“I’m jus scared.”
“Scared of what? You didn’t beat him up. In fact, you probably saved his life.”
“Just scared a the cops. I mean, I’m thinkin maybe they think I did it or somethin.”
“That’s stupid. Why would you beat up Mr. Paul?”
“I’m jus sayin you never know what the cops is gonna do, is all. Better off sayin as little as possible.”
I picked up the tent and wrapped the pole lines around it and led him into the kitchen.
“I’m headin back now, I guess,” Buzzy said.
Audy Rae smiled and brought out a huge bag of leftovers from our last three dinners. “Take these to your momma,” she said.
He nodded thanks.
“Let me go wake up Dr. Peebles so he can drive you.”
“No, ma’am. I’m gonna walk.”
Audy Rae didn’t press the issue; she just smiled and went back to her kitchen work.
I showed him out to the empty front porch. “I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”
“Yup,” he replied and walked quickly off the porch steps. About halfway down Chisold Street he turned and looked at me. I raised my hand to a wave. He gave back a halting half wave that seemed to be pulled right back down to his side by the weight of what he had seen. He turned, broke into a run, and was gone.
Chapter 15
INTO RICH AND SPLENDID WINGS
I was dozing on the porch a few hours later when Audy Rae came out of the door carrying flowers and a foil-covered casserole dish. “I’m off on an errand, be back in a few hours,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m off to see Paul in the hospital and give Paitsel this shepherd’s pie… he loves my shepherd’s pie.”
“Can I come?”
She nodded. “Just tell your Pops what you’re doing.”
Pops had been sleeping all morning, and it was now well past noon. I ran into the house and up the stairs. His room was all the way at the end of the hall. I tiptoed past my mother’s closed door. The wood floor creaked under my weight. Pops’ door was slightly ajar. I pushed it open just enough to slip inside.
He was there on the four-poster bed, stripped down to boxer shorts and T-shirt—one arm over his eyes to shield the day, mouth slightly agape. I watched as his chest rose and fell ever so slowly. The headboard of the bed had the same intricate carvings as the wardrobe in the attic. On his nightstand was an old photo of my grandmother by a lakeside with a handful of sand ready to throw at the picture taker.
On the other nightstand was their wedding picture—Pops dashing in his Lexington store suit, Sarah Winthorpe dazzling in a white satin dress.
I stood at the side of the bed, just watching him breathe; a slight smile came to his face and I backed away slowly, so as not to disturb the dream that was producing it. I found a notepad and a pencil on his dresser, jotted my plans, and left the note on the bed.
Audy Rae was already in Pops’ truck with the engine started. She had put the seat as far up as it could go, and I pulled myself into the cab with my legs pushed sideways. “Sorry about the tight squeeze, Kevin. I seem to be shrinking with the years.” She sighed and backed out of the driveway slowly, looking both directions twice before gingering into the street. We passed Green Street and I couldn’t help but look down to the alley, now covered with police tape, a sheriff’s car still parked on the road. We picked up speed after the abandoned stores in town and shot over the last hill before the highway. The cab was quiet except for the sound of the old engine firing. We passed an abandoned church and Audy Rae began softly humming.
“What’s that song you’re humming?” I asked to break my silence.
“Oh, it’s just an old gospel song my daddy taught me years ago. When I drive out this way I think of him and sing it.” She broke into an abounding voice that sounded like a track from an old movie.
Hail, Brother Jesus, send me hope and grace
Make me a brilliant angel to lead them from this place
Make these simple shoulders, in an effortless embrace
Into rich and splendid wings
“He’s buried out at the church we just passed,” she said. “It’s closed now, but all the graves are still there. I go out once a week and tend to it and the others.”
“How old were you when he died?” I asked, not wanting to stir up sad memories but curious about her life.
“A little older than you, sixteen. Left me and my momma struggling, but we managed. She’s still going strong, probably live to be a hundred.”
“How did he die?” I asked tentatively.
