by Pam Durban
After meeting with Swope, he’d gone home and packed fast, as though the story were melting ice. Ink pens and yellow paper, his typewriter and clothes. He’d latched the suitcases and stood them by the door. He’d smoothed the white chenille spread then sat on the bed and looked around. An armchair upholstered in flowered chintz, a mahogany dresser and bedstead, a lamp, a table, a sink and mirror on the wall. Already the room felt like he had never lived there, which was how he liked to leave things. When he walked out the door, carrying his suitcases and his typewriter, there would be no trace of him left.
A wagon pulled by a shaggy chestnut horse with white front feet eased under the portico in front of the station, and a tall young black man jumped down and walked toward Barrett with a long stride, his fists clenched at his sides. He was dressed in a black suit coat, a faded blue shirt buttoned up under his chin, dusty gray pants mended with thick white thread, and a pair of brogans laced with brown twine. A gray fedora was cocked over one eye.
“Carry you somewhere, captain?” he said, pulling off the hat. He had a deep voice, and he pronounced every word completely, as though competing in elocution. His face was rough, like a rock outcrop, and he had a way of looking just to the side of Barrett’s eyes with a grim little smile that seemed meant to be humble but felt challenging. He looked, Barrett thought, like a man who had just lost one fight and didn’t plan to lose the next one. Given what Leland had said about this place, he bet that look had gotten him into plenty of trouble.
The black man pointed behind him, to the wagon. Barrett tugged down his vest, straightened his tie, dusted off his shirt and trousers. “You bet,” he said. “Take me to the Hotel Aiken.” The hotel stood directly across Park Avenue from the Southern Railway depot, but he didn’t want to be seen carrying his own suitcases across the sandy street. The young man gave him a quick, narrow look from the corner of one eye then shrugged; he was used to carrying white men across the street, out into the county, ten times around the block; as long as they paid him, it wasn’t any of his business where they wanted to go. He had the biggest hands Barrett had ever seen.
He settled the hat back on his head, picked up both suitcases and tucked one under his arm, then picked up the typewriter case and clumped off toward the wagon. Barrett followed him out from under the portico and into the light. A haze of woodsmoke hung in the air, the rich, fermenting smell of rotting leaves. White sand below and a bright blue sky overhead, the moon still hanging in the sky like an empty bowl. The gleam of pine needles in the sunlight and the squawk of blue jays hauled him back to the moment when he’d stepped off another train and into the same light and air, down in Georgia, where they’d sent him to learn to shoot and climb, to dig and run and hit the dirt, and burrow into it. Where he’d volunteered for the medical corps, learned to splint bones and pack wounds and swab gas from men’s eyes and skin. “Curtis N. R. Barrett,” he said, putting out his hand. The man looked around then shook Barrett’s hand once and dropped it. “What’s your name?” Barrett asked, as they stood beside the wagon.
The question seemed to startle him. He kept his eyes on Barrett’s face as he spat to one side. “Zeke,” he said.
“I thought you looked familiar. Didn’t I see your picture in the Aiken Standard a few weeks back?”
Zeke looked at him obliquely again, calculating. “Might could have. Get on up there if you please, sir.”
“I thought so,” he said as he climbed up. A familiar sight, the caption beneath the picture of a smiling Zeke and his wagon had read. He was ashamed of himself for feeling relieved that the question had rattled Zeke. Ten minutes in the South, and he wanted to gain the upper hand.
Zeke loaded his suitcases and the typewriter case into the bed of the wagon then climbed up onto the seat beside him. “Come to think of it,” Barrett said, “why don’t you take me for a turn around the metropolis before we go to the hotel.”
“Yes, sir,” Zeke said, grinning. “I am happy to do that.” He clucked at the horse and flapped the reins, and they started off down a wide dirt street that was separated from a parallel street by a park planted in plume grass and small oaks held up by guy-wires.
“Pretty town,” Barrett said.
Zeke touched the brim of his hat. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It is.”
