Thrilled, I rushed to the door. But just as I was ready to leave, Mr. Salter said, “Darby?”
I stopped. “Yes, sir?”
“Got a quick question before you head back to school.”
“What?” I asked.
Rolling up his sleeves, Mr. Salter said, “Well, I was wondering what you know about that black boy on Turpin Dunn’s farm? You heard anything?”
Mr. Salter’s helper lifted his head and watched me like I was a fox.
Worried I’d make Daddy angry, I said, “I . . . I haven’t, Mr. Salter. Why, sir?”
Lacing his fingers together, Mr. Salter pushed his hands forward so that his knuckles made sharp cracks. “Oh, I’m just thinking about things people said this morning at the Sanitary Café. Few guys were talking about it. Nothing big, mind you. They were just talking among themselves.”
“My daddy said the boy died of being sick,” I lied.
Mr. Salter clapped his hands together. “That’s right, Darby. Anyways, you get on and tell everyone you got another story coming out.”
“Thank you, sir,” I called, and shot out the door and down the steps and along the street to the Murchison School’s big field. The whole rest of the afternoon I felt like I was stepping on clouds. It didn’t seem like my feet touched against the ground at all.
After school, I snatched my best dress-ups from the basement and ran and hid in the field so my mama wouldn’t see me waiting for Evette. Then, when Evette got home, I rushed up the road to her and blurted out about both of us getting in the Bennettsville Times. Right off, her eyes swelled up to the size of nickels, and the two of us danced and screamed wild and crazy, kicking up a nice dirt cloud. Shortly, Evette changed, and when she came out again, she was still grinning, and her grin stayed right there as we carried my pile of dress-up clothes into the woods.
On account of it being my turn, I got to wear our favorite fancy dress. Freezing, I slid it on fast. Then I put my coat back on and smiled at how the bottom part of the dress was bright pink and shined in the sideways sun streaks. I also pulled on some old shoes that stopped fitting my mama after she had me. Alongside, Evette wore the second-best dress, which is blue with a big bow in the back that you couldn’t see on account of her coat covering it over. Both of us rolled on long gloves and circled about like we were rich ladies. I said I was married to a famous husband who was a general in the army. Evette said that she wasn’t married at all and that she was rich from a book she’d written about a shipwrecked family who got attacked by a polar bear.
“I read that story,” I told her in a rich person’s voice. “It was good.”
“Yes, it was,” she agreed, trying to sound like me. “After it got published, I went and bought me two homes, plus a car, and a radio.”
“You know what? We got three homes. One in France, even.”
She leaned against a tree. “And after my book came out, all the boys wanted to marry me, but I told ’em I ain’t interested, that I got me a writing job and they’d get in my way.”
I said, “My husband, General Carmichael, he would never bother me about my job, ’cause he likes the way I do with the kids. We only have girls, and he thinks they’re all the most beautiful he’s ever seen in his whole life except for me. So I can do whatever I want.”
“The general’s nice,” Evette told me.
We played that way for a long time, and it was more fun than normal because both me and Evette were going to be in the Bennettsville Times. We even forgot to notice the sky going dark and had to take everything off fast, then run home with the dress-ups flapping in a bundle. We laughed the whole way across the cold, windy field.
At Evette’s house, she gave me a hug, and I gave her one back. “Don’t forget my birthday,” I said. For the first time, my mama was going to let her come.
“I ain’t gonna,” Evette promised.
That night, after closing the store, Daddy drove out to visit the family whose boy had died. For that reason, we ate dinner later than normal. By the time Daddy got in, it was seven o’clock, and we sat down and commenced to eating right away, even though he looked half-asleep and truly sad.
Mama said, “How’s the family doing?”
“Not so good,” he told her. “Not so good. They’re gonna bury the boy tomorrow.”
“They angry?”
Daddy handed me my plate. “It’s a bad situation, that’s for sure.”
After dinner, I had to help scrub dishes, and when I was done, I put on my coat and went out to visit my daddy on the porch, where he was drinking his headache medicine in gulps. Leaning over the big eating table, he had one of his hands jammed up under his chin, and that made his face wrinkled. Sitting next to him, I said he looked real sad, and I wished he didn’t.
