or cookies. This time she didn’t, as if she knew this was not a mere social call.
I got right to the point. “I’m taking Mary Lou Martin to homecoming,” I said.
“I heard that,” said Gina. “I think that’s sweet of you. Promise me you won’t get into any fights.”
I said, “I don’t know how I can promise that. How am I supposed to deal with it when they say ugly stuff about her?”
She said, “Most of them are too scared of you to say it. If a few do, you just hold up your head and pretend you didn’t hear it.”
I said, “When has that ever worked?”
And she said, “What do you think I did these last two years when Todd Powell was spreading all those nasty lies about me? I never broke anybody’s arm!”
I let that pass. “I hope you’re not mad about homecoming,” I said. “We hadn’t exactly discussed going together.”
She smiled for the first time in the conversation. “I’m the homecoming queen. I won’t have any trouble getting a date.” And I knew she would not.
“I want you to be nice to Mary Lou,” I said.
Gina quit smiling. “That would probably piss off my dad.”
“Could you maybe be nice to her without him finding out?” I asked.
She smiled again, mischievously now. “That wouldn’t be any fun. I want him to be pissed off. I’d do it for you anyway, but after finding those robes in that attic, I’ll take special pleasure in treating Mary Lou like a princess!”
A day or two later, I entered a classroom to see the fashionable quarter, the section closer to the door and the front of the room, had been deserted by its customary in-crowd. Ernestine had moved over to the right rear, and now sat in the seat to Mary Lou’s left, and Gina sat in front of Mary Lou. Gina was turned around in her seat with her chin resting on her hands, which were folded on Mary Lou’s desk, talking intimately with my new love. Though I had never been quite in love with Gina, at that moment I treasured her, for her kindness to Mary Lou.
The following weekend, in the basement recreation room of a fine home to which I had never before been invited, I watched four tall, pretty girls teaching each other the twist. Two of the girls were Gina and Ernestine, who were close friends of the hostess, and another was Mary Lou. The fourth was the hostess herself, Annabelle Johnson, the daughter of Doc Johnson, as close to upper crust as anybody was in Early. It was clear that Mary Lou had been invited to this party because Gina willed it. And I myself had enough status to be there only because I was Mary Lou’s date!
So while many of our elders were deeply offended by Mary Lou’s violation of the color bar, Mary Lou had moved into the teenaged in-crowd with ease, and it was mostly Gina and Ernestine who made that happen. I knew Gina’s kindnesses were partly driven by shame about her father’s involvement with the Klan, but of course I did not tell Mary Lou that. Could not, because I had given my word to Gina; would not, anyway, because I wanted Mary Lou to think Gina simply liked her. I think that was at least partly true, because they had long relied on each other as basketball teammates. And in time, they became fast friends.
I turned eighteen that September, which released me from the juvenile court supervision I had been under since tearing into Todd Powell with an ax handle. The very next day John Yates arranged for me to testify for Buddy Jepson. He’d waited for my birthday because my testimony would disclose about a dozen violations of my juvenile probation, and that was the first day the juvenile court could not hold me accountable for them.
It worked out just as Yates hoped it would. Buddy had to pull four months on a road gang, but road gangs were mostly young guys like him. Buddy would not be locked up with the hardened criminals in the Richmond penitentiary, and he’d get plenty of exercise and some experience doing honest work. He took another couple of falls over the next few years, being a stubborn student of the justice system, but Buddy eventually gave his heart to Jesus and became a lay preacher and a saw miller. I ran into him a few times, and we didn’t try to kill each other.
= = =
Once I had done something close to the right thing, coming clean so they’d go easy on Buddy, Ben let me back into the sheriff’s office, and I worked there all the time I could spare from school, and a little more. Ben needed any help he could get, even from a politically dangerous eighteen-year-old, because he was now an official candidate for sheriff, and he had to spend a lot of his own time running a campaign. He needed to reach everybody who had ever voted in their lives, and then some, because all of them were going to turn out for the general election, which was shaping up as a hot race between Kennedy and Nixon. And in Early County, those same voters would be asked to select the next sheriff.
T.J. Thompson was also running hard for the job. He took a leave of absence from the state police, and he was everywhere, telling what he called “nigger jokes” to yahoos at the country stores, telling less offensive Baptist-and-Quaker jokes at Ruritan barbecues, even emceeing a “womanless beauty contest” at the county fair. Such contests were fundraisers in which prominent men of the community, the homelier the better, were persuaded to dress in drag for the benefit of some charity or other. T.J. didn’t have the connections to arrange all these appearances himself, but Rich Conway did.
