by Parrish, PJ
“There’s nothing to say,” he said softly.
“I know better than that. No matter what, she was still your mama and it still pains you, I can see it on your face.”
“Bessie,” Louis put the spoon down and sat back. “I…I’m not sure what I feel. I just know it doesn’t seem fair.”
“Nobody ever said things is fair, Louis. Life ain’t fair.”
Wallace’s thin face flashed in his mind. “I went over to Wallace-Pickney today,” Louis said. “You know what happened? They refused to take her. Refused. I…I wanted to kill him. For a split second, I could’ve killed him.”
Bessie reached across the table and took his hand. “I told you, Louis, just go over to Collins.”/p>
“I can’t do that.”
Bessie frowned. “Why not? Most of us folk don’t want nothin’ to do with Wallace-Pickney. We got our own, always have. It’s jus’ as good.”
“I know, but I kept seeing that picture of her, and I kept thinking about how stinking awful things were for her most of her life. And I just wanted her to be there. I wanted to have flowers and—”
“Louis,” Bessie said firmly, “Collins done got flowers.”
“I know, but—”
“Louis Kincaid, you’s a snob. Collins was good enough for my husband and half my kin. Why isn’t Collins good enough for your mama? What’s so bad about Collins Funeral Parlor?”
Louis ran a hand over his eyes. “It’s not the same.”
“What’s not the same?” Bessie asked, her voice rising.
Louis looked up at her. “It just…”
“It’s just that’s it’s black, isn’t it? Louis Washington Kincaid, you ought to be ashamed!”
He could not look at her. He stared fuzzily into the gravy. He looked up to apologize but she was gone. He was alone in the kitchen. He lowered his head to his arms. He was so very tired.
Bessie slammed a glass frame down in front of him and he jumped.
“This is my great-granddaddy Preston Everard Roberson,” she said. “He was born a slave but he was the smartest man I ever knowed. You know what he taught me? He taught me that being black done mean one thing. You can’t walk alone.”
Louis took the frame and stared at the photograph.
“My granddaddy, his daddy, and all the black men before and after them, they’re all in there inside you, Louis,” Bessie said, more softly now. “They’re inside you and every black man who walks the earth, them and their pain. You can’t escape it. You can’t deny it. It’s a heavy load to carry, but it’s what makes us strong.”
She took the frame back. “It’s what makes us different from them.”
He looked up at Bessie, his eyes welling with tears of shame. Her face softened and she sighed deeply. She came to him, stretching out her arms. Louis wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face in her breasts. She held him, rocking him gently.
The face called to him.
He had tried to ignore it, but finally, he had gone to the closet and got out the cardboard box containing the broken pieces of the clay bust. He had carefully set them on the table and for an hour sat looking at them.
Now he picked up the largest chunk. It was the eyes, with a part of the nose intact. He stared into the blank gray orbs.
“Who are you?” he whispered. “Who are you?”
The phone rang out in the hall, unanswered. Bessie had gone to the Piggly Wiggly. Louis let it go, listening to its plaintive ring, fifteen, twenty times. Finally he got up and went out to the extension in the hall.
“Lloyd residence,” he answered, slumping against the wall.
“Louis Kincaid?”
He straightened. The voice sounded familiar. “Yes. Who’s this?”
“I can’t say right now. You arrested the wrong guy in Earl’s killing.”
Jesus. It was his mysterious caller. “How do you know? Who are you?”
“I can’t tell you yet. I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of getting killed. They’ll kill me.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The others…”
Louis shifted the phone to his other ear. “Why are you calling me?”
“I need to make sure someone else knows.”
“Knows what? What have you done? Did you kill Earl?” Louis asked.
“No…no.” The voice hesitated. Louis could hear the man’s raspy breathing. “I can’t go to prison.”
“Look,” Louis said, “I can’t promise anything. I’m a cop, not a district attorney.”
“But you can talk to him.”
“I could.”
The other end of the phone was quiet a long time. Louis tried to stay calm.
“AH right,” the caller said finally. “I’ll meet with you, but first you go to Roberts and see what you can do.”
“Wait! Don’t hang up.”
“I’ll call back.”
“When?”
“Saturday night, at ten.”
“Look, I need something concrete, something I can tell Roberts to make him listen.”
“All right, all right…”
Louis’s mouth was dry and he was tense from his toes to his ears.
“Earl was killed because of the lynching of that guy y’all are burying on Saturday,” the voice said.
Louis fell back against the wall softly, stunned. “How do you know this?”
“I was there.”
Chapter 15
Leverette was walking toward him. His shoulders were huge and misshapen, covered with a burgundy shirt. Across his chest was a white number 15. He was wearing handcuffs. There was blood running from his head.
He came closer, along the two-lane road. Cars, big white cars, flew by, buffeting his body from side to side. The burgundy football jersey began to fade, turning to checkered flannel. Then it began to fall away from his body in shreds. Leverette held up his hands. The cuffs had turned into rope. His face started to darken, as if someone was shading in a pencil drawing, turning tan…brown…black. The cars kept coming, white cars with shiny chrome bumpers.
