by John Jakes
I share sadness of another kind with Jane. She told me that despite long effort she cannot conceive a child. Prudence, the Shermans, Orry’s dying as he did, senselessly—they are all linked somehow. Is it because they all testify that we are never guaranteed a happy life, only life itself? …
Encountered a man, young and poorly clothed, riding a white horse on the river road. He gave no greeting, though he stared as if he knew me. Despite his youth there was a cruel aspect to his face. He is no good-hearted Northerner come to inspect our school, I think. …
… Andy saw him this morning.
And again I met him. I hailed him. He charged his white horse at me as if to trample me down, forcing me to throw myself aside and take a bad tumble in the weeds. For one moment his face flashed by above me, a perfect study of hatred. …
… No sign of him for two days. I suspect and hope he has gone elsewhere, to terrorize others…
The small Negro cemetery overlooked the Ashley in the scrubs outside Charleston. The ground around the grave mounds was a musty carpet of brown decaying leaves. Bunches of wilted sunflowers and even a few brown dandelions lay on the graves; the place was poor, and poorly kept.
Des LaMotte knelt and prayed before a wooden marker from which he’d chiseled a shallow circular depression. Into this he had wedged a common-looking plate, chipped at many places on the edge and showing a long crack. On the marker, above the slave’s plate, he had carved an inscription.
JUBA
“thou hast been faithful
over a few things,
I will make thee ruler over many things”
Matt. 25,21
Where the trees opened on the water, a silver-colored sky shone with a strangely threatening luminescence. The wind, a rising nor’easter, streamed in from the Atlantic. It was too cold for spring. Or maybe Des was feeling the effects of time, and poverty, and his strange inability to come to grips with his enemy. After the travail of war and the passage of years, he no longer wanted vengeance so ferociously. Honor was less important than bread, or keeping possession of his tiny room in town, or preserving clothes he couldn’t afford to replace. “LaMotte honor” now had the queer sound of a foreign phrase impossible to translate.
His old ties to the past were gone. Ferris Brixham, dead. Sallie Sue, dead. Mrs. Asia LaMotte, dead; a year and a half now, her insides a feast for a cancer. Now Juba; the last. He had been so crippled at the end, he couldn’t crawl from his pallet. Des had fed him and bathed him and cleaned him as if he were some expensive artifact, the last artifact, from a razed house. Juba had died in his sleep, and Des had stared at the corpse by the light of a candle for nearly an hour. His servant’s passing reminded him that the human body was frail enough without deliberately endangering it. The hotblood who’d confronted Cooper Main on the plank bridge seemed like a foolish and very distant relative who didn’t understand life’s realities and whose ideas no longer had any pertinence. Des was old; he was sick; he had fought long enough.
He got ready to stand up. It required mental preparation because he knew his knees would creak and hurt. Strange that the same arthritic trouble that had tormented Juba had now fallen on him, and at a much younger age. He could no longer do a formal dance step gracefully. That was another part of his life that was over. His face, drawn down into sad lines, reflected the attrition of the years, and so did his carroty hair; the white streak was broader, and forked into a trident.
As he started to stand, he heard a horse walking into the cemetery. A hoof snapped a fallen branch. He groaned as he rose and turned, expecting to see some black sharecropper riding his sway-backed animal to a family grave. He was startled to discover a white man. Behind the man the clouds boiled like black soup in a hot kettle.
The stranger was young, scarcely more than twenty. He wore plow shoes and an old black coat with the collar turned up. He had shaved closely, but his black beard showed. The sun had burned his nose and upper cheeks and hands; they looked raw. When the young man climbed down from his milky horse Des saw the back of his neck. Red, from field work.
While the young man walked toward Des, other details registered. Something was wrong with the stranger’s left eye; it had the fixed look of blindness. The horse made Des think of Revelations: And his name that sat on him was Death.
“You are Desmond LaMotte?”
“I am, sir.”
“I was told I’d find you here.”
Des waited. There was a suppressed ferocity about the stranger. Somehow it fit with the rawness of his red face, red hands, red neck, ghastly staring eye; it frightened Des badly.
