Then I realized Jacob was talking about me. “So if you ask me, I think it’s high time we teach our guest a thing or two,” he was saying. “He needs to know we aren’t just a bunch of ignorant bigots. I make a motion that we give over the rest of our meeting to the proper education of Ben Corbett.”
I looked around and couldn’t believe what I saw. Half a dozen men, in a rough circle, were coming right at me. Then they were upon me, and they had me trapped for sure.
Chapter 78
FEELING SICK TO my stomach now, my brain reeling, I rode in the back of an open farm wagon with Jacob, Byram Chaney, and Doc Conover. I was the one with hands bound behind his back.
Cicadas made a furious racket in the trees, their droning rhythm rising and falling. We were driving south out of town into the swamp, an all-too-familiar journey by now.
I was almost as terrified as I was angry. When I spoke to Jacob, I could barely keep from screaming.
“How could you do this? The one man I thought I could trust!”
“Stay calm, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend,” I said.
“Ben, you can’t help it if you got some mistaken ideas about us,” he said. “You’ll find out, we’re nobody to be scared of. We’re fair-minded fellows, like you. I just ask you to keep an open mind.”
“By going to the swamp to watch you lynch another black man?”
“I said, stay calm.”
After a time we came into a clearing. I could have sworn this was the place where somebody hanged me. Where I almost died. But it was a different spot altogether.
Two men in white robes stood near a crude wooden platform. Between them they held a man in place, with a rope around his neck.
His face was turned away from me.
“Let’s go closer,” Jacob said.
“This is close enough,” I said.
But it wasn’t my decision to make. Byram Chaney lifted his reins and drove the wagon into the clearing for a better view of the murder.
Slowly the man on the platform turned to face the crowd. He was a small man. Frightened. Pathetic. On his nose he wore gold-rimmed spectacles.
The man was white.
Chapter 79
“HIS NAME IS ELI WEINBERG,” Byram Chaney told me in confidential tones. “He’s a crooked little Jew from New Orleans. He talked three different widow ladies out of a thousand dollars each. He was selling deeds to some nonexistent property he said was down in Metairie.”
“And he would have got away with all that money,” Jacob said, “but the fellows found him yesterday, hiding in the out-house at the McComb depot.”
Eli Weinberg decided to speak up for himself. “Those are valid deeds, gentlemen,” he said in a quavery voice.
“What are you doing?” I said. “You can’t hang him, he might be telling the truth!” I felt my whole body shaking. “Why don’t you look into what he says?”
“We did look into it,” said Doc Conover. “We got word from our brothers that he’s been fast-talking his way into towns all over this part of the country.”
“So have him arrested,” I said.
“This is better,” Conover said. “We get the job done, no waiting, no money wasted on lawyers and trials and such. And we let them other Jews know they better think twice before coming to Eudora to steal from the likes of us.”
“The likes of you?” I said. “Hell, you’re all murderers!”
Eli Weinberg heard my voice. He twisted around in the hands of his captors to see who might have spoken in his defense. “Murderers! Yes, that man’s right! You are all murderers!”
Jacob said, “You’re missing the point, Ben. The Klan is here to fight against all injustice. We’re not here just to educate niggers. We’re here to educate anyone who needs educating.”
I narrowed my eyes and shook my head. “You’re crazy, Jacob. You and your friends are just a bunch of crazy killers.”
Eli Weinberg shouted out, “Listen to him! He’s right! You’re all crazy killers!”
Those were the last words he spoke.
Someone jerked hard on the rope, and Eli Weinberg’s body flew into the air. His cheeks inflated. His eyes bugged in their sockets. His face turned an awful dark crimson, then slowly faded to gray. Vomit spilled from his mouth. His body jerked and trembled horribly.
Within seconds he was dead.
A few seconds after that, the brilliant flash of Scooter Willems’s camera illuminated the dark night.
