False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  They came on, at a steady pace of about eight miles an hour, to the hum of the throttled engines, and there was something disturbing about the evenness with which they came. The lead car drew up and halted a few yards from us; behind it the others also halted. The lead car turned off its lights, but not its engine. One by one the others followed, and the sky came out again, with the pallor peculiar to a clear night’s zenith, above the long dark line that stood stock-still in the road, its engines urgently throbbing, its gas-generated breath rising toward us like the musk of a waiting herd. Inside where we were the curtain stirred with it, the shed spread it like a sieve.

  “Who they come by for?” muttered Johnny. “Nobody supposed to be here I know of. Everybody supposed to round up in town.”

  He dug his fist in my arm for silence, to keep me where I was, and stole outside. I peered after him through the curtain, my heart pounding with the question of who they might be, that dark, animal line. But deeper still—favoring even then the mystery of the one over the many—I brooded on how it was to be Johnny, for whom home was a place where anyone, any time, might be there.

  When the gas lay so heavy on the wind that it seemed a word, a movement would spark it, the door of the main shed opened and was quickly closed. It was Frazer, the watchman, carrying his lantern, lifting it once broadly up and down, so that the whole swollen front curve of him showed, dropsical belly to crotch, making its childish, self-important “Oyez” in the dark. Behind him the other man, the long-chinned man from inside, seized the lantern and put it out.

  At once all the headlights went on, paired by paired eyes springing open. In their glow I saw Johnny’s face where he lay all but hidden in the long grass. He was staring at the lean figure of the second man. The man’s long jaw caught the light as he handed the doused lantern to old Frazer and took out the makings of a cigarette. He shook out the tobacco and licked the paper, his feet still half strutting in their buck and wing, and now I could hear the tune they jaunted to—“Old Zip Coon”—and catch the words he hummed.

  Went to the river and I couldn’t get across,

  Paid a silver dollar for an old bline hoss—

  He lit the cigarette, laid a hand on Frazer’s shoulder, and pushed past him.

  Hoss wouldn’t foller, so I swapped him for a coon,

  Coon began to holler, so I went back home.

  I watched Johnny as the long figure slouched past him unaware, almost catching his face with its heel, and slid, easy-loined, into the first car of the line. He was staring up at it with the same look that, earlier, swinging the bucket, he had bent on me.

  I crept out to him and crouched at his elbow. He did not turn his head to acknowledge me. “Never knew he came up here,” he whispered. “Could have sworn he never hung around with them.”

  I said nothing. I did not consider telling him what I had overseen of the man and old Frazer and his mother, of the familiar way they had been sitting at table, of how the man had replaced the round comb in her hair. Nor did I think of whispering to him, friendly helpful, friendly deceiving, that perhaps he was wrong about the man, whoever he was, the way he had been wrong about me. I knew better. Already, out of my innocence I was forming my own peculiar honesty, as each of us, not out of original sin—that I deny—but out of our innocence, is forced to do. I knew that one may only gather the threads, and be silent. I knew that nothing one says face to face avails.

  We were crouched there when the lead car moved in a direction so unforeseen that we barely had time to flinch into the shadows. This was the end of the road; the line must turn around, each car in its own radius, unless it planned to go in reverse the whole four miles to the state highway from which it must have come. Behind us was the siding. Beyond it there was no road, only the rough fields across which I had run from the backs.

  But the lead car moved forward, turned sharply and made for the siding. I saw the car’s hood tilt up and heave ahead under the fever-shine of the signal, and I recognized it as Semple’s, hearing Johnny from times past: A Packard eight. He got it off a widow in Mobile. Hundred-forty-five-inch wheelbase, longest wheelbase made. Has a fourth gear hauls it out of a ditch like a tractor. Brewster body. Custom-built for a man six and a half feet tall.

