Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  The two Pinkertons sat in his library telling their story until after three. “One last thing,” Albert Tully said, looking sly. “I got some news about your war hero at the newspaper.”

  “Do tell.”

  Taylor paid them in cash, but made a notation in his ledger so the committee could reimburse him later. When they had gone, he downed his brandy in one quick gulp, then poured another for sipping. So they meant to tear this town apart. They meant to tear down the old order. Well, there would be order. He and Hugh would see to that. It began with the list of names copied in a neat hand, running down the page in two precise rows.

  Rountree met the Pinkertons at his office in the Allen Building rather than at his home. He disliked letting business intrude on his family life. A gentleman kept things where they belonged—to maintain perspective.

  He checked his railroad watch—nearly one. They were late. He couldn’t abide lateness. Passion and time were all a man had in life. With a careful calendar, he could do his life’s work three times over.

  And why in the world did they insist on these midnight rendezvous? My God, he’d bought a Gatling gun in broad daylight. Surely, their secrets weren’t so dangerous. Must be their training, he reflected. Their instinctive distrust of daylight. Their love of shadows, secrecy, masquerade.

  He heard them talking loudly in the hall, then watched their shadows bloom through the frosted glass of his door. “It’s open,” he said.

  Two white men entered, both in soft clothes, wearing caps. With their rough faces and square hands, their clodhopper brogans and soiled corduroys, they had been passing for laborers in Brooklyn all week. Smith and Brown.

  “You’re late.”

  Brown said, “Fellow can get lost in these streets.”

  “Never mind.” It wasn’t worth the trouble to upbraid police agents. They ran on their own clock. In any case, they’d come with reliable references from a judge he knew in Chicago. They’d give him the straight story.

  Smith opened a notebook. Rountree wondered how he kept it so crisp and clean under the circumstances. The agent pulled out a miraculously sharp pencil, licked the point, then licked his thumb and flipped through the pages, occasionally checking off some item.

  “Well?”

  Smith smiled sardonically. The agents were still standing, as if to announce that this wouldn’t take long. Smith said, “We’ve been high and low, Mr. Rountree. We’ve been in the mills, under porches, inside the churches.”

  How had they managed that? Blackface, like in the minstrel shows?

  Brown said, “We’ve bought a round of drinks in every tavern between here and Virginia.”

  Rountree said, “Get to the point.”

  Smith shrugged and closed his notebook, as if disappointed not to be able to recite dates and times and places and names. “Point is, you’ve wasted a little money. And we’ve wasted a good deal of time.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning there’s no uprising. There’s not fifteen guns in all of Brooklyn.”

  Brown said, “A few old squirrel rifles, a Civil War pistol or two, a couple of one-bang shotguns. Like that.”

  Rountree leaned forward, squinting, as if to bring their words into focus. “No organization? No leaders? No plan to take the polling places?”

  Smith scratched his head with the sharp end of the pencil. “Somebody’s been filling your head full of tall tales, Mr. Rountree. Sure, there’s a half-dozen hotheads, big talkers. Winged some stones at streetcars after Mr. Dowling’s tour, then ran like hell. Maybe one of ’em will get up the nerve to throw a rock through your window some dark night. Maybe.”

  “But we understood there were hundreds—”

  “They had a church meeting. You know how they do—jump up and razzle-dazzle around. Ain’t no harm.”

  “Didn’t come to nothing,” Brown agreed. “Lot of hot air. One fellow with a big mouth, preacher man, but I’ve seen his kind before. When things get hot, they turn tail and skedaddle. Couple of Sunday-school teachers with birches could keep that whole Darktown buttoned up.”

  “So you’re not expecting a riot?” Rountree asked. He had to be sure they were all talking about the same thing. Colonel Walker Taylor would want to know. So would Hugh MacRae.

