The black man never stopped fussing with the door, making sure that it was pushed back up against the wall. “Well now, yes, sir, may be, but at Word of Truth Missionary Baptist we always have us a night of prayer before commencing with revival.” He managed to position the door as he liked it. “Yes, sir, revival once a year. Early for a revival, I know, but I like to get a jump start on the Devil.” This was followed by a hardy laugh.
The others didn’t say anything.
“You’ll excuse me, I’m gonna need to sweep this here stoop. Like to have things neat when they gets here.”
Still silence.
He stepped back and opened the coat closet just inside the door, took out a broom, and began to sweep. “Rest of the congregation coming long any minute now. Something I can do for you gentlemen?” He finished with the doorway and stepped out onto the stoop, still sweeping. “Yes, sir, be long any minute now.”
Tab strained to see just beyond him into the dark.
Suddenly, a hand reached out from the shadows and grabbed the reverend’s broom, jerking it away from him, knocking him off balance. There was a low cracking sound, like a bone breaking. Two pieces of the broom were thrown back up on the stoop; they rattled across the pine floor, landing at the preacher’s feet.
Tina reached over and touched Tab. Her whole body jumped. “Shhhh.”
The voice out of the dark again: “We ain’t interested in no prayer meeting, Reverend. Looking for a woman and kids been by here in a Buick.”
“That there is my sister and her kids,” another voice. “You seen ’em?”
The preacher needed only to point down the aisle in their direction. That was all he needed to do, but he was conditioned, as they were not, to a world of higher stakes, of greater consequences, a world that was ordinarily out of balance. He was standing very still, not lifting his head, not taking his eyes off the pieces of broom that lay on the stoop. “No, sir, can’t say as I have.”
“You sure?”
His eyes were still fixed on the broom and his story. “Yes, sir. Just getting ready for the all-night prayer meeting is all.”
A light came on in the blue Dodge as the third man got out of the car. “We ain’t got all night. What’s he say? Where they at?”
“Says he ain’t seen ’em.”
“Hell, he’s bound to. This the road they come by.”
The first man stepped up on the porch and grabbed the reverend’s coat and pushed him back against the door frame. “Don’t you go lying to me, nigger. This the road they come by.” The preacher’s head jerked back as the man slapped him across the face.
“What is it? What are they doing?” Eugenia eased forward to look up the aisle. “We just must stop this right now.”
Tina grabbed her skirt. “No. You might get him killed.” She caught her ankle and held tight. “And us.”
“Naw, sir, ain’t seen nobody.” The reverend had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket and was wiping his face but sticking to his story. “Just been getting ready for the prayer meeting. Everybody be long any minute now.” And just as he said it, as if he might have prayed them up, car lights appeared on the road. They turned off and came down the church drive, slowing when they saw the Dodge and pulling right up behind it.
“Maybe there really is a prayer meeting tonight,” whispered Eugenia, ever the believer.
Tab could hear the sounds of car doors slamming, of other people talking in accents and with a cadence that was familiar to her. She heard the reverend greeting the newcomers, saying in a pointed way how glad he was that they were here for the prayer meeting and maybe they might have seen a car full of white women.
“Go on. Go on and tell the gentlemen if you seen somebody,” the preacher said, his voice drenched in sincerity. “I’ll go on back in the sanctuary and turn on them outside lights to see better by.” He slowly walked away from them, leaving the Dodge boys to question the newcomers.
He was standing beside them now but not looking at them. “You ladies,” he whispered, “crawl on out the way you come in. Go on and get in your car. When I give you the signal with my flashlight, you turn on your engine, but don’t turn them lights on. Then get on out of here.”
Aunt Eugenia started to get up off the floor, whispering to the preacher. “I’m terribly sorry about placing you in danger, Reverend. We never meant to—” He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her down hard. “Go on and get, like I told you, while the getting’s good.”
“But I feel so responsible for—”
“This ain’t nothing. We handle this. They talking right now, asking the others if they seen y’all. The others done seen the situation. They hold ’em long as they can, but pretty soon they gonna wanna come in and search the sanctuary. Now when they do and I blink my flashlight, you drive on out of here, and remember, don’t turn them lights on.”
