Dark Series, The Color of Seven and The Color of Dusk (Books We Love Special Edition)

by Gail Roughton

  They drove slowly through the dark streets of Macon. An old, ragged car held together by threads of rust followed them, hanging two or three cars back. At the wheel of that car, stolen from the backstreets off Martin Luther King Boulevard, Justin Dinardo whistled cheerfully.

  “Boy, shut up dat noise!” his companion ordered.

  Justin complied immediately.

  “Sorry,” he offered. “It’s just, I can’t believe how lucky this is. I mean, you want him, I want her.” No fool, Justin knew who’d masterminded traitor Dennis turning state’s evidence. And Cain had certainly been descriptive regarding what he’d like to do to the man.

  “Slow down some,” Cain ordered. “Gettin’ too close.” Cain kept an eye on them frequently by hovering invisibly, of course, but he had to get some use of the new acolyte he’d tracked by following the spoor of the intruders who’d discovered his cave and pulled the stake from his ribs. In the main, Justin performed very well. Cain was satisfied with him and anyway, it wasn’t like he’d had a lot of choices to pick from. Besides, that constant hovering took a lot of concentration.

  “They ain’t paying no attention.”

  “I say slow down. Ain’t like we doan know where to find ‘em.”

  “When?”

  “When whut?”

  “When are we going to find them?”

  “Soon now. Real soon.”

  * * *

  Finally, Ria pulled back into her garage.

  “Well, it’s now or never.” She slammed the car door. “I wonder if he’s made arrangements to check us into the psychiatric hospital yet.”

  Dr. Knight watched stone-faced from the couch as they walked in.

  “Prove it,” he said shortly.

  Paul disappeared. Completely. Then he reappeared on the other side of the room and disappeared again. He materialized directly in front of Dr. Knight.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dr. Knight said flatly.

  “No, I’m afraid he didn’t have much to do with this,” Paul said dryly.

  “Well, all right, let’s have the rest of it. I’ve always wondered how my granddaddy managed to get himself killed by an irate white man. And Ria?”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “You’re right. I want something a hell of a lot stronger than beer. Fix me a drink, please.”

  She mixed drinks for everyone and settled onto her other couch facing her father. Paul paced restlessly around the room. She patted the seat beside her.

  “Paul?”

  He sat down and took her hand.

  “I don’t know how to start. How to begin. So much of it, you see, I don’t even know firsthand, just from Sadie and Joshua. ‘Cause I wasn’t ever around in the daytime. And after all this time, it hurts like it happened yesterday. I just can’t—how to—you have no idea how much I loved my brother.”

  “I think that’s pretty obvious from the first part,” Dr. Knight observed.

  “No, not really, that doesn’t even begin to explain it. Because over the years, when he was a man, our relationship changed. Completely. He didn’t need me anymore, not really, but I needed him. He was my connection, you see. With normal life. He was my best friend. He lived the rest of his life trying to atone for that summer of 1888. And no man was ever more truly his brother’s keeper.”

  Chapter Six

  A man emerged from the turbulent events of the summer of 1888 instead of a boy. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger and the young man striding briskly across the grounds of Rose Arbor Cemetery in the summer dusk of June 18, 1892 was a strong man.

  His skin still glowed with the creaminess of café au lait. His eyes were still large and lustrous. He was still a mulatto, a mixture of his remarkable white father, Dr. Everett Devlin, and his beyond remarkable black mother, Sadie. He’d finally figured out how remarkable they both were. The resentment of his youth for his mixed heritage and the confusing social limbo it cast him into had long passed. His height stopped an inch short of six feet, and his slender frame had expanded and filled out with manhood. His name was Joshua Devlin, and he was home. He increased his stride and laughed suddenly at the stray thought wandering across his mind.

  “A nigger in a cemetery at sunset!” he thought. “What would the white folks say?”

