Grievances

by Mark Ethridge

  “I said I thought you’d gone.”

  I saw her look at the book on the table. It happened to be open to a section on oral sex. I felt like a fifteen-year-old caught by mom with a dirty magazine. “I just picked it up,” I laughed nervously. “It opened there.”

  “Not likely in this house.”

  I felt myself flush. I looked at her and for the first time I became aware of how she was dressed—heeled blue slippers and a matching blue silk robe tied loosely at the waist. She bent over to pick up the book and I was enveloped by her blond hair and surrounded by her smell. Her robe opened slightly and I caught a glimpse of the top of her lacy blue bra. My mouth was dry. My heart rate doubled. I found myself calculating. We’d be alone for at least an hour. Lindsay and Brad were having troubles. If I pushed things and she was willing, no one would ever know. But I would. I would know.

  I was unaware that I had actually spoken until Lindsay asked, “Would know what?”

  “Sorry,” I stammered. “I’m a little distracted.”

  At that moment, the telephone in Brad Hall’s study began to ring. I answered it.

  “Red McCallum, here,” said the voice on the line. “What’s the matter? You sound out of breath.”

  “Had to run to get the phone.”

  “Too bad. I thought maybe you were havin’ sex.” He laughed. “Beats me why, but Possum says he’ll do it Monday. Got a pencil?”

  I took down the directions, read them back to McCallum and reaffirmed our promise not to write that Bascom was an informer without Bascom’s okay. When I looked up, Lindsay was gone.

  Mary Pell came in through the back door. And less than a half hour later, Bullock and Brad showed up, their tour cut short by a flat tire.

  I replayed the scene with Lindsay as I lay in bed that night but my thoughts kept turning to Delana. I thought of her gathering the berries for the crisp, swinging a wicker basket as she walked past the black-dirt garden that once grew lima beans and lettuce for me and tomatoes for her, past the hillock where we sat when I asked her to marry me and on to the patch of low-hanging fruit—quarter-sized blackberries that hung on thorny branches that tangled from thick stalks spiking from the ground. Delana was willing to have her hands stained purple if it meant doing the right thing for someone else.

  Delana has always believed in me. She has always been my rock. The greatest mistake in my life had been running away from her. I knew that now. She was right. My fling with the garden writer had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. I felt ashamed.

  Early the next morning I found myself alone in the kitchen with Mary Pell.

  “Could I ask you for a favor?” she said. “I need a ride to church tomorrow.”

  “Sure. I’ve got the whole day free.”

  “Good. Mr. Matt, it just might be a good idea for you to come, too.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  On the front lawn of the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer choir members chatted and helped each other with their robes as Mary Pell and I arrived in the Dodge. I parked on the sandy street and walked around to open the passenger door.

  “Nice ride. I hate that it got tore up.” She wore a bright red suit, matching shoes, and a red pillbox hat with a black feather so long that she had to twist her head to get out of the car. In her right hand, she carried a well-worn Bible. I took her left elbow and guided her into the sanctuary where the piano had started. “Showtime,” I heard one of the choir members say.

  In a moment, my eyes adjusted to the dim light and I beheld the most visible difference, other than the skin color of the congregants, between this church and the one I grew up in—hats. In the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer, every woman of every age wore a hat—not simple hats, but huge, flamboyant hats in red and purple and black and white, hats with wide brims, hats with tall feathers, hats that seemed to increase in audacity with the age of the wearer.

  Mary Pell led me down the aisle to her pew near the front and I squeezed in beside her.

  The service was a replay of the one Bullock and I had attended earlier: prayers with feeling, music with conviction; joys and concerns from the congregation, including Etta Mae Sampson’s continuing plea for “justice for my loving son Wallace.” And then Reverend Grace rose from one of the two red velvet chairs placed in front of the altar and began to talk.

