by Odie Lindsey
A new truth had been forged in the spirit, letter, and tone of the old. The Wallis land project had gone forward soon after. The house was trucked to town, while the club took up the land.
Doc’s eyes locked on Hare.
“They wouldn’t let me, Doc,” the old man said. “Just wouldn’t let me die invisible. I told you I weren’t no more than a mascot. I ain’t never been nothing more.” Hare shivered, and jabbed the Glock into Doc’s chest. “I got a daughter who sold me out, and my son changed his name. I got a wife who run off and left me like trash, and . . .”
Somehow, Hare’s face brightened. “But I do have an alibi, Doc. Did you know that? I got an alibi, come down here in a plane. Sonny was comin’ down to save me. He was comin’ with the truth. At last.”
Hare fired another volley of shots at the crowd. “Only, he ain’t made it, Doc. And he ain’t gonna make it, either. So guess what? You the last one who can save me. This here is the very last chance. Your last chance. Now, please, tell me, Doc. How do I get out of being me?”
Doc didn’t reply. For one thing, he’d heard only the sustained, roaring tone from the gunshots. For another, he didn’t care to listen. Eyesight was all that mattered here. He refused to look away.
In fact, it was Hare who had finally glanced elsewhere, surveying the crowd, to see if anyone else might assist him. Those who weren’t sprinting off were either crouched or crawling, or balled like pill bugs in the dirt. The only person still standing was Winnie.
2
“You loved him, though? Gabe?”
This was the last conversation Sonny would have with his mother. He’d been trying to get at it for years.
He had wanted so badly to be in love, for so long. Wanted so badly for someone to come and unravel him, and to understand what had been left there, on the porch of the cabin on the farm, with the chair. He wanted to understand how to share this loss: of faith, of trust, of adoration, of past. Of story, really.
Sylvia had been bathed in fluorescent hospital light when he asked her. She was propped up in an adjustable bed, and for once could not evade his inquisition. (Of all the things to land one in the hospital, she’d stepped on a sewing needle. The No. 19 fabric spike had driven deep into her foot, point to scarf to shank, curling a cut nerve in the process, and prompting wildfire infection.) There was a tube in her arm and a daytime movie on, above. She sucked watery juice through a straw and said nothing.
Sonny had pushed her. “It took me forever to figure it out. As a kid, I thought Daddy had told you to leave the farm for our own well-being. I thought he would soon come after and join us. That he’d hired Gabe to drive us to the train station, you know? Took me years to understand that you and Gabe were—”
“Gabe had a wife,” she all but spat, clutching the plastic cup, her hands mackled by age spots.
“But his wife had left him. Before.”
“Correct.”
“And then you and he . . . I know now that you and he were—”
“You don’t know nothin’, Sonny,” she’d snapped. “And you don’t need this. Now look here. Gabe had him a wife. He drove you and me to the train station because he was a good person. That’s it, that’s all.” She had glared at the television. “Don’t invent.”
“But—”
“But makin’ things up isn’t fair to the truth. You’re addin’ drama where it doesn’t exist. This ain’t some love movie. Some exotic black-white romance or whatever. My word, Sonny, the honest-to-Christ reality is that Gabe understood things. He’d been on that farm longer than ever’body, and he understood the gravity of the place, the time. He didn’t answer to anyone, in particular to Wallis—whereas your daddy and every other man’s livelihood meant that they did whatever the bossman wanted. So that was my attraction to Gabe. That, and the fact that he lived in the battle over whether or not to move on, for his family. He could go, but he hadn’t. I was desperate to go, but I couldn’t.”
“If there wasn’t any romance, then why are you so angry?”
“Because I knew, Sonny. I knew what’d happen to him before I ever asked him to take us.”
“What do you mean? Like, you knew he was going to die?”
She shut her eyes. She had at least known it was possible, known what it would mean for Gabe to take her and Sonny away from Hare, then return to the farm.
Sonny pressed her. “But you asked him anyway? You asked him anyway?”
What could she have done? What? Could she have asked Hare for permission to go?
“Sonny,” she muttered. “It’s okay that you don’t get it. You was a boy, and Hare was your dad. And I’m sorry that it has hurt you this bad for this long. But don’t you see? We had to leave, fast. There weren’t no other way but to—”
“Of course there was a way. There’s always another way.”
“And your daddy wasn’t goin’ anywhere. He was already bunkered up with Wallis and . . . So I had to go to Gabe. I told myself that I had to protect you. And me. And even Gabe—or so I hoped, anyhow. ’Cause Mr. Wallis and them? They was done with that farm. They needed everybody off, and only violence was gonna make that happen. Your daddy told me this, and then I told it to Gabe. And knowin’ that, I figured he’d come with us. To Chicago, his family. Figured he didn’t have no other choice.”
“No,” Sonny replied. “No, you didn’t.”
