Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  “We have a new mayor,” Harry said.

  “Who is it, Walker Taylor? Fishblate? Or Cousin Hugh?”

  Harry Calabash smiled, recalling the look of utter bewilderment on Fishblate’s face as Waddell’s coterie had marched past him into the board chambers—somebody clearly had welshed on a deal. “Waddell,” he said.

  Sam took another slug of the whiskey and laughed. So Waddell had been wired in all along. Running a shadow government.

  Harry clinked his glass against Sam’s. “Congratulations, Samuel. You backed the right horse. Or the right horse backed you.”

  They drank together and ordered more. Sam was feeling a warm surge of euphoria. Maybe some good would come out of this after all. Maybe he and Gray Ellen would have the future here they deserved.

  Harry drank hard and needed a new whiskey after two gulps. The bartender obliged. Looking away at the green-coated barman, he said to Sam, “You’re fooling yourself if you think so.”

  “What? I didn’t say anything.”

  Harry turned and drew closer to be heard above the growing noise of the newspapermen at the tables behind them. “No, but you’re working out all the angles. Your ambition is trying to fool your conscience.”

  Sam finished his glass and demanded another.

  Harry put a hand on his sleeve. Sam had never noticed before how crooked and bony Harry’s fingers were. The sallow skin was stippled with liver spots. Suddenly, he didn’t want Harry to touch him.

  “You’re a whisker away from the sweetest deal you’ve ever known,” Harry said. “All it takes to clinch it is to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ next time they ask you something. Doesn’t matter what they ask—might be murder, might be ‘Pass the salt.’ Just say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and you’ll be sitting pretty. Young man on the rise. Way I was, once upon a time.”

  “Lay off, Harry.”

  Harry smiled. “You’re about to find out if you have any character.”

  They had several more drinks, and the sun was already well down before Sam remembered he was looking for Gray Ellen. His stomach was boiling, and his cheeks were flushed. The conversations around him were just a buzzing racket. He stepped away from the bar and momentarily lost his balance. He wanted to pay for his drinks, but the barman stood in the corner and made no move to present a bill. Sam’s thinking was fuzzy. He had no idea how bills were paid at the Cape Fear Club. Let Harry handle it—he could square with Harry tomorrow.

  His head felt like a bag of water, sloshing back and forth behind his sore eyes. He could not focus properly—things kept going into and out of detail. He made it to the door. Outside, a cold drizzle matted his hair in minutes. The chill seeped into his body.

  He stood in the drizzle, hands stuffed into his coat pockets. The pistol in his right pocket was warm against his hand. He tried to clear his head, recover his bearings. The river was behind him, his home off to the right. He started walking straight ahead. He had to find Gray Ellen.

  Bessie King noticed somebody sneaking around the back of the house and stole out through the kitchen to investigate. “David?” she called softly into the darkness. “David boy?”

  A light-skinned Negro in a pearl-gray overcoat and hat stepped out of the drizzle into the kitchen light. Drops of water beaded on the fine fabric of his coat and glistened along the brim of his fedora.

  She said, “Mr. Manly?”

  The man shook his head. “I am a preacher of the Lord, ma’am. Come to bring you sad news.”

  Bessie took a step back and braced herself against the door-jamb. The drizzle was on her face. “Oh, lordy, lordy. My David.”

  “I am sorry, ma’am.”

  She steadied herself. “Where is he?”

  “At the mortuary down on Second, ma’am. You best wait until morning.”

  She nodded and put her face into her hands. When she lifted her head, the light-skinned man had melted away.

  Bessie locked the back door and stood in the kitchen, looking stupidly at the pots and pans. Her mind was a rushing vacuum. Something deep inside her shuddered. She could feel herself falling, and she held onto the counter with both hands. Her soul was faltering. She tried to pray and could not. All she could utter was “Sweet Jesus.”

  She stood at the sink for several minutes to let the rushing go out of her head. She could feel her soul swirling around in her breast. She wished she had never set foot outside to see who the skulker was. If she didn’t know, then it hadn’t happened. Yet what he had told her must be true—it felt true. Felt truer than anything she had ever heard.