Chapter 80
THE HANGMAN’S BOWIE KNIFE made quick work of the rope. They let Eli Weinberg’s body fall to the ground with a thud. I had seen ailing farm animals put down with more respect.
“You reckon we oughta bury him?” a man said.
“Leave him where he lies,” said Chaney. “He said he had a son in Baton Rouge. We’ll get word to our brothers down there. The son can come fetch him.”
“Jews are supposed to be buried before sundown on the day they die,” I said.
“It figures you would know all about Jews,” said Doc Conover.
Chaney climbed aboard the wagon and took the reins. As we jolted out of the clearing, Jacob reached down to untie my ankles. “Turn around and let me do your hands,” he said.
I will confess it – I felt a wash of relief. They didn’t intend to kill me tonight.
Without any warning a stiff breeze swept over us, along with a spatter of oversized raindrops. The breeze died for a moment, then the rain was on us, lashing us with windy sheets of water.
I noticed that Doc’s wet white robe had become translucent, so I could read his name stitched on the pharmacist’s jacket he wore underneath.
“What you think, Ben?” Jacob asked as the wagon wheels slogged through the mud. “Is the Klan making a little more sense to you now?”
If Jacob hadn’t been a friend my whole life, I would have punched him right then. “Listen to yourself, Jacob. You just killed a man. Do you hear me? You killed him.”
I thought he was going to snap back at me, but the fire suddenly died in his eyes. He shook his head, in sorrow or disgust. He stared down at his callused hands.
“You… will… never… understand,” he said. “I’m a fool to even try. You’re not like us anymore. You don’t understand how things have changed.”
“Let me tell you what else I don’t understand,” I said. “How you – the one I always thought was my friend – how could you do this to me, Jacob? Jacob, I was your friend.”
“I did it to help you,” he said. “To keep you alive.” His voice was weak, pathetic.
The rain was beginning to slacken. The wagon slowed to a stop outside Scully’s barn, where the evening’s festivities had begun.
“Come on, Ben,” Jacob said in a low voice. “Let’s go home.”
“I don’t think so.” I turned away and set off walking in the direction of Eudora.
“Where the hell you going?” he called after me.
I didn’t answer or even look back.
Chapter 81
A SILK BANNER with elegant black letters ran the length of the wall.
WELCOME HOME, BEN
This was the banner that had hung in the dining room for the big family celebration the day I returned from my service in Cuba. Half the town turned out to cheer the decorated Spanish-American War veteran who had distinguished himself under the famous Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.
Now the banner was dingy, the silk stained brown with drips from the leaky roof. I was standing not in my father’s house on Holly Street but in the “long house” out back, a former slave quarters.
It was to the long house that I had come after I left Jacob. It hadn’t housed an actual slave since well before I was born. At the moment it seemed to be serving as a storage room for every piece of castoff junk my father didn’t want in the house.
It was also home to the dogs, Duke and Dutchy, the oldest, fattest, laziest bloodhounds in all of Mississippi. They didn’t even bother to bark when I opened
the door and stepped inside.
I lit an old kerosene lantern and watched the mice scurry away into corners. As the shadows retreated, I realized that all the junk piled in here was my junk. My father had turned the long house into a repository of everything related to my childhood.
The oak desk from my bedroom was shoved against the wall under the welcome banner. Piled on top of the desk were pasteboard cartons and the little desk chair I had used before I was old enough to use a grown-up one.
I lifted the lid of the topmost carton. A musty smell rose from the books inside. I lifted out a handful: A Boy’s History of the Old South, My First Lessons in Arithmetic, and my favorite book when I was a boy: Brass Knuckles, Or, The Story of a Boy Who Cheated.
Next to the desk stood my first bed, a narrow spool one decorated by my mother with hand-painted stars. It was hard to believe I’d ever fit on that little bed.
In the far corner was another pile of Benjamin Corbett’s effects: football, basketball, catcher’s mitt, slide trombone, the boxer’s speed bag that once hung from a rafter in the attic.
