by Stuart Woods
Twenty minutes later Will Henry arrived home to find Billy and Eloise on the living room floor, playing with a golden Labrador puppy. Someone had left it on the doorstep after supper, with a note reading, “A gift from a friend for the Lee children.”
That night Will Henry fell asleep quickly. A part of his mind knew part of the truth, and the rest of him could not accept it. The anxiety this condition produced affected him like a drug, and he slept like a stone, afraid to dream.
16
THE BOY was buried in the city plot, a part of the cemetery set aside for the indigent or the unknown. Only Lamar Maddox, Will Henry, and the Baptist minister, Howard Abel, attended; the two black men who had dug the grave did not seem to count, although they removed their hats and assumed reverent postures as Preacher Abel prayed for the receipt of the soul of the dead boy into Abraham’s bosom. Not the early hour, the numbing cold, or the bleakness of the city plot inhibited the fervor of the minister as he shut his eyes tightly, tilted his chin toward heaven, and let his rich baritone roll over the bare earth toward the tall pines that watched over the family plots with their brown grass and wrought iron fences.
“And we beseech thee, O Heavenly Father, find a place for this young man in thy perfect paradise above, take him home to thee, and give him eternal rest.” Abel shifted his weight and altered his tone to one of special pleading: “And we pray, dear Lord, for the parents of this boy. Comfort them in thy secret way, and prepare them for the time when they can no longer hope for the life of their lost son. Spare them needless suffering and make them ready for the day when they can be reunited with their child in thy heavenly host.”
Will Henry huddled inside his pea coat and prayed for the preacher to finish praying. The cold of the early hour made it difficult to concentrate on the service, and he was becoming tense and irritable as his thoughts began to shift from pity for the boy to hatred for those who had beaten him, who had allowed this thing to happen. Despite the depth of his personal religious feeling, he could not bring himself to pray for them, and he felt guilty.
“All these things we ask in the name of thy son, Jesus Christ our savior. Ay-men.” Lamar Maddox stepped forward and touched a button on one of the four metal posts around the grave, and the coffin began to be smoothly lowered into the ground. Lamar watched carefully the inaugural performance of this ingenious new piece of equipment. He would give it its first large public display later in the morning at a more important and more profitable service.
Skeeter Willis was waiting in his car at the edge of the cemetery. “Morning, Will Henry. I saw your gathering and stopped. What’s up?”
Will Henry climbed gratefully into the warm car. “Well, Skeeter, looks like I’ve got a murder on my hands.” Skeeter did not respond. “Our paper boy found a dead body at the foot of Hodo’s Bluff yesterday morning. Boy in his late teens. We just finished burying him.”
Will Henry clearly had Skeeter’s undivided attention. “Tell me all of it,” Skeeter said. “Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”
Will Henry took the sheriff through the events of the last twenty-four hours, again omitting only the identity of his Klan source.
“What do you think?” Skeeter asked.
“I don’t know what to think,” Will Henry said. “I don’t put much stock in the doctor’s views about the kind of person that killed him. That seems like the wildest kind of speculation to me. If the Klan had anything to do with it I think this fellow I know would have told me or at least hinted at it. I don’t know anybody around here crazy enough to do something like this. Foxy lives up there near where it happened, and he’s a little strange, but I can’t see any fair reason for suspecting him.”
“Foxy’s not your man, Will Henry. Granted, he’s a little peculiar, but he’s a good enough man. Not the Klan, either. In spite of what you hear sometimes. No, Will Henry, I’ll tell you what happened, and I don’t want you to think I’m jumping to conclusions. I’m just talking out of my own experience and the experience of a dozen other sheriffs I’ve talked to. Your killer’s long gone by now. There’s a lot of fellows on the road these days, what with the weevil and the times. Probably this boy was traveling with another fellow or two, and he had something they wanted—not much, maybe a little money or something—and they beat him up to get it, and he tried to run and fell over the bluff. These hoboes are always killing each other, fighting over money or whiskey or less. I’m not surprised the boy was naked. I’ve known ‘em to kill a man for his shoes, nothing more. When they’ve been on the road for a while they start playing by their own rules, don’t care nothing for what’s right any more, just living from day to day.”
Will Henry felt oddly relieved. “Well, that sounds pretty plausible. It hadn’t occcurred to me, I’ll admit. I’d begun to think it was somebody here in Delano, and that really worried me.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that. This fellow isn’t going to get caught, not for this, anyway. Somewhere down the line somebody’ll do the same or worse to him, or he’ll finally run afoul of the law. But you’re not going to catch him, Will Henry. I know you’d like to, not just to get a feather in your cap, but because you’re mad about this. I know how you feel. Now, if you don’t want this kind of thing happening all the time, take my advice and don’t ever let no hoboes get a jungle going around Delano. Just make sure they don’t get off the train. You let ‘em start camping around here, and you’ll have one of these killings a week, you mark my words.”
“I see your point.”