She stared at him for a moment, until a tear traced her cheek. “No. But I told myself that he would. Because I needed to believe it, you know? I needed to believe he would come with us. I sat right in his cabin, and I asked him to help you and me, and I needed to believe that when he said yes to us, he understood what he was committin’ to. I had to believe that he knew there was no way back. And that therefore we wasn’t responsible. No way he could help us, then go home like nothin’ happened.”
“And Gabe knew this, too, didn’t he?”
“He did.”
“So you both understood. But then you let him take us anyway? Even after he said he wasn’t coming with us to Chicago?”
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“So you’re a part of it, huh? That makes us both a part of what happened to him?”
“Yeah,” she repeated. She wiped away another tear, but then her face grew stern. Fact was, versus any reason or belief, any right or wrong, more than anything she had needed Gabe’s goddamned truck. She would have done whatever was necessary to get it.
Sonny looked away from her, and to the ivory hospital wall. His thoughts cycled through all the reading and research he’d done about Hare: the old paper clippings and legal dockets, the magazine profiles and on-camera interviews. Online and in the library, care of textbooks and law journals, in search of the complete story. New coverage of the retrial had arrived every day.
He had never known that he was an accessory. He understood then that he would have to leave immediately for Mississippi.
“Daddy was passed out cold when we left that night,” Sonny said. “In his chair. Drunk. He could not have killed Gabe.”
“I remember every bit,” she replied. “Now stop. You been hung up on this for way too long.”
“You’re not hearing me, though. He didn’t do it.”
“What do you really know?” she sat up. “Or better still, what is it that you want to know? What are you trying to fix here, Sonny? All this business, all this time you’ve spent hung up on Hare. For what? What’s it gonna do?”
“But I saw him, Mama. I saw Daddy passed out in the chair. We both saw—”
“For one thing, you don’t know if Hare was really asleep or if he’d just shut his damned eyes. For another, even if he didn’t do it, well . . . don’t it matter that he forged a whole new life from the accusation? Does it mean anything to you that he reaped benefit off of Gabe’s death?”
“He has always maintained his innocence.”
“But he never condemned the act! Sonny, come on. Your daddy wore that murder like a medal.”
“I—I th
ink it was the Wallises. It was Mr. Wallis who—”
“And I promise you this, son. The accusation that Hare done it weren’t much of a stretch to begin with. Your father could barely live in his own skin.”
Strangely enough, despite himself, Sonny started to mutter those old Ferlin Husky lyrics: When troubles surround us / when evils come / the body grows weak / the spirit grows numb.
He had heard the song so many times growing up that it had become a sort of de facto soundtrack of Sylvia’s denial. Year after year, his mother would hum if not sing it to repulse any question or comment involving Hare, or Wallis Farm. When these things beset us / He does not forget us / He sends down his love / On the wings of a dove.
“Hey?” she grumbled. “You know the one thing a man like that can’t stand? A man like Hare?”
Sonny sighed. “What’s that, Mama?”
“He can’t stand being disposable. He can’t stand not being needed.”
“But this is about the trial. It’s about delivering the truth.”
“Especially a white man,” she continued. “I swear. All my life people raised me to be terrified of a black. But you take a white man who figures out he’s just as sorry as the rest of us? That the world can go on without him? Now, that, Sonny, is a dangerous man. And that’s exactly the type of man you trying to redeem.”
3
On the courthouse lawn, Winnie’s hands were held out in front of her, palms up and fingers fanned wide, as if this pose would stop any munition. She stared at her father, shaking her head in disbelief. Positioned behind her, the object of concern, was Ladybug. The child sobbed as she huddled beside the crouched reporter and her cameraman.
Hare started to call out to them, but couldn’t. Instead, he pivoted back to Doc, as if on appeal. He dropped the gun and held his arms out, glancing to Doc’s neck and to the gushing carotid. Hare’s lips parted as if to speak, and his eyes filled with tears, and he slumped.
For the rest of Doc’s life, he would wonder what had moved the man to cry. Was it because Hare’s rage had decimated his own family? Did he weep for his grandchild, to whom he had just delivered lifelong trauma? Or was there something more?
Doc would pull this apart through extended recovery and rehab, and through the outstretch of sensorineural hearing loss, this being the lasting physical impression of the moment. He would ponder it as the criminal charges piled up against him. (He had, after all, infiltrated the courthouse security detail. Bringing a weapon had pushed a tenuous police impersonation charge straight into a felony-class offense.) He thought about it when he was relieved of duty, likewise of his pension, and as he became a flash point of blame for any and all who needed a target.
He thought about it while witnessing the impact of his actions on Jessica. Good lord, how he had added to her lot, having transformed her theoretically elective job into a must-keep position, complete with must-have health insurance; having fractured her daydreams of further education, of double retirement pay, or of travel; having even soiled her social standing, if only tacitly, whether in book club or church group, let alone her secret little dream of someday running for alderman, or . . . None of this had crossed his mind beforehand.
