False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  Charlson has brains enough. Yes, Charlson Evans, his great form seated at the very end of the line as if for ballast, understood what Dobbin was getting at, had shifted his gaze to him. These eunuchoid men are often very quick of brain; how better conceal it? The minister’s bulk had always been useful; he kept a convivial pulpit. And he was known to be softhearted—remember how kind he was to the Denny girl? Between what we do and we do not—in his job he would know about judgment. He and I have not seen each other since my aunt’s funeral. But I remember, on a clear night’s zenith, the minister’s car.

  And I remember the doctor’s. He’s not here, Rollins, but he has sent a substitute—the young man on Frazer’s left, by the look of his brother Lee on him—Rollins has sent a son. An honorable custom of war hereabouts, to send a substitute, doubly so if one sends the son. This is Robert then, called Bobby, perennial flunkee, commonly called “Doc.” He looks sulky—too many brothers? Oh Bobby, does your mother, brother, know you’re out? Five or six years older than I am—you could have been there that evening. Depend upon it, your father knows—a doctor’s car is his hallmark. Perhaps we should ask my uncle, an expert on Rollinses. He’s not one to accept substitutes, even in sons. Or rather, say that, confronted with blame to assign, he can. You look frightened. But my uncle has his head bowed again. Until he looks up, until we have to look at him, we are both safe.

  “… that murder has been done … has been established sufficiently for the charge … for a charge, mind you; that is our purpose here.” Dobbin’s voice dropped again to its monotone. “Secondly … we then come to …”

  The Lemons, father and son (horses and allied arts), see what he’s after too, though one can’t tell it from their faces. Of the senior I know nothing. But Lemon was always one to see certain things early—even if his reach sometimes exceeded his grasp. A boy to brag as syphilis what was only acne, and come off in the end with no more than the clap. It’s thickened him early too; except for his pocks and that Indian hair hanging down just the same, I’d never know him for the string bean I stood up to in the Charlotte gym, doing better than either of us expected. He wasn’t afraid. I was. He’s looking at Dobbin now, got his answer ready, by the grin on him. (“What if we did? No more’n anybody here would do.”) Men who won’t accept the nature of man tend to amuse Lemon. He himself suffers proudly all the manly diseases. And is therefore not afraid.

  “… rumors of concerted action by a group … purported to be taking the law into … on that night … Of more recent date …” And Dobbin, still leaning negligently, dropped the name, Bean.

  Lemon still has traces of a smile, like a trader recalling a good trade. But even he is no longer looking at Dobbin. They are all staring at the back of the room, a class called to attention, pledging its allegiance to the caretaker’s mop. All do so except one. In the pause that Dobbin intended perhaps, but not for him alone, Hannibal Fourchette, Jr., his bruin gaze swaying—did he know me once?—is heard to be humming. He too has a disease which, when well tended, keeps him fearless. How incredibly it preserves them; he has changed least of all! The strength of his shirt front still upholds him; in some shell for his ear only he must be hearing the Gulf. Tactfully, the man next him touches his arm and he subsides at once, feeling down the side of the chair, his hip pocket, for—a cigarette. The kind neighbor at once strikes a match for it. Morning’s Junior Fourchette’s time of course, but he is still happy. What a fine place, club you might say, a grand jury room is. Lawyers must wait outside it. Even Dobbin, gentleman though he is, must leave before vote is taken. And a judge—no matter who—can never come in here at all. He puts a finger to his lips and nods gratefully at his neighbor. Tact. Tact is all that is necessary in this cat’s cradle world.

  Now. Now I must look at his neighbor. His long chin.

  “… until now, for lack of witnesses, we have been working pretty much in the dark….”

  Neighbor Nellis, lamplighter extraordinary, will strike a match for you. At the end of day, his orange light pops out on the dusk, first one. You know what grace is? In all public ceremonies, he shall be the Bearer. Don’t say nothin’; just join hands. Call for me. When the night hawk flies, then housewives place in the window those hooded lights that mean a man will be late from home. There, the lights go out again, one on a street we know. The last one. Nellis’s light.