Tina and Aunt Eugenia had crawled out before Tab. She backed up under the pew, her hand touching the paper again, her fingers gripping it as she backed and turned to crawl after them. They had made it to the smaller room and were standing when somebody called to the reverend to ask if he had found the outside light switch. He said he was trying it, that it must be burned out.
The voice of what sounded like an older black lady was saying that she believed she would come on in and practice her hymns while the gentlemen were looking around, and for everybody else to come join in singing with her.
As they were easing out the back door and making their way to the car, the Dodge Boys were coming in the front. The piano struck up “I’ll Fly Away.” The singing was loud and fervent. Tina slipped in the front seat with Aunt Eugenia. Tab tripped over the plaque and closed the back door. They began to creep away as soon as they saw the flash of the reverend’s light. Aunt Eugenia backed out very slowly and then shifted into forward and started up the drive in the dim moonlight. They got a glimpse, only a passing glimpse, through the two side windows. There looked to be a young woman holding a crutch or a cane and a boy and an older man all standing by the piano and singing along. A few notes of a new song drifted out to them as they passed.
They went up the drive, turned left, and drove for a mile or so before they found Highway 72, not a word among them. The night air blew at their faces. For the first time, Tab felt the paper in her hand. She had made sure she held on to it, hoping to find out where she had been. She unfolded it, thinking it might be an old church bulletin. She would know where they had been, who it was that had saved them. She reached up and turned on the overhead light.
“Are you crazy? Turn that off. Do you want them to see us?”
“Just a minute.” She unfolded the paper. It wasn’t a church bulletin at all, just cheap writing paper, like a child might use to practice penmanship—faded, awkward letters written out in obedience to the lines on the paper: “50 cents per person.” Vacation Bible School in the church was what she figured.
“Will you turn off that light?”
“Okay, okay.” She turned it off, wadded up the paper, and threw it out the window, not knowing where they had been or who had saved them from a fate that might have been worse than Cousin Annie Sue Harden’s.
They were coming to Twelve Mile Creek, not the Tennessee River, but it crossed under the highway bridge just before it spilled out into the big river, so that counted. Tina didn’t turn around, just reached her hand back over her shoulder and pointed. “We’re coming up on the bridge. You should get rid of that thing before we get too close to home.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. So get ready.”
Aunt Eugenia slowed the car to a crawl. “Let’s get rid of this business once and for all.” Tab looked down at the sweater that covered it, brushing her shoe over the top. “I don’t hear you moving, Tab. Get ready.”
Tab bent down, pretending to busy herself with the plaque. They were on the bridge now. The moon had come out from behind intermittent clouds. She could see moonlight reflected on the water ripples below. She lif
ted it up to her lap. She could hear the bugles sounding. She pushed the sweater aside to stare in the face of it. She could see his blond hair reflected in it as the moon caught the metal surface, his hat sitting at a jaunty angle, a boy’s smile forever on his face as he marched forward into the swirling mist, to the sound of the drums, to the shouts of the—
“Will you throw the thing?”
It was too heavy. It wouldn’t lift off her lap, like a child gone completely limp, not wanting to do her bidding. They were coming to the end of the bridge. Aunt Eugenia was slowing to a stop. No car lights were visible in either direction. “Throw it, Tab, or give it to me. I’ll throw it,” said Tina, trying to reach over the backseat.
“No, I’ll do it.” Tab couldn’t even see the plaque now. It was a hazy dark lump. “If we’re gonna do it, I’ll do it.” The car had come to a complete stop. She opened the door and got out, holding the plaque in both arms, bent over from its weight. A strange wind was blowing through the bridge girders, the sound of Yankee reinforcements coming off the steamboats at Pittsburgh Landing, thousands of them, headed for Shiloh Chapel. She lifted it up and let it rest on the bridge railing. The moon eased its way from behind the clouds again. She looked down into its murky burial ground.