Ben didn’t have the luxury of full-time campaigning because he had to run the sheriff’s department. And he didn’t have any political advisors comparable to Conway. My dad tried to help him, but Dad’s political experience was mostly in trying to not get elected mayor. Aaron Taylor did what he could for Ben, but he was still recuperating from his heart attack at home, and spent much of his time in an oxygen tent.
To make matters worse, the Klan, apparently emboldened by its victories of beating a teenage boy and vandalizing a girl’s home, held another recruiting rally. Jack and I watched the rally through binoculars, looking for faces we recognized and trying to figure out who was in charge. Of course, we knew that the men who did the Klan’s dirty work, the dark and bloody deeds along country cow paths and in the shadows of oak groves, probably weren’t the ones who acted big at the rally.
Legally, we couldn’t do anything to the people we recognized. But that Monday at school, I walked up close behind one of them, Todd Powell, and said, low so nobody else could hear it, “You can keep going to those rallies, hillbilly, but hurt her or hers again and I’ll break your other arm.”
Todd turned around, and he was holding the arm I had broken before, as if it still hurt him after two years. “I wasn’t one of them that did that,” he protested.
“Maybe you weren’t,” I said. “But you can see that shit stops, and it by God better stop!”
Mary Lou had been getting phone calls and notes left under her windshield wipers. Some were threatening, and some were just dirty. Both kinds stopped that day.
Ben had earnest discussions with some of the Klansmen, asking that no further trouble occur. But if it did, he specifically asked me and Jack to let somebody else handle it.
“You’re no juvenile now,” he reminded me. “Break another arm and Rich Conway will see you work six months to a year on a road gang. Get your own broke trying to be a policeman when you aren’t, and I’ll be held responsible. We can’t win, so stay the hell out of it.”
His reasoning was sound, so Jack and I promised to do as he said. Jack was nervous, though. He was willing not to look for trouble, but was pretty sure it would look for him. He took some target practice out in the woods, just in case, but didn’t hit much.
The sheriff’s office was so shorthanded by then, because Rich Conway had managed to starve out so many deputies, that Ben had us dispatching every Saturday night. That way Ben could send every sworn officer out on actual calls. Two state troopers were also patrolling parts of the county. Their jobs were mainly working traffic, but they could respond to emergencies of any kind. They were John Henry Light and Bunce Gilliam, both good officers, as unlike T.J. Thompson as it was possible to be and still own handcuffs.
About 8 p.m. on a Saturday in October, a call came in about a three-car accident with several people injured, out on the county line. Both troopers responded, and we sent the ambulance. Bobby Lee was driving it that night, a part-time job he had taken to make ends meet when the county supervisors cut the deputies’ overtime. Rudy Sexton was up in the far part of the county working a reported disturbance at a dance. On a call like that we had to send an officer no matter how shorthanded we were, because if we didn’t it could escalate into a shooting or knifing.
Ben himself was the last officer available. He was preparing to go work traffic when I took a phone call from somebody who sounded like a young boy. The caller said, “You gotta come out here and help Mama! Daddy’s drunk and I think he’s done broke her jaw!”
I turned on the speaker attached to the phone so Ben and Jack could hear the caller.
I said, “What’s your daddy’s name? Where’s he live?”
The caller said, “Frosty Sutphin. We live up Sutphin Hollow Road.”
“Oh, Lordy,” Ben said. He’d been dreading this call for years, fearing that Frosty Sutphin eventually would kill his wife, or one of her relatives would kill Frosty. He left his desk and took the phone out of my hand. “Is he still hitting her?”
“He was when I run down the road to use the neighbor’s phone,” the boy said. “You need to come!”
Ben said, “I’ll get somebody there quick as I can. I want you to go back there and calm him down.”
“I ain’t but fourteen years old,” the boy cried. “I can’t stop him ’less I shoot him!”
Ben said, “Don’t you shoot him! What’s your name?”
“Billy,” the boy said. “I gotta go do something! Please come!” He hung up while Ben was asking where he was calling from. I wanted to call the Sutphin house, but we knew there was no phone there.
Ben was living his own nightmare all over again. His two brothers were serving life in the Richmond pen for killing their daddy to protect their mother. Their own father. Ben’s father.
Ben laid rubber from the courthouse to the first stop sign, and ran it. I could still hear his engine when Jack said, “I don’t like this. It’s the first time we’ve been out of cops on a Saturday night. I guess we’re in charge.”