  After a time, she heard sobbing and realized it was not her own. Almost automatically, she floated through the dining room and into the parlor, where Gabrielle sat folded into a sofa, sobbing into her hands. Her body convulsed with each sob. The tears ran out between her fingers.

  Bessie laid a hand on her arm, and Gabrielle looked up. “Oh, Bessie,” she whispered. “This is an awful day.”

  She must have overheard, Bessie thought. She sat down next to Gabrielle and put an arm around her shoulder. The two women hugged and cried together. Bessie prayed, “Father, do not forsake us in the hour of our trial.”

  Gabrielle said, “Do you know what today is?”

  “A black day,” Bessie said. “No blacker day has ever been.”

  “He’s out there somewhere—who knows where? He should be here, with me.”

  What was she thinking of that old billy goat for at a time like this? “I know, honey, I know. Ain’t right.”

  “You don’t understand,” Gabrielle said, sitting upright. “Today, this is the second anniversary of my wedding.”

  Bessie King looked away. So not even this one, she thought. “Honey, we all got troubles,” she said, and went back to the kitchen to have her privacy.

  All the ones who left, they never came back. I know—because I waited for them.

  Elizabeth “Bessie” King, 1918

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Thursday, November 10

  ONCE AGAIN, Gray Ellen Jenks found herself in strange territory with a man she did not trust. She wrapped her shawl around her to keep off the drizzle as the driver steered the open buggy through the arched wrought-iron gate of Oakdale Cemetery.

  The driver was John Norwood, the only man in town who’d given her a chance. To her left sat Ivanhoe Grant, the man who had forced her to take a chance. Squeezed in the middle, she felt caught between two radically different visions of the future.

  Going home had seemed pointless—Sam would be out chasing the action. Norwood had dismissed all the jittery children almost as soon as the school day had begun, then had rushed off to attend some kind of meeting downtown. Nobody seemed to know what was going on, but everybody knew it was bad.

  Later, Norwood had found her outside city hall, where she had gravitated hoping to find Sam. Never had she seen Norwood so angry and frightened.

  “Can you get us a carriage?” he’d asked, hooding his face under the lowered brim of his hat. His tone had lost all confidence, all professional composure. He was just a black man asking a white woman to protect him. It made him ashamed.

  She had not hesitated. She retrieved the buggy Cousin Hugh had made available to them. Norwood directed her down streets she had never traveled before, stopping only once to let a gray-coated shadow leap up onto the seat beside her—Ivanhoe Grant.

  “What are we doing in the cemetery?” she asked now. She was already spooked enough without lurking around graveyards. She thought she caught a glimpse of a human shape, moving, out of the corner of her eye.

  “I must minister to my flock,” Grant said without smiling.

  “What, here?”

  The buggy moved softly in the drizzle along the narrow, rutted lanes, between hummocks planted with marble and granite monuments bearing the names of the finest families in Wilmington—invisible in the dark and rain. Grant lit a kerosene lantern and trimmed it low. They ducked under low-hanging dogwood branches, bare and heavily wet. Live oaks were splayed against
the black sky, their twisted limbs casting grotesque shadows in the fickle play of light. Spanish moss draped the branches in gray shrouds.

  “Dark as sin in this place,” Norwood observed.

  Grant signaled Norwood to stop the buggy. All at once, silent black shapes materialized out of the drizzle, human shapes gliding slowly toward them, as if the graves had opened and the dead were once again walking.

  “Dear God.”

  “It’s all right, schoolteacher,” Grant said. He reached out and shook hands with one of the shadows, then another.

  Now, Gray Ellen could hear murmuring, the fussing of infants, coughing, low voices singing. She recognized two of her students, the little sisters with the tightly braided hair, hanging onto a young woman in a green blanket coat.

  “They’ve been coming out here all day,” Norwood explained.

  “Why here?”

  Grant said, “These are the only white folks can’t do ’em no harm.”

  “Are they all right?”

  “All right as they’re going to get,” Grant said.

