by Cat Winters
“It was only sleeping, Fleur. Uncle Clyde got mad because I insinuated that he killed my father. I ran off with Joe so Clyde wouldn’t hurt either of us.”
She rubbed the inner corner of her right eye and looked up at the sky again. “They want to kill him so badly now. Robbie hates himself for not hurting Joe this morning when they found you. He said that if either of you came back . . .” She cupped a hand around her chin to keep it from quivering. “Laurence grabbed me so hard and made me swear I wouldn’t see you again. He left bruises on my arm.”
“Where?”
She lifted the butterfly wings of her sleeves and showed me purple marks the size of two thumbs, one per arm.
“Oh, Fleur!” I took hold of her elbows with the softest touch I could muster.
“I’m so scared of losing you, Hanalee.” She tipped her forehead against mine. “You’re the only person here who’s worried about what will happen to me, and I’m terrified of what’s going to happen to you.”
I pulled her close and held her against my chest, my arms locked around her back. Boisterous slides of trombones and the loud belches of tubas ricocheted over the headstones around us, but I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed the picnic away.
“I think something unspeakable happened to my father that Christmas Eve,” I said against her shoulder. “Something more damaging than Joe’s car. Something related to the boys’ desire to hunt down Joe.” I lifted my head so that we stood face-to-face again. “Have you ever heard anything about the Dry Dock being dangerous for nonwhites?”
She knitted her sunshine-blond eyebrows. “I don’t think so.”
“Have you heard anything about the owners’ ties to the Klan?”
“I . . .” She grimaced. “Well . . . they do have that sign out front.”
“What sign?”
“Do you ever eat at the Dry Dock?”
“No.” I shook my head. “We tend to avoid it, but I’ve always thought it’s because Mama doesn’t like their food.”
She rubbed her lips together. “Well, they have a sign on the door that says, ‘We reserve the right to serve whom we please,’ but I always thought it was a nice sign. I thought they were saying they didn’t want their customers making a fuss over any of their clientele.”
My stomach tightened. “I’m not so sure that’s a nice sign, Fleur.”
“Fleur!” called a male voice to my right. “What’re you doing with her?”
I turned my head and found Laurence standing just outside the cemetery entrance, hand in hand with Opal Rickert, a brunette with bobbed hair and a red dress that showed off her skinny knees.
“You stay away from my sister, Hanalee Denney.” He let go of Opal and ran toward me.
I took my hands off Fleur and shuffled backward, tripping over my feet.
Laurence grabbed hold of both my arms, and the next thing I knew, my back slammed against an obelisk, and Laurence shoved his face into mine.
“Why’d you have to go and run off with Joe?” He squeezed my arms by my sides and shook me against the stone. “That was the stupidest thing you could have done.”
“What are you doing, Laurence?” asked Opal from behind him with a lift of her plucked and painted eyebrows. “Picking a fight with a girl?”
“Go back to the picnic,” he called over his shoulder. “Take Fleur with you.”
“Let go of her,” said Fleur, running her hands through her hair, and I again saw the bruises beneath her sleeves.
“Go back to the picnic!” he shouted. “Go! Before I hurt her. I swear, I’ll hurt her if you don’t leave immediately.”
The girls retreated, for Laurence’s tone carried a rage that chilled me to my core and would have sent me running, too, if he didn’t have me pinned against a dead man’s marker.
He returned his blue eyes to me and spoke so close to my face, his hot breath blew into my mouth. “You two should have just kept running. Why’d you come back?”
“Joe . . .” My teeth chattered; it took all the courage I possessed to find my voice. “He didn’t want . . . we didn’t have . . .”
“I want you both gone and far from here. Do you hear me?” He shook me again. “Get out of this state, and take him with you. You’re going to get yourselves killed. We’re planning a necktie party for him. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s when a person gets raised by a rope from the branch of a tree—not long enough to die, but enough to get scared into running out of town for good.”