  Smith chuckled. “Not unless you start it.” He flipped open his notebook. “You don’t believe me, look it up. Times, dates, places. All the places where nothing was happening, all the times when nobody was up to anything. It’s yours, anyhow—you paid for it.” He tossed the notebook onto Rountree’s polished desk.

  “Names?”

  “All the names of all the coloreds who weren’t up to no good,” Brown interjected, grinning.

  “You’re looking for the bogeyman, Mr. Rountree,” Smith said. “Well, he don’t live in Brooklyn. All you got in Brooklyn is a whole lot of factory niggers who just want to be left alone.”

  “You agree with this report?” Rountree said to Brown.

  Brown shrugged. “Don’t know how you-all did it, but you’ve raised the tamest collection of niggers this side of the grave. They’ll sit still for anything, long as you let ’em work. My advice is leave ’em be.”

  Rountree showed the Pinkerton men out. Was this good news or bad news? One thing was sure: it surprised him. He had been preparing to defend his home and city against hordes of black vandals with guns. According to the Pinkertons, they could take this thing easy. Turn down the flame a bit. All those guns and speeches—maybe they’d overreacted.

  This would take some hard thinking. The whites were lathered up, and the blacks were lying down. Keep Waddell in check, Rountree thought. Let it roll on nice and easy. Think about Raleigh, the statehouse, a bigger world than this.

  He had to win on Tuesday. Had to keep the lid on somehow. No violence—there must absolutely be no violence. It was no longer necessary. It wouldn’t be legal.

  He locked his office door and went outside. The narrow streets looked broad, so empty. He walked home right down the center of the street. Business could wait until morning.

  From the pulpits of North Carolina the doctrine of white supremacy was preached in the same breath with the story of Christ’s love.

  Henry L. West, journalist

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Monday, November 7

  WHY SHE WENT SEEKING him out, she couldn’t explain. Not to herself, certainly not to her husband. Ivanhoe Grant had humiliated her, but what Gray Ellen wanted was not revenge. She wanted to understand. In Waddell’s speech, she had glimpsed something profoundly ugly, something completely outside her experience. Until she understood it, she would have no idea what to do next.

  She went looking for Grant at the boardinghouse where he’d cornered her that day as he toured her through the slums. The neighborhood was alive with the sounds of people, their smells, their chatter, the noise and clutter of their lives. Shirts snapped on laundry lines. Somebody was hammering a nail. Water was running out of a pump. Children shrieked. Two women laughed and slapped their fat thighs. A skinny dog yipped after a creaky peddler’s cart. A spoon clanged against a pot. A door slammed.

  Rain was predicted. As she walked, she felt somehow safer with her umbrella in her hand.

  She let herself in the front door, which wobbled on rusty hinges. Inside were a dim hallway and a rickety staircase. The place smelled of rotten wood and mildew. She sneezed in the dust-hazy air. On the second floor, she listened at a closed door: shoes scraping the floor, fingers tapping, a man clearing his throat. She knocked. The door wasn’t closed properly, and it sprang open and banged against the wall like a gunshot. A man in the chair by the window, working at a small desk, jerked his head around, terrified.

  “Reverend Grant,” she said, startled breathless herself, “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  He remained alert as prey, blue eyes focused on her. Something was different about him—the spectacles. She had never seen him wearing spectacles. They made him look bookish and shy. His right hand hel
d a pencil. Before him on the desk lay a tablet of lined pages. He didn’t get up. The room was tiny—a narrow, unmade bed, a night table and basin, a dirty brown carpet, and the little desk by the window. A breeze fluttered the papers.

  “Close the door, schoolteacher, before I lose all my work.”

  She did as she was told. “What are you doing?” she said.

  He stood up. He was jacketless. The sleeves of his white shirt were limp from perspiration, as if he’d been working for a long time. His tie was undone at the collar. He picked up the tablet and smacked it against his palm. “I have watched and I have listened and I have bided my time.” He tossed the tablet onto the desk, then set the pencil on it.

