Grievances

by Mark Ethridge

  “And the thing with the garden writer? It wasn’t about me and you know it. It was about you running away. But you can’t run from yourself, Matt. Sometimes it’s all you have to hold on to. One day maybe you’ll figure that out.”

  Chapter Eleven

  By noon Monday everyone in the newsroom knew about the highly touted investigative piece that had fallen through—at great expense and inconvenience to the paper.

  I kept my head down and tried to pretend the whole thing never happened. Walker had been burned pretty badly and I wanted to let as much time pass as possible before bringing up the subject of Wallace Sampson again.

  I covered the school board meeting because the regular education writer was on vacation. The second night I ended up on the front page with six paragraphs on a Pineville farmer’s pumpkin that looked like Elvis, provided that you squinted and sort of tilted your head sideways. It was my first front-pager in more than a month.

  But the Sampson story was on my mind and on the third day back, I brought it up with Bullock.

  We were alone in the cafeteria except for a janitor and the cloying smell of disinfectant and hard-boiled coffee. “Ronnie, we need to find a way to get back down there. Another couple of days is all we need. Maybe a week.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “We were rushed.”

  “You asked for two weeks. You got two weeks.”

  “Two weeks was a guess. We had no idea it would take as long as it did to get the police report.” I was rehearsing the argument I would use on Walker. “There’s stuff we still need to do. We never went back to Reverend Grace. And there’s got to be a way to get to Olen Pennegar. Even if he can’t talk, he understands. Both of them were around when it happened. We need to ask Walker for another week.”

  Bullock tore the tops from four packages of artificial creamer and emptied them into his coffee. “God, this stuff has all the appeal of number two grade crude.” He took a sip and sighed. “You could be right. But I don’t see Walker buying it. Our credibility isn’t exactly at a high point.”

  We shuffled back upstairs to the newsroom where a copy carrier was busy placing the latest edition of Saints & Sinners on all the newsroom desks. S&S, as it was known, was Carmela Cruz’s weekly in-house two-page newsletter critique of the previous week’s content. It was picky: “We said in a sports story that Monroe is twenty miles from Charlotte. It is eighteen,” she wrote. It was provocative: “Of the thirty-five photographs in the Business Section last week, thirty-five were white males in ties.” And it was well-read: On days when S&S hit the newsroom desks, work didn’t start until reporters, editors and photographers had had a chance to see if their work had earned bouquets or brickbats or, the usual case, had attracted no attention at all.

  No one had elected Carmela the arbiter of newsroom quality. She had started S&S on her own and everyone understood that many of its items carried an underlying theme: heroic copy editors (who worked, of course, for Carmela) were responsible for all that was good in the Charlotte Times as they worked miracles with poorly executed metro stories while producing clever, insightful headlines and weighty national and international stories that delighted readers.

  Knowing all that going in, I was still stunned when I got to the item in S&S titled “Never Send a Boy . . .”: “The Wallace Sampson story debacle was a failure of concept and a failure of execution from which the metro desk would do well to learn,” the item read. “The first question is: Of all the stories in the world, why would the Charlotte Times elect to go after one with no apparent relevance to our readers? And, second, if it were such an important story, it would have been well to select reporters experienced in dealing with such an assignment. These decisions were quite costly and would have been more so, had the story run. Fortunately, readers were spared—and instead were treated to the National Desk’s excellent package on Cyprus.”

  My ears burned and I flung the copy of S&S out of my cubicle where it fluttered to the floor.

  “Bitch,” I swore to no one in particular.

  Ronnie Bullock arrived at my cubicle with his neck muscles bulging and twisting a copy of S&S like he was trying to strangle it.“What a bitch. Where the hell does she get off? She’s never been out of the office. Never reported a damned story in her life. She’s probably never written anything more complicated than a grocery list. And she probably leaves that to the woman in the family.”

  I wouldn’t have said it myself. But I was angry enough that I didn’t mind when he did. And I knew then and there that no matter what I was not going to give up on the Wallace Sampson story.

