by Attica Locke
Darren turned to see Donald Goodfellow on the porch of his mother’s yellow house. He’d casually laid a rifle over the drum between his legs. Beside him sat his son Ray, who was holding a wooden flute, and a Caddo man Darren didn’t recognize who’d tucked a harmonica in the front pocket of his denim shirt and likewise had produced a weapon, a Buck knife a good six inches long with a hickory handle so polished it caught the sun and sent a shard of light into Darren’s eyes. He squinted, stepped toward the men with deliberation. There were some things he needed to make real clear real fast. “Not a deputy, sir, don’t answer to the sheriff. You’re talking to a Texas Ranger, who’s gon’ ask you one time nicely to take care with those weapons. No cause for none of that.” The knife found its way into a leather sheath. Darren stopped squinting long enough to see that Donald Goodfellow hadn’t stowed his rifle yet. “I’m looking for Mr. Page,” he said.
“You and them other cops that been by here.”
Darren understood then that they were guarding the place, protecting Mr. Page’s property. “Wasn’t none of that my doing, Mr. Goodfellow,” he said.
Ray glared at Darren. “You got no right to be here.”
“I got a right to be anywhere that’s under the rule of Texas law—”
“Tick tock, tick tock,” Ray said, jutting out his chin with swagger. “Just you wait.” His father shot him a look, and Ray’s chin disappeared like a turtle’s.
“Now, what’s all this here?” Margaret Goodfellow opened the screen door and poked her head out. Her eyes scanned the scene—the tense Ranger, her son with a rifle out. “Donald, put that thing away this instant.” His mama’s words evidently carried more weight than a Ranger’s, because Donald took the gun from his drum and set it at his feet. “We’ve got dush’-cut and dah-bus for lunch,” she said to Darren. A clear invitation that riled young Ray Goodfellow.
“He’s hunting after Leroy, E’-kah,” he said.
“He’s fishing,” she told Darren. “But you welcome to join us while you wait.”
She looked at the others and said of Darren, as plainly as if she were saying the sky was blue and they were fools to quarrel with her about it, “I like him. He’s got kind eyes. Music later. We eat.”
Darren Mathews had never been offered food on a woman’s front porch and refused. It was simply unheard of the way he was raised. So he spent the next hour or so in Margaret Goodfellow’s dining room, his long legs folded up under him at the low table around which the family sat on the floor. They were joined by Donald’s wife, Virginia, and his sister, Saku or Sadie—Darren heard both names used—who was much younger than Donald and a new mother. She held a chunky, barely walking toddler on her lap through the meal, feeding him by scooping a few beans from a decorative clay pot on the table onto a piece of golden fry bread, blowing on it, then easing the bean-soaked bread into his mouth. It was faintly sweet, the bread, and of a texture that was a feat of culinary physics: crisped with oil on the outside and as soft and chewy as a doughnut on the inside. The bread paired with the smoky beans was perfection, a simple meal that rivaled any of the Creole food he could get in Jefferson. The men mostly ignored him, but Margaret asked about his family, where he came from. In turn, she told him she’d been born in Hopetown, as had everyone sitting around the table except little Benji in Sadie’s or Saku’s lap. He’d been born at the hospital in Marshall, the first hospital delivery in a generation. “We lost our midwife year before last,” Virginia said with an air of mourning as she poured Darren a second glass of sweet tea mixed with sliced apples. “So Ray was the last one to be born in Hopetown. Well, Ray and Leroy’s daughter Erika.”
“She the one encouraging him to sell?”
The room grew so silent and stayed that way for so long that Darren could actually hear the lake behind the house, the music of warblers and the sound of wood storks nesting and braying up high in a cypress tree somewhere. Finally, Margaret spoke with the same firm knowingness with which she had told her people to trust Darren. “Leroy will protect us,” she said. And when Darren asked how, he counted a good twenty seconds before she said, “It’s all being taken care of.”
“May I ask how your people ended up here?” Darren said.
