I Got to Keep Moving

by Bill Harris

  Horse looked about the scattered space to the right-hand aisle at Branch Ottley, Chap’s cowboy, his right arm up, what looked like a M 1911A1 Colt .45 Automatic in his right hand. A DOA Negro in an overcoat, his left temple oozing blood, lay next to a fedora, and what looked like a Smith & Wesson lay at the cowboy’s feet.

  It was all so quick, as Vienna and most of the others interviewed by the police said. It all just happened at once.

  They began moving in two waves, one toward the widening circle around Reverend Richmond and Son, the other toward the door where Horse stood blocking the exit. Bradshaw had been handpicked by Police Chief Captain Francis Mahoney for what the chief thought was Bradshaw’s guard dog-like loyalty, and allegiance to him over any ties he might have to the Negroes he was hired to keep guard of, and therefore he had the good sense to follow the orders of his superior officer. Bradshaw, with only a slight tremor in his voice, told the cowboy to lay his pistol down. To Bradshaw’s relief Ottley did.

  Next, the young policeman announced, even though he was ordered to move by no less than Mother Johnson on the arms of two black-suited, white-gloved ushers, Deacons Hildebrand and Jenkins, that until reinforcements, meaning Chief Mahoney, arrived, and took official charge of the situation, no one was leaving.

  And so it was, until, sirens screaming, tires screeching, Chief Mahoney in his rain slicker and plastic cover on his cap with the patent leather bill entered, the wedge at his phalanx of heavily-armed patrolmen to put down and straighten up the mess and supervise the cleaning up of the carnage and incarceration of the congregates.

  Unnoticed in the confusion, Ada brought Pearl’s purse up and got her pistol and with it under a robe hung over her arm she moved, unseen, back into the basement and out of the door there and took it home to tell Chap what had happened.

  Big Horace Bradshaw was born and raised right on Evans Street. He had been All City center for the colored Lincoln High Panthers. Nicknamed Horse, who on offense was as protective of his quarterback as a mama bear of her cubs, and on defense was a nose-busting, head-cracking bruiser, who with a teeth-bared, red-eyed fury hunted and brought down ball carriers.

  Horse Bradshaw knew the rage that boiled in the bellies above and within ‘lo’ Dunbar: fear of and anger at cursed, savage niggers; anger at and fear of damned hateful crackers. He also knew what was expected, no, demanded of him by Captain Mahoney, the mayor, and council and citizens above Dunbar. They made it plain enough.

  They thought it was as simple as black and white, as them and us. He thought they had no idea, A, how wrong they were, or, B, how good he was at his job.

  To keep its denizens in line was to keep them alive. And if it took the slight injustice of a lumped skull, or boot in the butt, a night or two in the tank to keep his flock safe, then so be it. Well worth the price, and everybody was better off for it, whether they were like children with stinging hands or burning butts too temporarily painful to understand the long-term benefits of a spanking. None of their hissing and spitting at him behind his back as he strolled his beat, his twirling nightstick whistling its little tune punctuated by its snapping rhythm as it hit his palm, mattered to him.

  He was, he thought, whether they knew or appreciated it or not, their guardian and secret spokesman, negotiator and best friend. He saved them, he thought, from a bigger world of hurt in the long run. For he knew the depthless possibility of evil that lay in the tree line of the white folks’ fear. He’d seen it at the bottom of the pile at a goal line stand. He saw it in the Captain’s grease-soaked lunch bag each morning, heard it in the angry ring of the desk sergeant’s phone with a white citizen’s complaint about being bumped into on the street by some nigger bitch, or eyeballed by some young or old, big or little man or boy, felt it every-where. However rarely acknowledged and unappreciated his part in that was.

