I leaned away out of sheer instinct and contemplated telling Joseph not to shoot. But given all we’d seen that night, it didn’t seem right, me trying to influence his decision one way or the other. So I rose, silent, and stood at his side.
The man’s dry throat clicked. Joseph’s finger came out of the trigger guard, flexed, and went back in.
“Might be this is my chance to even up the score a little,” Joseph muttered, though whether to me or the roughneck I couldn’t say. And his hand trembled so bad I feared he might fire whether he meant to or not.
He squeezed his eyes tight, opened them, resighted down the barrel, and spoke so there was no doubt he was talking to me: “I’ve spent my whole life forgiving white folks, Will,” he said. “And I am so very tired of it.”
Then he lifted his head from the sight, lowered the shotgun, and carried it back to the truck without another word.
“Who shot you?” I asked the roughneck once Joseph had got safely in the back.
He was silent.
I poked my toe into the flesh of his leg near the bullet hole. He gritted his teeth. Said, “I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’, boy.”
It was a poor choice.
I pressed the sole of my shoe down square over the bullet hole. He roared in pain and set about expanding my repertoire of curse words until I lifted my foot to stomp him again. At that, he quieted and held up his hand, breathing ragged. And he feigned contriteness, saying how he was bleeding bad and couldn’t move because the truck had broke his other leg, and wouldn’t I please help him.
“Only if you tell me the truth,” I replied. “I bet it was white men who shot you, wasn’t it?”
He spit on my shoes and told me to go to hell. Only I went to the truck instead, to fetch twine and the handkerchief Reggie had stuffed in Joseph’s mouth. And I caught that roughneck as he cursed and howled and tried to drag himself away, and I tied his hands tight behind his back and stuffed the handkerchief in his gob. For it was at that moment that I realized how very much I wanted to be a righteous man, just like I’d told Vernon Fish lo those many weeks ago. And a righteous man would never leave another human being to bleed to death in the street.
Of course, a truly righteous man would take pains to keep the roughneck’s ruined legs from knocking against the truck bumper as he loaded him in, so I can’t say I was quite there yet. But I kept that miserable so-and-so alive and did him no permanent harm. Which, in my book, was at least a step in the right direction.
The church was dark and locked up tight when we arrived, and the clouds overhead had cleared enough for the moon to shine on the empty roadway. Still, there were dark shadows and corners aplenty.
No one came when I knocked. So I knocked again, and the lock turned and hinges squeaked as the door cracked open. I recognized the oval-faced girl peeking out. Her name was Claire, and like Addie, she was a year ahead of me. Unlike Addie, she wasn’t pretty. Not in the standard sense, at least. But there was something pleasing about the way her strong features fit together, especially with the electric light casting a halo’s glow around her nest of disheveled brown hair.
“Yes?” she said.
My words tumbled out ahead of my thoughts. “Please… Mr. Tyler’s head’s hurt bad, and Mrs. Tyler, she’s…”
Before I could bumble on, Claire lit up with recognition and opened the door wide and called me by name. And there was such a sweetness about her that my tongue tangled and my eyes filled with tears. And I feel no shame in saying that, for it was a moment of true grace.
“Where are they?” she asked. “Can they walk?”
I pointed in the direction of Seventh Street and said I didn’t think so. Then Claire told me to drive the truck across the grass and park close to the door.
Once I’d done as she said, she came out of the church with a man and a sturdy woman in a nurse’s cap, both of whom climbed inside the truck before I got the engine shut off. I heard the nurse talking in a worried voice, and Joseph saying something about a rifle butt. Then the man went back inside the church and fetched a makeshift stretcher made from a sheet and two mops. Jackrabbit quick, he and Joseph loaded Mr. Tyler onto it and carried him inside.
