Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  And once, too, the Klan sent word that they were coming to call, as they did with all the farmers in the county, expecting whiskey and a contribution. Mr. Wilson took two shotguns from his gun cabinet, filled his pockets with shells, and positioned himself on a dark little rise of ground by the entrance gates. He waited patiently for the riders to pass and then laid a neat metronomic series of blasts down the length of the road. He misjudged the range, but it had been a long time since he’d used a shotgun.

  At first Charles Tucker thought nothing of the vandalism the field supervisors reported to him. On a place as large as Aikens Grove there was always a certain amount of damage and thievery by passing tramps: of food from work crews in the fields; of a hen from a chicken yard; of clothes from a drying line; of tools left out overnight.

  But not like this. Every day now, somewhere in the expanse of Aikens Grove, in the miles of isolated pastures and pine lots, of houses and barns and storage buildings and smokehouses, something happened.

  The night fires. They began as small scattered brushfires in the fall-dry slopes and scrubby hollows. Then one by one the pasture feed stations flamed and smoldered, trailing white wisps of smoke into the morning sun. The old gristmill on Singing Water Creek exploded into a ball of flame that spotted the night sky, leaving only fire-streaked millstones by morning. The field shelters burned. They were lean-tos thrown up over the years by work crews as they needed them, crude rough things, but handy in bad weather. (Not worth destroying, Charles thought.)

  And one morning the whole of Baptist Ridge burned. At the first telltale squiggles of smoke, almost invisible in the gray-white of the early morning sky, Charles climbed to the barn roof and watched through field glasses. The mile-long crest fluttered into raggedy tatters of flames. Orange flowers bloomed along the slopes; the underbrush seethed with wriggling yellow snakes; pines launched exploding rockets into the air; a red tide began to flow down the corrugated sloping sides.

  It was dramatic enough, Charles thought, but with the southwest wind, it would burn itself out harmlessly in a few days. Still, it had been deliberately set, at four or maybe five different spots.

  He set two men to patrolling the roads at night.

  At the farm garage, the tires of a tractor and the hoses at both gas pumps were slashed; the pumps themselves were safely locked.

  The bell at New Hope African Methodist Church (just beyond the farm’s east gate) rang out before dawn, wild jerky sounds that carried for miles in the still night air; a window was open, but no one was there. Pasture gates were ripped off their hinges and pounded to pieces with stones. (Heavy wooden gates, it must have taken most of the night to destroy them, Charles thought.) The roof panes of the largest greenhouse were broken by a barrage of rocks from a slingshot; the kumquat and the grapefruit trees inside were ruined by frost.

  The county sheriff cleared the few remaining tramps from camps along the railroad tracks.

  Charles posted watchmen at all the large farm buildings. He no longer trusted the dogs. They had turned useless and unpredictable. At times they remained silent, mesmerized, or whined softly in friendship; at times they roared with furious anger and pursued foolish circling trails.

  Determined by the season, the farm work went on. The last of the beef cattle were shipped. The hog-slaughtering pens were busy. Smokehouses trailed their sweet wood scent through the air.

  A can of paint, stolen from a work truck, splashed over prize shoats in their pen. The last of the hogs, fattening in the stubble of the cornfields, were driven out and scattered; it took two days to recover them.

  Charles sent a mounted man with the dairy herd each day. Even so a broken fence in the pastures along Willow Creek let half the cows scatter into the swampy brushy lowlands. Shouting and cursing, the guard searched them out and drove them back. All but one. They found her the next day, hamstrung, X marks gashed along her flanks.

  Cliff Whitney’s old hound, rambling on arthritic legs to some secret night hunt of its own, was killed with a rock and its body dragged to Whitney’s gate.

  So they knew whose dog it was, Charles thought.

  Junior Thurlow, who lived in one of the supervisors’ houses in the east corner of the plantation, near the New Hope Church, woke to find pieces of burning lightwood on his roof, and his chicken coop completely in flames. He saw a shadow, got a shotgun, and gave chase, leaving his wife and sons to put out the fires. He fired both barrels, missing, but getting a clear quick look at a small figure.