  The more emotionally controlled were, with reassuring tones, calming children and weepers, patting the backs of hands, fanning the faint and frustrated who, under their hats, had sweated out their hot-combed hairdos, and whose mascara and skin-lightening face power was streaked despite their fanning. There were sprinklings of individual prayers, evident by closed eyes and silently-mouthed words. Some slumped in their pews looking upward. Grade school boys, squirming with their pent-up desire, eyed each other, trying to communicate with only their facial expressions their desire to whip out their pistols and have a running gun battle among the pews, or even better be out in the open of the playground; they were rehearsing their stories to tell in school. They squirmed and twisted their mouths and their eyebrows danced—until they were warned for the last time. Knowing better, they did not even protest their innocence but sighed and turned away from each other and tried to sit still.

  After what Vienna would describe as the moments of pure pandemonium was the long wait to get out. Within about ten minutes every policeman in Chilton was there. It was announced everyone in the church were being detained until their statements could be taken and their contact information obtained.

  Under the chief’s command lines were formed, and like third graders at an assembly, the congregates were marched slowly forward to be interviewed one by one by uniformed policemen and plainclothes detectives.

  They don’t know what they’re doing, an usher said to an usherette. They’d never had this kind of killing before. They were only used to a crap game razor fight, with a victim bleeding to death because of the perpetrator’s indifference or medical neglect.

  The three bodies, photographed from all angles before the coroner, in his golf clothes, had finally been found and had them declared dead, were bagged and hauled off to the morgue.

  —

  Daisy Wood, soprano who sang next to Vienna in the Zion AME choir, and did day work for Mr. Jacobs, the manager of First City Bank, and his wife, sat next to Vienna as they were waiting to be interviewed. Daisy listened to everybody complaining until she whispered to Vienna, “He’s trying his best to do a good job.”

  “Who?”

  “Horace Bradshaw.”

  “Oh.”

  Vienna found Bradshaw in the crowd, pointing parishioners to one of the four policemen taking names, addresses, and statements.

  “He loves his job,” Daisy said. “Being useful in his hometown.”

  Vienna could feel Daisy trying to hold herself back in her praise of Bradshaw.

  “That’s all he wants to do. Be useful, helpful to us.”

  Vienna nodded. Branch had been handcuffed and taken away.

  “If it had been a white policeman first through that door,” Daisy said, “no telling what would have happened.”

  Vienna smiled at Daisy. Honest to Jesus, she thought, there is somebody for everybody.

  It was Horse Bradshaw, Daisy said, who had been the first law officer on the scene and was the other hero of the day.

  Why him? Vienna wondered. To Daisy she said, “I wouldn’t tell that to Mother Johnson I was you.”

  Mother Johnson, bless her feisty old soul—in her almost brand-new taffeta and chiffon dress that Pearl Moon had made especially for her—and Sister Durham, who was well traveled and therefore knew that Mother Johnson’s dress was superior to anything women of taste were wearing in Chicago, Harlem, Detroit, or Riverton, were still giving Horace the side eye. It was Horace who had blocked her first attempt at an exit and had made her go and sit back down until the chief arrived to decide what was to be done. Whether everybody was to be taken down to the station or interviewed in the church was a decision the brass would have to make, Horace explained, but until then nobody was to leave.

  He must have had her confused with sanctified country Negroes like them in that Reverend Prophet Riley Cook’s so-called church that got happy and fell out, flopping like landed carp, or walleyed, snake-handling, red necked Southern Baptists who lay on the church floor. Mrs. Paul Johnson in Church Street Zion A.M.E. did not care how many people had been killed, or how many more had no home training, pistols or no pistols, she would
not stand to be ordered around in that fashion.

  Everybody agreed with her but his or her complaints were given no more weight than Mother Johnson’s.

  “Mysterious Father,” Mother Johnson began, her usually raspy voice like a sharp handclap. It was as if the volume of a radio had suddenly been turned up on a conversation in progress. The others around her hushed, but most did not look her way for fear her wrathful gaze was focused on them. “You who have taught us not to argue with or question the hard lessons You teach. And once again shown us what the absence of Your presence in the hearts of men looks like.”

