This time, it’s Daniel who, under the Ol’ Seminole’s patient direction, digs the hole in the sand beneath his fish, and guts and cuts the meat off its carcass. Later, refilling the hole, he offers the Indian the catfish head for stew. But Sampson refuses, saying, “First head, all yours.”
It’s getting on dusk when the two of them return to Sampson’s clearing, Daniel carrying the monstrous fish head by the piece of wire strung through its lip, Sampson carting the leather pouches filled with water and fillets.
The boy insists that the old man keep one of the pouches. Sampson accepts, on condition that he walk the boy home.
There’s a hiss and a crackle as Sampson lights a gas lantern with a stick from his still-smoldering fire. Daniel watches him carry the lantern to the third chee-kee, the one where he works, and rummage around for what looks like a small, woven bowl.
“What’s that for?” he asks.
“See soon, heh?” Sampson tells him. The old Indian crosses the clearing to the tree where the bee basket hangs quietly on guard. Only when he holds the bowl in front of the basket does Daniel realize it’s not a bowl atall, but the basket’s lid. With quick but gentle hands, Sampson seals the basket, and removes it from its perch, the web of fish bones tinkling below.
“Why’d you do that?” Daniel wants to know.
“Make you a present of it,” the old man says, then, holding the now-buzzing basket in one hand, the lantern in the other, nods, “Go now, heh?”
Daniel scoops up the catfish head and the dripping leather pouch. Together, they retrace his steps through the woods and the field to the cabins in the clearing.
43
K. A. DeLuth parks his freshly washed and waxed Sheriff’s car in front of his Main Street office downtown. Do folks good to see their reelected Sheriff workin’ hard on a Saturday afternoon, he thinks, chuckling, as he grabs file folders and the fat paper sack from Big Nick out of the backseat.
Unlocking and relocking the door, flipping on the light, he notes that his new deputy has swept the floor, polished the wooden reception counter, and stacked the mail neatly on his desk.
He’d hired Carl Paige on Clive Cunningham’s recommendation. Paige was Sarah Cunningham’s younger brother, a Korean War vet, and, like Clive said, “Carl ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he can shoot straight and knows how to take orders.” Though it had only been a few days, DeLuth was enjoying having Deputy Paige around. On top of everything else, he’s a tidy sonofabitch. Should’ve thought of this myself years ago.
Seated at his desk, DeLuth removes the gunmetal gray cash box from its spot, beneath the false bottom of his lower desk drawer.
Tossing the paper sack into the trash, he recounts the stacked bills of his Bolita share into the box, enters the amount and new total in the small journal, and replaces the box in his bottom drawer. Not as big a take as last weekend, Halloween night, but better than the week before. Next week should be better still, he thinks, grinning at the memory that, a few hours earlier, that Greek Nigger didn’t like my demand for a bigger piece of the pie, but he’s too smart to say no.
Turning to the top file folder, he reads again the letter from Paine Marsh, requesting “copies of any and all documents proving transfer of title of the following animals purchased by Howard T. Hightower from breeder B. T. Hallwelle of Houston, Texas.” The list contained references to practically his entire herd!
Damn the ol’ man! Toward the end, the Judge had promised DeLuth again and again that he’d sign the papers. Kyle had even gone so far as to secure the forms from Hallwelle in Texas, type them up himself, and present them, at the Judge’s bedside, at least half a dozen times. But, there’d always been something that got in the way—a coughing attack, the spitting up of blood, too tired, needed some sleep, and, finally, Lila, come home to bar him from the bedside.
Setting the unsigned stack of forms aside, DeLuth pulls out a blank sheet of paper and another document, an old writ signed by the Judge last year.
In the sharp sunlight pooling on his desk, DeLuth begins, slowly at first, then with increasing confidence, to practice the hacking verticals, the slashing crossbars of the Judge’s distinctive initials H.T.H., mastering later, the slicing horizontals, looping, like a snake, in between and after.
AROUND SIX, on his way out to drop the big envelope into Marsh’s mail slot, DeLuth phones Birdilee at the hospital to suggest a steak supper at the Cattlemen’s Club. She agrees “so long as you don’t mind my Pink Lady uniform. And it’s just us, right? I don’t have what it takes to make nice with the Cunninghams tonight.”
