The Truth Hurts

by Nancy Pickard

  “Too bad we don’t give Purple Hearts to civilians,” I say.

  The men look gratified by my comment, and I’m glad of that.

  I have met the wives of these men previously, on my earlier forays into Sebastion, but only in passing. They are Anne Wiegan, Melinda Reese, Delilah Goodwin, all of whom added a detail or two to my gathering of information about that original picnic and those days, but none of whom I talked to in any depth. The women’s stories hadn’t seemed so entwined with the story of my parents during that final twenty-four hours or so, and so I hadn’t bothered overly much with them. Now I find them to be ordinary small-town southern grandmothers, but ones who grow richly animated when talking of those former, heroic times.

  “I remember your parents,” they say, with great tact, to Nathan.

  “I’ll bet they do,” he murmurs under his breath to me.

  “How have you been all these years, my dear?” they ask me kindly, in one way or another. “Such a tragedy that befell you. You were so young. But I understand you’ve managed to make quite a success for yourself with your writing. That’s just grand. We’re all so happy for you.”

  Both of us, Nathan and I, stumble over ourselves at first, trying to make it clear that we are on their side and not aligned with our parents’ views of the world. It’s almost embarrassing how hard we work to prove we’re on the side of the angels until finally it’s clear that nobody here this evening expects us to be clones of our parents.

  Once we know that, I begin to relax enough to drink too much.

  “Easy on the booze,” Steve warns me, looking censorious.

  “I think it’s too late,” I tell him, with false cheer, and then I even tease him a little, which I would never have done two drinks ago. “You’re the bodyguard. You stay sober.” I’m glad to be a little drunk. I feel as if I’m going to need some false courage to accomplish what I have to do tonight. Then Nathan fusses over me, saying, “What’s going on, Marie? You don’t usually drink this much. Don’t tell me you care what these people think of you.”

  “What’s going on ?” I snap at him. “What do you think is going on? Everything that’s happening—it’s all knocking down my inner fences too fast. I wasn’t ready for any of this. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be in this town, at this party, with these people. I’m not ready for this.”

  Paulie Barnes is forcing my hand, forcing my history, forcing me.

  “May I ask all of you something?”

  Eight faces, plus Steve and Nathan, turn toward me as we sit around the Fishers’ circular table. Candlelight flickers on them, turning aging faces soft and young again, until I can almost imagine I am seeing them as my parents did. The empty plates have been removed, the remnants of the feast cleared away, and now we sit facing one another with coffee, brandy, or some other libation. They’ve all been so nice to me—and the mint juleps have been so potent—that I’m flying high.

  Surely they won’t mind if I ask them what I’m dying to know.

  Anne Wiegan says, “It sounds so funny to hear ‘you all’ pronounced as two separate words. Marie, honey,” she teases, “if you’re going to be spendin’ any time here, we’re gonna have to teach you how to talk right. But you go ahead and ask us what you want to, anyway. We’ll try to understand what you say.”

  Everybody laughs, including me.

  “I’ve brought something with me,” I tell them, feeling nervous in spite of the liquor. “Something I’d like you to read. I have copies for everybody.”

  Nate’s head jerks up, and he looks intensely curious.

  What are you up to now? his expression says to me.

  For an instant my brain clears and I comprehend more fully the nature of just what I’m about to ask them to do. This is no joke. No party game. “I hope this won’t upset or offend you, at least not too much. I realize it’s a lot to ask of you. It’s just that, I have to know. . . .”

  A shift in mood washes across the table.

  With Steve’s help, I pass out the copies that Mo made.

  “What is this?” Clayton Fisher asks, leafing through it.

  “Oh, my God,” Delilah Goodwin says, within two paragraphs of reading it.

  Eulalie looks at me with a raised eyebrow and merely says, “Marie?”

  “I apologize,” I tell them. “I have to beg your tolerance of this and of me. What you are holding in your hands is a purported account of how my parents died. I can’t tell you where I got it, because I don’t know. It was sent to me anonymously. I’m asking you all to read it. I want to know what you think of it.”