  Norwood clucked the horse onward, and they rode slowly along the winding lanes. On either side of them under the trees, families huddled, tucked into the shadows, reclining against the berms, sheltering themselves as best they could from the drizzle and the fitful night wind. Saffron King James knelt over a wounded man, bandaging his leg and speaking softly.

  “Why did you bring me here?” Gray Ellen asked after a while.

  “Goddamnit, woman!” Grant said. “Does it always have to be about you?”

  Norwood said, “I had to get out of town. I’m on some kind of a list.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Norwood.”

  “Running scared—no way for a man to do.” Norwood’s tone was soft, but it carried force.

  “I didn’t realize—”

  “People had better start realizing. A shame has visited this city.”

  “Amen,” said Grant, and all around them in the darkness, voices answered softly, “Amen.”

  They drove deep into the maze of burial plots until they came to the woods at the northern edge. “Looks like my stop,” Norwood said. The horse stood with her head down. Norwood hopped out. He had no extra clothes, no blankets, just an overcoat.

  “You’ll catch your death out here,” Gray Ellen whispered.

  “Take care of yourself, hear?”

  “Don’t fret about me. It’s you that—”

  “Well, get gone from here. Don’t tell a soul where you’ve been.” As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Norwood climbed a berm and disappeared into the tangled woods.

  Grant took the reins. As they started up, he said, “He’ll be all right—man’s got a powerful anger to warm his heart tonight.”

  The way he said it, she knew he was the one with the most powerful anger of all, the kind that burned a man up. Anger was not enough, she thought, but she didn’t say it. She was in no mood to argue, not here.

  The buggy wound through the tree-tunneled lanes. Grant said softly, “And now I am going to take you somewhere.”

  He drove down a twisting, rutted track hemmed in on both sides by thick foliage, trees growing so close together a grown man could not slip between them. After a time, he whispered, “Put out that lantern,” and she obeyed. It was raining harder—she could hear it pattering against the leaves, but the canopy was so overgrown that the rain reached them as a slow drip, then misted up into their bones from the wet forest floor.

  The smell changed—an overwhelming odor of ferment and rot. The wheels of the buggy sank into the muddy road, and the horse had difficulty keeping her feet. The buggy slowed. Despite her coat, Gray Ellen was soaked through and shivering. Her face was coated with an oily, cold film—the rain, and whatever was in the air. The road turned into paste. The buggy wheels hissed along. The mare slopped one foot after the other, picking her way cautiously around ruts and holes. In the thick darkness, Gray Ellen could not see the horse anymore, but she could hear her plainly.

  They were descending toward water, she could feel it. The air grew heavier. Over the steady patter of the rain, she heard bullfrogs and a shrieking night bird. An owl moaned in the trees. A rodent squealed.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Let me light the lantern again.”

  “Shh,” he said. Then, “Whoa, now. Whoa.” The buggy stopped.

  “Where are we?”

  He didn’t say anything. It was as if he wanted to spook her. He knew the value of a pause.

  “Tell me where we are.”

  “You always have to be talking?” His voice was so mean it frightened her.

  “Take me back. Now.”

  He sighed theatrically. “Teacher, you are going to have to learn patience. And faith.”

  “I have plenty of faith.”

  “Shoot. You don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “Take me back.”

  He reached over in the dark and grabbed her shoulders. “Shush. Now listen.”

  Too scared to do anything else, she listened hard. She heard the rain and the frogs. Then over the rain came another sound: voices. Human voices. Singing. She cocked her head to hear better. The incessant rain made it hard. The racket of frogs and insects disoriented her—she could not locate the direction of the singing. But after a time, she could make out some of the words. “When the battle’s over,” a woman’s voice sang, while deeper voices hummed along behind it, “we can wear a crown—in the new Je-ru-sa-lem.”

  “Over yonder, less than a mile,” Grant said softly. “Smith’s Creek Bridge.”

  He clasped his bare fingers gently around the back of her neck and swiveled her head. Twinkling like a low star, a faint light shone in the distance.

  “A lantern?” she said.

