“Tom’s scheme was this. He had talked with his wife and had planned to run the workboat back north, to take me home to see my mother. The vacation, and that’s what he called it, would last two months of the summer. He would leave me at the swamp and then, on a prearranged date, return for me. I immediately said that I was not sure he or the boat could make the trip. Tom was also not a well man, nor was his wife, both of them having high blood pressure. Yet, he insisted.
“To this day I do not know how Tom communicated with my mother. At any rate, in mid July I was left off at night at the same place near the swamp where I had been picked up years before. My mother had already left supplies for me at the spot in the marsh where I had hid before.
“So I had a nice visit. I would swim in to see my mother and at times she would come out to the swamp in her rowboat. I can remember her coming through the reeds, the scraping sound of the oars, her body almost as big as the boat she was in, the front of the boat piled high with things for me. On some swims, I even went to my shop and managed to shore up the old Mahoney boat that I had once tried to restore. I worked by flashlight to repair the supports for the hull. That was all I could do in a short time during the night. One day, I managed to swim to the point near the fort where I could watch the powerboat regatta. I was sorry to find that Homer was no longer racing and learned from my mother that he had died in a tragic crash during a race. Even with all the hatred he had shown toward me, I felt a kinship with him as a fellow race driver, something that was in my blood forever. I did see some of my old friends in their racers and watched with pleasure men like Jesse, Jimmy, Mike.
He went on, “We came back again five years later.”
“Did you rescue Senator from drowning during that second visit?” asked Harry.
“Yes. He told you about that?” said Walker.
“He said he never knew who it was.”
Walker smiled. “Then, after that visit, I came back again ten years later. By now Tom was very much in poor health and he was worried about his wife being alone. She wanted to come along with us but Tom ruled that out. Unfortunately, during this trip I took sick.
Walker told them about the trip to see the doctor for his heart. His mother took him to a man up the Shore who did not question who he was, did not have any idea he was from River Sunday. “She brought me out, that old woman, all alone in the rowboat, loaded me into a borrowed car, drove me and then brought me back the same way. For a few weeks there, she’d come out most every two or three days bringing me food and medicine until I was better. Tom came back early that summer and fetched me back to the farm. That was the last trip Tom made to River Sunday.
“About a year ago his wife died. Then, three months ago, Tom died after being sick for a long time. The farm was to be taken over by cousins of his, people to whom he owed a great deal of money. Tom told me before he died that he had made arrangements to return me to River Sunday. I was pretty old to be going back up to the Wilderness yet he and I had no other option. No one in the congregation could hide me. Word was, of course, sent to my mother. Otherwise, before he died, Tom and I prayed and he told me again and again that the Lord would take care of me.
“A young man from the congregation ran me up the Bay. The boat itself was in poor condition. I worried that the teenager would not make it home in that rotten old craft. Its engine had been repaired so many times I’m sure the cylinder walls were like paper with rust and corrosion. He assured me he would stay close to shore and if the boat failed, would go ashore and get home another way. So I was left off. There I was in the swamp again. Unfortunately, I found no package for me from my mother. She did not come out to the swamp to see me. After a while I knew I had a real problem” He looked at the Pastor. “I suspected with her advanced age that she must be dead also.”
“Did you try to come into town?” asked Charleston.
“I was too old to swim as I had in the old days. I wondered why I had not known of her death. I figured that her friends who had carried the communications were probably dead also, that perhaps the news of my coming had never got through. She being the only one alive who knew where I was, when she died, I figured no one knew how to tell me. Anyway, as I found out now, my mother is dead. I was right.
“When I was captured by Cheeks, in a way it was a gift from God. I did not have much time left. I had been surviving on what few shellfish I could dig or catch. I didn’t have the speed of a young man and the fishing was hard for me. I was pretty much starving to death out there.”
At that moment something hard and solid hit the wall of the hospital. The sheriff jumped up as if he was shot and ran to the window. He stood beside Harry and looked out. He waved to someone. Harry supposed he was trying to draw the attention of one of the town policemen below on the street. Then Good swore to himself, put a halt to the proceedings and marched out of the room. Harry moved away from the window and followed.
Annie was in the corridor, walking quickly toward Harry. She waved to him over the head of the two State Police officers watching the door. Harry walked up to her.
“A bigger crowd is forming outside the hospital, on both sides of the hill, Harry.”
“Any violence?” he asked.
“Not yet but maybe soon,” she said, excitement in her voice.
“Someone threw a stone at the window of Walker’s room,” said Harry.
She nodded. “I’m not surprised. I’ve never seen the town so upset. In front of the hospital on the one side is a contingent of white men and women, most of them from the New Jesus Temple. They want Walker sent to jail for murder. Reverend Blue is urging them on with his megaphone. On the other side are a few black men and women, some of them elderly, the women carrying signs proclaiming that Walker has paid for any crime he did and should be let go.”
They walked toward the stairway. The Pastor had gone ahead of them.
