by Pam Durban
His wife had cut the article out of the paper and stuck it in her Bible; he’d had her bring it to him this morning so he could read it again before he left for work. The paper had yellowed, but the story still held true. It told how, after the Longs killed Sheriff Glover, men from every corner of the state had vouched for Aubrey Timmerman to the governor. They’d spoken of his devotion to duty, his high regard for the things the average man does not understand, and his dedication to the law, which since it is the law he must preserve it. True then, and true now. He needed to pay Finley a call, inform him that the average man needed to understand when to keep his trap shut.
The phone was ringing as he stepped into the office, but before he answered, he turned the latest edition of the Columbia Record face down on the battered wooden desk. “Aubrey Timmerman here,” he said, crisply. “State your business.”
“Sheriff Timmerman, hold for the governor, please,” a woman’s voice said.
It wasn’t unusual for the governor to phone. His Honor had called to congratulate him after his first big liquor raid got written up in the Standard and many times since, to talk over one piece of law enforcement business or another. Surely, this morning’s call was to express outrage at the rank lie that Barrett’s article had made of Timmerman’s statement about being overpowered. From back in the kitchen he smelled biscuits; he felt hungry, and then he felt sorry for himself that he wouldn’t be able to eat a few while they were still warm because he had to be on the phone, explaining God knows what to the governor again.
When Arthur McCormick came on the line, he was breathing hard, still winded, no doubt, from hauling his stout little self up all those steps in front of the statehouse. “You’re up awful early, Your Honor,” he said.
“Sheriff Timmerman,” the governor said—his tone was not encouraging—“sounds like there’s a whole lot of whispering going on down in your neck of the woods.”
“Yes, sir, it does look that way,” he said. He yanked open the long shallow desk drawer, looked at the gnawed pencil and the pad of yellow paper there, and felt sorry for himself again. Of course the governor had seen the latest headline in that New York paper: “South Carolina Whispers Names of Mob Killers.” He’d heard from a reliable source in Columbia that McCormick sent a man down to the depot every night to meet the southbound train so he’d have the latest papers on his desk first thing every morning.
“Now look here,” the governor said. “I want you—I expect you—to cooperate with my detective and show him every courtesy. And I am troubled by that girl’s affidavit, sir, I’ll not deny it.”
So what he’d heard around town was true: yesterday J. P. Gibson had hustled back to Columbia carrying affidavits from the Rainey girl and a colored man named Martin, who’d been in the jail the night the Longs were killed.
The governor cleared his throat and began to read:
I got up from the bed and went to the door and looked out through the window in it toward the stairs. It was dark, and I couldn’t see anything. I could hear men talking. I could not hear what was being said, but I recognized the voice of Sheriff Aubrey Timmerman. With him were four other men. They went to Bessie Long’s cell. I recognized as one of the five men Robert Bates, the jailer, who had a black robe on and was carrying a lantern. He unlocked the door of Bessie Long’s cell and then stepped around to a bathroom. Sheriff Aubrey Timmerman, who I recognized by his back and his voice, said something to Bessie Long, and she got up and started putting on her clothes. He told her it wasn’t any use to dress; the sheriff just wanted to see her. She went to crying and asked him where was the sheriff. They brought her on, and when she got even with my cell door, she went to crying louder; she cried until she got even with the men’s cage. Then she said, “Lord, I will never see him anymore.” They told her to hush three times. I don’t know who told her.
“There’s things you should know about that girl, sir,” he said, but the governor kept rumbling down his own track.
“This Barrett SOB has us by the short hairs,” he said. The sheriff looked down at the dark wood floor, the way he would have done if he’d opened a door and found the governor compromised. The governor was a pious man, high up in the Methodist church; he chastised men for saying damn and hell in his presence. He had a favorite story, which Aubrey Timmerman had heard half a dozen times now, about Robert E. Lee reprimanding a Confederate officer for an off-color remark. “But, sir,” the officer said. “There are no ladies present.”
“No, sir, but there are gentlemen,” Lee answered.