  He started with church announcements and tidbits of news from the congregation—the fish dinner fund-raiser would be next Thursday; the youth basketball team would practice Tuesday; special prayers were needed for Miss Lottie Moore who was ill; we mourn the passing of Brother Smith. Grace dropped his chin to his chest and shut his eyes. He massaged his forehead. He was silent so long I began to feel uncomfortable. The place stood still.

  “No,” he said quietly, slowly looking up. A long pause. “We do not mourn the passing of Brother Smith. I have got it wrong, my brothers and sisters. We do not mourn the passing of Brother Smith. Instead, we celebrate the passing of Brother Smith!”

  Scattered “amens” from the congregation.

  Grace turned to face the choir, which sat behind the altar. Several members worked their fans.

  “You see,” he said, “You must live today as if you were going to die tomorrow. I still believe that. But those words have a different meaning for me now.”

  “Tell it, preacher!” someone shouted.

  “When I was a young, I took it as a challenge. Live today like you are going to die tomorrow.” Pause. “So I drank the liquor.”

  “Lord have mercy!”

  Louder. “And I ran the streets.”

  “Lord have mercy!”

  Louder. “And chased the women.” Pause. Then softly, “Caught a few, too.” Grace grinned. A few of the men smothered chuckles. Mary Pell elbowed me in the ribs.

  “But I’ve changed all that now,” Grace shouted.

  “Praise, Jesus!”

  “I’ve changed the way I feel about death.”

  “Praise, Jesus!”

  “I still live today like I am going to die tomorrow.” Pause. “But it has a different meaning for me now. Today, I don’t drink and chase women because I’m worried I might die tomorrow and run out of time. No, sir. Today, I live in a state of grace because I might die tomorrow. Today, I stand ready to meet my Maker because that could happen tomorrow. Today, I live my life like I’m ready for the Judgment Day because tomorrow, the Judgment Day might come.”

  “Amen!”

  When it comes to praying, I’m a little out of practice. But the bond I felt with Mary Pell and the people of Hirtsboro, the struggle I shared with them in some small way, made me set aside my self-consciousness when Revered Grace asked us to pray. I prayed for Mary Pell. I prayed for Bullock. I prayed for Brad and Lindsay. I prayed for Wallace and Mrs. Sampson. I prayed for my father. I prayed for Luke and my mother. I prayed for Delana. I prayed for my soul.

  The next morning, we awoke to wind and a cold, hard rain.

  “Stormy Monday,” Bullock said as he strapped on his derringer.

  “I hope Tuesday’s not as bad,” I mumbled from beneath the sheets, but Bullock missed the reference.

  I was excited. We’d been fooled before but at last we were closing in. At the very least, Billy Bascom was an eyewitness to the Wallace Sampson murder.

  We decided to break the rule about too many people on an interview and take Brad with us. Without him, we would never have been on the story in the first place. It was something he deserved.

  “The only difference between Brad and an investigative reporter is that he isn’t getting paid,” I said.

  “He doesn’t need to be,” Bullock added.

  Bullock drove. I navigated from the directions provided by Red McCallum.

  “We’re not far from Pennegar’s,” Brad said as we made a turn.

  “That’s it,” I said, pointing to the right.


  Ahead, a small red brick ranch house with black shutters sat in a tired yard surrounded by a picked-over cotton field. A green and white mobile home rested one hundred feet behind the house. In a grove of tall trees, behind the mobile home, a weathered wooden house with shattered windows and a rusting tin roof sagged into the leaves.

  “That’s how it works,” Bullock said. “First generation builds a nice house. Next generation moves out, but not too far away. They get a trailer and put it right by momma and daddy’s. Later, they can afford to build a regular house. So they put it right in front of the trailer. Momma and daddy pass on. The original house is used for storage and then abandoned. Reminds me of home.”

  The wind whipped the rain into torrents. Bullock guided the battered Dodge down the driveway, doing his best to avoid the potholes brimming with muddy water. He parked beside the house, got out, knocked on the door, and returned dripping to the car.