  The intense formal education his brother had begun upon his return from medical school in Scotland was now well-supplemented by the four years Joshua had spent in Boston. At this point in his life, even his thought patterns followed white idiom and he had to make a conscious resolution to shift back into the flowing, hybrid lilt between white and black speech used by his mother. For a few days, at least. Until his personal master plan could be implemented.

  He approached the doors of the large marble structure, so much larger than any other that stood in the bounds of the cemetery, and glanced swiftly around. No one. He opened the door and stepped in. He frowned.

  The top of the coffin was open. Again. Paul didn’t appreciate the protective covering the casket offered. Well, no matter. He was home for good now. He’d take care of his brother whether Paul wanted him to or not.

  Paul’s hand twitched and Joshua moved closer.

  “Joshua!”

  Paul stood and pulled his little brother into a bear hug.

  “Oh, it’s good to be home, Paul!”

  “I remember the feeling. At least you’re not heading out for school again like I did, all the way to Europe.”

  “Hell, no! I’m scared to leave you alone that long! Did you close that casket lid one time since I been gone?”

  “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” said Paul. “No, I didn’t and I don’t intend to, and I thought new preachers watched their language.” He’d never tried to explain how suffocating it felt to wake under the closed lid. How dark darkness could be. Joshua carried enough guilt. No reason to inflict any more.

  “Then I guess I’ll just trot out here every day at dawn and close it myself! Paul, show a little sense! What if somebody opened the mausoleum?”

  “Now, this might surprise you, little brother, but in Rose Arbor not too many folks come knocking on the doors demanding entrance.”

  “Really? From what I heard, folks just dying to get in,” Joshua quipped. Paul laughed at the bad joke.

  The brothers headed to the riverbank to sit and talk.

  “You disappointed in me?” Joshua asked.

  “Josh!”

  “Well, all that work, all that time. I know you expected to get another doctor out of the effort. So did Papa, by the end.”

  “All that effort was to make sure you could make the life you wanted for yourself, little brother. I didn’t have any expectations for me. Hope I never made you think I did.”

  Joshua did just fine exerting pressure on himself, any outside pressure would have been wasted. In his months away from home, Joshua struggled with nightmares. Something good had to come from Cain’s reign of blood and hate, but he couldn’t see what. Cain possessed abnormal power, power enabling him to mold his followers into slaves. There were many men, though, who held petty power, and Joshua, now always on the alert, spotted them everywhere. They moved through the poorer, uneducated classes, ensnaring both black and white, taking their money with promises of great changes, easy lives, luxuries such as the rich folks enjoyed. People were easily led. Usually to the slaughter.

  But what if? An idea germinated in Joshua’s fertile mind from seeds sown years before by Everett Devlin. The power of education. Many confidence men, possessing not a tenth of Cain’s charisma, used the trappings of religion to hook their marks. Cain had been the ultimate master, using homemade drugs to bind his followers close so they barely noticed the shift in his preaching from love to hate, accepted the blood sacrifices as natural, the sexual orgies as their right. Suppose a different sort of confidence man, one seeking a higher goal, used religion as his hook to pull his catch closer and closer to another great good? Education.

  Joshua examined the idea from every angle. He wasn’t an
d never would be conventionally religious. No one who’d plunged headfirst into the worlds on worlds ringing this world at seventeen could be. His mother’s twin Tamara, powerful Mambo, priestess of the Sweet Loa of the Rata, champion of the light, had made a believer out of him. Without her, Cain might have won.

  Still, like his mother and his Aunt Tamara, he had no trouble at all with the concept of God. There was good and there was evil. There was God and there was Satan. They were merely made up of many parts.

  Joshua didn’t think his private theology would endear him to any church’s congregation but in this case, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. He could use a church as a base. And from that base, he’d move outward and onward.

  The church could have a shelter, a place for those to go who had nowhere else to turn. That shelter could have a school. And that school could teach. And with those teachings, the people, his people and their future generations, would never follow false prophets like Cain again.

  Joshua walked the streets of Boston in the evenings. He stood in the slums and watched the immigrants. He met the second generation Irish refugees from the potato famines. He heard their stories of the signs greeting their parents: No Irish need apply.

