That’s when I got scared. We were two children out alone in the woods with a delirious adult and a broken-down car.
“What happened?” said Emma.
“Don’t know,” I said.
We slid out of the car and I opened the hood. Didn’t know what I was looking at for a moment, but then everything Dr. Griffith told me slowly started to come back. I pointed. “So cold, the water must’ve froze in the radiator. Pressure blew the top right off.”
Emma was impressed. I knew she was ’cause she opened her mouth like a fish but couldn’t get nothing out, just nodded and closed her lips again.
“Gotta get to Selma,” Mr. Walker moaned from the back of the car.
“So what do we do now?” asked Emma.
I checked the radiator again. It was about dry. “We need to go find some water.”
So me and Emma tramped off through the woods. The fog was so thick, it was like stepping through a rain cloud. We stayed close to each other. I carried the cup from the thermos.
“Emma?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“Want me to tell your daddy we couldn’t find a stream?”
Emma shook her head. “He wouldn’t believe you.”
Right then, I think he would’ve believed me if I’d said I was Abraham Lincoln. But I didn’t want to scare Emma. We pushed through some underbrush and stood on the edge of a small creek. The moonlight sparkled on the water. I leaned over to fill the cup.
“Want me to have an accident?” I asked, looking at Emma’s reflection in the water.
“What?”
“If I did, we wouldn’t get there in time,” I said quietly.
“But you’d get in trouble with your pa for wrecking his car.”
I shrugged. “I don’t care.”
“You’d do that for me?” Emma’s eyes were wide.
“Yeah.” I stood clutching the freezing cup.
Emma smiled. “I don’t want you to do that, Dit.”
“Do you want to leave Moundville?”
Emma shook her head. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.” Then she kissed me on the cheek. Before I could move, she dashed up the hill and disappeared into the fog. I touched my cheek and went to follow her.
Once we added the water to the radiator, the car started up just fine. Steam still trickled from the hood, but the engine sounded strong. I had to take it real slow on the icy patches, but there were stretches of dry road that were okay. Mr. Walker went back to sleep. I kept glancing at Emma, but she wouldn’t meet my eye.
48
FLOUR AND HOT CHOCOLATE
WE GOT TO SELMA AROUND SIX IN THE morning. The hotel where the exam was being held was right next to the drugstore where Dr. Griffith always bought me lunch. We parked the car out front, then Mr. Walker went into the lobby to register for the test. The fever’d finally broke in the night and he seemed a lot better.
Me and Emma wandered into the steaming kitchen to warm up. We sat on the radiator shivering, still in our jackets and mittens. All the guests I had seen in the hotel were white. All the cooks in the kitchen were colored. One of them gave us a friendly smile and brought us each a mug of hot chocolate.
“Thank you, sir,” said Emma to the cook.
He nodded and returned to his post.
For a moment, we sipped our drinks quietly. “Emma?” I asked.
“What?”
“You’ll write to me, won’t you?” I asked. “When you’re back in Boston.”
“Maybe Daddy won’t pass the test.”
I gave her a look. Mr. Walker was as smart as his daughter.
Emma sighed. “Yes, I’ll write.”
“And visit in the summer?” I pressed.
She shook her head. “Mama wouldn’t like me coming down south alone. But you could visit me in Boston.”
I’d never been out of Alabama.
“Or maybe we’ll move to Virginia,” suggested Emma.
“Richmond,” I answered confidently.
“Or Connecticut.”
“Hartford.”
“Or New York.”
“New York City?” I asked.
“Albany.”
“I knew that,” I said with a smile. We sipped our hot chocolates. The cook made the hotel’s morning bread, dumping empty flour sacks onto the floor.
“Nothing’s gonna change, is it?” I asked. Sounded like there was a frog in my throat.
Emma turned toward me. “Dit, everything’s going to change.”
I didn’t look at her. Just stared at my hot chocolate. It was thick and sweet, made with real chocolate and milk. Just the color of the skin on Emma’s cheek. “Why’d you do that?”
