Mason holds the door open for her as though Melody’s the visitor here, and Scotty leads her over the threshold, the hand on her elbow more of a clamp than gentlemanly guidance.
Mason closes the door behind them. Melody feels as though he’s just locked her into a cell. Irrational, she knows. This is home. It should be a haven. Maybe it had been, right after the honeymoon, but not anymore. It’s filled with furniture she and Travis had picked out together, the cabinet with their wedding china, and bare surfaces and wall space where framed photos of the two of them had been displayed. Now they’re stashed in a drawer along with their satin-bound wedding album, hidden away just like his Klan regalia.
“Ma’am?”
“Pardon?”
“I said, were you harmed in any way?”
“Harmed? I’m fine, I just need a glass of water.” She starts toward the kitchen.
“I’ll get it for you.” Scotty steps into her path.
She’s struck by his resemblance to Travis, though the two men share no physical characteristics. Scotty is short and wiry and dark. Yet his smile steers clear of his eyes, like her husband’s.
He has the same commanding air. To be expected, she reminds herself, seeing as he’s an officer of the law, with above-average intelligence and the confidence—arrogance—to go with it.
He leaves the room. Officer Mason gestures at the davenport. “Why don’t you just have a seat right there, ma’am. Try to relax. I’ve known you all your life. Known your daddy all his, too. Why, I was just down at the bank the other day, signing papers for my new mortgage. So you see, I’m here to help you. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“Don’t you think that’s a question I should be asking, not answering? Since this is my house, and I have no idea what all y’all are doing here?”
“Well, now, ma’am, it’s like your mama said—she’d told you she’d be right on over but when she got here, you were gone, even though you were expecting her.”
She weighs the wisdom of a quip—If you knew my mother, you’d have taken off, too.
But now doesn’t seem like a good time to make light of things. And anyway, he does know her mother. Everyone in this town knows everyone else. She lets him go right on talking.
“Honeybee thought, bein’ in your . . . condition, you know, that maybe you’d gone into labor and left in a hurry. And when she saw the kitchen—well, like she said, she called us, and everyone else.”
“Not Rodney Lee.”
“No, Mr. Midget got wind of it and came by, real chivalrous and neighborly like, and . . .”
Scotty’s back, pressing a glass of lukewarm water into her hand.
“Here you go, Mrs. Hunter.”
She ignores him, prodding Mason. “Mr. Midget came by, and . . .”
“Yes, ma’am, and when he saw the mess in the kitchen, he said—”
“Sorry to interrupt, but you might want to drink some of that water,” Scotty advises, pushing the glass into her hand. “You’re looking awfully flushed.”
“What did Rodney Lee say?”
“Said you got real friendly with a Negro from out Barrow way,” Mason tells her, “and that he might’a done something awful to you.”
“He’d never hurt me!” she screams, plunking the glass onto the end table, and missing. It crashes to the floor and shatters into a storm of glistening daggers.
She hears her mother cry out beyond the window screens, and her father calls, “Everything all right in there, Duke?”
“Just fine, sir,” Mason calls back. “Just a little mishap here, is all.”
“So there is a Negro man? Why didn’t you let us know?”
“Let you know what?” she asks Scotty.
“That this no good n—”
“Officer Jackson,” Mason cuts him off with a warning look, and turns to Melody. “Mrs. Hunter, if someone’s been bothering you, especially while you’re pregnant and alone here with your husband away serving our country, we’d want to—”
“No one’s been bothering me!” Melody’s heart pounds along in time with the baby’s fists. “Where on earth would you get that idea, Officer Mason?”
“Like Rodn—uh, Mr. Midget said, these people have plumb gone crazy, torching and looting every—”
“Do you see any torching and looting here? Do you?”
“Well, now, ma’am, your kitchen sure looks like it’s been looted,” Mason says, “and there was blood all over the—”
“I cut my knee when the drawer fell! And then I went out!”
“Dressed like that? Without pickin’ up all that mess, or at least wipin’ up the blood?” Scotty shakes his head.
