“General Lee will tear your throat out if you come any closer,” he said in a voice that sounded as if it, like the door, could use oiling. He peered at her with squinting, weak eyes, his hand resting on his sword hilt. His gray hair was like rotten straw peeking out from the edges of his cap.
There was a clanking, and Sam noticed with relief that the dog was on a heavy chain. Of course, Blanding could loose him, but she began to breathe again.
I’m going to stand here and talk to this man, she thought. God, I’m brave. God, I’m terrified.
“Good day, Mr. Blanding.”
“How do you know my name?” he shrilled. “They’ve been spying on me again!”
“I’m Samantha Adams. I’m here to talk with you about—” But she never finished the sentence.
“Stone Mountain!” Blanding cried, naming the huge granite outcropping near town. “Why…Stonewall, and Lee, and Jeff Davis! It’s a pity, a travesty, I tell you, their faces having to look down at all that harlotry. Skating rinks! Riverboats! They’ve built a goddamned amusement park right there at their feet.”
They don’t have feet, she wanted to say. The carvings of the three Confederate generals, like those on Mount Rushmore, were of heads only. But she didn’t think Blanding wanted to hear that.
“Why, did I think, when I was up on that hill”—he pointed in the direction of Oakland Cemetery, which was just on the other side of the defunct factory—“looking down on the Union troops advancing in the Battle of Atlanta, did I think to myself: General Hood, this rolling mill”—he pointed at Fulton Bag—“this rolling mill is going to make great condominiums one day? Hell, no, missy! I didn’t! I thought: We’ve got to save the mill or we won’t have any armor.” He pointed in a different direction. “We’ve got to save the railroad, or we won’t have reinforcements from Decatur. We’ve got to stop the Yankees in their tracks! That’s what I thought. I didn’t think about any goddamned condominiums!”
“No, sir.” She nodded.
Blanding focused on her as if he hadn’t known she was there until that second. “What’s your name, miss? Would you like to come in and set for a spell, have a glass of iced tea? I don’t get many visitors. It’d make me proud if you could.”
Sure, General Hood, Sam thought. Yes sirree bob. Never had tea with a Confederate general before.
Sam slid through the screen door that Blanding was holding open for her. General Lee followed, sniffing the hem of her denim skirt. Blanding/Hood brought up the rear.
The front room in which she found herself was as cluttered as the front porch, but this jumble was thematic. The room was a memorial to Susan Blanding, Herman’s wife. Photographs of her, from infancy to late middle age, created a bizarre wallpaper. Her clothes, shoes, stockings, and underwear were flung in little heaps, much as a woman might leave in her boudoir in a flurry of dressing or undressing. Bottles of her perfume were open on a mirrored tray, filling the air with the sweet smell of Shalimar. A small table, which was almost covered with her books and letters, was set for two.
“Were you expecting someone?” Sam asked Blanding, who had disappeared through a curtained door into what she assumed was the kitchen.
“Why, yes, Susan. You.”
Samantha froze. Her blood chilled and flowed more slowly, bumping into floes of fear as she began to realize the dimension of Blanding’s madness.
He reentered the room. “I bought you some more of your favorites, dear.” He was carrying a pitcher of iced tea and, holding it by the string, a box of animal crackers. His sword clanked as he moved.
He patted her on the shoulder. “Sit. Sit down and we’ll have our tea party.” He opened the little box with the circus animals pictured on the outside. “I’ll find you the elephants,” he said. “I know they’re your favorites.”
“They taste better,” Sam said very softly. Maybe she could get through this if she played along.
“You always say that,” Blanding said, and laughed. It was the first time she’d seen him smile. His complexion pinkened, came alive. He had a beautiful smile.
“What have you been doing today,” he asked, “while I was at the store?”
Sam hesitated.
“Have you been visiting with Mrs. Brown again?”
She nodded.
“I do think it’s nice that you keep one another company. Especially with her being such high society. Imagine, both the mother and wife of governors.”
“Imagine.” She didn’t have a clue.