  Junior Thurlow went to the manager’s office the next morning.

  “I seen him, boss. A nigger kid.” His own black face was sweating with fury. “A goddamn nigger kid not five feet tall. Killed all my hens and burnt a big hole in my roof.”

  “Only one?”

  “One, boss.”

  That same night the yellow tom from the stables was killed, knife clean through the body.

  Charles thought: I know this much about him. He loves fire. He is silent enough and quick enough to stalk a cat, even a wary half-wild creature like that. And he is good enough with a throwing knife to kill it.

  He hung long cords of electric lights, like strings of diamonds, around all the farm buildings. Inside, the watchmen reached for their guns whenever the dogs howled or barked or just grew restless and paced.

  The weather turned chill; there were heavy frosts at night. Charles, .38 at his hip, spent endless hours on horseback, searching pastures and woodlots, climbing razorback ridges, sidestepping along gravel gullies and streambeds, through canebrakes and bottomlands. He even hunted through the worn-out land along Little Lost River, where the soft moist ground was pocked with the V-shaped hooves of a herd of sheep, handsome in full winter coats.

  Once he saw a thin thread of smoke hanging in the still air and rode toward it eagerly, to find a camp of surveyors for the new state road.

  Sometimes he felt eyes watching him. Once he saw movement at the far side of a cotton field and sent his horse charging through the dry brown stalks. He found nothing but scrub and ground too hard to hold a print.

  Day after day, he checked springs and runs and creeks. He saw many animal tracks and once a single set of footprints, small prints in the soft ground that told him nothing.

  Finally, on the slopes above the old quarry—deep still cold water, almost black under the cloudy sky—he found a camp: a small low tent, brush and kindling laid for a fire, a neat tightly rolled blanket held above ground in a split stick, two unopened cans of beans, scattered bones on the ground. And a wooden mug, very carefully made with carvings all around the sides. They might be snakes, Charles thought, or maybe flames or maybe both, though he wasn’t sure. He shot holes in the cans and the mug and burned the canvas and the blanket.

  Two days later, as he stacked plates in his kitchen sink after dinner, a half brick smashed through the window, glancing past his cheek. Spurred by his wife’s screams and the cries of his two sons, he fired his shotgun over and over again into the dark, aiming at nothing.

  I must have come very close to finding him, Charles thought. And now I know that he has no gun. Or I would not be alive.

  The next morning, precise to the minute for his weekly meeting with Mr. Wilson, he parked his truck under the porte cochere. The houseman swung open the door and nodded down the hall toward the study.

  Mr. Wilson was waiting—as he always was—hand outstretched for the reports.

  The study, the only room in the house Charles had seen, was panelled in dark wood. Even on this bright morning it was dim and filled with shadows. Mr. Wilson coughed softly as he turned the pages. “Yes,” he said finally. “And now, the incidents. What of them?”

  He always calls them incidents, Charles thought, even the fire that blackened an entire ridge line. “Last night it was a broken window at my house.”

  Mr. Wilson folded his arms and leaned forward into the yellow round of desk light. “And?”

  “A couple of days ago, I found his shelter, one of the places he
uses when he’s hungry or needs a rest. But it wasn’t his main camp. I know he’s got one, a good one, the nights are cold. That’s what I got to find.”

  “Yes.” Mr. Wilson leaned back in his chair; his face floated against the dark panelling.

  “I want to take three men off their regular jobs and put them to searching. And the men I want,” Charles said slowly, “Johnson and Atwell and Frazier, they’re all foremen. Work’ll fall behind without them.”

  “No choice.” Mr. Wilson stood up. “I can see no other possible course of action. Take the men you need for as long as you need them. Another thing. Could this fellow have worked here once? Was he discharged and now wants revenge?”

  “No, sir,” Charles said. “Nobody from around here.”

  “Why then? Why out of the entire county has he singled out this farm?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  But maybe it is because this house is big and white and all around it the pastures are green, even this time of year, and on them the herds are fat and sleek and when the horses run their tails fly past like visible wind. And the bains and stables are brick and new-painted and nicer and cleaner than most houses. Maybe it’s because of the smell of money.

