True Fires

by Susan Carol McCarthy

  “You cats g’wan t’ fight,” Sissy grumbles, “you best take it outta mah kitchen.”

  Violet laughs. “We’re not fightin’. Lila never fights. She hits and runs. Don’t you, girl o’ mine?”

  Lila feels herself at once rising to and resisting her mother’s bait. Don’t do this, do NOT do this with her, she tells herself and puts on a saccharine smile. “Does this mean you’re over your nervous breakdown, Mamma?”

  “Well, of course, it does.” Violet grabs a dishtowel to wipe the bacon grease off her fingers, checks her seventeen-jewel Lady Hamilton watch. “The polls are open. You headin’ out anytime soon?”

  “Not till ten,” Lila tells her.

  “Ready when you are, Missy,” Violet says, her tone awash in sweetness. Then she asks Sissy, “Any more biscuits?”

  AT TEN, Lila emerges from her father’s office, hoping her mother’s changed her mind. But Violet sits primly at the kitchen table, purse and white gloves in hand, smiling like a birthday child awaiting her presents.

  “Mamma, I’ve got one question before we go. You votin’ for Kyle or not?”

  Violet looks hurt. “Not,” she says, pouting pansy-colored lips.

  “Let’s go then,” Lila sighs, grabbing the keys to the grove truck off the rack by the back door.

  “Oh, can’t we take the Cadillac? I’ll never get into the truck in this skirt.”

  Lila loathes the royal blue Hightower Cadillac. Even now, it reeks of her father’s cigar smoke and her mother’s pretentions. “You could drive yourself, you know.”

  “Oh, I’m hardly strong enough for that,” Violet shoots back and hands her the Cadillac’s keys.

  Once they’re on their way into town, Lila tells her, “I have a few errands to run. Why don’t I drop you off at the polls? When you’re done voting, you can walk across the street to the Women’s Club. I’ll pick you up there, at eleven.”

  Violet clasps her purse, feigns shock. “Drop me off? By myself ? I think not! Run your errands. I’ll just wait in the car till you’re done.”

  The sunny streets of downtown Lake Esther are thronged with cars and people. Violet’s eyes dart left and right. She rests her arm on the open window, waves a white-gloved hand weakly and smiles wanly at those she knows.

  As if they’ve all come out to welcome her back, Lila fumes silently. From what? A month of breakfast, crossword puzzles, and bourbon in bed!

  WHEN LILA PULLS IN FRONT of the law offices of estate attorney T. Paine Marsh, Violet sits up, eyes brightening at the prospect of being fawned over by the old gentleman. “Paine’s office?” she exclaims. “Can I come?”

  “Just dropping off a few files, Mamma. Won’t be a minute,” Lila tells her. “Wouldn’t want you to exhaust yourself on the stairs,” she adds, moving away from the car as quickly as she can.

  Although Paine Marsh was never a part of the Judge’s tight circle of Courthouse cronies, her father trusted him. “Only lawyer in town worth his shingle,” Judge How-High used to declare. Marsh’s family was among the county’s original settlers. He’s a solid, old-school gentleman, tall with an attentive stoop, white-haired, impeccably dressed in a charcoal gray suit. Today, he greets her warmly, with the affection of a special uncle for his favorite niece, and ushers her into the highceilinged, mahogany-paneled office that smells pleasantly of pipe smoke, leather books, and Olde English furniture polish.

  When she presents him with the stack of Receipts of Sale for the Judge’s Brahma herd, he shakes his head, lets out a long, slow whistle. “So, top of everything else, our Kyle could be a cattle thief ?”

  “You got any title transfers in your file?” Lila asks him. “ ’Cause Daddy didn’t have any in his.”

  “Not a one. Shall I present our query before or after the final vote count?” he asks, blue eyes twinkling beneath silver brows.

  “Sooner’s better than later, don’t you think?”

  HER NEXT STOP, two blocks away, is the campaign headquarters for “I LIKE SYKES, Future Sheriff.”

  In the seat beside her, Violet cranes forward to scan the hubbub of anxious and expectant faces milling about—new people, Lila notes, nobody who’d know who she is—then sits back dejected. “I’ll wait here.” She sighs, closing her eyes.

  Fred Sykes, handsome in a pale blue dress shirt with a loosened red tie, stands behind the row of hunchbacked volunteers who are working the phones to get out the vote. Despite a noisy industrial-size fan in one corner, the room is hot, ripe with the smells of sweat, strong coffee, and stale pastries.