  Behind it, each car wheeled sharply and made for the main-line crossing. As they passed, here and there I thought I recognized cars Johnny had described or pointed out to me, repeating their dossiers in longing or condemnation. It took about twenty minutes for them all to cross over. Now and then a truck moved out of line to help a weaker car over; once an old touring eight, wedged on a timber, needed the help of two. But in all the pushing and grinding no human arm appeared, no voice, no driver. It was like watching a fable of cars changed to beetles, turned masters. At the finish, shell ranged by glittering shell, they were all on the other side. Behind them the signal light, some switch tripped or wire crossed, began blinking. Then the lead car struck out alone straight across field, grinding like a tractor over hummock and stubble, making a path for the rear to follow, and in a long, transverse line, single in the starlight, all the cars of Tuscana crawled forward, humming, into the backs.

  When they had gone, Johnny turned to me. Under cover of the noise we had gradually been drawn to our feet, shoulder to shoulder, away from the sheds. The smell of the grass rose again, that meek smell which will inherit the earth. All was quiet now around us except for the signal light, beating on. It went on like a warning pulse, although no train would pass here until dawn.

  “So you come through the backs,” he said. “See anyone there.” It was not a question. Then he knew I had not.

  I shook my head.

  “You fool,” he said. “You poor dumb fool.” But his eyes, shining, looked past me.

  He seized my wrist suddenly and dragged me forward. “Come on! I’ll see you home.”

  He led me north on the lane that met the first streets of the town, and all the way along he hurried me, goading me like a child on its way to be punished. We went almost at a trot down the shrubbed lane, and all the way, as I panted to match my stride with his, I could feel his anger growing, clotting.

  In front of my house we stopped short, both of us winded. He faced me, breathing harder than I. I thought he was going to jump me again—me, or whomever, in his fury, I stood for. This time I held my ground, lifting my chin to look at him eye to eye. Then I saw that his eyes were full of tears.

  “You—you’re such a fool,” he said, choking. “You’d believe anything, wouldn’t you!”

  Suddenly he let out a torrent of curses, words I had never heard him use, and all of them directed at me, for the fool I was. He babbled at me like a fishwife, and always for the same word, the single fault that enraged him.

  “All that stuff I used to tell you about the town,” he said at last, in the creaking voice of someone exhausted by crying. “Up there.” He pointed up to the hill. “And you believed it!”

  It was only two days ago that we had been up there, and he had described for me the latest tracery in his saga of goodness. It concerned the Nellises, and it had no story really, being only an account of how, Semple having sent him there after hours with a package for Nellis, he had walked up the trim lawn, edging his feet away from the borders where the bulbs were beginning, had knocked on the door with the brass plate, so neat, that said Treacher Nellis, and had found them all sitting at table, clean and comely as paper cutouts; mother, father and children, all in their proper family places. And through his dim words, lame pauses, there had come, as always, the moral fragrance of how people really were.

  “Didn’t you!” he said.

  I was silent. I would not answer him as he needed. I could not. The listener is not the friend. Few understand this.

  “We’ll go downtown then,” he said. “Come on.”

  My eyes wavered shut. Too much had been expected of me. I slept standing, a column of sleep between the outer dream and the in. “But the café is closed,” I said.

 
He shook me roughly. “We’re not going to the café.”

  I awoke, and followed him.

  Out on the main street, that I still thought of as the High, our doubled footfalls echoed. It had been paved the year before, and there were sidewalks now, one on either side, each broad enough for a man to step aside for another. We had gone on for some paces when I halted, nudged by a queerness, a difference. I was wide awake now, with the special sentience that comes like a second wind.

  “What you stopping for?” said Johnny. Again I had the feeling that he already knew.

  I turned, looking back at the way we had come. I turned again, holding unsure hands in front of me.

  The town, I thought—it was inside out. For here on the main street, where always a certain few lights burned, municipal and lonely, we stood on a long rib of dark. And scattered like beads around us, the houses, that should have been as dark as they were silent, had each its little spore of light, those hooded lights, paler than candles, that housewives place in the window when a man is late from home.

  “The town,” I said. “Look at the town.”

  He did not answer. He waited, slow elder brother, for me to show him in my sharpness what he already knew.

