by Lori Roy
Chapter 4
IMOGENE
Today
Standing at the door where Mama asked her to wait, after the last of the mourners left Mama’s house, Imogene braces herself for the things Mama will say when she walks out of her bedroom. She’ll sit Imogene down, gather her hands, and tell her how much she loves her little girl and that it breaks her heart to see Imogene treating herself so unkindly. It’s always toughest when Mama cries. Imogene never intends to hurt Mama, but her acting up at her own daddy’s funeral, whatever that might have involved because Imogene doesn’t much remember anything after they left the cemetery, might be the thing that forces Mama to finally give up. Imogene’s single goal these days has been to spare Mama, and Tillie and Mrs. Tillie too, as best she can. But all too often the grief is bigger than Imogene, and she long ago grew tired of trying to make it behave. It’s the misbehaving that makes her feel better, at least for a short time. Another person’s grief must be exhausting. It has to be, because Imogene is exhausted by her own.
She’s exhausted too from a day spent burying Daddy, but instead of feeling like she was seeing Edison Coulter into the ground, it felt like burying Russell and Vaughn all over again. Just as it had five years ago, a pressure settled in her head, right behind her eyes, pressing so hard it barely left her room to breathe. When a bit of food at the reception and a few shots from Eddie jump-started her thinking, she began to wonder if this day restarted the clock on grieving, because if she had to relive the last five years, she was done. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, go through it again.
“You sure we need to do this tonight?” Imogene asks when Mama walks from her bedroom, her gardening jacket draped over her shoulders. “It’s getting awful late.”
“It won’t take long.” Mama cups Imogene’s face; pokes her in the side so she’ll stop slouching, a bad habit that settled in when Imogene sprouted to six foot tall; and motions for her to follow Mama outside. “And mind you, not a whisper of this to Jo Lynne or Eddie.”
Pressing her shoulders back, Imogene crosses her heart and promises to say not a word and can’t stop the sigh of relief she lets out. Mama having a secret to share is better than her wanting to have yet another talk. Truth is, Imogene probably wouldn’t have overdone it today if Jo Lynne hadn’t kept eyeing Imogene’s plastic highball every time their paths crossed at the reception. By the end of the day, Imogene was looking her sister straight on and draining her whiskey in one long swallow. Imogene’s overdoing it also made her forget to ask Tillie if he’d called the police about Tim Robithan and those watches. As soon as she finishes with Mama, she’ll give Tillie a call.
Following Mama outside, Imogene stumbles as she tries to keep up. The wind out of the north has shifted from cool to cold with the setting sun, but none of it slows Mama. Imogene’s never been one to stomp around outside after dark, not since she was a little girl. The farmhouse that’s been in Mama’s family for more than 150 years is a modest enough place, not the grand plantation home people imagine. It has white clapboard siding, a screened-in porch, and six-over-six windows flanked by dark green shutters, and is framed by massive oaks. It also has a heavy history that clings like a fog and blurs what might otherwise be a charming picture.
She’d see them, the men who shaped that history, as a child when peeking through the house’s front windows. They were carved into the dark night—the white, ghostly figures with pointed hoods—and carried torches that glowed orange against the pecan trees, trailed smoke, and smelled of kerosene-soaked burlap. She’d hide behind the living room drapes and hold her breath for being so afraid and wanting to be so quiet. Clutching the window ledge, she’d hang there until Mama caught her peeking and chased her away.
And as a teenager, she’d see the men down at the lake. All those same ghostly figures would gather in a circle, arms stretched wide, black eyes tipped toward the sky. First just one man would step forward—it was Daddy, the only one to wear a red robe as leader of the Knights—and touch a torch to the cross and then another and another, all the while shouting about God and country and Klan. In the beginning, Imogene would blame Mama, shouting at her for letting the men march past their house and down to their lake, because there was no one else in the house to blame. And then Imogene realized Eddie and Jo Lynne were both among the ghostly figures, right alongside Daddy, and she never blamed Mama again. That was also when Imogene realized that her having a different daddy was the thing that saved her from the same hate-filled fate as Jo Lynne and Eddie. If Edison had wanted Imogene, not even Mama could have protected her.