I froze. “W-w-what do you mean ‘we,’ Laurence? What are you a part of?”
He loosened his grip and stepped back a foot. The sun shone down on his golden hair and skin, brightening the soft smattering of freckles on the bridge of his nose, just as the rays used to set his skin and his eyelashes aglow whenever we climbed stacks of hay in my parents’ field.
“Why do you hate me so much, Laurence?” I asked.
“My family comes first.” He placed his hands on his hips, looking tall and sturdy and strong—or at least like a boy pretending to be all those things. “To keep us all safe, we can’t afford to associate with a mulatto any longer.”
I sank back against the stone and felt my vertebrae become no stronger than blades of river grass.
Don’t ever let them hurt you, Hanalee, Laurence had told me himself when he held his arms around me and taught me to shoot his father’s gun. Don’t ever let them make you feel small.
I stepped forward and spat in his face—right beneath his right eye, with those sun-streaked lashes I used to want to kiss—and I walked away from the cemetery.
CHAPTER 17
THE WEEPING BROOK
SOMETHING HAD CHANGED IN THE air by the time I came around the side of the church and rejoined the Fourth of July picnic. The music had stopped, and an unnatural stillness hung over the grounds. Everyone shaded their eyes with their hands and faced the main highway, where Sheriff Rink’s black patrol car reflected the afternoon sun.
In front of the vehicle stood the sheriff, tightly holding the belt surrounding his thick waist. He spoke with Reverend Adder, who stooped as if carrying a great weight on his upper back. Mrs. Adder clung to her husband’s right arm and, without warning, howled like an injured dog—the wail of a woman in the throes of early grief. I knew that sound all too well from the night my father died.
My stomach dropped to my toes. I ran toward Mama through the other picnickers, who turned into streaks of red and white clothing.
“What’s happening?” I called out. “What happened?”
Mama turned to me with a worried brow. “I don’t know. There are murmurings of a death.”
Uncle Clyde sauntered our way from the highway, his face wan, his mouth drawn. His arms hung by his sides.
“They found . . .” He slowed to a stop in front of our blanket and tugged a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his coat. “This afternoon, in St. Johns, along the northernmost stretch of the Willamette River, the body of a young man . . . a young man meeting Joe’s description . . . washed ashore.”
I dropped down to a crouched position on the grass. No air entered my lungs; I completely forgot how to inhale.
“Breathe, Hanalee.” Mama knelt beside me and patted my back. “Come on—take a deep breath.”
I dug my fingers into Mama’s arm. The world around me turned bright and blurry and distorted, and all I could do was squeeze my mother’s flesh and wonder how a boy—a boy alive in our woods just that morning—could have ended up in a body of water miles and miles over the forested hills.
Uncle Clyde took off his coat and flapped the garment in front of my face, which at first caused me more panic, but somehow the air blowing into my nose reminded me how to take a breath. My lungs expanded, and after more gasping and coat-flapping and clinging to Mama, I lay back on our blanket with my knees bent and breathed in a shallow rhythm.
Uncle Clyde rubbed my arms and asked if I could hear him, but he looked so strange and f
ar away, with the glare of the sun shining against the lenses of his spectacles. My brain flitted to an image of him sitting beside my father on a bed, a needle full of morphine at the ready.
“How f-f-far is the r-r-river from our house?” I somehow managed to ask, still seeing the world as shiny and fuzzy, still imagining Uncle Clyde positioned beside my father in Joe’s bedroom on a Christmas Eve.
Uncle Clyde made responses I only half heard: “At least sixteen miles . . . Tualatin Mountains . . . he could have gotten a ride . . .” I closed my eyes and pushed his voice into the distance and let the world slip away into darkness.
