“There’ll be no need for questions,” I said. “I’ll just tell what happened.”
Semple and I sat opposite, not more than a few yards between. For a moment, or so it seemed, the room ceded us our silence—two cocks, before what hoods were slipped? Had he already thought of Johnny? Neither of us could see the other’s private vision, but surely for him too the room and its men of either side had dropped away, were of no more account than poor Fourchette there, thralled now in his afternoon sleep—and as far. Who sat opposite Semple? Opposite me—who? The adversary? All the villainy and fright of the world, convenient in one neck for hands to squeeze.
I put mine down quietly on the table between us. “As he knows it did,” I said, and I began.
“That day—that day—my mother and stepfather had gone to Memphis for the week, leaving me on my own. It was market day; the stores were supposed to be open till nine. But your store closed early that night, didn’t it, Mr. Semple? And the café never opened up at all. But in the café, behind those windows painted green halfway up, there was plenty going on. I knew, because they’d had me coat the upper parts with Bon-Ami the day before. Anyone could tell there was still something going on, though. Maybe they wanted the niggers to know it. They had the wood piled there—early that morning I’d helped them truck it in from the grove—two-by-fours for the bracing pieces and logs both—pitch pine that had been cut a while back and let season—they always kept the grove well thinned. And the café telephone went all day long. I wasn’t allowed to do any of the phoning of course; my voice hadn’t even changed yet.” Johnny’s had, but he hadn’t been allowed.
“Everyone else took a turn at it. ‘Stay in tonight, nigger!’ was all they had to say, then hang up on them.” Meanwhile, Johnny had done the legwork. “My job kept me running back and forth between the depots where the cars were supposed to line up that evening. Market day was a help; even so, isn’t the easiest thing to round up fifty, sixty cars in a town this size. Ran my feet off in the morning. I didn’t have no—any bike.” Careful. “Then when they found I could drive, they let me—wasn’t far. Trout’s Garage, we used, many private yards as we could, and the M & H Livery.” I caught my breath; surely now he would know me, or whom I stood for. I meant him to. “First time I’d ever driven any car but my uncle’s; if I didn’t remember anything else, I’d never forget that. A sweet job she was—I don’t suppose she’s around town any more.” On the table, my hands moved closer to each other. “Old Packard with a hundred-forty-five-inch wheelbase. Ran like a dream, she did. Came from Montgomery. Built for a man six and a half feet tall.”
His eyelids flickered. He’d got it. I waited. “Maybe you do have a question, Mr. Semple?”
If he made any further move, I did not see it. But his eyes must have looked like that at Johnny—through the slits in the hoodwink.
“Of course, we didn’t go anywhere near your store,” I said. “We had special orders not to. And we didn’t.”
“Why not?” said Hake. “What store is that?”
Even Nellis, whose long muzzle was always pointed sideways at his master, turned with most of the rest of them there on the left, to look at Hake with amazement. Power shifts so quietly, seen only intermittently, even by those who already feel the need to sit together.
“Mr. Semple is the factor for Rhine’s,” I said quickly. “Used to be the biggest store in the county. Before they built the bypass.”
“Oh, I know that place.” It was the clerk with the big nose who spoke up eagerly, in a voice like a young drake’s. “That’s where they hold the cockfights—at least, I’ve never been, but I—” His voice trailed off, suddenly recalling whom, by the chances of citizenship, it sat next to. Equality was not enough. Before our eyes, he shriveled. Hake did not even look at him.
“Easier to close up the café, for one thing,” I said. “And it was nearer the new state road. Tuscana had itself an entrance to that then, before the dams went. Mr. Semple will recall it.”
He said nothing.