“That can’t be good,” I opined.
To this day nobody else has driven to the head of Sutphin Hollow as fast as Ben drove it that night. He told me later he had his pistol in his hand when he ran up the steps of the Sutphin house and onto the dark porch.
Frosty came out on the porch barefoot and wearing nothing but bib overalls. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Ben said, “I need to see Mrs. Sutphin.” She came out and looked okay.
Ben said, “I gotta have the truth right now. Has he hit you tonight?”
Mrs. Sutphin smiled and said, “He hasn’t hit me since he quit drinking and that’s been two months. I don’t believe he’ll ever hit me again.” And she reached over and hugged her husband.
“Goddamn it,” Ben said.
“I thought that would please you,” she said.
But Ben had jumped off the porch and was already spinning the car around. He didn’t even ask whether they had a boy named Billy, which they didn’t.
Ben didn’t radio us because Sutphin Hollow was a dead spot for transmission, one of dozens of such spots in Early County. He could radio when he got out into more open country. But that required first moving a foot-thick locust tree somebody had felled across the road half a mile below Frosty’s place in the few minutes since Ben had gone up the hollow. Ben backed up all the way to Frosty’s at about forty miles an hour and asked to borrow a chain saw. Frosty had no chain saw, but he was good with a crosscut. Between him and Ben, they cut through that locust, one of the hardest woods that grows, in just a few minutes. Frosty hitched his tractor to the lighter end of the tree, towed it out of the way, and Ben sped on through for about three more miles till he got to a spot where he could radio the news that we’d been tricked.
That was no surprise to us, because of what had happened in the meantime. Rudy Sexton had radioed that nobody was fighting at the dance, and he was driving back in, but he was still at least thirty minutes away. The troopers and Bobby Lee called to say the wreck was a fake; there were three cars way down the bank and two of them on fire, that was true, but they looked like wrecking-yard carcasses just dumped in the ravine and lit up.
A minute later we knew why. A commotion outside drew us to the front door of the courthouse, where we looked out and saw about seventy-five men in white robes walking up Main Street. This time, they were wearing hoods to cover their faces, and carrying torches and gasoline cans and shotguns, and they were heading toward the black neighborhood and the wooden buildings of Steep Street.
We radioed for all officers to get back to town fast, running their sirens and cherry-top flashers. I telephoned Aaron Taylor. He had resigned as sheriff but hadn’t been replaced yet, so I didn’t know if he was legally an officer anymore, but this was no time to split hairs. Taylor got out of his oxygen tent, put on his badge and pistol, and drove down to the entrance of Steep Street.
Jack said, “We gotta go help Aaron.”
I said, “We promised Ben we’d let the others handle it, and I gotta man the radio.”
“Who you gonna dispatch that you ain’t already sent?” Jack said. “Screw the radio!”
So we both ran hell for leather toward Steep Street to Aaron Taylor’s makeshift roadblock. He’d parked his civilian car across the road and set up flares, but he hadn’t had time to bring a shotgun or tear gas, so he was facing all those men with a bullhorn, his undersized pistol, and his once-imposing presence. He didn’t draw the gun. When the masked marchers got within about twenty-five yards, he raised the bullhorn.
“What you are doing is illegal,” he said. “I declare this an unlawful assembly and order you to disperse.”
But one of the leading marchers, a tall man with a booming voice coming from behind his Klan hood, said, “I don’t believe Aaron Taylor’s going to stop us.”
The tall marcher motioned the Klansmen forward and they came stepping around Taylor’s one-man roadblock on all sides. When the sheriff again raised his bullhorn, two quick men darted in and snatched the revolver from his holster, then pinned him to his car until they found a backup gun in his pocket. Taylor was still very sick, and could do nothing now but sit defeated on the seat of his car. There was no other lawman between all those torches and the black people’s wooden homes and businesses.
The men marched singing about “the power of the Klan, the power of the Klan,” to the tune of a real Christian hymn, “Power in the Blood.” Jack and I withdrew down Steep Street as they came, trying to think of something to slow them down or at least figure out exactly what they were going to do. Steep Street was ordinarily busy on a Saturday night, with people coming in and out of homes and open shops till nine thirty or ten. Now there was nobody to be seen but the Klan, Jack, and me.
One block into Steep Street, the marchers split into two files, one on each side of the street, and began moving up the side streets. Jack decided that before the Klan spread through the whole neighborhood, he should make his own play to stop them. Didn’t consult me about it. He just stepped into the middle of the street and pointed his sawed-off .45 pistol at the huge leader’s crotch.
