“All four of us,” he finally said. “That’s the best way to keep things right between me and my brothers.”
“Then it’s settled,” Lila said. “We’ll do as you say. And as far as we’re concerned, it’s nobody’s business whether any money changed hands. Word will get out, though, that the land is yours, which is why we wanted to do it now. Let them do their talking and speculating and forget all about it before anything happens with Pete and Dovey. That way the two of them can start fresh without any nonsense in their way.”
For a while, John and Lila sat there with no sound but the ticking of her kitchen clock between them until he said, “So while you’re easin’ the way for everybody else, how are you makin’ it?”
“I’m fine,” she said, her eyes fixed on her coffee cup. But when she looked up at John her smile faded. “I’m fine except when I’m miserable—when I’m missing Jack so much that I just want to run screaming across a cotton field. Or when I’m lying awake wondering if I’m doing what’s best for Pete and trying to figure out how on earth I can help him through yet another heartache if Daddy can’t find out what happened to Isaac. And when I’m done worrying about all that, I move on to my own life—what in the daylights is that supposed to look like? You know I was seeing Garland Harris for a while.”
“Seems decent enough.”
“Oh, he is. Only he’s not Jack, and there’s no helping that. Almost four years have gone by, and I swear some evenings I still expect to see him come walking in that door right there, tracking up my kitchen floor with those muddy work boots and grabbing supper off the stove before I could get it on the table.”
“Got a pretty good idea how you feel.”
“I know you do,” she said. “And I just think—feeling that way—it’s not fair to somebody like Garland. He wants a wife, and he deserves one who isn’t wishing he were somebody else. So I told him I thought it would be best if we—well, you know . . .”
“I’m sorry, Lila. I didn’t have no right—”
“You didn’t say anything wrong. It’s good to talk about Jack with somebody who knew him so well—and cared about him so much.”
After another silence, he had a question for her, one he had turned over and over in his mind ever since Lottie passed. “Do you ever wish you didn’t know?”
“Know what?”
“What you had—what you lost.”
“I never thought about it before . . . Might be easier . . . But no. I’d live my life with Jack again even if I had to lose him again. Living through all of that gave us Pete and Dovey, and neither one of us could ever give them up.”
“No—you’re right.” He closed his eyes and let out a long, tired sigh. This was getting to be too much, all the churned-up memories and the grief. But then Lila did something that John would see her do again and again—walk into a pitch-black room and turn a light on.
“You know what I could use?” she said, as if she’d had a sudden revelation. “I could really use a good friend. Somebody who doesn’t ambush me with dinner parties where there just happens to be an unattached insurance salesman or a widowed tax accountant prattling on about nothing. Somebody who’ll tell me straight up that my Shrimp Panama is disgusting. You up for it?”
He frowned as he thought it over. “Never had a woman friend before.”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything.”
“Always figured you can’t trust ’em.” He was finally smiling again.
“Oh, you can’t. You absolutely can’t.”
“You ever learn to fish?”
She shook her head. “Still despise it.”
“Being your friend ain’t gonna be much fun.”
“No, but there could be an occasional supper in it for you.”
“Hold up, now—I’ve had your cooking.”
Lila laughed. “I am much better than I was back then!”
“Okay then.”
“So now that we’re friends, can I meddle some more?” she asked with a big smile. “Anybody new in your life?”
“Just your son, God help me,” he said.
They had one more cup of coffee as the rain finally began to let up.
Seventeen
APRIL 18, 1967
Pete opened his high school locker and crammed in all the books from his morning classes. After lunch, all he had left were shop and PE. Then the final bell would ring and set him free.
It wasn’t that he hated school. He actually liked history and geometry. Shop was okay, but it was pretty lame compared to what he was learning from Dovey’s family. Her father, he had discovered, was a master wood craftsman. Her Uncle Hollis was the best mechanic in the whole county, and her Uncle Noah could fabricate anything from metal. Unbeknownst to Miss Paul, all three of them had quietly used their skills to supplement the family income for years. And all three were willing to teach Pete what they knew as long as he did his part in the fields, which he was happy to do. So making a cutting board in shop class wasn’t much of a challenge, given that he already knew how to dovetail joints and turn wood on a lathe.
As for PE, what a total waste of time. You didn’t need dumbbells to “bulk up” if you were pitching hay bales around all summer and spending long autumn days tromping on cotton to pack it down in the wagons.
Now that Pete was a junior, his mother let him decide how much he could farm as long as he kept his grades up, and he found himself working more and more. He worked for free with the Picketts during the summer and for pay with Daddy Ballard the rest of the year. Whenever he was rained out, he was either with Dovey or in her father’s woodworking shop. He had saved up for a used truck, but when he turned sixteen, Daddy Ballard bought the pickup for him and told him he would likely need every dime he had saved for repairs, gas, and the Dairy Queen. He actually got to take Dovey there now, all the way to Childersburg, because the longer he worked with the Picketts, the more Dovey’s father seemed to trust him. Work, for Pete, had translated into time alone with Dovey, and there was no such thing as too much of that.