“Right up here,” Mama calls out as she rounds the side of the house where Imogene grew up.
“What’s right up here?”
“That there,” Mama says, jabbing at the house with her pointer finger.
A single wire appears from a hole drilled in one of the garage’s window casings, runs down the clapboard siding, and disappears into the ground. It’s an electrical wire that’s been beaten up by time and the weather.
“You talking about the wire?” Imogene says.
“I ain’t told no one else about it,” Mama says, turning her back on the house and looking out toward the lake that lies in the valley to the east. Then she waves Imogene to her, gathers her hands, and squeezes them tight. “Only you. You’re the only one I can tell.”
The lake is an easy walk from the house and is the spot where Daddy and his men would gather. On those nights when Mama would scold Imogene for peeking out the front window to watch the hooded men walk past, long before she was old enough to sneak out and follow them to the lake, Imogene would crawl into bed, pull the quilt up to her chin, and listen for the crackling and popping of the burning cross.
“Only one spot that wire could be going,” Mama says.
“You think it goes to Grandpa’s old place?” Imogene says.
The old house where Grandpa Simmons last lived but that’s been empty ever since he died sits a quarter mile on beyond the main house.
“And I’d like you to take care of it for me,” Mama says, dropping Imogene’s hands and cupping her face again. “Yank it out.”
Mama smells of her stiff white face cream, and her gray, wiry hair hangs loose down to her lower back. And even with the wind whipping around the house, Imogene can hear the quiet ticking of Mama’s heart. It’s the reason Mama spent the whole of the reception in her room, where the few folks who weren’t troubled by her condition could pay their respects. Brought on by a surgery soon after Imogene’s birth, the beating of Mama’s heart, loud enough to hear across a room, is so unfamiliar, folks don’t generally realize what they’re hearing. There’s something entirely unnatural about hearing another person’s beating heart, and folks will be feeling queasy or coming up faint without ever knowing the reason. Imogene is one of the few who isn’t troubled by the never-ending pulse.
“Yank it out?” Imogene says. “I don’t know anything about . . .”
Mama steps away from Imogene and presses her face into the wind. It catches stray strands of her gray hair and blows them across her bright blue eyes. Mama’s shrunk in recent years and grown rounder, but she has always carried herself with good posture and pride. She has had to hold her head up through a good bit during her life, and this wire seems to be another one of those things.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” Mama says.
“No, Mama,” Imogene says, leaning against the house to steady herself because the alcohol is still working on her. It’s that last shot Eddie poured as he was leaving. “It’s a wire. That’s all I see.”
“Now that your father is gone, I want it out. Might not have been able to tend it while he was living, but I sure enough can now. I’m done putting up with his nonsense.”
“We can do that,” Imogene says, stumbling as she pats her pockets for her phone but not finding it. It’s Jo Lynne’s rule for all family gatherings—cell phones go in the basket by the sink. “Let’s get ourselves back inside and I’ll call Eddie. He�
��ll know what to do about it.”
“No,” Mama says.
Her voice is sharp as if she’s angry, but then she ruffles Imogene’s stocking cap and smiles. Mama has never much minded the black stocking cap Imogene likes to wear or her wild red curls that are never quite contained, but Jo Lynne, with her smooth blond hair, clear blue eyes, and perfectly powdered skin, hates nothing more than that cap, except maybe the leather work boots Imogene wears most days. How’ll you ever find another husband, Jo Lynne started asking a few years ago, if you insist on dressing like a lumberjack?
“I’m not trying to upset you, Mama,” Imogene says. “But I still don’t understand. Do you think Daddy ran this wire?”