I lifted the corner of a bedsheet draping a large object, and uncovered the most wonderful possession of my entire childhood: a miniature two-seater buggy, made perfectly to scale of white-painted wicker with spoked iron wheels. I remembered the thrill it gave me when our old stable hand Mose would hitch up the old mule, Sarah, to my buggy. He would lift me onto the driver’s seat and lead the mule and me on a walk around the property. I must have been all of six or seven.
Before I knew what was happening, I was crying. I stood in the middle of that dark, musty room and let the tears come. My shoulders shook violently. I sank down to a chair and buried my head in my hands. I was finally home – and it was awful.
Chapter 82
A FAMILIAR VOICE brought me out of a deep sleep. These days I came awake instantly, and always with an edge of fear. It was only when I blinked at the two figures smiling down on me that I was able to relax.
“Near ’bout time for breakfast,” said Yvella, my father’s cook. Beside her was Dabney, the houseman. Each held a silver tray.
“Way past time,” said Dabney. “In another hour it’ll be time for dinner.”
Among the items on Dabney’s tray were a silver coffeepot emitting a tendril of steam from its spout and a complete place setting of Mama’s best china.
Yvella’s tray offered just about every breakfast item known to southern mankind: grits, fried eggs, spicy link sausage, homemade patty sausage, griddle cakes with sorghum syrup, a basket of baking-powder biscuits, butter, watermelon pickles, and fig preserves.
“Yvella, you don’t expect me to eat all this?”
“Yes, suh, I sure do,” she said. “You too damn skinny.”
“I have lost some weight here recently,” I said and rolled my eyes.
“Yeah, I heard all about it,” she said.
“How’d y’all know I was here… in the guest quarters?”
“Duke come and told me,” Dabney said.
I realized that I was standing in front of them shirtless, wearing only my drawers. I looked around for my clothes.
“Don’t you worry about it, Mister Ben,” Yvella said. “I seen plenty worse than that. I took your clothes to the wash.”
Dabney brought over a filigreed iron tea table I remembered from Mama’s flower garden.
“I didn’t tell your daddy you’s here,” he said. “I figure you’d want to tell him yourself. But why don’t you come on and sleep in the house, Mister Ben. That big old house just rattling around with hardly nobody in it, you out here sleepin’ with the dogs.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Thank you for the invitation.”
Along with the coffee, Dabney had brought me a straight razor, shaving soap, a tortoiseshell comb and brush, and a stack of fresh clothing – my old clothes, laundered and folded. I was probably skinny enough to fit into them now.
“God bless you both,” I said.
“You the one that needs the blessin’, from what I hear,” Yvella said. “You best keep out of trouble.”
“I will try,” I said. “Listen, I have a favor to ask both of y’all.”
“Your father don’t need to know, and we ain’t gonna tell him,” said Dabney.
“The same goes for me,” said Yvella. “And now I got a favor to ask of you.”
“What is it?”
“Would you eat them damn biscuits before they get cold?”
Chapter 83
AS SOON AS I POURED the last of the coffee, Duke and Dutchy started barking – insistent, urgent, annoying barks. They ran up and down along the wall underneath the cobwebby window.
I went over and was astonished to see Elizabeth in the bushes and with her none other than L. J. Stringer.
I motioned for them to go around to the front door.
“Damn, Ben,” L.J. said, “if we wanted to come through the front door, we would have done it in the first place.”
I shut the door behind them. “How’d you even know I was here?”
They looked annoyed at my stupidity.
“Don’t you think those Klan boys had somebody follow you home last night after their meeting? The whole town knows, Ben. Everybody knows who you are and where you are. All the time.”
I felt stupid. Of course they had followed me.
L.J. straightened. “Ben, let me put it to you as simply as I know how. Your life is in danger.”
“He’s right. Actually, it’s a miracle you’re still alive,” said Elizabeth. She reached out and touched my shoulder, eyes wide with concern.