“Another thing, Will Henry.” Skeeter shifted in his seat and rubbed at his nose. “About the Klan. I think you’ll find it’s best to leave ‘em be. Somebody calls you about a cross burning, you go out there in your own sweet time and poke around the ashes with your toe and look concerned and forget about it. They don’t mess with nobody don’t deserve messing with, and they’ll take care of things you can’t yourself sometimes. Like horsewhipping that fellow last year. He needed it, and I couldn’t do it; so they did it.”
Will Henry’s surprise must have shown in his face, because Skeeter reddened slightly and went on, “There’s some highly thought of people in the Klan, Will Henry. They’re all that’s going to keep the niggers in line, and I’ve got a lot of respect for anybody can do that.”
Will Henry made an effort to keep his face expressionless and his voice calm. “Skeeter, I don’t hold with horsewhippings or scaring innocent colored folks to death with cross burnings, and I don’t have much respect for grown men who run around at night in bed sheets. If I catch anybody at any of that in this town I’ll have ‘em in jail on the best charge I can think of.” He paused. “And you can pass that message on to anybody who’s interested.”
Skeeter reddened further and began to fumble with starting his car. “Suit yourself, Will Henry.”
“Can you think of anything I should have done that I haven’t already done, Skeeter?”
“Nope, you’ve covered everything I would of. I don’t think you’re going to catch any murderers on this one, though. Whoever did it is long gone.” The car’s engine clattered to life, and Will Henry got out.
“Thanks for coming down, Skeeter.”
“Any time,” Skeeter called back as he put the car into gear. “Shit,” the sheriff muttered under his breath as he pulled away.
17
FOR A WEEK nothing whatever happened in Delano to require Will Henry’s attention. He watched for speeders, checked locks, and patrolled streets, but nothing occurred that could take his mind off the boy. The story was run prominently in the Atlanta Constitution, and Will Henry hoped that someone might read it and come forward to identify the boy, but there was not a single phone call. He covered his steps again, talked to the people who lived on the ridge near the bluff, examined again the path to the bluff, and racked his brain to think of some other sensible step to take, but he could not. As each avenue of investigation proved fruitless, he turned more to Skeeter’s theory
of a murder among hoboes; it made sense; it fit the facts in every respect; but he could not drive the thought from his mind that there was a killer loose in town, and there was nothing he could do about it.
At home he had always been a quiet but affectionate father and husband, but now he was unusually silent, and the children tiptoed around him. Carrie did not. She bore his preoccupation for a day or two, bustling about the house in her accustomed manner, cooking, sweeping, dusting, scolding children; then she had had enough. When the children were in bed she removed his feet from the stool in front of his easy chair, sat on the stool, and looked at him closely. “It seems to me that if you are going to be able to live with this job you are going to have to maintain some detachment from it.”
“I know it, but it’s hard. Especially in this instance.” He had told her little more than he had told the newspaper.
“You’re new at the job, but it seems to me you’ve done everything any policeman could do under the circumstances. Would Skeeter Willis have done anything you haven’t?”
“I asked him that. He said not.” Will Henry also felt that Skeeter had now withdrawn any help he might have offered, because of their conversation about the Klan, but he did not say so to Carrie.
“Can’t you find some peace in that?”
“I know I ought to be able to, but I haven’t.”
“Then I think you ought to pray about it. I’ll pray for you, too.”
“Thank you, honey. I know that will help.”
“You haven’t been paying much attention to me lately, you know.”
He smiled down at her and pulled her into his lap. “Are the children asleep?”
“Like logs.”
Will Henry finally found distraction from routine and from his state of mind when court met in Greenville, the Meriwether county seat. His testimony was required in the matter of the robbery of the Bank of Delano, since he was the arresting officer of the O’Brien brothers. The twenty-mile drive took nearly an hour over a pitted, badly paved road that was still the best in the county.
Greenville was a pretty town by Georgia standards. Dating from the 1840s, it presented a handsome, red-brick, whitedomed courthouse set in a spacious square of neat stores and green grass, and out on the La Grange road there were graceful examples of antebellum architecture, set among carefully tended azaleas and tall magnolia trees. It was one of those rare Georgia towns which conformed to the southern myth. The streets in the square were twice the breadth of Main Street in Delano and offered ample room for the mule-drawn wagons of farmers and the cars of local merchants. As Will Henry drove into the little town, the square was teeming with people, for the opening of court was a semigala occasion, offering an opportunity to see distant neighbors, to window-shop on the square, and to transact a little business at the bank or at one of the cotton gins which still clung to existence despite the pestilence of the boll weevil.
Will Henry thought, as he pulled into a parking space reserved for court officials and the sheriff’s department, that the lack of money showed in the crowd. Clothes were clean but patched; the women looked longingly into the store windows, but most remained outside; there were too many children selling sandwiches and fruit and homemade preserves to an unbuying crowd; and the men stood about in groups, a vacant, stunned look about them, talking, but not laughing much. Since the War Between the States, as it was called in Georgia, these people had had little, and had perhaps not had much before that. Only the land. During the boom that had come with the Great War they had hoped for a future; they had worked harder and borrowed more for seed and equipment. Unused land had been cleared and planted in more of the single crop, cotton. The war ended, and with it the boom, and meanwhile, out of west Texas a plague of Biblical proportions began moving east at the rate of sixty miles a year.
