The Lesser People

by Lee Thompson

  Sarah trekked upstairs and Ben’s breath hit my shoulder. He whispered, “We’re going to go upstairs, Elijah. We got to so if they start shooting we’ll be okay. All right? You hear me?”

  In the yard, headlights cut through the night air. I saw the silhouettes of four men and one off to the side standing still, calm, the barrel of the gun he held catching a sliver of light and reflecting it dully.

  Miss Jessie held her shotgun tight to her shoulder, halfway raised, pointed at the nearest man’s feet. She said, “What’s this all about?”

  “You Tommy’s little cunt?” a shadow said.

  “Tommy’s not here,” she said. “Get back on the road.”

  I thought of what Preacher had said the day that Daddy broke Fred’s hand in church, how the town was full of cowards. I wondered if Fred was among their number. And I thought about a Conover father almost stabbing Ben in the back because he couldn’t stand the sight of his boy getting beaten in a fist fight.

  I thought Miss Jessie should come back inside and wait for Uncle Tommy to return so that he could tell them they weren’t welcome to visit, but I knew she couldn’t do that since some people never listen to what you’re saying because all they hear in their ears is the hurricane of their own want.

  Upstairs, Sarah banged around and cussed. Feet shuffled on the floor above us.

  Ben said, “Get away from the door, you hear me?”

  He grabbed my shoulder, started pulling me back. I raised a hand and pointed at the window, unable to speak as men lit bottles stuffed with rags and Miss Jessie raised her shotgun so fast it blurred and fire exploded from the barrel and one of the men fell and the bottle exploded the same moment that the other men launched theirs at the house.

  And the bottle the shot man dropped had exploded over him and he screamed hoarsely, on fire, the car next to him catching and the paint bubbling, and the house we stood in with other flaming bottles coming right at us, and Ben’s hand was hard on my shoulder and he jerked me back as the porch boomed and thunder bellowed, rattling pictures on the walls a split second before it looked like lightning hit the siding and doorway.

  I heard Miss Jessie scream as Ben drug me back and the smoke billowed black and thick among the fire eating at the old farm.

  Shotguns bucked and the man outside continued to scream but I couldn’t see him or anyone else because the front door was a curtain into hell, and Sarah was running down the steps pulling someone behind her. He was smaller than her, darker of skin, thin, the metal covering his mouth from beneath his jaw up around his nose. The tubing ran vertically, about a half an inch between each bar. A muzzle. His eyes were extremely blue, like the sky, and they were scared and I saw them up close as Ben jerked me back and dragged me along behind Sarah while her brother looked back with his scared eyes, mewling like a kitten that has lost its mother and left to fend for itself.

  I know that feeling, I thought.

  Guns blared as we busted out the back door and Sarah drug her brother and Ben was pulling me faster than I could run toward the old servant’s quarters, its shape rising from the darkness and the four small windows reflecting the inferno behind us as the fire eating the house crept over the roof and around the side walls.

  I tripped but Ben didn’t let me fall. He slipped his arms around my ribs and hoisted me up and carried me to the door that Sarah held open with one hand while she tried to keep her brother inside the barn with her other.

  He clawed at the air, clawed at her face, but she batted his weak strikes away. We hustled inside and she slammed the door shut and the air seemed to whoosh for a second before there was only our heavy breathing and the distant crackle of the pyre.

  Sarah hugged her brother and said, “Shh, shh, be quiet now, Leonard. Quiet. It’s okay.” He calmed and cried against her shoulder. She held him and Ben held me but he was looking out the window, unable to see much from the angle.

  He whispered, “Your mom…”

  Sarah’s eyes gleamed in the pale light, her lips contorted, messy looking like they were stitched up at horrible angles by a drunk doctor. She forced herself to take a deep breath and clung to her brother as the men out front hooted and shot their guns in the air or in Miss Jessie’s dead body, and I hated them, hated so hard I thought I’d faint, and I wanted to hug Sarah and Leonard but there wasn’t time for it because Ben said, “We need to hide down in the hole in case they come searching the property.”