“The plan was simple. Cars to line up there at nine o’clock, at the edge of town. Men to dress in them when they got there. Each man had his place in a car, same as a funeral.” Same as a funeral, Johnny had said, sliding a look at me, then away again. “Every car had a number. Pace set at eight to ten miles an hour—it was a mile and a half to where the macadam ended, at the base of the dams, where the procession was to stop and watch. Only the lead cars were to go on to the top. Two farm trucks and two eight-cylinder tourers. One for each dam.” My fingers laced together. “The Packard was at the head of the line. She was almost new then; had an extra gear could pull her put of a ditch like a tractor. She was to carry the Exalted Cyclops and the Night Hawk up to Number Three Dam, the highest.”
“You drove her?” Hake’s distaste was plain—the use of such terms lessened the dignity of pursuit. What sensible man could pursue “nishness”?
And now Semple, puzzled, hung on my answer, as if all would be explained by it. Was I “Johnny”? Had I come from that corner? Or had I come from some other still unknown. Would I go on—to the top?
“I was only the runner,” I said. “A kid. I was told to go home at nine.”
Semple’s eyelid flicked again. Johnny had been sent home then. He had his answer. But only part of it. Another puzzlement was beginning. What was my reason?
Silently I sent my answer to him. You. I. There is no other.
“And did you?” asked Hake.
Careful. Take it slow. I forced my hands to lie separate again on the table. Not yet. For now I had come to the part where I must make my jump across the gap between what is and what might be. What had been and what might have been. And this was the part where, last night, Dobbin too had halted, made me repeat. Head sunk on his breast now, his eyes, whatever their change by day, were veiled, but that no longer mattered, and if he cared to look, I should not be afraid of what he saw. I was that boy. He himself had said it.
“No, Mr. Hake.” I smiled at him. “At fourteen—would you have?”
Everyone on Hake’s side burst out laughing, except for the young clerk—too near him, still too abashed. Laughter was precious in that room, and I had provided it; they could not help but like me the better for it. And as they relaxed, stretching in their fixed chairs, one could see more clearly their human differential; they were emerging from the office picture one by one. It was the moment when their group took the ascendant, and I with them. For their own laughter had reassured them; as so often happens when men think collectively, it gave them the confidence to believe in what further I would have them believe.
“You see—” I said. In their receptive faces I could see my own bearing—sunny, boyish, median, image coveted for their sons, resembling or replacing their quondam selves. “You see—I knew they hadn’t told me all their plans. I knew they were concealing something. I didn’t know what.” And this I had seen to be true enough, in its way, in the moment last night when, still unwitting, I had said it to Dobbin. Johnny had told me of the grove, what they did there and had done, of what they had done that day and would do that evening—while we hunted the hiding place, poked about in the room’s decaying niches. On and on his words had come, spoken into a bin as we pried there, to a corner as he absently turned to it—a rush of words fascinated with its own release, like that of a boy who in that very moment had learned to read. And even then, following after him, I must have sensed and somewhere recorded it—the something he had not told me, that still for my innocence, or for us both, he had held back.
“What had they told you?” Hake, intent on his memoranda, had let the laugh wash by him.
“What everyone knew—that they were going up to the dams.”
“You knew what they were going to do there?”
“Burn a cross on each one—as a warning.” I could see Johnny, pushing at the fallen paper with his toe. “Will they be coming back?” I had asked him. Not tonight. They’re going up to the dam. Nigger took a job th
ere couple of days ago.
“You knew why?” Hake had to ask me twice.
“A—Negro had taken a job there. A few days before.”
“Why—we’d had a whole mess of them for months, on the construction gangs!” This was Anderson.
“Yes, sir.” I spoke slowly, from two positions in space. “But not for equal pay. They kicked back to the foreman, and it was redistributed to the others. Everyone knew it.”
“What was this man’s name?” This was Davis, the pharmacist. One by one, there on the right, they were coming to the fore.
“I didn’t know. Nobody much did, I guess.”
“You mean to say they just went along with it? Let themselves be called out—and didn’t even know that!” His glasses shone with pedantic triumph and he turned them from side to side, letting their light shine on all. I knew his type as well as his accent, having encountered both in New York. He would see injustice behind every bush, often where it was not, but any to really interest him must first be humanized by some inside dope that, inaccurate or not, he always had.
