His weary eyes caught the light of the torch. “Why you think I put you in my no-count church? Why you think I got the crippled girl, couldn’t get round? And here you go, making peoples think they care ’bout you.” He leaned forward, the torch coming within inches of her face. “You think you matter? No, child. I’m doing the Lord’s work. Can’t nobody stop the one doing the Lord’s work.”
She heard Jessie’s car pull off the main road and come careening down the hill, and she relaxed, knowing he would take care of Reverend Earl now. There would be time to repair the float. “It’s Jessie,” she said half to herself, half to him.
“Ain’t never gonna get it out now. Lord see to that.” He threw what remained of the torch up on the top of the float. The hand-painted sign on the counter—REGISTER TO VOTE—began to catch. “Had to be done,” he said. “Had to be done.”
She could hear Jessie’s car door slam and his footsteps running toward them. Flames were shooting straight up in the air, casting the whole thing in black and white. The shadows beyond the church were impenetrable, but the light right where they stood was white-hot, so that all their faces were not colors, but flat, one-dimensional surfaces. “What happened?” she heard him shout as she rested the gun on the back stoop and started searching around for something to put out the flames.
“It was her,” she heard the preacher say. She almost laughed, knowing Jessie would find that ridiculous. She found an old piece of cloth and began slapping at the burning crepe paper.
“Her? What the hell you talking ’bout, her?”
“I done found her out here. Tried to use this here gun to scare me off, but I done took it away from her.”
Suddenly, there was no movement, only the crackling of the flames creeping through paper, their shadows dancing up and down the wall of the church, the reverend’s shadow cast stock-still in among them. Very slowly, she lowered the cloth and turned her head to see Jessie standing between them, Reverend Earl holding the gun. Jessie stood motionless. “Had a little to drink, has you, Brother Earl?”
“You Brother Earlin’ me now, are you?” Reverend Earl chuckled as he cradled the gun in his arms. “Wasn’t Brother Earlin’ me when I was asking for more money to fix the roof, was you?” He seemed to close one eye, as if he was starting one of his sermons. “Wasn’t Brother Earlin’ me when I say we gonna have to help sister Luella ’cause she down in the back, or when I say where we gonna get the money for the Willard twins ’cause they orphans now. Everybody saying, ‘Can’t help out Old Brother Earl. Got to do for me and mine.’ Done forgot the Bible say, ‘Love thy neighbor.’” He held the gun in his arms, running one hand along the barrel. “White folks up there in the mountains gonna send you down here to get peoples registered, and I ain’t even got enough food to feed my own.”
Jessie glanced at her. He didn’t say the word, but she knew what he meant, and she shook her head that, yes, it was loaded.
“Now Brother Earl, you don’t wanna go messing round with that old double-barrel. My daddy had it. Safety done broke long time ago.”
“Ain’t messing with nothing,” he said. “Just standing here watching a fire, watching the Lord’s fire.”
Flames began to creep up on to the voting counter and into the fake window they had made, and she was standing there doing nothing. She felt she couldn’t catch her breath. She felt she might faint. Jessie shouted for her to get back in the church.
“Leave her be. She the one made me do it. She the one cause it. Tried being polite about it, leaving that broke-down engine, letting the air out of them tires. Trouble with y’all is you ain’t got sense enough to know what somebody trying to tell you.”
“Got sense enough to see you ain’t nothing but a drunk old man.” Jessie began walking toward him.
“Stay on back. Go on and stay back.”
“You ain’t gonna use that on me. Give it here.”
Even as drunk as he was, Reverend Earl had no intention of using the gun. He had known Jessie since he was a young man, had baptized him down at Twelve Mile Creek. Jessie was part of the flock he had somehow guided through all the storms that had rained down on them over the years. He had made do, one way or the other, balancing everything—the white and the black, the good times and more bad times. He had tried to give them all what they wanted, but now he was old and tired and the way had become too treacherous and the new rules too confusing. And so, on this night, in the light of the moon that rose out of the north Alabama pines, the Reverend Earl Watts, never meaning to, held them all—for one moment—suspended between the tail end of an era and what was the inevitable rush to a new day. And then he turned the double-barrel to one side, but forgot to take his finger off the triggers. Both barrels exploded, spraying out beyond Jessie into the heart of the burning Labor Day float and into the center of the fumes left in the gasoline can Roy Boy had thrown back under the truck a few nights before. The fumes, the full gas can next to it, and the half-empty tank of the old truck blew almost simultaneously.
A ball of fire rose seeming to circle up and up right above them, until it disappeared into a black column of smoke. The explosion had thrown Jessie up against the church wall and Reverend Earl to the ground. Pieces of wood splintered and shot out in all directions. The frame of the old flatbed cracked and fell in on itself. Swirling black smoke rose off the burning tires. A large piece of make-believe voting counter landed on the roof of the church and the surrounding shingles began catching.
Jessie couldn’t hear anything at first. The sound of the explosion had been so loud, it had knocked out his hearing for the few moments he lay there. He rolled over to his knees, all the while calling to her.
