The Apostasy

by Ted Minkinow

  As a boy, Jolly and his pack of buddies often brought packs of cigarettes filched from Mama’s drawer into Copper Gulch. So, the boys explored most of this area at one time or another. Jolly strained to remember this particular clearing and could recall finding remains of a scraped-dirt foundation here or there, or the rare brick or two from an old fireplace. Never an entire shack.

  This scene smacked of something wrong; out of time and step with his childhood memories.

  CHAPTER 35

  Sunday, July 15, 7:18 pm, Copper Gulch

  1

  Warren would want to know about this.

  Jolly pawed at his shirt for the portable microphone and his hand brushed starched fabric.

  Dagnabit. Left the rascal in the back seat.

  A round trip to the cruiser would add fifteen minutes to Jolly’s tardy return home. He took another glance at his watch…Almost twenty after. Now he’d miss the first five frames. Jolly considered “Forget it” and just leaving. Besides, it didn’t look kosher.

  The police academy in Huntsville emphasized avoiding not kosher stuff. “When it comes to kosher,” the police instructor said, “you best be listening to your gut.” Jolly ignored the flutter tickling his insides and decided to forego the radio and the backup it would bring.

  Backup...For what…Shanty in the middle of Copper Gulch? Why couldn’t he walk up to the shack and talk to the man inside without plodding all the way back to his car? The trek would eat what remained of the sun, put his boots at risk for more mud, and kill any chance at rolling in the first game.

  Mess up the team’s score, thought Jolly…and it probably would. Rationalization crept in. He spoke to dozens of people today without backup. If I haven't needed it to talk to anybody else...

  Warren's admonishment interrupted in Jolly’s subconscious like the principle’s voice over Vienna High School’s intercom, "Don't get complacent." But how could this fall into that category? Forgetting a radio used to pass personal messages or close lunch plans hardly added up to complacency. Did it?

  As Jolly argued with himself wisps of smoke appeared and snaked through weathered gaps in the tar paper roof. The smoke reminded Jolly of the purpose that brought him to that spot in the first place.

  Just one person to interview. And as Jim Croce put it, you don’t pull the mask of that old Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jolly Rogers.

  He dismissed the mental spat, forgot about the radio and backup, and ignored his boss’s instructions. He just wanted to get this final interview behind him and then roll the black ball down the lane.

  Jolly avoided stirring noises as he approached the shanty even though he felt confident the man had seen him. So why did each step eat away bits of his bravado the same way the muck underneath nibbled at his shoeshine?

  At first the mental alarm pulsed light and intermittent; but the closer he came to the shack, the louder and more frequent it became until a steady hum produced enough electricity to raise hair on his forearms. Jolly heard someone inside.

  He peered in the front window. A small fire in the far corner of the hut revealed four rough-hewn walls and a dirt floor. Facing away from the window, the man stirred a bucket of something, oblivious, or at least uncaring, of Jolly’s approach.

  Putting an eye on the skinny man eased Jolly’s fears as a fisherman eases the tension on his line when a small bass strikes. But the sight did nothing to flatten the hair on his arms. Conventional wisdom advised taking expected action. Jolly made his way toward the door.

  Several medium sized knocks. No response. Not unexpected. Country folks seldom expected visitors and thus were slow to answer a door. Jolly did the right thing. He moved to the side of the door and called out, “Vienna Police. I’d like to speak to you for a minute, sir.”

  A cloud picked that moment to waft in front of the sun and extinguish remaining light as if the infamous Mr. Murphy controlled the script. Jolly pulled out his flashlight, a long, black leaden instrument designed as much for bashing as for illumination.

  "Vienna Police, sir. I'm here to speak, nothing else." Silence. No movement inside the shack. Jolly instituted Plan B and pushed the door. It squeaked open.

  A sweep of the beam and…Empty room. Save for the bucket and smoldering fire attended by the skinny man only moments before. Jolly walked over and shined his light inside.

  Empty.