“Where’d you go, Mrs. Hunter, that you were in such a hurry to get out of here that you couldn’t even get dressed?”
“For a walk!”
“You were driving,” Mason points out.
The truth would have been so simple.
I heard about the assassination and I went to visit a friend.
“I drove to the beach. I walked on the beach.”
Duke says, “Seems to me a woman in your condition shouldn’t really be walkin’ around on any beach. And in a nightgown.”
“Let’s get back to the Negro,” Scotty suggests. “He put you up to this?”
“Did who put me up to what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You said he wouldn’t hurt you—so you do know Cyril LeBlanc?”
The name hits like a razor-sharp shard.
She thinks of Rodney Lee in his car on that February night when she was on her way to her parents’ house. “Someone’s been putting crazy ideas into that pretty little head of yours.”
She’d read that dog-eared handbook in Travis’s drawer. Read all about sacred duty to the brotherhood, and the oath to protect the sanctity of womanhood, the American home, and patriotism.
“Mrs. Hunter? Do you know Cyril LeBlanc?” Mason gazes at her, forefinger propped on the tip of his mustache. “He works behind the counter over at that colored meat market—Morrison’s.”
“I don’t shop there.”
“I wouldn’t expect that you do. But you know him?”
“No. Now I’m going to ask you gentlemen to be on your way.”
“Ma’am—”
“I’m sure you understand. All this fuss isn’t healthy for a woman in my condition. So if you’ll excuse me . . .”
She sails out of the room, closes the bedroom door behind her and turns the lock. Then she leans back against it, shaken, eyes closed, thinking of the white hood in her husband’s drawer and the scars on Cyril’s face.
Weary after a milk delivery shift that had begun in the wee hours and then all the excitement over at Travis’s place this afternoon, Rodney Lee pulls up in front of the low stone block house he shares with his mother.
She’s not home. On Fridays, she goes from her waitress job at the luncheonette to the bartending job she’d started a few weeks ago. This one is at a joint where Rodney Lee always liked to shoot pool with his buddies. Now that she’s behind the bar, he stays away, even on nights when she’s not working. No man wants to see, or even hear about, his mother falling all over the patrons, and none are off-limits when Ruth Ann Midget starts sampling as much as she’s pouring. He’s gotten into more than his share of skirmishes with guys his own age who think it’s funny to tell him they’d messed around with his old lady.
Before he throws the first punch, he always says, “Take it back, or I’ll kill you.”
Some do, right away. Others hold out a little longer.
In the end, they all take it back. Even when it’s the truth.
He parks the Impala at the curb and goes to the mailbox. A letter from Travis isn’t the only thing he’s looking for, but the other evaporates from his thoughts the moment he sees an envelope with the familiar red-and-blue-ticked border right there on top of the stack.
He opens the door, and his mother’s cat pushes out past him. It brushes agai
nst his legs, and he kicks it.
“Whole damned house smells like your piss,” he calls after it as it scampers into the weeds and disappears over the chain-link fence.
He slams the door and dumps everything but the letter onto the pile of unopened mail on the hall table. The heap topples, scattering envelopes—mostly overdue bills and collection notices—all over the floor. No draft notice today.
But it’s coming. The first week in March, he’d been summoned for his armed forces physical. Stripped down and funneled along with hundreds, maybe thousands of fellow underwear-clad healthy specimens, he wondered how many would be dead in a year’s time.
He’d passed the physical examination. And then he passed the mental aptitude tests that had tripped up his pal Buddy when he’d attempted to enlist right out of high school.
“I thought they were looking for soldiers, not geniuses,” he’d complained after being deemed mentally unfit for the army. But Buddy has a second chance, now that the Pentagon lowered the recruitment standards. He reports to basic training in a couple of weeks.
Rodney Lee’s Statement of Acceptability arrived in the mail before the month was out. It’s just a matter of time before he’s called up as an infantryman. He’ll do his patriotic duty, just like Travis.
