by Carolyn Wall
His voice catches. “Mr. Phelps, he takes out a knife and sets to cuttin’ off my ear. But I come to. I jump up and run outa there like the devil had my shirttail. That boy, Booger, whistle to me from the bushes, and I run in there. He hide me till the sun come up and all them men drive off in wagons.
“One day,” Junk says, “I tol’ Mr. Tate.”
Only Elizabeth knew how death came to Booger. I recall the Phelps boys saying he had shot himself. How Pap offered to help bury him, all the time knowing what monsters they were.
“Did they ever come back for you?”
“They come all right. But they take Samuel, my mammy’s oldest.”
“Were they—wearing red hoods, Junk?”
“Yes, ma’am, they were.”
I turn in my seat, see Miss Pinny Albert and her sisters and Miss Dovey. Junk’s mama, rocking and holding her daughters, Mettie and Doll, whose husbands ran off—or did they? I see a half dozen children and old men with gray chin whiskers. Mr. Radney Holifield, who is near eighty and a lifetime deacon in the African Methodist Church that is no more. Two ladies with babies asleep in their arms. A dozen more.
The bus is shaking as if it’s palsied.
But I need to know. “How many others?”
Mr. Holifield rises partway from his seat. “Yes, ma’am, they hung my brother John. Old man Phelps said he stole a sheep from their field.”
Miz Iva says, “My boy Lavelle, when he worked at the bakery. Hung him, then sent word he’d stole bread.”
“—My daddy when he rode into town for a newspaper. And my uncle.”
A terrible moan rises up from me. “Didn’t you ever try to stop them?”
“Yes, ma’am—”
Someone says, “My pap and his buddies, when they come home from the war. But them Phelpses said they caught my pap watchin’ their ma through a window. They took him away and brought him home blind in both eyes.”
“When we knew they was in town, we’d pray to God, then listen for ’em to drive up in our yard.”
“It ain’t just our county,” Mr. Holifield says. “They brung ’em from clear across the state line. All any family got back was one ear—so’s we’d know.”
My words are weak and without substance. “Miss Dovey, Miz Hanley. How—how did I not know?”
“You couldn’t, Olivia,” says Miss Dovey. “You ain’t got this black skin.”
I look at my hands. If God had answered my prayers back then, I, too, would have dreaded sundown every Saturday.
“You could have told me.”
“What for?” Miz Hanley said.
“You-all took the bolt of red cloth from my store, didn’t you?”
“We did,” she says. “Din’t make a dent in what they was doing, but—it was something.”
I sigh. “What will happen, now that Phelps is dead?” “Guess the others’ll just carry on.” “Do you know who they are?”
“Ain’t nobody knows for sure. Them Cott’ners is deep.” I want to tell Longfeet to hurry. But he’s already hunched over the wheel.
61
We arrive early in the prison lot. The others won’t leave me. The Reverend suggests we close our eyes and get some sleep—ain’t nobody gonna bother us here. Close by are the high turrets of the penitentiary. It’s enormous, the white wall going on for miles and it’s topped with rolls of razor wire. At eight o’clock the Reverend touches my shoulder, says they’ll wait for me, take me with them after I’ve seen Pap.
I don’t argue because I have nowhere else to go and no way to get home. I’ve thought no further than this. We drive around until we come to a gate where four men in gray uniforms hold rifles to their chests. The Reverend leans across Longfeet and speaks. The guard shakes his head.
“Visiting hours start soon, Olivia.”
It’s a fair walk to the gate but maybe not so long when you consider the years.
Love Alice gets up to loosen my braid and winds my hair in a knot. She pinches my cheeks.
I step down from the bus, and set off up the road, but by the time I arrive at the gate, I can’t remember why I’ve come. What place is this—granite building after building and small fenced yards. Rows of gray trucks. I should get back on the bus, ask the Reverend to drive away. But now I’m here. I’m here.
People stream through the gate. Some have children. The coloreds hang back, to be let in last. I give the guard my name. He asks who I’m here to see. I can’t breathe.