  “How’s it goin’ today?” Lila asks him. They’ve spent the past four days campaigning together.

  Sykes’s smile is confident, but his eyes are deeply tired. “DeLuth’s high jinks with the Baptists, turning the kids’ petition into a public prayer list, seems to have backfired with the Methodists and Presbyterians,” he says.

  “Yeah, but what are the numbers? Don’t the Baptists outnumber the others two to one?”

  “Three to one, actually.” Sykes says it ruefully.

  “How about the Jaycees? The Junior League?”

  “We got ’em. We got just about everybody who’s not hard-shell Baptist, racist, or somehow in business with our present Sheriff. The question is, will they be enough?”

  “When do you think we’ll know?” Lila demands.

  “Polls close at seven, should know something for sure by nine. Win or lose, my wife’s putting on a party at the New Haven Community Center tonight. Will you come?”

  “I’m not much for parties.” Lila masks a small shudder at the memory of Ginger and Charlie’s barbecue. “But will you call just as soon as you hear?”

  “Of course. And, Miss Hightower . . .”

  She sees in his face the start of some kind of emotional thank-you. “You’re welcome, Fred Sykes, Future Sheriff,” she interrupts, releasing them both. “Just beat the bastard, would you please?”

  Sykes presses his lips, a determined half-frown, turns tired eyes back to the phone banks. He’s done his best, she thinks, but, hooah, it’s still a crapshoot.

  VIOLET’S RECEPTION at the precinct is as predictable as leaf curl in late summer. At the door, Lila stands back, watches the ladies manning the polls embrace her mother as the invalid restored, with gentle, outstretched arms, soft shoulder pats, and the quiet clucking of hens.

  On her part, Violet plays it to the hilt, smiling heroically, thanking all graciously for their concern, dabbing a lavender linen handkerchief delicately to dry eyes. The prodigal penitent returned.

  How many times over how many years has she played exactly this part? Lila wonders. And how often have these same women sanctioned her charade with their ritual acceptance? Was this a white-gloved triumph of good manners over Violet’s social chicanery? Or, was it a sincere act of Christian charity on their part? Probably, Lila realizes, a bit of both.

  Predictably, the ladies invite Violet to join those who are breaking for lunch at the Women’s Club across the street. Violet turns a preening face toward Lila, who stands at the exit, Cadillac keys in hand.

  “Well, if Lila doesn’t mind picking me up in an hour or two . . .”

  Lila, who’s had quite enough, smiles slyly. “Of course not, Mamma. Shall we say two? Or, if the juleps are as good as you remember, four?”

  Violet, her back to her friends, slits her eyes, and says, in full sugar, “Maybe I’ll just call you when I’m ready?”

  “No, no, no!” Pearl Lee Bagwell steps forward—Pearl Lee, who was their neighbor on Beech Street before the Judge and Violet built the big house outside of town, who shared many an afternoon sherry with Violet in those early days, who is no longer allowed to drive and has a Negro chauffeur—“you go on, Lila. Jack Henry and I will see your mamma home.”

  Lila nods, waves, and is off, wondering how Pearl Lee’s liver is holding up after all these years.

  On a whim that surprises her, Lila turns the Cadillac toward Beech Street to drive past her childhood home. It’s sti
ll there, the simple two-story clapboard beneath the solitary live oak, then and now, the biggest tree on the block. When they were children, Louis told her that the oak, with its tremendous trunk split just outside his window into five massive limbs, reminded him of a huge hand flung up, outstretched, toward heaven. We believed in heaven then. When was it I stopped?

  At the end of Beech Street, Lila finds herself turning east onto Old Road, toward Pine Forest Cemetery. It’s election day, and if things go as she hopes, she’ll be leaving soon. She feels a gut-level urge to say a proper good-bye to Louis (she’d avoided his grave during the Judge’s funeral) and to deliver an overdue apology to her father.

  Just beyond the heavy wrought-iron gates at the cemetery’s entrance, rusted open her entire life, she slows to make the sharp turn through the trees toward the family plot in the sunny southwest corner. Still in the shade, she sees ahead— What the hell?—and stomps on the brakes, hoping the thick layer of pine needles masks the sound of her sudden stop.

  In the clearing, beside the Judge’s grave, a tall man in uniform holds on, leans upon a small slip of a woman. His shoulders shake; he appears to sob. With one slim hand, she braces herself stiff-armed against his squad car. With the other, she rubs his back gently, in small consoling circles. Kyle DeLuth and his wife. Here? Now? Then it hits her: Election day. His first without Daddy. Of course. Is it grief alone you’re feeling, Kyle? Is there a bit of fear there, too? Are you wondering, as I am, who you are without him? What are you, Kyle, without the Judge to call the shots, set the limits, define the boundaries of your existence?