They saw it coming. Deputations were sent who looked, came back, and said, yes, the boll weevil was destroying cotton, something must be done. But no one knew what to do. Some tried to diversify, buying dairy cattle or chickens, but there was no market for these products, no economic system to connect farmer and consumer. And so, even when the weevil crossed the Chattahoochee from Alabama, men were still planting cotton and hoping. Nobody but a farmer can understand what it means to clear land, plow, plant, then come to harvest and find nothing but dust in his hands and the note due at the bank.
Will Henry knew, as he picked his way through the crowd, exchanging a greeting here and there, that all that stood between many of these people and starvation was the fact that a prudent farm family could produce much of what it needed, keep a cow and a few chickens, grow vegetables and put them up for winter, pick berries and crab apples and make preserves, make clothes from flour sacks and mend them repeatedly. And there were quail, rabbit, squirrel, and ‘possum for the boys to shoot if enough preserves and sandwiches could be sold in town to buy ammunition. Will Henry thanked God it hadn’t come to that for his family.
He found Skeeter in his office, a place of oiled floors, cigar smoke, and spitoons; it was filled with bewildered people waiting for justice for their kin, wondering whether their husbands and sons would come home with them that night or go with Skeeter to the county camp, and how it had come to this. The two men went together into the high-ceilinged courtroom, with its hard benches and yellowing paint, and chatted idly up front as the milling throng filed in, blacks in the balcony, whites downstairs. Skeeter excused himself and left through a side door to find his prisoners, and Will Henry seated himself on a front bench and waited to be called. He was not kept waiting long.
A clerk bustled in, dumped a load of papers on his table, and yelled into the din, “Order in the court! The superior court of the fourth district of Georgia is now in session, Hizzoner Roy B. Hill presiding! All rise!”
All rose, and Judge Roy Hill strode to his bench and rapped twice. “Be seated. Call the first case.”
“The state of Georgia versus P. and R. O’Brien!”
A side door opened, and the O’Briens, accompanied by Skeeter Willis, entered, blinking in the sunlight which was streaming through the room’s large windows. They were directed to face the bench, where they were joined by their attorney, Pope Herring, a courthouse fixture for twenty years.
“Read the charge.”
“It is charged that on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty, the defendants, P. O’Brien and R. O’Brien, did enter the premises of the Bank of Delano in Delano, in the county of Meriwether, in the state of Georgia, and did, by the use of force and with firearms, unlawfully take money in the sum of seven hundred and forty dollars and forty cents in violation of section five one five four of the penal code of Georgia!”
“How do the defendants plead?” asked the Judge, turning to Pope Herring.
Herring stepped forward and assumed an almost reverent tone. “Your Honor, the defendants both plead guilty to the charge as read, and, being unable to raise bail, request immediate sentencing. In sentencing I would ask the court to consider that these boys are from an honest farming family and that neither has ever been in serious trouble before. I would also point out that no one was injured in this incident and that very little damage to property occurred. When faced with arrest for their offense, the defendants readily surrendered and offered no resistance, and I submit that this incident occurred only because of a rare overindulgence on New Year’s Eve, the night before. The defendants beg consideration of these circumstances and the mercy of the court.”
The judge turned to the county attorney, Jesse Bulloch. “Does the state wish to comment before I sentence?”
Bulloch shuffled forward. “Yes, Your Honor. The Upson County Sheriff’s Office has advised me that the defendants have on three other occasions been arrested on drunk and disorderly charges and on one occasion have served thirty days in the Upson County jail on such charges.” Pope Herring shot an uncharacteristically sharp glance at the O’Briens, who blushed and looked guilty. Bulloch continued. “I wou
ld also point out that the car which they were driving and the weapons which they used in the bank robbery were stolen and that a warrant for their arrest in Upson County has been issued on charges arising from these thefts. The state cannot, therefore, join in a recommendation for clemency in this case.” He handed the judge a sheet of paper. “This is a true copy of their record of prior arrests and of the Upson County warrants.”
The judge read the sheet of paper, placed it on his desk, and directed his attention to the two boys, who stood with their hands cuffed behind him, staring at the floor. “The defendants will step forward.” The boys moved toward the bench and looked sheepishly up at the judge. “The court accepts the plea of guilty to the charge and accedes to the request for immediate sentencing. After consideration of the defense request for mercy and the statements as to the past conduct of the defendants by the county attorney, I sentence both defendants to twenty years at hard labor in the county prison camp. However, in consideration of the facts that no one was hurt, that no resistance was offered to arrest, and the absence of any prior felony conviction, I will suspend the last two years of the sentences, on condition of good behavior.” He rapped sharply with his gavel. “Next case.”
Skeeter led the bewildered boys out of the courtroom, followed by their attorney, and the clerk began to call the next case over a hum of conversation in the courtroom. The whole process had taken less than three minutes.
Will Henry sat, nearly as bewildered as the O’Briens. They would pay at least eighteen years of their lives for fifteen minutes of drunken foolishness. He left the courtroom and drove back to Delano, his journey to Greenville wasted. All the way back he dwelt on the contrast between the imprisonment of the O’Briens and the continuing freedom of the unknown boy’s murderer.