At Imogene asking this question, Mama straightens her back and lifts her chin. She wakes every morning to a day of tending her garden, a day she’ll spend alone because Imogene is one of a few people who can be in her company without falling ill. But still Mama sees to her hair every day and puts on a sheer pink gloss. She’s kept her pride, and even now with Imogene, she isn’t willing to let it go. If Imogene had Mama’s toughness and dignity, she’d have become a better person after losing Russell and Vaughn. Hardship would have made her stronger, but that hasn’t happened.
“I don’t want Eddie knowing,” Mama says. “Jo Lynne neither. It’ll hurt the both of them. I hate to put this on you just now, but you’re all I got. I need you to do this, Imogene.”
“It gave him privacy,” Imogene says, because she finally understands. “That’s why Daddy was using the old house.”
Mama nods. “I’d be happy if that wire were gone tonight.”
There’s no doubt Daddy had reason to want privacy. There were plenty of other women over the years. You can’t hardly blame the man, Jo Lynne would say, what with Mama’s heart being what it is. And then there was his Klan business. Mama never allowed Daddy’s nonsense in her house, so maybe Daddy was meeting with the Knights down at the old place. That’s what Mama called Daddy’s Klan business . . . nonsense, likely because she couldn’t bring herself to say her husband, the man from Missouri who once whispered to her about gabled roofs and longleaf pine and whom she loved in their early years, had become a member of the Klan. She must have thought things would be different for her and the children she’d eventually have when she married Edison Coulter. He’d had no part in the history Mama had been born under. She must have been happy for a time and thought she had finally escaped, but then her husband, like her father and his before him and his before him, joined the Ku Klux Klan. He became one of its leaders.
“I’ll take care of it,” Imogene says, trying to shake off that last shot and promising herself yet again she’ll do better tomorrow. In the meantime, she can at least do this one thing right. This wire is a leftover of all the things Daddy did to hurt Mama, and Imogene will see to getting rid of it. “Tonight, right now, while I still have light. Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it.”
As much as Mama has always railed against any suggestion Imogene isn’t a real Coulter, she’s never been able to change what’s true. And she’s never told Imogene who her real daddy is, or was. He had been an evil man who attacked Mama and left her in an indecent way. Nine months later, Imogene was born, and her being born is what broke Mama’s heart, literally. That was the story in the beginning. You are what comes from an unholy union, Edison Coulter once said to Imogene, and then he flicked her long, wiry hair and pointed out her ridiculous height. That’s why Mama can ask Imogene to cut out the wire that leads to Edison Coulter’s indiscretions. She’s not a real Coulter, and so it won’t hurt her to hear about his lying, cheating ways like it would hurt Jo Lynne and Eddie. They loved Edison Coulter. Imogene did not. This is also Mama’s way of making Imogene believe she is still needed and of giving Imogene a reason to keep waking up in the morning.
The Origins
On or about December 1865, six Confederate veterans met in a law office in Pulaski, Tennessee, and founded the Ku Klux Klan. Derived from the Greek kuklos, meaning “circle,” the Ku Klux Klan, which was formed as a secret organization, committed violent and deadly attacks aimed at, among other things, intimidating black voters during the Reconstruction era. In 1871, following congressional hearings, a law passed with the intent to stamp out Klan activity. That law, in combination with white Southerners having successfully regained control of Southern state governments—a primary goal of the KKK and one that originally incited the surge in membership—led to a significant reduction in Klan activity.
Chapter 5
TILLIE
Today
Tillie parks in back of his shop and turns off the engine. It’s darker back here for the oaks growing alongside the alley and blocking out the last of daylight. Pushing himself out of the car, he glances toward the end of the alley where the narrow dirt road gives way to the bricked street. It’s empty. Same on the other end. Mrs. Tillie will know he lied when he dropped her at home after the reception and said he was running down to the shop to check he’d turned off all the lights. She always knows.
Earlier in the day, when Tillie and Mrs. Tillie walked into Riverside Baptist for Edison Coulter’s funeral, Mrs. Tillie didn’t know anything about the watches, and so she hadn’t been scared of running into Robert Robithan. She hadn’t been scared of Robert trying to draw Tillie back into the Klan after forty years either. Instead, she’d been scared of the memories that would surely be waiting for them inside the church. It had been five years since they stepped into Riverside Baptist, and only then because they were burying their son and grandson, husband and baby to Imogene.