Still, every afternoon he had to waste a whole hour doing push-ups and sit-ups and running laps and tossing free throws. He didn’t mind the rope climb because he had learned long ago that such a skill could come in mighty handy, but there wasn’t much chance he would ever free-throw his way out of a deep hole in the ground.
His family probably thought he didn’t participate at school because he didn’t want Dovey to feel left out. But that wasn’t true. All of Pete’s life, he had felt a little alienated from kids his own age, even though he got along with them well enough. He could sense things they were missing, like an undercurrent in the river. The world looked so different to him than it did to them. But Dovey could feel the currents. She saw everything Pete saw and some things he missed.
As he closed his locker, he heard giggles behind him and turned to see a cluster of freshman girls gawking at him. He smiled to himself. “You can call me Lucky,” Isaac would’ve said to them. But that image conjured another, much darker one. It was the way Daddy Ballard’s private detective had described what the car dealer saw the night Isaac disappeared. Isaac had been helping somebody, like he always did. And somehow his very kindness had gotten him killed. The whole thing made Pete feel a little sick. He doubted the lunchroom menu would do much to help that.
Pete eyed his cafeteria tray and sorely regretted turning down the sack lunch his mother had offered to pack. Tomato soup and peanut butter sandwiches—that was today’s menu, only the peanut butter had an oozy, grainy consistency that made even hungry teenagers suspicious of its origins. He looked around for an empty chair and saw plenty of them at the table where the only six colored students in the whole school were sitting. They had come in January, one of Alabama’s federally mandated baby steps toward integration.
They were like a solitary island of color floating in a sea of white. Seeing them there reminded Pete of the day he first met Dovey at the old sawmill, when she had told him why she didn�
�t go to school: “We don’t belong there.”
Pete thought most everybody seemed polite enough to the new students in the hallways and in class, but for three months they had sat together at the same cafeteria table with no one coming near them. That, Pete decided, was crazy. What was the difference between sharing a lunch table with them and sharing a kitchen table with Aunt Babe or a creek bank with Isaac? He found himself walking steadily toward them, every eye in the cafeteria fastened on him.
“Mind if I sit with y’all?” he asked.
“We’re not looking for trouble,” said the tall, thin boy at the head of the table.
“Me neither.” Pete shrugged, and the tall boy motioned for him to sit down.
“You some kinda crusader?” one of the girls asked.
“No. I just figure y’all put your shoes on one at a time, same as the rest of us. It’s not like you’re from Mars.” They stared at him without saying a word. “Then again, maybe I’m wrong,” Pete went on, tasting the awful soup and making a face. “Maybe y’all did beam down here from outer space to vaporize all us white folks. If that’s the case, I’d sure ’preciate it if you started with the football team, ’cause some of them are real jerks.”
One of the girls was still staring at him like he was crazy, but the others were smiling. “Who are you?” the tall boy asked.
“Pete McLean.” He grinned, reaching across to shake hands. “And you might as well know that I’m pretty much a nobody at this school, so the fact that I’m gracing you with my presence won’t exactly get you elected to the student council.”
“That’s a shame,” the tall boy said. “And here we thought we’d finally found us a white boy to pin all our hopes and dreams on.”
Pete didn’t know what to say at first, but then the boy broke into a grin and the two of them laughed.
“I’m Lenny,” he said. “And that’s Theo, Wanda, Reesie, Sharon, and Florence.”
“Hey,” Pete said. “Where y’all from?”
Coach Gilbert “Buster” Thrash loved football. He especially loved it when the crowd, after every victory, sent the opposing team off the field with a humiliating chant: “You’ve been Thrashed! You’ve been Thrashed!”
Coach had made himself something of a legend in Alabama. He had carried five teams in as many counties all the way to the state championship, which continued, maddeningly, to elude him here in Glory. In three years, he had yet to put together that winning combination of raw talent, Spartan discipline, and evangelical devotion to football that would bring home the trophy.
For the past few months, though, he had kept his eye on one boy who just might be able to tip the scales in his favor—a strapping junior who had yet to see the light and follow it straight to the goal line. McLean was a sad case, really. Something about a dead daddy and a backwoods girlfriend—he couldn’t remember the details. But that sad case was a strong six feet two with speed and brains. Let him work out his childhood trauma on the playing field, that’s what Coach thought about it.
McLean had breezed through the rope climb and agility test. Now came the final bench press. Coach was eager to see what this boy could lift once Judd Highland did his predictable eight reps at 210, mediocre as always.
“Never seen you in the weight room, McLean—what you press?” Coach asked as Judd finished and took his place with the team.
“I really don’t know, sir,” Pete said.
“Well, let’s start you off at—”
“Hey, Coach!” Judd called with a smug grin on his face. “Why don’t we let McLean pick up where I left off—if he can?”
“McLean?” Coach said.
“If you want me to, sir—I really don’t know what I can lift.”
Coach motioned for Pete to take his position on the weight bench. Pete gripped the crossbar, looked up at the weights on either end, and pushed high. He lifted the barbell up . . . five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven . . .
“Whoa!” Coach said. “Looks like you need a little more weight, boy.” He added ten pounds and Pete lifted. Ten more and Pete lifted again. Coach stopped him at 230, guiding the barbell back into the rack, and Pete returned to the civilians.