“Though she has nothing on you, my dear. Don’t think I meant that for a moment.” Blanding reached over and stroked Sam’s curls. “And I don’t think that portrait of her on her gravestone is particularly flattering. Do you?”
“No, I don’t.” Sam shifted in her chair as she began to get his drift.
“Can you imagine, her going to all that trouble to order her own gravestone on that Grand Tour, and then coming home with such an unfortunate likeness? I think the simple inscription I chose for you is much more tasteful. Don’t you?”
Sam choked on a sip of iced tea. “Yes—oh, yes.”
“I’m sorry it’ll soon be time for you to be getting back. We’ll have to put you under again before you’re missed.”
Sam pictured beautiful old Oakland Cemetery up the hill, the resting place of many of Atlanta’s early elite. What an interesting idea of Blanding’s, the dead visiting together: his wife and Mrs. Brown; Margaret Mitchell chatting up mayors and generals; slaves and paupers sitting down with Morris Rich, the founder of the city’s famous department stores, or the golfer Bobby Jones. But the Coca-Cola Candlers wouldn’t be at an Oakland tête à tête. For that family, the elite of the elite, had long ago bought Westview Cemetery and moved the right side of the tracks to the other side of town, causing entire crypts of other families to be dismantled and moved there from Oakland, society wishing to stay as close to the Candlers, so the wags said, in death as in life.
Sam looked up. Herman Blanding was standing now with a frown on his face, cleaning an old muzzle-loader. She started. Was he going to shoot her now that they’d had tea?
“I’m going to kill the son-of-a-bitch who did this to you,” he growled. At his feet, General Lee muttered sympathetically.
“He’s in jail. Carlos Ortega is in jail,” Sam said softly, hoping to remind him that the murderer of his wife, Susan, had been put away.
“No, no, no!” Blanding twisted his head, his teeth holding the string of a bag of gunpowder. “Ortega was the instrument. Like this rifle”—he patted it—“is the instrument of my vengeance. I’m going to kill Forrest Ridley!”
Samantha was about to tell him that Ridley was already dead, but then she remembered that Blanding had been at his funeral. On some level, he had to know that.
“They’re the scourge of the earth, lawyers,” Blanding fumed, his face growing more and more livid. He waved a finger in her face. “We should shoot them! Shoot them on sight! Come here.” He pulled on her arm. “Come, Miss Adams. I have something to show you.”
Well, at least he once again knew who she was.
He propelled her through the surprisingly neat kitchen and out the back door into a tiny backyard. There, beyond a patch of a freshly tilled vegetable garden, plastered against the side of a toolshed, were life-size blowups of the head of Forrest Ridley. Sam recognized the photograph as the one that had appeared in the Constitution with Ridley’s obituary. A peppering of holes had been blasted through the eyes until they were sievelike.
“Watch,” Blanding whispered, laying a finger alongside his nose as if they were partners in a conspiracy.
He stepped inside the door of the toolshed, and as he flipped a switch, the eyes of Forrest Ridley glowed red.
“Do you like it?” Blanding cackled, then stuck his head back out of the shed, grinning. “Doesn’t that make him look like the devil, that little red light?”
Leaving the light burning, he rejoined her beside the tiny plot of tilled earth.
&nbs
p; “See that?” He pointed. Over in one corner of the yard was a small wooden cross. “He did that, too.”
“What, Herman?”
“Killed my Sheba, General Lee’s mother.”
The dog’s ears perked up at the mention of his name.
“Forrest Ridley killed your dog?”
“Nawh.” He waved away the specificity of her question as if it were unimportant. “But another one just like him did. Defended the son-of-a-bitch who ran over her. I went to court. Yes sirree. You bet I did. Went to court and sued the son-of-a-bitch, but that oily devil, that lawyer”—he spat the word—“he got him off scot-free. Never had to pay me a dime. Laughed, that’s what they did. Laughed in my face in the courtroom. Son-of-a-bitch laughed at me.”
“But not Ridley?” Sam asked softly.
Blanding drew his sword. Sam stepped back. But he brandished it in the air above his head, looking to the life like the famous portrait of John Brown, wild-eyed, crazy.