Barrett knew this kind of Negro, more and more of them coming to New York all the time. You could guess how long they’d been there by how careful they were not to offend. A month or less, and they still doffed their hats, stepped off the sidewalk to let a white man pass, looked at the ground when they talked. “You’re in the North now, son,” he’d said to the new man from Alabama who swept up at the paper.
“Yes, sir,” he’d answered, keeping his eyes on the floor. “Much obliged.”
Zeke’s wagon rolled along the street, wheels hissing through the sand. A light hack passed them, pulled by a gleaming bay horse outfitted in an oiled harness with polished brass buckles and jingling hardware. A sharp-faced woman sat up very straight on the seat, holding a thin whip with a silver handle and looking straight ahead. She wore a hunting horn on a red cord around her neck, an African helmet on her head. As she passed, Zeke tipped his hat. “Morning, Mrs. Hitchcock,” he said.
“Zeke,” she said, without turning her head, as though driving the horse demanded all her attention. His horse nickered, and the woman smiled. “You too, Princess,” she said.
Once she was ahead of them, Zeke said, “I haul ice cream to that lady’s parties. She doesn’t believe in iceboxes. Rich lady from up North. A whole slew of them come here every year. When she was a puny little girl, her auntie brought her here to take the cure, and by the time she got well, she liked it so much she decided to keep on coming. Brought all her friends down here with her too.”
“What do people need curing of, Zeke?” he asked.
Zeke pressed one big hand to his chest. “Consumption, Mr. Barrett. TB. The hotels and boardinghouses fill up with them every year. They get well here too,” he said. “They surely do that.” Every spring he beat the rugs from the hotels and boardinghouses that catered to the tubercular pilgrims. He bundled up the bed linens and took them to his mother and the other women who boiled and washed them. People hired him for any kind of errand. Go meet the Columbia train and pick up a package and bring it to my house. Go to the icehouse for me, chop-chop. He saved thick chunks of oak so his mother could keep a slow fire going under the kettles behind her house in Howard Aimar’s backyard; he brought the laundry to her and took it back when it was done. On horse trading Tuesdays he went to a flat, sandy lot behind Laurens Street called the Boneyard and laid out his blacksmith’s tools on an old blanket. He hired out his wagon for children’s birthday hayrides, wore a silk top hat and morning coat for those occasions.
“When the rich folks come to town, you can go down there to Hahn’s Grocery and buy you any kind of special cheese you want,” he said.
“You’re a good tour guide,” Barrett said.
“Thank you, sir.”
Across the long narrow park between the streets he saw the Catholic church then the courthouse and the wall of the jail behind it. Barrett had read about the sickly and the healthy rich, their horses and their cheese and English biscuits. They called Aiken “the village,” and the locals treated them like visiting royalty or gods on a mountaintop, and they were the mortals below, telling stories about the deities. He disliked lords and ladies as much as any New Englander. “Listen here,” he said, leaning over close to Zeke’s ear. “You know anyplace I can buy some whiskey?” The supply he’d brought from New York would be gone in a week, but there would be good whiskey here, the nobility would have seen to that too; the local product wouldn’t be good enough for them. Leland said there was top-notch blockade whiskey being smuggled up the Savannah River and into town.
Zeke shifted suddenly on the wagon seat and flapped the reins over the horse’s back. “No, sir,” he said. “I wouldn’t know about that, but I’ll tell you who does. You rem
ember that jail we passed back there?” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s full up all the time with whiskey people, men and women both. Sheriff Timmerman takes a particular interest in the whiskey business. He’ll run you down, sure enough, you start messing with that whiskey. But if you need your clothes kept up, my mother does that for folks all over town. I pick up on Saturday, deliver back to you on Wednesday.”
“I will need that,” he said. “Much obliged. But I’d like to find some decent whiskey too.”
“I don’t know about that, sir, I surely don’t,” Zeke said. “You need anything else, ask for Zeke. That’s Ezekial Settles,” he said slowly, as though Barrett might be writing it down. He chirped to the horse and flicked the reins on her broad, dusty back. “Get up there, lazybones,” he said. They had reached Laurens, the town’s main street, a wide dirt track lined with wooden and brick buildings and a line of gingko trees down both sides. Their golden leaves fluttered against the bright blue sky.