“Leroy’s ancestors invited our ancestors to Hopetown near the turn of the last century,” she said, the lines around her eyes crinkling warmly as she played some picture in her mind, Caddos and blacks living side by side. “We’re family.”
“I meant how did your people end up here in Texas?” Darren said.
Margaret gave Darren a sly look as she reached into the pocket of her dress for a pipe and a packet of tobacco. Sadie or Saku took the baby from the room rather than telling her mother she couldn’t smoke in her own house. Margaret watched Darren as she packed her tobacco. “So they give you this badge with no history, is that it?” She lit the pipe with a kitchen match; the burning tobacco smelled faintly of cherries. “Texas is our ancestral home,” she said with a careful patience that embarrassed Darren. He sounded as much a fool as the white folks who asked the Mathews family where they were from from. I know Texas, but before that— A question to which Darren’s uncle Clayton would offer caustically, “We grew ourselves whole here, passed one set of ribs around a cotton field until we had made a tribe of black Texans called Mathews. Before Texas, we were dust.”
Darren hadn’t meant to sound ignorant about state history and forced migration; he’d only been trying to put the Goodfellows within the political context of most Texas Indians, who’d been pushed out of the state in the middle of the nineteenth century. “I thought most of the Caddos settled in Oklahoma. On a reservation there, yes?” He looked at Margaret, who smiled faintly, puffing on her pipe.
“My family has never seen Oklahoma,” she said.
Donald Goodfellow tossed an embroidered napkin onto his mother’s table and finally spoke. “There were many bands of Caddos from this part of the country. The Kadohadacho around the Red River in northern Texas and Arkansas, some in southeastern Oklahoma, and the Natchitoches in Louisiana. This family, we’re Hasinai, and East Texas is our true home. The legend of this family is that a small band of Hasinai, led by a stubborn caddi, or chief, simply never left Texas. No treaty, no plans by other Caddos to surrender land, no murderous white folks could make them go. We are the last of that band of Hasinai Caddo Indians.”
“I’ll tell you one thing about this badge,” Darren said, feeling the weight of it tugging uncomfortably on the thin fabric of his shirt. “The Rangers were used by landowners and government officials to clear out Indians from so-called white land,” he said, willing to tell the truth about the Texas Rangers’ racist past in a way he never would if he weren’t among people nearly as brown as he was. “How did your family, your ancestors, avoid being captured and sent up north?”
Donald looked at his mother. She puffed on her pipe and said, “Oh, there are ways of hiding in plain sight.” The wrinkles around her eyes seemed to wink at Darren as she smiled. He waited for her to say more, but then he heard the squeak of what sounded like a barn door but was really the door to the boat shed behind Margaret’s house. She set down her pipe suddenly and stood, the hem of her dress rushing to the floor like a waterfall. It was blue, woven through with red strips of cloth, studded with yellow beads. “Leroy is back.”
Darren stood, thanked Margaret for the food, and even nodded a polite goodbye to the mostly mute men around the table who hadn’t exactly been warm to him. He was sliding his Stetson back on his head when Margaret told him what she needed him to know. “You understand he didn’t hurt that boy, don’t you? Leroy is my friend for sixty years. I know him. He would never do this.”
Darren was waiting on the old man’s front porch when Mr. Page came up from the boat shed lugging fishing gear without a cooler or a single catfish in sight. Darren asked the man point-blank why he had lied about seeing Levi Friday night. “They’re going to use that against you now,” he said. “Look, I don’t know what you did,
but if you were serious before about getting a lawyer, now’s the time.”
“Aw, I just said that shit to get you out of my house.”
Darren raised his hands in exasperation. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. “They’re getting a warrant on you. They’re going to search your place.”
“Good,” Leroy said, pushing past Darren into his house, where he unceremoniously dumped the fishing gear in the front parlor. “They had to get a warrant to get into them white people’s trailer down the way, they gon’ have to do the same for me. Wasn’t about to let a black man with a badge use his East Texas bona fides to trick me into letting the law search my house. I want the same rules the white man gets.”