“I’m okay, Darby,” he promised me.
“You sad for that black boy?”
“I am.”
“I am, too.”
Quiet, my daddy stared out over the fields and the dairy barn and all his property, which was his daddy’s and his granddaddy’s before that. He slurped some more headache medicine, and the extra-cold breeze pushed his hair flat to his head and made me shiver. Without even looking, he wrapped one of his strong arms around me and held me so tight to him that I could hear his stomach sputter. After a while like that, he lowered his head and said, “Darby, dear, I love this place, Ellan, and Marlboro County and my friends and the people. I love it and wouldn’t wanna ever live anywhere else. But you gotta know that there’re folks around here who do some God-awful things we should be ashamed of. I suppose they’ll pay in heaven. But I wish I knew they would. I wish I knew that, ’cause in all the world there isn’t a place more beautiful and more perfect for me and your mama and you children than right here, where we got the fields and the trees and birds and my camellia bushes. But sometimes . . . I hate it.”
After speaking, Daddy got real quiet. Seated alongside him, I tried to be respectful and let his lonely words disappear into the chilly air, but, secretly, I was sort of honored and surprised that he’d said that stuff to me.
Daddy kept his head down till another breeze shook the pecan trees and got me shivering. Then, sitting straight up, he rubbed a palm on my back. “Darby, sweetie, I’m very proud of you for getting your second story in the paper. I’m as proud a daddy as there is.”
“Thanks,” I whispered, feeling wonderful and sad.
He said, “You worked hard.”
“It didn’t seem hard, is why I did it,” I confessed.
“But it is hard. It’s hard and rare for a child to do something like that,” he told me.
I sat against him for a while. “Daddy,” I finally asked, “are you still thinking about that black boy?”
“Not completely, but some,” he answered.
I told him, “I’m doing it some, too.”
On Friday, which was the day before I was turning nine and having a big party, I stayed in town with Beth. Together we left school and moseyed up the street toward her house, past the tinier, pretty homes in town, which have wide, shady porches. For some reason, the whole, entire way I worried about seeing Chester, her brother. I even daydreamed that Beth left us alone for a minute, and he snuck up and kissed me smack on my cheek. It was almost nice, too, the way he did it with his eyes closed. Anyway, he is right cute except that one part of his blond hair jumps straight up and won’t lay down for nothing. But in my daydream, it did. It was flat to his head.
Halfway through our walk, Beth yelled, “Darby! Hey, Darby!”
Confused, I said, “Yeah?”
“What’re you thinking about? I keep talking to you, but you aren’t saying anything back. It’s boring for me when you don’t talk.”
“Sorry,” I told her.
At her house, we went around to the back door, and just as we were going in, Chester scooted past me and headed toward Mercury’s pen. My eyes stuck on the back of his coat while my heart thumped like a drum. Trying to look as sweet as I could, I called
after him, “Hey.”
Chester didn’t stop or anything. He just answered, “Hey, Darby,” over his shoulder, which got me to thinking that Beth was playing a mean joke. I didn’t even feel like eating the gingerbread their cook gave me.
Up in Beth’s room, I said, “You want my cake?”
“Sure I do,” she said. “You don’t feel good?”
I didn’t look at her. “I thought Chester might talk a little more.”
“He would,” Beth explained, “except I told him that I told you he’s got a crush, and now he’s embarrassed.”
“You told him you told me?” I hollered. “Why’d you do that?”
“’Cause when I did it, he was being mean.”
I stomped on the floor. “Now . . .” I sputtered like a car. “Now he might not want me to help with Mercury.”
“He will.”
“He might not.”
“He’s gonna, ’cause he always says you’re so nice.” Beth grinned and looked evil doing it. “Darby Sinclair,” she whispered after a minute, “do you got a crush on Chester or something?”
“No,” I told her. “I don’t. It’s just that I like Mercury so much. And . . . and I also like to ride in the cart.”