Harry said to himself. “Almost like in the Bible when they let the crowd kill Jesus.”
She looked over her shoulder, bouncing as she went down the metal hospital steps.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“I was just thinking about the irony of the colors,” he said.
“What irony?”
“Outside the black folks are talking about the light of Jesus and the white folks are talking about the darkness of the Devil.”
Chapter 18
Friday August 6, 11am.
Downstairs, the sheriff was on his cell phone, his eyes darting from the crowd to his phone and back again. He was talking in a loud voice and Harry could make out most of the conversation. He was calling the Governor’s Office in Annapolis with a report on the crowd gathering outside the hospital. The big man huddled over his phone at the side of the gleaming waxed hospital corridor. The two State Police officers Harry had seen with the sheriff on the barge in the swamp stood next to him, worried looks on their faces.
“Yessir,” the sheriff said. “We got more than five hundred out in front of the hospital, whites and blacks, gathered around the brass plaque there in the grass. Lot of arguments starting. We’re handling the fights now but we don’t have enough State Police assigned in here. Town police aren’t trained for riot work. Besides, they’re all locals. The white police will go with the whites and the blacks with the blacks if it comes down to that. Me, well, you know that I’ll be impartial, stay out of either side. I got Marty Sol, my deputy, but he ain’t worth piss. I’m only one man, Governor. You’re going to have to get me some Army boys.”
He listened again, then he said, “Yeah, well, you think about next year’s election yourself. You have someone get hurt or even killed over here and Mrs. Kirby, she won’t take it too well when it comes to her contribution to the Governor’s campaign. No, it won’t look too good.”
The sheriff added after a pause to listen to the response, “All right, you think about it. Just don’t think too long.”
Harry walked into the sunlight. In front of him, playing on the hill with
the brass memorial plaque to the Civil War soldiers of both sides, were the children white and black who had been playing there when Harry entered the hospital a while ago. The boys and girls, most of them of about elementary school age, climbed and fell on the sides in a roly poly formation of fun that was oblivious to the shouts and jeers of the crowds on both sides of them.
Looking first to the side where the people of color were congregating, Harry saw that a platform of two by four lumber had been erected and that several United States flags were flying from its corners. On the platform several men and women were milling about as if waiting for someone else. One of them was adjusting a microphone, the sounds sparking over the crowd.
To Harry’s left, the scene was similar. The crowd was mixed with white men and women, some of them in the strange antique dress coincident with the members of Reverend Blue’s church while others were attired in the simple blue jeans and works shirts of farmers and tradesmen, costumes easily seen on the streets of River Sunday every day. The faces of these people held anger, expressions that looked similar to the determined faces in the odd painting of warriors that he had over his desk at the newspaper office.
Beside him, Annie pulled at his arm. “They look like they are ready to explode,” she said.
Harry looked up at the sky. No clouds in sight. He had a vision of the simplicity of a common thunderstorm coming over quickly and dousing all the heat in these self- righteous people. How many battles, how much death, had he seen in Africa, he thought, that could have been avoided with a cloudburst in the midst of all the anger, a cold drenching of the combat fever that could force a second thought before the guns were fired.
Harry, in spite of his career training to always remain neutral, to always keep an equal ear for each side’s arguments, had begun to cheer. He could no longer be impartial. As a reporter he felt himself shifting to the ranks of future mediocrity, the home of all reporters who take sides, who accept that some things bear more attention than others. Yet in a way he might have learned something; he might have realized that the reporting quality that he aspired to, had aspired all his life, was more than gathering facts like he had done in the past. Instead, he was beginning to realize the value of what he had always believed was heresy, that true news had to be interpretation. He had always known that honesty, however well meaning, was inevitably flawed. He was learning from the confusion of the Walker story that his role here in River Sunday was to find the best honesty he could report by using his own common sense.
Harry said, “I want to hear more from the old man.”
Annie turned back to her car saying she had to finish tomorrow’s edition. Harry rushed upstairs. The sheriff was just ahead of him on the stairway. Harry could feel the old hospital stairway creak with the big man’s weight.
Charleston looked up as Harry entered, following the sheriff.
The sheriff nodded and Walker began talking again.
“You see, General Store had a real fast rise to power from when the Pastor and some Vietnam veterans started it in 1965. By summer 1968 it was making good money for its members. It may have been the most important thing in town to tell the truth. At least it was to the people of color in Mulberry.
“Got so black folks relied on the General Store people out there at the old cannery. I’d ride by the place one time or another and see all the cars and the trucks. Busy, I guess so, with consultants from Baltimore and all. The crowd in Washington that was working on the various self help programs, they were from the Office of Economic Opportunity, were always visiting, because they said that General Store was one of the best programs in the country.
“I’d get a call from the Pastor at least once a month asking me to come on by and join the operation. My girl friend Stella, she worked out there, kept talking to the Pastor about me. Anyway one day he came to my shop himself, my mother in tow and my sister and they made me sit down in a chair.