Forty years ago, Tillie had indeed been a member of the Klan, but he got out, is likely the only fellow who ever did. And since that day, Mrs. Tillie has refused to walk into a house of the Lord in the company of any of them fellows. Riverside Baptist was their place, always had been. It’d be like telling the good Lord that we’re just fine with the things them fellows do. I won’t be saying any such thing to my Lord. Will you, Jean Tillerson? And Tillie told her no. Five years ago, the day they buried their Russell and Vaughn, a day he and Mrs. Tillie still cry about some nights when they’ve set their books aside and turned out the lights, was the only time in all those years they stepped into Riverside Baptist. And they’d only done it then so their boys could be near family.
“Don’t make a fuss,” Tillie whispered when they both saw Imogene standing in the church’s front aisle. She stumbled, righted herself by grabbing on to the back of the pew. It was the whiskey, no doubt, and he couldn’t hardly blame her. He couldn’t hardly blame her for any of it—the drinking, the late nights, not even the random men. Grief was a heavy load, and he couldn’t blame Imogene for doing whatever she had to in order to bear it.
“If ever there was a day that child needed someone to fuss over her,” Mrs. Tillie said, “today is that day.”
Even though that awful first pew had been where they all sat together five years ago, Mrs. Tillie walked straight to it and wrapped Imogene in a hug. They stood like that, rocking to and fro, Imogene with a hand pressed over her eyes, her red hair mostly pulled back, for a good long time. Imogene was a foot taller than Mrs. Tillie, and yet somehow looked small in her arms. Tillie often thought he and Mrs. Tillie were no good for Imogene. They were a bitter reminder, a crutch even. Imogene was a young woman and needed to move on. She even—and with this thought, Tillie choked on a sob—had time to start a new family. But she might never do any of those things, be it out of compassion or shame, as long as Tillie and Mrs. Tillie are near enough to watch it all unfold.
“Pretty near your daughter, ain’t she?” It was Robert Robithan. Tillie had been so all consumed with keeping his grief at bay, he hadn’t noticed Robert walk up.
Back when the Klan was last in its heyday, Robert had been a feared man. Robithans were Klan killers, and everyone knew it. But age and a membership that had been dying off, literally, for years generally silenced Robert and all the Knights of the Southern Georgia Order. They kept up
with lighting their crosses down at the Coulters’ lake, occasionally gathered on the courthouse steps, and spread flyers now and again. But mostly, they communed among themselves, quietly, as they tried not to get dragged into court, a tactic that had effectively destroyed many Klan chapters. They were biding time until they could rise again, because always there was another rising. And in the past year or so, all their waiting had started to pay off. Young men were joining again and propping up the old ways. Timmy Robithan in particular had a gift for spreading their word, and Robert could again be seen cruising through town in his red pickup, just like the old days, one arm slung out an open window. He was making sure folks knew he was back and that the old Klan ways were still alive.
“And don’t your Mrs. Tillie look fine too?” Robert said. He wore boots and black trousers, smelled of a sweet cigar, and his hair, while gray, was thick as ever. “How about you, Tillie? Things good down to the shop?”
“Real fine,” Tillie said, wondering what Robert did or did not know about his son trying to sell his daddy’s most prized possession.
Whatever fading might have happened to Robert in years past, he was back to being a big man with a deep, clear voice. His size had always been his way of making folks take notice. Tim, his son, had the gift for drawing attention too, but he did it with smooth yellow hair and a knack for stoking fears in one sentence while offering up how to soothe them in the next. As Tim slid up alongside his father and rested one hand on Tillie’s shoulder, Tillie wasn’t sure who scared him more—the father or the son.
“Such a sad occasion, Mr. Tillerson,” Tim said, holding tight to Tillie’s shoulder.
