Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  “Maybe so,” Thomas said. “Maybe that man deserved the judgment of hellfire. Let’s say he did, but whatever he had coming wasn’t mine to mete out. I should’ve overcome evil with good that day instead of answering violence with violence. Maybe killing that fella wasn’t the worst thing I did in this whole affair, or maybe it was—I don’t know—but it was wrong. And I need to give an account for it.”

  “Then give your account to the Lord,” Cargie said. “Not to a bunch of . . . not to a bunch of people who aren’t worthy to judge you.”

  “Cargie, you know I’m right.”

  “The only thing I know for sure is you’re about to resurrect something that’s been dead and buried for half a century. You’re a good man, Thomas. You are. But you’re about to breathe life back into those racist old words, and you’re liable to be living with them for the rest of your life. We are going to be living with them too.”

  After a moment, Thomas said, “You think I’m being selfish.”

  “I know you don’t mean to be. But yes, honey, you are.”

  Thomas stared straight ahead. “If the Lord is working on my conscience and I don’t do the right thing, well, I just feel like I might sear my conscience, Cargie. Maybe nothing bad will happen because of it, but something terrible might happen inside of me. Everything has to be reconciled eventually.”

  They sat in silence for a little while, then Cargie reached for Thomas’s hand and entwined her fingers in his. “I don’t like it,” she said, “but I’m with you if you feel like it’s what you have to do. I’m with you every single step of the way.”

  “Thank you, honey.” Thomas squeezed her hand. “I reckon it’s time we get this show on the road.”

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Thomas pulled over to the shoulder of the road before they crossed the old drawbridge that spanned Lake Caddo from Mooringsport to the north shore. “Look at that rusted old thing, Cargie.”

  “It’s seen better days.” Cargie looked up through the windshield at the tall stanchions and said, “Looks like they took down the counterweights. There weren’t many bridges built like this one, with vertical lift.”

  “You know about that?”

  “My first year at Wylie, I roomed with a girl from Mooringsport. I went home with her one weekend, and here was this bridge—the most interesting contraption I’d ever laid eyes on. I loved to watch them raise and lower it. No telling what that girl and her family thought about me for getting excited about a bridge. Instead of boys.”

  “Gramps and I were going to watch them build it,” Thomas said. “We planned to drive over here every Saturday to check the progress until it was finished.”

  “Did you get to?”

  “No ma’am. They built it after I was gone.” Thomas pointed to the water. “Just think, Cargie. That old Runabout’s still under there.”

  Thomas turned into the parking lot of a small grocery store at Rodessa and asked if Cargie could use a cold drink.

  “Yes sir. Sounds real good.”

  “Be right back.”

  Cargie sat in the truck, looking out the side window at two young boys wrestling in the yard of the house next to the store. They rolled around on the ground, and a dog on a chain barked at them.

  The driver’s side door opened, and Thomas got in. He handed Cargie an Orange Crush with a paper napkin wrapped around the cold, sweating bottle. He set his Coke on the dash, along with a stack of napkins. “Looky here, what I got.” He placed a greasy paper sack on the seat between them, and Cargie smelled warm red-skinned peanuts.

  “Thank you, honey.”

  They sat in truck sipping their cold drinks and eating the salty nuts. When Thomas finished his Coke, he laid the empty bottle on the seat next to him and wiped his hands with a few of the napkins. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Cargie said.

  “No rush.” He put the wadded napkins beside the empty bottle.

  “Do you remember that book The Velveteen Rabbit?” she asked. “We used to read it to the kids.”

  “Yes’m. You brought it home when Becca was just a little-bitty thing. I think it was the first book you bought for her.”

  “It was, and I still have it. I kept it all these years.”

  “Every one of the kids loved that book.”

  “Do you remember what the story was about?”

  Thomas nodded slowly. “Sure. A stuffed bunny that turned into a real rabbit.”

  “Do you remember how it happened?”