“Do what?” she asked.
I touched my cheek.
“Oh.” Emma exhaled. “I don’t know.”
I finished my hot chocolate. The cook came over to take our mugs. “Where you kids from?” he asked.
“Moundville,” Emma replied.
“Moundville,” the cook repeated when he returned to pounding the rising bread. “Ain’t that where that Negra murdered the sheriff?”
“It wasn’t murder,” I snapped, “it was self-defense.”
“Really?” asked the cook. “They didn’t put that in the papers.”
“We were there,” Emma insisted.
The cook shook his head. “You kids,” he mumbled to himself. “Active imagination.” He emptied more bags of flour into a huge vat. The flour filled the air like a white fog. Like the mist that had surrounded us the night before when Emma gave me my first kiss.
Emma abruptly stood up. “I have an idea.”
We spent the next hour loading empty flour sacks into my pa’s car. Emma wouldn’t tell me why ’cept to say it was important and it had to do with Doc and she would explain later. Right when we finished with the sacks, Mr. Walker came out of the hotel.
“I don’t think I missed a question,” he said proudly. “They won’t have any reason not to promote me now.”
That was just what I was afraid of.
49
EMMA’S PLAN
BY THE MIDDLE OF APRIL, EVERYONE IN our family was getting better. We were lucky. Most families in town had lost at least one family member to the flu. Mama said it wasn’t luck—it was Mrs. Walker. “Without her . . .” Mama just shook her head and didn’t finish the thought.
Doc Haley discovered one good thing about being in jail—without any contact with other people, he didn’t get sick. And I was awful glad Doc hadn’t died of the flu ’cause Emma had come up with a plan to save his life.
We knew we couldn’t just let Doc out of jail. Everyone would know he was gone, there’d be a big search, he’d probably be caught and we’d get in a whole lot of trouble. But if everyone thought Doc was dead, there’d be no need to go off looking for him. And those flour sacks were what gave Emma the idea of exactly how we could fake Doc’s death.
But we didn’t have much time. The hanging was scheduled for the last Saturday in April, less than two weeks away. Luckily, I knew just who to talk to about getting Doc out of jail.
“What do you want?” asked Chip when I pulled him aside at recess. He’d only been back at school a few days. He looked the same, just a little thinner, but he seemed different. He was quieter. Didn’t joke as much. Heck, he’d even apologized when he showed Mary the big red scar across his belly and accidentally made her cry. Maybe it was having his appendix out. Maybe it was Buster’s death. In any case, for Doc’s sake, I’d risk trusting him one more time.
“Nothing much,” I said. “Just need a little favor.”
“Ain’t you still mad at me?” asked Chip.
“’Cause of that little afternoon in jail?” I laughed. “I got no hard feelings about that.” That wasn’t quite true, but what’s a little white lie if it helped save Doc’s life?
“In fact”—I lowered my voice and looked around to see if anyone was listening—“I’d like to borrow the jailhouse key myself.”
&n
bsp; “Why?” asked Chip. “Does this have anything to do with Doc?”
“I can’t tell you,” I said, “but if you loan me that key for three hours, I’ll give you my baseball glove for keeps.”
Chip seemed to think that over. “Don’t know if I could take the key again,” he said. “My pa’d get awful mad if he found out.”
“Since when were you ever scared of getting in trouble?”
Chip grinned.
“Besides,” I continued, “I don’t need it yet. I’ll let you know the day before.”
“Your good glove?” Chip asked.
“All yours,” I said.
“Okay,” Chip said finally. “I could use a little excitement after being stuck in that hospital in Selma. They put me in the children’s ward!”
“You can’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”
“Course not!” Chip replied.
And so we had a deal.