  “They wouldn’t,” Sarah said.

  “They might,” Ben said.

  She let go of her brother who stared into the empty space of the quarters trying to get his bearings. She took his hand and rubbed it. “I’m afraid he won’t be able to climb down the ladder.”

  Ben said, “I’ll help him.”

  “I don’t want to go down there,” I said.

  “We ain’t got a choice,” Ben said.

  He glanced back out the window.

  He said, “Shit, here they come.”

  I ran to the window and rose up on my tiptoes to see out one corner.

  Three men moved toward us, each carrying a gun in one hand and an unlit bottle in the other. The man in the middle of the other two stared at me with only the weak and glaring glass between us. The dirt beneath my feet felt like it was giving way. He said to the men with him, “The kids are hiding in there.”

  He set his shotgun down and pointed. The other two men said nothing. They just waited like I waited, like the world was waiting to right itself. One of the men I figured was that coward Fred, trembled so badly that the bottle he held rattled against the stock of his shotgun.

  I swallowed hard, staring at the man who had spoken, wanting to show him that I was unafraid but he raised his hand and cocked his finger like the hammer of a gun.

  I shuddered and wondered what kind of man it took to hurt children, if he could hate my father so much that he could live the rest of his life with my blood, with Ben’s and Sarah’s and Leonard’s on his hands.

  His face was hidden by shadows, the fire roaring behind him.

  He flipped open a Zippo and the oldest Conover’s face grinned in the light it cast as he put the lighter to the wick of his homemade explosive.

  He held the bottle on its side and slid the lighter back in his pocket.

  I scooted back quick, said, “They’re almost here.”

  Sarah’s eyes were hurt and fierce. She said, “Help me get him in there.”

  Ben nodded and put an arm around Leonard and we rushed to the little room with the trap door, Sarah squatting, tearing the board free, then me at her side because Ben had his hands full trying to hold her brother still, pressing the younger boy’s head to his chest and stroking his hair, both of their eyes wet as another whoosh roared in my ears and a lit bottle smashed one of the windows and the bottle exploded on the other side of the partition.

  Leonard cried out but his muzzle smothered the sound and me and Sarah lifted the trapdoor. “Get him down there,” she cried. “Hurry.”

  Smoke quickly filled the old servant’s quarters and I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth, trying not to breathe at all as Ben and Sarah worked to get Leonard safely down the ladder, the fire on one side of me, and the young boy disappearing into the darkness in the earth and Miss Jessie out there somewhere staring at the ruins of her home and all the men in her life had worked for and done their best to protect.

  My skin grew red. The fire climbed the partition wall and heat ebbed through it, wood crackling there and above us as another bottle hit the ceiling and shook dust from the rafters and it fell down into my eyes.

  Sarah cried from the hole, “Elijah!” Ben and Leonard were down below. She waved to me. I couldn’t move my legs. I heard men laughing and looked toward the broken window out the open doorway and thought I saw ghosts shuffling sadly among the flames, trying to grab their things and their fingers falling right through them.

  I choked on the smoke and on the pain in my chest that made my nose run, my jaw ache.

>   I said, “It’s like they’re erasing everything that was here with the fire.”

  “Get over here,” Sarah said. She waved frantically. I heard Ben’s muffled voice crying my name and I could imagine him down there in the dark only glimpsing how the fire cast light upon his girlfriend’s legs, seeing her arms outstretched for me, and Ben not understanding why I wasn’t coming to her, maybe thinking that I was hurt.

  My throat clicked and tears burned my cheeks and I got down on all fours and crawled to her, trying not to imagine what it felt like to her knowing that her mother was out there bleeding in the crisp black grass.

  Sarah said, “Squeeze by me. Hurry!”

  She scooted over and I slid down onto the ladder beside her, smelling her sweat, her elbow brushing me as I inched my way down the ladder and into the darkness and above me, Ben’s girlfriends wrestling with the trapdoor, trying to pull it back in place. She grunted as she struggled. She mewled like her brother with the thick black smoke trailing along the ceiling above her.