  “Uh-huh. There was a fairy in a flower. She made the bunny real.”

  Cargie turned to face her husband and said, “Love made the rabbit real, Thomas.” Then she asked him if he remembered the Skin Horse.

  “Yes’m,” he said.

  “The rabbit asked the Skin Horse if it hurts to become real,” Cargie said. “And the Skin Horse said that sometimes it does—the horse was always truthful—but when you’re real you don’t mind being hurt. Then the rabbit wanted to know if becoming real happens all at once, like being wound up, or a little bit at a time.”

  Thomas rested his hands on the steering wheel. “You remember the story better than me, even though I must’ve read it to the kids a hundred times.”

  Cargie went on, “The Skin Horse told the rabbit that becoming real does not happen all at once. It takes a long, long time. The Skin Horse was old and worn out himself, so he knew about such things.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Becoming real doesn’t happen to everybody either. Usually, it doesn’t happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges. And it doesn’t happen to people who have to be carefully kept.”

  “I’d say we have avoided those pitfalls,” Thomas said.

  “Generally, by the time you’re real, you’re worn pretty thin from being loved so long. You get loose in the joints and very shabby.”

  Thomas laughed.

  “But none of that matters one iota because once you are real, you can’t ever be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” And then Cargie Barre, who in all her years of marriage had never touched her husband in public, laid her palm against his cheek and said, “You made me real, Thomas.”

  He reached for her and they hugged each other as tightly as they could for a long time.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  When they left the little market at Rodessa, Thomas said, “I wanna go by Mama and Daddy’s house one more time, if I can find it. And their graves.”

  “I assumed we would,” Cargie said.

  They drove a few miles, and then Thomas pulled over on the two-lane blacktop. “We’ve come too far. I must’ve missed the turnoff back there somewhere. It’s been so long that everything looks different.”

  “Take your time,” Cargie said.

  Thomas made a U-turn and drove slowly. He stopped at a dirt track with a wide galvanized gate over a cattle guard. A no-trespassing sign was posted on the gate. “I’m pretty sure this is it,” he said. He looked at Cargie. “Private property.”

  “Let’s go have a look anyway,” she said.

  “Alrighty.”

  The unlocked gate swung easily on greased hinges, and Thomas stepped back to allow Cargie to hopscotch across the cattle guard. They walked side by side in the rutted dirt, with a grassy ridge between them. Cargie breathed the country air, more fresh air than she felt like she’d had in a month of Sundays. She’d kept her head in books and ledgers for too long. It was time to look around at what she’d been missing. “We need to start taking walks in the country,” she said.

  Thomas did not respond. The trail curved to the right, and he stopped. “It’s straight ahead, through those trees.” He led Cargie into the underbrush, here and there placing his heavy boot on a vine or a bramble so she could step over it. They came to a creek, which they followed to a spot where the bank had been flattened on both sides. The area had been strewn with gravel years before, and the gravel had long since mingled with the soil. But here and there, the pebbles had wash
ed into long fingers that reached into the creek bed. “This is the old wagon crossing,” Thomas said.

  They followed the creek a little farther, then Thomas turned away from it, and before Cargie knew it, she was standing in the overgrown yard of the Walker home. Kudzu vines climbed the old clapboard walls and hung from the eaves, and a mature pine tree stood in one corner of the house, its trunk and branches breaking through the porch and walls and roof. Thomas climbed the steps onto the porch, and the old boards creaked. He stepped this way and that, testing them. “Feels pretty solid,” he said. The front door was ajar. He pushed it open and went inside, and Cargie followed.

  The house was empty except for broken bottles and rusting cans strewn about and piled in every corner. Thomas walked across the floorboards, testing them with each step, until he came to a doorway, beyond which Cargie saw an old sink. He pointed to the doorjamb and said, “Mama put me up against that doorpost every year on my birthday.”