  “You’re making a record.”

  He smiled and nodded. “Exactly. If anything should happen, people must know what was said and done here.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “I am not a prophet. Something may happen. Who can say?”

  “Who do you work for?”

  He shook his head, clapped his hands, and paced the little room. “You are a piece of work, schoolteacher. Who do I work for?” He turned on her and put his face right into hers so she could feel his heat. “The Lord Jesus Christ, our God and Savior!” he said.

  “I’m not impressed.” She sat in the only chair in the room, by the desk, and stood the umbrella against it.

  He kept pacing. “Now, you going to tell me what you’re doing here?”

  She didn’t have an answer. Or the answer she had was not the kind that lent itself to words. He was the only man in town who took her seriously. Maybe it was just that. A few months ago, she could never have imagined herself coming to a place like this in search of a man like Ivanhoe Grant.

  “You know, you could get me hanged just by being here.”

  It had occurred to her. “You didn’t seem too worried about that last time.” Right out on the street, she recalled. No pretending about it—pure bullying. If she’d given in, he’d have surely taken advantage.

  “There’s a lot more to worry a man these days.” He glanced out the window, as if making sure she hadn’t been followed. “Now, what are you doing here?”

  “You tell me.”

  He sat on the desk and leaned over her. “I think you don’t know what to make of me. I believe I baffle you.”

  “Go on.” She couldn’t look away from him.

  “You’ve never met a man like me before. I’m not nice. And that excites you.”

  “Don’t go too far.”

  He shrugged elaborately. “I don’t mean only sexually, although if you’re honest—”

  “I said, don’t go too far.” She started to get up, but it was a halfhearted attempt. She’d come here looking for a solution. This man did have a certain power about him. He stuck in her imagination. Her memory kept coming back to him, fascinated. He had that smooth, bedtime voice that took her off guard, then poked her in the eye with truth.

  “There is an excitement of the heart, teacher, as well as of the body. A tingling of the mind in the active presence of new ideas. A trembling of the soul.”

  Yes, she had felt all those. But that wasn’t it. “How about fear?”

  “Fear? Ah, then you have come to me as a confessor.”

  “I already have a confessor.”

  He nodded. “The priest.”

  “Yes.” She had told Father Dennen everything. She only wished Sam would confess to him, too.

  “You tell him everything?”

  She pondered that. “Not everything.”

  “Not everything,” he whispered. “Then I am the one who hears the things you cannot even confess to your priest.” He kissed her. She held her breath, wondering what to expect. His mouth had a slightly metallic taste, like the taste of well water from a tin cup. It was not unpleasant.

  He drew back. “I am forcing nothing,” he warned her. “You came to me.”

  She could not bring herself to speak. He was right and he was also wrong—at this instant, she was powerless to do anything but let the world happen to her. She was under his spell.

  He pulled her over backward in the chair. She felt herself falling and cried out, weakly.

  “I will not let you fall,” he said gently. “You shall not even stub your toe.” The odd remark sounded vaguely scriptural to her. He eased her back and then rolled her off the fallen chair and onto the brown rug. He was surprisingly heavy on top of her.

  She waited for the passion to flood into her, but nothing happened. She was not even really afraid, did not even feel guilty. She watched herself as if she were a detached observer peeking in the window: half-undressed now, she lay on her back, arms flung limply over her head, on a dirty brown carpet in a cell-like room in a tawdry boardinghouse in the Negro section of a city she had come to loathe.

  The image astonished her. Then her vision filled with his blue eyes, the sweat gleaming along his razor-sharp moustache. She was disappointed—she had expected a mad loss of control, a sudden violent surge of guilty emotions, a heart-pounding tumult of caresses. Meanwhile, he was peeling off her blouse.

  “Wait,” she said.

  He must have heard the sadness in her voice. She wasn’t struggling, just politely asking.

