First thing we did was head on over to Chip’s to get the key. Emma held the basket with the rabbit while I threw pebbles at Chip’s window. I could hear the rabbit’s claws scratching at the reeds as we waited. Finally, Chip pushed open the window and stuck his head out.
“I don’t have it,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I don’t have the key,” Chip repeated a bit louder. “I couldn’t get it from my pa. Ever since Doc got arrested, he’s been carrying it around with him. Even sleeps with it under his pillow.”
“You promised,” I said. I couldn’t believe Chip was letting me down. Again.
Chip shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“Who else has a key?” asked Emma.
“I don’t know. Big Foot had one. Maybe Mrs. Pooley’s got it now.” He glanced back into his dark room. “I gotta go.” He pulled his head back in and shut the window.
“What are we supposed to do?” I wailed. “Break into her store?”
I looked at Emma. And we both knew what we had to do.
51
THE KEYS
WE SNUCK DOWN MAIN STREET, HEADING toward Mrs. Pooley’s store. The gallows loomed in front of city hall. All week Mr. Fulton had worked on them, singing as he sawed and hammered. Emma stopped in front of the gallows and looked up at the wooden structure.
“Emma,” I asked quietly, “freeing Doc is breaking the law, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Ain’t that wrong?”
“I don’t know.” Emma thought for a moment. “Some people helped slaves escape before the war. They were breaking the law, but I don’t think they were wrong.”
I stared at Emma. I couldn’t imagine her a slave. She was too smart. She was too beautiful. Was it possible that in another time and place, that wouldn’t have made a difference?
I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
“Don’t do that, Dit,” she said.
“Why not? You kissed me.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
I didn’t think so but said nothing. Even Emma was wrong once in a while.
“We’d better keep moving,” Emma said finally.
We reached Mrs. Pooley’s front porch. She lived in a couple of rooms above the store. There weren’t any lights burning, so I figured we had a chance of pulling this off. Soon as I thought that, Emma brushed past one of the rockers, causing it to squeak. I held my breath till the sound faded into the night.
We tried the front door, a large oak slab with a small window. It was locked. I pulled out my pocketknife and fiddled with the lock. Nothing happened.
“Stand back, Dit,” said Emma.
I took a step away from the door. Emma held a large stone.
“Emma, no!”
But she threw the stone anyway. It crashed through the front window. I thought we were caught for sure, but no one came by to see about the noise. Guess the old woman was a heavy sleeper. Either that or she’d had a couple of nightcaps.
I carefully reached through the broken glass and unlocked the door.
Soon as we were inside Mrs. Pooley’s store, I lit my candle. It flickered, creating strange shadows as we looked down the aisles. I had been through those aisles a thousand times in the daylight, but at night they seemed as strange as a Chinese market.
“Where do you think the keys are?” asked Emma.
“By the register?” I suggested.
Sure enough, right by the front counter there was a ring of keys hanging on a nail. Emma reached up and took them down. She spread the silvery keys out in a fan over her fingers.
“Which one is it?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll have to take them all.”
“Think we’ll have time to bring ’em back before day-break?”
“I don’t—”
The front door opened. A figure stood in the doorway, huge and shining in the starlight. “I saw you go in,” growled a deep voice. “Come on out!”
For a minute I thought it was Big Foot, come back from the dead. Me and Emma slowly crept forward. By the light of the candle, we saw Mrs. Pooley in the doorway. “What are you doing?” she asked.
I couldn’t think of nothing to say.
Mrs. Pooley tried to snatch the ring of keys from Emma, but she stepped back. “We need the key to let Doc Haley out of jail.”
Mrs. Pooley ripped the keys from Emma’s hands.
“You have to help us,” Emma pleaded.
“Don’t you tell me what to do. I’m an old woman. I do as I like.” She hung the keys back on their nail, then turned her gaze to us. “Come with me.”
52
HOW BIG FOOT
GOT HIS NAME
WE FOLLOWED MRS. POOLEY ROUND THE side of the store to the wooden staircase that went up to the rooms where she lived. She led us into her kitchen and put on a pot of water. There was a large knife on the table, and for a minute, I thought she was gonna stab us both to death and cook our bones. But she only used the knife to cut a couple of slices from a pound cake.
A few minutes later we were sitting around her small table, each with a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Mrs. Pooley stirred her tea round and round with a spoon, just like Mama did when there was something she didn’t want to say.
“When Big Foot was just a little boy,” Mrs. Pooley said finally, “his daddy would come in from the fields and take off his shoes. Little Gabriel, that was his name then, would jump into his daddy’s shoes and shuffle around the house. ‘Look at me, Mama!’ he’d say. ‘I’ve got big feets!’” She smiled at the memory.
I finally noticed how thin Mrs. Pooley was. Instead of wrinkles, the skin was pulled tight across her face. Me and Emma didn’t move as she kept talking.
“But he always was a violent boy. Got in fights at school, tortured stray dogs around town. I knew he was naughty, but I loved him anyway. He was my only child.” She paused. “You used to remind me of him, Dit. That’s why I asked you to run my errands. But you changed.”
She took a deep breath. “I think it’s terrible that a nice boy like you runs around with a nigger.”
