by Cat Winters
A twig cracked outside the stable.
Joe and I stiffened, our shoulders squared toward the stable door. I refused to breathe—refused to move even the tiniest muscles in my fingers—and I forgot all about the derringer crammed down inside its new hiding spot in my boot. Wind whistled between the boards in the roof and rattled across splinters and nails in the rafters. A chill seeped down my body, starting at the roots of my hair, slicing down the length of my back.
Joe scooted himself toward me.
“It . . . it’s funny,” he said in a whisper. “I’m finding myself sitting here, p-p-praying that’s just your father’s ghost out there.”
The wind toyed with the door, nudging at the wood, as though a person with weak hands attempted to push it open. I heard a gentle tap-tap-tap, and the chill washed all the way down to my feet, until every inch of my skin sweated ice.
“Joe,” I said. “I’m frightened to death.”
“It’s all right.” He slid all the way next to me. “It’s probably just—”
Footsteps! I distinctly heard footsteps scuffling across the dirt outside.
Joe wrapped his arm around me. “It’s probably . . .”
I grabbed hold of him by his waist.
Bursts of yellow light traveled past the slats in the boards, rushing toward the door.
I froze and whimpered in fear. Joe pulled me close, clasped my head to his chest, and cussed under his breath.
The door flew open and banged against the stable wall with a crash as loud as a gunshot, and I screamed and clung to Joe. My greatest fear manifested before my eyes: a half-dozen figures in white hoods and robes—red insignias on their chests, round black holes for eyes—pushed their way into the stable with lanterns burning bright. I flew into a panic and tried to climb up Joe’s shoulder, just trying to get away—somewhere, anywhere—and then hands clamped down on my arms and tore me away from him. Klan members descended upon him, and although Joe thrashed and kicked, they slammed him down on his stomach, tied a cloth around his mouth, and strapped another around his wrists, which they forced behind his back.
Someone yanked a cloth around my mouth, too. The bindings tore into my lips and my cheeks, and my attackers pulled my hair when they tied the knot behind my head. No one spoke—all I heard were panicked grunts from both Joe and me and the swiftness of feet bustling around us—and I wanted to cry out, Say something! Show me you’re people and not faceless creatures. My eyes bulged. I tried to keep my head facing Joe, to see what they’d do to him. My knees buckled and banged against the floor, but those hooded devils pulled me to my feet and wrenched me out of the stable. They pulled Joe out, too, and dragged him away, ahead of me.
White cloth surrounded me. White cloth with dark eyes peering out of round holes. Lamplight burned at my corneas. The soles of my boots scraped against dirt and rocks, and only then did I remember the little gun wedged inside, down in the crook of my right foot, below the ankle bone. Up ahead, glimpses of Joe’s trousers and bare toes peeked through a wall of white cotton. He was on his knees, and they were dragging him toward the highway beyond a narrow thicket of firs on the east side of our property.
A surge of terror gripped my arms and legs. I acquired a strength that nearly set me free from the hands bearing down on my wrists. One of my captors grabbed the back of my neck and pushed me forward, onward, in the direction of a Ford truck that looked to be the Paulissens’, parked beyond the trees on the side of the highway. Nothing seemed real.
The air turned cold, and everyone’s feet crackled through pine needles on the dark earth beneath us. A bird of some sort flapped its wings out of nowhere and rushed over my head with a suddenness and swiftness that made me scream into the cloth.
I’m dead, I’m dead, I thought, and my knees sank again to the ground. The Klan members had to drag me; I would not willingly walk to whatever fate they intended for me and Joe. Stones and twigs tore at my legs and stung my skin, but I would not walk. I smelled a citrus-tinged cologne that reminded me of Laurence, but my brain forced me to think of the hooded men as creatures and strangers—not neighbors and childhood companions.
One of the Klansmen pulled down the wooden gate at the back of the truck’s bed. Three of the robed figures hoisted Joe into the vehicle. Two of them jumped in after him and dragged him by his pinned-back arms across the floor, toward the back of the cab. Two more Klansmen lifted me in by my arms and legs. I writhed and fought, but they shoved me into the open compartment and climbed right in after me before I could reach for my boot. One of them pulled me down onto my back and held me by my elbows, while the other pinned down my legs by my knees. I prayed my little derringer wouldn’t slide into view at the edge of my boot. I prayed the truck would crash and kill our attackers before they yanked us anywhere near a tree and a rope.