  “Of course, until now we have not had the resources of the Federal—” Dobbin bowed almost imperceptibly, no more than a shift in accent, to the new faces on his right, then turned again toward the left, where, it might be assumed from this, his own allegiance lay. “Now, however, Washington promises evidence … it may come any time … depositions of witnesses formerly connected with this office, concerning Asher, who was buried as a flood victim. Also, from nearby states, transcripts of records impounded. If we refuse … a show of airing things here … a federal grand jury may not be so persuaded….”

  Memory also impounds. Once, Nellis, your heel, slouching past, almost caught on a face raised to look at you from the long grass, next to mine. You don’t know me; you’ve never seen me in your life. I had the matchless invisibility of my age. But you should know well the urge that comes over us when we are in hidden places—toward the enormous joke to be played. You bend now, but only to confer with your neighbor on your other side.

  One by one they are all coming out of lodging. One more. Between Nellis and my uncle, a pair of white duck trousers.

  And now Dobbin is at last calling his witness. Witness need not stand during testimony. But witness does rise, to face Semple.

  For the entire state of Alabama, some say. Or for the world? Strange, how, seeing you here, I no longer trust in the general klandom of evil. Here in this room, we too have no knowledge of how to ascribe evil except singly. It must go by one and one, by face and face. You.

  So, Dobbin, I obey. Truth bombards us from wherever it can. I speak as that boy.

  There is a place—filled with the moral fragrance of how people really are. Outside its orange lamp we are all Ishmael, until we enter there. There is a town—above the town—Johnny, Johnny Fortuna, I believe you. I believed you all along.

  “I kept watch for them in the grove,” I said. “I helped cut the pine and truck it down to the café. I rode lookout for them all that day.”

  Chapter V. Klanship.

  YOU. YOU. YOU, YOU, you, you, you. I. There was not a face there, no matter its guilts or its sympathies, which was not for that one moment my enemy. And for the same reason—beneath all reasons. When the witness speaks, he brings the problem of truth into the room. There was not one man there who, for a moment, did not curl protectively around whatever secret he thought kept him in swinedom, wishing to be left in his sty with it, only not to have to aspire.

  And I watched them with joy, thinking I had found the adversary at last.

  “Will the witness explain whom he means by ‘them’?”

  So my preceptors had been correct—there were choices to be made. For the general “they” of the feared, we may choose our surrogates. The lie I told then was greater than any I told later. Much may be done in the name of justice by those avenging their childhoods.

  “The Klan,” I said.

  The word was new to the room. Everybody heard the echoes refuse it. Outside, a bird spoke, chelo, chelo, from siesta. I had time to remember exactly what I was doing. I tallied it:

  I speak as Johnny would, using what he did, what he knew.

  Dobbin does not know this. As far as he knows, I alone was “that boy.”

  “They,” up on the stand there, will know I am lying.

  They cannot declare it.

  I even had time to note that the clock over the dais was the same as the one in the main courtroom, even to the gilt “Seminole.” Then Dobbin, rushing in, allowed no further pauses.

  “Will you tell the jury what you mean by ‘that day’?”

  “The day the dam went.”

  “According to record, Sept
ember 19, 1932. If you don’t mind—would you tell us how old you are?”

  “I’ll be twenty-one in November.” Lemon was the one who made me feel youngest. He had taken out a small, old-fashioned cigar clipper and was elaborately fooling at fitting the end of one into it.

  “Then, on that date, you were just close on to fourteen. Do you ask us to believe that a kid like that would observe all those details I’m going to have you repeat to these gentlemen? And that seven years later, you can still quote scripture on ’em?”

  For one second, his hostility dumbfounded me. Then I almost smiled at him. Oh downy Dobbin. He had to be.

  “Nothing so scriptural about it.” My dander was up, tongue loosened. “It wasn’t the kind of day that anybody down here would be likely to forget.” But the very next day, they all had claimed to. Their blank faces remanded me. Not a man could be found.