Aunt Eugenia had gotten out of the car and come up beside her. “We’ve got to get going,” she said. “Either you do it or I’ll do it.”
“I’m not doing it,” Tab said. “You can do it. I’ll watch you do it, but I’m not doing it.”
Aunt Eugenia tipped it forward with a flick of her finger. It lost its balance and fell headfirst. The moonlight caught it in flashes as it sank beneath the water.
It was almost ten o’clock when they hit the front drive of Grandmother’s house and then walked up the steps to the others, who were enjoying ice cream and watching the lightning bugs.
“I’ll bet,” Tab said, out of breath from running to them, “I’ll bet y’all are not surprised to see us.” In fact, they were all sitting there looking dumbfounded.
Aunt Eugenia was right behind. “Didn’t Bebe tell you we were coming? I told her to call you.”
“She didn’t call you?” Tina tried to look incredulous.
“We told her two hundred times before we left to call you and tell you we were on the road.” They looked at one another, shrugging shoulders, “Musta slipped her mind.”
Tab plopped down in the wicker swing after kissing her mother, grandmother, grandfather, and her aunt and uncle, then waving to the cousins, who were still up, and out in the yard playing hide-and-seek. For the moment, she and Tina hadn’t noticed their father was missing, thinking he must have stepped in the house and would be along presently. Grandmother took the top off the freezer, spooned out some ice cream, handed it to Tab. “Why on earth are you wearing those ridiculous cat’s-eye sunglasses and it’s pitch-black dark?’
Tab looked at sweet old Grandmother and all the others sitting there like they hadn’t moved since she had left them.
“It’s in keeping,” she said, swallowing a spoonful of strawberry, “with my new self.” She pointed her spoon at Grandmother. “I’m not saying right this very minute that it is gonna be my new self, but—”
“Oh Lord,” said Grandmother.
CHAPTER 43
The Last Night
JESSIE STAYED LATE, tying up the Kentucky Wonders and weeding the corn. Maudie made tuna fish sandwiches, using lettuce and tomatoes fresh from her little garden. They had eaten sitting in the swing, looking at the float. Recently, there had been trouble with some white crackers from up in Tennessee coming by the church and messing with Reverend Earl. It had made Jessie even more watchful. He had been with her constantly, had made sure the old shotgun was close by her bed, in easy reach. He finished two sandwiches and an RC before he got up to go. “Be back in awhile. Gotta go get some medicine for JD. Had a bad ear for two days now. Doc at the pharmacy say he’s ordered medicine from over in Huntsville, gonna bring it home so I can pick it up at his house—save me a trip to town. Coming back once I get the medicine.”
“Go on to JD, no need to come back.”
“We see.”
She remembered thinking how big his shoulders were as he walked away from her to the car, wearing the new shirt she had given him.
It was late when she heard the noise out back. She had turned off the light some time ago, and usually by this time, she would have been asleep. She had half-expected Jessie to come back by, but she herself had told him not to come, to go on and take the medicine to JD. Now she lay there wondering why, if that was Jessie, she had not heard his car. She sat up in bed and heard the noise again, a rustling sound, nothing ominous. Curiosity got her out of the bed, not fear. Maybe a possum was on the float, eating the crepe paper.
She was strapping on her brace when a light flickered outside for a moment. Still she thought maybe it was heat lightning. She picked up her crutch and eased over to the window. Someone was standing by the float. Again the light flared. The match went out and it was dark.
At first, safe inside the church, she thought she would let him do it, whoever he was. Burn down all their hard work in the same way he had pulled the tarp off the float and let the dew ruin the crepe paper, and later let the air out of the tires. She watched, more fascinated than afraid, more amazed than mad. Whoever this person was, he wasn’t someone to be afraid of. The other acts, if he had committed them, had been so benign, so halfhearted.
Even as she walked over to it, it passed through her mind what she had heard about nonviolence up at Highlander, but this wasn’t the civil rights movement. This was just a backwater church in the middle of nowhere, with a homemade parade float sitting outside. Even as she laid the gun on the bed and felt around for the cartridges, even as she slipped them in the chambers, she had no idea of using it. She kept the gun on the bed as she snapped the old barrels back in place. The feel was clumsy and heavy, a throwback to the time when she’d had to use two crutches.
