by Pete Dexter
“You ain’t scart of him.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am that too.”
Time passed, and the woman opened her eyes. She put her hands underneath her bottom and began to push herself up off the ground. The girl did not want to leave yet.
“I’ll tell you what I’m scart of if you want,” she said.
Miss Mary settled back into the tree, but she was awake now, and in some way she was pleased. “I brung you into my house,” she said, “and now you allow me into yours.”
Rosie said, “I’m scart my momma will come get me back.”
“You don’t have them dreams with me, do you?”
“No, ma’am.”
The woman bit the corner of her lip. “I tell you what,” she said, “whenever you get scart, you come to me.”
“You keep me away from my momma?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I will be there with you when she come.”
TWO WEEKS LATER ROSIE Sayers was sitting on the porch in her new dress when she saw the car coming up Spine Road. She’d worn the dress every day since Miss Mary bought it for her. It had rained that morning, and the car threw a steady curtain of water and mud into the air as it came.
Some of the mud landed on the car itself and blistered there in the sun. The windows were open—it had turned steamy that afternoon—and she could see Mr. Trout behind the wheel. He had pulled his hat down over most of his face, but she recognized him. From the store and from somewhere else.
Thomas was sitting on the porch too, in the chair, with his feet crossed on the railing. Thomas was sweeter than Henry Ray, but he was lazy.
The children, Jane Ray and Linda, were playing inside. Rosie Sayers stood still and watched the car come.
“Who would that be now?” Thomas said.
“Mr. Trout,” she said. “Send the children after Miss Mary.” They minded Thomas and wouldn’t listen to her. She wouldn’t hit them.
Thomas sat up straight without taking his feet off the rail. “Who he comin’ to see?” he said.
“Us,” she said.
He called into the house for Linda. “Go fetch your momma,” he said, but she never answered.
There was another man in the car with Mr. Trout, and they looked at each other and spoke before they got out.
“Look out, Jesus,” Thomas said.
“Who is that with him?”
“Mr. Buster Devonne,” he said. “Used to be a police, but he treated folks too mean, had to let him go.”
The men got out of the car. Mr. Trout was wearing rimless glasses and had pulled his hat down almost to cover them. The other one, Buster Devonne, was bigger than anyone the girl knew except Miss Mary. She saw he was bothered.
The men walked up the steps to the porch without a word. Rosie stood still, and they passed her by like she wasn’t at home. Thomas did not get up or move. Mr. Trout found a place directly in back of him and waited. Buster Devonne stood to one side.
Thomas began to talk. He said, “The little money I owe you, sir, I pay it on the tenth. Just to the agreement we made.” His voice was quicker than she remembered it.
“I ain’t here about no twenty dollars,” Mr. Trout said. “Your family bought a car off me, ain’t paid me a cent. I come out here to find out what you mean to do about it.”
Thomas shook his head. “I don’t mean to do nothing, sir,” he said. “It ain’t my business, it’s my brother’s.”
“Where is he?”
“He over to work at the state. Ain’t that right, Rosie?”
She stood frozen. The man named Buster Devonne watched her close.
“Buster Devonne’s got a blank here for you to sign,” Mr. Trout said to Thomas.
Buster Devonne pulled a piece of folded white paper out of his back pocket and handed it to Mr. Trout, who reached over Thomas’s shoulder and dropped it into his lap.
“I ain’t gone to sign no blank,” Thomas said.
He opened the paper and began to read it. Mr. Trout grabbed him then, by the collar, and lifted him out of his seat. Rosie heard a little cry come out of herself, and she saw Buster Devonne’s hand go into his jacket pocket.
Mr. Trout went to his pocket too. He was holding Thomas with one hand, shaking him now, and the other hand came out sparkling in the sun.
Rosie heard herself again. “Lord have mercy,” she said, “He’s got brass knucks.” She had seen the uses of brass knucks back in the Bottoms, they were as bad as a knife.
And then Miss Mary was there, on the first step to the porch, looking up at Mr. Trout. “There’s no call to hurt nobody here,” she said.
“Lord a mercy,” Rosie said again, and her voice distracted Mr. Trout. He stared at her a minute, and then she saw that screaming look in his eyes.
“What the hell you got to do with it?” he said suddenly. He let go of Thomas and came after her, and she ran into the house. She heard him behind her, tearing up the furniture. The shades were drawn over the windows in the first room, and coming in out of the sunlight, she was suddenly blind.
She cried out for Miss Mary.
Mr. Trout stumbled behind her, he broke a piece of glass. She heard him curse as she passed into the second room. It was lighter in there, and she could see the details of the walls and floor, she could see her own feet. It seemed to her that things had slowed down.
And then she heard him behind her again. It surprised her in some way that he was still there. “What the goddamn hell does it got to do with you?” he said again. And she saw his face without turning to see it, and then his arm had gone around her throat, and he was shaking her from behind.
She reached in back of herself to slap him away, and then there was a cracking noise on the side of her head, and he let her go. And in that moment things went dark and she felt the beginnings of a nightmare.
And she bit her hand, to make it stop, and then she heard another noise, louder and farther away, and something hit her in the side and spun her down. Then she smelled the smoke in the air and knew that she’d been shot.