“Tate Harker.”
I wait for him to say, “Nobody ever comes to see him.”
But he doesn’t, just writes on a card with a buttonhole. Jabs a thumb to show I should button it on my coat—whose coat? Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing, where they’re going. We walk single file through a chain-link passage. Another guard glances at our cards. One by one they let us into a damp gray room. Although it’s not raining, water stains the walls and spreads in puddles on the concrete floor. I follow the others down a ringing hall. Sign my name to a list, sit on a metal chair with bent legs.
I don’t know what I feel anymore. I recall being angered that my pap simply wanted his wife to come home. Then when times went bad, he took her side. All these years I blamed him for not surviving the crash. Now all those quarrels seem pale and flat in light of his having lied about his death.
Over a loudspeaker, someone calls names. I am trapped. But when the woman next to me sobs and runs for the door, I see that I, too, can choose to go. I stay. Wait with my hands in my lap and pain in my heart till I hear, “Olivia Cross!”
A guard waits for me in front of a steel door. With a great deal of clanking, the door rolls open. When we step through, the door grinds shut, and there’s yet another hall.
The room we enter is long and narrow, a putrid green. A row of windows runs down the center, and on either side are chairs. The guard shows me where to sit, and I see that the window is really two panes of glass with a wire grid between, and a perforated metal plate that, I suppose, allows voices to pass through. A guard stands at each end of the room, and another watches from a balcony.
When all the visitors’ chairs are taken, a door opens on the other side. A prisoner comes in. His trousers and shirt are striped, his hands chained in front. The guard snaps the chain to a ring in the counter two windows away, and the prisoner sits down.
“Thirty minutes,” he says. On the wall, a big clock ticks off the time.
The woman on my left leans on the sill, puts her hand on the glass, waiting. I look away.
Two more prisoners come.
Then the door opens, and I recognize this man. His hair is white, and he’s thinner than I remember. But he walks straight and tall, as Tate Harker always did, and he stands looking at me until the guard gives him a shove. He sits down. Snap. He’s locked to the counter. I keep my eyes on the stripes. A patch is sewn on his shirt, with the letter M.
I put my hand to my face.
On the other side, there’s a terrible groaning, and I worry that the guard will take him away.
After a while he says, “Ida’s gone.” His voice has not changed. “If you’re here, that means Ida’s gone.”
“She’s in Buelton.”
After a minute, he nods.
More minutes pass before I force the words out. “I think—I killed Alton Phelps—yesterday.”
Through the holes in the metal I hear his sigh. “Aren’t we a pair.”
“A long time ago—he tried to hang Junk.”
“Yes.”
“And others—”
“Thirty-four on the day they sent me here.”
“Thirty-four! And you didn’t say anything?”
“That’s right.”
I hear laughing, weeping, buzzing talk. I want to climb through this glass and beat him senseless. “You could’ve told me you were here.”
“Ida Mae must have changed a lot.”
“She never changed.”
“Then you’ll understand. If I’d told you,
she’d have made your life hell.”
I want to laugh at that, make an ugly, sharp-edged sound.
He says, “Whatever she did, she’d have done a hundred times over.”
“I slept in a dog run.”
“Me, too,” he says, looking around.
“The Cotton Club. Tell me what you know.”
He shakes his head. “There isn’t time.”
“Start anyway.”
He draws in a breath. “Evil men, evil deeds.”
I can’t argue with that. I risk a look at his face.
“They’re watching me, Olivia. Listening.”
I remember the conversation from the bus:
Do you know who they are?
Ain’t nobody for sure. Them Cott’ners is deep.
“I can tell you this,” Pap says, leaning close. “I witnessed hangings. Went there on a delivery one night and saw into the barn. Boys not much older than you—”
“Tell me who. I’ll—”
His elbows are on the counter, hands restless, nails scratching at the paint. I think: Coward.
“Why didn’t you do something?”
He gives me a long look. “With Phelps and the club down the road from you? And then later—who’d listen to a convicted man?”
The guard says, “Five minutes.”