  The three men, George Johnson, Goat Atwell, Harold Frazier, began searching, methodically, from the Providence River to the north ridges. Frazier found a second shelter in a shallow cave on Wolf Creek, in it a fire already laid, a cloth bag with a piece of fresh rabbit, a broken umbrella, a neatly tied bundle containing bits of things: leaves and twigs, a bird’s wing and a rabbit pelt, carefully dried and stretched, head on. But no sight of him.

  Each day Charles told them, “We keep on looking. He’s got a camp somewhere. And he’s not by himself, there’s somebody with him.”

  “You sure are sure, boss.” Atwell laughed.

  “I am,” Charles said flatly.

  All those days of hunting, of feeling his eyes, of coming so close to him. That brick on my kitchen floor was still warm when I picked it up. I was holding him in my hand…I know.

  Atwell found the carcasses of two sheep from the Little Lost River flock. Their throats had been ripped clean through, their heads turned backward.

  One morning there was a squirrel’s head at the front door of the main house, fresh killed, its blood smeared across the white door. His footprints in the soft damp soil of the flower beds showed how he’d walked around the house, while neither watchman nor dogs stirred, and looked in all the windows.

  The weather turned foggy. Sounds carried farther now; scents hung like flags in the unmoving air. The musky smell of snake nests, the crisp decay of dead leaves, a deer’s rank scent, the sweet warm smell of beaver dams: they were all there to read.

  Atwell said, “Boss, I heard something, don’t know what, but I heard something back behind the burnt-out mill.”

  And Johnson said, “I seen something on Baptist Ridge. Could been a deer, but I don’t think so.”

  “He’s getting tired.” Charles could feel the other’s weariness in his own bones. “Why the hell don’t he pull out?”

  “What happens now, boss?”

  “We keep looking,” Charles said, “along the ridges. That’s where I’d be.”

  And he is like me. If I ever see him it’ll be like seeing myself in a photo negative, me white, him black. But lookalikes for all of that. Brothers.

  Two days later Charles rode across Whiskey Ridge. The trail here was clean and wide, bootleggers had used it for generations. Above and beyond were the burned-out flanks of Baptist Ridge. Below, the ground fell away into sharp boulder-littered wooden ravines. A pale mist filtered the sunlight, blotched and deepened the patterns of leaf and branch, smoothed the sharp edges of granite.

  Too many cedars, he thought, practically. I need to get a crew up here and grub them out.

  He swung down from the saddle and walked, horse’s snorting breath at his shoulder. And then he crossed it, the long thin waving trail of scent, held in the damp still air. Dirt and sweat and excrement and the licorice-like smell of black skin. He took a few steps. Stopped. The smell was gone. He turned, retraced his way: only his own scent, shaving soap, saddle leather, and horse sweat. He had blundered through a thread, and broken it. He swung back in the saddle and went on. A few hundred feet later another small puff of scent. And nothing more.

  He crossed here, Charles thought. Not long ago. His camp is there below.

  He rode on, carelessly, giving no sign that he had noticed anything.

  Is he watching me, is he down below there, one eye, one speck in all that tangle? A wilderness, good cover.

  Except for one thing. It’s too small, not more than a quarter mile wide. A few men could sweep right through it.

  He began whistling cheerfully.

  In the last of the daylight, he rode, still whistling, into the stableyard. Atwell and Johnson and Frazier had come in earlier and were waiting.

  “Boss,” Johnson said, “you sound mighty happy.”

  Atwell said, “You found something.”

  Frazier, tobacco plug stretching his black cheek, grinned. “You sure as hell found something.”

  “Whiskey Ridge,” Charles said flatly. “Off the old bootleg trail. He’s there now.”

  Johnson grinned. “Son of a bitch.”

  “He’s cornered himself.” Charles scratched his fingernails against the stubble on his cheeks.

  Atwell said, “We go looking tomorrow, boss?”

  “Tonight,” Charles said. “We go looking tonight. We never been out at night before. He won’t be expecting us.”

  “Boss, we been out all day already.” Atwell tipped his chair back against the wall, refusing.