“He was killed in the mines. It was dangerous work back then, especially for black folk. Our men had to do all the jobs that the white folks refused. My daddy’s job was setting explosives deep in the shaft, and one day his charge exploded before he could get out.”
“I’m really sorry, Audy Rae.”
She looked over at me and smiled, then gave my knee a squeeze.
We were silent for a few minutes. “I can’t believe what they did to Mr. Paul,” I said to myself as much as to Audy Rae. I looked over at her.
She shook her head and let out a resigned breath. “It is an evil as big as I’ve ever seen. There ain’t nobody I know more gentle and caring than Mr. Paul. It’s a tragic day for this town… a tragic day indeed.” Her eyes were welling.
“He’s been telling me stories about Grandma, Mr. Paul has,” I said after some silence.
“Has he now,” she replied. “Paul and Miss Sarah were good friends. When she first moved into town, he was one of the few who took to her right away.”
“Did the other people not like her at first?”
“It wasn’t that… She was just different than any other woman in town. Didn’t take sass from nobody. Spoke her mind to the men.” Audy Rae laughed at the memory. “She was a handful, I will tell you that, but she won folks over pretty quick.”
We drove past the shuttered urinal-mint factory, then onto Route 17 toward Glassville.
“He told me about the time that she slapped that man and saved that girl.”
“Oh, I remember that one very well.”
“You saw it too?” I said with surprise.
She hesitated. “I did indeed.”
“I mean, that took guts just walking up and slapping the guy.”
“She had nerve, your grandmother—couldn’t abide injustice of any kind.” Audy Rae shook her head slowly, “Mmm, mmm, mmm… I remember that day like it happened yesterday. Must be nigh on thirty-eight, thirty-nine years. She saved a life that day.”
“How did she save a life?”
“Cause those men were gonna kill that girl.”
“He didn’t say that.” I was skeptical that anyone in a town like Medgar would do such a thing to a kid, but after Mr. Paul, I wasn’t so sure.
“Those men were taking that girl away and were gonna kill her for sure.”
“How do you know?”
“Some things you just know and you can’t explain why you know em,” she said, and turned back to the road and began humming again. I was silent for a while thinking of Mr. Paul and my grandmother. At the rise of the next hill was an old redbrick building. A sign announced, Glassville General Hospital.
“I wish I could have known her… my grandmother,” I said as we pulled into a parking space.
Audy Rae put the car in park and turned sideways to face me. She reached out and put her rough hand on my cheek and let out a long slow breath. “It’s a nice thing to think about, child, but don’t spend all your wishings on things that can’t ever be.”
As we walked into the hospital, my mind jolted to my father rushing into the emergency room holding Josh’s limp body in his arms—me right behind him negotiating the wake of death smells. My father screaming for help and a nurse intern dropping a metal tray and bringing her hands to her face. “Oh my God,” she said when she saw his destroyed bundle. Him screaming again when no doctor or nurse appea
red. The toddlers in the waiting room who started crying from his shouts. Mom wandering in behind us, her quintessence taken in flames.
Mr. Paul was unrecognizable in the bed of the intensive care unit at Glassville General—face a swollen mass of purple flesh and blood-soaked bandages; drain hole drilled into the top of his head to relieve pressure from a bruised and swollen brain. A ventilator hissed and groaned and his chest heaved with it in a terrible death rhythm.
Paitsel was sitting next to his bed speaking gently as we entered. “… said she’s gonna open the salon for you tomorra and is gonna do all your appointments til you come back.” His voice was deep and steady. Audy Rae knocked gently on the open door. “Oh, look who it is, Paul. Audy Rae and Kevin. Please come on in. I was just tellin Paul that Mary Alice is gonna take over the salon til he gets back. He’s true bout keepin appointments, you know.”
I stood awkwardly in the room, not quite knowing what to do next. He stretched out a hand. “It’s good to see you again, Kevin.” I took it silently.