“Miss Mary …”
She heard the woman somewhere behind. “Coming,” she said, “I’m coming now.” And then there was another shot and then another.
She heard the breath go out of Miss Mary, and then she heard the words again. “I’m coming now.”
Rosie lay on the floor and looked up, and Miss Mary walked past without seeing her. She was bleeding from her shoulder and her back. “Where you goin’?” the child asked.
Miss Mary stood still to speak. “I got to go into the stove room,” she said. “I got to lie on the table.”
Miss Mary walked slowly through the second room and into the third. She dropped to her knees just before she reached the last room of the house, the kitchen.
Rosie watched her from the floor, feeling sick and dizzy. When the dizziness passed, she pulled herself up and walked into the kitchen too. She was wrong in the side, she couldn’t say exactly how. She heard the men talking, she could not make out the words. The smell of gunpowder was thicker when she stood than it had been on the floor, and the voices seemed to come out of it.
She touched the wall for her balance and got into the kitchen. Miss Mary was on her hands and knees. The child wanted to help her, but she turned sick again and sat down on the trunk against the wall.
Miss Mary climbed off the floor then and laid herself across the table. For a moment it was still, and then Mr. Trout appeared in the doorway, holding his gun. He took a step in, raising his arm, and Rosie raised her eyes to meet it. The first shot hit her in the arm, a little above the elbow. The second shot took her breath.
“Lord have mercy,” she said to Miss Mary, “the man has shot me in the stomach.”
Miss Mary twisted up off the table at that and turned to stare at Paris Trout. He shot her in the breast. She pushed off the table.
“Come on, child,” she said, and held out her hand.
Rosie Sayers took the hand and got to her feet, and
she and Miss Mary walked together out the back door into the yard. They sat together on the back steps and then lay together on the ground. They heard the car engine race as Buster Devonne and Mr. Trout left.
Rosie closed her eyes. She opened them once and saw the children, Jane Ray and Linda, standing over her as still as pictures. Thomas Boxer had left to call the police.
She called out to Miss Mary.
“I’m right here next to you,” Miss Mary said.
“It’s so cold,” she said.
“You ain’t afraid, child, you been saved.”
“Yes I am.”
“You been saved,” Miss Mary said. “And I am here with you now to wait for Jesus.”
“I’m so cold,” the child said.
She said, “Jesus will be here soon, cover you with a blanket.”
The news that Paris Trout had shot two colored females in Indian Heights came to Harry Seagraves from the police chief, Hubert Norland. Seagraves kept Chief Norland on a small retainer for just that sort of information.
The call came at supper. The maid brought the telephone to the table, but when Seagraves heard the chief’s voice, he excused himself and used the phone in his study. He did not like to discuss matters of blood or violence in front of his wife, who had an interest in other people’s troubles which he tried not to feed.
“Mr. Seagraves,” the chief said, “I’m over to Cornell Clinic, and there’s a couple of negras here got shot up by Paris Trout.”
Harry Seagraves had taken the call standing up. Now he sat down. The police chief did not add to what he’d said or explain it. Seagraves liked to find things out in his own order.
“Who are they?” he said.
“Females,” said the chief.
Seagraves tried to picture it, Paris Trout with colored women, but it would not come. He didn’t think Paris Trout had an appetite for women, colored or white. He was one of those people who did not like to be touched.
“One of them’s named Mary McNutt,” the chief said, reading now from the report. “Thirty-eight years old Negress, employed by the Markham family as a maid … shot three, four times. The other would be Rosie Sayers, and that one ain’t going to live.”
Harry Seagraves sat still and tried to think of a way of removing himself from this before it began. His law firm, Seagraves, DuBois, Clatterfield & Spudd, represented most of the old and the rich families in Cotton Point, the families that lived in the houses on Draft Street, families like his own. He was part of their safety. Paris Trout was not of that group socially—he had no social affiliations—but he owned property and lumber interests and the store and was known to have money. His sister was a court clerk. His mother, until her stroke, had run the family store and been the most visible and outspoken woman in Cotton Point.
Seagraves had represented him before, in half a dozen civil suits, and did not see how he could turn him away now. The obligation was not so much to Trout as to the families on Draft Street, who counted his protection as a constant.
“The one that ain’t going to live isn’t but a child,” the chief said.
“How old?”
“It ain’t written down,” the chief said, “but she could be thirteen, fourteen years old.”
“You have the name?” He opened the drawer of his desk and found a piece of paper. He dipped his desk pen in the inkwell. The chief spelled out Sayers. It was not a name Seagraves had heard before.
“Is she native?”
“Not to me,” the chief said. “They ain’t related, but the girl lived with the woman. Sometime they take each other in like that.”
“What was Paris Trout doing in Indian Heights?” Seagraves said.
“Collecting for a car, he says.”
Without realizing he was doing it, Harry Seagraves drew a cross on the paper, above Rosie Sayers’s name. When he saw what it was, he changed it to a dollar sign. “Paris Trout doesn’t make loans to women,” he said.
“Well, that’s what he told me,” the chief said. “Him and Buster Devonne was out there to collect for a Chevrolet.”