“I declare you under arrest by the Virginia citizen’s authority and duty of arrest,” Jack said. This was official-sounding baloney that Jack had made up on the spot; all he really had to say was he was making a citizen’s arrest.
“I declare I’m gonna shove that limey pistol up your pansy butt,” mocked the big man. And he charged Jack. I never saw a big man move so fast, and it must of startled Jack, ’cause he fired! He missed the big man, but a tall Klansman a few feet behind the leader spun in a full circle and fell, grasping his leg just above the knee and curling into a weeping and cursing ball of white robes. Now the big man had Jack’s arm locked painfully in his grasp. He twisted the gun out of Jack’s hand and pointed it at Jack’s head.
“You’re playing with the big boys, punk.”
I ran toward them. I had the Owlhead pistol in my pocket, but I realized that if this guy would walk over Jack’s .45, I sure wasn’t gonna scare him with Dad’s .32. If I pulled it I’d have to shoot him, and I’d promised I wouldn’t do that again.
So I did the only thing I could think of trying; I just grabbed the Klansman’s gun hand and shoved it away from Jack’s head for a second. I was able to do it only because the guy wasn’t expecting it. I pushed the gun away with my left and used my right to sucker punch the big man with a right cross to the jaw, which was my best punch. He was saying something when I hit him, so I know it took him by surprise, and I hit him so hard I broke my hand. It made him loosen his grip on the pistol just long enough for Jack to snatch it back into his own hands. But the big man didn’t go down, and I thought Jack would have to shoot him.
At that moment, Grady Penn ran up and hit the big guy across both calves with a baseball bat. That put him down right quick! I thought Roosevelt would be proud of his dad, despite Roosevelt’s own role in the mess.
Jack and I threw ourselves onto the big Klansman, each of us pinning one of his arms to the pavement, and Jack pressed the pistol muzzle into the middle of his chest. The big SOB quit struggling, but angry-sounding utterances continued to issue from beneath the white hood.
“Don’t harm these boys that ain’t wearing masks,” Mr. Penn yelled. “They’re the ones helped Roosevelt.”
Involved in our own brawl with the leader, Jack and I had not seen what was happening around us. At the sound of Jack’s shot, black men and boys had broken from hiding places in the alleys of Steep Street and from behind the low, vine-covered fences in some of the yards. They came leaping into the street from all directions. The blacks carried baseball bats and the handles from picks, grubbing hoes, and axes. Some swung chains and some were carrying egg baskets full of baseball-sized rocks that they threw with great accuracy. Both sides had a few shotguns, but the black men fired first, aiming at the armed Klansmen, and each one who was hit would scream and stumble away, usually dropping his gun.
“We’re shooting rock salt,” Mr. Penn explained hurriedly. “But we got buckshot if we need it!”
I had never seen so many black people in one place at a time. I learned later that after the earlier Klan rallies, local families had called in cousins and grown-up sons living elsewhere to visit for a few nights in case any trouble happened. The scores of Klansmen who had seemed unstoppable before were now overwhelmed by numbers. One white-sheeted figure would go down fighting under a pile of black men and boys; immediately, the black guys would let him up, and if the Klansman still showed fight, it would happen all over again. But if he turned to run, each black man anywhere near him would kick him in the ass, or try to, till he got away.
It was over in just two or three minutes, then black men were standing in the street yelling, “Whooo-eeeeeee!” It was the famous rebel yell, and I had never heard a black man yell it before.
The street was littered with abandoned torches, now starting to go out. One ignited a ruptured gallon can of gasoline, which exploded with a big WHOOSH and burned harmlessly, lighting the whole street. Somebody threw a discarded robe onto the fire, and the idea captured the victors’ imaginations, so other abandoned Klan trappings were soon thrown onto the pyre. The victors did not burn the three homemade wooden crosses they found, but kept them as souvenirs. They carried home shotguns and gasoline cans as spoils of war.
There weren’t any Klansmen in sight except the leader who broke my hand on his jaw and the guy Jack had shot. I tried to pull the hood off the big man’s head but he fought it, so Mr. Penn swung the bat and smacked the soles of the big man’s shoes.
“Learned that from T.J. Thompson,” he said as the big man howled and reached for his smarting feet. In doing so, he let go of the hood covering his face, which allowed me to lift it.