“There was nothing personal about it,” I said. I had had to go North to see that.
“For the record.” Hake, holding up one hand to address the clerk, read from one of his memoranda. “Triplicate of employment record in files U. S. Employment Office, Washington, D.C.; original lost when the Charlotte hiring office was flooded. On September 12, 1932, one Lucius Asher, aged 23, born Tuscana, holder of mechanical draftsman certificate from manual training high school, Philadelphia, taken on assistant inspector on blueprints, attached to Dam Number Three.” He glanced briefly at Davis, a ward boss’s appraisal of the underfoot liberal, then turned back to Dobbin. “Suppose the existence of such a person here can be further established—no need to go into it now.”
“No.” Dobbin was fiddling with the yellow paper, folding it, tapping with a nail. “Let’s finish with the witness.” He leaned back. “Any questions?”
“Where did you go?” It came uninflected, a voice to match the eyes.
I had forgotten him for the moment. I was remembering Johnny in the long grass—“Weren’t due to pass this way!” Johnny at the door of the annex—“Where else they gonna find him?” Johnny waiting there. “You coming? Or ain’t you?”
“Where all the cars did, Mr. Semple.” I had been there before the cars came, not with them. But, early or late, a fair of that sort is much the same. “Through the backs.”
“Why-eee!” Frazer’s aged semiquaver rose to a height and faded. “Sit here,” he grumbled. “Sit here, listen to a continental liar. But now we got you.” His voice rose again, and one wavering finger. “No-ow we got you. Because I was right there on the job at my signal, all that night. You couldn’t a crossed thew there ’thout me seeing you. Not you nor any other bo—” He stopped, finger in mid-air. All but senile as he was, it had got to him too.
“No. You wouldn’t have seen me.” Once more I felt how it would be, to cover the white face. “But there’s no road to the backs, there at the signal light, Mr. Frazer. And I didn’t mention that we crossed there. How did you know we went across the tracks?” Mouth open still, he did not answer me.
“Did you—they—meet anybody?” Dobbin no longer lounged. “In the backs.”
“No one. There wasn’t a sound.” One voice calling: Louie-lamb? Louie-lamb?, but they would never hear it. “It was like a fairground, I thought. Like after the fair is gone.”
“Did they stop? Pick up anybody?” What was it he wanted?
“Not as far as I knew. They kept the pace. Went through without stopping.”
“Go on.” I saw by his face that I had given it to him. They already had him.
“Getting out was easier, along the old road that led back to the highway, then the new mile and a half of macadam, to the base of the dam site. They went slow all the way, as if they were on some kind of work operation—from the outside it looked as if the cars were driving themselves. Nowadays there’d be too much traffic, but that night they were all the traffic there was. And when they spread out—it was hard to believe that over a hundred men could be that quiet. From then on, it must have gone according to plan. I don’t know how the lead cars got past the gates and the guards, but they got there. It was a clear night. After a while, everyone for miles around could see that they had.”
“What did you see?”
That image was still on my retina; let Dobbin probe as he wished now, this is what he would find. I answered to the room at large. “The crosses burning. One on the top of each dam.”
Hake put his papers aside. Their rustle was the only thing heard. Again I had the sensation that what I said was new to these walls. And almost at the moment of triumph, I wished myself outside them. If I turned my head, the window there on the periphery would flash like a mirror at the end of a burrow. At least let that bird speak again, bearing in its poetry of elsewhere. But the moment remained heft on its pin.
“You’re the first person to say that publicly, do you know that?” With his screen of papers down, Hake seemed more threatening. I nodded to his every question. “I was here later,” he said, “on the investigation. It turned up nothing—you recall? Dam Number Six wasn’t built yet.” This was the dam that now blocked off Tuscana. “A clear night, you said? Then Tuscana had a clear view. Eight thousand people, and they saw nothing. You know that?”
“Where were you?” Semple’s voice was hoarser. “I asked you that before.”
I drew a long breath, took the long jump.