Reverend Earl was lying on the ground, moaning and rolling back and forth, trying to put out the flames on his coat and pants.
She had thought she was going to save the float in the seconds before the explosion. She had imagined that if she could get the lower part out, then she could crawl up on the flatbed and somehow save the rest of it. She was just moments, just seconds away from doing that—so close to saving it. It brought to mind the time when she was a child fishing on the river and she had come too near one of the big river barges and it had almost run her down. She and the white girl, Tab, had come within inches of getting hit and being drowned by the barge, but they had made it. They had made it with just seconds to spare.
She lay on the ground now, unaware of how she had gotten there and why she was thinking about that, about how whole lives might go one way or the other in fickle moments. She seemed to be rising up, looking back at herself. Her clothes were smoldering—the pieces that hadn’t been blown off in the explosion. She watched as she tried to lift her arm, but it was limp beside her, and she thought how strange it was that she wasn’t in any pain. It was likely that her leg brace was red-hot and burning her leg, but she couldn’t feel it. She saw Jessie running toward her. She couldn’t hear him, but she could see him. It was like watching a silent movie. In the firelight, she saw the look on his face when he rushed up to her and she saw the tears running down out of those beautiful brown eyes, and she thought she asked him, hoped she asked him—because she had been wondering about it ever since Reverend Earl said it: Did he think the voting school mattered? Did he, Jessie, think the voting school had much mattered to them, to him? She could see that her eyes were closed now, but she thought she saw his lips moving and saying, as he gathered her up in his arms, that, yes, yes it mattered; more than anything in the world, it had mattered to him.
Now all that was left were the crackling flames consuming every part of the Word of Truth—charred pieces of planking dangling, then falling on smoldering pews; a discordant note as rafters fell in on Miss Laura’s piano; the glass from the side windows cracking and shattering—and, somewhere back in the woods, a screech owl.
Smoke rose, disappearing in the darkness, and out near the swing, he held her, the random and inevitable fallout of cataclysmic change.
He was still holding her
when Miss Laura came rushing to them, called from her house by the explosion. He watched through flickering firelight as other members of the congregation arrived. He backed them all off with his stare. He held her as a pickup came down the hill and men carried Reverend Earl, unconscious now, to the truck for the trip to the hospital. It was only after Mr. Calvin came that he let them take her. Only after repeated assurances from Calvin did he carry her to the hearse that had come out from town. He watched as it climbed the drive. Then he took a seat in her swing.
By first light, most of the congregation was there, milling around, walking up the three steps that had been the back entrance to the church, staring at what was now a dark piece of smoldering ground, pointing out the remnants of a pew, a charred piece of the pine cross. Then they would turn and walk back down the steps, slowly circling the ruins and standing on what had been the front steps. Some came over to the swing, patting him on the shoulder, murmuring things he didn’t hear. Others helped Miss Laura cut away what remained of his shirt, cleaning his cuts and burns and wrapping his swollen wrist. One of the men brought him a glass of whiskey that he held warming in his cupped hands. Lou Ann and Izzy were there, had taken up a vigil on either side of the swing. They stood holding the whiskey bottle and a white handkerchief, the one and the other, at the ready.
Eventually, he found himself sitting there again, on the swing, at the funeral. They were burying her in the cemetery beside the church—where the church used to be. They had tried to call her mother and brothers but couldn’t wait on them to come up, and Jessie was afraid if they did come, they might want to take her back with them, and so he insisted they go on with the funeral. Her old family would arrive later. They were her family now.
Aunt Laura sat beside him in the swing—JD in between them. The others, all the congregation, formed an arc on either side of the swing, making sure his view of the grave was clear.
Mr. Calvin did the preaching. Preaching, he said, was not much in his line, but he wanted to do it for her, wanted to say something she had read to them, something a black man wrote, because, he said, he would never have known a black man wrote something so beautiful if it hadn’t been for her, and then he repeated what he had memorized from the famous poem by a famous black man. “‘Weep not, weep not,’” he said, “‘She is not dead; she’s resting in the bosom of Jesus.’”
It was hot and still out under the pines. Flies were brushed aside by paper fans; grasshoppers danced in the weeds that had grown up beside the graves. An occasional car passed by on the road above. A white car stopped to stare, but mostly, mostly, everybody black from around Crossroads had come to pay their respects. “Steal Away” was the closing hymn, sung a cappella, the voices, without the constraints of ceiling and walls, drifting out into the air, up past the tallest pines, perhaps even farther.
Everyone had brought food for afterward. They set it out on card tables and car hoods. Jessie remembered looking around and noticing that it was a beautiful day.
The cotton girls had tried to tempt him with barbecue and ham. Later, they had brought a dessert plate mounded with pie and cakes. It all sat on the ground beside the swing, gathering ants.