He saw no sign of a weapon, but his long legs shook when the stranger began reaching into various pockets of his threadbare coat, saying, “I am Benjamin Ryan Tillman of York County, sir. I have ridden here with instructions to speak to you.”
“York County.” That was a long way; above Columbia, at the North Carolina border. “I don’t know anyone in York County.”
“Oh, yes,” Tillman said, presenting what he’d found in his pocket. A news clipping already yellowed. The headline startled Des.
THE KUKLUX
DISCOVERY OF THE REMAINS
OF DETECTIVE BARMORE
Des’s fear sharpened. The nor’easter snapped the corner of the clipping, which came from some paper in Nashville. “I don’t understand this, sir—” he began.
“I’m here to explain it to you. The story says the man’s body was found in some woods, along with an empty pocketbook and part of his K.K.K. rig.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I am here to explain that, too. This white man, Barmore, he failed to carry out an order from the Grand Dragon over there in Tennessee.” Tillman plucked the clipping from Des’s pale hand. “The Grand Dragon of Carolina wanted to show you that the Invisible Empire won’t be disobeyed.”
Des felt a keen, hurting urge to make water. The stranger’s good eye had a fanatic glitter. The wind, near gale force now, shot leaves past them in swirling clouds. Old tree limbs creaked. One broke off and sailed away.
“I’ve not disobeyed a single order,” Des protested.
“And you won’t disobey the one I’m here to give you, either. Your klavern hasn’t controlled this district like it should. Everybody in the state knows about that woman at Mont Royal, coining money left and right with her mill and her phosphates while she runs that nigger school.”
Des’s gut hurt. “We tried to burn the school—”
“Tried,” Tillman said, the initial T sending little sprays of spit into Des’s face. “Tried is no good. You botched it. Now the damn Yankee politicians and Bible-thumpers are coming down to see it and praise it, and you do nothing. It’s a stench in the nostrils of God-fearing white men. You’re to get rid of it, LaMotte. You’re to get rid of it or you’ll go the same way Barmore went in Tennessee.”
“Do you know who you’re talking to?” Des shouted. “I fought the whole war in the Palmetto Rifles. An elite regiment. What did you do? Stay home with the rest of the redneck farmer boys?”
“You shit-face Charleston snob!” He was spitting again; there was something primitive and utterly dangerous about him. “I lay sick two years, trying to get well enough to join up. I lost the sight of this eye and I lost two brothers to war wounds and another to the camp fever. I’m foursquare for the South and the white race, and I’ve killed to prove it. I ride for the Klan in York County, and I’m to give you just one warning. The Grand Dragon of Carolina wants some blood down here. Nigger blood. That Main woman. Get your den together, get rid of her school, then get rid of her.” Scornful of Des’s fright, he held up the clipping. The wind tore the edges. “Understand?”
“I—I do.”
“That goes for the rest of your klavern, too.”
“Believe me, Tillman, I want what you want. What the Klan wants. But we had opposition last time and we’ll have more now. There’s nigger militia at Mont Royal—”
“Nobody
gives an ounce of rat pee if all th? archangels from glory are on guard with their harps and halos,” Tillman said. “Either she’s gone in thirty days or you’re gone. I will return with pleasure to execute the sentence.”
He stared at Des until Des looked away. Then, with a snicker, he tucked the clipping into the side pocket of Des’s coat. He strode against the wind to his milky horse and mounted nimbly. “Good day, sir,” he said, and rode out of the burying ground, his black coat the same color as the sky ahead of him.
Des leaned against a tree, weak. He read the Barmore story, then read it again. He didn’t doubt the authenticity of the visitor’s credentials, or the seriousness of the warning. The stranger, Benjamin Ryan Tillman of York County, was one of the most daunting human beings he’d ever met. He made Des think of Romans who slew Christians, and of the Inquisitors of Spain. Carolina would hear from the young redneck if the darkies didn’t rise up and kill him to save themselves first.
In the howling wind he rode Juba’s mule back to Charleston.