That look again. Then Pap drops his eyes, scratches at the glass, looks up. “Who told you?”
I glance up at the guards, lower my voice. By now Pink has told the hunt club everything. I’m as good as dead. “Alton Phelps, just before I pushed him down the cellar stairs.”
“God almighty.”
“I don’t know if I killed him. Junk and some others went up to get him. They say he’s dead now.”
“Well then, that’s that.”
“What do you mean ‘that’s that’!”
He shakes his head like he’s terribly tired. “Olivia, let them do this for you.”
I feel hard and cold and sit back in my chair.
“Leave it alone,” he says again.
“A lot of people will take the blame—”
He pinches together his thumb and finger. I look at his hands, picking, picking. Their constant movement is giving me a headache. Maybe I’ll end up with a nervous disorder like the one Ida had.
“Olivia,” he says, “you remember how old Jackson Winna-mere used to ride up to our place on his mule?”
I feel like I’ve hit a bump in the road. “I remember, kind of. He used to wave his hat….”
“You asked me, once, why he did that.”
“You said—it was a sign.”
He nods. “And?”
“That a body had to learn to read the signs.”
And then I see the sign. He’s not peeling paint or tracing cracks in the glass—he’s holding an invisible pencil, sketching words. What does he want—paper? A letter? He sees that I see.
But I don’t, not completely.
He passes one hand from his right to left, idly, as if he’s brushing things away. Passing the potatoes, turning a page.
I’ve seen him do that with his doctoring books, flipping pages, writing some more.
I hear Phelps’ voice, I know what you’re doing, and I want it stopped.
What I’m doing is figuring it out. Like Pap did, a long, long time ago.
He says softly, “All of it, Olivia. Every single bit.”
I stammer a few words, piecing, piecing, and then, in a glorious unfurling, the truth explodes in my head as the books and the hoods and the hay slide into place. It’s all I can do not to scream it out.
And they think I know. They think Pap told me.
On the other side of the glass, he shakes his head. Shh.
I can hardly sit still, shove close to the opening. “We’ll hire a lawyer, Will’m and me! Wing will help.”
“That’s useless talk, daughter. I killed a man.”
“So did I!”
“What’s done is done, Olivia.”
He says, do I see this insignia, the letter M, on his shirt?
Yes.
He’s a medic. He helps inmates, calms men. Now I, myself, must settle down and think clearly. I breathe in and out.
“Pap, did you love Ida—in the beginning?”
“I did.”
“And she loved you?”
“I believe so.”
He answers the question I can’t ask. “Sometimes, Olivia, she loved you, too. In those moments we were as right as apple pie.”
The guard bellows, “On your feet!” He unlocks the prisoners and leads them away.
Pap shuffles through the door without looking back.
62
I’ve seen a ghost.
Who told you, Olivia?
Phelps told me.
Not really. The unraveling began when we dug by the outhouse and found nothing, no coffin, no bones. I felt it the moment Ida ignited her gown. Now I’m choking to death on all that I know—and all that I don’t because I haven’t yet found what I’m looking for.
I need help, right now, and I bang on the guard’s window. “Excuse me, please! I have to make a telephone call!”
“We got no public phone,” he says.
“This is an emergency!”
“They’re all emergencies. There’s a pay phone down the road, that intersection.”
I run for the bus, step up, hear the doors wheeze shut. I see them, in their seats, wrapped against the cold, faces waiting, hopeful, babies being soothed and rocked.
“Longfeet, start this thing up. I’ve got to get to the pay phone.”
I reach in my pocket and count the change. “I need twelve cents!”
They dig in their trouser pockets and handbags and pull out nickels. Then I can see the highway, and Longfeet grinds the bus to a stop.
I step down, and into the booth, pick up the receiver and wait for the operator, but nothing happens. Seconds go by. Sweet Jesus, how far to another telephone? I clutch the nickels and watch through the window as a shiny black car comes down the highway, turns the corner. Two men are inside, their eyes shaded by the brims of their hats.
“Operator.”
“The marshals’ office in Nashville, Tennessee.”