  “I’m gonna trash those things,” Bullock announced. He began going from desk to desk, collecting the just-distributed copies of Saints & Sinners. “This stuff is complete bullshit.”

  “Ronnie, I don’t think you ought to do that.”

  “It’s trash. It belongs in the trash.”

  “It looks like censorship.”

  “She needs to be censored. Walker’s gonna go crazy when he sees this. We’ll never be able to talk him into letting us go back down there.”

  “Maybe there’s another way. Walker’s probably never going to be able take another chance on us. But who says we need his permission?”

  Bullock looked at me like I was nuts.

  “I’m serious. We don’t have that much to do. We could do it in a series of day trips. It’s good that we work nights. We could leave early, before dawn and get to Hirtsboro first thing in the morning. If we head back right after lunch, we could be in the newsroom in time to work our regular shifts.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Why? We just go down there every morning and come back every afternoon until we get what we need. Then we spring it. It’ll be too late for anyone to tell us no.”

  He looked across the newsroom at the rows of desks and the copies of Saints & Sinners on each.

  “I’ll pick you up at 5:00 a.m.,” he said.

  Even on a slow night, it takes me two hours to wind down once I get home from the office. On a high adrenaline night, or if I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee, it can take longer. It was 3:00 a.m. before I fell asleep and only ninety minutes later when the alarm went off. But I was ready when Bullock arrived, with military precision, at 5:00 a.m.

  The sky had not yet begun to lighten and a crescent moon hung low on the eastern horizon as we sped south, too drowsy to talk. Bullock tuned in WWL from New Orleans and we listened to country music and the weather forecasts for the interstate highways system from Oregon to Florida, programming aimed at truckers, our brother travelers through the night. When we turned off the interstate and away from the lights of the city, the sky grew thick with stars.

  The highway through rural upstate South Carolina was straight and empty. Bullock set the cruise control at seventy-five miles per hour. The Dodge whooshed smoothly through the cool night air. With a series of clicks, Bullock notched the cruise control higher and soon the speedometer read 80, then 85. Then 87, 89, 91.

  “Better take it easy, Ronnie. We don’t need another ticket.”

  “Would you relax? Every minute we save coming and going is another minute we can spend reporting.”

  I shut my eyes and let him go. The radio switched from an upbeat country song to a report from Nashville about the goings-on of various country music personalities including two that had announced their engagement. Before long, I was asleep and dreaming a strange dream in which Delana and my father were in the University Chapel getting married while my dead brother Luke served as best man. I watched from the choir box, unable to make myself seen or heard.

  The sensation of falling snapped me awake. It took me a moment to get my bearings. WWL had turned to static. The sky was lightening in the east. Fog clung to the ground like clouds that had descended to earth in the night and had failed to rise before dawn. The sun popped over the horizon and I felt
the heat on my cheek. I glanced at the speedometer. The needle nicked 95.

  Bullock caught me looking. “This is why we have the Dodge instead of your old beater,” he said.

  Ten minutes later and without slowing down, we followed the highway into the swamp. Sunlight filtered through the high tree canopy and illuminated the remnants of fog that created a gauzy, dreamy quality, like we were driving through a fairy tale.

  In my peripheral vision I caught the blur of a doe and three fawns standing by the edge of the swamp. I was thinking we were lucky they hadn’t bolted across the road when Bullock swore and swerved. The Dodge fishtailed into a three-sixty. I caught the huge scared eyes of a giant buck right outside my window as we spun down the highway in a slow-motion pirouette. The glove box popped open and the .38 slammed into my knee again. My reporter’s notebook went flying across the backseat. Bullock gripped the steering wheel, hit the gas and kept his foot off the brake. Miraculously the car straightened. Bullock braked to a stop in the middle of the highway. The buck, the doe, and the fawns were gone.

