by David Stout
“Mason Funeral Home in Columbia,” Willop repeated, scribbling in his excitement. “Any street address?”
“None here. ’Course, that outfit might not even exist anymore, it being that long ago. Black only funeral home, no doubt.”
“Any other information?”
“Linus Bragg. Height five feet one inch, weight ninety-five pounds. Eyes maroon. Can that be right? Five-one and ninety-five pounds? Born December twenty-ninth, 1929 … Why, shit, that didn’t make him but …”
“Fourteen,” Willop said.
“Damn. What’d he do to get the chair that young?”
“Some people say he killed two little white girls. In a little dinky place an hour or so east of here.”
“Damn. Sure way for a colored to get the chair back then. That’s all the information we have here.”
“You’ve helped me a lot. Anything else you can tell me? Anything at all?”
“Got a picture of the little bugger if you want to drop in and take a look.”
Jim Baker was a big man with an unfashionable crew cut, beefy ears, and a face the color of ham. His smile was toothy and broad and his handshake just short of crushing.
Willop thought Jim Baker was friendly in part because he was completely confident about his physical appearance. He envied him.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Willop,” Jim Baker said.
“Same here.” Willop thought Jim Baker’s eyes measured him for a moment, but they were friendly eyes all the same.
“What’s your interest in the little fella here, if you don’t mind my asking?” Baker said, putting a tan envelope on the counter in front of Wallop.
“Oh, a little history, a little research into the past. Nothing much more.”
Jim Baker said nothing, for which Willop was relieved. He opened the envelope and took out the picture.
An ordinary face, an ordinary colored boy (looking at the picture from so many years ago, Willop would not have thought to call him black, or even a Negro), an ordinary expression. No, not quite ordinary. There was a hint of sullenness, a hint of despair.
“Young-looking, ain’t he?” Baker said. “And small. Look how them prison clothes hang off his shoulders.”
“This was taken just before he was executed,” Willop said.
“Yep. I wasn’t even around then. Long damn time ago.”
“Long time,” Willop said. He stared at the picture, but no matter how intently he stared, the picture remained just what it was: a slightly overexposed prison mug shot in tones of gray that softened an already soft, boyish face that had neither edges nor guile.
“Killed two little girls?” Baker said.
“So they say. I got the Columbia paper to send me a couple of clips. Stories from back then say he killed them near some tracks where they were picking flowers.”
“He was after a little somethin’, was he?”
“So they say.” One could certainly not tell by looking at the picture that here was a boy (and a killer?) with a burgeoning sexuality so fierce that it had driven him to slaughter two innocents. But then, Willop thought, one never knew.
“I could get that copied for you,” Baker said.
“I guess not.” Willop thought he could look at the picture for an hour and not learn anything more. A moment from long ago, crystalized forever. Willop wondered what the boy behind the face in the picture had been thinking; wondered if the boy imagined, even for a moment, that someone would be looking at his face all these years later and wondering.
“Tell you what,” Baker said. “I got a few other things to do now, but if you want, you can sit down here and use the phone. Just go easy on any long-distance calls. Okay?”
“That’s very nice. I just might make one or two local calls.”
Willop did, and found that there was no Mason Funeral Home, and that the Funeral Directors Association had no record of one in recent years. Then he called the state archives department and found that there was nothing on file about a criminal case involving one Linus Bragg from more than forty years ago.
“Now, that isn’t really too surprising,” said an archives employee, a man who sounded middle-aged and knowledgeable. “If there was no appeal filed, and if there was an execution fairly soon afterwards, most likely the material was just thrown out.”
“Well, I am ninety percent sure there was no appeal,” Willop said.
“Then I’m sure there’s nothing still around here. Maybe in the county where it happened, though. See, if the lawyer, whoever he was, had appealed, why then a transcript would have been preserved. I mean, the lawyer himself would have ordered up the transcript, and then there would have been all sorts of additional paperwork generated. But without an appeal …”
“I see.”
“Of course, without an appeal, it all became pretty academic to the fellow who was executed,” the archives man said, chuckling at his little joke.
“Thanks anyhow,” Willop said, hanging up without laughing in return.
There were no more phone calls to make. It was late afternoon (Jim Baker would be closing up shop soon), and the Scotch Willop had drunk was beginning to wear off. It was definitely time to go.
“Thank you for everything,” Willop said, shaking hands with Baker.
“Just doing my job. Good luck in your research.”
Willop wanted to say something more to Jim Baker, to tell him that if more people were like him, the world would be a much better place. Then Willop canceled his own notion. He really didn’t know Jim Baker at all, certainly didn’t know how he talked about nonwhite folks outside the office.
Besides, for all he knew, Jim Baker’s parents would have been glad to kill Linus.
Late afternoon. Too soon to go to bed, too late to start a drive into foreign territory, to the hamlet where Linus Bragg had lived. Willop stopped at a mom-and-pop store, bought a prepackaged ham sandwich and two cans of soda to go. On his way back to the hotel he stopped at a drugstore and bought a newspaper. Only after he’d tucked the paper under his arm did he realize he had just obeyed an old habit that was no longer relevant: As a newspaperman, he had always bought a paper whenever he was in a strange city, just to compare it to the New York papers and to the Newark Tribune.