Doc considered Hare’s tears when interviewers had asked him to describe the moment, though he never gave detail of his antagonist’s face. With the blanket of probation draped over him, and then, years after, the liberated rousing of a counternarrative, a folk-hero type of label that brought young people by Doc’s house now and again, graduate students and the like, and which later found him on the receiving end of boosted charitable collections, sometimes even care of Jessica’s same church group, or as a sort of honorarium or speaking fee provided by various community colleges or universities, or, many, many years later, as supplied by progressive, candidate-sanctioned events—though not even these factions considered Jessica’s role in things, no matter how hard Doc had pushed the impact of her narrative—he would think about Hare, and those tears.
He would spend endless months, then years, operating a zero-turn riding mower across the football field at the county high school, a job he was afforded despite the known red flag on his background check, and one which he would pilot well past any reasonable age of retirement. Alongside a mastery of relevant landscape machinery, now and again Doc could experiment with the nap of the turfgrass, or perhaps the turfgrass hybrid itself, and even tinker with the paint types, aerosol or latex, employed as both regulatory field marker and school-themed aesthetic. He could ride back and forth on the zero-turn and consider, and reconsider, the moment of his survival; he did the same in the fieldhouse, or even while standing at the sidelines, watching his children both cheer on and compete in regional 3A competition.
Doc once thought about Hare while he was lost in the belly of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, University of Mississippi, Oxford. He’d been on hand to watch the Gridiron Classic, where his oldest, an undersized tight end who was athlete enough to serve as utility, played in his final high school playoff game, before taking up a scholarship and a commission, care of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Specifically, Doc got lost while looking for the men’s room, then despite himself had snuck into the Rebel Club, the university’s elite donor level. Perhaps his entry had been granted because Doc had his coveralls on. (He’d long since taken to wearing them, his lawn-care uniform, even on weekends.) As in, the very concept of Doc on that site was chalked up to maintenance.
Jessica was not on hand because she could not get off shift.
The opulence of the club, the controlled climate and aromatic drift of succulent foodstuffs, and, of course, the clientele on hand, reminded him exactly of that first job, at the Pitchlynn CC. Yet the vacancy of it all, the echo and sterility, also reminded him of an empty prison corridor. Of a body left alone with its own sense of worth, or a body made desperate to make worth of itself.
Beyond the field view and robust concession, the spiked Cokes and Patek Phillipes, and the wash of Ole Miss propaganda, what had moved Doc the most was the floor-to-ceiling stockpile of cottony toilet tissue, stacked high in an open double-door supply closet inside the Rebel Club men’s room. The rolls alone were the type of fixture he and Jessica would never afford (their budget being at best good for yet another Angel Soft eight-pack). He was reminded of those PCC members who pilfered quilted rolls of similar tissue into their gym bags, and who skimmed from the clubhouse stores of soap, shampoo, combs, towels, Barbasol, and Bic disposables.
Doc wondered for the hundredth time if this looting, this filching, was what had made the men successful, or if success itself had persuaded them of the privilege and right to steal. Staring into the closet, the barrier of tissue, this rampart flanked by rows of glass-bottled lavender hand soap, likewise wrapped stacks of folded, linen-like, air-laid paper towels and foil-wrapped chocolate mints, he considered what would happen if he snatched just one little . . .
He didn’t. Couldn’t. For one thing, he didn’t believe in theft. For another, he didn’t believe he could get away with it. There were eyes on him, everywhere. Always had been.
Besides, what was it Hare had claimed about Doc and rich people? “You obviously ain’t one of them! And you ain’t never gonna be.”
“Are you?” Doc had asked himself, staring at a cache of ass paper worth more than he made in a month.
Nope.
He thought about this truth, and he thought about Hare, and he was furious. What on earth had made Hare Hobbs weep? Given all, had the man even deserved to cry? Though Doc could never, ever bring his considerations up to Jessica, he could not get over his belief that Hare had felt sorrow. That even a wretch could grieve.
In any event, the facts were only this: with his final breath, Hare had fallen forward, not a word, toward the gray granite steps in front of the art deco Hinds County Courthouse, with its rooftop statues of Moses and Pharaoh and Socrates. He’d fallen toward the checkerboard pedigree of the government quarter of Jackson, Mississippi, as if plu
nging, somehow, through history: to a time before the snarl of contemporary infrastructure and industry, before the laying of asphalt and application of public utility, and even before the original platted plots of dirt road development.
Hare Hobbs had collapsed at the factual apex of Mississippi’s geographic, Jeffersonian democracy, a location proposed in 1802 by Thomas Jefferson himself. He fell dead as a stone into the representative center of the center of the state, a land site designed to grant equal access to government by any and all Mississippians who might seek justice.
(Tribal land that was ceded by the Choctaw under extreme duress, of course.)
The old man fell forward, with fissure vents of bullet holes in his back.
Doc had caught him again, and they went down together.
4
Sonny’s eyelids clenched tight against the beam of the hospital lamp.
“You there?” a woman asked, her tone welcoming. “For real this time? Hello?”
Through the gauzy light he made out her berry-colored scrubs . . . and then sank back into the hallucinatory murk.