  There was an edge to her voice and a set to her countenance as if she were scolding a child who should have known better, especially after all of the talking-to’s it had had. She paused. It was Pearl and Son she was focused on.

  Pearl had her arm around his shoulder. The darkening red of the slain minister’s blood on the boy’s white shirt was like a splotched bull’s-eye. She was whispering to him. He was nodding. Both of them were as calm as if they were watching butterflies on a sunny bench in Perkins Park.

  Mother Johnson continued, “In our puny understanding of Your mysterious wisdom, and under the protection of Your loving, guiding hand, You allowed that cowboy man to defend us with his sure and steady aim, Mysterious Father.”

  “Amen.”

  “And we know we must thank You for nestling that child there to your bosom. Seeing fit to take his eyes, You have burdened him in one way, but giving him another kind of insight have gifted him in another. You spared him this day to carry forth with that gift.”

  “Amen.”

  She paused to swallow, one, two, three times, as if trying to get down a portion of graveyard dirt, then, eyes narrowed, focusing, Mother Johnson continued, the tone of her voice like a scythe slow-honed against a dry Arkansas grindstone. At the sound of it, children stopped their whining and squirming and bit their lips or sucked their thumbs. Clung closer. There was little doubt they would have regressed to the nipple had breasts been bared.

  “—When You taught us through the bitter broth of experience we have sipped from the tarnished cup of injustice at the hands of the law, Mysterious Father—”

  Mother Johnson stopped. Her voice had been ebbing lower and lower like a boat on receding floodwaters. It had fallen so low at the end they had to strain to hear her.

  Unsure now if it had even been for those around her to hear, they wrinkled their noses as if they smelled smoke and kerosene, or brimstone. They listened to each other breathe.

  —

  Those who had been interviewed exited the church into the late gray afternoon. They grumbled but were relieved to see the crowd outside. There were husbands who’d come to meet their wives who’d gone to church without them. There were non-churchgoers who’d heard the news and came to see what was what.

  Like a fire the word leapt from party line to party line, house to house, front porch to front porch, across back fences, domestic worker to domestic worker, factory worker to factory worker. That it was a Sunday made it easier. The businesses and the bars were closed. The weather even helped by it being gray and rainy, so few were out and about in the parks and such.

  It wasn’t long before somebody realized that the center of the action had shifted from the church to the police station. That was where they went.

  It was 5:20 when Chap, with Hughes at the wheel, pulled up in front of headquarters. Chap had called ahead, leaving a message for the chief that he would see him at 5:35.

  The rain had long ago stopped, the weak sun valiantly trying to dry things off. There were Son and Pearl and Mother Johnson sitting on one of the benches in Veteran’s Square facing police headquarters. Son, with the fifteen-foot-or-so-high flagpole behind him, had dark blood on his shirt the same color as the stripes on the damp, dingy American flag hanging like an empty sleeve from the pole.

  A car full of white street toughs, their complexions ruddied by the contents of the occasional flash of tilted flasks, parked on the west side of Veterans Square, across from colored boys from the plant slow-chewing sandwiches in Frank Parker’s old green Hudson on the east side, both motors idling.

  Greetings. Expressing their appreciation and relief for Chap’s showing up, and their frustration with still having to be there.

  Chap was still mad as a motherfucker.

  Mad at the police for holding every goddamned body in the church for that long. Making him have to call up Lars Walton, a Negro lawyer, and have him call up a white lawyer that he trusted to meet him at the police station.

  Mad too at the two dead motherfuckers who’d come to Chilton to shoot Richmond in the first goddamned place. Sons of bitches, served them right Branch’d shot their sorry asses to goddamn death. Last time they’d try some shit like that in Chilton.

  Mad too at whomever had sent them.

  Chap told Mother Johnson he was going to have Hughes take her and Pearl and Son home; he thanked them all.

  He took the old woman’s arm and walked her to the car. She nodded to him before he closed the door. Other than that she never said a word. They pulled off.