  “Excuse me—Mr. Dobbin?” A man on the other side of the room, the new side, had spoken—the first voice from them. Would they speak much? I had not considered. Now I scrutinized them. But scrutiny was not the word for it. White-shirted, dark-tied, most of them, these new men, more stiff-backed than the others and not as colorful, not as easy in the crotch. Not as much at home here, they offered themselves to the eye as a group, like men in an office picture. Time-study clerks, engineers, office managers, as might be, they had that look, drained of the personal dossier, which went with the man of business. And their business here was precisely that—not to be at home in this place.

  “Yes, Mr. Anderson?”

  “Excuse me, but I’d like to clear something up—this witness—isn’t he some relation to Mr. Higby, our foreman?”

  “Stepson.” My uncle’s face, raised to look across at Anderson, shocked me, seen now in public perspective. It had the shielded, masked guise I had expected of the others. “He’s my wife’s son.”

  So that was how he thought of me. I had sometimes wondered.

  “Things like that are bound to happen in a small county, Mr. Anderson. Perhaps you’re not yet used to it.” Dobbin showed his teeth very slightly. “We may even bump into—other instances—as we go along. Not unusual.”

  “Oh, no reflections on anybody, of course. It’s just that—wasn’t the witness involved in a court case sometime ago—something about his name?” Now I recognized him, the heavy white cheek that he was rubbing. He was the second man in court that day, the man who had helped Dabney Mount bring my mother home.

  “I understand he changed his name legally. No ‘involvement,’ as you called it. I believe—a family matter?” Dobbin, addressing me, deflected those probing eyes of his. Probably he too thought me a bastard, if not my uncle’s. For testing opinion, the dock had its use.

  “Yes,” I said. “A family matter.”

  “Ah,” said Dobbin. “That satisfactory, Mr. Anderson?” Polite, excessively so, he no longer lounged, suddenly tall defender of those privacies that some of us here would hold to be still paramount. Covertly he sent them a glance, these parfit knights on his left, that reassured them. Delicately, for Mr. Anderson and other tiresome bumblers, he checked his watch. “Shall we go on then?”

  “I’d like to establish something first,” I said. “My uncle never knew of my—activities. Doesn’t yet.”

  “Entirely suitable,” said Dobbin. “Would Mr. Higby like to, er—?”

  In the pause, my uncle seemed not to be answering. Then he coughed. From the store of honesty that hampered him, what would he choose? Who was that other man who, from a mouth full of pebbles, learned to speak clear? “No,” he said. “We did not confide.”

  “Eh … yes….” Dobbin pursed his lips, for all fathers. And in the same instant he turned on me, hard-voiced, all procurator. “Explain what you meant by ‘the grove’!”

  And it was in that moment, with his repetition of the word “grove”—tossed by me, accepted by him—that the full, serious sense of where I was came to me, and its marvel. Once more the owl tapped, showing me the spectacle of what was, the great gamble of what could be, and this time, in this old, professional room, worn and capable as a whore’s bed where the pure and venal chased each other through all the odors and malodors of man, I was not afraid. I apprehended my powers, like sportsmen on those charmed days when the shot, not yet sighted along the barrel, already rings true on the limp, glazed target. Like an actor, stretching his limbs to the arena on that sure day for which all the practice of life had prepared him, I understood how a man might elongate himself until he was of a length to hang another, how he might make those long, simian jumps which are made in dream. The word “grove” had done it, magicked by me out of memory not my own, cast like a boomerang and perfectly returned, whang, to my hand again—“Catch!” I understood without mysticism the power that mind might wreak on matter. From then on I did not falter. I used Johnny’s words. The use of them was mine.

  “Maxon’s Grove. If you go through the backs, straight westerly from the whistle stop, you come out to two crossroads on the other side. Take the dirt one, about three quarters of a mile down, and you come to it. I came on it once, exploring, and after that I used to go there the way a kid will when he finds a place that looks secret; used to read there, try and slingshot rabbits, generally hang around. Built myself a kind of cave in the bracken.” Johnny had done that, found the place on one of the afternoons his mother had had to turn him out of the house because she had a man there.