  He moved into the streets where Italy’s accents echoed from the corners and mixed and mingled with the accents of Spain and Germany and Russia. He watched the lines of workers move in and out of the sweat shops. During his visits home, he moved around the streets of Macon. He watched the textile workers empty out of the mills. He saw the children, black and white, pour out the doors and disappear. To where? Despair and hopelessness had no geographical boundaries.

  The whites weren’t the only race with prejudices. Joshua knew that for a fact. The black population where he would, of necessity, build his base, looked down their noses on the ‘po white trash’ that formed the bottom of the pyramid in Southern society just as much as did the whites.

  I’d rather live next to a decent nigger than po’ white trash, any day of the week. How many times in his life had he heard white folks say that? Too many to count. He couldn’t do everything at once. But he could make a start. And in his church, in his shelter, no one’s color made him an outcast. No child would ever be turned away. Not even if they were plaid.

  But he had to start somewhere. Where? Three months before he came home for good, he got a letter from his mother. Joshua’d been raised in St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. St. Barnabas hadn’t been fortunate in its ministers after Isaiah Gorley’s unfortunate and unexplained demise in the summer of 1888. Isaiah. Unsung hero. Man of God who’d died trying to help Paul end Cain’s rule. The church was looking for a new minister. Again.

  Joshua wrote letters and made inquiry. When he stepped off the train that June day in 1892, he was the new minister of St. Barnabas. He could almost see Isaiah smile.

  He returned from his musings and spoke to his brother.

  “First sermon’s Sunday. Sunday night.”

  “Sunday night? You forget about Sunday morning?”

  “’Course not. But my first Sunday’s special. The morning’s going to be a big homecoming type picnic. You don’t go to too many morning picnics. The sermon’s Sunday night. In case you wanta sort of—hang around? Over in a corner.”

  Paul laughed. “You’ve come a long way, little brother.”

  “Not as far as I intend to go. Does Mama seem, well, different, to you, Paul?”

  Sadie’d never fully recovered from the successive shocks of that summer, but she’d pulled herself back together for three reasons. Paul needed her. Joshua needed her. Everett needed her. Everett didn’t need her any more. He’d suffered one more heart attack in the months following Paul’s transformation and a third one the prior October. He hadn’t recovered from the third one, and now lay beside his first and only legal wife, Paul’s mother, in Rose Arbor.

  Paul hesitated in his reply. He worried about Sadie a good deal. But Joshua was home for good now. And he was the mainspring to keep Sadie going.

  “She’s had a hard time adjusting to Papa’s being gone,” he said finally. “But I think you coming home for good ought to pull her over the hump.”

  “Paul, I’d like to sell the house.”

  Sadie now occupied the Devlin family home on College Street alone and had since Everett’s death. Town gossip soared into the stratosphere over the terms of Everett’s Will. That house belonged to Sadie for as long as she wanted to occupy it. After that, it belonged to the foundling Everett took in off the street and gave his name to so many years ago. Joshua Devlin. Everybody knew Everett Devlin’d been downright peculiar when it came to the blacks anyway. More than a few folks suspected for years Sadie wasn’t just the housekeeper and Joshua hadn’t been found. They actually appreciated the obvious confirmation of those suspicions evidenced by Everett’s Will.

  “Won’t bother me any but I don’t think Mama’s goin’ be too pleased.”

  Seeing as how Sadie was the only actual mother Paul really remembered, he’d decided long ago it was stupid not to call her what she was, and she was as much his mama as she was Joshua’s.

  “There’s no hurry, naturally. It’s just, I’d like to buy a house—or build one—a big one, nearer the Church.”

  “Big enough for your shelter.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t tell her about it just yet, Josh. I’m sure it’ll work out.”

  The brothers sat a while longer and finally parted, planning to meet shortly within the walls of the College Street house. Sadie took a lot of reassurance. She never slept well unless she inspected her boys, singly or together. Sadie’s peace of mind died during Cain’s reign, another of his casualties.