“I was invisible,” I said.
I could feel the recoil in the room, the air curled like a lip ready to explode with the nasal rage of the tricked. Here in this public room, a hundred men might be credited their dream of “nishness” and still be found sane; the same tolerance would not be accorded the private fancy of one. It took the simplest sleight of hand—to slip the private dream inside the other. “The Invisible Empire, Mr. Semple. You remember? I had a pass to it for one night.”
Then, quickly, I turned away from him to the others, for now drama must be deserted, the manner to be as ordinary, dry, humbly aware of the strange stuff it dealt with as I could make it.
“Believe me, I couldn’t do it now. Only a kid that age could have.” Did the older ones already begin to smile at my assumed eminence of age, the way Dobbin had at our first meeting? “I was the go-between for all sorts of errands, among them the delivery of the tokens for seats in the cars. By mistake one of these was for a dead man—I found that out when I brought it to his widow.” Davis must have his name, I thought, glancing at the pharmacist, and whang, in the same instant it was provided me; in the hour of triumph, I thought, arrows fly to the hand. I mentioned the last name on the list, the one scratched out and replaced by Nellis’s. “She made me take his hoodwink back with me—that’s what gave me the idea. I was tall enough. I knew the proper signs and exchanges, all to be whispered. We were to remain as anonymous as we could. I knew where the car was. I could be already dressed and seated in it when the others arrived.” I turned to Dobbin. “I saw what I saw, in privileged company. No account of it can sound more reasonable than it was.” I turned to Hake. “I can’t prove what I saw. What a whole town said it didn’t. But there must be those who saw it from the other side.” He knew that as well as I. And finally, I turned to Semple. “There were one hundred eighteen of us who were invisible that night, Mr. Semple. I took the place of a dead man named Victor Miller.” I raised my fists with the thumbs aligned so that all could see them. “I was Klansman Two, of the thirty-ninth car.”
Outside, the heavy sunlight had dipped beyond the eaves; within, all the faces before me darkened to a platinum with gleaming edges, the daguerre stillness, I thought, that must be asked of life by habitual liars. “Later on, I was scared enough,” I said. “On the way back there was drinking in some of the cars, luckily none in mine. But everybody was more careless; most of us were set down still in our rig. I’d asked to be let off at Pridden
Street to mislead the driver, but he was from one of the other towns and went past it, instead let me off at headquarters. I was the only one on the street—and the street looked strange. I remember thinking that the town looked inside out.” I smiled, in patronage for that boy back there, and they smiled with me at him, at me, their son, their “self,” and I saw that I had them now—from now on I might show them the truth as freely as the lies. “The public lights were out,” I said. “There was none on this courthouse.” I glanced down the line, at Charlson. “The light was out over the church door. It was the houses that were lit, waiting for us to come back. But there would be nobody at home in mine.” I hesitated. There was not much truth left.
And here I faltered, not just in speech, but deep within. For now, advanced far on my plateau of time shift, fact blend, truth change, I saw opened like a pit before me, that up to here Johnny, either in what he had done or had yearned to, had been with me. All along, in the lies just told, he or his theme had been there. But now, just as I neared that denouement toward which—still innocent—I saw my story to be tending, I was deserted. That line of faces before me—I had meant to bring them, with a great lariat swing, into Semple’s lumber-room, there, before their eyes, to let them see me once again hide the pamphlet with its list of names. And in the same moment reveal it, for its practicable uses. After which I could fall silent, Semple and his band struck down by the perfect boomerang of memory, my testimony—ours—done. But Johnny, back there in the lumber-room, evaded me like an after-image, sliding to the door when I fixed on him at the table, back at the wardrobe, the peaked hood over his head, when I strove for him at the door. Now, when I needed him, he hid himself in the unforeseen shadow of memory, behind what he had not told me, whatever it was I did not know. And I knew myself lost without him. “There is a town,” I said to myself, but that moral dream, magic prop, could not help me; it had always been more his than mine.
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