“Buster Devonne was there?”
“Yessir,” the chief said. “He done some of it too. I don’t know how much. Their story is that the negras had guns.”
The line was quiet while Harry Seagraves thought. Buster Devonne had been a policeman, and he’d hurt a number of colored people without reason. “Are you sure the girl’s going to die?” he said finally.
“That’s what Doc Braver said.”
The line was quiet again, and it was the chief who finally spoke. “Mr. Seagraves?” he said. “What do you want me to do about this?”
“Have you talked to Ward Townes?”
“No sir, I called you first thing after I’d finished with Mr. Trout.”
“And he told you he’d shot the girl.”
“Yessir, him and Buster Devonne.”
Seagraves leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, picturing the conversation. “Did you take it down?”
“No sir, it was on the phone. I bring them in to my girl to take it down.”
Paris Trout would refuse to see it, that it was wrong to shoot a girl and a woman. There was a contract he’d made with himself a long time ago that overrode the law, and being the only interested party, he lived by it. He was principled in the truest way. His right and wrong were completely private.
Harry Seagraves had been around the law long enough to hold a certain affection for those who did not respect it, but his affection, as a rule, was in proportion to the distance they kept from his practice.
A man like Paris Trout could rub his right and wrong up against the written law for ten minutes and occupy half a year of Harry Seagraves’s time straightening it out. And a man as important as Paris Trout, it was difficult to pass the case to a junior partner. Draft Street would watch what happened to him and fear for itself.
“Mr. Seagraves?” The chief sounded worried now.
“Yessir,” Seagraves said. “I appreciate your courtesy, Chief. My advice to you now would be to call Ward Townes and inform him of the situation. He may want to wait, see if the girl dies. Sometimes young folks are resilient beyond medical expectations, and if that is the case with Miss Sayers, then we may be interrupting supper for no cause.”
“I hate to bothered you at supper,” he said, “but I thought you’d want a head start on this.”
“It’s no bother.… Listen, you come by soon and sit at the table with us. Lucy was asking on you and your family just recently.”
“Thank you, sir. Y’all have to come over to see us too.”
The line went quiet again, both of them out of manners. “There’s one other thing,” Seagraves said.
“Yessir?”
“As long as it’s not taken down anywhere, I’d just as soon Paris never talked to you at all. That way me and Mr. Townes start fresh and fair.” Seagraves waited while the police chief thought it over. Then he said, “Of course, if that compromises you in some way …”
“No sir, that’d be all right.”
“Good.”
“Yessir, I can do that.…”
“Is there something else?”
“If the girl dies,” the chief said, “I’d likely have to come get Mr. Trout.” Seagraves heard the worry in his voice.
“You just give me a call at the office, I’ll bring him to you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Seagraves. And I’d likely have to come for Buster Devonne too.”
“That would be up to you,” Seagraves said, “Mr. Devonne is no concern of mine.” And then he hung up. Paris Trout was principled, in his way, but Buster Devonne was a dog off his leash.
The door to the study opened a few inches and his wife looked in. “Harry?” she said. He looked up without answering. He did not like her in this room, her or anyone else.
“Is something wrong?” she said.
He rubbed the front of his face with his hands, feeling tired. “I’ll be out directly,” he said. Sh
e did not move, though. She wanted him to apologize for leaving supper. He said, “I’ve got to make a call.”
“Now?”
He nodded and picked up the telephone, waiting for her to close the door. She stood where she was. “What is it?” she said.
“Paris Trout gone took a damn gun and shot two colored women.”
Her pretty white face turned soft, opening to the news. “Did they work for anybody we know?” she said.
“Charley Markham’s maid is one of them,” he said, “but that doesn’t make it our business.”
Her face, suddenly hurt, stayed in the opening a minute longer and then disappeared. The room took a peaceful feeling the minute she was gone.
He decided to visit Trout instead of calling. It wasn’t that the man was less remote in person—he was one of the few clients Harry Seagraves had who were actually easier to talk to on the telephone—but that the news of what he had done was disquieting in a way that made him want to get out of his own house.
Lucy watched him come into the dining room and saw he was carrying the keys to the car. She was angry and did not speak. He saw she had put her glasses on, and they were fogged from the steam of the boiled potatoes on her plate.
PARIS TROUT LIVED IN a hundred-year-old white house at the corner of Draft Street and Samuel. There were eight bedrooms and four baths, servants’ quarters, long hallways, and high ceilings. Seagraves had been told he kept the whole house dark.
His wife answered the doorbell. She did not seem to recognize him and stood in the door waiting for him to explain what he wanted. “Mrs. Trout?” he said. “I am Harry Seagraves.”
Her look did not change. “I know you, Mr. Seagraves,” she said. “What may I do for you this evening?”
He had seen more of Hanna Trout before she married than since. She had grown up in Cotton Point, taught third and fourth grades at Fuller Laboratory School, and then worked herself into a position with the state department of schools in Atlanta.
She had been plainspoken all her life, a trait which, in spite of her good looks, had scared off all the men who noticed her until Paris Trout. The town psychologists said that he’d married her to replace his mother, who had not spoken a word since her stroke.