  “He’s got to be here somewhere,” he said. “No tire tracks on the driveway. No one’s left here since the rain started.”

  We eased further down the drive, past a yard of tall brown grass and a crop of two dozen rusting oil drums, each with a square opening cut at ground level and surrounded by chicken wire fencing. Outside several drums, brightly colored roosters, each with a leg attached to a tether, pecked at the ground in the rain.

  “Gamecocks,” Bullock said. “Fighting chickens.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Only fighting them,” Brad said. “People around here still breed them.”

  I made a mental note about yet another South Carolina story for Walker.

  Bullock saw Bascom first, smoking a cigarette beneath the tin roof overhanging the abandoned house in back. He wore jeans, a denim jacket, and brown work boots covered in mud. His hair had turned completely white. He looked small and hunched. But when I compared him to the picture over the sun visor, there was no doubt we were looking at the Possum.

  We parked the Dodge and splashed through puddles to the porch, where we took shelter from the sheeting rain. Bascom’s eyes tracked us but his head faced a different direction, as if he were perpetually in the process of sneaking a glance and quickly looking away. Even his grin was lopsided, stretched long and narrow on one side of his face, revealing a row of tiny brown teeth.

  “Bill Bascom,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Bullock and I gave him our cards. Brad thanked him for seeing us.

  “Red said you could be trusted. He told me what you’re after.” Bascom lit another cigarette and motioned for us to sit down on some empty apple crates.

  We talked for the next three and a half hours as the wind blew and the rain played on the tin roof like a snare drum. Bascom answered every question Bullock and I threw at him and seemed to light a fresh cigarette for each one, alternating between a pack of menthols in his right jacket pocket and a pack of regulars in his left. I took fifteen pages of notes. Brad listened intently.

  When we could think of no more questions, Bullock asked Bascom to pose for a picture.

  “I don’t mind,” he said, striking a pose almost exactly like the one in the photo we carried.

  “I need to ask it one more time,” I said as we prepared to leave. “There’s no question you told your contacts in state law enforcement what happened in Hirtsboro?”

  Bascom sucked in a lung-full of smoke, dropped his cigarette and ground it out. “I told them everything. That wasn’t the only case they never followed up on. Why they followed up on some and not on others is not for me to know. But I told them, all right. And they wrote it all down.”

  “Just one more,” Bullock said. “Red McCallum said he never did know how they flipped you.”

  The Possum gave me a sidewise glance. “Had me by the balls,” he shrugged. “Had pictures of me havin’ sex with a black woman. Threatened to go public with ’em or give ’em to the boys in the Klan. I’d have been strung up for sure. By my first wife or the Grand Dragon, depending on who got me first.” His hearty laugh turned into a hacking cough.

  “What happened to the woman?” Brad asked.

  He glanced at his watch. “She works nights. Ought to be up in a minute.”

  Brad seemed stunned. “You’re married to a black woman?”

  “Common law. Been together almost fifteen years.”

  “Why on earth were you ever a member of the Klan?”

  Bascom shrugged his shoulders. “At the time, I believed in it. ’Course, liquor might have had something to do with it, too.”

  I had one other question. “Billy, Red McCallum said you’d be in danger if we wrote that you’d been an informer.”

  He lit another cigarette. “Hell, I don’t care. Cancer’s eatin’ me up anyway.”

  The rain had stopped by the time we left the porch. Intervals of sun had warmed the interior of the Dodge. It felt good when I climbed in. I sorted through my thoughts and emotions—a deep and burning anger at the appalling story we’d just been told, relief at finally getting what we had come for, excitement about the splash we were about to make, happiness for Mrs. Sampson and Brad, anxiety about the list of things that still needed to be done.

  “I never imagined,” Brad said.

  “I did,” Bullock said. “I’ve already got the lede.”

  A vision of Walker Burns and the questions he’d ask us flashed through my mind.

  “One more stop before we write,” I said.