  Ben said, “Come on, Eli, get down here. She’ll get it.”

  I clung to the ladder, the roughhewn wood biting into my palms, into my fingers, the blackness below me too dark to see through. My throat clicked, I whispered, “I can’t see.”

  “Just climb down, damn you,” Ben said.

  The lid above us closed and the light vanished. I clung tighter to the ladder. Above me Sarah worked her way down, almost on top of me as her sneaker bumped the run I held. My brother said, “Where are you guys?”

  “I’m right here,” I said.

  “You need to go down,” Sarah said. “Like, right now.”

  “I can’t see,” I said.

  “Well, we’re not going back up,” she said, a little angry. I got to thinking again about her Momma out there in the grass, with maybe those ghost slaves nearby, leaning over her corpse, maybe with Isaiah sitting cross-legged in the grass, singing to all of them about the spider that paid a visit on night’s like this when the fires raged out of control and those left to pick up the pieces it destroyed were huddled in a damp and dusty grave, the spider large as the house, its venom as hot as the inferno its stale breath stirred.

  And I knew that we were caught in its web, that the web was just invisible and it’d always been there, up ahead, hiding in the forest, the fields, the houses, the towns, waiting for us to stumble into it and snare ourselves. And men like the Conover’s, like Fred, and Sheriff, they were willing to sacrifice the blood and bone of others to feed that spider because they knew if they didn’t feed it, it would feed on them.

  Leonard cried.

  His sister said, “You move, Eli, or I’m climbing over you and we both might fall then.”

  “How far is it to the floor?” I said, thinking that a fall from the ladder might feel like an eternity until the landing in that darkness, in the not knowing.

  “Far enough to hurt us,” she said. “Now move it, all right? I’ve gotta get to Leonard.”

  I swallowed a gulp of dirty air, smelling the smoke and burning wood above us, seeing the light of its burning around the cracks of the trapdoor. I forced myself to climb down, afraid of the not seeing, my hands hurting and knees scraping each rung. At last the rungs ended and I set foot on rocky earth. I reached a hand out and stepped forward to make sure I didn’t walk into a wall. I couldn’t tell which way was which. Sarah sighed as she exited the ladder. She grabbed my neck and said, “Hold on to me.”

  We joined hands.

  She said, “Ben?”

  “I’m right here,” he whispered. His voice echoed softly.

  Up on the ground a large beam cracked and the ceiling must have caved in because the floor above us shook and dirt fell from the walls and the granules seemed like bugs crawling over me and I almost screamed but Sarah’s hand covered my mouth.

  “Quiet,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”

  My brother said, “You’re close.”

  A second later I felt his fingers brush my chin. He stroked my face, patted it. He pulled me into a hug and I felt Sarah brush by us and heard her soothing Leonard in the darkness close by. I looked up at the ceiling and whispered, “Will the fire burn through it?”

  “No,” Ben said, but he didn’t sound too sure.

  “What if the walls all cave in? How are we getting out of here?” I was thinking that moving the trapdoor would be hard enough without any rubble on it, and my heart started pounding hard again, my mouth dry, me thinking that we didn’t even have anything to eat or drink and nobody knew where we were.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Over previous summers, when Daddy had time in the late July to take a vacation, we spent a lot of time on the lake fishing, laughing, sunlight tanning our skin, and at night, with fireflies dancing about on the wind, with the cool breeze coming off the lake and our bodies gathered around the campfire, we were close, a family.

  A family in the light, and at night in the firelight, toasting hotdogs on long sticks, and Daddy telling us ghost stories. Comforting times, close times, times that seemed ages ago even though the last time was just the summer before we were forced from Miss Jessie’s house and into the tunnel beneath the old servant’s quarters. And we were sitting there, stooped and scared in the darkness, me thinking that we didn’t even have anything to eat or drink and nobody knew where we were.

  We sat on the floor after a while and leaned against each other.