Emma stared at her piece of cake. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mrs. Pooley. Her dress was a couple of sizes too big, and she had a sash tied about her waist. Without it holding her together, it seemed her old body might just fall apart.
“Course Gabriel had a nigger for a brother. I always pretended I didn’t know—never breathed a word of it to my husband—but I wasn’t no fool. I knew my husband liked the Negra women, and Doc Haley was the spitting image of him. Thing is, most people didn’t see it ’cause they couldn’t get past his color.
“But Doc Haley’s wife worked as my maid till the day she died. When she was brushing my hair or sweeping the floor, she often talked about what a kind man her husband was. ‘Kind’ was not a word I’d ever use to describe my son.
“He only got worse as he got older, drinking and brawling in bars. Then there was that man in Selma. I knew it wasn’t no accident.” Her voice started to tremble. “If Doc got into a fight with Big Foot, it must have been my boy’s fault.”
Mrs. Pooley sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “There’s been enough killing. If I hadn’t told Big Foot that nigger girl was in the play, he wouldn’t have started fighting with Doc. I already got one of my husband’s sons killed. I won’t harm the other.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Go get me the sugar bowl, Dit.” She pointed to a blue ceramic container on the counter. I got up and brought it to her.
Mrs. Pooley cradled it in her wrinkled hands, then took off the lid and dumped the sugar onto the kitchen table.
I stared at her. She was crazy. Any second now she was gonna pull out a gun or a knife—or maybe the pound cake had been poisoned. Not that any one of us had choked down more than a bite.
It was Emma who noticed the bit of silver metal sticking up out of the mound of sugar. She picked it up and shook off
the grains. It was a large, silver key.
“Now get out of here,” Mrs. Pooley snapped. “Before I change my mind and tell someone what you’re gonna do.”
53
FREEING DOC HALEY
I DIDN’T REALLY BELIEVE MRS. POOLEY had helped us till the key turned in the lock and the prison door slid open. Doc Haley was sitting on his cot watching us. We stared at each other. Our candles made big shadows on the wall. Doc made no move to cross the open threshold.
“Quick,” Emma said. “Jim Dang-It’s going to hide you until you can get out of town.”
“But . . .” Doc started to protest.
“We’ll explain later,” Emma whispered. “Go.”
Doc nodded and brushed past us, disappearing up the stairs.
Soon as Doc was gone, me and Emma stripped the sheet from the cot. It was old, but it had a tough hem. I had to cut the edges with my pocketknife so we could tear it into long pieces. We quickly knotted the pieces together, making a thick rope. We had studied pictures of a hangman’s noose in a book at Emma’s house and practiced with an old sheet in our cave, so I thought it would be easy. But our hands shook at every noise and the minutes stretched out like an old sweater as we struggled to form the makeshift rope into the right shape. Finally, it was done. The noose lay on the floor of the cell, still as an albino snake.
Next, I took the rabbit from the basket. It quivered in fear, its dark eyes huge in the candlelight. “Do you have to kill it?” Emma asked.
“Dr. Griffith said we needed blood,” I reminded her. “The rabbit was your idea.”
She nodded and looked away.
With a snap, I broke the rabbit’s neck. It twitched for a moment, then hung limp as an old hat, warm in my hands. Quickly I began to skin it. When I was through, I put the hide aside and took the bloody rabbit meat and rubbed it all over the white noose.
Finally, Emma dipped the sheets in the outhouse bucket. That was real disgusting, but Emma had read that sometimes people peed on themselves when they were hung, and we wanted to make things as realistic as possible.
The noose was a dripping, stinking mess by the time I boosted Emma onto my shoulders. Emma pulled away bits of plaster from the old ceiling till she found a beam. She looped the filthy sheet over it and tied the noose tight. We both hung from the rope, making sure it could hold our weight.
Next, we dragged the cot over so it was under the noose—as if Doc had used it to boost himself to the ceiling. Emma suggested we tip it on its side, as if Doc had kicked it over once he decided to hang himself. Finally, we wiped some blood onto an old, rusty nail, threw the nail on the floor and stood back to look at our work.
“I’d believe he killed himself,” said Emma.
“Me too.” But I hoped it would fool the people who mattered.
The coffin was waiting in the hall. Me and Emma dragged it into the small room next to the jail cell that was used for a morgue. We struggled to lift it onto the flat table. It wasn’t really heavy, just awkward ’cause of its size. Then we ran back to my pa’s barn. The bags were too heavy for us to carry, but Emma could pull one in my wagon and I could push two in Pa’s wheelbarrow. We thought we could move them all in just two trips.
The first trip went fine ’cept for a raccoon that scuttled across Main Street and scared us half to death. We were almost back to the jail with our second load, and I was just beginning to think we might pull this off, when Uncle Wiggens wandered into the street.
“Who there?” he called out, his words slurred.
Emma ducked behind a tree, but I didn’t move fast enough. “Is that you, Dit?”
I nodded. Something was strange about him.
“What you doing out so late at night?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I figured out what was strange. “Where’s your leg?” I asked. His leg ended at the knee and he was hopping along on one leg and his cane.
