Mr. Frank talks about his purchases in New Orleans and how the next morning, when he was ready to leave town, he went down to the French Market and had a breakfast of fish, oysters, and coffee.
"How are we to believe that you were in New Orleans and not with Sunny Rise?" Mr. Frank's lawyer asks, and I can't help but wonder whose side he's on.
"Well, I did meet up with an acquaintance in New Orleans. Garner O'Donnell."
People all around us start to whisper.
"When did you see Garner?"
"The night I was in New Orleans. The night Sunny disappeared. Garner and I took dinner together."
"That all?"
Mr. Frank looks at Miss Irene and lowers his head. He clears his throat and says softly, "We had a drink together. At a saloon."
Some of the women in the courthouse draw their breath in. Some of the men in the courthouse laugh out loud. Miss Irene just stares quietly on.
Mr. Frank steps down, and the lawyer calls Garner O'Donnell to the stand. Garner swears in and takes the stand. He testifies that he had dinner and a drink with Mr. Frank in New Orleans the night Sunny Rise disappeared.
Mr. Frank's lawyer says that's all he wants to ask Garner, but then Mr. Smith's lawyer steps up and asks Garner, "Mr. O'Donnell, weren't you in this very court before? Weren't you the very man who once tried to cheat Frank Russell out of his own land?"
"I wasn't cheating..."
"Answer the question," the judge says.
"Yes, sir. I am the same man."
"And now you say you had a friendly drink with Frank Russell in New Orleans?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you expect us to believe you?"
"Yes, sir."
"What did the two of you discuss?"
Garner clears his throat. "Business, mostly," he says. "And my niece Addy. Frank took in Addy when her momma left her. I thanked Frank for that. I bought him a drink."
People in the courtroom mumble, but I can't hear what they're saying.
When Garner steps down, he passes Mr. Frank and nods. Mr. Frank does not nod back. He has his head down like he can't even look at Garner even though Garner has done him a kind of favor.
I see Mr. Frank lean back to whisper something to Miss Irene. I guess that he's hoping he has not brought her shame. I see her hold his hand and smile. I hear her say, "I love you, Frank Russell."
This is the love that is good in a marriage. This is the love that Momma and Pappy never had. This here in front of me is a proud love, a quiet, honorable love. This love rises above fierce love and smashing lips.
I envy the both of them. I envy Garner too because he has finished his own hard work.
When I hear my name called I think that I will faint before I stand up. It is my turn. It is my turn and I am not sure at all what I am there for, what this lawyer will ask me, and if I can remember the words to use to talk.
Everybody is talking at once. Mr. Smith's lawyer says, "Addy O'Donnell is not in the courtroom. In fact, Addy O'Donnell has long disappeared. She's probably somewhere with Sunny Rise." The people in the courtroom laugh, all except Pappy.
Little Bit squeezes my hand. "Just tell the truth," she whispers. Truth should be easier than it is. I recall that poem by Mr. John Keats. The one I told Zula. Truth is beauty and beauty is truth and that's all you need to know. That is powerful troublesome. For I have seen some of the ugliest truth and it was not beautiful.
I stand up. People all around me look at me and whisper as I stand. Pappy. He doesn't even turn around. And I cannot look at him.
I put my hand on the Bible. I swear to tell the truth. Then, I take my stand.
Mr. Frank's lawyer asks me easy questions first. My name. Where I've been. Then I tell things in order. I tell the story of the night Little Bit and I took a walk in the woods and saw all the men at the schoolhouse while the Negroes sang church songs. I tell how I saw one of the men light the cross and how he looked up at the burning. I describe the hood he wore. I tell how I tried to save that little boy, Jess Still. "These are not stories I embroider," I say. "These here are facts."
Then I tell of what I saw in the woods, how I watched these men get ready to kill Sunny Rise. I tell of how all the costumed men got spooked in the land of the bones, how I shook down ice, and how a family of skunks scattered them all away.
"How are we to believe what you are telling us when you were the only witness?" the lawyer says. Again, I'm thinking, Whose side are you on?