UNCLE CLYDE CARRIED ME TOWARD HIS CAR. I HAD vague memories of townspeople in red ribbons and white suits staring, gaping, as the man who presumably killed my father lugged my limp body toward the family of a boy who might lie dead on a riverbank—a boy who might have died because of the man who carried me, or at least because of people like him. I heard the reverend murmur something about going to identify the body, and the next thing I knew, my head was jostling against the half-opened window in the backseat of Uncle Clyde’s automobile. My stepfather and mother sat in silence in the front seat, and the wind from their open windows screamed past my ears. I stared out at the passing fields and farmhouses and the white clouds smeared across the sky.
We neared a brown-skinned man in a dark suit and a derby hat who lumbered down the highway with a limp. My jaw dropped, and I sat up straighter, and I saw him—my father—right there in broad daylight, wandering in the direction of our house. Daddy raised his head and met my eyes, but the car sailed past him and drifted around a bend, stealing him from view.
“Are you all right?” asked Mama, turning toward me. “I heard you gasp.”
I slumped back down in the seat and closed my eyes.
BACK AT HOME, MAMA TOOK HOLD OF MY RIGHT ARM in the driveway and steered me straight toward the front door.
“I want to look for Joe,” I said, pulling away.
“No.” She pulled back, refusing to let go. “You’re not going anywhere by yourself.”
“Wait,” said Uncle Clyde from the stone walkway behind us. “I want to speak to Hanalee in private.”
“About what?” asked Mama, gripping my shoulders.
“I just . . . I need a few words with her”—he readjusted his spectacles on his nose—“to clear up the trouble between us. Help her get seated on the porch here.”
I didn’t possess the strength or the clarity of mind to keep fighting to run off, so I allowed Mama to guide me up the porch steps and sit me down on our wooden swing built for three.
“Everything will be all right.” She kissed the top of my head and patted my shoulder. “Just stay here. Recover. Behave. I’ll be inside if you need me.”
I nodded and rested my head in my hands, my elbows digging into the tops of my thighs. I focused on all the splinters sticking out from the worn boards of the porch and saw, out of the tops of my eyes, Uncle Clyde’s black oxfords clomping up the steps. Then the shiny shoes came to a stop.
“I don’t think he’s dead, Hanalee,” he said, his voice so calm it made me shudder.
“Hmm,” I said in a low murmur. “You must be like Mildred, then. Gifted with premonitory senses.”
“The northern Willamette River’s too far. I was thinking about the logistics on the car ride home. If you were with him in the woods just this morning, he couldn’t have hiked over the hills that quickly.”
I raised my head. “Unless someone fetched him and threw him into the river.”
“If someone wanted him dead, they’d have killed him in the woods instead of going to the trouble of driving him seventeen miles away.”
I sat back against the swing and couldn’t decide if that statement comforted or troubled me.
Uncle Clyde took hold of one of the white posts that supported the porch overhang. “The Adders and I asked the sheriff to make telephone calls to try to find the two of you. He contacted ports at both major rivers. Some other poor body likely washed ashore and made for a terrible coincidence.” He rubbed his left temple, ruffling the short hair that came to a stop above his ear. “I’m sure the mistake is killing the Adders right now.”
“They don’t care about Joe.”
“Don’t make such quick assumptions about what parents feel for their children. Including stepparents.”
I folded my arms over my chest.
“I want you to know,” he said in a voice that quavered with emotion, “that I’ve made a great many sacrifices for your safety, Hanalee. I’ve even sacrificed the safety of others to keep you alive.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Don’t glare at me.” He let go of the post. “Everything I’ve done since the death of your father has been with the primary intention of keeping you and your mother alive and unharmed.”
I blinked at him. “Are you trying to tell me that you married my mother to keep me safe?”
“In some ways, yes. I love your mother dearly, of course, but my reasons for becoming her husband included protecting the two of you.”
I sat there, stiff and silent, while he tucked his thumbs into his coat pockets and seemed to wait for my response.
“Well?” he asked. “Do you have anything to say to that?”
“Yes.” I pushed my feet against the floorboards and rocked myself on the swing. “What—or who, as you put it—did you sacrifice to keep me safe?”
He tapped his fingers against his sides. “I’d rather not say.”