Leverette’s face was just a blur now, smudged… It came closer, but it wasn’t Leverette anymore. It was his own face. And it was mouthing two words, over and over: Help me, help me…
Louis jerked awake.
The room was black and cold as ice. His heart was hammering and he was bathed in sweat. He sat up, pulling in a jagged breath. The sound of a car going by in the street below filtered up to him. Slowly his heartbeat returned to normal.
Jesus…First ghosts, and now nightmares.
He threw back the quilt and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The cold of the wood floor on his feet felt reassuringly real. He stood up and went to the kitchenette. He threw open the refrigerator, blinking in the light as he looked for a beer. None. He closed it and sank back against the counter. Damn, he had to get out of this place before he went crazy.
He looked at his suitcase, sitting on the floor in the corner.
piled high with his clothes. The face in the dream came back to him and he closed his eyes against it. He pushed himself away from the counter and went to the window, snapping back the curtains. The street was quiet, deserted, the sky brushed with pale pink in the east. Louis leaned his head against the cold pane.
He saw the light come on in Tinker’s store and knew it was six. Too early to get up. But he was too keyed-up to go back to sleep. He showered and dressed, pulling on khakis and an old beige knit shirt. Downstairs, he grabbed his sheriff’s jacket off the hall tree and quietly let himself out the front door.
Tinker’s store was warm, the coffee smell pungent. Louis started across the creaky wood floor toward it just as Tinker emerged from the back with a tray of donuts.
“Good morning, Mr. Tinker,” Louis said as he poured coffee into a to-go cup.
Tinker nodded politely. “Mr. Kincaid.”
As Louis went to the counter to pay. Tinker took a sprinkled donut fr
om the tray and set it on a napkin before Louis.
“You have a good memory,” Louis said.
“I have an excellent memory,” Tinker replied. He selected a plain donut for himself and moved to the coffee machine, picking up the pot of hot water. He brought a cup back to the counter, and Louis watched as he unwrapped a teabag. Dipping it into the water, he looked up at Louis and spoke softly. “Bessie told me about Miss Lila. My sympathies,” he said.
“Thank you,” Louis said. He finished his donut in two bites as Tinker went about straightening the gum and candy around the cash register.
“All packed?” Tinker asked suddenly.
Louis looked at him over the rim of the cup. Bessie must have told him that, too. “Not all the way,” Louis said, glancing at the donut case. Tinker lifted the lid and Louis got another.
“Your case is solved, then?”
Louis shook his head. “Far from it.”
Tinker’s expression remained impassive, but Louis could sense something behind it. Anger? Disappointment?
“There’s no sense in keeping at it,” Louis said, feeling the need to explain. “It’s their town, their crime. They can handle it however they want now. I’m finished banging my head against the wall.” Louis bit into the donut.
“So you’re giving up,” Tinker said.
Louis looked Tinker square in the eye. “I have no choice. It was hopeless to begin with. You were right.” He took a sip of coffee.
“I was right?”
“You said things don’t change. You said I couldn’t make a difference.”
“Perhaps I was wrong. I am, occasionally.”
“You weren’t wrong. No one cares. No one was willing to help me.” Louis said, shaking his head. “I even dreamed about it last night.”
“Dreams cannot be interpreted by those who experience them. Dreams come from deep inside. Their true meaning is often fantasy or desire, not reality.”
Louis stared into the coffee. “Yeah, sure. Name one person in this town who gives a damn what I do.”
“Willie Johnson…or whoever he is.”
Louis hesitated. He was about to say, “He’s dead. He can’t do anything anymore,” but he didn’t. The unknown man was not dead. He had spoken to him that first day in the woods and he hadn’t stopped since. Louis studied Tinker’s face as the old man took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief pulled from his overalls. Tinker glanced up, leveling his soft brown eyes at Louis.
“Mr. Tinker, that man can’t help me,” Louis said.
“Then you must help yourself.”
Oh man, why did he bother to come over here? Louis wadded the napkin and tossed it in the trash can. He should know better than to get sucked into the old man’s reedy muck of musings.
Louis put two dollars on the counter and picked up a copy of the Black Pool Journal, tucking it under his arm. “I’m leaving, Mr. Tinker. There’s nothing more I can do.” He started toward the door.
“Mr. Kincaid,” Tinker called out. “You know your Shakespeare?”
Louis paused. “Some.”
“‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’” Tinker recited. “‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.’”
Louis smiled bitterly. “You’re quoting a weak man who couldn’t decide what to do,”
“That’s what most people think,” Tinker said without smiling. “But that’s not how I see it. I think those words are really a call to action, spoken by a man who has made a decision and plans to see it through, no matter what.”
Louis shook his head, pushed open the screen door and stepped out on the porch. It was light now and he breathed in the cold breeze, watching the cars coming and going at the stop sign. He let out a sigh. Call to action…shit.
He started down the steps and the paper slipped from his arm, scattering in the wind. Louis hustled after it, grabbing the front page. He rose and looked at the headline: city plans symbolic TRIBUTE TO SLAIN MAN.
Beneath it, there was a photograph of the pencil sketch that Marsha Burns had sent with the clay bust. The caption said: Willie Johnson.
