I put it on the plate in front of me and tried again to call Andrew and April, but once again the operator came on the line: “We’re sorry. All our circuits are currently busy. Please hang up and try your call again later.”
It was the same when I tried Seth’s number, Daddy’s and Haywood’s. Nothing was getting through to their exchange.
I left the toast on my plate and headed for Cotton Grove. If I didn’t get caught behind any tractors, there was just enough time to make it there and back to Dobbs before court convened.
I may have pushed the speed limit a little as I drove west in the early morning sunlight. Traffic didn’t seem much heavier than usual, but then I was zipping through back roads and shortcuts. I took the homemade bridge across Possum Creek so fast that for a minute I thought I’d busted one of my shocks.
When I pulled up to the back porch of Andrew’s house, Dwight Bryant was standing by his departmental car there in the yard and Daddy was leaning against his pickup. A.K. and Andrew were on their tractors, ready to head out to the field as if nothing had happened, and April’s smile was serene and unworried.
No one seemed surprised to see me.
“I figgered you’d be out here once you seen the phones was all tied up,” Daddy said.
“We’ll go on then, Dwight,” Andrew said, giving me a wave before he cranked his tractor and trailed A.K. down past the barns. Time and tobacco wait for no man.
“Everything’s okay, then?” I asked inanely.
April’s smile widened. “If you’d gone to church last night, you’d have known.”
“Huh?”
“New Deliverance opened their revival last night.”
Enlightenment dawned. New Deliverance is the borderline charismatic church over in Black Creek with a borderline Ayatollah for a preacher. Not my favorite place to worship by a long shot. But that’s where my brother Herman and his wife go—Nadine’s one of those strait-laced Blalocks from Black Creek—and she’s always badgering different ones of us to come fellowship with them. To keep family peace, we occasionally do.
“Andrew went and promised Nadine we’d come,” April said with a wicked grin, “and we decided it wouldn’t hurt for A.K. to sit through one of their preacher’s hellfire and brimstone sermons either.”
“Ain’t that cruel and unusual punishment?” Daddy asked me with a wink.
“And guess who was sitting in the row behind A.K. till almost ten o’clock?” asked Dwight.
“Who?”
“My mother.”
I hooted with laughter and relief.
Emily Bryant is one of my favorite people. She has bright orange hair and drives a purple TR—a real catbird. But she’s also the highly effective principal of Zachary Taylor High School, and her word carries weight.
“What about the other two boys?” I asked. “Raymond Bagwell and Charles Starling?”
“We’re looking into that,” he said repressively.
Normally I would have badgered him for more details but right now it was enough to know that A.K. wasn’t involved and that I could drive back to Dobbs with a lighter heart and, with a little luck, maybe even get to court on time.
Provided Dwight or a highway patrolman didn’t follow me, of course.
✡ ✡ ✡
Cotton Grove’s a twenty-minute drive to the west of Dobbs if you follow the posted speed limits, and with most of Colleton County’s law enforcement agencies buzzing around out there, directing traffic around the two churches, Dobbs itself was relatively calm when I got back.
There was much head shaking in the courthouse halls and everyone had a theory. One of the records clerks postulated that the fire had been set by skinheads on their way back to Fort Bragg. “You know how violent they are.”
My nominal boss, Chief District Court Judge F. Roger Longmire, was sure it would turn out to be kids high on drugs.
“No, no,” said attorney Ed Whitbread. “The first fire might have been done out of white racism, but what if these last two were copycats looking to stir up more excitement?”
“Or,” said a white bailiff, and here his voice dropped almost to a whisper, “what if they was set by somebody to make it look like things are bad here for colored folks?”
“By somebody, you mean someone from the black community?” I asked.
He shrugged and hitched up his pants. “It happens. Besides, I hear they can’t find the guy they had living over at Mount Olive to take care of the place. Maybe he really did take care of the place, you hear what I’m saying?”
We heard.