Now he was an unemployed newspaperman, the Tribune having gone belly-up the week before. Willop mocked himself: Hey, maybe I should stop at the Columbia paper and see about a job. No, if they turned me down, it would just activate the butterflies in my stomach.
Back at the hotel, he chewed the ham sandwich slowly, sipped on the soda, and decided he needed to talk to Moira. So he went down to the lobby and called her collect.
“Hi.”
“James. I was hoping you’d call. I guess you got there safe and everything.”
“Yep. I’m in Columbia. At a hotel you might call … unpretentious. Just for tonight.”
“Get a good night’s sleep if you can.”
“Do my best. Anything new?”
“Well, the Mayor called me at work. He was very nice. Said again that if he could do anything to help …”
“He already told me that. Damn, he sure knows how to keep up the pressure.”
“That’s why he’s a politician. It’s your choice.”
“May not have one.”
“Put it out of your mind for now, as much as you can.”
“You’re right, again.”
He told her about Baker and the picture of Linus Bragg and made the hotel sound a little better than it was. She told him it had turned colder up north. She said she could hear rain lashing the window of her apartment. He didn’t know if that made him feel closer to her, or farther away.
They said good-bye and he went back to his room. After a few minutes, he thought he had read all of the paper that he cared to read, so he poured himself a little Scotch. He lay down, sipped the drink, and remembered that he had not studied the editorial page, something he always did with an out-of-town paper. He picked up the paper again, but befo
re his fingers had even found the right section, he reminded himself that he had no professional reason to read it.
He threw the paper toward the wall; it fluttered apart in mid-air and fell to the floor. Damn …
He knew he was lucky: It was a lot easier to find a new job in your early thirties than in your early forties, or fifties. He knew of Tribune people who would have to tell their sons and daughters they weren’t going back to college next fall.…
Willop took another sip and tried to relax as his head sank into the pillow. God, what a day that had been. Talk about your world changing …
He had played golf that morning with Newark Mayor Delmar Springs, fascinated as always by the Mayor’s smooth, powerful swing and his seemingly effortless way with people. About halfway through the front nine, a white golfer had shouted a greeting to the Mayor from an adjoining fairway.
“Say what?” Springs shouted back, smiling and waving. Then he turned back to Willop and the smile disappeared. “He sells stationery. Wants to do business with the city. He asked me if I wanted to join his club, too.”
“Might be a better course than this,” Willop said.
“Fuck it. My father used to caddy for him, long time ago. He never would have invited me to join twenty years ago, now would he?”
“I guess not.”
“In golf and life both, you gotta avoid the unplayable lies.”
That blend of idealism and bitterness had attracted Willop to Springs and made his offer so seductive. The Mayor was in his early forties, honest as well as calculating, charismatic and had built a solid constituency among whites as well as blacks. Whether he ran again for Mayor or, as Willop thought more likely, ran for Congress, he would need a full-time, shrewd press spokesman. Of course, if he ran for Congress and won …
Willop knew that Moira had wanted him to take the offer, or at least consider it. The offer had been tempting even before that day on the golf course.
Willop had been on the ninth green, near the clubhouse, standing over a two-foot putt that would have given him a forty-nine. As he studied the green, he was vaguely aware that one of the Mayor’s errand boys had driven up and called Springs aside. The messenger whispered something into the Mayor’s ear, and the Mayor walked over toward Willop, stopping a few feet away. Willop looked at him, and saw something in his eyes.
“Something wrong?”
“Sink your putt, man,” the Mayor said.
“What is it?”
“Go on, make it.”
But Willop saw something in the Mayor’s eyes, and the Mayor knew he saw it, and so he picked up Willop’s ball. “That’s a gimme, man.”
“Okay, what the hell’s going on?”
“Your paper just died.”
The Scotch wasn’t treating Willop too badly, so he poured himself a little more, lay down on the bed again, and took a short sip.
Actually, the Tribune’s folding shouldn’t have been a big shock. The paper had been slipping for a decade or more, unable to keep a solid city-based readership and unable to cultivate a loyal suburban following as the Newark area changed. Willop knew he should have planned better, should have left the Tribune for a more solid paper, should have been bolder.…
Of course, Moira was kind of stuck in Newark, at least for the time being. She was an assistant at Legal Aid, and until she saved enough to go to law school …
His first thought, after hearing Springs’s words, were that his housing series would never be published. He had worked on it for weeks, had honed and polished and rechecked every fact, every paragraph. And he had plumbed his conscience, making sure that he was not being too easy on the administration of Delmar Springs.
It was the best reporting job he had ever done. It might have won him a prize if it had been published. Now, it existed only in the form of a computer printout he had sneakily made in the Tribune’s funereal city room the afternoon of the closing.
Willop gulped the last of the Scotch in the glass and vowed that the drink would be his last of the day.