“And I’ll be surely damned!” Mr. Penn added when he saw the big furious face of T.J. Thompson himself. Thompson was trying to say something, and I realized his jaw was broken just like my hand.
Then we took the hood off the guy Jack had shot in the thigh, and that guy was Rich Conway.
Rich Conway nearly bled to death from that big .45 bullet hole, but blood transfusions saved him. Mr. Penn and his daughter Susannah, who used to work for Rich, always claimed they donated some of the blood.
“I just wanted to be able to point out he has lots of Negro blood in him,” Mr. Penn would cackle, and slap his knee. He told the joke the rest of his life, and folks who knew Rich Conway never tired of hearing it.
Conway still had his broken thigh in a cast when the letter came from Richmond informing him that a commonwealth’s attorney’s participation in a Ku Klux Klan riot was an embarrassment, and that his timely resignation would be viewed favorably in the pending disbarment proceedings. He resigned as commonwealth’s attorney but managed to keep his law license. John Yates, who had done a good job getting Buddy Jepson off with a light sentence in the Tazewell County court, was appointed to finish Conway’s term, and the first thing he did was announce that he would not prosecute Jack for shooting Conway. The very fact that he hit Conway, Yates pointed out, meant that Jack was aiming somewhere else.
T.J. Thompson’s campaign had peaked too soon, in that all of his speeches had been made before Dr. Johnson wired his jaw shut to heal up. He captured only a humiliating 278 votes. It was clear that even most of the Klansmen and sympathizers hadn’t voted for him. Still smarting from humiliation and rock salt, they blamed him for leading them into that ambush on Steep Street, and people began saying that T.J. stood for “Terrific Judgment.” He didn’t get to return to his state police job, either, and the last I heard he was running a bulldozer on a logging crew over in Tazewell County.
Of the 11,742 adults counted by the 1960 census in Early County, about 12,000 cast votes in the November election. The U.S. Department of Justice, much interested in Klan interference with minority voting, also noticed this mathematical wonder, and insisted on a general cleanup of county voter registration books. That allowed many dead white Southerners to finally lay down their civic duties and remain dead even during elections, which further reduced the power of the courthouse gang, already dealt a body blow by Rich Conway’s resignation from office. But even with all that reform, my dad still had to serve another hitch as mayor.
Nobody demanded a recount of Ben’s election, however, because it was clear that if Ben had nearly all the votes, he had the real ones as well as most of the questionable. Conway and his candidate had become footnotes to history, so the Early County supervisors saw no point in further starving the sheriff’s department. Ben got his overtime budget back, every deputy got his job back if he wanted it, and Ben hired some new deputies as well. He even gave me official status as a “law enforcement cadet,” which meant I got paid to do what I’d already been doing.
Jack could have been a cadet, too, but he passed it up to take over my old job at Harlow’s Garage. He already knew a lot about cars, and was so deeply interested in them that he learned quickly. After we graduated, Mr. Harlow let him run the garage all that summer. Nobody called Jack a flaming asshole anymore, because everybody wanted him to soup up their engines. Some guys hung out there, hoping Jack would tell one of those big entertaining lies like he did when he first moved to Early, but they were disappointed. Jack had started messing with truth and got addicted. He worked his way through Georgia Tech as a dealership mechanic, then pulled a hitch in the Army, where he finally learned to shoot, and served on his base’s pistol team.
He’s the same Jack Newcomb who now has a NASCAR racing team. They tell me his driver, Roosevelt Penn, doesn’t take much crap off him, or vice versa, and that arrangement works for both of them.
Between Mary Lou’s academic coaching and my accidental acquisition of an interesting résumé to submit with my application, I got into college, where I took criminology. Mary Lou went on to law school, and I went on to Vietnam. When I got out of the service she was practicing law in our hometown, and I didn’t have to ask why. My dad had already carved her reason into the antique, wormy chestnut plank that still hangs in her law office lobby. It says, “You can’t change Early by living in Bluefield.”
Ernestine and Gina also became career women like Mary Lou, and the three of them are still pretty good friends.
As for me, I circled back round to the sheriff’s office, and pretty soon Really Big Ben pinned a deputy’s badge on my shirt.
I guess now I’ve told the whole story and answered all the questions anybody ever asked me about those days, except the ones about my relationship with Mary Lou. I took Mary Lou to homecoming, and many other places too. She stayed feisty, and principled, and got even stronger over the years, and she stood by me as reliably as any fighting man I met in Nam. I am proud of her every day. But I can’t tell you exactly how that part of the story turned out, because I don’t yet know myself.