“I suppose you’ve seen that Wesley Barton mess too?” the governor said. He was breathing easier now.
“I’m looking at it as we speak,” the sheriff answered, and he flipped over the Record. There on page 1 was what Mr. Barton, a South Carolina man, had written about his fellow citizens.
The serene confidence that sustained the mob leaders in the belief that they could get completely away with wholesale murder has been shattered under the cold scrutiny of the outside world that is now searching its dark corners. The “patriots” who led the mob through the open door of the county jail to play an improbable game of Blind Man’s Buff in the darkened corridor where the stalwart sheriff and the jailer were so easily overpowered are not as sure of themselves as they were a month ago. Names were being whispered of organizers, ringleaders, participants, and witnesses who stood on the sidelines. They are beginning to be sensible of the fearful and rotten blight of lawlessness that must pervade Aiken County to have enabled it to muster so many human buzzards to such a feast. They are beginning to ask themselves if they have not been deluded with regard to the efficiency, heroism, and devotion to duty of their peace officers.
It never ceased to amaze him how newspaper people could take upright, decent words like stalwart or patriots or peace officers and make them stink to high heaven. So the governor was calling to agree with him that there is nothing worse than being betrayed by one of your own, to let him know that he would not have the good name and integrity of his peace officer undermined by innuendo or the affidavits of one whore girl and a colored criminal who hadn’t had any more light to see by than anyone else that night. When he could get a word in edgewise, he’d also remind the governor that no one of any consequence had uttered a word against him.
“Yes, sir,” the governor said. “A lot of whispering. What I’m trying to impress upon you, sheriff, is that we have to take this business seriously.”
“I am well aware, Your Honor.” Two of the governor’s cousins were on Leland Dawson’s list of ringleaders and perpetrators. “You have my word that I will assist Detective Gibson in his investigation by every means available to me.”
“Fine, sir, see that you do,” the governor says. “I don’t intend to leave office under a cloud.”
“No, sir,” Aubrey Timmerman said, and then, without a word of encouragement or farewell, the governor hung up.
The sheriff sat at the wooden desk and read Wesley Barton’s article again and then Barrett’s latest screed. It made his jaw tense to hear himself sounding like a mealymouthed simpleton. “Why, I just felt sorry for that girl, that’s all,” Barrett had him saying. “And I don’t even know Martin by name. I declare, I don’t know why they got it in for me.” He stared at the new pink flesh on the palms of his hands. Yesterday Dr. Hastings had unwound the last bandage, and now he could make a fist again without wincing, though the new pink skin felt tight, binding. He stared at his hands then picked up the gnawed pencil, smoothed down the top sheet on the pad of yellow paper in front of him. He’d best start sketching out what he was going to say when Gibson came to take his affidavit.
Gibson wore a black patch over one eye, and the other eye was small and cold, an unnerving shade of amber. Just looking at him rattled some people, but not him. He’d invite the man to take a seat in a chair directly across the desk from him, to show that he had nothing to hide. Doing anything with Gibson involved waiting while he fished a can of Prince Albert smoking
tobacco and papers out of the pocket of his suit coat and set up shop on the desktop, so Aubrey would sit tight while the detective rolled and licked and sealed and tamped himself a smoke. His fat little fingers were surprisingly nimble. Then, once he’d scraped his match across the desk and lit up, brushed off his pad of paper, and licked the point of his pencil, they could begin. But no matter where the detective wanted to start, the sheriff was determined to start where he knew the story began.
Let’s go back to the night of April 25, 1925, he would say, the night of the day that Bud was gunned down, because that was where the trail began that ended on the night of October 8, 1926, and to understand one, you had to grasp the other. On that April night a crowd had also come to take the Longs, he’d say, and Aubrey Timmerman had stood in the jailhouse door with Mack and Frank Bell, and together the three of them had faced down the mob. It was a big crowd too, he’d remind Gibson, come with torches and guns.