Hours passed. There was quiet laughter out under the shade trees. Children chased around through the cars and people. The sun was almost to the tops of the pines when Roy Boy came to sit down beside him, the swing creaking under his weight. Jessie winced at the movement. For the first time since the fire, the pain was beginning to break through to him. His body was aching all over, the soreness from being thrown across the yard, the cuts and bruises from flying debris. “My fault for leaving her. Shoulda stayed right here the whole time. Knowed it from the beginning.”
Roy Boy took a waiting glass of tea from Izzy and started to give it to Jessie, but then, lost in contemplating what Jessie had just said, he took a drink himself. “If you wanna look at it that way, I ’spect you could. You done caused it.” He downed the rest of the tea. “Now the way I see it—wasn’t you,” and he pointed a finger skyward. They sat quietly, letting precious minutes distance them from it, each passing moment building a barrier, paper-thin now, but the beginnings of a march toward perspective.
Dusk was settling in out across the fields and most of the people had gone when Roy Boy said it. “You know what they waiting on, don’t you?” And Jessie turned to look at him, not sure what he was talking about. “You know, don’t you?” he said again, and Jessie shook his head.
“Waiting for you to tell ’em what do to. Waiting for you to tell what we gonna do, now she’s gone.”
He looked up at the cotton girls on either side of the swing. They were staring straight ahead, pretending they hadn’t heard. Mr. Calvin was leaning up against a car fender, talking to some of the foundry men but intermittently glancing at him—waiting. Miss Laura had packed up all her empty food containers and had taken a seat on one of the folding chairs somebody had brought. Seated on either side were Viola and Dottie Sue, along with some other ladies of the congregation—all talking quietly, glancing over to Jessie now and again. Small groups of men were hunkered down on their haunches, smoking and watching the ground.
“It’s over, Roy Boy. Nothing to do now. It’s over.”
Roy Boy was staring at what was left of the burned-out truck—wheel rims and a frame. “Ain’t got but one gear. Wasn’t born with no ability to put it in reverse,” he said. “I’m one knows ’bout that.” He got up and wandered over to inspect one of the blackened wheel rims.
It was almost dark when Jessie lifted himself up off the swing to face them. It didn’t matter, he said, that they only had a few days left. It didn’t matter that they would have to start from scratch. They would rebuild it in time for the parade.
CHAPTER 44
Home
IT NEVER CAME—the sense of relief Tab hoped she would feel with their homecoming. In the back of her mind she had thought there would be some great reckoning, a scene in which she would break down and confess the whole thing. They had not gone to Chattanooga. They had almost been killed on the way home. Told in this setting, back home where she belonged, where she felt safe, she could make full sense of it. She had, in a way, looked forward to it. It never came to pass.
What she and Tina had forgotten—probably not Aunt Eugenia—was that while they had been gone, their parents and the rest of the family had been getting on with their lives. Their world had not stopped just because Tab and Tina had gotten off it for a while.
That night on the porch, after they were welcomed home a few days earlier than expected, the conversation had quickly turned back to what they were talking about before being interrupted. Their mother cleared her throat to break the news as the others on the porch turned to her. There had been an accident, she said. Their father was fine, but he had been hurt and Mr. Rosenstein had been killed. It was an airplane crash. The man running for governor, the one their father had written them about, had been killed, as well. “But your father is fine. Your father is fine.” She kept repeating it until she saw the worry easing in their faces. He was out of the hospital and at home. She had just dropped by to give everybody a report. She would take them home soon and they could see for themselves. He was sleeping.
In all of the tumult, no one bothered to ask anymore about their trip. What Tab and Tina had done was so far out of the realm of anything the porch people could imagine that they had done just that—not imagined it, not thought anything but that the girls had had a wonderful time playing in Chattanooga while they themselves were still here in the real world, coping with tragedy.
There were a few polite inquiries as the girls were eating their ice cream. “And I’ll bet you had a grand time with Miss Bebe,” Tab’s grandmother said.
“I’ll bet she fed you some wonderful meals,” Aunt Helen said.
Soon they had turned back to the important news of the day—the crash—hardly interested at all in the sweet pleasures of children.
After finishing their ice cream, Tab
and Tina sat down in the shadows on the top steps of the porch, listening to the news. They must have looked the same to everyone, sitting there in their same places on that same porch. After Tab realized her father was safe, the whole thing—what had happened to them at Highlander, the trip home—gave itself over to a sense of melancholy, and there was no one to share it with but her sister.
The fact that the candidate had died in the crash was all the papers talked about. The additional fact that the pilot had been a married man and had four children and that Reuben had died in the crash was always mentioned, but only way after the candidate and what the political implications of his death held for the rest of the field. It was an incidental fact that Charles survived, having suffered a gash on his head, a sprained wrist, and a broken leg—something even he had not realized until he was found by the rescue team and asked if he could walk, and then ended up being carried down the mountain on a stretcher.
It was never pointed out in the newspapers, but the air-safety investigators had wondered out loud to Charles why Reuben had ended up with massive internal injuries and he, Charles, had come out of it relatively unscathed, especially considering that the main impact had been to the front of the plane. The back cabin had hardly been touched. The vagaries of airplane crashes, the air-safety investigators had concluded.
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