  Cargie examined the faded pencil marks. They started at two and climbed the wood to seventeen.

  “Put your back against it,” she said.

  Thomas obeyed, and Cargie saw the tick at seventeen was a little shorter than he was now, at seventy-two. “You haven’t shrunk yet,” she said, and Thomas smiled.

  Cargie crossed the room to a window, and Thomas followed her. They stood quietly a long while, looking at the brush and trees. Cargie tried to imagine a bare yard and a boy playing there with his speckled dog. Her underlying aggravation with her husband melted, and she slipped her arm around his waist and leaned against him. “I’m so sorry this happened to you, honey,” she said. “You were robbed of so much.”

  Thomas reached his arms around her, but he didn’t say a word.

  “Oh, Lord,” Thomas said when he wheeled the truck into the gravel parking lot. The little church house, which Cargie was certain must have been white at one time, was the most colorful building she had ever seen. Every wall of the exterior had been painted with flowers and birds in psychedelic colors. People were painted on it in all different colors too. A thick purple cross encompassed the front door. It was curved, as if in dance, its crossbeams raised in praise.

  “Was it like this the last time you were here?” Cargie asked.

  “No ma’am. I drove up last spring—I always try to come up around Eastertime and put flowers on the graves. It was still painted the regular way then.” Thomas turned off the ignition and the sound of a lawnmower drifted through the truck’s open windows.

  “Let’s go have a look,” Cargie said.

  They got out of the truck and walked around the church to the graveyard behind it. A young man was mowing at the rear of the yard. His head was wrapped in a yellow kerchief above which bobbed a blond afro the size of a basketball. He tromped behind the mower in work boots, cut-off blue jean shorts, and a faded tee shirt on which Jesus Freak was printed.

  Thomas paid the mower no mind and walked directly to a double headstone of white limestone. Patches of lichen grew on the stone, and the grass around it was freshly mown and fragrant.

  “Lee and Blanche Walker,” Cargie read aloud. She hadn’t even thought to ask their names. “Where’s your grandfather’s grave?”

  “He’s buried in Port Barre with my grandmother.”

  “Barre,” Cargie said.

  Thomas turned to her. “Barre was the closest I could come to offering you a name that meant something.”

  “What about Thomas?”

  “That was a little less weighty. When I was a boy, I used to pretend I was Tom Sawyer.”

  The young hippie who was mowing had cut the engine and was walking toward them, taking care to step around the graves. “Take your time,” Cargie told Thomas. “I’ll head that one off at the pass.” She started walking toward the young man.

  “Are you looking for someone in particular, ma’am?” he asked. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand then wiped his hand on his shorts. His accent wasn’t local.

  “We found them,” Cargie said. “The Walkers. Lee and Blanche.”

  “Did you know them?”

  “My husband did.”

  “I’m Ricky,” he said.

  “Cargie. Do you mind if we give my husband some privacy?”

  “This way,” Ricky said, and Cargie followed him around to the front of the church house, where they sat on the steps.

  “Where are you from, Ricky?” Cargie said, to get him talking.

  “San Francisco. Have you ever heard of Haight-Ashbury?

  “No sir.”

  “It’s like this epicenter, where everything’s happening all the time. Around the clock. Haight-Ashbury never sleeps.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “I got clean, and I wanted to stay clean, so I had to get out of there.” Ricky laughed. “Little did I know Louisiana is full of potheads and acidheads. The fields are white unto harvest around here. Lots of opportunities for ministry.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much of anybody around here,” Cargie said.

  “You’d be surprised. We have a camp in the woods. It’s a whole community. We have a common garden and some fruit trees. We grow everything you can imagine, and we’re canning a bunch of it for winter. We raise goats and chickens too.

  “I reckon you can get through just about anything as long as you have fried chicken,” Cargie said.

  “Oh no. We don’t eat anything with a face.”

  “I better go check on my husband,” Cargie said.