Standing there, he’d heard a roaring in his head, but when he looked down, he saw that the shotgun in his hands was rock steady, and that had been a surprise and a relief. His arm still hurt like the devil where Bessie Long had torn a chunk out of it that morning, and whenever he closed his eyes, pictures flashed through his head: Bud lying dead in the Long’s yard, lying dead in his casket in the courthouse not ten yards from the jail, while his orphaned children drooped and clung to their mother and she asked everyone who came to pay respects what in God’s name she was going to do now.
Yes, sir, he would say to Mr. J. P. Gibson, that night he’d been tempted, and he made no apologies for that, he’d been strongly tempted, to step aside and let the mob get what they’d come for, but that would have been a smirch on the memory of the man who’d helped Aubrey Timmerman become the man he was that night. Only a few years earlier Aubrey had been a conductor on the trolley that ran from Aiken down through Horse Creek Valley and over the river to Augusta and back. Bud’s people were from the valley too, and when he rode the trolley home, they’d talk about their families and this and that.
Then one day Bud said he was looking to hire a couple more deputies and would Aubrey like to throw his hat in the ring? You bet he would, he said, and Bud had hired him and schooled him about what it meant to uphold the law, to be a man who could resist the chance to do wrong when it was offered, which it would be, Bud said, because of the frequency with which a lawman rubbed elbows with the criminal element. “Lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” his mother used to say, but Bud had wanted his deputies flea proof.
“I have lost my best friend,” he told the mob on the night of April 25, 1925. “But if Bud was here, he would say ‘We are sworn to uphold the law,’ and that’s just what I intend to do. I ain’t scared of heaven or hell,” he said. “And I’ll shoot the first man makes a move for that door.”
He’d seen his share of bad situations. You couldn’t kick in the doors of all the blind tiger joints he and Bud had raided or execute the liquor raids they’d gone on and not run into a couple of them. He and Bud had crept through many a thick stand of pines out in Little Hell Hole Swamp, hoping to surprise a solitary man running a steamer outfit, only to find a dozen men lounging in a clearing, each with a pistol stashed in pocket or waistband and not one of them cowed by the sound of the word law or the sight of the two men who’d come in its name. Bud had taught him that at those times you stated your business, then you looked sharp and waited to see which way it was going to swing. Because there was always a moment in any showdown when you felt the cord of danger twist so tight it had to snap, and when it did, the people you were facing were either going to go for their guns or throw them down and surrender.
So, on that April night he’d stood in the jailhouse door and held his shotgun in plain sight with both hammers thumbed back, while Arthur and Mack stood beside him with their shotguns at the ready too. Not that three guns would have counted for much against the firepower in that crowd. He knew that, and he’d stood his ground, and what he’d felt then was as bare and clean and true as any feeling would ever be: It wasn’t just his weapon that was holding back the crowd; it was him. It was hard to read their faces in the wavering torchlight, but he’d wanted them to see his, so he took off his hat and stood directly under the lightbulb that hung beneath the tin awning that shaded the jailhouse door. In a crowd like that one, there was always one man who threw the switch, and you needed to find him right quick and divine which way he was going to swing, so he peered around the torchlight until his eyes lit on a horse-faced man near the front of the pack. Yes, there he was.
Finally, the man spoke. “Stand aside, Aubrey,” he said, “we’re taking those niggers.” The voice was familiar; he came from down in Horse Creek Valley—Graniteville maybe, Langley or Clearwater. Aubrey told the man again that he was sworn to uphold the law and that he intended to do that. He saw the man hesitate; then the long face sagged, and he looked around for someone to back him up. Aubrey felt a little give in the mob, and he pushed at the spot where it had gone soft. “You men go on home now,” he said. Back in the crowd other men began to shift their weight and spit on the ground, and he knew he had them. “Give us the niggers,” someone called from the back, without conviction.
“You all go on home now,” Aubrey Timmerman said. “Let’s put an end to this long, sad day and let the law take its course.”