Someone closed up the back of the truck, rocking the bed, and the remaining Klansmen must have climbed into the cab, for I heard car doors opening and shutting.
The truck engine grumbled to life, and the vehicle lurched forward and headed down the highway, the floor of the bed rattling against the back of my skull. I heard Joe squirming and grunting behind me, and I realized that one of his feet was thrashing about near my right eye. Mainly, though, I saw hooded faces looming above me, and the wide black sky that stretched overhead, the stars winking down as though it were a regular July night in a regular summer. I closed my eyes and pushed my mind to thoughts of Daddy and me standing side by side in the green waters of the creek. I made myself hear the sound of my father’s deep voice singing “Wade in the Water,” while the current trickled past the tree roots and branches hanging out from the shore. Cool waters lapped at my stinging knees. Daddy’s large, warm hand wrapped around mine. The sun shone hot and sweet on my face, and I no longer tasted the cotton of the cloth that bound my mouth or felt hands forcing down my limbs. I willed Joe to escape, too, to join Laurence in the woods when they weren’t yet sixteen; to taste their first kiss and run his fingers through the sunshine in Laurence’s hair.
The brakes of the truck squealed to a stop. My body jolted. Car doors opened. I writhed again and arched my back, but hands grabbed me and yanked me forward in the dark. My feet hit the ground with a thump that made the gun jump in my boot, and I thanked God for the safety mechanism.
“Look what we found,” said one of the Klansmen who squeezed down on my arm. I recognized his voice as being that of Mr. Franklin from the Dry Dock. “Both of them, huddled in the stable on the girl’s family’s property.”
The man whipped me around toward a scene of bright light, and my breath caught in my throat.
A wooden cross, at least eight feet tall, burned in the patch of tall grasses between the Dry Dock and Ginger’s. The inferno crackled and strengthened and reflected off the glass of the Dry Dock’s windows, brightening the white of the Klansmen’s robes. Beyond the cross stood the oak tree, looking larger and blacker and more monstrous than I remembered, its crooked boughs stretching out to the surrounding darkness. Four more Klan members waited by the tree, and they held torches that illuminated a noose that hung from the thickest branch.
Behind me, Klansmen pulled Joe out of the truck, his mouth and hands still bound. His eyes widened at the cross and the noose, the fire shining against his brown irises, and he dropped to his knees.
“Joseph Adder and Hanalee Denney,” called out a wheezy, high-pitched voice that I knew for certain to be Sheriff Rink’s. He stood by the noose, a slightly shorter figure than the others, and the black and hollow eyes of his hood stared straight inside me. “We have brought you here because you are both threats to the moral purity of this community. As punishment”—he grabbed hold of the noose dangling beside him—“we will bring you each forward, fasten this rope around your neck, and raise you in the air three times in a row.”
I whimpered beneath my gag and bent my arms and knees in a frantic fight to break free. The fire on the cross blurred and jumped about, and all I could see was the color red.
“Afterward,” continued the sheriff, “you will leave this community, as well as the white homeland of Oregon, for the rest of your living days. You are not welcome in Elston, nor will you ever be. Boys”—the sheriff waved to the Klansmen holding Joe—“let’s start with him. You new recruits will have the honor of slipping the rope over his head and ensuring it’s secure.”
Four of our original attackers crowded around Joe, and at first I couldn’t see any part of him, aside from one of his bare feet sticking out from between the bottoms of the Klansmen’s dark trousers below the robes. Two of them reached down and hoisted him to his feet. They steered him toward the noose that the sheriff held in his meaty fingers. Joe’s hands remained bound behind his back, but he wiggled his elbows and kicked at his captors and gave one last go at escape. The sheriff grabbed him by the back of his collar and forced the rope around his neck.