“Highland, you want another go?” Coach asked.
“Uh . . . can’t today, Coach—Doc says I strained my bicep when I went for 240 last week.”
Coach could see that even the freshmen weren’t buying it. His quarterback looked like he might actually punch Judd in the face.
“In that case, hit the showers, everybody,” Coach said. “Say, McLean, hold up a minute.” He motioned for Pete to sit down with him on the bleachers. “Pretty impressive, what you did on that bench.”
“Thank you,” Pete said.
“What’s it gonna take for me to get you on the team?”
“I ’preciate it, sir, but I’m working after school and in the summers—hoping to schedule all my classes in the morning next year so I can go to the fields in the afternoon. That doesn’t leave any time for practice.”
“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” Coach was nodding earnestly as if he completely understood and sympathized, but he wasn’t really listening. He was too busy plotting his next move. If he could hook this boy before the end of spring training, they might have a shot at the state championship come fall.
“Tell you what,” Coach said, “I can let you stay a while and use the weight room if you like.”
“Thanks, Coach, but I’ve got to get home,” Pete said. “I’m helping my granddaddy with his crop.”
“Well, that’s admirable—helping the poor old fellow scratch out a living. You go on home, son. We’ll talk another time.”
Pete thanked him again and headed for the locker room.
Eighteen
APRIL 19, 1967
Ned Ballard glanced at his watch—a quarter to nine. That should work out about right. Tate Harwell, an old friend and the principal at Pete’s school, had asked him to come down a little early for their nine o’clock appointment. Tate’s secretary greeted him just outside the principal’s office.
“Would you care for some coffee before you go in, Mr. Ballard?” she asked.
“No thank you, Jewel. But I ’preciate the offer. Tate’s forever braggin’ on your coffee.”
“He’s telling the truth too.” She smiled as she ushered him in.
Tate Harwell stood up when Ned came into his office. With his wire-rimmed glasses and silver hair combed back, he was a dead ringer for Lyndon Johnson. He had been running the school for twenty-two years.
“Morning, Ned,” he said as they shook hands.
“Tate, ’preciate you callin’ me,” Ned replied, taking a seat in one of five chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of Tate’s desk. “Looks like you’re expectin’ a crowd.”
“Well, it’s like I told you on the phone, I believe in having all parties represented,” Tate said. “Never cared much for a stacked deck.”
“What’s the situation?”
“Last night around suppertime, Whit Highland called the house spouting off about some fight Pete and Judd got into yesterday afternoon.”
“A fight? Pete’s never been one to fight.”
“I know. I also know what Judd’s made of, which isn’t much. Highland apparently thought I didn’t have sense enough to know what’s goin’ on at my own school.”
“Well, that’s his mistake.” Ned smiled. As long as the two men had been friends, Tate had always known what parents wanted to say to him long before they walked into his office. He likely already knew everything about the fight—who started it, who finished it, who saw it, and what he meant to do about it.
“I’ll not make any bones about it, Ned—I despise the Highlands, and Pete was absolutely not at fault yesterday. Fact is, you ought to be mighty proud of him. Still, when a fight happens on my school grounds, I have to make a formal investigation, just to show the students and their parents that I mean to be fair.”
“You’ll get no objections from me,” Ned said.
Jewel knocked. “I’ve got the boys.”
“Send ’em on in,” Tate said.
Pete came in and sat down next to his grandfather, with Judd taking a seat as far away from both of them as he could get. Four other boys filed in behind them and stood along the wall. There was a tall colored boy Ned had never seen before; Burl and Ted, two roustabouts who rode around town with Judd all the time; and a much younger boy—likely a freshman, given the terrified look on his face.
Judd’s jaw was bruised and puffy, and he looked confused. “Mr. Harwell, there’s been some mistake. I’m not supposed to be here—my parents are handling this.”
Tate didn’t look up from the folder he was pretending to study on his desk. “Were your parents in that parking lot yesterday afternoon?”
“Well—no, sir, but—”
“Then they can’t tell me what I need to know, can they?”
Judd slumped down in his chair as Jewel ushered in Whit and Celeste Highland. They stopped just inside the door when they saw the crowded office.
“What’s this?” Whit Highland demanded. He pointed at Pete. “That boy is the only one with anything to answer for. You had no business taking Judd away from his studies—and no right bringing anybody into this meeting without my say-so.”
Ned had a sudden vision of himself opening the window behind Tate’s desk and pitching Highland out on his head. But that would set a bad example. Sure would feel good, though. And he was pretty sure it would qualify as righteous anger.
Tate did not get up to shake hands. “I have every right to conduct business in my office as I see fit,” he said calmly. “It’s been my experience that most fights involve two boys, not one. And if Judd’s entitled to have his family with him while he explains himself, so is Pete. Fair’s fair. Take a seat, won’t you?”
The Highlands sat down next to Judd.
“Now, it’s my understanding that some sort of skirmish occurred in the parking lot yesterday around three p.m. and that these two were involved. Am I right so far, boys?”
Missing Isaac Page 13