But, of course, Clive and Sarah were there—he’d known they would be—with the Matthewses, the MacGregors, and the Fraziers. And they’d all wound up, the county’s biggest beef men and their wives, at the banquet table in the back. Too bad Birdilee was so tuckered out. She was quiet all evening and, on the way home, closed her eyes claiming she was “too tired to talk.” But, not him! No way! He was all keyed up over the evening’s triumph—the first night, “the first time, Birdilee!” he’d actually “sat with the big boys and felt like I belonged! All those years—ten years, Birdilee!—of being the Judge’s chief boot-licker are behind us! Thanks to Ol’ Ben and Big Nick, we are in like Flynn!”
Around ten, having squired Birdilee home, he heads out again, in his truck, to meet the boys. He’d guaranteed Zeke Roberts that this whole mess with the Nigger Dares and their suit against the school board would go away. And he, by God, was a man of his word!
44
After supper Saturday night, Daniel sits on the porch in Pap’s rocker, cradling his father’s shotgun in his lap, staring up at the slice of melon moon. Wish he was here, the boy thinks. Or better yet, that there’d been a way for Pap and Uncle Will to take me with them.
It was all that lawyer man Mr. Marsh’s fault. He was the one give Pap the list of things—marriage certificates, death notices, wills, and the like—to collect from up home.
Up home. If they drove straight through, taking turns like they planned, Pap and Uncle Will are there by now. He can picture them, sitting on Uncle Dolph’s porch, with his cousins Jack and Frank. If word got ’round in time, there’d be others there, too. Maybe Uncle Dolph has busted out his banjo, Cousin Jack his box, and Aunt Angie her fiddle. They’re all up there now, picking to beat the band, something old and lively like “Cacklin’ Hen,” or sweet and sorrowful like “Wildwood Flower.”
Daniel swats a mosquito off his arm and rocks, hearing the strains of “Wildwood Flower” in his head, wishing he had a box to pick out the notes. He’d been promised one once, but that was before Mam and the move off the mountain and all. Before Floridy and the Sheriff at the school and all. Before Sampson taught him how to catch a catfish.
In the dark, Daniel smiles, remembering his catfish. Aunt Lu had done a fine job on his fish for supper. And he’d had fun scaring the girls with the head. Even now, drying and hardening on the porch post, that head was monstrous ugly and plumb beautiful at the same time.
Across the clearing, Aunt Lu appears in the doorway. “Daniel, sure you don’t want to come in with us?”
“Got a better view of things from here,” he calls back.
“All right, then, but don’t sit out all night. Them skeeters’ll eat you alive.”
“All right,” he calls and goes back to rocking.
Sometime later, not meaning to, he dozes off, hearing in his head the sound of up home singing “I Am Weary, Let Me Rest.”
THAT’S A QUARE NOISE, the boy thinks. Stirring stiff in his chair, Daniel doesn’t recognize it at first. But, swimming up into awake, he remembers. The tinkling sound of the bones strung off Sampson’s bee basket. He’d hung it off the live oak beside the house. Them bees are hard at it, he thinks. Wondering why sits him straight up now, clutching the cold, heavy metal of Pap’s shotgun.
The clearing and the wide field are deeply dark, except for the pale light from the slice of moon. Everything’s hushed, but for the b
ees buzzing angry and rattling the tangle of dry bones.
Way off in the distance, a pair of headlights turns off the hardtop onto their road. And another pair. And another after that. Five of ’em in all, the dust kicked up from the car in front smearing the headlamps of those behind.
Daniel’s up and running. “Aunt Lu!” he yells as he slams into the kitchen. “Git up! Git the girls somewheres safe, under the bed, back o’ the cupboard. Now!”
Once he sees his aunt, with Uncle Will’s rifle in her hand, he races back into the clearing between the two cabins and watches and waits.
The line of headlamps makes its way around the field and up the drive. When the light of the first car, or mebbe it’s a truck, hits the cabins, it stops. The two behind it pull up alongside, the other two stop behind. Three pairs of bright white eyes stare into the clearing where Daniel stands frozen, staring back.
He hears the sharp mechanical wrench of doors jerked open, slammed shut. He sees the shapes of men dressed like ghosts, the flash of gunmetal against their chests. “It’s the boy,” he hears one man call to another.