“I wouldn’t say he’s fighting for our country,” Melody Hunter had the nerve to tell Rodney Lee the night he’d stopped to offer her a ride. Then she’d gone on to criticize President Johnson.
Until then, Rodney Lee hadn’t believed the gossip about her, even though he’d heard she’d been driving Travis’s car around Barrow Island last summer. He’d figured there was a logical explanation for that—maybe dropping off a housekeeper, some such thing.
Only she doesn’t have a housekeeper, and her mama and daddy’s housekeeper is white, and there was rumored to be a man involved.
A man who is not white.
What kind of woman would do such a thing?
The kind of woman who’d badmouth her own soldier husband during wartime, and the president of the United States. That’s what kind of woman.
Something had clicked in Rodney Lee’s brain the night Melody Hunter had said those terrible things. He couldn’t just stand by and let her get away with this.
Knowing she was safely occupied at her parents’ house, he’d driven over to her place, parked on a neighboring block, and snuck through yards feeling like a damned burglar. The back door had been locked, but Travis had lived there alone before the wedding, and Rodney Lee knew he had a key hidden out back. That’s how Mary Jane Foster used to let herself in while Travis was at work, so’s she could have dinner waiting for him.
She sure can cook, Mary Jane. Travis didn’t want leftovers around in case Melody came over unexpectedly and opened the fridge, so he always handed them off to Rodney Lee.
“Too bad Mary Jane’s not the kind of girl you date out in the open,” he’d told Travis over day-old fried Spam and Betty Crocker Scalloped Potatoes. “’Cause if she was, I’d be asking her to come as my guest to your wedding.”
The invitations had been out a few weeks by then. Rodney Lee didn’t have a steady, couldn’t find a willing date, and didn’t want to go alone.
“I oughta smack you good for even saying such a thing,” Travis had said.
“I just meant, she’s a bartender down at the Palace, and a few years older than us and not from a respectable family, is all.”
“I know what you meant about that. But don’t you think it would be a slap in the face to me if you brought my girl to my own wedding?”
“Aw, come on now, I’m just pickin’ with you,” Rodney Lee said hastily. You don’t cross Travis Hunter when he gets that mean gleam in his eye.
His wife sure has, though. Crossed him, that is. In worse ways than unpatriotic talk.
On that February night, he’d found a letter she’d written to Travis and left lying right there on the kitchen counter.
Turned out the things he’d been hearing were true, and then some.
Shaking with fury, he’d searched that house for more evidence. He hadn’t found any, but the letter was incriminating enough. He took it home and wrote a note of his own, explaining the situation to Travis. He’d folded it around Melody’s letter and sealed the whole thing into the envelope she’d already stamped and addressed.
Let her wonder what had happened to it. Let her worry about who might have taken it and knows her dirty little secret.
Her letter had been dated a few days before he’d found it. Maybe she’d have eventually sent it to Travis.
But what if she’d decided to burn it and carry her secret to the grave? If Rodney Lee hadn’t come along, Travis would have gone on fighting for their country and his life with that woman on his mind and in his heart. A man deserves the truth, in case he never comes home—or in case he does.
He figured Travis would be upset, sure, but more angry than anything else. Furious, and who wouldn’t be? He’d married the prettiest girl in town, had given her everything a husband could provide, and how did she repay him?
Rodney Lee skims the letter, then reads it more carefully. Travis doesn’t spell things out, but Rodney Lee knows what he’s getting at. As a knight in the Invisible Empire, Rodney Lee bears a sacred duty to defend patriotism, and to protect womanhood and the sanctity of the American home.
Remember what we pledged when we took the oath. “Bear ye one another’s burdens.” You do what you have to do to make this right, Rodney Lee, just like that time on the Panhandle. I’ll be forever grateful.
The Panhandle . . .
Rodney Lee flashes back to ’65. They were on their way to visit a pal in Tallahassee that night, whole carload of them: Travis, Clive, Buddy, Hank Roberts, who shipped out to Vietnam a few months before Travis had, and Scotty Jackson, back before he was local law enforcement. If he’d been a cop then, none of it would have gone down the way it had.