“No!” I cried out from beneath the cloth—a muffled sound, but one that startled the two Klansmen who held my wrists. Their grips loosened. I somehow yanked myself free of their hands.
I tore off, darting down the side of the highway like a hunted rabbit.
Mr. Franklin shouted, “Run after her!”
Footsteps pounded the soil in the grasses behind me, and I heard my name, called out in Laurence’s voice. Adrenaline soared through my body, allowing me to fly over the ground and run harder than I’d ever run in my life. I pulled the binding off my mouth and allowed my lungs to breathe.
The muscles in my legs carried me through the copse of trees that rose up in my path, several yards south of the Dry Dock. With motions swift and powerful, before my pursuers could even think of catching up, I was down on the ground, pulling off my right boot, knocking my fingertips against the wood and cold metal of the pistol.
“Leave me alone, or I’ll shoot!” I cried, and I pointed the double barrel up at two white sheets that came to a skidding stop in front of me. “I swear to God, I’ll shoot.”
“Put the gun down, Hanalee,” said Laurence from beneath the hood on the right.
“Take off your hoods and run to my house for help.” I rose to my feet. “Tell my parents there’s going to be a murder.”
“Hanalee—”
“I know that’s you, Laurence. Take your goddamned KKK friend here and go get Dr. Koning. Tell him blood will be spilled at the Dock tonight.”
“But—”
“If you don’t want the blood to be yours”—I lowered the gun to the direction of his groin, figuring he might value that area even more than his head—“then go now and fetch Dr. Koning—quickly!”
Laurence and his friend remained frozen and hidden beneath their sheets.
I cocked the hammer and fired at the ground next to Laurence’s left foot, scattering leaves and dirt in all directions. “Now!”
Both Klansmen jumped into the air and skedaddled in the direction of my house.
“What was that?” a voice shouted in the distance, back where I’d last seen Joe with the noose around his neck.
I ran back with one foot in a boot and the other one bare, and I clutched the pistol in my right hand, contemplating the damage I could do with that last precious bullet. I could kill Sheriff Rink. At the very least, I could shoot him in the kneecap and cause him to moan in pain and distract his cohorts while I released Joe from the rope. I pushed past trees and the blur of the highway and thought of all the possibilities—all the consequences that would follow. A funeral. A trial. Tears. Heartache. Prison. Eugenics. Pain. Regret.
I reached the oak tree and found the Klansmen unsettled. Two of them held on to Joe by his shoulders. The noose remained around his neck, and the rest of the rope dangled over the branch. The other Klansmen paced about, their wide sleeves flapping.
“I don’t want my life to end in tragedy!” I shouted with my gun raised, and I cocked the hammer with my thumb.
“Oh, Christ!” said a voice that sounded like Robbie’s. “Put the gun down!”
I swept the barrel in the direction of them all—all eight of the remaining Klansmen, along with their victim, Joe Adder.
“I want to live and love and thrive,” I said, and a solution entered my head—a way to lessen the tragedy. To appease the pain.
I pointed the gun at Joe’s head.
His captors dove away from his sides. Joe’s eyes expanded above his gag, and he turned as rigid as stone.
“Stay still, Joe!” I shouted, and I closed one eye. “Don’t move!”
I squeezed the trigger with the pad of my index finger, and the blast of that shot exploded inside my head. The bullet soared in his direction with a force that rattled my bones.
Joe collapsed into a thick blanket of tall grasses, and the entire world fell silent.
CHAPTER 27
THE REST IS SILENCE
I DROPPED TO MY KNEES IN A CLOUD of white smoke and watched as all attention shifted toward me. Hoods came off. Voices shouted amid the brain-piercing ringing inside my ears. To my right, Robbie removed his covering and begged me not to kill anyone else, not paying any mind to the fact that the pistol only possessed two barrels, two bullets. Sheriff Rink yanked off his hood and clamored toward me with his hands in the air, demanding, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun!”
I clutched the grip with both my hands and kept the barrels pointed in the direction where Joe had stood. The weight of the little derringer grew too much to bear, as light as it actually was. My arm muscles weakened and slackened, and the weapon sank toward the ground.