“Left it at home,” said Uncle Wiggens. “Always do when I’m sleepwalking. My daughter warned me about drinking a whole bottle of whiskey in one sitting. But I was never one to let a woman tell me what to do.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
“Well,” said Uncle Wiggens, “I’d best get on home before I wake up.”
“Yeah.”
“Being out without my leg and all.”
“That would be embarrassing.”
“Sure would. Sure would.” Uncle Wiggens mumbled to himself as he wandered off. “General Lee always said, if you ain’t got all your supplies, don’t ride into battle. Course he meant bullets, but he wouldn’t have liked us going off without our legs neither. Course most of us have our legs buttoned on, but . . .”
When he was finally gone, Emma stepped out from behind the tree. “You could have helped me,” I said, heart pounding.
“I thought you did pretty well on your own.” She giggled, and for a moment, I forgot what we were doing and giggled too.
54
A NIGHT IN JAIL
ONE BY ONE, WE LUGGED THE BAGS DOWN the stairs and lifted them into the open coffin. I got the rabbit skin from the other room and threw it in the coffin as well. Then Emma put in a hammer and a handful of nails we had stolen from my pa’s toolshed and closed the lid.
“Do you think it’ll work?” Emma asked.
“Course it will.” But even I could hear the uncertainty in my voice.
We made our way up the stairs and out of city hall. “What time is it?” Emma wondered.
I looked up at the stars. “About three, I think.”
“I better get home.”
“Yeah,” I said. I handed her the basket with the dead rabbit and reminded her to throw it to our dogs on the way home. I could see the silver key clutched in her left hand. She played with it absently, sliding it between one finger after another.
“Sure you don’t want me to stay with you?” she asked.
“Emma.” I sighed. “If someone finds me here, I can make up a lie and they might believe me. But if you’re here too, we don’t have a chance.”
She nodded. We’d been over this a million times. But the truth was, I didn’t want her to leave. We stood next to each other in the starlight, and I felt her rest her head on my shoulder. I put an arm around her waist. She didn’t pull away. We stood like that for a long time.
“Dit?” Emma said softly.
“Yes?”
“Whatever happens, we did the best we could.”
I nodded.
She kissed my cheek. I turned to see her face, but she wriggled away and hurried down Main Street.
I went back inside the jail and lay down on the floor in the room with the coffin. It was cold, lying on the hard stone floor. I could hear little claws clattering over the old stones—the rats Chip and Buster had promised would eat my bones. Poor Buster was dead now.
Right now, Emma was taking the key back to Mrs. Pooley. We had promised to leave it under the mat to her back door. But what if someone saw Emma slipping into Mrs. Pooley’s yard? Or if Mrs. Pooley changed her mind and told on us? All I could do was sit and wait.
Dr. Griffith was coming first thing in the morning to get Doc Haley ready for the execution. It was really the job of the sheriff, but we didn’t have one no more, and no one wanted to hire another. ’Cept for Jim Dang-It, Dr. Griffith was the only grown-up who knew about our plan.
And even though Dr. Griffith had agreed to help us, I couldn’t help worrying as I lay on the floor under the table, beneath the coffin filled with dirt. The darkness was thick as pea soup. It pressed on me. My stub of a candle had long since burned out. I began to imagine I was Doc Haley, going to be hung in the morning. A cold panic crept up my throat. What if Dr. Griffith didn’t show up? I forced the thought away.
I must have fallen asleep ’cause suddenly there was sunlight streaming in through the small window near the ceiling. I heard voices and jumped to my feet.
Dr. Griffith was supposed to get the key from Mayor Davidson and come alone. He would “discover” the b
ody, then I would just happen to come along on a morning walk and help him cut Doc Haley down. Least that was the story we were gonna tell everyone. By the time anyone else arrived, the “body” would be safely in the coffin, closed and nailed shut, so that no one would have to see the horrible sight. So why did I hear voices? Something had gone wrong. I climbed onto the table next to the coffin and peeked out the tiny window.
Mayor Davidson was standing with Dr. Griffith at the top of the stairs that led down to the jail. Dr. Griffith was real pale. “You really don’t have to come down with me,” I heard him say. “I can get Doc ready alone.”
“Nonsense,” Mayor Davidson replied. “I’m up, excited and looking forward to the hanging. I don’t mind coming down to give you a hand.” He moved toward the stairs. Dr. Griffith put a hand out to block him.
“Larry,” Dr. Griffith said firmly. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but . . .”
“What?”
“Doc Haley don’t like you too much.”
Mayor Davidson laughed. “I don’t like him neither.”
“He’s a little unbalanced, what with the hanging today and all. Yesterday, I promised him I’d come get him ready alone.”
“A promise to a murderer don’t mean nothing.”
“I know. I just want to go down first to warn him that you’re coming. We’ve got to put on the cuffs and the ankle chains so he can walk up to the hanging. That could be difficult if he’s agitated. And if you show up unexpected, he’s going to get agitated.”
“All right,” Mayor Davidson snapped. “You go down and put the chains on, then come up and get me. Don’t want no trouble. Though I don’t know when you became so soft-hearted.”
The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had Page 17