That surprised me, I’ll admit, for I’d been raised in a world where white folks’ needs always came first. It shocked the roughneck, too, and he sputtered and coughed around the cloth in his mouth while old Mrs. Tyler watched. Then Claire climbed in and introduced herself, and the roughneck quieted enough for her to take out the handkerchief. And he plastered a false smile across his face and commenced to lying, saying how the Negro boy who’d just carried the old man away had shot him, and how I’d run him over with the truck after that and stepped on his wounded leg to torture him.
Claire looked at me as if to ask was it true. I hung my head and said I’d hit him with the truck all right, but it had been an accident. She didn’t inquire about the torture, only told the man there was a doctor inside who could tend to his injuries till morning.
Then the church door opened again and a trim and dapper Negro with rolled-up sleeves stepped out of the church. “He’s been shot in the leg, Dr. Butler,” Claire said. The doctor climbed into the truck, ignoring the man’s curses and slurs. And when he tried to touch the roughneck’s leg and the fool commenced to screaming bloody murder, Claire picked up the handkerchief and stuffed it back into his mouth so tight that even his grunts were muffled.
Which was a relief to everyone, most especially Mrs. Tyler. Her eyes sparked to life, and she asked if I wouldn’t please take her inside to her husband. I said it would be my pleasure and helped her out of the truck, bending low so she could get her arm across my shoulders for support. We made our way into the church, down a set of stairs, and through a door that swung open when I tapped it with my toe. And it’s a good thing I’m built sturdy, elsewise the blur that flew across the room into my chest would have knocked Mrs. Tyler and me down like so many ninepins.
The smell of roller skate grease and the feel of small arms squeezing me tight hit all at once, so that my heartbeat skipped about and the shadow over my soul lifted like a thousand sparrows taking flight. And I reached down with my free arm and lifted Ruby up and hugged her hard.
“Ow, ow, ow!” she squealed. “You’re gonna squeeze my guts out, Will Tillman!”
Only I didn’t let go.
And neither did she.
Rowan
A spark lit up inside Joe when he mentioned the body, bright enough so I could see it through his wrinkles and the morphine and the pain. I forgot all about being in a nursing home, and the cookies, and even James, and asked him who it was.
“I’m sorry, young lady, but I can’t tell you,” Joe said.
Which felt like the sound a bird makes hitting a window. But short of threatening a dying old man, there wasn’t much I could do about it.
James asked him: “You can’t or you won’t?”
“Both. I swore to my father at his deathbed that I’d carry his secret to my own grave. And there’s no breaking a deathbed oath.”
Out in the hall, a feeble voice started hollering for Mary to take him home.
Joe sighed. “That’s my roommate, Herb. Mary died five years ago. He forgets. But tell me—what have the two of you learned on your own? I never did promise not to help other folks find the truth for themselves, and maybe I can steer you in the right direction.”
Which was better than nothing. So James and I traded off telling Joe about the Polk Directory and the house title and everything else we’d tracked down.
“But how did you find out about my father in the first place?” Joe asked.
“From the receipt,” James said.
“Receipt?” Joe brought the back of his bed up higher.
“The Victrola receipt he made out to someone named J. Goodhope. It was in the skeleton’s wallet,” I said. “Here.” I slipped the receipt out of the envelope in my purse and handed it to Joe. “See?”
Joe’s fingers trembled as h
e pulled it close and squinted. “Dammit,” he said, fumbling for his reading glasses on the tray. I picked them up for him and held the receipt while he put them on. He mumbled thank you and took the receipt again, making a sound that was a sob and a laugh all at once. Then he traced each word and figure with his fingertip, whispering, “I can’t believe you found it.”
“You knew about it?” I said.
His head nodded on the thin stalk of his neck. “I knew of it. It’s just not something I ever thought I’d hold in my own hands. You’ve made an old man very, very happy.”
Which wasn’t exactly what James and I had set out to do that morning, but it felt good anyway. And when I asked Joe if he knew who J. Goodhope was, he nodded again and said, “Of course. He’s my namesake—Joseph.”
James and I locked eyes as Joe went back to reading the receipt.
“Joe,” James said. “Do you happen to know if Joseph was any relation to Della Goodhope?”