“How’s he doing, Paitsel?” asked Audy Rae.
“Well, Paul’s workin hard to get that darn swellin down. Aren’t you, Paul?” Paul’s eyes were shut tight, chest rising with each thrust of the ventilator. He didn’t seem to be working on much of anything, except dying.
Audy Rae went to the bathroom to fill an extra plastic water pitcher. She placed the flowers she had brought in it, then put the pitcher on the empty windowsill.
“We’re takin a trip to Louisville tomorra, aren’t we, Paul? The doctor there is gonna fix us up right, get all that swellin down, he is.”
Pops and I were alone on the porch that night. It had rained in the early evening for the first time in a month, and the air smelled like sweet asphalt.
“Napoléon was not a large man, you know,” he said to start the night’s conversation. “Barely stood five-six.” Despite the events of yesterday, I think Pops was determined to continue our routine so that some trace of normalcy came back into our lives.
“How did he get on his horse, then?” I asked, thinking he must have ridden a pony.
“He had wooden steps that his assistants brought with them everywhere. But his problem wasn’t the size of his body; it was the size of his ego. Like most tyrants he didn’t take advice from anybody. Kept pushing on to Waterloo.”
“Why did he always have his hand in his shirt?”
Pops sniffed. “Dirty fingernail, I suspect. People never bathed back then.”
“He must have stunk.”
“Well, everybody stunk in those days, so it was okay. Body odor is only a problem if you’re the only one who has it.”
Audy Rae opened the screen door, affixed her walking-home hat, and pulled her summer sweater tight around her shoulders. “See you gentlemen tomorrow,” she said sadly and padded down the stairs, out past the streetlamp. We watched her disappear around the corner.
“Have you ever met Audy Rae’s family?” I asked after a while.
Pops stopped spinning his sour mash. “Of course I have. Audy Rae and her family are almost like my own.”
“Is she married? Does she have any kids?”
“She and Frank have been married for over thirty years. He works over at the printing plant in Glassville. They raised four great kids. Tilly is in school in Raleigh and the boys are all spread out. Raymond’s a lawyer in Atlanta; Frank Jr. lives in Baltimore—sells insurance, I think—Curtis teaches school in New York City. As solid a family as you’ll ever know.”
“We were talking about that black girl that Grandma saved, Audy Rae and I.”
“Were you now,” he said, spinning mash.
“She said they were going to kill her. Is that true? Did Grandma really save her life?”
“That’s an open question. I don’t think so, but Audy Rae is convinced of it.”
“Why? What did she ever do to them?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Why would they try and kill her? Were they ex-cons or something?”
“No, they were from old-time Missi County families.”
“They just must be evil.”
“Evil? I don’t think I’d go that far. However, what they tried to do to that girl was certainly evil. I’d classify them as just scared, insecure, uneducated rednecks raised by scared, insecure, uneducated rednecks. It’s kind of a pattern in these parts.”
“But if they’d killed that girl they would’ve gone to prison, right?”
“Probably not.”
“Why?”
“Well, you gotta know the history. That girl’s daddy was one of Medgar’s leading black citizens, respected by blacks and whites alike. He was also the former Kentucky heavyweight boxing champion seven years running. A big, powerful man. About a year before the slapping incident a few of those men had attacked that girl. She was walking home alone through the woods and they must have seen her. They tore off most of her clothes, probably were gonna rape her, but she fought back like a panther as they beat on her. Somehow she managed to escape and ran home to her daddy. Now, Lucas was a proud, decent man, but he had a crazy temper. When he saw what those men did to his daughter, he went wild. He had had run-ins with a couple of them before and he knew the law wasn’t going to do much about it. Three white men beating up a black girl with no witnesses—forget it. A few nights later he lay for two of them and beat them to a bloody pulp. They arrested Lucas but couldn’t prove anything since it was at night and neither man could remember much anyway. Besides, most folks in town thought those two had it coming, so the whole thing just blew over. Six months after that, Lucas Steptoe was killed in the mines. Whether he was murdered or died accidentally, we’ll never know. But after he passed, those men—boys really, barely out of their teens—started getting bolder, following the girl around and saying rude things, strutting round town like fighting cocks. I don’t doubt they would have raped her, but I don’t think they’ve got killing in them. Anyway, they were trying to force her into their truck right out in front of Hivey’s when Sarah saved her with that slap.”