But it is a good question. I am an O'Donnell. I'm not sure I would believe me either.
I hold up the folded piece of paper and unfold for him the map of that first night, the night the schoolhouse burned down. He looks at it.
"Objection, Your Honor," Mr. Smith's lawyer says. "Anybody could have drawn that any time." But I can hear the scare in his voice.
"It's dated," I say, pointing out the date Little Bit wrote in the corner.
"That doesn't refute my point, Your Honor," Mr. Smith's lawyer says.
"I'm not lying," I say. It's the best I can do.
The judge wants to see. The jury wants to see. There is a good deal of grumbling and talk. Then the judge turns to me and says, "Addy? Do you have any other evidence you can provide from that night or from the night that Mr. Sunny Rise disappeared?"
I think and think and think until my head itches.
"Ask Mrs. Smith and the other wives how their husbands smelled that night, the night Sunny Rise disappeared," I say.
And all at once, all female voices in the courthouse let out a moan. Some laughed, but I could hear others say how they spent weeks soaking this or that in tomatoes to get the smell of skunk out.
And their men? They like to froze.
These wives were crossing with their husbands' business without even knowing.
"Anything else you witness, Addy?" the judge asks.
I don't know what comes over me. Maybe O'Donnell mischief. I say, "I watched Rew Smith cry like a baby."
"I wasn't scared at all," Rew screams, standing up all of a sudden. "I did everything my daddy told me to do." His pappy, Mr. Smith, shushes him, tells him to sit back down. Pappy, he slaps the back of Rew's legs until Rew whimpers and sits.
"Anything else?" the judge asks me.
Out from my pocket I pull the smelly, dirty, balled-up hood and I hold it up for all to see, making sure they see how it's the hood that matches the hood in the drawing. Same one with the fancy slits all around.
"Where did you get that, Addy?" the judge asks.
"It's my pappy's. I took it off him when he was sleeping, the morning I left him."
Everyone turns to look at Pappy.
Mr. Frank's lawyer clears his throat and addresses the jury. "Gentlemen, we have here a set of men who have established for themselves their own law. They put their foot upon the criminal code and trampled it in the dust. They may and they do commit murder. But we do protest and shall with our dying breath protest against an aristocracy of crime. This man? Frank Russell? He is guilty of nothing more than being a fine, upstanding citizen of Smith County."
The judge says that due to the circumstances, Frank Russell is clear of all charges. Then he calls Mr. Smith and Mark O'Donnell to the stand. Pappy takes a long time to saunter up to the judge's desk.
"Those are the shoes!" Little Bit says as loud as I ever heard her. "Those are the shoes I told you I seen that night." And everyone in the room is talking at once as we all look at the very shoes Little Bit described in her own testimony.
The judge hammers his gavel down on his desk over and over and tells everyone to settle down. I am still sitting there in the witness stand when the judge charges both Mr. Smith and Pappy with murder and setting fire to government property, "among other misdeeds," he adds. Then he asks them if there's anything they want to say for themselves.
Mr. Smith shakes his head.
"I come home to clean up No-Bob," Pappy starts, turning around toward the jury and the courtroom, running his hands throu
gh his hair. That's what he does when he is nervous. I can hear the nerves in his voice too. He is trying to sound courtroom-like.
A few women whisper. Most all of us wait for more.
He looks past all of us and up at the rafters of the building. He stands there, staring. If I had his fiddle, I would hand it to him now. It's as though he is standing in front of a beautiful woman and he is no longer sure if he has the courage to ask her to dance. He tilts back and forth, seems to think better of it, then looks past everyone and straight at me.
"I'll meet you in heaven, Addy O'Donnell," he says to me. People who said this to Pappy before said it like a threat. But when he says this to me, he says it sweet, like a nice promise, and I don't know what to think or say.
Now I think I know what that John Keats fellow means about truth. Once the truth is all laid out in front of you and everybody else and the whole world to see, truth good and bad, it is a sight to behold, and that sight might be where beauty lies sleeping.
"I still love you, Pappy," I whisper.