  We could see old man Pennegar from almost a half-mile off, sitting in his lawn chair by the side of the road, his right hand raised, his left hand limp, a floppy straw hat shielding his face from the sun which was now out in full force.

  We parked the car and approached. He nodded and I could tell that he remembered us.

  “Sorry to trouble you again, sir,” I said. “We won’t take much of your time.”

  For the next half hour he listened while Brad, Bullock and I talked. We told him what we had learned about the night Wallace Sampson was shot and what had and hadn’t happened later. When I got to the part about the actual shooting, the eyes of former Hirtsboro policeman filled with tears.

  At every point in our story, he perceptibly nodded his head “yes.”

  We had almost finished when I heard the roar of an engine. I looked up to see the Hirtsboro town police car fish-tailing down the narrow road. It skidded to a stop and Olen Pennegar Jr. jumped out, gun drawn.

  “I told you to stay the hell away from here,” he yelled. “You’ve got ten seconds.” Olen Pennegar Jr. leveled his gun and began to count. “One, two, three . . .”

  Before I could speak, a loud, long moan, half cry, half wail came from Pennegar Sr. The young policeman walked over to his father, knelt on the wet ground, and held his face close. “What is it, Daddy?”

  His father grunted. Pennegar holstered his pistol.

  Another sound came from the old man. He was trying to speak but I couldn’t understand.

  “One more time, Daddy,” urged his son.

  Then he made the same sound that he had made when we had first come to question him. Suddenly, I knew what it was.

  “Bluffing,” I said. “Your dad is trying to say the word ‘bluffing.’”

  Pennegar Sr. nodded “yes.”

  Back at Windrow, we called Walker. He was in a meeting so Bullock left a message with the receptionist. “Tell him to get ready,” he said. “Harper and Bullock are coming in.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  We had just finished packing the Dodge the next morning when Mary Pell burst from the house, waving. “It’s a Mr. Burns,” she shouted. “He wants to talk to Mr. Matt.”

  I picked up the phone, feeling cocky. “Walker, we’ve got the story. We’re comin’ home to nail the coonskin to the wall.”

  “Matt, your father’s oncologist has been
trying to reach you. It’s not looking so good.”

  One thing about Walker, he doesn’t mess around. He gave me the details. When he was done, I felt nauseous and scared. This was all happening much faster than I had expected.

  I called Delana and told her the news.

  “I know. I’ll meet you at your place. We’ll drive over this afternoon together.”

  Bullock and I hashed out the Wallace Sampson story lede and the first ten paragraphs on the way back to Charlotte. He drove and I wrote.

  “Holy shit,” he said when I read the paragraphs back aloud.

  “Holy shit, Mabel,” I corrected. As powerful as the story was, I loved the process just as much. It was exhilarating, consuming. It was why I had become a reporter in the first place. And it gave me something to focus on other than my father’s sudden deterioration.

  “I’ll take the first draft the rest of the way,” Bullock said as we neared town. “We can still get it done for the weekend.”

  It’s not how I would have preferred it, but I knew I had no choice.

  Bullock dropped me off at my place. I shook his hand and wished him luck. He bear-hugged me and gave me a slap on the back. Delana arrived in the Honda looking more beautiful than I’d ever seen her. I told her so.

  Sad as I was about my father, the trip gave me an opportunity I’d been aching for—the chance to share the news about the Wallace Sampson story with Delana. I replayed the interview with Bascom and the confirmation from Olen Pennegar Sr.—developments that made it certain we could write the story of our lives. She wanted every detail.

  “I knew it would happen, Matt!”

  “I was never so sure. When I think of all the luck we had . . .”

  “You make your own luck. You wouldn’t have been lucky if you hadn’t believed. You saw something no one else saw. You took a chance no one else would.”

  “I’m just happy for Brad and Mrs. Sampson. And for Wallace.”

  “Matt, I’ve never been prouder of anyone.” She touched me tenderly on the arm.