“So that’s it?” Darren said. “That’s why you kicked me out?”
“That ain’t good enough?” He walked down the hallway to his kitchen. Within moments he had the radio on and the refrigerator open. He popped the top of a Miller High Life, then pulled a premade bologna sandwich from a stack of at least two dozen just like it, all of them wrapped loosely in wax paper, lunch for a month, maybe two. The sight saddened Darren in a way he couldn’t explain. There was a bluesy zydeco on the radio, Beau Jocque on the accordion, singing about coming home, another song trying to pin that elusive idea to a place and time. Darren didn’t think he’d ever heard a blues song consider the place currently under the singer’s feet home. No, home was always a long walk on a dusty road, a stowaway ride in a boxcar, or a slow train to Jordan. All you need is faith to hear the diesels humming. For Beau Jocque, home was where his mother was. ’Cause that’s where I belong, he sang before one of the meanest guitar solos in zydeco history, more East Texas than western Louisiana, the black coloring the French. The longing in his throaty tenor was familiar to Darren, who’d been raised on this music, who set a blues record on his uncles’ hi-fi the second he walked into the house in Camilla, every time, because even there, even in the house where he’d grown up, home was always a reach back in time, glassed as it was in memory. It was still an idea he couldn’t exactly touch. Food could sometimes reach it, a pot of peas and ham hocks on the stove. Stories too. But music did it every time. Texas blues were the way home.
Darren asked, “Did you or did you not see Levi King Friday night?”
“Not gon’ be called a lie in my own home.”
“Dana, Marnie King’s daughter, says you weren’t even on patrol that night.”
“You see what trash she come from?”
“Don’t make her a liar.”
“But you gon’ take her word over mine, a homeowner and a man who never caused nobody no trouble in his whole life, a vet who served his country?”
“She says she never saw you.”
“She’s wrong,” Leroy said. He guzzled half the bottle of beer.
“Then walk me through it again. What were you doing when you saw the boy?” Darren asked. Leroy Page paused so long that Darren could hear the soft patter of water, as light as tears falling on sand, coming from somewhere in the kitchen. He glanced down and saw that the rolled-up bottoms of Mr. Page’s dungarees were sopping wet from the knee down. What the hell kind of fishing was he doing out there that got nearly his whole body wet? Thin beads of water, cloudy as crocodile tears, continued to patter onto the linoleum floor. The old man downed the rest of his beer and belched softly. “I was walking,” he said finally.
“Walking?” Darren said. “No horse, no patrol?”
“I don’t believe I ever said I was on patrol.”
Darren was sure he had. But five seconds later, he couldn’t remember if Quinn or Page had used the word patrol. He cursed himself for not taking the time to write up a few notes after that first encounter with Page and Donald and Ray Goodfellow. He’d been so focused on getting info for the task force—and on his own plans to use Bill King’s incarceration and messy family life for his own ends—that finding the kid had almost been an afterthought. But Levi King felt real to him now. He still had the boy’s picture in the pocket of his shirt.
“And so you were just taking a stroll . . . down by the trailers?”
“My property still,” Leroy said with a huff of indignation.
“Unarmed?”
“Didn’t say I was stupid.”
“And you saw the boy?”
“I saw the boy,” Leroy said. “He was locking up his granddaddy’s boat in Lester’s old shed.”
“You two speak?”
“Naw. I reckon he’d grown kind of scared of me, the way I cussed him after the mess with Margaret’s church and blackening my door with ugly words. Naw, Levi didn’t say anything, and neither did I.”
“Did you see Dana, Levi’s older sister, in the window of his trailer?”
“Didn’t look toward the trailer, just kept on with my walk.”