The sheriff lifted the bottom of his robe and fetched a pair of handcuffs from the belt of his dark uniform underneath. “Everyone, leave the scene immediately.” He came over and shoved me down to the ground by my back, pushing me onto my stomach. “None of you were here. Do not leave a trace of yourself behind.”
Cold metal clicked around my wrists. I tasted dirt on my lips and felt the earth digging into my scraped knees.
“Hanalee Denney,” the sheriff barked into my ear in the deepest voice I’d ever heard from him, “you are under arrest for the murder of Joseph Adder.”
Legs swathed in sheets and dark trousers leapt past my head in the mass exodus from the scene. I lifted my face far enough off the ground to see a couple of grown men and several boys my age—the same pack of boys from Laurence’s place—fleeing down the dark highway, their robes billowing behind them, hoods tucked under their arms like empty pillowcases. They ran with their torches and lanterns and left the clearing dark and abandoned, save for the sheriff and me, and Joe, lying somewhere in the patch of blackness beneath the oak tree, near the burning cross.
Sheriff Rink lifted me to my feet by the crook of my left arm and dragged me alongside the highway, past Ginger’s. I tripped on an uneven patch of dirt and imagined hitting my head on the highway, without my arms to catch me. The sheriff yanked me upright before I smacked against the ground, and he tugged me onward.
“You sure saved me a heap of trouble by killing that boy yourself,” said the sheriff with a squeak. “I don’t know why you did that—maybe you were trying to spare him the pain of the noose—but I’m happy as hell you did.”
“I knew exactly what I was doing when I pointed that gun at Joe’s head” was all I said, and I held my chin high.
“Hanalee?” shouted a girl’s voice from somewhere behind us.
I swiveled around, which made the sheriff wrench me toward his car all the faster. A strange, chirping sound emerged from the darkness.
Mildred’s rickety old bicycle.
“Joe’s lying below the branches of the oak tree,” I called out to her, even though I couldn’t see her. “The sheriff’s taking me to his car to—”
Sheriff Rink smacked his hand over my mouth and opened the back door of his vehicle. The sideways grin of the moon spit an anemic haze over the automobile’s black paint, and a jolt of doubt struck my heart. The words I’d shouted to Joe—Stay still, Joe! Don’t move!—replayed in my head, and I kept feeling my arm and my hand aim
the gun just so and seeing Joe fall to the ground in the darkness.
The sheriff grabbed a clump of my hair on the back of my head, shoved me into his backseat, and slammed the car door closed, just grazing my heel.
I lifted my head from the dark leather seat and heard him crank the vehicle to a start down below the grille in front of the car. With an obnoxious sigh and a hiss from the upholstery, he plopped down on the front seat and slammed his own door shut.
“It’s time for you to take a little journey outside Elston,” he said with a quick peek over his shoulder.
I scooted myself up to a seated position, despite the hindrance of the handcuffs, and watched Mildred’s bicycle careen to a stop up ahead, in the patch of grass leading to the cross and the oak tree. I thanked the Lord for her bizarre premonitions.
“You do realize, Sheriff Rink,” I said, forcing my voice to leave my throat with a deep and confident sound, “my father’s spirit roams this highway late at night.”
“Hogwash!” He shifted the vehicle into gear. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Daddy called such spectral apparitions ‘haints,’ which always sounded to me like ‘hate.’”
The sheriff laughed with a wheezy whistle and sent the vehicle rumbling forward onto the black road ahead of us, lit only by the twin beams of the headlights. We passed the burning cross and Mildred, bending down over Joe.
“I sure hope you see him out here,” I said, peering out the windshield beyond the sheriff’s round head. The glow of the headlights brightened the outstretched tongue of the highway. “I hope you see Hank Denney’s face staring straight into your guilty soul.”
The sheriff didn’t chuckle at that comment and instead increased our speed, sailing the car past the tree-lined stretch of highway where the Adders and several other Elston residents lived, where Daddy had stumbled into the road. We rode beneath the boughs of trees that arched over the highway like the arms of ancient crones.
“Up ahead,” I continued, “in the crossroads—that’s where I’ve seen him myself.”