  “White soldiers up there. Sentries. They’ve sealed off the city.”

  “Then we’d better warn—”

  “Shush, now. They won’t come out here. Those white boys know better than to try and rout us out of the swamp.”

  She nodded in the dark. They must be huddled out there by the hundreds.

  Grant said, “Runaways been hiding out in these swamps for a hundred and fifty years. It’s a hole in the map.” Alex Manly’s father, mother, and two brothers were out there somewhere, he knew.

  “Then they’re safe? But it’s so cold.” She didn’t think she could survive the night in the open.

  He sighed. “Safe is an approximate thing, teacher. Nobody’s going to shoot them out here. Nobody’s going to get close enough.”

  She shivered in the rain. The mare snorted but stood patiently, waiting for the driver to take up slack on the reins. Gray Ellen said, “It’s no night to be sleeping outdoors. My God.”

  “They dare not light fires,” Grant said, his voice suddenly breaking.

  She wished there were light enough to see his face. He had not hesitated to urge on the violence—was he now feeling remorse? Did he have any right? He had invented himself—a man who was not a man but a living cause, a flame burning toward a single purpose hallowed by a dead grandfather and two centuries of racial memory. But in this moment, in the dark, she glimpsed the man who lived inside the invention. He was close to breaking.

  His voice recovered its matter-of-fact tone. “Some will catch pneumonia. Some will die. The old and infirm, the babies.”

  “The children,” she said, suddenly realizing. The willowy, squirming bodies who lived behind the wooden desks in her classroom were tonight sleeping in the swamp, without even a fire.

  Grant abruptly handed over the reins and started to climb out. She could only hear him. “What are you doing?” she said.

  “It’s all over now. They’ll be hunting me down, too, by and by. Can’t go back.”

  She thought quickly. She couldn’t help all those invisible people out there in the darkness, but she could at least help this man. “Come back with me. Stay at the house until morning. Wait till things calm down.”

  “I oug
ht to stay here. I belong with them.”

  “You can’t do anything for them.”

  “Maybe not. But I am a preacher of the Lord—”

  “Stop it. I’m giving you a chance—take it.”

  Without answering, Grant settled back into the seat and took the reins. He backed the mare and skillfully turned the buggy around. They headed back to town. Now that she knew the voices were out there, she heard the singing all the way back to the main road, long after it was too far away to hear. The eeriness of it thrilled her stomach—it was like riding among ghosts. She wept all the way home.

  The Reverend J. Allen Kirk huddled under the Hilton Bridge in the railroad culvert. He heard the single horse and buggy clomp across the bridge—too slow to be vigilantes. He almost ventured a look, but at the last minute ducked back into the shadows. When the rain let up, he would follow the culvert farther out of town.

  He ought to be braver, he knew. He wanted to stand at the head of his congregation in defiance of the white vigilantes. Once, he could have been a rock, a leader, a martyr—but then, in one sermon, Ivanhoe Grant had stolen his congregation away from him. Let Grant be their martyr.

  The buggy was gone, and the rain came down harder than ever. A slow train rumbled past him. Through the windows in the lighted cars sat white men, their rifles poking up between the seats.

  He prayed for courage. He bolted from under the shelter of the bridge and dodged from shadow to shadow along the deep culvert, running away.

  By nightfall, companies of State Guards from the outlying towns of Clinton and Maxton and a detachment of Naval Reserves from Kinston arrived in town. The Kinston troops relieved the men of the Light Infantry at the jail. Half the Clinton men were assigned to patrol the perimeter of Brooklyn, and half were detailed to guard the hospital after a rumored attempt to finish off Bill Mayo. The Maxton men were billeted in reserve at the armory and in private homes nearby.

  Colonel Walker Taylor now commanded some five hundred men in uniform. Mike Dowling still led eighty Red Shirts. Another fifty Rough Riders prowled the streets. Colonel Roger Moore could count on three hundred vigilantes, many of whom were now deputized. Police Chief Parmele fielded about half his force of twenty-five patrolmen, three sergeants, and a captain. The rest had fled the city under threat.