  Why on earth put a danged empty bucket over a fire and stir air happy as grandpa stirring the pond with his trolling motor?

  Another thought displaced that riddle. Why am I so concerned about a bucket? Where’s the man?” Jealous for attention over the past several minutes, the mental alarms came into the forefront as a single word beeped like a neon sign through his synapses: TRAP!

  Jolly moved the flashlight to his left hand, unsnapped his holster, and pulled the pistol free. He placed the flashlight under his arm and chambered a round in the automatic. A slight squeeze of his index finger would unleash a high-impact hollow-point round. Fourteen more could follow in rapid succession.

  The feel of his weapon usually resulted in secretion of testosterone proportional to the weapon’s weight. But the euphoria died when his light first dimmed, then extinguished.

  Jolly whacked the flashlight against a beefy thigh. Nothing but pain. The blackness was complete. Once more he thwacked his thigh. The light returned but his nerves would not. Too much had gone wrong.

  Where is he?

  Jolly turned the full measure of his senses to the primary task at hand. His forty-plus year old ears retained keen sensitivity. He could hear insects rasping outside…and his blood as it rushed through his temples…but no indication of the man.

  Two ways in means two ways out. He continued to sweep the flashlight.

  Side window’s small for bailing, though you did seem a bit puny for your height. His heart continued to pound. Didn't come out the front door or window. Jolly crept to his right, over to what passed for a side window. Must have shimmied through here when I was beating on the door. He considered holstering the weapon but only pulled his finger away from the trigger and rested it along the barrel housing. Probably half a mile away by now.

  Jolly shined the half-working flashlight to the ground below…he leaned through to make the beam cover more ground. That’s when the still air behind Patrolman Jolly Rogers stirred.

  Maybe he perceived a slight atmospheric perturbation; maybe he detected a muted ripping noise. Jolly did not sense the gentleman standing at the edge of the clearing…nor did he see hundreds of red orbs floating like pairs of fireflies hovering in still formations behind The Man. All that would require X-ray vision—an ability to see through plywood and tarpaper. Even so, for some reason Jolly twisted and, still hanging half in and half out of the structure, pointed the beam back inside. As if taking form out of air, the black man appeared in the doorway, out of Jolly’s sight.

  2

  What was once Julius Washington contemplated the police officer’s backside and a humorless smile creased lips that even in life were never made to acknowledge joy. Without effort or sound Julius glided toward the unsuspecting law officer.

  3

  "Patrol Two, Patrol Two." Myra Holmes's voice sputtered into the empty squad car. Jolly's wife wanted to know just what time he intended to get home. They needed to get on the road in short order to salvage any part of their Sunday evening.

  CHAPTER 36

  Sunday, July 15, 8:24 pm, Hattie Jackson’s House

  Hattie raised the remote and dismissed the five-day forecast man. She stared at the blank screen as if answers to her thoughts could bloom in living color. Two nights passed since the attack on her porch. She felt certain the vagrant fellow and Sam Howard were part of what was beginning. If history foretold the future, this danger would spread.

  It rained earlier, not the typical afternoon sprinkle, but a full-fledged gully-washer. Faint grumbles from the storm passed through Hattie’s house and she gave up trying to putter in the kitchen
. She wasn’t sleeping so much over the past couple of days.

  Who wants to waste what time a bad heart allowed in bed?

  But the storm outside washed away morose thoughts—reminded her of the happy times she and Nana Sally sat together on the big feather bed during the summer thumpers. When Nana told stories of childhood and the war. Hattie stood and rode the good memories down the hallway to the master bedroom. What she wanted sat in the second drawer of the bureau…hidden underneath a layer of ladies’ unmentionables.

  She opened the cardboard box sunken by weight of years and arranged the contents on the comforter made decades before by Nana Sally’s hand. Hattie picked up the family album and leafed through the pages. It took only a couple seconds to find the right one.