At dusk he set out for the Dixie Store at Summerton. Arriving there, he instructed Gettys to buy explosives. Gettys stuttered that it was too dangerous. Des told him to ride to Savannah, or upriver to Augusta if necessary. He told him it was the Klan’s order. He told him the Klan’s sentence if they failed. After that Gettys didn’t argue.
59
THOUGH WHISTLING SNAKE WAS at least seventy winters, he walked with the vigor of a young man. His neck and forearms had a taut, sinewy look. His pure white hair was simply parted and braided without adornment. He wore a hide smock that long use had buffed to the color of dull gold. A plain rawhide belt gathered the smock at his waist. In his right hand, chest high, he held a fan of matched golden eagle feathers two feet wide from tip to tip.
Charles couldn’t remember seeing another old man with such an aura of strength. Or human eyes quite so arrogant and unpleasant. The right iris was only partly visible, hidden by a lip of puckered flesh. Scar’s face was smooth by comparison with that of Whistling Snake’s, which looked as though his flesh had melted from temple to jaw, then been pushed and twisted into ridges as it hardened. Indentations like large healed nail wounds stippled the ridges of flesh. The man was hideous, which only made him seem stronger.
“They say they search for his son,” Red Bear told the priest, with a nod at Charles.
Whistling Snake regarded them, fanning himself with a small rotation of his bony wrist. A toddler, a plump bare girl, started toward him, reaching out. Her mother snatched her back and clutched her, dread in her eyes.
The priest shook the fan at Magee. “Buffalo soldier. Kill them.”
“Damn you,” Charles said, “there are other black men on the Plains besides buffalo soldiers. This is my friend. He is peaceful. So am I. We are looking for my little boy. He was stolen by another white man. A tall man. He may be wearing a woman’s bauble, here.”
He pulled his earlobe. An elderly Cheyenne covered his mouth and popped his eyes. Charles heard the excited buzz of the women before Red Bear’s glare silenced them. Charles’s stomach tightened. They’d seen Bent.
The priest fanned himself. “Kill them.” The brown iris shifted in its trench of hard scar tissue. “First that one, the betrayer of the People.”
Gray Owl’s pony began to prance, as if some invisible power flowed from the priest to unnerve and befuddle his enemies. The pony neighed. Gray Owl kneed him hard to control him. His face showed uncharacteristic emotion. Fear.
Magee spoke from the side of his mouth, in English. “What’s that old bastard saying?”
“He told them to kill us.”
Magee swallowed, visibly affected. “They better not. I want to get out of here with my wool on my head. I want to see Pretty Eyes again.” The squaw, Charles assumed. “I’m not going to cash in here. I been trounced by nigger-hating saloon trash—”
The priest pointed his fan, exclaiming in Cheyenne, “Stop his tongue.”
“I been cussed by white soldiers not fit to shine a real man’s boots. I won’t let some old fan-waving Indian just wave me off this earth, whisssh!” There was a strange, fear-born anger prodding Magee. He shook his derby the way Whistling Snake had shaken his fan. “You tell him he doesn’t touch a wizard.”
“A—?” Startled, Charles couldn’t get the rest out.
“The biggest, the meanest of all the black wizards of the planetary universe. Me!” Magee flung his hands in the air like a preacher; he was back in Chicago, encircled, with only his wits to forestall a beating.
Red Bear retreated from him. A fat grandfather protected his wife with his arm. Magee looked baleful sitting there on his horse, arms upraised, shouting. “I will level this village with wind, hail, and fire if they touch us or don’t tell us what we want to know.” A moment’s silence. Then he yelled at Charles like a topkick. “Tell ’em, Charlie!”
Charles translated. Where he faltered, as with the word for hail, Gray Owl supplied it. Whistling Snake’s fanning grew rapid. Red Bear watched the priest for a reaction; Whistling Snake was temporarily in control of things. “He is a great worker of magic?” Whistling Snake asked.
“The greatest I know,” Charles said, wondering if he was insane. Well, what was the alternative to this? Probably immediate annihilation.
“I am the greatest of the spell-workers,” the priest said. Charles translated. Magee, calmer now, sniffed.
“Cocky old dude.”
“No,” Charles said, pointing to Magee. “He is the greatest.”