  “I can’t read in this light,” Austin Reeves says, fretfully.

  Clayton moves a candle closer to him.

  Nathan, who wasn’t in on this plan, looks pale and upset across the table from me. Steve looks no more or less stoic than usual.

  “Oh, my God,” Delilah breathes again and again as she reads. “Oh, my God, my God . . .”

  Finally, they finish, all of them, and look up at me.

  I ask them bluntly, “Could this be true?”

  Nobody answers that, no one seems to want to break the silence, so I ask another question.

  “Do you recognize anyone from the descriptions in that account?”

  I see Austin and Clayton exchange worried glances.

  “Yes,” Austin says. “All right, yes, I do. You do, too, don’t you, Clayton?”

  Our host nods reluctantly but doesn’t say anything.

  “Who?” Marty demands. “Who do you know in this?”

  Austin looks at him and says, “Think who had relatives in Oregon, Marty. There’s only one person here in Sebastion who had relatives like that in Oregon. You know who I mean, don’t you?”

  “Oh, Jesus, yes.”

  “Tell me,” I beg.

  “What about the crossroads?” Marty asks, ignoring me and turning toward his wife. “Who’s got property by the crossroads?”

  She shakes her head, and even in the candlelight her face looks pale. “I know who you’re thinking of, and so am I. He’s the only person I know who had a farm out by the crossroads, and who also always drove pickup trucks, and who also belonged to the KKK.”

  A gasp comes out of me, but nobody seems to notice.

  “The pickup trucks,” Melinda says then.

  “Yes,” Clayton says. “They all drove pickup trucks.”

  “Who?” I ask them, practically beg them. “Who?”

  “And the land with the caves on it—” Austin says.

  For the first time, Eulalie speaks, sounding infinitely weary. “We all know who you mean, Austin.” She turns her beautiful face toward me. “We all know who these people are,” she says, tapping the papers with her fingers. And to the others, she says, “Let’s face it. It couldn’t be more clear if their very names were spelled out for us.”

  My heart is beating so fast.

  “I’ll swear I would never have thought they were smart enough,” Eulalie says with a sigh.

  “It didn’t take many brains or much courage, either, for that matter,” her husband remarks with a wry twist to his mouth, “to round up a dangerous bunch like the eight of us, and then to ambush two unarmed people on a deserted highway in the dark.”

  Across the table, Marty Wiegan’s face darkens with anger.

  “Then you think this could all be true?” I ask them.

  Around the table, they nod their heads, they murmur affirmatively.

  “You could take this to the sheriff?” I ask them. “Or the FBI? They could issue warrants on these people you’re talking about, and arrest and charge them with the murder of my parents?”

  Marty throws down his napkin onto the tabletop and I hear him curse under his breath. Anne, his wife, who is seated to my right, reaches for my hand to hold. “Marie, I think that I can safely speak for all of us when I say that we all believe that this account may well be true. And we all know exactly to whom it refers. But it won’t do you any good to go looking for any o
f them. We can give you the names, but you won’t have ever heard of them. They were all ignorant, crude men, KKK members, and you won’t even recognize their names.”

  “That’s all right, that won’t stop the police from—”

  “They’re all dead, Marie,” her husband tells me, angrily.

  “Dead? What?” I am confused by this. “How can they all be dead? Were they killed, or something?”

  “No,” Clayton says, speaking coolly enough to nearly sober me. “Nothing like that. These were older men at the time, my dear. They did their bad deeds, they lived their squalid lives, and they died in the usual kinds of ways. Disease, heart attacks, what have you, nothing out of the ordinary. They’re just dead and gone, that’s all.”

  I’m stunned. My parents’ murderers. Dead, themselves.

  “Where’s the justice?” Anne Wiegan asks of no one in particular.