After that, we played with Beth’s three doll babies. Each one has a smiling porcelain face and fake hair that is strapped back in a hard bun. They look like Miss Burstin, our teacher at school. We played like the one with the worst dress was sick in bed, and we got the other two to treat her nice and undress her so that her daddy could ship her to a hospital that was straight across the bedroom. When she died of coughing, our doll babies got so sad and sorrowful that they threw themselves on the pillows of Beth’s bed. The thing is, while I was mashing my doll’s face into some fringe, I looked back at the little crib where the undressed doll had died from coughing, and I all the sudden thought of the black boy who’d been beaten by Mr. Dunn.
I stopped making my doll squeal. I let it rest and walked over and sat in one of Beth’s rocking chairs. A slice of sharp, eye-burning sun hit me on my neck and face.
“What’s wrong now?” Beth asked.
I didn’t know how to say it. “It’s that this black boy from Mr. Dunn’s farm died yesterday, and I keep imagining him stretched on a table, sorta like that doll there.”
Beth looked over at the undressed doll. “If you want, we can say that we only thought she was dead.”
I stared quiet at the polished floor for a while. “That’d be good.”
Beth went over to the little crib. “Out of nowhere, she can cough real soft and suddenly wake up and everybody will see that she was just deep asleep.”
I added, “Then she can be better and we can pretend that she’s gonna get married, and we can save her from getting bit by a snake at Crooked Creek.”
As the sky was changing to darkness, me and Beth walked along Main Street to her daddy’s office. We were hoping he might have some candy in a drawer, which he sometimes does. Streetlights were just starting up, and a few people were packing around the picture show entrance. The Carolina Theater was playing a cowboy movie that had a handsome, tough man on the poster. The Sanitary Café was full up with customers and noise. Griffin’s Barbershop is alongside, and its big window was so steamy that all you could see was the outlines of folks reading newspapers. We turned the corner near the Lewis & Breeden drugstore and saw that Beth’s daddy’s law office had the shades drawn tight, which was strange because he never does that.
Going in, we found Mr. Fairchild talking to a black man who was squeezing and rolling a dirty hat. “Hello, Darby and Beth,” Mr. Fairchild said.
“Hello, sir,” we answered.
Mr. Fairchild indicated the black man. “Girls, this is Jerome Hawkins. Jerome, this here is my daughter and her friend Darby.”
“Hello, missuses,” the black man mumbled, and his voice sounded real familiar.
“Hey,” we told him.
Mr. Fairchild said, “Girls, we’re just finishing up. You mind stepping outside a minute?”
Beth leaned over his desk. “We just came to see if you have candy.”
“Candy,” Mr. Fairchild said. Playing shocked, he opened up a desk drawer. “You’re looking for candy, you say? Why . . . why, what a coincidence. I sure do have some,” he told her. He reached into a brown bag and got hold of some butterscotches.
“Thank you, sir,” I said while I undid a gold wrapper.
“You’re welcome, Darby.”
“We’re going over to her daddy’s store,” Beth said.
We started through the door, but before I could pass, Jerome Hawkins caught my coat sleeve, and said, “Miss Carmichael? Tell your daddy I appreciate what he done.”
Confused, my eyes glued on his craggled face for a second. Then Beth pushed me outside, and we were on the busy sidewalk. The courthouse was across the street and what people call the Carmichael Block was straight ahead. We laughed and enjoyed our butterscotches, and I forgot to tell my daddy Jerome Hawkins’s message.
At Carmichael Dry Goods, me and Beth had Russell haul us up and down in the elevator till he said his hands were throbbing. Then we stayed upstairs and played around the shelves of dungarees and work shirts. Beth said that she was looking for a tuxedo for her pretend husband, and I was a fancy cashier and told her we had all measure of brands in silk, cotton, and wool, the silk being the fanciest since it’s so hard to get and worms make it. She decided that her husband should have the best and got him the silk. After that, she searched around for a good bow tie.
“This one costs a hundred dollars,” I said, lifting up a red handkerchief.
