Home Fires dk-6

by Margaret Maron

  Lashanda was frantic in her pain, yet I couldn’t run and keep her hand in ice at the same time and every second counted.

  People hurried toward us, but I pushed through them. “Aunt Sister! Where’s Aunt Sister?”

  They pointed to the serving tent and there was my elderly aunt, Daddy’s white-haired baby sister, fixing herself a plate of barbecue. She turned to see what all the commotion was about and as soon as I cried, “Burns. She burned her hand,” Aunt Sister sat right down on the ground and held out her arms.

  “It’s okay, Lashanda,” I crooned as I knelt to put her in Aunt Sister’s lap. “She’ll make the fire go away. It won’t hurt much longer. Shh-shh, honey, it’s all right.”

  Aunt Sister took the child’s wounded hand between her own gnarled hands and bent her head over them till her lips almost touched her parted thumbs. Her eyes closed and I could see her wrinkled lips moving, but I quit trying years ago to hear what words she whispered into her hands when she cupped them around a burn.

  “It’s okay, honey,” I said. “She’ll take away all the fire.”

  Lashanda’s terrified screams dropped to a whimper. Her brother came running and hovered protectively if helplessly while I continued to pat her thin bare shoulders and murmur encouragement.

  “Feel the hot going out of your hand?”

  She nodded, her fearful wide eyes intently focussed on Aunt Sister.

  “Soon it’ll be all gone. I promise you.”

  All around us, people watched with held breaths as Aunt Sister’s lips kept moving.

  Reverend Freeman burst through the ring, Cyl just behind him. “Baby—?”

  He knelt beside us and put his arm around his daughter and she leaned against his chest with a little moan, but didn’t pull her injured hand away. “She’s making it better, Daddy.”

  At last Aunt Sister raised her head and pushed back a strand of white hair that had escaped from her bun. Old and faded blue eyes looked deeply into young brown ones.

  “All the fire is gone,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  Lashanda looked at her hand and flexed her small fingers. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Her palm and fingertips were smooth and unmarked. No blisters, faint redness.

  A collective sigh erupted from the crowd and so many people started talking then that I was probably the only one who heard when Lashanda smiled up at her father and said, “Mommy’s wrong, Daddy. There white people are nice.”

  I stood up, feeling suddenly drained and weary. A whole lifetime of knowing, yet I’m surprised every time I get reminded that racism isn’t a whites-only monopoly.

  Someone handed me a welcome cup of iced lemonade. One of the newcomers, Allison Lazarus.

  “Remarkable said,” Dr. Gevirtz in a clipped New York accent. “I’ve heard of fire-talkers, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it done.”

  “The colorful natives performing their ritual ceremonies?” I snapped. “Too bad you didn’t have a camera.”

  “Was I sounding like a tourist?” he asked mildly. “Sorry.”

  Abashed, I apologized for my bad manners. “I’d be curious and skeptical, too, if I hadn’t seen Aunt Sister do it enough times.”

  “But surely it was putting her hand in cold liquid so quickly?” protested Ms. Lazarus.

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s a true type of sympathetic healing. The practitioner believes so strongly that those around her—especially the patient—also believe and that in turn causes—”

  I excused myself and left them to it. I know all the intellectual arguments: the burn wasn’t that bad, the prompt application of ice kept the tissue from blistering, the power of positive thinking, psychosomatic syndromes, et cetera, et cetera. As with old Mr. Randall, who dosed my well, or Miss Kitty Perkins, who talked seven warts off my hands when I was fourteen, I no longer questioned how such things worked. It was enough to know that they did work, that there were people like Aunt Sister who had the gift and used it freely when called upon.

  I was walking away from the tent when Ralph Freeman called to me, “Judge Knott? Deborah?”

  “Yes?”

  “I hope you didn’t misunderstand back there.”

  “I don’t think I did,” I said evenly.

  His eyes met mine and he nodded. “No, I reckon you didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. We can’t be responsible for everybody else’s gut feelings. Your wife probably has better reasons than some of my relatives.”