“The Pastor spoke first. He said that my occupation wasn’t represented in the General Store list of professional services for hire. They had no one to do outboard motor repair. He said that I could come into the group and I would make just as much money as before and I would get a lot of money for the future out of the company’s fast growing stock values. Part of his deal was that he wanted me to teach younger people how to fix engines so others could make a living doing repairs too. ‘Spreading the wealth,’ he called it.
“My mother told me that she had made almost a hundred percent on her stock in just a few months, that people even whites, were coming in to her house and asking her to sell it to them, and I heard talk of listing General Store on the Philadelphia exchange so it could be traded more easily.
“I didn’t want to do this. I’d always been independent of others and I wanted to stay that way. So, I said, ‘Pastor, I’ve always worked on my own. I like it that way. I get my share of customers with my shop. Just Homer and me fixing motors in town, and he and I share the business.’
“I said, ‘My location is important too. I get a lot of the young white kids with money to spend on their boats and engines. They won’t come up to General Store to do their business because it’s too far away from the harbor. Hard enough,’ I said, ‘getting them to come to a black man without making it even tougher. When they get older, make some money and buy bigger boats, maybe I’ll get that business too.’
“The Pastor replied, ‘We got to have the whites buy from us and the only way to do that is to build up General Store so they have to come to us. ‘
“’Don’t you think,’ I said, ‘that the white folks are going to resent your monopolizing everything? I mean if I want to get the roof on my mother’s house fixed, I don’t think I’d want to be forced to come up to General Store just because you put all the other carpenters out of business.’
“My sister said, and, keep in mind, she was only a teenager, ‘If that’s what it takes. You should listen to the Pastor.’
“I said, ‘I don’t think anyone is going to stand around and let you get away with this.’
“The Pastor said, ‘Money talks. That’s one thing we have learned from the Terments. When they spend money they get results. So now, we spend money. In most industries here in River Sunday we have people either working or in training. We even have this up to date computer system, more modern than anything in River Sunday.’
“‘I know. Stella told me,’ I replied.
“‘That’s right. She’s being trained on it,’ the Pastor said.
“‘You think this is just black kids,’ he went on, very excited. ‘We got white and Hispanics at General Store too. We take everyone to work with us. All they have to do is live by our rule.’
“‘What is this rule?’ I asked, thinking to myself that the white businesses have rules too.
“‘Nobody is for themselves,’ said the Pastor. ‘Everybody tries to make General Store a success.’
“Well, the deal didn’t sound good to me,” Walker said. “I turned to the Pastor and said, ‘You can count me out. I’ll go on my own steam.’ I remember tapping the old boat. “’Like my friend Mahoney here.’
“‘Mahoney got himself killed,’ my sister had to say then.
“‘Mahoney died doing what he wanted. That’s important,’ I said.
“‘What will you do if we bring in another outboard mechanic and start taking business away from you?’ asked the Pastor.
“‘If he’s better than me, he deserves the business,’ I said, thinking that I was very professional in that remark.
“‘What if he’s not as good as you, but he gets the business anyway because we monopolize all the other crafts?’
“‘I guess Homer and me will have to face up to that when it happens,’ I replied.
“That’s when the Pastor got after me about my boat. He said, ‘Well, one thing you could sure do is not call your boat such a racist name. It puts down all the people of color in this town.’
“My mother was nodding in agreement.”
> “I said, ‘What’s wrong with black duck as a name?’”
“The Pastor said, ‘It’s like you are calling all of us stupid like a duck.’
“‘First of all,’ I said, and I got to admit, I lost my temper, ‘the black duck is a pretty smart bird. Besides, it’s my right to refer to myself and my own boat the way I want.’”
“I started to inform him that Black Duck was the name on the fastest rum runner used in during Prohibition up in New Jersey but I said to myself, that his prejudice doesn’t deserve any explanation from me. Then I left them all in the room and went out.
“Early that summer the President of the United States came to River Sunday to give an award to the Pastor for building up General Store. It was strange. The Baltimore papers handled the event like a major trip while the local paper barely gave it room on the front page. What was important to the world didn’t seem important to River Sunday.”
He shifted on the bed. “The visit, President or not, was meaningless to most of the people in town because they didn’t understand why it concerned them. Matter of fact, the only house Johnson got invited into was the little one owned by Pastor Allingham and that house was mostly a church. I don’t think the local Congressman even showed his face that day. I know Senator’s father wasn’t there.
“I remember that one of the boys in my shop, young Billy Elliott, told me his father said the Presidential visit was like when the Federals occupied the town during the Confederate War.
“I was in my shop preparing to walk down to the Courthouse to see the ceremony. That’s when two men, in dark suits, coat and tie, all dressed up in that summer heat, came into my shop. Their faces were solemn. The one on the right, a middle-aged person, held out his hand with a badge on display across his palm.
Powerboat Racer (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 3) Page 24