“I’ll take it, plus the shiniest tuxedo shoes you got.”
Taking hold of some work boots, I put them up on a tabletop. “These shine so much you might wanna put some dirt on ’em.”
She declared, “Miss Carmichael, I like ’em that way, thank you.”
Shortly, my daddy came upstairs alongside Mr. Fairchild, who must have walked over from his office. They settled themselves against a wall and grinned at us. After a few minutes, my daddy announced, “Darby, you tired out Russell so bad I have to give him an hour off in the morning.”
“Daddy,” I muttered, “are you playing?”
“Yeah, I am, sweetie.”
In a little while, Beth went home with Mr. Fairchild, and me and Daddy switched off the lights and went out back to the Buick. Daddy cranked the engine. Then we got in and he steered around a corner and along Main Street toward the edge of town.
Halfway to Ellan, I asked him, “You reckon I can talk about my birthday party yet?”
“It’s so close, I don’t see why not.”
Excited, I twisted and looked at his shadowy face. “Did I get a present?”
“I’m sure you got something.”
“I wonder what Mama’s gonna do for my party.”
“You’ll find out.” Daddy laughed and looked into his rearview mirror. A car was following close behind us, wagging back and forth so that its lights shined all around our fenders and splashed into the ditch. On the edge of Bennettsville, it sped past and got in the middle of the road, where it commenced to slow down till we had to stop.
“Why’d they do that?” I asked my daddy.
“I don’t know,” he said.
A minute or so went by, and a skinny man got from the car and walked toward us.
Daddy said, “Darby, honey, you stay here.” Careful, he got out and met the man by our bumper. The Buick’s headlights made them look like pale angels.
I rolled down my window so that I could hear, and cold air rushed against my head.
“Mr. Carmichael,” the man said, tilting his hat.
“You’re a long way from home,” my daddy said back.
“Yeah, I am. Came here on business, if you wanna know.”
“I don’t.”
“Sure you don’t, Mr. Carmichael. But rumors is rumors, and we gotta ask questions.” When the man smiled, I could see he was mis
sing some teeth, and that gave me a shiver fit so that I had to wrap my arms across myself to stay warm.
“See, Mr. Carmichael, yer a respectable part of the Marlboro community. Why, yer a big man round here. Nobody wants nothin’ ta happen ta a fella like you. That’s why I gotta ask a simple question: Why’d you wanna get involved in somethin’ so simple as a black boy dyin’? Why did you get involved at all, huh? What I hear is that boy, he come at Turpin, and Turpin, he didn’t do nothin’ but protect hisself.”
My daddy leaned forward, and said, “That boy was twelve years old. If a twelve-year-old attacked me, I believe I could keep myself safe with one hand.”
“That boy had a knife. You see now?”
“That boy didn’t have a knife.”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Look, the only reason I got involved is because one of my tenant farmers woke me up and told me the boy had an infection. I didn’t have any idea he’d been beaten till I saw him.” I could tell Daddy was getting mad.
“You was put into a bad situation,” said the skinny man. “That’s for sure.”
“When somebody asks for my help, if I can, I give it.”
The man smiled. “Yer a good guy, Mr. Carmichael. Got a family that goes to church and you keeps yer farm runnin’ in hard times. And, I’ll tell you, helpin’ someone’s fine. Helpin’ anyone is. But we got ourselves another situation altogether. Now, if a black man was ta ask you for a lawyer, you wouldn’t help him get that, would you? You wouldn’t give one of them that sorta powerful information?”
My daddy took a small step closer to the man. Fearful they were gonna wrastle each other, I shrunk down and curled in a knot on the seat. Still, I listened as hard as I could.
Daddy said, “Now, hold on. Yesterday Mr. Hawkins asked me who he could see about legal counsel, and I told him. He asked, and I told him. That’s all. I gave him Mr. Fairchild’s name, and Mr. Fairchild came and informed me not twenty minutes ago that he can’t be any help. So except for you threatening me, I think it’s all over. Don’t you?”
The man didn’t say anything.
“Don’t you?” my daddy shouted at him.
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