  “But . . . ,” I say, then stop, trying to figure out what my own last question is. “But . . . if you think this story is true . . . and you believe you know who these people, these killers, were . . . and if they were KKK members . . .”

  There is a charged, expectant silence around the table now.

  It is Clayton Fisher who breaks in to state the appalling question for me, to his friends. “Why would the Klan have killed Michael and Lyda if they were all on the same side? And if Michael and Lyda weren’t allied with the Klan, then were they still on our side? And if that’s so, and they weren’t the ones who gave our names away and betrayed us that night, then . . . who did?”

  The couples, old friends, former revolutionaries in their quiet ways, look around the table at one another until finally Austin Reese asks, “Who were the only people who didn’t get either marched downtown or arrested that night?”

  His wife moans and puts her face in her hands.

  “Hubert,” somebody else whispers. “And Rachel.”

  “No,” I hear another person cry. “No!”

  “Why would they? Of all people?” Eulalie demands. “Why would they?”

  “There may have been some private grudge that we don’t know about,” her husband suggests. “Or maybe for money.”

  “I don’t know about the grudge part,” she argues back at him, “but I certainly don’t believe it could have been for money. Because if it was, where did it go? As far as I can tell, Hubert and Rachel have never been anything but poor.”

  “I didn’t say it had to be a lot of money,” he gently points out. “Jesus himself was betrayed for a mere thirty pieces of silver.”

  “What shall we do?” Marty asks them suddenly.

  “I’ll see the sheriff in the morning,” Clayton says. He pats the copy of the story I forced them to read. “I’ll take this with me.”

  “Not so fast, Clayton,” Lackley Goodwin says. “You can’t just go charging in there accusing people of murder, not even dead men, not even those dead men. We’ve got to think about this some more. If we go accusing people, we’ve got to do it coherently, we’ve got to have all the answers to all the questions that are going to get raised.”

  “Like what?” Austin asks him.

  “Well, for one thing, why would they only embarrass us, but then kill Marie’s parents? I mean, we didn’t even get arrested! Did they hate Michael and Lyda more for some reason? Were Michael and Lyda a bigger threat to segregation than we were?”

  “It was Michael who started Hostel, remember,” Clayton reminds them in his most authoritative banker’s manner, and nobody contradicts the frank and painful things he says next. “He sniffed out the liberals among us and recruited every one of us. I think we all have to admit that Michael was our guiding light. Would we ever have started such a thing without him? There’s a simple answer to that, whether it flatters us or not, and that answer is a no. Would we have reestablished it without him? We did not, did we? Time has already told the truth of that. When they removed Michael they removed our brain, and when they killed Lyda, they took the heart clean out of us. Lyda was our passionate one, wasn’t she? She was a burr under the saddles of the bigots from the time she was a little thing.”

  “How could my father stand to teach there?” I blurt, wanting to know what I’ve always wanted to know. “How could any of you?”

  Lackley Goodwin nods, as if he understands my total incomprehension. “When you live in the water, Marie, you’ve got to swim. We would have been working in racist environments any where we went, not just at Jim Forrest. But since we were there, it was superb cover—”

  “I knew it,” I whisper.

  “We thought that no one,” he continues, “would ever suspect two teachers and a couple of administrators from Jim Forrest—”

  “And one banker from town,” Clayton interjects.

  “Hubert says that my father got a phone call that night,” I tell them. “It sounds as if it was a warning, but who would have known to call them?” I look over at Eulalie. “I think that’s why they didn’t go to your party that night, Eulalie. I think they were planning to be here, but then my dad got that phone call.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a warning call,” Austin Reese says, slowly, as if he’s thinking out loud.

  “What do you mean, Austin?” Delilah asks him.

  “I mean, maybe it was intended to get Michael and Lyda scared and running, so that then they could be ambushed outside of town.”

  Theirs is a sudden appalled silence, into which I toss the question, “Why didn’t they take me with them?”

  “I’m sure they meant to come back for you, child,” Eulalie says.