  Lila shakes her head at the scene—pure pitiful. Slowly, she slides the Cadillac into reverse, and backs it out of sight.

  On Old Dixie, heading toward her parents’ house, she rolls up the Cadillac’s windows, flips on the air conditioner against the afternoon’s gathering heat—hot for November. The cool air reminds her how much she misses her air-conditioned apartment in Georgetown, its smell of sandalwood, its pen-and-ink prints purchased from the stalls along the Quai de Montebello, its thick-walled sense of privacy and inviolable space.

  In Washington, not necessarily at the Pentagon but inside the Beltway, there was the definite air of possibility, the distinct quickening sense that it was possible, with the flourish of a pen or the strike of a gavel, to alter the course of human destiny, allay the suffering, improve the lot of millions across the country, if not the world.

  So unlike the air of transparent, patent inevitability in Lake Esther where, like the Judge always said, “everyone’s chickens come home to roost.”

  THAT NIGHT, with Violet (who’d been helped, stumbling, up the stairs by Pearl Lee’s patient Jack Henry) tucked into bed, Lila sits at the desk willing the phone to ring.

  Just before nine, it does. It’s Sykes, sounding genuinely hopeful. “Miss Hightower, I told you we’d have the results by nine. But they’re telling me it’s still too close to call!”

  “How much longer?”

  “An hour, they’re saying. Maybe less.”

  “Call me the second you hear,” she tells him.

  “Of course.”

  AT TEN-FOURTEEN, the ticking of the clock has become unbearable. Lila, on her second pot of hot tea, jumps at the phone’s insistent ring. “Well, did we kick his ass or not?”

  “Why, Missy, of course we did.”

  Lila feels her blood freeze. “What the hell you doin’, Kyle?” she demands icily.

  “Makin’ the same call I’ve made every election night of my life,” DeLuth says smoothly. “Old habits are hard to break, I guess.”

  “You won?” Lila’s voice falters on the word, on the very idea.

  “Why, yes. B’lieve it was the Nigger precincts put me over the top. Little slow addin’ up their final figures.”

  On her end—Goddamnit to hell!—Lila’s speechless.

  “It’s customary for the loser to congratulate the winner, Lila.” Kyle’s tone comes at her, awful as an ice pick.

  “You . . . insufferable . . . bastard, rot in hell!” she hears herself roar and slams the receiver against the rumble of his laughter.

  Damnit, Lila fumes. Damn him, and every ignorant, goddamn, moronic, backwoods fool who voted for him! How in the hell . . . She wrenches open the county phone book, flips the pages, scans the columns for the number.

  Ruth Barrows’s tobacco-raw voice answers abruptly at the first ring, “Towncrier.”

  “This whole damn town oughtta be cryin’ if what I just heard is true!”

  “Just confirmed it with the County Registrar. Who told you?”

  “The horse’s hind end himself. How the hell did this happen?”

  “My best guess is a bunch of ballot stuffing in the Negro precincts,” Ruth tells her. “The very ones you’d think would vote him out kept him in. Any idea why?”

  “Classic Fascism . . . fear beats out enlightened self-interest every time.” Lila says it bitterly.

  “You think DeLuth fancies himself the local Il Duce?”

  Lila hears the quick click of Ruth’s Zippo, the hungry pull on her cigarette. “No need to study the newsreels,” Lila says wearily. “Kyle’s nothing but a junkyard dog gone rabid on power. In someplace reasonable, they’d get a gun and shoot him, put us all out of his misery.”

  39

  Wednesday, the morning after the election, Principal Ed Cantrell’s in a piss-poor mood.

  “May!” Cantrell groans, dropping the front section of the morning’s Towncrier on her desk. “What the hell’s wrong with the people of this county? Reelecting Kyle DeLuth Sheriff, plus Jim Gibbons and Sam Higginbotham to the school board?”

  “Well, at least it was close,” May consoles him. “That’s progress.”

  “They won, goddamnit,” Cantrell rages. “Four more years of idiocy!” he grouses, spilling coffee. He grabs a towel, does a lousy job of sopping up his mess, and barrels into his office. “No calls,” he snarls.

  Minutes later, he hears the lobby door open, hears May call out from her desk, in welcome and in warning, “Why, Superintendent, Chairman Roberts! And Sheriff, good morning!”