“Kill them all!” he shouted. “Sons-of-bitches are the earth’s scourge. Pestilence! Damnation!”
Then he took Sam’s hand in his free one. “Pray with me,” he said hoarsely, emotion shaking in his voice. “Pray with me for Forrest Ridley’s death.” This time she tried reminding him. “Herman, you know he’s already dead.”
“Hallelujah!” he shouted. “Praise the Lord! Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord! Thank you, oh Lord. Thank you, Jesus.”
He dropped his sword and grasped both her hands. “Sing with me,” he said. “Sing with me, Miss Samantha Adams.”
And then, in a childlike voice, high-pitched, he sang a song she remembered from Sunday School many years ago.
“What a friend we have in Jesus,” he crooned. “All our sins and griefs to bear.” Tears gathered in his eyes. “What a friend we have in Jesus. Take it to the Lord in prayer.”
He smiled into her face, his beautiful, gentle, crazed smile. “He’s answered my prayers, Miss Samantha. He’s sent someone to kill them all.” Then he crossed his arms over his chest and turned his head in a gesture of supplication. “Not me. No, not me. He did not find me worthy. But someone. Someone stronger and more valiant. Someone worthy of the task.”
He turned and smiled at General Lee. “Come, boy,” he said. The powerful dog jumped to attention. “We’ve got to ready ourselves for the battle. They’re coming. They’re coming to try to take the railroad now. We’ve got to stop them. It’s our duty, die if we must, to save Atlanta, to save the South!”
He began to march around the small garden plot, General Lee following close behind, his bearing as military as a dog’s can be.
“Look to the north,” Blanding called to Sam as she slipped toward the side of the house and her departure. “Look to the lines at Peachtree Creek. That’s where the battle will be joined. We’ll ride like hell to help you at the creek when we’re done here. We’ll smash the vipers as they crawl out of their nests. To the north!” He flashed his sword once more. “The North is where the devil lives.”
Eleven
Climbing back into her car, she thought, I’d give anything to stop in at Manuel’s for a cold one. Herman Blanding had knocked her for a loop.
Samantha drove back north on Highland. She could see ahead that the roadblock had been cleared, but instead of proceeding on to the address in Virginia-Highland Lona had given her, she wheeled into Manuel’s parking lot, stepped inside, and ordered up a frosty glass of the diet version of Atlanta’s official drink, a Coca-Cola. It wasn’t bad with peanuts.
She sat at the bar staring at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar and thought about calling Beau. Had Horace delivered to him the fingerprints he said he’d get from Lona?
But she knew that Horace would do as he’d promised. Horace was as reliable as the rising sun.
That wasn’t why she wanted to call Beau. It was the dream she’d had about him last night. Damn him, why had he moved back home?
In the dream, Beau and she, both very young, were floating on the surface of a lake in a rowboat. She was wearing a yellow sundress. He leaned over and pinned a fragrant gardenia in her hair. Then time shifted, and they were sitting on the edge of a cot in a boathouse. Beau untied the little straps of her sundress very slowly, looking all the while into her eyes in the glow of a kerosene lantern. She let the top of her dress drop. He murmured something she couldn’t quite make out and then lowered his head. But his head was silver, as now. They weren’t young. His lips, soft as pansy petals, lowered to her breast.
“I said, “’Scuse me, could you pass the salt?’ “
Sam jumped. A stranger seated at her right elbow was grinning at her.
“Sorry. I was daydreaming.”
“No problem.” He kept grinning. He was a handsome good old boy, a country boy come to town and prosperity, a salesman sporting a diamond pinky ring that glittered when he raised the hard-boiled egg in his left hand. His right hugged a beer.
“What’s a pretty lady like you doing here sitting all alone drinking a Co’-Cola? Can I buy you something else?”
“No, thank you,” she said, and then pulled out the line she used for these occasions when she didn’t want to be bothered—which she usually didn’t, resenting the attentions of presumptuous strangers: “I’m an alcoholic.”
“Well, hell,” he said, turning to the man on his right and including him, “we all got our little faults, ain’t we? Like my friend Chester here.” Then he stuck out his hand toward her. “I’m Eugene.” The two men smiled, and lit up the bar.