  He got off her. “So, you can’t make up your mind.” He wasn’t even breathing hard. “I am forcing nothing. Just go home and forget about this.”

  As he stood over her, shirtless, she saw that something was wrong with the skin of his stomach and chest. Slowly, she got to her feet, feeling the breeze fretting through the open window. “Your stomach, those marks.”

  “What?” He stood confused, one hand holding his shirt, the other touching a pink scar on his stomach. There were more scars, livid pink slashes.

  “Your scars.” She moved toward him, fascinated, and traced her fingers over the long scar on his belly.

  He laughed. She felt his laugh under her fingers. “You’re tickling me,” he said. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He pushed her back, gently but insistently. “Last man tickled me, he used a cat.”

  “A cat?”

  “You know, teacher—the kind with nine tails? The kind where each leather tail is knotted wet around a steel rivet and then dried in the sun till it’s nice and tight?”

  “They whipped you?”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, woman! You have no idea what goes on in this world. Lynching—it’s an old custom in these parts.”

  “Turn around. Let me see.”

  “You don’t want—”

  “Turn around.” She turned him and saw the bare flesh of his back. She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. His flesh was pink, white, and black, crosshatched in overlapping scars. The texture was corrugated—that was the only word that described it. She said the word to herself, to remember the effect later.

  “Have you ever seen a lynching?” he asked quietly, his back to her, staring out the curtainless window. “Do you know what happens when a man is whipped?”

  She said nothing. She had never seen such a thing in her life.

  “They tie your arms up over your head, like this.” He raised his arms and crossed his wrists, then let them down and picked up her umbrella. He whacked it against the desk. She jumped. “At first, it stings. You close your eyes and you can see the stripes on your back—each one as it is laid on, as if your eyes were watching through your own skin.”

  Whack! “How it makes a long, red welt.”

  Whack! The rubber tips at the ends of the umbrella ribs ricocheted against the wall. “You feel the knot biting, then flicking off. Each time it flicks off, a little piece of flesh goes with it.” Whack! “By the third lash, the welts start to bleed. They don’t sting anymore—now, they burn. Now, it’s like fire is being poured onto your back.” He flailed at the desk with the umbrella till it was beaten shapeless, the fabric shredded. He flung it away.

  She wanted him to shut up, she didn’t want to hear any more about it, but she didn’t dare speak.
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br />   “Like liquid fire. You keep your weight on your feet no matter how bad it hurts, so your arms don’t pull out of their sockets. You say to yourself, Lord, help me keep standing on my feet. You promise him anything.”

  “Please,” she managed to say.

  “No, I don’t guess you want to hear all this. But I believe this is what you came here for. I do believe that.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Let me tell you this,” he said, still not looking at her. “I have never told this before to anyone.” He paused, but she said nothing. “Whipping a man is hard work. In the old days, on the plantations, they used to make a black man give the whippings. Black on black. Insult to injury.”

  He waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. “Sometimes, the man doing the whipping, he has to take a break. Let another fellow take over. Man can hurt his back, whipping another man. So for a few seconds each time, you think it’s over. They’re done. They’ve lost the stomach for it. There are women in the crowd, young children. Surely, they’ll put a stop to it.”

  He forced a laugh, shook his head. “But you know what? They never lose the stomach for it—not in my experience. They want you to scream. They want you bawling like a baby. Especially the women.

  “You’ve already pissed yourself,” he said. “And your pants are soaked with blood—feels like greasy water. Your shoes are full of blood, but it don’t do you no good in your shoes. You start to feel dizzy, your eyes go all swimmy, you wonder if you’re going to pass out and break your own arms.”

  “Please, that’s enough.” Her insides were churning and her throat was dry. The room seemed suddenly too hot, yet she had gooseflesh on her arms and breasts. She realized all at once that her breasts were uncovered, her nipples erect against his ruined flesh, that she was standing at his back nearly naked. She grabbed her blouse and held it over herself.