“Why not?”
He exhaled a short breath and shifted his face toward the highway. “Because we’re living in corrupt times, Hanalee. Even the best intentions can sound cruel when spoken aloud.”
I kept rocking and glowering.
“If Joe shows up here,” said Uncle Clyde, “if he didn’t actually run off to Washington as you claim, I’d like to tell him that I have a friend in Seattle, an old medical-school classmate of mine, who could use an assistant to help with filing and other organizational tasks in his office.”
I brought the swing to a stop. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“I want to help Joe find work. I know his time spent in prison will keep him from acquiring the type of position he once aspired to.” Uncle Clyde removed his spectacles and used the hem of his coat to wipe a smudge from the left lens. “This friend of mine . . . he has a brother who’s like Joe. He’ll be compassionate toward the boy. Joe would be safe and well cared for. There’s some tolerance in my friend’s community.”
“Why?” In spite of myself, I looked toward the opening to the woods between the firs on the edge of our property. “Why do you want to help him?”
A swallow bobbed down Uncle Clyde’s throat. He placed his specs back upon his nose. “To make amends.”
My lips parted, but no words formed.
“If he shows up in this area again . . .” Uncle Clyde wrapped his arms around himself and swiveled in the direction of the woods, as if he, too, sensed Joe’s presence there. “Tell him, if he sets aside his anger toward me, I’ll do whatever I can to make sure no one puts him back in that prison. I’m well aware of the state’s push for sterilization of homosexuals, and I don’t agree with the practice in the slightest.” He swallowed again. “It’ll only cause more anguish.”
“Why do you need to make amends, Uncle Clyde?” I cocked my head at him. My heart pounded, but I kept talking. “What did you do?”
My stepfather returned his gaze to me. “Joe was the sacrifice.”
I gripped the bottom edge of the swing.
He shifted his weight between his legs and failed to elaborate.
“Are you admitting to me,” I asked, my heart thumping faster, my palms slick with sweat, “that you allowed an innocent sixteen-year-old boy to head to prison . . . and not a guilty one?”
“You don’t—”
“Is that what you mean by a ‘sacrifice’?”
“It’s not . . .”
“Not what?�
�� I asked. “Not as bad as it sounds?”
“It’s not what you think,” said Uncle Clyde. “Just . . . just know I’m on Joe’s side. I want him to be all right.”
I stared up at my stepfather without blinking.
He nodded toward the front door. “Now go inside and drink a couple of glasses of water. And eat. You’re probably dehydrated and hungry.”
I refused to tear my eyes away from him.
“Go on now.” He opened the door for me. “I don’t want you getting sick.”
“I’m going to look for him.”
“You’ll do no such thing. You tore your mother’s heart to pieces last night. I know you don’t care for me in the slightest right now, but show the woman who raised you and loves you some respect.” He pulled the door farther open. “Come inside. For her. Now.”
With a deep groan from the bottom of my throat, I pushed myself off the swing and did as he asked, for the sake of my mother, but not without one last glare at him, and one last peek at the woods.
CHAPTER 18
DESPERATE UNDERTAKINGS
RESTING ALL AFTERNOON ALLOWED me to stay wide-awake and alert at night when Mama and Uncle Clyde retired to their bedroom. They closed their door, and through the wall I heard murmurings and the squeaks of dresser drawers—and then private sounds I didn’t care to hear. I pushed my hands over my ears and told myself, Drink it, drink it, drink it . . .
I slid out the box of toys and Klan notes and derringer ammunition from beneath my bed and dug around for the bottle of Necromancer’s Nectar.
Another fiery spoonful.
Another rush of heat exploded through my chest, my stomach, my head, my extremities.
This time around, I remembered to screw the cap back on and tuck the bottle into its hiding place, and as soon as I pushed the box back beneath my bed, my hair, too, seemed to catch fire. Flames scalded my cheeks and my neck, and I couldn’t stand the heat of my burning curls against my back a moment longer.