She had to smile back. Ease up, she told herself. They’re just being friendly—like Labradors. That’s what they looked like, both big and muscular with short haircuts, smooth necks—sleek, boisterous, teenage dogs. She introduced herself.
“Chester,” Eugene continued, “now, his little fault, he cain’t help himself, he goes out into the country once a month and bays at the moon.”
Wolf, Labrador. She was close.
“I guess that’s harmless enough,” she said, laughing.
“Well, it would be, if he didn’t fall in love with cows. Scares the bejesus out of ’em, him trotting along on all fours at their heels. Plays hell on the farmer, too—makes the milk clabber.”
“You a fine one to talk,” Chester defended himself. “Your whole family is damned Froot Loops.”
“Now, is that a nice way to talk in front of this young lady I’m trying to impress?” Eugene protested.
“Might not. But it’s the truth. Tell her about your Uncle Moses, boy.”
“Lord have mercy, Chester. You gone bring that tired old thing up?”
But Sam thought he was protesting too much, and she was right, because Eugene immediately ordered up another round and launched into what had to be one of his favorite stories.
“My Uncle Moses, see, he’s the mayor of this little town, Towunda, down in south Georgia, where all the folks are crazy ’cause they’re descended from those criminals Oglethorpe brought over.”
“Not to mention the incest and the fluoridation,” Chester interrupted. “Course, Gene’s from Albany”—he pronounced it “Albiny”—“which ain’t too far from there.”
“Which makes me crazy, too. I never said I wuddn’t. Anyway, as I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted, my Uncle Moses was slap silly about his daughter B.J., short for Bobbie June. He and Aunt May Lou’d had six sons before Bobbie June came along, when Aunt May Lou said ‘Praise the Lord’ and kicked him out of her bedroom, but anyway B.J. was the apple of his eye. She got to be the princess of Towunda when she was growing up.
“What with Uncle Moses being the mayor, why, anything that little girl wanted, all she had to do was point. They had a school play, she was the star. They had a dance recital, she took the last and longest bows. They had a drawing at the Piggly Wiggly for a sack of groceries, Moses would show up with Bobbie June in tow, and no matter whose name they drew, they was smart enough to give the sack to Bobbie June. ’Cause you didn’t want to g
et on the wrong side of Uncle Moses about his daughter. If you did, next thing you knew you’d get your car impounded, your livestock locked up; no end of trouble could come to sit on your front porch and visit you.
“Anyway, my Uncle Moses looks like the south end of a mule headed north, whereas Aunt May Lou is a nice-looking woman. Luckily, the good Lord made it so B.J. favored Aunt May Lou’s side. In fact, He did them one better, because by the time B.J. was about fifteen, why, she was a raving beauty. Wuddn’t she, Chester?”
“You can say that again. Miss America didn’t have nothing on her. Blond hair, big blue eyes, cherry lips, and besides, she was built—pardon me, Samantha—but B.J. was built even then like a brick shithouse. She was worth the special trip I made down from Athens—that’s where me and this old boy met, up at school—to see her. Course, it was too late by then.”
“Now, don’t be giving away the story, Bubba. This here’s mine. You got one to tell, you just wait your turn,” Eugene said.
“’Scuse me, partner. Go on ahead.”
“Anyway, as I was saying, B.J. was something else. She’d been homecoming queen three years running, which has never happened before or since in the history of Towunda High School, when all of a sudden, in her senior year, everything just went to hell.”
“Say what?” Sam said, then caught herself. Well, it didn’t take long, did it, for her to sound as if she’d never left home.
“See, Uncle Moses had never let her go out with boys, not once, but when it got to be her senior year, well, Aunt May Lou put her foot down,” Eugene continued.
“‘Moses,’ she says, ‘that child is going to grow up an old maid if you’re not careful. She’s never going to leave home.’
“‘That’s exactly what I’m planning on,’ says Moses. ‘You think I’m ever going to let those horny hounds coming sniffing around my sweetheart, you got another think coming.’
First Kill All the Lawyers Page 10