  Chapter Seven

  Sunday night, Paul hovered, invisible, in the corner of St. Barnabas’ main sanctuary. He watched with pride as Joshua strode to the pulpit.

  Joshua greeted the congregation with the practiced ease of a minister with years more experience than he actually had. But Joshua’d learned from the best. Or the worst. He guessed it all depended on your point of view. And Cain could damn sure work a crowd, even without the aid of his hallucinogens.

  “My people!” he called in greeting. He raised his hand high. “The proverbial prodigal son has come home!”

  “Praise the Lord!” The congregation responded with less than its usual enthusiasm. There was something different about their new minister tonight. He didn’t sound like he’d sounded when he moved among them during the morning social gathering. He didn’t even walk the same way. Damned if he didn’t look and sound white.

  “I see y’all looking at me a little funny,” he continued, resting his hands against the podium. His speech was more casual, but it was still white.

  “Wouldn’t be ‘cause you notice I’m speaking a little different, would it?”

  The congregation shifted uneasily. In her seat on the front pew, Sadie went rigid. What was the boy thinking?

  “’Cause I am. You know why? I want to illustrate for you the text of tonight’s sermon. Know what that is? ‘Course you don’t, I ain’t told you yet.”

  That did elicit a small chuckle from the crowd.

  “Well, tonight, people, we’re going to talk about the most important thing in this world. The truth. Now, we all know about truth. Know the truth and it will set you free! And the truth is, I’ve spent years, not just the years up north, but years before that, getting something that always leads to the truth. It’s called an education. This is the way I talk. Most of the time. And I can’t stand before you tonight and talk about the truth and tell you a lie just by the way I speak. Especially not when I want to get rid of a lie that’s cast its shadow across this congregation for the past four years.”

  Many of the people sitting in the pews had attended Cain’s services. They’d fled in terror before the sight of the Blood Drinker. They knew who they were, and they knew Joshua knew who they were. The members of the congregation who hadn’t been part of Cain’s entourage we
ren’t exactly ignorant, either. Something that big didn’t have a prayer’s chance in hell of staying secret.

  “Do I need to tell you what lie I’m talking about?” asked Joshua, his tone still conversational. “I doubt it. But just in case, I’ll tell you anyway.”

  He moved in front of the pulpit and dropped the cloak of casualness.

  “I’m talking about Cain! How long’s it been since any of you thought of him? You, Abe, or you, Eulises?” He moved around the pews. “Or you, Silas, or you, Jeremiah? Not long, I hope. I hope you think about him a lot. All of you. The ones of you who know first-hand what I’m talking about and the ones who only know from the stories. And folks, if you only know from stories, you don’t know how lucky you are! ‘Cause I know about him first hand. Like you do John, and you do, Betsy, and you do, Clara! And I think about him a lot! And how he used us, and how we listened to his lies because we weren’t strong in the truth! We followed false gods because they offered us things we didn’t have, pleasures we couldn’t imagine. And what did it cost us?”

  Joshua dropped his hands and lowered his voice. “It cost us our integrity, our pride, our self-respect. Who among you have been proud of yourselves since that summer? Who? Not me. ‘Cause it cost us even more than that. Is there anyone sitting in this room, anyone, who doesn’t know how Isaiah Gorley died?”

  The crowd hung its head in collective shame. Nobody in that sanctuary didn’t know Cain had beheaded Isaiah and lobbed his head through Paul’s front windows, even though his murder was still an unsolved and forgotten question mark on the white police records.

  “I guess not,” said Joshua. “But Isaiah didn’t come to that riverbank alone. Did he?”

  The crowd looked up again. They remembered Paul Devlin. They never spoke his name.

  “No, he didn’t. He came with a white man. A man who tended your cuts and broke your fevers and in the end, died delivering you from Cain’s prison. That man and his father, between them, they gave me my name and made me who I am. His name was Paul Devlin. Is there anyone here who doesn’t remember that?”