For the first time, Whistling Snake smiled. He had but four teeth, widely spaced in his upper gum. They were fanglike, as if he’d filed them that way. “Bring them in,” he said to Red Bear. “Feed them. After the sun falls, we will test who is the greatest wizard. Then we will kill them.”
He studied Magee over the tips of the fan feathers. His laugh floated out, a dry chuckle. He turned and walked majestically into the village.
Magee looked numb. “My God, I never figured he’d take me up on it.”
“Can you show him anything?” Charles whispered.
“I brought a few things, always do. But it’s only small stuff. That old Indian, he’s got a power about him. Like the devil was singing in his ear.”
“He’s only a man,” Charles said.
Gray Owl shook his head. “He is more than that. He is connected to the mighty spirits.”
“Lord,” Magee said. “All I got is saloon tricks.”
The prairie sunshine had a precious glow then; this morning might be the last they’d be privileged to see.
The Cheyennes put the three of them in a stinking tipi with old men guarding the entrance. A woman brought bowls of cold stew too gamy to eat. Before dark, the villagers lit a huge fire and began their music of flute and hand drum.
An hour of chants and shuffling dances went by. Charles chewed on his only remaining cigar, nursing a superstitious certainty that they wouldn’t get out of this if he smoked it. Gray Owl sat in his blanket as if asleep. Magee opened his saddlebags, rummaged in them to take inventory, closed them, then did it all over again ten minutes later. The shadows of dancing, shuffling, stomping men passed over the side of the tipi like magic lantern projections. The drumming grew very loud. Charles reckoned two hours had passed when Magee jumped up and kicked his bags. “How long they going to string us out?”
Gray Owl raised his head. His eyes blinked open. “The priest wants you to feel that way. He can then show a different, calm face.”
Magee puffed his cheeks and blew like a fish, twice. Charles said, “I wish I hadn’t got us into—”
“I did it,” Magee said, almost snarling. “I got us here. I’ll get us out. Even if I am just a nigger saloon magician.”
A few minutes later, guards escorted them outside. A hush came over the ring of people around the fire. The men were seated. The women and children stood behind them.
The evening was windless. The flames pillared straight up, shooting sparks at the
stars. Whistling Snake sat beside Chief Red Bear. The latter had a bleary smile, as though he’d been drinking. Whistling Snake was composed, as Gray Owl had predicted. His fan lay in his lap.
A place was made for Charles to sit. Red Bear signed him to it. Gray Owl was roughly hauled back with the women, further punishment for his betrayal. The grandfather on Charles’s left drew a trade knife from his belt and tested the edge while looking straight into Charles’s eyes. Charles chewed the cold cigar.
Red Bear said, “Begin.”
Magee spread his saddlebags flat on the ground. Charles thought of the campfire circle as a dial. Magee was at twelve o’clock, Whistling Snake sat fanning himself at nine o’clock, and he was seated at three, with Gray Owl behind him at four or five.
Magee cleared his throat, blew on his hands, reached up for his derby, and tumbled it brim over crown all the way down his arm to his hand. An old grandfather laughed and clapped. Whistling Snake’s slitted eye darted to him. He stopped clapping.
His face already glistening with sweat, Magee pulled his blue silk from a saddlebag and stuffed it into his closed fist. He chanted, “Column left, column right, by the numbers, hocus-pocus.”
Red Bear showed a slight frown of curiosity. Whistling Snake regarded the distant constellations, fanning himself. Charles’s belly weighed twenty pounds. They were doomed.
Magee pulled a black silk from his fist and popped the fist open to show it empty. He waved the silk like a bullfighter’s cape, displaying both sides, and sat down. Whistling Snake deigned to glance at Charles. The four filed teeth showed, in supreme contempt.
Whistling Snake handed his fan ceremoniously to Red Bear. He rose. From his robe he produced a wide-mouth bag made of red flannel. He crushed the bag, turned it inside out, displayed both sides, balled it again. Then suddenly he began a singsong chant and started a hopping sidestep dance around the circle. As he danced and chanted, he held the top corners of the bag by the thumb and index finger of each hand.