  We sat there breathing heavily, our hearts slamming in our chests. After a minute, Bullock slipped the Dodge into gear and pulled over to the side of the road. Moments later, a school bus passed in the opposite direction, its driver and passengers oblivious to what had occurred.

  “Close call,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Good thing I spotted him. Those things will about take out a car.”

  We drove the rest of the way at the speed limit. It seemed like we were crawling but we reached Hirtsboro by 8:00 a.m. Just in time for breakfast.

  Bullock parked by the tracks on Jefferson Davis Boulevard. “We don’t have time for the Hungry Tummy. I’ll call Brad and let him know we’re in town. You go over to the Feed & Seed and get us a couple of Moon Pies and RC Colas. Then we’ll go see your buddy, the Reverend Grace.”

  We got out of the car. The sun had climbed higher in the sky. Bullock unbuttoned the pocket of his khaki shirt, extracted his aviator sunglasses, slipped them on and went in search of a phone.

  Just over the tree line, where Hirtsboro stopped and fields started, a crop duster roared past, swooped high, made a sharp turn and descended for another long low pass over the surrounding furrows. On the street in front of me, a tractor chugged by pulling a trailer. Twelve black men in floppy straw hats sat on the edges of the flatbed, their legs dangling off the sides, workers on their way to the fields. I crossed the street to the Feed & Seed just as the rig pulled to a stop in front.

  “Ya’ll be quick about it,” commanded the driver, a deeply tanned white man in a John Deere cap. “We’re already late.” The workers slid off the flatbed and ambled to the store. I followed.

  I plunged my hand into the icy water of the open cooler by the front and pulled out two RCs. I found the Moon Pies at the checkout counter. The men on the flatbed were already there, waiting to pay for individual cigarettes sold from a glass jar with a hand-lettered sign that read, “smokes—10 cent ea.”

  The tractor driver came into the store, pulled two six packs of beer from the cooler, grabbed a bag of ice, and got in line behind me. “Don’t be botherin’ me for it ’til quittin’ time,” he said to the workers.

  I paid for the RCs and Moon Pies and met Bullock back at the car.

  “Brad’ll meet us at the church.”

  At the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer shrieks of laughter could be heard as two dozen young children chased each other and tumbled on the church grounds as three older women watched. The smell of fried chicken and cooked vegetables wafted from an open window along with the sounds of laughter and the banging of pots and pans from the church kitchen. We found Reverend Grace bent over a small desk in his office, writing.

  “Lord have mercy! You scared me,” he said, unfolding his lanky frame and jumping up quickly when I stuck my head inside the door. “I heard you’d given up and gone home.”

  I had forgotten how tall he was. The top of my head reached his clerical collar. I had to look up to look him in the eye. “No, sir. Just a little setback. We’re still on it.” I remembered he hadn’t met Ronnie Bullock and I introduced them.

  Bullock, apparently seeing the dark pants, black shirt and clerical collar as a uniform, stepped forward, shook hands firmly, took a crisp step back, and said, “How are you, sir?”

  “Ronnie and I are double-teaming this thing,” I explained.

  “Triple-teaming it,” said Brad Hall, walking into the office. “Good to see you again, Reverend. Matt. Ronnie.” We shook hands.

  “Three wise men,” Reverend Grace said. “Seeking what?”

  “Road map information,” I answered. “What we talked about. What you said.”

  Reverend Grace closed the door to his small study, walked to the window and silently watched the children playing outside. Finally, he spoke. “The church in Hirtsboro exists to ease the burdens of its members. We take care of the young. We feed the poor. We mourn the dead. I counsel them about their sins and their fears. There is not much we don’t know about the lives of our people. But I cannot give you information I have learned in confidence.”

  “I understand your vows,” I said impatiently. “I understand confidentiality. Just tell us where to look.”

  Grace turned to Brad. “How well do you know the people who work for you? Do you know their names? Their last names, not just their first names? Do you know what comes after Miss Mary? Or Mr. Jim? Do you know the names of their children? Their grandchildren? Do you know what they think about Strom Thurmond? Or Jesse Jackson? How well do you know them?”