Louis crumbled the paper and stuffed it in a nearby garbage can. It wasn’t right. Goddamn it, it just wasn’t right.
He went back up the steps and jerked open the screen door. He stalked to the counter. Tinker hadn’t moved, and Louis looked at him calmly.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay and finish this.”
“I never asked you to stay, Mr. Kincaid.”
Louis was shaking his head. “But people aren’t going to like it,” he said firmly. “They’re going to have to face the ugly parts of their past instead of running away from them.”
“We all need to do that sooner or later, Mr. Kincaid,” Tinker said.
Louis stared at him. There was something new in Tinker’s eyes, a hint of empathy, a glimmer of compassion perhaps. Tinker went over to the coffee machine and returned with a fresh cup for Louis. Louis thanked him and leaned back against the counter.
Through the window, he could see a small knot of children bundled in tattered parkas, lining up to get on the yellow school-bus. He took a drink of the bracing coffee.
“I’m going to have to do things my way, even if it means going behind the sheriff’s back,” he said, more to himself than Tinker.
“Your sheriff—is he a good man?” Tinker asked.
“I don’t know. He seems to want to close his eyes to the whole thing.”
“Then show him something he can’t ignore.”
“I don’t know if I can trust him,” Louis said. “Sometimes he seems like he’s capable of being a cop, of doing what has to be done, but then…” He shook his head. “I just don’t know him.”
Tinker went over to the vegetable bin, pulled something out and came back. He held an artichoke up in front of Louis’s face.
“I don’t sell many of these,” Tinker said. “People come in and say. Tinker, what the hell is that ugly thing?’ They say it’s too much trouble to eat, too hard working through all the tough leaves to get to the good piece inside. But it’s worth it, what’s inside.” He tossed the artichoke in the air and caught it, smiling.
Louis stared at the artichoke in Tinker’s large hand, then laughed softly. Tinker set the artichoke on the counter. Louis sobered, looking at him.
“This could cost me my career, Mr. Tinker,” he said.
Tinker nodded. “You could leave. You have that choice.”
Louis shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not anymore.”
After leaving Tinker’s, Louis drove straight to Ethel Mulcahey’s house. He sat in the driveway, looking at his watch. It was only seven-thirty, probably too early to bother her. He didn’t even know if she would open the door after the way she acted at the station yesterday, and he didn’t really blame her. But he had to try.
The drapes at the living-room window pulled open suddenly and Louis saw Ethel. She spotted his car, stood frozen in the window for a moment then moved away. Louis got out and went up to ring the bell.
He stood waiting for several minutes. He was just about to give up when she opened the door, just enough to look out at him.
“What do you want?” she said flatly.
“Mrs. Mulcahey, please give me a minute,” he began slowly. “I want to talk to you about Leverette.”
“Did Sam send you?” she asked.
“No, I’m here on my own.” He hesitated. She looked worn-out, like she hadn’t slept. “Mrs. Mulcahey, I don’t think Leverette is guilty. I want to help him.”
Ethel’s eyes scanned his face. She clutched the lapels of her pink robe tighter around her neck.
“Please, Mrs. Mulcahey,” Louis said softly but firmly. “I need to talk to you.”
She disappeared and a second later, the door swung open. Louis came into the entrance hall. Ethel was walking away, toward the livi
ng room. He shut the door and followed her.
She had sat down on the edge of a chair, hunched over like a sick bird on a perch. Louis took the sofa across from her. The sun streamed in through the big window, falling full on her wan face. She looked terrible.
Ethel looked up at him as if coming out of a trance. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m usually dressed by now but…” Her voice trailed off. “You said you think Leverette is innocent.”
Louis nodded.
“Then why was he arrested?”
Louis wasn’t sure what to tell her. He considered telling her what had been tumbling through his mind since the mysterious man had called him last night. But the only thing he had been able to deduce from the caller’s confession was that Earl had been killed because of the lynching. If Earl had played a part in it, he didn’t want to be the one to tell Ethel. But somehow Earl and the mysterious caller were involved. And Walt Kelly was, too, if the picture of him wearing the medallion meant anything.
“I need you to tell me about Earl,” Louis began. “About what he was like when he was young.”
Ethel frowned in confusion. “What does this have to do with Leverette?”
“I can’t tell you exactly. Please, Mrs. Mulcahey, just trust me. This will help Leverette.”
She sighed deeply. “All right, what do you what to know?”
“Start when you met…anything.”
She told him they had known each other since childhood. Earl’s family living close by her own, and that they had started dating in high school.
“Who were your friends in high school?” Louis asked.
“I had many friends, but Earl didn’t,” she said. “Most of the boys thought he was…a sissy, I guess you would say. Earl was a quiet boy. He liked to read. He didn’t play sports. He wanted so desperately to be a part of the crowd but, I suppose. Detective, he was what the kids nowadays call a nerd,” Ethel seemed to drift off for a moment.
“Did he hang around with anyone?”
“I…I don’t really remember.” She ran a hand over her face. “Would you like some coffee, Detective?”
Louis took her invitation as a sign she was warming up to him. He was filled to bursting with Tinker’s coffee, but he accepted anyway.