Me and Emma moved on to Dr. Griffith next. Even though I already had the two dollars for the Fourth hunt folded up safe in my pocket, I still drove with Dr. Griffith to Selma. Our monthly trip was a week before the hanging, and this time I asked if Emma could come along. Soon as we were out of town, we told Dr. Griffith about our plan. How we were gonna let Doc out with Chip’s key, fake a hanging and bury flour sacks filled with dirt in the coffin instead. He listened quietly but shook his head when we were done.
“No,” said Dr. Griffith firmly. “I can’t get involved in something like that. And you two shouldn’t either.”
Emma had expected him to be hard to convince, so she had done some reading and found out about this oath doctors took when they finished their training. I think it was called a “hippopotamus oath.” In any case, part of it said, “I will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption,” and if hanging Doc Haley weren’t mischief and corruption, I didn’t know what was. But when we reminded Dr. Griffith about the oath, he laughed.
“That’s just some fancy custom they started in France. I didn’t take an oath when I graduated from school.”
“Oh,” said Emma.
“Still,” Dr. Griffith added, “those are good words to live by.”
“You gotta help us,” I said. “You know Doc Haley ain’t done nothing wrong.”
“A man’s got a right to defend his own life; that’s true enough. But the law’s the law. You can’t take justice into your own hands.”
“We know,” said Emma. “But that trial wasn’t justice.”
Dr. Griffith was silent for a long time.
“Please, Dr. Griffith,” I said finally. “Elbert’s my friend. We can’t just let his father die.”
Dr. Griffith drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Did you know Mayor Davidson doesn’t like blood?”
“No,” said Emma.
“Once he even fainted when one of his boys skinned his knee. If you could make it look like Doc tried to slit his wrists before deciding to hang himself, I don’t think Mayor Davidson would ask to see the body.”
“We could do that,” said Emma.
I held my breath.
Finally, Dr. Griffith nodded. “I’ll talk to Jim Dang-It about hiding Doc till we can get him out of town. With a change or two, your plan just might work.”
Six days before the hanging, me and Emma started digging. We made our cave bigger and wider, shoveling the dirt into a flour sack. When it was full, Emma pulled out a needle and some thread she had borrowed from her mama. I sewed the bag shut. With ten kids, my mama said she didn’t have time to be sewing buttons back on every time we ripped a shirt. My stitches were big and a little sloppy, but they held the dirt in.
We dragged the sack onto my wagon and pulled it to the iron dealer’s place. The old man looked up from his accounts when we entered.
“We need to use your scale,” I said.
“Don’t let just anyone,” said the old man.
“Give you five cents for your trouble,” added Emma.
The man nodded and heaved the bag of dirt onto the scale. Emma handed over the nickel.
I shook a finger at him. “And don’t tell us it weighs ten pounds.”
The iron dealer laughed, but he read the scale carefully. “Twenty-seven,” he said.
If Doc weighed about 160 pounds, that meant we needed five more bags. I had finally found a use for long division.
Three days before the hanging, our hands were full of blisters from digging and our cave was twice the size it was before, but we finally had all the bags filled and hidden behind some bales of hay in our barn. Mr. Fulton brought the coffin to the jailhouse that same day. I thought it was awful rude to put it right outside the cell where Doc could see it. But I guess if you were gonna die, you’d have more important things to worry about than looking at your own coffin.
Two days before the hanging, I went to set some rabbit snares in the broom sage patch. Emma promised to leave them alone this time. Also told Chip we’d need the key Friday night.
That left us with one day just to sit and wait.
50
A CHANGE OF PLANS
THE DAY BEFORE THE HANGING, I TIPPED over the bucket when I was milking the cow. I also pinched my pinkie in the outhouse door, lost all my marbles in a game at recess, got every single problem wrong on my math test and broke my brand-new fountain pen by accidentally sitting on it. But what bothered me most was that I still couldn’t decide if we should tell Elbert about our plan. I had tried the night before, but Elbert had turned and walked away. I hadn’t followed him. Emma thought it was best not to get his hopes up. I guessed she was right.