“My God,” Barrett said.
“The wife of my employer planted them trees,” Zeke said. “I dug every one of those holes. You wait till you see those leaves come showering down like gold falling out the sky.”
A few wagons and a couple of square black Fords were angled into parking places along the curb on either side of the thoroughfare. A line of tracks ran down the middle of the sandy street. “You have a trolley here,” Barrett said.
“Sure do,” Zeke answered, relieved, Barrett saw, to be a tour guide again. “Runs all the way down through the valley and across the river over to Augusta and back. You can set your watch by it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Barrett said. “Isn’t that something?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
They rolled down Laurens Street, past a shop displaying hats on stands in the window. Out front a girl in a long gray skirt and a white blouse cranked down a gold-and-white striped awning. She shaded her eyes and watched them pass, and when Barrett nodded, she looked away. Outside of the hardware store, talking and laughing, two black men dragged heaters onto the street. At least there’s money here, Barrett thought. And some of the black people were prosperous: doctors, teachers, tailors, builders, butchers. Leland had been excited to talk about that. They could go to a good school, the Schofield Normal and Industrial School, that had been operating since just after the Civil War. Thank God it wasn’t some sun-whipped cotton town with a few grand houses behind magnolia trees, a cotton gin, and a water tank up on rickety stilts. He’d seen enough of those towns from the train. He’d seen enough cotton fields too, the spindly brown plants picked clean, the shacks in the middle of the stubble, half-naked children and skinny dogs in the bare yards. The worst sight had been the abandoned tracts with their deep, eroded gullies, a wasted landscape where ignorance and carelessness had done the same work the shells and bombs had done in France. The deeper into the South the train had traveled, the lower he’d felt, as though he were entering a low-pressure system of the spirit.
Here he could almost smell the complacency in the air, and he felt knives sharpening inside him. The idea of the three Longs dumped into a common grave while people let down gold-and-white awnings and worshipped the rich reminded him of why he’d come. Looking at the couple on the bed at the Waldorf, he’d felt nothing; now he was reckless with the thought that he might be the one to bring justice to these other dead. “Look here,” he said. “I guess it was whiskey that started that business with the Longs.”
Zeke shifted on the seat, and something watchful happened to his face. “I wouldn’t know about that business either, Mr. Barrett,” he said. “I surely would not know about that.” He clucked and whistled to the horse. “Get up there, you,” he said. Already Barrett had ignored Leland’s sternest warning. Talking to the black people about the Longs could bring the worst kind of trouble down onto them, he said. Leave them out of this. Do not for one minute forget where you are.
On the stoop in front of a narrow glass door, a man stood watching them, his hands shoved deep in his trouser pockets. Zeke lifted his hand. “How you this morning, Mr. Howard?” he shouted.
The man shrugged. “Comme ci, comme ça,” he said, watching Barrett.
“That’s Mr. Howard Aimar,” he said. “And that’s his car. It’s one of the new colors.” A deep green Ford was parked at the curb. “I work for him too, me and my mother both. I carry his son to school every morning of this world. I’m head on over there soon as I drop you off.”
Barrett checked his watch. Seven o’clock. “He go to work this early every morning?” he asked. He turned on the wagon seat to look, but the stoop was empty. The sun had barely cleared the trees; it struck the glass storefronts and gilded the gold letters on the office door. HOWARD AIMAR, INSURANCE AND REAL ESTATE.
“He’s a hardworking man, for sure.”
And then they pulled up in front of the hotel, and Zeke jumped down, lifted the suitcases out, closed his hand around the money Barrett held out to him. He touched the brim of his hat again. “Much obliged,” he said. “Ezekial Settles, at your service.”
3
Howard Aimar
June 1943
LIBBA HAS BROUGHT the photograph and set it on the metal table beside his bed so it’s the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes. One look is all it takes, and he carries the image into the dark behind his eyes again, where he can study the scuppernong arbor in her father’s yard and the three of them standing under it on the morning of Lewis’s christening. He sees the sunlight dapple Libba’s white high-necked dress, his stiff white dress shirt, the long white gown in which Hastings babies were always baptized.