“On the other hand,” said Roger as we walked down the hall to our respective courtrooms, “we both know weirder things have happened. Did you see that sexton yesterday? Pickled worse’n Peter’s peppers. Louise Parker told me that Ligon was going to recommend that the deacons fire him. Maybe he did get mad and decide to get even.”
All I could think about was that green spray paint and the fact that the fires began well after A.K. and his cohorts were released from jail at five o’clock yesterday afternoon.
And then there was Dwight’s evasive answer to my question.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised when lunch time rolled around and a bailiff told me that Bagwell and Starling were on ice downstairs in Sheriff Bo Poole’s office while Ed Gardner was hunting up a U.S. magistrate to sign an arrest warrant. The newly enacted Anti-Church Arson Act makes burning a church a federal offense now, so ATF had jurisdiction.
“They were drunk as skunks and got themselves thrown out of a shot house at eight-thirty last night, less than three miles from Mount Olive,” the bailiff said. “And nobody saw them after that. They say they went straight to Starling’s trailer and slept it off there, but it’s down at the very end of the trailer park and our people canvassed the place. So far, none of the neighbors can put Starling’s car there before ten o’clock.”
“Same green paint they used in the Crocker family graveyard?” I asked.
“Same green, same lettering. Good thing your nephew wasn’t hanging with ’em last night.”
By the time Starling and Bagwell were actually bound over in a federal courtroom so jammed with reporters that all cameras were banished, the charges had escalated. Under the new and tougher laws, death as a result of deliberate arson was now a capital offense and they were being held in our local jailhouse without bail.
As Ed Gardner described it for me later, the investigation had started in earnest that afternoon after all the coals cooled off enough and everybody’d gathered at Mount Olive.
“It was a real team effort,” Ed said, ticking the participants off on his finger.
In addition to Ed and an ATF Special Agent In Charge who’d helicoptered over from Charlotte with the resident FBI agent, there were about twenty other ATF agents (twenty-one if you counted four-legged accelerant-sniffing Special Agent Sparky), two SBI arson investigators, a handwriting expert from the SBI who would measure and photograph the new graffiti and compare the results with the Polaroids taken at the graveyard—“He was sure wishing your brother hadn’t made those boys clean it up so fast”—a couple of detectives with arson experience from Sheriff Bo Poole’s department and a couple of members of the local volunteer fire department.
“What about Buster Cavanaugh?” I asked. “Don’t tell me our county fire marshall wasn’t there?”
“Yeah, well, we sorta forgot to call him and his nose was bad out of joint when he caught up with us.”
Patrol officers kept reporters and cameras back behind the lines, but they couldn’t do much about the two news helicopters that circled overhead all day.
“Least they didn’t fly into each other and crash down on our heads,” Ed said dryly.
They began with a physical examination of the whole exterior, paying particular attention to the graffiti, then moved over to the most damaged area of the fellowship hall, trying not to disturb any evidence that might still be there.
“Ol’ Sparky hit on accelerant right away
. We took samples from the floor and wall areas. This time there was no attempt to make it look like an accident. No electrical wires in that area, no appliances with heating elements, and no fancy delay devices either. They just broke in somehow—maybe busted a window. Judging by the pour patterns, once they got inside, they started sloshing gasoline or kerosene around. Soaked the rug and the curtains and some wooden chairs that were there, then put a match to the curtains.”
With all that wood, it hadn’t taken long.
Mr. Ligon had told them of his disgruntled church mouse and how drunk he’d been the afternoon before. He was worried that if Arthur Hunt hadn’t started the fire, maybe he’d perished in it? They had probed the area around his room with no success.
“We’d about decided he’d taken off, then one of my buddies hollered from inside the church.”
Sometime in the past, well before 1900, a false floor had been installed so that the choir could sit on tiered risers behind the minister. When the wall burned, so did the chairs and the risers and the false floor.
They found Arthur Hunt where he had fallen through both floors to the dirt beneath the church.