  “Don’t be a bunch of niggers. You get paid,” Charles said shortly, “just like me. Now I got to find me some more men.”

  By midnight there were five men on Whiskey Ridge. George Johnson, his son Bubba, Leroy Green, Mac Reily, Jimbo Howard. They spread out, shouting distance apart, lit their lightwood torches, picked up their shotguns, and began to climb down. The ground underfoot was broken and rough and spotted with boulders, but the night fog didn’t reach this high, and the rising moon gave some light.

  Far below, where the ridge slope ended in wide flat pastures and a stream called No Name Creek, Charles swung off his horse, stretched, and sat, Indian-style, on the ground. Here the windless bog-spotted grassland held fog like a bandage wrapped tight across its surface. He couldn’t see the barbed-wire fence a couple of hundred yards ahead. He couldn’t see Atwell and Frazier positioned on either side of him, though he could hear the snorting and stamping of their horses.

  I didn’t figure on the fog, he thought wearily. Half an army could walk across this meadow and we’d never know.

  He lit a cigarette, settled himself, and waited. It would be a long cold time till morning.

  The gullies ran like scratches down the side of the ridge, narrow and deep, knee-high leaf mold hiding a bottom of gravel and granite boulders. The moon was high now, and just past the full. Its mist-filtered light blotched and deepened the pattern of shadow of trunk and limb and brush. The five men worked their way down slowly, line across, shouting to keep in touch. Mac Reily stepped over a ledge, sprawled facedown, rose cursing. The whiplash of a branch slashed Leroy’s cheek; he washed it at a small seep spring.

  Jimbo Howard followed a gully as it twisted and right-angled downward. Until he found himself face-to-face with Mac Reily.

  “Jesus,” Mac Reily said. “Where’d you come from?” He was limping, his leg swelling over the top of his heavy boot.

  “You hurt?”

  “Feels like I busted my leg.”

  “You got to be real careful.” Jimbo Howard, nearly fifty, sat down on a flat rock. His chest hurt and lights sparkled behind his eyes.

  Mac Reily sat next to him. “Damn gun feels like it weighs a ton and a half.”

  “Well, it don’t.” Jimbo lay back and stared at the hazy patches of sky through the tang
le of branches and vines overhead.

  Mac Reily pulled off his cap and scrubbed at his kinky hair. He took out a flask, had a long swallow, held it out. Jimbo drank, nodded his thanks.

  “Call out. Keep a line across.” George Johnson shouted, voice far off and muffled by the brush.

  “That’s us, man.” Jimbo pushed himself up, hands on thighs, and picked up his torch.

  “Reily. Howard,” they shouted back.

  Jimbo said, “This way here don’t look too bad.”

  The gully was slightly wider than the others, and deeper, with a firm sandy bottom. “They all look alike to me,” Mac Reily said. He felt his leg carefully, wincing. He put his weight on it, then sat down again, and began to loosen the laces of his boot. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  The flame of Jimbo’s torch made a hole in the solid black of the twisting brushy slope, passed through and faded to a glow, disappeared.

  Mac Reily tied his boot lacings, had another swallow of whiskey.

  From the dark below, Jimbo began shouting, “Here. Here, man. I got it.”

  “Coming.” Mac Reily broke into a trot, dodging around boulders, slipping on loose shingle, shotgun heavy and awkward in his hands.

  A hundred yards down the slope, where the ravine narrowed abruptly, there was a canvas-roofed shelter and a rock fireplace whose coals still showed flecks of red under their ash gray.

  Unseeing, Jimbo had walked straight into the camp. Now he stuck his torch carefully into the cleft of a pin oak and began tearing the shelter apart, tossing frame and blankets into the air. All the while shouting, roaring, “Here, here, I got it here.” When he stood up, his left arm held a bundle, a lump, a shapeless nothing. Held it triumphantly, high over his head. Waved it back and forth like a flag.

  Hurrying forward, Mac Reily saw something else—another figure at the edge of the flickering light. A short thin black figure, arm drawn back, cocked, arm like a bowstring snapping. The knife was a single speck of light in the air.

  Jimbo screamed and fell facedown. The coals of the fire flickered, flamed, and died.