  “I’ve known them all my life,” Brad said. “Look, don’t start on me about where I’m coming from. I’m the guy who got this whole Wallace Sampson investigation going.”

  Grace pressed his palms together as if he were praying. “Have you talked to Mary Pell?”

  “I don’t see . . .” Brad said and stopped. “Mary Pell?” he said incredulously.

  “In the church, we can tell people how to get to heaven. We can show them the path. But we don’t know exactly what they’re going to find when they get there.”

  Outside the church, Bullock glanced at his watch and said, “Oh-ten-hundred hours. Do we have time to talk to Mary Pell today or should we head back?”

  “She’ll be at the Big House,” Brad said.

  “Half hour to Windrow. Maybe three and a half hours drive back,” I calculated. “Let’s go for it.”

  We caravanned to Windrow, Bullock and me in the Dodge trailing Brad in his pickup. We found Mary Pell at the Big House, just as Brad had said. She was in the kitchen, on the phone.

  “Now, Charles, don’t be sending me any of those bent cans this time. You sent ten cans of soup up here last week and three of the cans were bent. Mr. Hall doesn’t want bent cans so don’t try to send any more of them up here.”

  The cord on the wall phone was long and Mary Pell paced back and forth as she talked. She wore her lavender maid’s uniform, trimmed in white at the collar and hem. She was small and wizened, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a bun. Brad said she was sixty-five but she looked older. As she paced, she favored her right hip.

  “She’s on the phone to the market,” Brad whispered. “She phones in the order every day to the grocery and they bring it out. She knows everyone who works in the place or ever has so she tends to get her way.”

  “Make sure that beef is lean, Charles,” Mary Pell was saying. “You pick me out a good one, y’hear?”

  “I swear those boys think I just fell off the turnip truck,” Mary Pell said when she hung up. “Mr. Matt, I didn’t know you’d be comin’ back. I don’t believe I have your beds made up.”

  “We’re not staying. As a matter of fact, we have to head back after we talk to you.”

  She looked surprised. “Why do you need to talk to me again?”

  “Mary Pell, w
e’ve been talking to a lot of people,” Brad said. “You know how long I’ve been working on this. Matt and Ronnie have, too. We want to solve this killing. You were around then. Someone told us we should talk to you about De Sto and the firebombing, that you might be able to help.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Can’t tell you,” I said. “We promised. Besides, it doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean you can’t tell me who told you?” she asked archly.

  “We made a promise of confidentiality,” I said. “We promised the person we wouldn’t tell. Sometimes people will tell reporters information only if we promise not to put their names in the paper. We made that promise.”

  “You can break it.”

  “We wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Reporters have gone to jail to protect that privilege even when they’ve been ordered to talk by a court.”

  “So you believe in civil disobedience.”

  “I never thought about it that way, but in this case, yes.”

  “Would you make that promise to me?”

  I looked at Bullock who nodded his head. “Yes,” I said. “But it’s conditional on one thing.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t lie,” Bullock said.

  Mary Pell took off her apron and laid it on the counter. She hung up a dishtowel that was lying by the sink, went into the pantry and began stacking jelly jars. She emerged from the pantry a moment later. “I like what you said to Mr. Hall, the way you stood up to him that night at dinner. Willie Snow and I laughed about it all night. I knew I could trust you then.” She turned to Brad. “Your father can be stuck in the past.”

  “No one knows it better than me,” he replied.

  We followed her down a flight of stairs and into the basement. Two bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling. A washer, dryer and commercial clothes press sat in the corner next to a laundry sink. A toilet stood in the open. A copy of Ebony magazine rested on the tank. I wondered if Mary Pell was not comfortable using the toilets in the main part of the house or if it was not permitted. Mary Pell’s purse sat on a laundry table. She rummaged around in it and pulled out a small tin.