“Where’s your daddy, boy?” a hard voice yells from behind the lights. “Get ’im out here!” “And your uncle, too!”
Daniel’s shaking. He wonders desperately what to yell back. His mind skitters through his options. But before he can say a word, a single word, all hell breaks loose among the ghostly men behind the headlights.
The outermost guards saw it first. The waiting at roadside, the passing of jugs, the gas and gunning of angry engines. They turned and, imperceptibly to the intruders, sent the alarm. “Some come!”
The message was passed from guard to guard, from outer rim to inner wall, from watchful eyes to anxious hearts. “Some come!”
Those assigned to the Young One’s defense took flight immediately. Others followed from neighboring commands. Only a few, and the Old Ones, stayed behind to guard their communal treasure. Sensing the alarm (“The Young One and his sisters, are they safe?”), She Who Decides emerges from Her chambers.
The forward most flank attacks first; their enemy, though large, a thousand times outnumbered. In waves, the defenders assault their intruders, each strike a single soldier’s sacrifice. Word of the battle flies to and through the woods. He Who Provides rises, alert, to their report.
45
Sunday morning, as part of a new weekly series spotlighting local clergy, Ruth stands outside the arched double doors of the First Methodist Church, having a final cigarette before the service begins.
Among those milling around the base of the church steps, one man mentions his disappointment over the past week’s election. A woman chimes in her upset over the school board’s firing of Principal Ed Cantrell. “They say Ed resigned, but that’s a bunch of hogwash,” she declares, hardening red lips.
Plump, henna-haired Patsy Denby, Doc Denby’s wife, nods. “Seems to me Sheriff DeLuth’s on the warpath. Had the Klan out to those Indians, the Dares’ house last night,” she confides, eyes bright beneath pencil-thin brows.
“What?” Ruth gasps, nearly swallowing the stub of her half-smoked cigarette.
“Why, Patsy, how on earth could you know that?” Patsy’s sister, Sandra Moore, married to the local pharmacist, demands.
“Because,” Patsy says, “five of ’em came to our house afterward, rousted Charles outta bed for help with bee stings! Said they were attacked by a whole cloud of bees. Must have had forty, fifty stings apiece! One of ’em, Leroy Russell, bit so bad he couldn’t walk or talk!”
“But why in the world did they bother Charles?” MaryEllen Ranson scrunches her face at the veterinarian’s wife.
Patsy grins. “They were ranch hands mostly, from the Cunningham place. Told him he was the only doctor they knew!”
“But, Patsy,” Deacon Red Phillips interjects, “how’d Charles know they were Klanners? Where they’d been?”
“Well,”—Patsy eyes the circle that had now grown to a dozen or so—“they were still in their robes and all, covered with bees. Most of the bites were on their hands and faces. And Charles made them tell where it happened.”
“Was anybody home? Did they say what they did?” Ruth asks it urgently, knowing full well that Franklin Dare and his brother are away collecting documents for their suit against the school board.
“Said they saw the boy, but then those bees came and they had to get outta there,” Patsy tells her.
George Meyers, owner of the local lumberyard and Will Dare’s employer, scowls mightily. “But both the Dare men are in North Carolina till late Monday.”
“So that poor woman and the children are out there all alone?” His wife lays a pale hand on his brawny forearm.
“It didn’t take long, three minutes flat,” Ruth tells Hugh on the phone, “for those Methodists to organize a forty-eight-hour prayer vigil out at the Dare property, to protect Lu Dare and the children till the men come home. The congregation’s still smarting, you know, from the Baptists turning their kids’ petition into a public prayer list. I’m on my way out there now, to photograph the tire marks, and let Lu and the kids know that the Methodist Cavalry is on its way!”
LATE THAT NIGHT, as Ruth, exhausted, slips into bed, Hugh rolls over and turns on the light.
“Well?” he asks quietly.
“Damnedest thing you ever saw,” she replies. “The women showed up first carting casseroles, carrying coffeepots, pitchers of iced tea. Set up camp in the clearing between the two cabins. George Meyers and the men came afterwards with a couple truckloads of scrap wood from his lumberyard. They parked their cars in a barricade across the drive, then built a huge bonfire, flames initially as high as a house.