  —

  Branch sat on the kitchen stool with the lath-turned legs and spindles in the interrogation room in police headquarters.

  The many chips, scars, nicks, and gouges revealed a dingy, money-green beneath the top coat of black enamel paint applied with thick slathering strokes streaked with bristle marks. The green was probably of the same vintage as shrouded the walls of the small windowless room. A sludge-gray beneath that, and where it was gouged, deepest evidence of the original stained pine. The rear left leg was at least an inch and a half shorter than the two it formed an equilateral triangle with, and two inches shorter than its kitty-corner opposite, causing Branch, his back to the door, to make an effort to sit straight so as not to titter. The stool was placed a couple of feet from the oak table with the matching chair behind it.

  To calm himself he thought of the Oklahoma flatlands stretched quiet and tranquil, clear to the skyline laid out before him. He waited.

  Horse Bradshaw, leaning back against the door, watched Branch Ottley’s back.

  “Branch Ottley,” the chief said. He tapped the sheet of paper in front of him. “What the hell kind of name is that?”

  Ottley didn’t answer.

  “We expect the occasional weekend incident in Low Dunbar,” the chief continued. “It’s expected. But murder?” He shook a cigarette from his Lucky Strike Green Label pack, hung it in the corner of his mouth, and struck a match, holding it as the flame crawled up the stick. “When they come three at a time”—he put the flame to the cigarette tip, inhaled, shook out the match, and dropped it into the jar top ashtray—“that’s too much at once.” He exhaled. “You a member of the church?”

  “I was just there to hear the boy sing,” Ottley said.

  “What boy?”

  Bradshaw told him about Son.

  The chief asked, “What was Richmond to you?”

  “We both roomed at 560.”

  “The boy lives there too,” Bradshaw said.

  “Does it seem funny to you, two Negroes with no identification would come in a church and shoot a preacher?”

  “Strange. Not funny,” Ottley said.

  “Who were they?” the chief asked. The Lucky Strike was angled in the ashtray, burning down.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Do you know who sent them or why did they shoot the preacher?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Why’d you shoot them?”

  “I had a choice to make. I could have backed off and got them coming out of the church, but I wasn’t sure that Richmond was their only target.”

  “Who else you think it might have been?”

  “Didn’t think I could wait to find out.”

  You wouldn’t tell me if you did know, would you?

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “What are you doing in Chilton?”

  “Working for
Chap,” Bradshaw said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Being around,” Ottley said.

  “For what?”

  “In case.”

  “What?”

  “I’m needed.”

  “Be careful,” the chief said. “You want this to go rough it can go rough. Any more of this snake-hipping do-do bird shit I will let Horse do the questioning.”

  “And I know how to get the answers we want,” Bradshaw said.

  “Ordinarily,” the chief said, “I’d have him beat the shit out of you, convict you of double homicide, and lock you away as a warning, and the mayor would give me a commendation.”

  Branch waited.

  “But there’s the slight smell of the hero on you. If only it hadn’t happened in the church.”

  Branch waited.

  “Why did you have a gun?”

  “I always have one.”

  “Why?”

  “In case.”

  The chief paused as he picked up the cigarette, inhaled, and stubbed it out. “Two dead center shots in a crowded church. That’s pretty good shooting.”

  “I had a good teacher.”

  “Who? Annie Oakley?”

  “My uncle.”

  “Who was he, Black Bart?”

  “Peace officer.”

  “Your uncle is a lawman?”

  “He was a marshal. It’s in my statement.”

  The chief asked Bradshaw why he hadn’t told him that.

  “Sergeant Thomas interviewed him,” Bradshaw said.

  The chief asked, “Marshal where?”

  “Malone, Oklahoma,” Ottley said.

  “You want me or Sergeant Thomas to check?” Bradshaw asked.

  “I’ll tell Thomas. You stay with him,” indicating Ottley with a head gesture.

  There was an urgent knock on the door.

  “It had better be important,” the chief called.

  There was another series of knocks. “Chief?”