Joe was still running his fingertips over the paper like he couldn’t believe it was there.
“She was his mother,” he said. “And Ruby was his sister.”
James took out his phone and held up the picture of William Tillman for Joe to see.
“And this was your father, William?”
“Yes. Though he went by Daniel after he moved to Kansas City. I’ve seen this portrait before, on the bookshelf at my grandmother’s house. Wherever did you find it?”
“In Central High School’s 1921 yearbook,” I said. “He was a junior then. But why did he change his name?”
Joe smiled. “Dad dropped out of school and moved to KC after the riot in ’21. He wanted a fresh start, and I suppose changing his name was part of that. He did well for himself, too. Sold Victrolas and wax cylinder dictation machines, then radios and hi-fis. Say, you don’t happen to have Joseph’s picture, do you?”
“From the yearbook?” James asked. “You mean he was still in school, too?”
Joe took a breath to speak, then stopped like he was afraid he was giving too much away. But before long, he got this what-the-hell kind of look and said: “That’s right, only he didn’t go to Central. Joseph was a senior at Booker T. that year.”
Now we were getting somewhere.
“If you were named after him, they must have known each other pretty well,” I said.
“They did.” Joe folded the receipt back up. “Rowan, would you be so kind as to bring me the photograph in the gilt frame over on the windowsill?”
I picked up the picture he motioned to and saw a younger version of Joe standing next to a wrinkly black woman in sweatpants and a Naughty by Nature T-shirt with the “O.P.P.” album cover on it.
“That’s Ruby and me back in 2001,” Joe said. “June first, to be exact.”
I tried to show the picture to James, but he was looking for something on his phone. “Are she and that shirt for real?” I asked.
“Every inch of them.” Joe laughed. “Ruby lived out loud like no one else I’ve ever known.”
James was still mumbling to himself. “Let me just… here!” He shoved the phone in front of me. The image was of a yellowed page with three photographs in heart-shaped frames. The top and bottom pictures were of girls. In the middle was a serious-looking young black man with chubby cheeks and something written beside him that I had to enlarge the picture to see.
A better soul you’ll never meet
No matter where you roam.
His mind is sharp, his manner sweet,
His heart true to his home.
JOSEPH GOODHOPE
“Have you found him?” Joe looked so eager that James handed him the phone and let the picture speak for itself.
“There he is,” Joe said softly. “Just like Ruby and Dad described him.”
“You mean you’ve never seen him before?” I asked.
Joe shook his head slowly. “No. Joseph died young. But Ruby lived a good, long life. She was ninety years old in that picture, though you’d never have known it to meet her. She worked as a nurse until they made her retire at seventy-five. After that, she kept busy with volunteer work. She died in her sleep just a few weeks after her ninety-seventh birthday, only a month after she brought me the last pie.”
The skin on my forearms prickled. Pie at the Nut-n-Honey Café. Tilda’s peach pie at Arvin’s funeral.
“Joe, did you say pie?” I asked.
His smile was wistful. “Indeed I did. Ruby made one for us every year on the first of June. In the beginning, she’d take a Midland Valley train up here to Pawhuska and leave them on Granny Kathryn’s doorstep. But after Granny died, she brought them to me.”
Joe lowered the picture, closed his eyes, and sighed.
“Best peach pie in the whole wide world.”
Mom was in shorts and a tank top, sitting cross-legged on the back porch swing when I got home. Beaded drops of condensation dotted the untouched glass of iced tea beside her. When I came through the gate, she pointed toward the open back house door.
“Geneva’s here,” she said. Which wasn’t exactly news, since I’d already seen the van. Hammering started up. Mom ignored it.
I sat beside her and asked what was going on, and Mom told me how Geneva had called her at work, asking to be let into the back house to check on something she’d overlooked. Mom had called me, but I’d turned my phone off after deleting the voicemails about Arvin that morning. So she’d come to let Geneva in herself.