  “The courthouse light is out,” I whispered. “And the one over the church door.”

  Still he waited. The wind moved, shabby-sweet.

  I saw the houses, lit up for a fair.

  “Johnny!” I said. I whispered it. “Who were the men in the cars?”

  For answer, he led me down an alley, behind a store, where a gamecock chirred.

  Chapter VIII. Semple’s Store. The Hill.

  SEMPLE’S STORE. I’LL ENTER it again, in a moment, as the two of us did so long ago. But first, I sit here, having just reread as I do each evening the excursion of the night before. I see a change. I see a change in the method by which I record. I did not expect this so soon.

  Come, come, I did not anticipate it at all. There is a dangerous arrogance in those words “so soon”—the secret pomp of the dissembler, of one all too used to being, in most company, the subtlest, the most aware. But if I begin to dissemble to myself, then I am done.

  As to the change. When I began this, I counted on every resource of a memory of more than average intensity. Memory runs on of itself for most, a river always partially underground. But for me it is my harnessed “familiar” who can be focused like a camera obscura upon a chosen scene of the past. Gradually, then, within that boxlike frame, granules of light stream toward a center, and in an atmosphere dead and clear as old starlight, the color gathers again to the peach, the prussic smell to the bitten stone. Faces are the hardest, somehow foreign to that landscape, Venetian heads thrust into a nature morte. But even when they come they are only addenda to the once quick gesture now repeated andante, to the light word fossilized, to the cadence of the said and the unsaid, the felt and the unfelt, all returned now in empathy to me, who will hold them like coral, forever.

  Therefore, when I began this it did not occur to me to premeditate any discours sur la méthode. I am the method. Nor do I forget that I am also the critic voice, outside the scene and above it, even as Donne was, when, in the depth of his devotions, he felt the stone beneath his knee, the tickling straw. But I see now that the encyclopedist cannot research his own past with the same calm as, daily, he may do it for others, building out of the crabbed footnotes a half-column’s worth of man.

  One keeps a tryst with one’s own life at a certain peril. Not that my owl, my monitor, will desert me. It is not likely that I shall lose, in the transports of memory, what cannot be lost even in any transport of love.

  Still, there is too little of the critic voice in last night’s notes; they speak too often in the soft, mucused voice of self-immersion, in the hypnotic voice of the child I was. “Excursion” is such a suggestive word. I must be more careful to keep in mind that the box has a frame.

  Once inside the shop, Johnny seemed to shrink, reminded, as I thought then, of who he was. For, as he lit a lamp and brooded over the length of its wick, I saw in his slumped shoulders only the mingy posture of the part-time clerk, and later, when he spoke, I took the tone of his voice for the clerk’s serviceable tone. I did not yet know its note for that dead timbre, accepting of the world’s dust, which people employ once a shock is over, already becoming absorbed in the fiber, an already known quantity in the future catechism of days.

  That night, also, I was to have my first sight of feeling gurgled up from a heart that does not pause to know it has it, but I was too young to recognize this, or value it for the great sight it is. Later on I would be still young enough to recognize it and despise it. Only much later would I come to hunt it for myself, for its intercession, as I do now.

  We were in the lumber-room of the store, with no other entry but the one through which we had come. Opposite this, a door in the wall had been nailed up by means of two bars of hewn wood, crisscrossed over the lock. Semple’s store had been let into the lower story of one of those two-decker wooden houses of the eighties, loaf-shaped, topped with a single border of crenellation, that often line the main streets of small towns here even now, receding behind their gouged fronts like faded backdrops of the vaudeville period to which they belong. The store proper lay on the other side of the nailed door, a jumble too, as I had once or twice glimpsed it, but one of cash-register brightness, filled with the unmellowed, turpentine smells of all the brisk hardware of the hour.

  Here, on the other side, all the unsalable had been put to molder. One corner held a wardrobe big as a stall, made of walnut—in the South the poor man’s wedding wood, the rich man’s ordinary. In one of its closed panels, long as a coffin lid, the lion’s mane of the burl still spumed under the dust. Elsewhere, harness hung to rot, over bladder-shapes of leather and iron and shadow, in a quiet brown of accumulation, the color of the cul-de-sac.