  He gave a wry smile and we fell in step together.

  “Must make it awkward for you,” I probed.

  “Not really,” He walked along beside me with his hands clasped behind his back. “If you don’t work outside the home, if you confine your social interactions to the African-American community, it’s amazing how long you can go without having to speak to an ofay.”

  His voice parodied the offensive word and took the sting from it.

  “School?” I asked. “PTA?”

  The excitement over, the kids had resumed their volleyball game. We watched as Ralph’s son took the setup and spiked the ball for another point.

  “Sports?”

  “Well, yes, there are those times,” he conceded.

  Despite a certain sadness in his voice, I sensed that he felt disloyal to say even this much about his wife and I quit pushing.

  “Lashanda’s okay?”

  He seized gratefully on the change of subject. “Oh, yes. Ms. DeGraffenried—Cylvia? The prosecutor?—she took Lashanda up to your house to change out of her bathing suit and then there was some mention of a lemon meringue pie. I can’t thank you enough for what you did.”

  “Not me. My aunt.”

  “She might have prayed the fire out, but you were the one got her to your aunt so quickly.”

  I shrugged.

  Ralph Freeman stopped and smiled down at me, a smile as warm and uncomplicated as July sunshine. “You don’t like to be thanked, do you?”

  “Sure I do, but not when it’s for something as elemental as helping a hurt child.”

  He brushed aside my demurral as if I hadn’t spoken. “All you have to do is say ‘you’re welcome.’”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I say ‘thank you,’ you say ‘you’re welcome.’ What’s so hard about that?” There was such genuine goodness in his smile.

  Goodness, and yet a touch of mischief, too, in the tilt of his head.

  “Thank you for helping my baby girl,” he said.

  I smiled back at him.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  17

  A trying time is no time to quit trying.

  —Jehovah Pentecostal

  Cyl soon returned with Lashanda, who had a flick of meringue on the tip of her little nose. For the child, getting changed had been a simple matter of sliding a pair of yellow shorts on over her bathing suit and stepping into a pair of yellow jelly sandals. She trailed an oversized yellow T-shirt across the grass and seemed too tired to walk.

  Ralph Freeman swung her up on his broad shoulders so that a leg dangled down on each side of his chest and motioned to his son, who had just stripped off his rugby shirt and was ready to follow the other kids into the pond. The boy immediately put on a typical teenage face.

  “Aw, Dad” do we hafta leave now? I didn’t even get to swim yet.

  I was amused to see that a preacher could be as torn as any father between the needs and desires of his children. Seven-year-old Lashanda was clearly exhausted and in bad need of a nap after such an emotional experience, while thirteen-year-old Stan was enjoying the swing of things.

  “I don’t mean to interfere,” Cyl said hesitantly, “but if your son wants to stay a little longer, I could drop him off on my way home.”

  Stan’s face lit up. “Can I, Dad? Please?”

  “Are you sure it won’t be too much trouble?” Ralph asked her.

  “Positive. Just so Stan can tell me where you live. Cotton Grove, right?”r />
  “Right,” said Stan. “It’s only two blocks off Main Street on this side of town.”

  “No problem then,” Cyl said.

  With a paternal injunction to behave himself and to come as soon as Ms. DeGraffenried called, Ralph thanked Cyl for her kindness and me for my family’s hospitality. Then he headed out to the parking area with his daughter clinging drowsily to his head.

  “Nice man,” I said, watching them go.

  “For a black man?” Cyl asked sweetly.

  Stan had gone racing down the pier and we were alone for the moment beneath the hot July sun.

  I felt as if I’d been spat on. “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I spoke out of turn.”

  “But that’s what you think?”

  “I said I was sorry, Your Honor.” She turned to walk away.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” I said hotly and grabbed her arm. “You’re not getting out of it like that. Forget I’m a judge. When did I ever give you a reason to lay something like that on me?”