  Jerome…her pulse quickened, but not the hurtful way it did a couple of nights ago. This time love accelerated the heartbeat and Hattie thought that was just fine. He stared up with dark, faded eyes through the sepia hues of intervening decades. Hattie closed her eyes and thought.

  From the time of their childhood in the sharecropper’s area just outside Copper Gulch until the moment they took Jerome from her, the two never spent one day apart. She raised the book to her chest and spoke as if Jerome stood inside the parlor of Nana Sally’s old house.

  “I miss you, baby.” She waited, but not for an answer because she knew one would not come but to savor the moment…to allow her beaten heart to simmer.

  If I’m to die soon, then please God make it now, Hattie thought. Make it now with my Jerome against my heart and his face so clear in my mind.

  But Jerome’s face faded and in its place came a dim figure dressed in the mask of a southern gentleman twirling a cane along the farthest horizon of her mind’s eye. Hattie placed the album back on the bed. Even so, she still had a few things to say to Jerome.

  “It's happening again, and this time…I just don’t know.”

  The last time Leland Graves dealt terror in the small town Hattie found enough strength to survive. Young people can sometimes…even if they don’t completely understand the opponent. Hattie wondered how much fight she could muster now…heart giving up and all the rest of it.

  “You never knew what got you, did you, Sugar?”

  Hattie traced her hand across features that fading chemicals could not erase. She paused, closed her eyes again, and willed the old photo to return with his touch. Nothing; so she flipped back to the album’s first page.

  In the center of that leaf sat the photograph Sally Jackson.

  Nana Sally knew.

  Outside the remembrance in Hattie's heart, the picture represented all that remained of the woman.

  Skin so perfect, thought Hattie, and smiled as she remembered the Creole complexion of a New Orleans lady. Not extraordinary, since Sally was more than three quarters Caucasian. Three quarters white but fully slave, at least according to the law.

  Far-off thunder rumbled like the low growl of a toothless dog and Hattie closed her eyes. The noise tickled her memory…opened doors to rooms that stored all those summer evenings with Nana Sally. Her mind saw them both—Nana Sally and young Hattie—on the same bed where Hattie sat now. Teenage Hattie held a silver brush.

  Loved Nana’s hair, Hattie thought. So long…so straight and silky. As Hattie brushed Nana Sally’s hair, her grandmother would speak of the old days.

  “Field hands would go first,” said Nana.

  She meant the slave auction in New Orleans at the corner of St. Louis and Chartres.

  “White folks made it an outing…brought their children…drank wine in the grand dome inside the St. Louis Hotel while people were sold,” said Nana. “And always the field hands first,” Nana Sally said. “That kept folks at the auction till the end…tempted them to bid on an extra picker or two.” A pause, and then, “You know why they made the field hands—women included, mind you—strip to the waist before the bidding started?”

  Hattie pretended like she didn’t.

  “So buyers could look for stripes on their backs.”

  Sally took Hattie’s hand and kissed it—a brief butterfly that brushed Hattie’s skin and floated away.

  “Stripes indicated a rebellious nature…drove down the value of human flesh…at the auction, that is.”

  Sally shook her head and Hattie’s brush followed.

  “Think of it Hattie,” said Nana and paused the story long enough to allow time for Hattie to do just that. “Folks beat their people before they’d beat their dogs.”

  Nana Sally went quiet long enough for Hattie to complete five or six full-length strokes.

  “Everyone knew what came next.”

  Hattie did too. Nana needed to talk about this part—had to let it out just like a person needs to drain a stubborn cyst from time to time.

  “There’d be a clatter as the wives took children away…shopping maybe, but probably just rode the hansom on home. When things quieted down the auctioneer would pass out cigars and brandy…velour chairs came forward and the best customers took the finest view.”

  Though no hint of a tangle remained, Hattie kept the brush moving through Nana’s hair. “Then came the beauties and that’s when things got moving.”

  Hattie heard this one before—about the flourishing sub-market that existed for beautiful slave women and their female children—but she did not interrupt.

  “City men would bid…folks with no need for planting and picking rice or cotton.”