  But in the center of the room there was a ring of chairs, twelve chairs closing a circle with exemplary neatness. And in the center of these, on one of those bent-bamboo stands which women use to set a choice plant in the sun or a nightlamp in a window, a small, clean book lay, a startle of white that held the chairs, the room. I moved toward it.

  “Watch how you touch it!” came Johnny’s voice from behind. “They know when you touch it.”

  I leaned forward on tiptoe. It was a pamphlet rather than a book. Four long pins had been driven into it, and from these white thread had been suspended, up to down, left to right, forming a hairline cross.

  “Who?” I whispered. “You were going to tell me.”

  He turned to the wardrobe and took something out, holding it folded on his arm. “Ain’t you figured that out yet?” Then he drew the thing over his head, a pointed white hood that blanked him to the shoulders, all but the pencil-holes for the eyes.

  “Don’t!” I said, recoiling. A chair fell over, behind me.

  “Is that what they had on?” I said. “Why we couldn’t see them? The men in the cars?”

  “Ah-hah.” His voice came blunted as a ghost’s. “Better put them back their chair.”

  “What is it?” I said, not moving. “What’s that thing for?” But deep in the acquisitive blood that learns to course with the climate it inhabits, I already knew. No one had ever breathed a word to me here of their open secret, but I breathed their oblique air. And I understood their need, being one of those born to form a hood of his own, one that would keep me a thousand times more secret than they. I looked at theirs, and felt of my cheek, that I had wanted to cover as I crouched in the backs. This was the white hood they used here, to cover the white face.

  He drew the hood off. “It’s all there,” he said softly. “In the book there.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything. The names,” he said softly, urgently, not looking at me, so that I guessed that he had brought me here, not for myself, but for a purpose of his own. It did not occur to me that he took it for granted that I knew who “they” were in g
eneral, as the ant must assume that the nest is the organism of the world. He must have thought that I wanted to see the names, as he did, as he both wanted and feared to see, a particular name.

  “You’ve read it?”

  “I don’t read so good. Not so good as you.”

  He is afraid, I thought, but I credited him with the wrong fear.

  So I stepped into the circle, and he followed close behind me, through the gap of the fallen chair. The white threads stirred as we bent over them. The pins came out easily from the blank cover. He shivered as I laid them aside.

  Under the cover, the title sheet held a single black inscription: Klansman’s Manual. 1924. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. P.S. Etheridge—Chief of Staff and Imperial Klonsel.

  His face was near my shoulder. “Read it out.”

  I turned the title sheet and read out the table of contents, stumbling now and then on the one repeated letter that bird-tracked the page:

  Table of Contents

  The Order. Objects and Purposes. The Invisible Empire. Emperor of the Imperial Empire, the Imperial Klonvokation, the Imperial Kloncilium, the Imperial Wizard, Realms, the Initial Klorero, Provinces—the Initial Klonverse, Klans.

  I. The Name—Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

  II. Its Divisions.

  1. The order of citizenship or K-Uno (probationary)

  2. Knights Kamellia or K-Duo (Primary Order of Knighthood)

  3. Knights of the Great Forrest or K-Trio (The order of American Chivalry)

  4. Knights of the Midnight Mystery or K-Quad.

  “That’s it,” said Johnny. “The K-Quad, for the three towns. Does it have the names?”

  “Not here.”

  “Read till you come to them.”

  I read on, down one page after another, through all that wandering hagiolatry of pure red blood and white faces, sounding out each glyph as I could sound it now, unconscious then of the camera that stored it away. I read of the Imperial Wizard, of his Realms and Provinces, of the offices of the Kludd, the Kligrapp and the Klarogo, and the duties of those who bore them, and of the Exalted Cyclops and his twelve terrors, “a board of auditors, investigators and advisors, three of whom shall be known by the title of Klokann.”