  “Woman to woman?” She looked me in the eye. “All right then. You show your prejudices almost every court session.”

  “Prejudices?” I was stung by the injustice of her accusation. “I bend over backwards to be fair.”

  An eyebrow lifted scornfully. “Right. You bend so far backwards when it’s a black defendant that you go looking for mitigating circumstances even where there aren’t any. You never hold black youths to the same high standard you hold whites. Oh, you’re not as blatant about it as Harrison Hobart or Perry Byrd used to be, remember? Remember how they’d give suspended sentences if one black man killed another? Black-on-black crimes never got their attention. For them, it had to be black-on-white to put the law in play and then they came down like an avalanche.”

  “Now wait just a damn minute—”

  She brushed past my protest. “I said you’re not as bad as they were, but it’s still condescending that you’re always tougher on white boys than black ones. You’re not doing them any favors when you don’t hold them as accountable.”

  “How can you say that?” I argued. “I treat everybody the same.”

  “Ha! Maybe twice a month you’ll hand out the sentences I recommend for a black offender,” she said. “But if the person’s white—”

  “If anyone’s condescending here, it’s you,” I said hotly. “I don’t follow your recommendations because they’re consistently tougher than for whites. Go check your records. Look at the crime, not the color. See what you ask when it’s a black kid as opposed to a white for the same offense. I’ll bet you dinner at the Irregardless that I’m a hell of a lot more evenhanded than you are.”

  “You’re on,” she said with answering heat.

  I was still annoyed enough to slip the needle in. “You ever consider that maybe it’s your Uncle Isaac you’re trying to punish for running out on you?”

  She glared at me. “What do you know about Isaac?”

  I shrugged. “Just what people have told me. That you loved him, that he got in trouble, and that you were devastated when he left and never kept in touch.”

  The belligerence suddenly went out of Cyl and she turned away. But not before I’d seen her eyes glaze with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly. And I really was. But Dwight and my brothers are always accusing me of nosiness and I have to admit that it was curiosity that made me add, “Did Wallace Adderly tell you how to find him?”

  “You may not have noticed,” she said acidly, “but Wallace Adderly took advantage of Lashanda’s accident to leave before I could pin him down.”

  I looked around blankly, but it was true. I couldn’t see him anywhere in the crowd, although I did spot Reverend Ligon’s tall figure standing in the shade of the tents with Louise Parker and Harvey Underwood, the president and major shareholder in Colleton County’s largest independently owned bank. Harvey had already personally guaranteed a low-interest loan to help rebuild the church. As Mount Olive’s treasurer, Louise had set up a special account at the bank to handle the donations that were coming in from all over the country.

  “Let me ask you something,” Cyl said abruptly. “What was it like to grow up with all those brothers worshipping the ground you walked on?”

  “Worshipping? My brothers?” I started to laugh and then I remembered the things Maidie had told me about Cyl’s childhood. “They didn’t worship, but I guess they did look out for me,” I said as honestly as I could. “And I guess I always knew I could count on them.”

  “And what if you’d had only one brother and then he left and never came back?”

  “Yeah,” I said, seeing her point.

  “Okay, then.” She nodded and again started to walk away, but I followed.

  “Look, Cyl, I don’t know how we got off on the wrong foot, but I meant what I said the other day—if you ever need to talk, I’m here.”

  Again the skeptical eyebrow. “I could be your token black friend? As in Some Of My Best Friends Are Black?”

  “If that’s what you really want. And I can play Little White Missy From De Big House if it’ll help with that chip on your shoulder.”

  “Oh, spare me your do-good liberal tolerance,” she snapped. “I don’t need it.”

  “Yes, you do!” I snapped back. “North Carolina may not be a black paradise but without a lot of do-good liberals trying to make things more equitable, you’d have had to take the freedom train north to get an education and you certainly wouldn’t be prosecuting white offenders in a court of law here.”

  “And how long do we have to keep thanking you for letting us sit at the table?”