L.J. spoke in a no-nonsense voice. “People are really angry, Ben. I mean angry. You forget what a small town this is. Folks know you’re up to something, and whatever it is, you ain’t here to make them look good.”
“I don’t have to defend myself, L.J. There’s murder going on in this town. Hell, I’ve seen six people with my own eyes who’ve been murdered, just in the short time since I got here! They nearly killed me, just for seeing what I saw.”
Elizabeth spoke, her voice as gentle as L.J.’s was harsh.
“Ben, these are, or were, your neighbors,” she said. “These are your friends. Most of them are good, decent people.”
“Elizabeth, I don’t see anything decent about men who murder innocent people. You put neighborliness ahead of simple humanity? Forgive me if I disagree.”
I realized that I probably sounded like a defense attorney pleading a case. Another hopeless one?
L.J. seemed to read my mind. “No point in discussing it any further,” he said. “We came here because we’re afraid for you, Ben. We want to try to help. It’s just a matter of time before they come for you again. And hang you good. I’ll figure out some way to keep you safe.”
“Thank you, L.J., Elizabeth. I really do appreciate your concern. More than you can possibly know.”
“Until then, Ben, listen to me. Do not trust anyone. And that means anyone.”
I knew that “anyone” included Jacob Gill, and even my father. It probably meant Dabney and Yvella too. But did it also mean the very people giving me this cautionary advice? Could I trust L.J. and Elizabeth?
“We’d best be on our way,” L.J. said. “Isn’t there a back door out of here?”
I pointed to it.
“Don’t forget what I said, Ben. Keep your head down.”
L.J. opened the little door that let onto the alley. He glanced around, then turned back. “Nobody around. Let’s go, Elizabeth.”
She turned to me with a smile that spoke of her concern.
“Ben, please let us help. We’re your friends. Maybe your only friends.”
Chapter 84
ALMOST MIDNIGHT. Another knock came on the rear door of the long house.
I shot the bolt and the door swung open.
Moody Cross was standing there in a white jumper. And not a little terrified. She pushed past me and slammed the door shut.
“Papaw sent me.”
> “I guess my secret hiding place is the worst-kept secret in Mississippi,” I said.
She was out of breath. “We need help. A lady from the Slide Inn sent her colored girl out to warn us. Said they’s a group of men coming out to kill me and Papaw and Ricky.”
“Who’s Ricky?”
“My cousin, you met him at the funeral. He got run out of Chatawa, where he lived all his life. He been staying with us since you left – you know, like for protection.”
Now I remembered him, a boy about the same age as Hiram, with a family resemblance to Hiram and Moody.
“What happened in Chatawa?” I asked.
“Two white men said they saw Ricky staring at a white woman. Said he was thinkin’ evil thoughts. I guess some white folks can even see inside of a black boy’s brain. There’s this group of ’em – the White Raiders, is what they call ’em up there. They s’posed to be the ones coming to get us.”
This seemed like more than coincidence. The horror raining down upon Abraham’s family simply would not stop, would it?
“There’s something else.”
What else could there possibly be?
“Papaw is sick,” she said. “He can’t get out of his bed, got the fever and the shakes, and Aunt Henry’s been there nursing him.”
Moody started to cry, and I remembered something Mama always used to say: When the time comes you want to start crying, that’s the time to start moving.
It was time for me to go get L.J. and Elizabeth.
Chapter 85
L. J. STRINGER’S six-seater spring wagon flew down the road, stirring the motionless air of a sticky-hot Mississippi night.
“You’re going straight to hell, Ben Corbett, and you’re taking me with you!” L.J. raised his crop to urge on his team.
As soon as I had gotten Moody to stop crying, we’d sneaked over to the Stringer place and surprised the whole household with our late-night knock on the kitchen door. I’d asked L.J. to help me protect Abraham, Moody, and Ricky. He’d listened and he hadn’t hesitated. “I said I’d help you, Ben, and I will.”
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