  Sally paused, and when she spoke again her voice sounded distant to Hattie…as if it were not Nana Sally she heard but the voice of a much younger Sally coming from the other side of sixty years.

  “The way the men looked at the girls,” Nana said, “eyes kind of closed and half-smile on their faces.” Sally interrupted Hattie’s brush by turning to look at her eyes. “You could read their minds clearer than the front page of the Daily Crescent.” Nana Sally faced forward again and allowed Hattie to resume.

  “Harems,” Nana Sally said. “That’s what these men got…harems like those Babylonian kings in the Bible.” Sally turned again. She held Hattie’s wrist, stopping the brush midway through the stroke. “And once the gavel fell,” Sally snorted a laugh with no smile attached, “Then…well…didn’t anybody care about what the man did with his new property.”

  Nana Sally spoke with no shame in her voice of how her mother spent a lifetime of moving from one master to another in the New Orleans of the mid eighteen hundreds. She bore three children in the process, Sally the last.

  “They sold Mere,” that’s what Nana called her mother, “from one plantation or city estate to another.”

  A wealthy planter from Corinth, Mississippi visited Sally’s estate in New Orleans. Mere escorted the master’s guest to church services on Sunday morning. She pleaded with the planter during their return drive and before the sun set that Sunday evening, the visitor completed all necessary business arrangements with his host. Transaction completed and Little Sally no longer belonged to her New Orleans master…or to her mother, for that matter.

  Little Sally could not serve her mother's master in any case; the man had fathered her. Though the Mississippi planter suspected as much, he feigned ignorance during the negotiations.

  “You know what I still can’t understand…even after all these years?”

  “No ma’am, Nana. What’s that?

  “These men—making deals for lives like Satan himself—thought they were gentlemen.”

  Years later, what Nana Sally would remember about the time her carriage departed the old bound for the new was the placid look on her mother’s face. She never saw, or heard from the woman again.

  “My life in Corinth didn’t vary to any great degree from what I knew in New Orleans,” said Nana. “Fine mansion…a bit more lavish, if you could believe it…and the mistress assigned menial tasks.”

  Hattie knew two exceptions proved worth noting. This new master turned out every bit the gentle master Sally’s mother sensed… and Sally became Sall
y Jackson instead of just plain Sally.

  “Slavery was still slavery,” Sally said. “Because when I turned fourteen, the Mississippi master presented me as a gift to his daughter on her fifteenth wedding anniversary.”

  “And that’s how we came to Vienna, Alabama, isn’t it, Nana.”

  Sally turned and raised an eyebrow. But Hattie could see no reproach in Nana’s expression…she thought she detected a hint of a smile.

  “It was how I came to Vienna, Hattie.” Now the smile broke through. “You came a few years later and through entirely different means.” Her face turned serious.

  “Corinth, Mississippi was my home…the Jacksons my family. At first I was devastated…reminded that what I felt and what I wanted meant nothing at all to people who were so good in every other way.”

  “You said before that you liked the Brewtons.”

  “Liked them?” Nana replied. “Child, I grew to love them.”

  “Then why did you say you were devastated?”

  Nana Sally sighed. “Hattie, does a horse have a favorite field…prefer one place to graze over another?”

  Hattie thought for a moment, the brush frozen halfway down Nana’s hair. “I don’t know…don’t expect anyone ever asked the horse.” Hattie looked at her fingernails, and thought. She said, “Don’t people just do what’s best for the horse?”

  Three quarters of a century later the thunder stopped and Aunt Hattie returned from the conversation with Nana Sally that came to her like the echo of the sea comes from an old shell that has not seen the shore for centuries. Hattie would go further tonight…had to if Leland Graves’s scent really sat on her damaged heart. Time was short and Hattie knew it. She looked back to Nana Sally’s photograph.

  “Gets a little complicated,” she said to the empty room. “Because my Tommy belongs to your Brewtons.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Sunday, July 15, 8:46 pm, Hattie Jackson’s House