The judge thumps down his gavel and says we're finished for the day. The sheriff handcuffs first Mr. Smith, then Pappy, and takes them both to the hotel because they have not yet built a prison for white people.
That night the courthouse catches fire and burns down to the ground. Some say Pappy did it. Some say he had his friends and family do it for him. All the records from the day's court session and the year's before this day burn up along with the building.
But he knows. Pappy knows. And I know. We don't need anything writ down to know about the truth.
The prison room at the hotel is wide open and empty, and nobody can find either Mr. Smith or Pappy.
Pappy said I could never run away from family, but I did. I did because I had to. Now he's the one running. Running away from both the law and himself. I figure out now that it's a fact that Pappy never did go to Texas. He just camped out in the swamps all that time he was away from Momma and me.
Maybe this time he has run off to Texas for real.
Chapter 11
It is spring. The dogwoods are in bloom and the whole world is popping. Already, Miss Irene planted verbena, old maids, phlox, and four-o'clocks around the house, just to set it off right, and Mr. Frank has planted his fields. I plant the kitchen garden with every seed I can lay my hands on. Four kinds of beans, peas, lettuce, okra, peppers, squash, turnips. I plant watermelons and mush melons in the loamy dirt near the creek. I plant and plant and plant, for they have taken me back in. Miss Irene and Mr. Frank have taken me back into their home.
We got ourselves a new preacher. This new preacher says sin is the cause of the world being in the fix it's in today. The only way to fight sin is to get together, and getting together is all right by me.
We all go for Easter service at the new church built on Clear Creek. On the way, we pass a new horsepower cotton gin, made from steel from Mobile. I ride with Mr. Frank's parents, Little Bit, and Jack. Mr. Frank and Miss Irene ride together. Miss Irene is about ready to burst with child.
The preacher tells us about the legend of the dogwood. At the time of the crucifixion of Jesus, the dogwood attained the size of the oak and other forest trees, and because it was so strong and firm, the wood was chosen as the timber for the cross. To be thus used for such a cruel purpose greatly distressed the tree. Jesus, as he hung nailed upon it, sensed the tree's distress and, in his gentle pity for all sorrow, said to the tree, "Because of your regret and pity for my suffering I make you a promise that never again shall the dogwood tree grow large enough to be used for a cross. Henceforth, it shall be slender and bent and twisted, and its blossoms shall be in the form of a cross, two long petals and two short petals, and in the center of the outer edge of each petal there will be nail prints brown with rust and stained with blood, and in the center of the flower will be a crown of thorns, that all who see it may remember it was upon a dogwood tree that the Lord was crucified, and this tree shall not be mutilated nor destroyed, but cherished and protected as a reminder of my agony and death upon the cross."
After the preaching, Mrs. Davenport makes announcements about the boxed suppers. Every woman should put together a boxed supper to be auctioned at the church to raise money for a new piano.
Little Bit, Jack, and me, we all say, "Aaahh," just thinking on the sound of a piano.
"Well, I'll be," Miss Irene says after the service ends. She holds her stomach as Mr. Frank helps her into their new buggy. "I never knew any of that about dogwood."
"Jesus sure was something," Little Bit says, climbing in with me. We sit in the back and let our legs hang off the edge.
Mr. Frank laughs, taking hold of his mule's reins. "Yes, he was. He opened his heart to the presence of love."
"If I do that, could I hear a tree talk?" Little Bit wants to know.
***
We all go back to Mr. Frank's, where there are potatoes on the coals and bacon in the iron pan. There is bread, molasses, meat, sweet potatoes, pot likker, milk, fried chicken, boiled ham, banana cake, and homemade pickles. I set to work and help serve everyone who can find a chair. Then I sit down too with a loaded plate, and as I eat, my eyes water when I think that the one cure for this hollow feeling is eating until your hollow stomach is full up with good things.
A friend of Mr. Frank's pa has come after the service to join us too. He tells how he fought in four battles during the war, then he was captured and put in prison on Ship Island, where he was held and guarded by Negroes for thirty-eight days. He was never wounded, but in Rome, Georgia, his belt was shot from around him and his clothes were set on fire by the bullet. In Vicksburg, they set him free and he walked home, swimming the Pearl River. He never learned to read, so he was glad to hear that story that the preacher told about the dogwood.