So after school I walked past the barbershop and went to check the snares I had set. The first two were empty, and I started to get nervous. If I couldn’t catch a rabbit, we wouldn’t have no blood and the whole plan might fall apart. But in the third snare I found a large brown swamp rabbit. It stared at me with wide, scared eyes. The rope was pulled tight around its left leg. I picked it up by the scruff of its neck, gentle as a mama cat, and untangled its limb.
“It’s all right,” I said softly. “Everything’s gonna be okay.” I hated lying, even if the poor old rabbit couldn’t understand a word.
I put the brown rabbit into a large basket I had borrowed from my mama. She used it for picnics, and it had a nice lid you could shut with a latch. Stuffed a couple of carrots in too, so at least the rabbit wouldn’t go hungry. Took the basket back to our barn and hid it in Pa’s old wheelbarrow, next to the stack of flour sacks filled with dirt. The two kittens we had rescued from the river had gotten sleek and fat on the mice in our barn. One of them slept on top of a flour sack. The other danced around my feet, meowing for a bowl of cream like Emma sometimes brought.
I was too worried to eat much at supper that night, even though we had ham, green beans and biscuits with butter and honey. No one said much. I knew they were all thinking about Doc Haley and the hanging scheduled for ten tomorrow morning.
After supper I went over to Emma’s to do my homework. Found her crying at the kitchen table. She’d gotten a 75 on a history test. Her mama’d spent the whole afternoon yelling at her and asking why. Emma wasn’t good at lying, but she couldn’t tell her mama the truth. We’d spent so much time planning recently, she hadn’t had no time to study.
“Glad to know you need to study too,” I said. “I thought you were just born knowing everything.”
Emma cried harder.
“Shoot, Emma, a 75 is nothing to cry over. It’s just a number on a piece of paper.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” Emma sobbed, and I finally realized she wasn’t crying about the history test. I didn’t have no answer, so I just held her hand and let her cry for both of us.
I went home soon after that and went to bed early. Me, Robert, Earl and Raymond share a bedroom on the second floor. I sleep next to the window. Little Robert was already asleep, and Earl was busy changing into his pajamas. I climbed into bed without undressing and pulled the blanket over my head.
In the dark I picked at the lumpy baseball I had hidden under my pillow till I had unwrapped enough twine to make a loop. I slipped the loop around my wrist and pulled it tight.
Instead of trying to stay up till the grown-ups were in bed, me and Emma were just gonna go to sleep and get up later. Emma had her own alarm clock, given to her by her grandma. If she placed it under her pillow, it was just loud enough for her to hear but muffled so it wouldn’t wake her parents. I was planning on tossing the baseball out the window so Emma could wake me by pulling on the twine.
I peeked out from under the covers. Earl was in bed with his eyes closed, but Raymond came into the room and saw me looking around. “You still awake, Dit?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Raymond came over and sat down on the edge of my bed. “I’m sorry about Doc.”
“Yeah,” I said again, praying Raymond wouldn’t notice I was still dressed and had a baseball tied to my arm.
“You’re closer to him than any of us,” Raymond said.
“Yeah,” I repeated. Why did he have to pick tonight to be nice?
“Just wanted to say I was sorry.”
“Thanks.”
Raymond finally said good night, climbed into his own bed and turned off the kerosene lantern. Soon as the light was off, I forced the baseball out the slightly open window. I could feel the twine unwinding as it fell and heard the soft thump as the ball hit the ground. The twine felt like an iron chain around my wrist.
I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep at all, but I guess I did ’cause next thing I knew, someone was jerking at my arm. I sat up. The room was dark and my brothers were breathing nice and steady. I peeked out of the window. Emma was looking up at me, one hand still wrapped around the twine hanging down the side of the house.
I grabbed my baseball mitt and carefully slipped out of bed. I could hear Pa snoring gently in the big bedroom at the end of the hall as I crept down the stairs. The clock on the mantel in the parlor read five minutes after midnight.
The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had Page 16