“Now,” Mom said when she was done explaining, “tell me where you’ve been all day.”
There was no point lying. I told her about Pawhuska.
“You were supposed to be resting,” she said. “But I’d probably have done the same thing if I were you.”
A man in white painter’s coveralls came out of the back house. He laid a floor plank on the grass, saw Mom and me, and gave us an awkward hello before he went back inside.
The hammering started up again.
Board by board, he carried out the subfloor, lining each piece up carefully. Mom’s legs stayed tucked underneath her. I slipped off my sandals and pushed us back and forth in the swing. “They’re tearing things apart,” I said.
Eat your heart out, Captain Obvious.
Mom dipped her finger in the pool of water gathering at the base of her glass. “It seems that way.”
We kept swinging, the man kept bringing out planks, and Mom kept not talking. It got so weird that I ended up asking her if I could visit Arvin’s aunt Tilda the next day, just to kill the silence.
“You haven’t asked my permission for things like that in a long time,” Mom said. “Why start now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s not so much that I’m asking as that I wanted to tell you.”
There was only one rectangle left to go before the floor was completely reassembled on the grass. Mom pinched the middle of her shirt and pulled it away from her belly. We were both sweating like crazy.
“I like that,” she said. “It’s nice. But there’s something else I want to ask you. You don’t have to answer right now. In fact, you should think about it as long as you’d like—at least overnight.”
There was nothing to do except say that I would.
“Good,” Mom said. “What I want to know is, if you’re sure that Jerry Randall used a racial slur and pushed Arvin out of anger instead of self-defense, would you be willing to go speak to the district attorney with me? Maybe even testify about what you saw and heard in court?”
The hammering stopped. The swing stopped. Geneva carried out the last board herself and waved Mom and me over, saying, “I’m glad you’re here, Rowan.”
“Think about it,” Mom said. Then she got up, and Geneva told us not to come down off the porch. “You’ll have a better view from there,” she said, climbing the steps to stand next to us.
She leaned over the rail. The man, who Geneva never did introduce but must have been her gallbladderless assistant, stood off to one side.
“Su
re enough. See that?” Geneva pointed toward a dark stain that covered the board farthest away from us on the left, and parts of the ones around it. “That’s where our skeletonized friend bled out. It’s a typical spread pattern for exsanguination due to head trauma. But look…” She pointed to a separate stain midway up the opposite side of the reconstructed floor. “That one’s from a different victim. Someone who received a significant injury, bled out, then dragged themself a ways. They never made it all the way across the room, though. See how their blood trail stops two feet short of the other one and spreads again?”
Mom was quiet at my side.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
Geneva rubbed her palms against her cutoffs and shrugged. “It means I should have checked under the floor sooner. But it also means we know more now than we did before. And in my book, that makes it a good day.”
WILLIAM
The basement was a big space filled with women and children, all of them frightened and weary, but safe as they could be given the circumstances. A few electric bulbs were strung up overhead, and there were lit oil lamps scattered about. Claire drew two cups of coffee from a fancy silver urn set up on a wooden bench and handed them to Joseph and me. And that was the best thing I ever have tasted in my life, bar none—loaded thick with sugar, and so hot it scalded my tongue.
Then Claire put her arm around Ruby’s shoulders, saying, “Won’t you introduce me to your friend?” To which Ruby replied that Joseph was her brother, not her friend. And Claire shook his hand and smiled and told Ruby, “I bet these boys would like to sit down. Would you show them to a cot while I fetch Joseph a shirt that’s not cut to ribbons?” Her voice was soft and firm all at once, so that Ruby didn’t balk. She only said, “Yes’m, Miss Claire,” and led us over to an empty cot like the sweetest, most obedient child you ever did meet.
And she sat next to us, chirping on about how she’d set off to find Joseph after I warned her away from the shop. “You sounded for-real scared, Will,” she said. “Enough so I knew you weren’t just trying to get rid of me.” Then she scolded Joseph for not being in any of the places she’d gone looking.
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