“Whatever happened to him? The one she slapped.”
“Oh, he’s still around causing trouble. You met him the other night. Gov Budget’s his name.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “He’s the one?”
“Indeed he is,” Pops said and took a sip of his sour mash.
“He’s the one that beat up Mr. Paul.”
“We think he is… or put someone up to it.”
“But you told the sheriff that. I heard you.”
“Me saying it and Zeb proving it are two different things.”
I was silent for a while thinking about my grandmother and how Gov Budget’s face must have shot sideways at impact. “Audy Rae said she saw the whole thing,” I said, as much to fill in the silence as anything else.
Pops paused and leaned toward me with his sour mash cradled in both hands, fingers interlocked under the glass. “Kevin, that black girl Sarah saved was Audy Rae.”
I sat back in my chair, stunned. Why hadn’t she told me?
Pops continued, “After the ‘slap heard round the county,’ Sarah gave Audy Rae a job working for us. Did all the cleaning and sewing, just about anything else she could.”
“Weren’t you afraid that Gov and the others would try to hurt her again or do something to Grandma?”
“No… those men are classic cowards and bullies. Besides, that slap set the whole town talking for months; if they had tried anything, they would’ve probably been jailed out of respect for Sarah.”
We were silent for most of the next hour as I let the revelation about Audy Rae and Gov Budget sink in. At eight thirty, Sheriff Binner’s car pulled to the curb. He worked his way up to the steps, took them one at a time, then eased into one of the wicker chairs. He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the new sweat around his neck.
“What do we know?” Pops asked after he settled himself.
“We know that Gov Budget’s outta
town. Down in Johnson City—Rachel’s brother is racing on the dirt down there. Whole family went down for it. Sen too.”
“Sen went with him?”
“He did. No one’s up the holler cept Lucille an that whole raggle a kids.”
“When did they leave?”
“Two days ago. It’ll be easy to check out.”
Pops was chewing furiously on his pipe end. After a while he said, “Had to have put someone up to it.”
Zeb Binner took a cigar out of his breast pocket and lit it. “Thinkin is easy; it’s the provin what’s hard. An on that score we got a lick a nuthin.”
Chapter 16
TWO HEARTS BEATING EACH TO EACH
The next morning was driving rain and a chill that spoke of late fall rather than midsummer. Audy Rae had taken the morning off to clean Mr. Paul’s house, so Pops and I decided to stop into Biddle’s for breakfast before a morning of calls around the county.
We rattled onto Main Street, the old wipers on Pops’ truck leaving a frowning streak of water on every cycle. There were two cars in Biddle’s parking lot as we pulled in.
Hank Biddle bought the place in 1965, two months after Miss Janey’s opened. Pops said he was semiretired now, which wasn’t difficult, since business was off by two-thirds. Charlie Swanson, the cook, leaned on the counter. “What’s the latest with Paul? It’s all everybody’s been talking about this morning. How bad is it?”
“Bad. They are taking him to Louisville today to a brain specialist.”
“Who the hell would want to hurt Paul? Nicest man in the county, I think.”
“Been thinking about that all night. Don’t have any answers, but I’ve got some ideas.”
I excused myself to find the toilet and caught snippets of similar conversations in the few filled booths as I walked to the bathroom.
“… his brain so swelled up they hadda drill a hole in the top a his head,” from booth three. “Heard he’s gonna be fine, though.”
“… brungt me the eggs in a nice basket ever mornin. He an Paitsel got eight in the roost back there…,” from booth five.
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 15
