Then Paul said, “I think we have to.”
No words would explain it in a way that made sense, but I understood.
Three blocks from the crowd was a sheriff’s office with a jail attached, and I figured that was as safe a place as any to leave the Model T. When we started to get out, I saw Henry shove something into his waistband under his shirt.
“No. Henry, no. Do not take that with you.”
“What?” he said, all innocence. “My wallet? I’m puttin’ it someplace safe. Didn’t you hear those fellers last night talkin’ about all the pickpockets in Reno right now? You think they’re all there?”
I took his measure and could tell there was no leeway for changing his mind. “Okay, then, but be careful. Let’s all of us be real careful.”
We walked back to the main street and saw the mouthy man from before on the far side of the white crowd, almost where the black group started. Henry headed straight for him, and I saw them exchange looks. I took Paul’s sleeve to hold him back just as the announcement came that the fight was about to start.
A man in a suit fit for a funeral was the one who said so from the doorway at the top step of the telegraph office.
“Who’s he?” I mumbled, more to myself than anybody.
“The mayor,” a man next to me said with a glance. Then he looked again like he was memorizing the stranger who’d come to town.
I looked away.
“Harry shall read the telegraph tape as it comes through,” the mayor was telling us. “And I’ll pass along each and every word. I promise. I won’t even make the fight come out the way I want it to.”
Most of the white people laughed. There were some murmurings from the colored side of the crowd, and the mayor raised an eyebrow in that direction.
Then something inside caught his attention. He turned back to us. “The battle of the century has begun,” he proclaimed.
I wondered if he’d ever been a patent medicine peddler. He’d have made a good one.
The description of the fight was stutter step at best—a sentence would come over the wire, the telegraph operator would tell the mayor, and he would shout it out with great urgency and importance, and then we’d all stand and wait. A few minutes later, the next sentence would come.
The first part of the fight sounded more like a dance, the two big men locked in a clinch more often than not.
A man standing near me nodded. “That’s the way, Jim. Use your weight.”
Out of habit, I started to turn to Paul and describe what was going on, then realized he was experiencing the fight exactly as we all were.
In the third round, Johnson landed four uppercuts in a row. The crowd in the street fell so quiet you could hear a fat man wheeze from twenty feet away.
Then in the fourth, the first blood was drawn, and it was Johnson’s. A cheer erupted from the white crowd, and it looked like the black people shuffled a little farther away.
But Jeffries was bleeding by the middle of the fifth and seemed to take the brunt of the punches all the way through the seventh. The part of the crowd I was in started getting restless.
I looked over at Paul and couldn’t read his face. I tried to look through the crowd at Henry, but there were taller men and women with hats in the way.
After the seventh round, the teletype fell silent. We waited. An ambitious tavern owner from down the street made a circuit under the broiling hot sun through the crowd—the white crowd, anyway—selling glasses of beer and lemonade from a tray.
The mayor asked the telegraph operator if he was sure the machine was still working. He was.
Ten minutes had passed. The tavern owner came back with more drinks, this time trailed by a black girl who looked to be about fourteen. She carried a second tray and commenced selling beverages on the other side of the crowd.
“Hope he washes his glasses real good,” a man near me muttered.
Fifteen minutes had passed. Still we waited. The crowd on both sides of the color line was getting impatient, milling around, the murmur getting louder.
After twenty minutes had passed, the mayor’s head whipped around and we heard him ask the telegraph operator, “What? Are you sure?”
He looked dazed when he turned to face us, and his voice was only half as loud as earlier when he said, “Johnson wins in the fifteenth.”
There were two seconds of stunned silence, and then the colored side of the crowd went crazy. They were whooping and yelling and crying. I saw tears among the white folk too.
Most of the whites hung their heads for a long moment and then started shuffling off in various directions. A few, five or six of the younger men, drew into a tight little knot and talked right up in one another’s faces.
The teenaged colored girl walked by the bunch with her tray of empty glasses shoulder high. One overgrown boy stuck out his foot and tripped her. The whole group laughed as she fell and glass shattered all around her on the hard-packed dirt.
“Hard to be uppity on the ground, ain’t it?” one of them said, and the rest roared.
The girl got to her knees and looked at her bloody palms.
“Oh, lookie,” said another from the group, “the white part of her’s bleedin’. Well, if that ain’t fittin’.”
The rest of the group liked his comedy too.
The girl didn’t even look up. She started crawling around picking up shards of glass and collecting them on the tray. One of the men who had yet to join in gave her a hard kick in the rump that laid her out flat on top of the field of glittering glass.
“What’s going on?” Paul said close to my ear.
“They’re tormenting a colored girl.”
“Well, let’s do something,” Paul said.
I opened my mouth to answer him, but nothing came out.
The girl rolled over and sat up. There was blood on her face, on her dress, and all down the length of her arms. She looked dazed.
“Get outta there, Lucinda,” a woman’s voice rang out. I looked to see the colored people huddled together like sheep in a storm. “Get up!”