  “The grove was near enough to the backs, but the Negroes never went there. I was still new enough to the town so I didn’t know why. Maxon had been one of the organizers of the first Klan in the old Civil War days. Place had always been used by them. Still was. But of course I didn’t know that. Summer nights, I sometimes took my supper there, leaving by sundown, since I had to be home soon after dark.” Johnny used to camp there overnight. “One night, though, I fell asleep there. When I woke up it was dark, and they were not ten yards from me, the whole ring of them. They were holding a tribunal, and of course they were wearing the hoodwink. I was too scared to make a noise. But I’d not been brought up to believe in ghosts, and these talked like men—one with a voice I thought I recognized. Upshot of it was, I spied on them several times running, by getting there early. They had a guard of course, the Klexter, but he always watched the road. Then, one night, they caught me at it.” Johnny had spied on them for months, only being caught when he wanted to be, when he yearned for it.

  “I let slip all I’d seen; I was even fool enough to address that one of the men by name.” Even now that scene, as it had come to me through Johnny’s lame pauses, still shook me. He’d let himself be brought out, collared and kicked forward in his fowl-stained overalls and boiled-out T shirt, into the center of their cleanly ring. Then he’d gone down on his knees to that seated figure, to the slit eyes in the peaked white hood above him. (“Oh, Exalted Cyclops,” he had said, “please let me belong. I could be the mascot.” And then, out of his simplicity and his longing, “Please, Mr. Semple, please!”)

  I paused for breath. Following my double thread, I no longer saw my audience. “They saw I was harmless—and dazzled. Gave me a bloodcurdling warning—it only thrilled me the more, though I was scared enough—and turned me loose. But later on, the man I’d recognized tapped me on the shoulder one day in town. Started me out on small errands. Kept me on a string, like.” That last was Johnny himself speaking. I must be more careful. “It was supposed to be for him, but I soon knew it wasn’t. And as I got older, he—they—let me do more. They—just got used to me.” I stopped again, fighting my heartbeat for breath. I had done the first lap, come round the circle. “And that’s how it was that day.”

  Dobbin spoke. “You were a kind of apprentice then. Till you were old enough to be eligible. That how they do it?”

  “They may do. I only know my own history. And almost from the beginning I knew I couldn’t belong.”

  “How’s that?” Softly he led me, toward what was to both our interests to make clear. />
  “I got to know their rule book by heart, all seventy-five or so pages of it. You know what parliamentarians boys are.” I smiled slightly. They would never believe the other—that I had seen it once. “I knew it as well as the baseball scores. I still do. You have to be native-born to belong to the Order. And I’m not.” At times, Johnny’s mother would tell him that he was the legal son of a husband in the old country, at others that he had been born a few years after that man’s death, in a town somewhere near Shamokin, Pennsylvania. He too had had his choices.

  “I’ll ask you to quote from that book shortly. Meanwhile—just for my own interest—and no doubt the jury’s—what in God’s name is the ‘hoodwink’?” I had piqued him. For a moment his other world showed itself.

  “It’s the official regalia of the Klan.”

  “Question, Mr. Dobbin.” The voice, a ringing nasal, was not Anderson’s, but came from their side. I found its owner, a small man in their front row, bald as ivory. His heavy lips moved as slowly as if they were.

  “Yes, Mr. Hake?” Hake, the general superintendent of the dams. He emanated the chill that came from all the absolutely hairless. A busy man, often in Washington. More chill was to be taken from the fact that he had found time to sit here.

  “Of what country is the witness?”

  Dobbin let me answer. I did so with impatience. “Great Britain. I came here at the age of ten.”

  “I take it that his noncitizenship has no bearing on the legality of his testifying at this hearing?”

  “None,” said Dobbin, grave to this absurdity. “None.”

  “Thank you. Some of my colleagues here were doubtful.” A nucleus of men around Hake nodded. So they too had taken counsel among themselves.

  “Tha-at’s right!” Lemon spoke without looking up. Cigar in mouth, ever a man for activity, he was now trimming his nails with a pocket-knife. He leaned forward, easily flicking one hand, and the tiny, invisible gauntlet fell on the papers on the desk before me, with an almost inaudible pip. “What’s he down here pimpin’ for trouble for spyin’ on us? Him and his uncle.”