By this time J. P. Gibson would have finished one cigarette, but Aubrey would wait while he rolled another; he had more to say. When Gibson lit up again and said, “Proceed,” he’d say that the reason he’d gone on at such length and in such detail about that first night was to focus Mr. J. P. Gibson’s cold amber eye and his shrewd cold mind on one question: Why would Aubrey Timmerman risk his life to save those people on one occasion and then invite the mob in to take them on another? Such an act would be evidence of a corrupted character, he would say, and he was not prepared to hand down that verdict against himself.
Had he made mistakes on the night in October? No doubt about it. He shouldn’t have gone home and left Robert Bates alone at the jail, knowing that Robert sometimes lost his head in a pinch. That had been a lapse that he would answer for at God’s great judgment seat. And maybe he didn’t fight as hard as he could have when the men swarmed into the jail, their faces wrapped to the eyes in dark cloth. But the electric line had been cut; they’d knocked his flashlight out of his hands. They’d overpowered him and marched up the steps and ordered him to unlock the cells.
Now, he wasn’t saying that those three Longs didn’t deserve to die for murdering Bud. They were guilty as sin, and everybody knew it. The boys would have been long dead by now if that colored lawyer hadn’t started poking holes in the first verdict until the high court sent them back down to Aiken for another trial. Had anyone thought to ask N. R. Latham what his part had been in getting three of his own people killed? Yes sir, he’d say, Aubrey Timmerman had prayed for justice, the way any other law-abiding, red-blooded, Anglo-Saxon man in any town or county in the state would have done. And yes, he was mad as hell when the judge set Dempsey Long free and made a liar of the one man—himself—who’d tried all day to keep a lid on the situation by advising the riled-up citizenry to let the law take its course. And yes, he’d sent Arthur out to pick up Dempsey Long again and serve him with the outstanding warrant for assault and battery and put him back in jail. He’d done all that, yes sir.
But it was a hell of a leap from there to what the Rainey girl said he’d done. It was a far cry from being mad as hell at a miscarriage of justice to climbing those steps, talking and laughing, to unlock Bessie Long’s cell and hand her over to a mob. What kind of man would do something like that? No man like the man he knew himself to be. And he was no human buzzard either.
The sheriff opened the desk drawer again, pulled out a wooden ruler, and used it to guide the pencil down the middle of the next page of his pad of paper. In times like these a man should be able to tell friend from foe. In the left-hand column he listed the names of the me
n he could count on. Frank Bell, he wrote, and McLendon and Robert Bates, James Edwin Manning and Finley, the lumberman. He might be fond of the sound of his own voice, but he would stand with you. To the right of the line, in the enemy’s column, he wrote John Moseley and Ella Rainey and Charlie George, the stationmaster down at Warrenville, who’d been almost as loud as Moseley in running his name into the dirt. Col. Earl Henderson, he wrote. The man who’d hustled up to the bench after the judge dismissed the charges against Dempsey Long and told him that lynching was in the air. Then he lifted the pencil. The next name he needed to decide where to put was harder to place than any other: Howard Aimar. Mr. High-and-Mighty himself, who only last week had turned from his office door when Aubrey Timmerman called out to him and looked down at the sheriff like he’d never seen him before.
Now when the sheriff closed his eyes and let the scene run, he saw himself speeding north out the Columbia Highway, passing car after car heading back toward town. But he’d driven on anyway, found the dirt track that ran along the edge of a field, and followed it until he came to a clearing in the pines. He remembered dust smoking in the headlights and a dog that barked and barked.
He remembered getting out of his car, looking up at the sliver of moon, and thinking God Almighty, somebody bring a light. The woman was on the ground with her dress on fire, and by its light and by the light of a lantern set on a pine stump he’d seen the two boys lying dead and a few men prowling the outskirts of that dim province. He will tell any jury in the land that Howard Aimar was among the prowlers. He’d drawn his pistol, said, “Stop in the name of the law.” The others ran, but Howard Aimar just stood there like he’d been turned to stone while the sheriff beat at the fire in Bessie Long’s clothes with his own two hands, and when it was out and he looked up again, Aimar had disappeared. But he was sure it was him; he will put his hand on the Bible and swear that the man was there that night. What troubled him was that Aimar could return the favor.