He and Mr. Frank's pa talk of an old war veterans' gathering in Oktibbeha County, a reunion to commemorate the Confederacy. I suppose if I had been through something as big as a war, I would want to see the others who had too, but I'm tired of hearing about the war and all that fighting.
Mr. Frank's ma, she says, "Haven't we all had enough fighting and destruction to last a lifetime? I for one don't need to sit around and remember it."
Mr. Frank laughs and says how once upon a time, he imagined Yankee soldiers as cruel monsters blowing fire and smoke.
"And then you saw one up close," his pa says.
They both nod and they are quiet.
I think on this. I think how you think about people in lumps, and then you get to know one and all that thinking changes. I think of how Mr. Frank's pa lived in a world of slavery, how he might have looked at someone like Sunny Rise and thought slave, and how now he might look at him and think man. I think about how Mr. Frank sees me as Addy and not an O'Donnell termite. I think about how I saw the Choctaw as a people who had no real home. Then I met Zula.
Miss Irene brings out a coconut cake and Mr. Frank's ma opens up a jar of her fine peaches.
Everybody is talking at once and eating at once.
Mr. Frank is talking about supplementing what he earns with the store he's got up and running and his teacher's income of ten dollars a term. He's saying that with the railroad and the easier traveling, and now that it's safer—that's when he winks at me—he could start a peddling wagon to go along with his store.
Mr. Frank's pappy listens, then he stops and looks at me. My mouth is full so I keep chewing. "Frank? This girl, Addy."
Mr. Frank's pappy doesn't say anything for a minute and I think by the serious sound of his voice that he will finally throw me out, just because I am an O'Donnell and he can't stand to think about O'Donnells after what they done to his son. I swallow. "Addy. She saved you same as you saved me once. You know that?"
Mr. Frank, he smiles.
"That's right, Pa."
"Happy Easter, Addy,"
Mr. Frank's pappy says to me, raising his coffee cup.
He sits at the head of the table and doesn't eat any of the sweets, thou
gh before him is a spread so fine, I can hardly keep my mouth shut. I am so happy I melt down.
Mr. Frank's pa looks to have everything but food on his mind. He recollects a heap about slavery times and we all listen and eat. He talks about the long ago. He tells us how he and his soldier pal would march behind a wagon, and when the wagon wheel smashed over a frog, he and his friend would pick it up, shake the dust off it, and eat it. Some of us laugh but Mr. Frank's pappy doesn't. They were that hungry, he says. He says isn't it fine how his son can provide for us all with so much bounty. Then he lays his knife down like he is real tired, and he stops talking.
"What's wrong with Mr. Frank's pa?" I say.
Then Mr. Frank gets up and leans over his pa and says, "Pa? Pa?"
"Jack? Jack?" Mr. Frank's ma asks.
And Lord help that poor man, for he is dead. Mr. Frank's pa is dead.
When Mr. Frank sees my uncle Garner O'Donnell coming down the road, and when Garner tells him his intentions, Mr. Frank just stares. As an act of kindness and sympathy for Mr. Frank, Garner says he has come over to help Frank dress and put his pa away. He will help Mr. Frank bury his pa. Garner rolls up his sleeves, then shows Mr. Frank that he has brought over a razor to use to shave Mr. Frank's pa before Mr. Frank dresses then buries him.
Mr. Frank leans on the door frame, looking down at his shoes. The two of them don't say anything as Mr. Frank looks to be trying to decide. I figure he will shut the door. But he lets him in. Mr. Frank lets him in, and I can see by the way Garner puts his hand on Mr. Frank's shoulder that these two here are not just friends who drink together, not like Smasher and Pappy or Mr. Smith and Pappy. These two men have come to an understanding betwixt themselves. Once upon a time they argued, even fought over some land, and now, now they are friends. They are friends.
When I Crossed No-Bob Page 11