  “Well, then, if they couldn’t do that, why not just leave me in the house with the people who worked there, or send me home with Rachel? Why leave me in a rundown motel where anything could happen to me?”

  “If they were running from the Klan,” Lackley Goodwin tells me, “they’d have likely been scared their house might be torched that night, and they wouldn’t have wanted to get any of their black employees into trouble, either. They couldn’t very well have sent you home with Rachel or with Hubert, because they were Hostel members, too.”

  Delilah adds, gently, “I’m a mother, Marie, although my children are grown. But if I thought that somebody was going to come looking for Lackley and me to kill us, the last thing I’d want is to have our children with us. And if on top of it, I didn’t have much time to plan what to do with them, why then I just don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Why not leave me with Julia and Joe?” I persist.

  “Because—” Anne Wiegan suddenly glances at my cousin, who has sat through this without saying a word. When Nate catches her glance, he saves her from having to answer.

  “Because,” he says, “my parents might not have helped them.”

  We all sit for a moment with that awful realization.

  “Was the motel Hubert’s idea?” somebody asks then.

  None of them seems to know. I interviewed Hubert, but that was a question I didn’t think to ask him. They suspect it doesn’t matter who had that idea, however, and I agree with them.

  “I’ll bet it was Hubert,” Anne Wiegan says, and then sounding infinitely sad, she adds, “at least he thought to spare the baby.” She looks directly at me, and I see in the candlelight that tears are running down her face. “I loved your parents dearly, Marie. I grew up with your mother, she was always one of my best friends, but she always seemed special somehow. She thought bigger than the rest of us, she did bigger things, she was braver and bolder than I could have ever hoped to be. When she brought your father home with her, I thought he was the perfect man for her. At first, I thought he was unfriendly, as if he thought he was too smart and sophisticated for the likes of us, but when you got to know him he was the kindest, most honest man, he really was. That’s why it was so shocking when it seemed they had betrayed us. I didn’t think I’d ever get over the hurt of that. And now it pains me more than I can say to find out that we were the ones who betrayed them, all along, by not believing in them. We shoul
d have known,” she cries to the others. “We should have known that Michael and Lyda simply couldn’t do that.”

  “But the FBI said it was them!” Delilah says. “Clayton, isn’t that what that FBI friend of yours told you?”

  Across the table from her, he nods, looking grim.

  “The Feebs always have their own agendas,” Marty says, darkly.

  “What should we do now?” somebody asks, for all of them.

  “I want everyone to read and reread this carefully,” Clayton directs, taking unquestioned charge now. “Make notes. Write down anything that supports what we believe to be true. We’ll meet tomorrow night to decide exactly what we’re going to say and to whom we’re going to present it.”

  “Where?” Austin asks him. “Do you want us here again?”

  “At the inn,” Marty suggests. “I’ll tell Mo to put on some coffee and save us the parlor.”

  “We owe it to Marie,” his wife says, looking directly at me.

  “No,” I tell them, my voice quavering for the first time. They aren’t the only ones who are feeling guilty, but at least I have the excuse that I never knew my parents, or only knew them through the memories of people like these. “Nobody owes me anything. We owe it to my parents.”

  At the door, when the “party” finally breaks up, Eulalie folds me in her arms and whispers, “Oh, my God in heaven, can you ever forgive us?”

  28

  Marie

  “There’s at least one thing wrong with their theory,” Steve tells Nate and me as we all walk back to the inn following the party. His unemotional tone has an astringent quality that sharply cuts into the wallow of emotions that the booze and the amazing evening have left me in. “It’s fine to identify the men who killed your parents. That’s one thing. But if they’re all dead, then who sent that story to you?”

  “Who is Paulie Barnes, in other words,” I say, slowly.

  “Yeah,” Steve says. “And what’s his connection to all this?”

  “And why,” my cousin adds, “did he bring you here . . . why did he bring me here?”

  “To reveal the names of the killers?” I guess.