Good thing he’s a cop now, though, with a solid brain in his head. He’d known just how to handle the situation this morning. The moment he got the call that Melody Hunter had gone missing, he found Rodney Lee and told him to get over there in a hurry.
“Make it look like you’re just driving by,” he’d cautioned. “But you’re gonna want to be around for this.”
Rodney Lee figured Melody had either run off with Cyril LeBlanc, or been harmed by someone who didn’t like what she’d been up to any more than Rodney Lee and the boys do. They’d never lay a hand on Travis’s wife, though. That’s the difference. You don’t harm women; you provide chivalrous protection, even to the ones who stray so far from the fold.
En route to the Panhandle, they’d stopped off for some beers at a roadhouse. There were plenty of loose-looking women hanging around.
“Help Me, Rhonda” was playing on the jukebox as he gravitated over to one who was drinking gin, snapping gum, and smoking a cigarette. Her name happened to be Rhonda, like the song—one heck of a coincidence, he’d said, and she’d laughed. But he thought it was maybe in that “not with you, but at you” way the high school girls used to do with him.
When the song ended, Travis ambled over.
“Hey, Travis, this here’s Rhonda.”
“Sure, she is, and I’m Mr. Tambourine Man.”
The girl returned his sly grin and promptly shifted her interest from Rodney Lee to Travis the way girls always did.
That night at the crowded roadhouse, the war was a dim and distant threat and the boys were carefree, living it up. They pounded a couple of rounds. Travis went to take a leak out back and got into an altercation with some mouthy colored kid working in the kitchen.
“He’s bigger’n me,” he’d reported back to Rodney Lee, “but not bigger than you.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Rodney Lee said, and rolled up his sleeves.
Ten minutes later, they were back on the road to Tallahassee. Rodney Lee had found the kid more meek than mouthy, but he’d dutifully left him face down, trickling blood in
to the dusty back parking lot.
He hadn’t even considered that he’d killed him till they stopped back into the Roadhouse again on the way home a few days later. “Rhonda” spotted them before they set foot inside.
“The police been around here askin’ if anyone’s seen all y’all or knows who you are,” she warned them. “Unless you want to be questioned about a murder, you best go back to where you come from.”
He’d been shaken up, hearing that. But Travis started laughing as soon as they were back in the car, clapping Rodney Lee on the back.
“Guess she really is ‘Help Me, Rhonda,’ ’cause she sure helped you, you big ol’ outlaw!”
Rodney Lee’s misgivings had transformed into pride, and they’d whooped up and yee-ha’d all the way back to Fernandina.
After that, they all called him Outlaw, the best nickname he’d ever had. A hell of a lot better than Rodney Lee Giant. Travis had come up with that one, too, back on the grade school playground, but he didn’t mean no harm. He was a good guy. Everyone liked him—girls, guys, teachers, parents.
Someone like Travis deserves the best things in life. He doesn’t deserve to die facedown in a foreign jungle like he’s no better than some wiseass colored kid out behind a panhandle roadhouse. And if he does make it home alive, he sure as hell doesn’t deserve the shame his fool wife will bring him.
You do what you have to do to make this right . . .
There’s only one way Rodney Lee can do that, and this time, it’ll take more than fists. It could be dangerous. Deadly, even for an outlaw. But when he joined the Invisible Empire, he’d sworn to protect his brothers’ homes, reputations, interests, and families, and he’d meant it.
LeBlanc is tall—not nearly as tall as Rodney Lee, but lean and powerfully built. One on one, unarmed, things might not go in Rodney Lee’s favor. He can’t afford to mess this up. He’ll call on Clive and Buddy to help. And Scotty can help him figure out how to handle this thing—make it look like an accident, or send a message loud and clear.
He folds the letter back into the envelope, puts it into his pocket, and begins picking up the mail that had scattered all over the floor. As expected, today’s batch had brought nothing but more bills and collection notices, and . . .
The Butcher's Daughter Page 19