  I’d thought—I’d hoped—things were getting better, yet here I was, looking at Cyl across a gulf that seemed to widen with every word.

  “It’s a no-win situation for me, isn’t it? If I try to be friends, I’m either patronizing you or assuaging my own conscience; and if I don’t, I’m a bigot. You get to have it both ways? What’s so fair about that?”

  “And you’ve been a judge how long?” she asked sardonically.

  I laughed. It was the first crack in her armor.

  “It started the summer I was four, when my cousins gave me the paper bag test and I flunked,” Cyl said.

  We had fixed ourselves plates of barbecue and were seated at one of the back tables. The first wave of guests had crested and Daddy and the rest of my family could handle host duties while I ate.

  “What’s the paper bag test?” I asked.

  “Take an ordinary brown paper bag from any grocery store,” she said, pulling apart a hushpuppy with her beautifully manicured fingernails. They were painted the same shade of coral as her soft, full-skirted cotton sundress. “Is your skin lighter or darker? You’ve seen my grandmother?”

  I nodded, my mouth full of barbecue.

  “And heard the rhymes? ‘Light, bright—all right./Honey brown—stick around./Jet black—get back.’”

  “I’ve heard similar versions, yes.”

  “All of my mother’s people were as light as Grandma. All except me. And her baby brother Isaac. He said we were the only true Africans in the family and we’d have to stick together.”

  She broke off. “This is crazy. Why am I telling you this?”

  “My mother died when I was eighteen,” I said.

  “But your father didn’t turn around the next month and marry a woman with three blond-headed Miss America daughters who sneered at your hair and put you down because your eyes are blue and not green.”

  I added a little coleslaw to the barbecue already on my fork. “I take it your stepsisters could pass the paper bag test?”

  “They could almost do milk,” Cyl said with a sour laugh. “I begged my dad to let me come live with Grandma, but he’d promised my mother—” She shrugged. “Just as well. While New Bern may not be the state’s center of intellectual aspirations, at least my stepmother did believe in education. Grandma tried the best she could, but she was fighting against
a culture here with lower expectations than New Bern, especially for its men. Even Snake Man couldn’t get them stirred up and God knows he tried.”

  “Adderly?”

  “That’s what Isaac and I called him. He’d given himself a long African name that meant son of the snake god or something like that, but people kept remembering what it meant, not how to pronounce it, so by the time he got to us, it was just Snake. You should have seen him in those days. Bone skinny. Afro out to here—” Her graceful fingers sketched a balloon of hair around her own head. “—and army surplus fatigues. Don’t forget, I was just a child back then, so all this time, I never connected the Wallace Adderly you see on television with the NOISE activist who zipped into my life and right back out again. Not until he popped up again on television after that first church burned.”

  “So that’s why you were so upset in my office!”

  She nodded and took a sip of iced tea. “Realizing who he was brought it all back again as if it’d just happened. Adderly was here only two or three weeks when he got a message that some of the brothers were going up to Boston. A federal court had ordered desegregation of the South Boston schools by forced busing and the Klan was supposed to be there, so NOISE planned a show of strength, too.”

  “And your uncle joined them?” I asked, slipping Ladybelle the second hushpuppy on my plate so I wouldn’t be tempted. She gulped it down in one swallow and turned hopeful doggy eyes to Cyl, who heartlessly finished off the last of her hushpuppies without sharing.

  “It was a rough time for Isaac,” she said slowly, as she pushed her plate aside and laced her slender brown fingers around the red plastic drink cup on the table before her.

  “I didn’t understand all that was going on. Grandma had to tell me some of it later. Basically what it boils down to is that a lot of his pigeons came home to roost that summer. He’d gotten a deacon’s daughter pregnant at the same time he was sneaking off to see a white girl with a mean brother.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  “I forget her name. His was Buck. Buck Ferguson.”

  I vaguely remember a slatternly tenant family by that name that used to farm with Uncle Rufus before he got tired of bailing father and son out of jail. “Peggy Rose Ferguson?”