  She got up and walked to the corner of the church house to see how Thomas was getting on. She rounded the corner in time to see him struggling to get up from lying prostrate on his parents’ graves. He knelt in front of the headstone and laid his hands on it. He bowed his head. She returned to Ricky, lest he take an interest in seeing what Thomas was up to.

  “Do your folks know where you are?” she asked as she sat down again.

  “Yes ma’am. They’re trying to understand.”

  Thomas came around the corner, heading toward the truck. He did not look their way.

  “Is he okay?” Ricky asked.

  “He’s fine.” Cargie stood. “We’ll be on our way. It was nice visiting with you, Ricky.”

  “You too, Miss Cargie. Um, before you go—I have to ask—do you know Jesus?”

  Cargie had never been asked such a personal question outright, but she tried not to let her displeasure show. Ricky was young and forward, but his heart was in the right place.

  “I do indeed,” she answered. “But I find my comfort in believing that he knows me.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Cargie was ready for a fight by the time Thomas pulled into a parking spot in front of the Miller County Courthouse. He turned off the ignition.

  “Reckon I’m about to have my first conversation with a white man in over fifty years,” Thomas said.

  “What?”

  “In all these years since that Klansman, I have never once spoken to a white. Not one time. I made a point of it.”

  “You’ve never met Bill Cole,” Cargie said. How was that possible?

  “No ma’am, I have not. Well, reckon I’m just stalling.” Thomas reached across her and took the ancient leather pouch and his old pistol out of the glovebox.

  “Why’d you bring your gun?”

  “It was his, Cargie. I kept it.”

  “Leave it,” she said. “Don’t take it in there.”

  “It’s evidence, honey.”

  “You’ve got plenty of evidence right there in that pouch,” she said. “Leave the pistol in the truck. A gun changes everything.”

  Thomas thought about it for a few minutes, then he put the pistol back in the glovebox and opened his door. “I love you, honey,” he said.

  “I love you too, Thomas.”

  Cargie waited for him to come around and open her door. She got out and they trudged up the steps, side by side. Thomas opened the courthouse door and they walked straight across the lobby an
d into the sheriff’s office.

  All the desks were empty except one, and the deputy sitting at it raised his meaty crew-cut head. His neck bulged above his collar, even though the first button was undone and his tie was loosened. On the sides of his face, above his ears, arrow-straight lines creased the pink flesh, the work of wire-rimmed sunglasses that hung from a buttonhole in his shirt pocket. The name on the tag above his pocket read W. Bates.

  Cargie’s blood ran cold, in spite of her insurance.

  “Morning,” Thomas said.

  Deputy Bates put his pen down. “Mornin’, yourself.”

  “We’re here to see the sheriff.”

  “Sheriff ain’t here. What can I do for you?”

  “We’ll come back,” Cargie said. “When will the sheriff be back?”

  “Hard to say. He’s been up at Little Rock since last week.”

  Without a word or a glance toward his wife, Thomas laid the ancient leather pouch on the desk.

  Bates looked at it suspiciously. “What’s this?”

  Thomas unwound the cord and opened the flap. He pulled out the Treasury notes and the letter, its seal like a thick globule of blood. Then he took the money clip from his pocket and laid it on the desk with the Klan’s emblem up.

  Deputy Bates stood. “Where’d all this come from?”

  “A Klansman had it.”

  “What Klansman?”

  “I had a run-in with a Klansman at a little lake down below Doddridge. I was?”

  “When?” Bates interrupted.

  “The morning of October 18th, 1913. I don’t know the time exactly. But I killed him, and I’m here to make it right.”

  The deputy hooked his thumbs between the protuberances on his utility belt. He looked around the room, as if searching for something. “Nineteen thirteen?” he said to no one in particular. He peered out the window at the street for a while, then he turned his attention to Thomas again and said, “You got a hidden camera around here or somethin’? This ain’t funny. Killin’ ain’t no joke.”