It was chagrin that was driving her as she walked back to the door and turned the knob. What would they all say when they came tomorrow and found a shell of what they had worked on all summer, their pride and joy, the thing she had made them believe in—the cotton girls, Jessie, Mr. Calvin, all the others.
Would she say she had seen the whole thing and done nothing? Would she say she had stood at the window and watched him burn it down without so much as shouting at him? She could hear them as she pulled a crack in the door. “Wasn’t like you didn’t have nothing. You had a gun. Couldn’t you a done something to scare him away?” This pathetic white boy, drunk, maybe her age, maybe even younger? She had probably seen him on the other side of the split-rail fence. And now here he was ready to make a show so he could go home and brag to his friends: “Burned down the nigger’s plaything.”
She jerked the door open, letting it swing back against the wall with repeated bangings, and walked out on the back stoop, holding, almost dragging, the gun in one hand, her crutch in the other. And only then, as he heard the steady tapping of her crutch, did Reverend Earl raise his head.
He looked as if he had been expecting her. With the next match, the newspaper torch caught fire. “Them crackers over to the drive-in, always asking me . . .” He waved the torch through the air to get a good flame, all the while mumbling to himself. She could understand snatches. “He say, ‘You hear ’bout a voting school going on round here?’ And I say, ‘No, sir, ain’t heard nothing ’bout no voting school, Mr. Bowie. . . . Shit!” The torch had died again. He searched his pockets for another match.
She watched, still denying it. “You be careful there now, Reverend. You might start a fire with all this wood and paper around here.”
“He say, ‘You wanna keep your business going, I better not hear nothing ’bout no voting school.’” Reverend Earl looked at her now, talking directly to her for the first time. “Him standing out there, watching this here pass by, and my name on it.” He stared at the match in his one hand,
trying to line it up with the paper in his other. “I got peoples depending on me. See this? See this?” He waggled the match in front of her. “Gotta put a stop to all this foolishness. Here you go, putting my name all over for everybody to see. Too many peoples depending on me. Can’t have none of this foolishness.”
This time, the flame caught on the ragged edges of the half-burned pieces of newspaper and flared into a steady flame, revealing eyes yellowed and worn-out from too many years of accommodating a system grossly one-sided in its weights and measures, and yet one he had adjusted to. Using the rules he had been given, Reverend Earl had fashioned a world for himself and his people and was too old now—too long old to start over. “Them ladies always talking ’bout ‘Brother Earl, we gotta have us a voting school, for the children, to show the children.’” He brought the torch down to the crepe paper and held it fast. The sight of the flames writhing and gnarling the paper strands seemed to calm him. “Church ain’t my business, church my calling. This here gonna keep my business going.
“Sitting round here playing school, like you was doing something.” He watched the flames creeping along the chicken wire, curling up: REVEREND EARL WATTS, PASTOR. “Where you think the money come from to keep the church going, from them no-count collection plates? Ain’t enough in there to feed the chickens.” He lifted the torch out of the flaming paper and touched it to another section. “Where you think I get the money to patch the church roof, food for Miss Luella’s babies, work boots for Edward so he can get a job to support his mama? Keep three churches going with the drive-in money.”
Maudie moved closer to him. “Maybe we can get some water and put the fire out if you give me that.” She held out her hand. He swiped the torch through the air, backing her off.
“And me thinking going to the man own the place gonna make it right. No-count white man, sitting up there in the cool, saying, ‘Now Mister Watts,’ calling me Mister. Ain’t no white ever call me that. . . . Saying, ‘We gonna integrate the whole thing.’ Now he’s telling me. Now he’s telling me.” He poked the torch at her, as if he was jabbing at a fire in the grate, furious he had been brought so low. “What’s he saying to me? I come this far. I made do. . . . Now he saying he wanna change, wanna change everything we go by.”
The Summer We Got Saved Page 31