Darren sighed, removed his hat, and scratched at an itch at the back of his head. He didn’t like the fact that the story sounded slightly different than the one Leroy had given before, just as he didn’t like the part of himself that was clearly trying to protect the man. He thought of sitting with Greg in that bar, remembered his best friend of twenty-something years trying to get Darren to own up to his blind spots when it came to black folks, the feelings of deference that shot up through him like roots through fertile soil—the instinct to protect and serve that came over him around black folks, especially those of advanced age, men and women whose challenges and fortitude had made Darren’s life possible.
“Why don’t you just tell the sheriff, the FBI, that you’re planning to sell?” Darren said, his old legal training never too far from his mind. “If you’re planning to sell and get out of this place soon, leaving behind all the mess with the white folks down in the trailers, there’d be no motive to harm Levi King.”
“The FBI?”
“This is serious, Leroy. Folks want to make an example of you. It’s more than just the sheriff’s department in this thing now. Just tell them you have a deal to sell the land to Sandler Gaines, and it might shift the investigation.”
The old man opened the fridge and pulled out another Miller High Life. He offered a golden sweating bottle of it to Darren, who hesitated and then refused. “Never heard of him,” Leroy said, popping the top of the beer. His hands were dry and ashy since he’d come in off the water, and Darren noticed scratches on them that he hadn’t seen before. They were at least two, three days old.
“Sandler Gaines, the real estate developer. The man buying Hopetown.”
“I’ve sold my land to a trust, something Rosemary King put together with some preservation society she’s on the board of. The Marion County Texas Historical Society, something like that. This is a sacred site for the Caddo Indians, and it will stay that way. Rosemary made me that promise.”
Darren shook his head; too many contradictory pieces of information coming at him fast, like he’d walked into a swarm of horseflies. He needed to see clearly, to make sense of what he’d just heard. “So in this deal with Rosemary and her trust, she’s essentially going to force her grandson, his mother, and his sister off the land? Just kick them out with no place to go?”
“Oh, them people ain’t kin to her,” Leroy said. “The only one in all this that Rosemary gives a damn about is her boy.”
“Levi?”
Leroy shook his head. “Bill, her son.”
Darren gave in and asked Leroy to go ahead and give him one of those beers. He watched the old man lift the bottle opener from where it hung on a string by the Frigidaire and noticed a bent, cream-colored business card that was taped to the wall next to it. It was, Darren could just make out, a card from a law firm. So the old man had contacted a lawyer after all. He thought to comment on it but liked the idea that the old man maybe didn’t realize he’d seen it.
Leroy Page was right about one thing, Darren thought. Rosemary King seemed infinitely more concerned about the welfare of her son, Bill, than about the whereabouts of her nine-year-old grandson. But how Leroy knew this was itself a mystery. “H
ow do you know Mrs. King?” Darren asked. The moss-draped, swamp-side hamlet of Hopetown seemed a world away from Rosemary’s Victorian colonial in town. “I mean, how did you even come to know her well enough to reach out for her help on this deal to put Hopetown into a private trust?”
“Oh, it was Rosemary who reached out to me,” Leroy said, eager to make that piece of it crystal clear. He set down his beer and started in on his bologna sandwich, talking with food in his mouth. “Like I said before, black people are the most forgiving people on earth.”
There was so much bitterness in the way he said it this time that Darren made a face, not understanding what the man was getting at, realizing that he didn’t actually understand Leroy at all. From the moment Darren had arrived in Hopetown, he’d looked into the man’s elderly black face and seen his own uncles, his grandparents and great-grands past; he’d seen Geneva Sweet and the black folks in Lark, and he’d seen Mack, the longtime family friend he was trying to save from prison. But he didn’t know Leroy Page, not really, and he definitely didn’t think the man was being straight with him now, hadn’t been since they met. He nodded toward the scratches on his hands. “How’d you get those?” he said.
Leroy looked down at his hands, then looked up at Darren in his pressed slacks and ironed shirt, the shiny badge pinned to his chest, and said with a tiny kernel of scorn he didn’t bother to hide, “I work with my hands, son.”