This morning, though, when he closes his eyes Libba walks away from him, carrying Lewis away. “Where are you going with the baby?” he shouts after her, and her voice drifts down and buzzes in his head like a wasp trapped in a window.
“Howard,” she says, “Howard, lie still. Someone help me.” Hands that are not Libba’s press him into the bed and hold him. But Lewis’s daughter is not bothered by his fear; she sits quietly beside his bed, holding his hand, waiting. Waiting for him to tell what she’s come to hear. And he must do it. She will not wait forever, and somehow he understands that if she leaves, he will go too. His life, he tells himself, depends on keeping her there.
Who knows what the dying know, what they feel or what they think? Dying, we believe, is all ebbing and confusion, but what if the mind stays clear enough to watch the body go? What if there is a final alchemy, consciousness refining itself in the fire and turmoil of the body’s failure?
“No matter where we go or what we add or subtract later,” he says to her, “we must start with the fact that one of the Longs shot Earl Glover dead when he went to their house that April day in 1925. The Aiken paper got it spot-on right. ‘Over a thousand citizens viewed the spot of Sheriff Glover’s murder. They saw him lying dead with 93 shots in his back. They saw the door of the Long house splintered with bullets when Dempsey Long engaged Deputy Timmerman and Deputy Bell in battle, shooting first at one and then at the other. They saw the bleeding hand of Timmerman, with an ounce chunk of his flesh torn away by Bessie Long in her effort to kill him with the dead sheriff’s pistol, which she had taken from his cold hand . . . You could not tell these people that the Longs were not guilty.’ ”
“Guilty,” he says. “They were guilty as sin, and all of us who endured their second trial over a year later knew what it was like to have that truth defiled. For three days the men in the courtroom, myself and Dr. Hastings among them, watched the lawyer Wise, who’d come all the way down from Spartanburg to argue those people’s case, make a big show of rolling up his shirtsleeves, like he was any other honest man going to work. For three days we watched that man strut back and forth in front of Sheriff Glover’s widow and orphaned children, braying that the original case against the people who’d killed their husband and father was full of holes so big your could drive a Packard through them. ‘Old grandfathers,’ he called
the court-appointed Aiken lawyers who’d defended the Longs at the first trial.
“And then, as if that man’s insults and strutting weren’t bad enough, things got much worse when N. R. Latham started talking, and the longer he talked, the thicker the air got, and hotter and harder to breathe, until it felt like a thunderstorm was building inside that courtroom while outside the windows a cool, blue fall day went on about its business.
“Not one scintilla of evidence of a conspiracy to kill the sheriff had ever been introduced, this N. R. Latham said, and since conspiracy had not been proved, all three Longs could not be guilty, as this court had found them in the mockery of a first trial. Throughout Latham’s argument Dr. Hastings thumped his cane on the dark wooden floor, like men all over the courtroom were doing, but Latham pitched his voice above the sound and went right on talking.
“It was the word scintilla that crawled into my ear and started buzzing. When the judge recessed the court soon after Latham uttered it, I walked over to my office and pulled down the Webster’s dictionary from the shelf behind my desk and looked up the word. ‘A spark, a particle, a trace,’ it read. That was all the respect this N. R. Latham had for the truth of the Longs’ guilt. I’ve often thought I’d like to find N. R. Latham now, ask him how he liked the fire that spark started. ‘Your own people were the ones who got burnt,’ I’d say. ‘What do you think about that?’
“After the judge dismissed the guilty verdict against Dempsey Long and adjourned the court, I wanted more than anything to drive Dr. Hastings to his house and then go home myself, to my paper, my supper, my son, my wife, and my bed. But Dempsey Long would not stop grinning or talking or shaking N. R. Latham’s hand, and every time I heard Latham’s voice, I remembered that word scintilla and what it meant, and I got riled up all over again at that colored lawyer in his good suit, and soon, without knowing exactly how it happened, I found myself and Dr. Hastings in the crowd of men who flooded out of the courthouse and ended up in a lawyer’s office across the street.”