He had said guilty good-byes to the Tribune people he liked best—guilty because he had told them he might stop in at the neighborhood bar that served as the Tribune watering spot, when actually he had no intention of doing so. He detested the cliché of the newspaper wake.
All Willop had wanted to do that afternoon was empty his desk and leave the Tribune. Why stay close to a corpse? So, still in his golf clothes, he had sat at his desk, dumping the contents of the drawers into a wastebasket. But first, from the back of the top drawer, the one he always kept locked, he took out an envelope. It was a white, business-size envelope (at least it had been white; it was gray now with age and finger smudges), and it was addressed to “My Son James.” It had been written more than twenty years before, when he was a schoolboy, by his mother, and only given to him after her death. The fold lines of the writing paper were sharp-edged from the years.
James,
I write this for you to keep and save till someday you be able to act. Even tho your smart (the teachers sayd your english is good, which I am very proud of becase it is so important) you probly wont understand this whole thing now becase your to young. That is why I will not show this to you now but keep it till you are older but I belief i must put words down now. I am remembring how my own mother passed away and how surprised I was when she did. We dont always know when things take place. So I write now when I have time. When I was little girl I lived near a place in South Carolina where they cut wood. It was very peaseful and quiet, way out by a swamp and away from most people. We did not have to much but we were happy most times, our folks and me and my brothers, Linus and Will. You will never see your uncle Linus on this earth becase he be in Heaven.
They kill him for a thing he did not do. They say he killed two little girls over near where they cut wood but we know in our hearts he did not. He never had chance to show it and our folks, they not unerstand how it can be. Linus so young. He not to much older than you when this be taken place.
No one care then, it was the war and all and no one know what happen way out there by the mill away from every one. No one care, but our mother and father never same after, they put us on big train and send us up north away from every one with hate in there hearts for us.
We never go back to that little peaseful place where there so much hate for us. Hate for something he not do. May be some day you can find out The Truth and tell every one. This so much to ask you to take up, such a load, but I feel you can. I feel I must say, or no one will know. Your uncle Will is not the one, he not have a head like God bless you with. He who God give most to, he carry bigger load. My mother say that, long before she die.
My feeling bigger than words I can use. Some day you unerstand more on why I ask this of you and just know for now I love and am proud of you. I hope it be a time before you see this, yet I wish also you can see it now. There is no telling how God He works His Wonders! If you find this out, your uncle Linus will rest easy in Heaven at last waiting for all of us.
With love,
your Mother
His mother had not had so long to live after writing that. But Willop would not think about that, not tonight.
He had kept the letter in his desk at the Tribune for a long time, telling himself that he would investigate, one day. But the time never seemed right. Early on, of course, he was too young, too inexperienced a reporter to have dared suggest such a story to an editor even if the story had not been about his own family. And when, not so suddenly, he was no longer a cub but a journeyman, there were too many other stories to write, closer to home.…
Closer to home. Where was that?
So he had never written, never even gone after, the story he should have pursued. Now he was going after it when he didn’t have a newspaper to publish it, and when he had to pay his own way. Or let Moira pay it …
God, he owed her a lot. She had done so much, said so much, to boost his self-esteem. It bothered him to reflect on his own neediness.
He got out of bed and went to the sink. The mirror over it was dirty, but he could see his tan face clearly enough. With shame, he recalled how he had wanted things both ways: The minority scholarship program had made it possible for him to go to college, but once there—and for long after—he had thought himself blessed to have straight hair and skin no darker than a white lifeguard’s.
He did not want too many people to know. Was that why he had pulled some punches in his reporting, why he had never written, never even tried to write, the story hinted at in his mother’s letter? He dared not probe his soul too deeply with that question.
Willop guessed that it was better to repay a terrible debt late than not at all. And if he got anywhere on his mission, there would be no place to hide, no chance to pass for anything but what he was.
19
Willop didn’t sleep too badly, all things considered. After getting up, he dressed quickly, closed his suitcase without worrying about the wrinkles in his clothes, washed his face, and brushed his teeth and was out of his room in ten minutes.
He plunked the room key on the lobby counter without looking at the clerk, got into the car, and drove out of the alley with a feeling of relief.
No more excuses for delay …
Willop stopped at a diner to buy rolls and coffee, which he took with him. Soon he was headed out of Columbia. He drove with the window open. Clean, Carolina air. Not much dirtier than when the slaves and their owners used to smell it, he thought.
Driving on Interstate 26, he saw buds on the trees. He guessed that spring had arrived here several weeks before it would up north.
When Willop heard the siren, he looked in the mirror and saw the car. Unmarked, no red gumball, the trooper hatless. Willop was alarmed, and puzzled. Wasn’t doing more than sixty, he thought. Don’t think about asserting your rights, he told himself.
“License and registration.” The trooper had short hair and ice-blue eyes and smelled like chewing gum. His hat was on now, the strap pressing into the back of his neck.
“Didn’t think I was speeding,” Willop said, his attempt at casualness ruined by a croak.