“Every hour, on the hour, they pass out pieces of wood— ‘prayer logs,’ they call them—and gather ’round the fire. The minister or one of the deacons begins. Then, round robin, each one adds something—a special thought or appeal—and tosses their prayer log onto the fire. I imagine that sounds corny, or strange. But, I’ll tell you, Hugh, it was something else entirely. In between prayer circles, the women sing—turns out Lu has a lovely voice—and I actually heard them invite her to join the Methodist choir! And the men tell stories to entertain the children. One of them, Red Phillips, has a guitar and is teaching Daniel how to play. Hell, even Lila Hightower showed up. Somehow she knew that ‘Becca, the one with the nose, who never talks, has a favorite kind of cookie—thumbprint, they’re called, round with a dab of strawberry jam in the middle—and Lila shows up with a whole platterful. Had that little girl grinning from ear to ear.
“The whole day and into the night—the men are taking shifts tonight, the women will be back tomorrow—standing ‘round that fire felt—I don’t know, Hugh—instead of corny, it felt . . . communal, a community of good people gathered to do the right thing. And, instead of strange, it was somehow . . .” Ruth stops, searches for the exact word, which, when she finds it, comes out surprised, in a whisper. “. . . true.” She shakes her head, reaches over him, turns out the light. “Damnedest thing you ever saw,” she says softly, settling next to him in the dark.
TUESDAY MORNING, Ruth drives eagerly to the courthouse. Rumor has it that Judge Winston K. Woods, a Methodist, is fit to be tied. According to Paine Marsh, the Judge has cleared his docket and summoned all parties involved in the Dares v. the Clark County School Board suit to his courtroom for an immediate preliminary hearing.
In the hallway, Ruth greets an amused Lila Hightower. “Isn’t this a bee-yootiful day?” Lila demands. And together they find seats in the back.
Up front, Ruth spots the row of defendants in their suits: Superintendent Bateman, Chairman Zeke Roberts, and the rest of the all-male school board. Their attorneys, one old, one young, stand and face them, answering softly spoken queries, nodding reassurance.
Opposite them, the Dares seem dwarfed by the Victorian furniture, the high ceilings, the calculated grandeur of the courtroom: Pigtailed Minna and snaggle-toothed SaraFaye stare goggle-eyed up
at Will; rail-thin Lu cuddles baby June in her lap, whispers to a somber ’Becca by her side; and the two stoics, Daniel and Franklin, sit ramrod straight on the aisle. In front of them is the quiet, dignified, silver-haired figure of attorney Paine Marsh, studying a thick, open book. Behind them is a rather large contingent of people from the prayer vigil.
Although identical in design, the Fifth Circuit courtroom, where Judge Woods presides, lacks the highly polished luster of Judge How-High’s Number Two next door.
Judge How-High was a stickler for appearances, Ruth recalls. While Judge Woods, also called The Whittlin’ Judge, is known to arrive at his bench with a handful of sticks. At preliminary hearings, he announces to attorneys on both sides that he has deemed the case a two-stick, four-stick, anywhere up to a six-stick case. Which means he will listen patiently for the time it takes him to whittle down the designated number of sticks—curled shavings piling up in front of him, occasionally brushed off onto the floor—and at the very end of the last stick, he will rule.
Veteran attorneys know to match the length of their arguments to the length of the sticks. And that Judge Woods looks harshly on those who attempt to eat up more than their fair share of shavings. Ruth wonders if the school board’s attorneys understand this and privately hopes for their ignorance.
Two minutes before ten, there’s a brief, sharp exchange at the back of the courtroom. Sheriff K. A. DeLuth has arrived, and the Bailiff is requesting he surrender his firearm.
“No guns in the courtroom,” the Bailiff, a thin man with thick glasses, says.
“C’mon, Henry, I’m not about to shoot somebody in front of all these witnesses,” DeLuth jokes.
“Please, Sheriff. Judge’s orders.”
“No deal,” DeLuth says, abruptly serious, and brushes past the Bailiff, his ivory-handled pistol still in place. Ruth watches the big man sweep down the aisle, solicitously tipping his hat to the school-board wives seated behind their husbands, seizing the empty seat next to Zeke Roberts. Beside her, Ruth feels Lila bristle with contempt.
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