  Sarah said, “Once Leonard is calm enough we’ll get out of here.”

  I said, “How?”

  My brother touched my leg. He said, “We’ll get out soon. Soon as Sarah’s ready.”

  My stomach growled. I tried not to think about food, which wasn’t too difficult since Sarah started crying. I found her hand, found Ben’s was already covering it. My brother said, “Maybe she’s alive.”

  Leonard scratched the floor over and over for what felt like hours.

  Sarah said, “She ain’t alive and you know it.”

  I said, “Uncle Tommy should be back by now.”

  Sarah said, “We don’t even know that he’s coming back. They might have killed him.”

  “They couldn’t kill him,” I said. “Right, Ben?”

  I leaned hard against the wall, thinking on how Daddy had been overpowered by a group of men in our front yard, and how Preacher had been overpowered outside the police station, and Ben didn’t have to answer my question for me to know that they could kill Uncle Tommy.

  My eyes grew hot and wet and my face felt flushed. I tried to see the fire dancing around the trapdoor but it was gone, all burned away.

  I didn’t understand how this all happened over people not liking other people.

  I shook my head, sobbed, felt Ben’s shoulder pressed tight to mine. He said, “Uncle Tommy wouldn’t try to stay and fight a group of them. He would have gotten away.”

  “They’d chase him,” I said. “They’d like chasing him down.”

  Leonard’s nails dug into the floor.

  Sarah said, “We can’t count on anybody coming to help us. We’ve gotta deal with this on our own.” She spoke quietly to her brother and his scratching ceased. I asked her what was wrong with her brother. She said, “There ain’t nothing wrong with him.”

  “He has a muzzle on, like he’s some kind of dog. Can he talk?”

  “No,” she said.

  She went on to tell how he’d cried as a baby, pretty much non-stop, and there were times that she thought her mom was going to fill the bathtub and hold him under the water, said that there were times she thought of doing it herself, too, though she’d never admitted it to anyone.

  Leonard’s crying continued through the toddler phase, and by then he’d also taken up on biting things when he was frustrated, which was all the time. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him and Miss Jessie had taken him far away as Washington D.C. to have him helped. But nobody could do anything. She thought of the muzzle after he nearly bit one of her fingers off. I remembered the
scar she’d had, the one I saw when we were eating hotdogs with Uncle Tommy at the Klan rally, before Ben had gotten jumped by the Conover’s and stood his ground. I asked Sarah if her brother had ever bitten her. She said he had. She said once he’d broken the skin and she’d been terrified for days that whatever had infected him was contagious, and she’d hated him and feared for herself, but nothing ever came of it and then she felt pretty awful for the way she’d felt and the thoughts she’d had.

  She held his hands there in the darkness as dust drifted down on us.

  She said, “He just don’t know any better. Just knows he can express himself with the biting and the screaming. At first, when Momma had put the muzzle on him, I was angry with her, because I thought she’d done something horrible to him, treating him more like an animal than a boy. But I knew deep in my heart that she was doing it to protect us, and to protect him so that he couldn’t bite any random person who wandered by or knocked on our door. People are mean. If we’d judged him and he was our blood and flesh, others would judge him worse, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “So this is better,” she said, though she still sounded as if it wasn’t completely better.

  The air changed, moved around us light and breezy as she stood.

  She said, “Okay, we better get moving. I think he’s calm enough.”

  Ben stood and helped me up. He held my hand. His was warm. Mine felt cold. I kept thinking about Miss Jessie going out to face the men and kept seeing that bottle of gasoline or whatever it was flying at the house and the front door blanketed in flames and smoke.

  Sarah said, “Ben, take Leonard and Elijah’s hand and I’ll lead the way.”

  Ben shifted and a moment later he cursed. “He’s squeezing too hard.”

  “He’s scared,” she said. “Leonard, it’s okay. We’re going home,” and her voice cracked on home, and I felt she probably had a crack in her spirit, one that ran the length of it, and if something else hit it she might never get better.