Video cameras whirred with new energy and there was a frenzied buzz from all the electronic still cameras when the sexton’s charred body was rolled out on a draped gurney to the ambulance and sent to the Medical Examiner over in Chapel Hill.
15
He that feeds the birds
Will not starve His babes
—Hico Baptist Church
July the Fourth came three days later.
Despite the fiasco of the pig-picking Daddy had thrown for me the first time I ran for judge, he saw no reason not to do it again, and invitations had been distributed by voice or mail in early June for a Fourth of July blowout.
The problem with a party this size is that it quickly assumes a juggernaut momentum of its own and you can’t stop it on a dime.
For a dime either, as far as that goes.
Deposits had been paid on rental tents and tables, the pigs had been ordered, the cabbages and the hushpuppy mix bought, cartons of soft drinks, paper plates and plastic utensils were piled high in my new garage, along with a stack of borrowed pots for boiling corn on the cob and pails for icing down the drinks. Plastic tubs already held a half-dozen watermelons and waited for the ice water that would chill them properly. Cousins were flying in from Atlanta and Washington.
Black citizens were still roiled up and angrily denounced the climate that could produce a Bagwell and Starling. Wallace Adderly had been on every local television channel and most of the radio talk shows to voice their basic concerns as he saw them.
“Churches are our key institutions,” he said. “Not the schools, not city hall, not the playing fields and gymnasiums. When you burn a church, you do more than destroy a building. You strike at the very heart of the African-American community. Every white person in this state ought to rise up in shame for what has happened in this one small area, this despicable attempt to undermine the strength of a people who will not be denied.”
Nevertheless, with both culprits in jail, and with offers of help pouring in from all over, tensions were easing and most of the media had pulled back to New York and D.C.
I had conferred with Seth’s wife, Minnie, about whether a big political celebration would seem frivolous so soon after the burnings in which a man died. (Minnie’s my campaign adviser and can usually read the community’s pulse.)
“Life keeps moving,” she said philosophically. “Some people are always going to pick fault, but let’s quick go ahead and invite all the preachers in the community. We’ll need to cook some extra hams and shoulders and that means Seth’ll have to round up another cooker.” She was already drawing up a mental list of things to do. “We’ll ditch the beer kegs, stick to soft drinks and lemonade, and if we remember that poor man in our prayers and sing the national anthem before we eat, we should be okay.”
I gave her a hug. “Hypocrite.”
“God bless America,” she said wryly.
With the new pier such a success, my family thought it’d be more fun to have the pig-picking where people could go swimming if they wanted to. Stevie and Emma had volunteered to lifeguard and we hung old sheets across a couple of doorless rooms in my new house to act as changing rooms.
Haywood and Robert set up the cookers beneath a clump of oak trees that used to shelter holsteins from the burning sun back when this pond was newly dug, back when what’s going to be my front yard was a pasture. Two long blue-and-white-striped tents—one for serving the food and drinks, one for eating—were erected and staked down by Wednesday afternoon and folding tables were hauled in and set up underneath the tents before dusk. When I finally crawled into my old bed at the homeplace sometime after midnight on the third, everything that could be done ahead of time was done.
“You mama always liked a good party,” Daddy said happily when I kissed him good night.
As I lay there listening to the familiar creaks and groans of the old house settling down for the night, I could almost hear Mother’s light voice floating up the stairwell: “Deborah! Where did you put those tablecloths? Kezzie? You’ll have to send one of the boys to the store for more plastic cups. And better tell him to get another carton of paper napkins while he’s there.”
And Daddy’s exasperated roar. “Just how the hell many people you expecting, Sue? You promised me it was gonna be a little get-together this time.”
“Now, Kezzie,” Mother would say, then she’d flit off to take care of another dozen details that would make the weekend run smoothly.