“Deposit ten cents, please.”
Another car! This very booth is where I’m going to be slaughtered, and after that every colored man, woman, and child in Aurora.
“Marshal Evan Quaid’s office.”
“This is Olivia Harker Cross,” I wrench out. “I live on Farm Road One in Aurora, Kentucky, and I have proof of thirty-four lynchings in Pope County.”
“Ma’am—hold on a moment.”
The cars pull in behind the bus. “I can’t—”
Marshal Quaid comes on the line. “Miz Cross?”
“We’re on a bus at the crossroad in Kingston. We need help right now.”
“How many of you?”
Car doors open. They’re going to kill us, and they have plenty of reason.
“Maybe thirty. Mr. Quaid, I know where the bodies from the cotton trials are buried. I know—”
“Stay where you are. We’ve got a landing strip in Kingston.”
They’re going to fly here? “We can’t—”
“Then you-all head this way. We’ll intercept—”
“No money for gasoline—”
“Can you-all make it back to Aurora?”
“Maybe.”
“We’re on our way.”
A third car pulls up. The telephone goes dead. Have they cut the line, or did Quaid hang up?
Men I recognize stand outside, talking. Deciding the best way to take us.
I drop in the last nickel.
They won’t murder us, but will follow us and force us into a ditch, watch as the bus rolls down, then shoot us as we tumble from the shattered windows. Maybe, like Ida, we’ll go up in flames.
“Kentuckian Hotel. This is Molly.”
“Molly, put Mr. Harris on. Hurry.”
“Yes
, ma’am.”
They’re moving toward the telephone booth now—French, the sheriff, a couple of others. They don’t look like killers, but now I know the color of their hearts.
Wing’s sweet voice comes on the line.
“It’s Olivia. I—”
“Olivia? Where are you?”
“Kingston. Wing?”
“I’m here.”
“I’ve always loved you,” I blurt. “Back then, being angry when your folks died, and when you married Grace, I was selfish and childish, but—”
“Olivia, honey—”
“Wing—” I pare the words from my throat. “Is Will’m with you?”
“He’s here.”
“Take care of him.”
I can hear Wing’s fear. I drop the phone. Before the door is closed, Longfeet has us moving. The Cott’ners bang on the side of the bus, then race for their cars.
“Help’s on the way,” I tell Longfeet. “But we have to go back.”
Two cars have come alongside, another behind. The Reverend turns from the window and shouts for everyone to get down. “There’s only God’s help for us now,” he says. “Longfeet, take us to the Methodist church.”
The bus pulls into traffic.
“No! You can’t jeopardize people who have nothing to do with this. Listen to me, I can prove the Cott’ners murdered those people—your brothers and sons. But we’ve got to go home!”
They look so tired.
I say, “Reverend Culpepper, God helps those who help themselves.”
He sighs and rubs at his face. “We’ll take a fair show of hands.”
“Way I see it,” Junk says, hunkering down with his arms around Love Alice, “I’d sooner meet Jesus on the road home as any other.”
Miz Hanley speaks up. “Ain’t no need to take count, Reverend. If Tate Harker says go home, we go home.”
Longfeet finds a wide place in the road and turns the bus around. It wheezes mightily, coughs, and dies. He grinds the gears and starts us up again. I hold on tight and watch the gravel and brush race by my window, duck my head when the cars begin to pass and pull ahead. Coming around a turn, I see that a black sedan barricades the road ahead.
“Hold on!” Longfeet says, and he stands on the gas pedal.
My last thought before we hit broadside is that I hope nobody was in that car. Junk and the Reverend catch me as I topple. With a great screaming of metal and the stink of burnt rubber, we shove the car off to one side, and it disappears. In the mirror I catch Longfeet’s toothy grin. Behind me there’s sobbing and weeping as we barrel along toward Aurora. Any minute, we’ll be surrounded again. The bus rattles so hard, I fear for its parts. No one closes an eye, not even the children who are tucked into laps and under the seats. A great deal of crying has been replaced by prayers.