  Good Christ, now what? Cantrell groans.

  “Ed in, Miss May?” he hears Superintendent Larry Bateman ask.

  “Well, sure,” May replies. “C’mon in. Get y’all some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.” It’s Zeke Roberts, Chairman of the school board. “We won’t be staying.”

  “Gentlemen,” Cantrell says, rising. Seeing the fourth man in his doorway, he adds, “May, another chair in here, please.”

  But DeLuth, closing the door in May’s face, holds up his hand. “ ’S all right, Ed. My new deputy, Carl Paige.” He jerks his chin toward the new man. “We’ll stand.” Carl Paige’s look is rawboned, lanky, and vacant. But his clothes, Cantrell notes, are, like DeLuth’s, military pressed.

  Cantrell sits. Across from him, Superintendent Bateman clears his scrawny throat, says, “Well, Ed—”, then stops. Instead, he reaches inside the breast pocket of his coat, pulls out a white Clark County School District envelope, slides it across the desk.

  “What’s this?”

  “Letter of resignation, Ed. We’d like you to sign it, please.”

  “Me? You want me to sign it? Why? What for?”

  Bateman’s Adam’s apple bobs like a float on a fishing line. A career bureaucrat, he eyes Zeke Roberts, then passes the buck. “The school board has directed me to ask you to leave.”

  Big Zeke Roberts, Chairman, nods his jowled chin. “It was unanimous, Ed.”

  “But, you haven’t told me why. What’s this all about?” Should’ve seen this coming, he thinks.

  Behind Bateman and Roberts, DeLuth unfolds his arms, hitches up his uniform pants. “Oh, cut the crap, Ed. If you’d done your job in the first place, told them Nigger kids to take a hike the day they got here, the school board wouldn’t have its tit in the ringer over all this. If you’d kept your mouth shut in your Youth Group, ’stead of fomenting that petition
, the whole damn country wouldn’t be readin’ about your foolishness in the Pinko Press. To my mind, you’ve either gone stupid or Red. Which is it?”

  The man’s a goddamn lunatic, Cantrell realizes, and drops his eyes back to Zeke Roberts. “What if I refuse to resign?”

  “Then we’ll have to fire you, Ed. Blackball your record. You don’t want that.” Zeke’s big bulldog head sways as he threatens Cantrell with the end of his career.

  Pencil-necked Bateman, at Roberts’s side, dips his head. “Ed, the board’s bein’ more than fair.”

  Cantrell sits back, his swivel chair complains. Think, THINK, goddamnit! “I’d like to think about this,” he says. Should I call an attorney? Who?

  “Thinking time’s past, Eddie-boy.” DeLuth steps forward. “Sign it or not. We’re here to escort you off the premises.”

  “Now?” What the hell’s their hurry?

  “Ed.” Pencil Neck hunches forward, apologetic. “No need to make this unpleasant. Principals and school boards part ways all the time. In your case, the board’s giving you the option to resign and go. Don’t make us fire you. Just go.”

  Beside him, bulldog Roberts purses his lips. Behind him, the lunatic DeLuth fondles the ivory handle of his gun.

  Cantrell has the dizzying sensation of watching the room but not being in it, watching himself open the Superintendent’s envelope and read its brief paragraph. They’d have him resign for “personal reasons.” Personal? The race of the Dare kids, a small part Indian, is personal ? The teenagers in his Youth Group, seeing right from wrong clearer than most adults, are personal? Bullshit! What will be personal is May’s face when she hears about this. And, Alice. Goddamnit. Alice’s face when she learns the split-level’s o f. The question is how’s he to go? Resign or be fired? Flight or fight? Scapegoat or martyr?

  Cantrell sees himself shake his own head to clear it, finds himself wondering what the squat, balding guy on his side of the desk will do.

  “Well, boys,” he hears his voice, miraculously steady, say, “looks like you all need a fall guy, and I’m it. I’ll go,”—he sees himself lean forward, smiling—“but not without telling you you’re a bunch of goddamn dinosaurs. You’re trampling the law here, the very moral wall between right and wrong, to suit your own pathetic prejudices.” Cantrell sees himself sign the letter with a flourish, flick the signed letter across the desk toward DeLuth, the biggest dinosaur of them all. “Today, you’re getting away with it. Four more years, maybe a few after that. But not forever. Someday, your kind will be extinct. Schoolkids will study your bones, wonder how in the hell you were allowed to live.”