What Daddy could never remember was that her idea of a good party was one that started on, say, a Wednesday and didn’t end till after breakfast on Monday. Cousins and friends still miss my mother’s parties. There would be picking and singing, maybe even a little dancing, marathon card sessions, lots of food and drink, people shoehorned into every cranny of the house with babies and teenagers sleeping on pallets spread across the floor. And all that was before local friends and relatives arrived for the real party on Saturday.
Daddy always grumbled about having to wait on line to use the bathroom, or being eaten out of house and home, but Mother would just smile and keep moving, knowing that he’d be standing right there on the porch beside her come Monday morning, telling their guests, “I don’t see why y’all got to run off so quick. Seems like you just got here.”
The Fourth dawned hot and hazy and by the time Maidie and I drove out to the pond, we could smell the smoky succulence of roast pork as soon as we stepped out of the car. Robert and Haywood were seated out by the cookers where they could keep their eyes on the thermometers. They’d rigged a makeshift table from a couple of ice chests and were playing gin.
Robert knocked with two points and I took advantage of the next shuffle to lift the lid and fish out a Pepsi. “What time did y’all put the pigs on?”
“Around six,” said Haywood, looking suspiciously at the ace of spades that Robert had just discarded.
There are still purists who insist that the only way to cook pig is on a homemade grill over hardwood coals, but I’m here to tell you, people, it don’t taste too shabby over gas either. All up and down North Carolina roads, from early spring to late fall, you’ll see what look like big black oil drums on wheels being towed behind cars and pickups.
Pig cookers.
What you do is start with a basic two-wheel steel trailer and a 250-gallon oval oil drum. Then you take an acetylene torch and cut the drum in half lengthwise through the short wall. Weld the bottom half to your trailer, add hinges and a handle to the top half and a heavy rack to the bottom half. Scrounge some burners from your local gas distributor. Punch a hole in the top for your heat gauge and another hole in the bottom so the fat can drip out into a metal bucket. Add a small tank of propane gas and you’ve got what it takes to start cooking.
Of course, you do need a little experience to know when to flip the pig—too soon and it wo
n’t cook all the way through, too late and it’ll fall apart when you lift it—and you really ought to have a secret sauce recipe you can brag about even though most of the braggarts just add the same basic five ingredients to cider vinegar. It all eats good to me, but Haywood and Robert still argue over just how much red pepper’s needed.
“Gin!” said Haywood. “Did I catch you with a fist full of picture cards?”
I waited till Robert finished adding up the score, then asked, “How much longer till you turn them?”
“Getting hungry, shug?” Robert set down his cards. “That little ninety-pounder’s been going right fast. Let’s take a look.”
He got up and walked over to the nearest cooker, Haywood and I right behind him. When he lifted the lid, a cloud of smoke escaped, carrying wonderful smells. The pig had been split from head to tail and lay on the grill skin side up, split side down.
Robert laid his hand on one of the hams and looked at his brother. “What do you think?”
Haywood flattened the palm of his own huge hand against the shoulder ham, held it there a moment and said, “I’n sure feel the heat.”
“Let’s do ’er then.”
By now Seth and Minnie were there as well as Maidie and four or five of my nieces and nephews. A raised cooker lid draws more kibitzers than a game of solitaire.
Using old dishtowels as potholders, four of the men each grabbed a foot and at Robert’s signal, they gave a heave and gently flipped the pig over so that it was now skin side down over the gas burners. Eager fingers reached in to pick off hot crispy slivers of the tenderloin, mine right along with them.
“Hey, now,” Robert scolded.
He swished a clean dishmop through the sauce and used it to slather the meat with a generous hand before closing the lid, ignoring all the pleas for just one more little taste.
“Y’all can just wait till everybody’s here,” he said firmly, even though Maidie pointed out that he’d had his fingers in, too. He just grinned, licked his lips, then he and Haywood wiped their hands and resumed their card game, so Maidie and I went on up to the tents to spread red-white-and-blue tablecloths and unfold chairs.
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