“Yeah, get up!” It was the guy our age—the one who’d called us deaf, dumb, and blind. The toe of his boot caught Lucinda under the chin and sent her flying backward. She landed flat on her back and didn’t move. The same fellow took another step toward her.
Henry stepped between them and put up a hand that said, Stop.
“Henry!” I yelled. No, no, no, no.
“What? What’s he doing?” Paul pulled at my sleeve.
Henry and the other fellow were shouting. I couldn’t pick their words apart, but it was clear what they were saying. Then the other fellow shoved Henry hard, and Henry’s right hand reached inside his shirt. I wanted to run to him, but my feet felt like they were mired in quicksand.
“No!” It was so loud I couldn’t have been the only one. The sound echoed in my ears while my leg muscles still wouldn’t budge.
Henry’s hand came out of his shirt with a glint of metal in the sunlight. I strained forward, still without taking a step, as he pointed the barrel of the gun in the air.
Had the next second not stretched to seem like a minute, the four shots that rang out would have sounded as one. As it was, they were set apart by the motion each one spawned.
First, a puff of smoke issued from Henry’s pistol as he fired a warning shot.
Second, a hole opened in the right side of his chest and knocked him back a step.
Third, a force bent him forward like he’d been kicked in the stomach. He started to straighten up, and I thought our eyes met. They couldn’t have. That far, that fast, they couldn’t have. But there was no question about the start of a smile on his face.
Then fourth, his head blew apart like a pumpkin, showering bits of Henry onto everyone within six feet. My mouth was still shaped in an O from saying “No.”
He hit the ground, and I heard a loud cry that may have come out of me.
“What’s going on?” Paul was clawing at my arm
. “What happened?”
I took a step backward to make sure of my balance. Things were starting to go around me in circles.
Whatever I said was going to make it real.
“He saved her life,” I said, and then the day went dark.
I opened my eyes a few seconds later, sooner than I would have wished. Paul was kneeling over me, looking terrified. “John? John! Don’t leave me!”
“I’m right here.”
“Are you shot?” He was patting me down.
“No.” I sat up. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to say.
Paul was shaking like he had the ague. “What do you mean, he saved her life?” In the background, there was a chorus of wailing women and the thunder of cowboy boots. Men with guns still in their hands ran past. I watched them untie their horses, roll up into the saddles, and gallop off like the cowards they were. Still, I didn’t look behind me.
“John! Say something!”
“Henry’s dead.” There. It was true, whether I turned to look or not.
“No!” Paul stood up and wailed. “Go for help. Get a doctor!”
“Paul.” I hoisted myself to my feet and put my arms across his shoulders so we were face-to-face. “It’s too late for that. God himself couldn’t put him back together.”
Paul’s face crumpled, and tears streamed from his cloudy eyes. Eyes I had never imagined I could envy. But I did. I would have been willing to give up sight if it meant not to have seen what had just happened to Henry.
Then I felt myself go numb, and it seemed like I was watching the whole scene from a distance. Looking down from the top of a mountain, maybe. There were two white men holding each other up, one of them crying.
There was a group of black folks, some running away and some paired up just like the two men were, arms tangled and tears running free.
There was the girl Lucinda still bleeding, now on her knees by the dead boy and wrapping his shattered head in her apron while she cried. There was the sheriff, walking up to the two white men and saying something that caused them to walk away with him.
I came back to myself, sitting in a chair in the sheriff’s office, holding a cup of coffee I didn’t want. Paul sat nearby, his face a pale mask.
The sheriff sat behind his desk with a look on his face that said he’d just asked a question. It was a face that had seen its share of trouble—a face older than the body it went with.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?”
He scratched the back of his head. “I asked if you saw which ones of them shot.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t know them to tell you even if I had.” I told him how we were travelers from Missouri, on the road five weeks with nobody around we knew but each other. “Three of them shot. That’s all I know.”
“Four!” Paul spoke up. “There were four shots.”
The sheriff looked at me.
“The first one was Henry,” I told him. “He . . . he fired a shot in the air to try and warn them off.”
“Henry had a gun with him?”
The sheriff took in Paul’s astonishment and looked back to me.
I shrugged. “He didn’t have a wallet, Paul.”
“Oh.”
The sheriff frowned and rearranged some papers on his desk. “Well, I guess the next order of business is asking you boys what your plans are now.”
Our plans. I wanted to say our plans were for all three of us to go to Yellowstone. To make it home again, all of us alive. I said, “I don’t know, sir.”
He nodded. “What about . . . What arrangements should be made for your friend? For the body, I mean. Does he have family back in Missouri that should be notified?”
I thought about the father who hadn’t been sober since his wife died. The one who blamed Henry for that loss. “Not really. His sister, I suppose. Ellen.” Surely at least she’d want to know.
The sheriff nodded. “Well, then, how about we all walk over to the telegraph office together and send a wire? Then I’d suggest you two be my guests here at the jail until you’re ready to leave town.”
“You’re arresting us?” Paul cried out.
“No, son.” The sheriff’s voice got gentle. “I’m tryin’ to protect you.”
Paul’s Adam’s apple bobbed at the same time mine did.
I walked with them to the office, writing and rewriting telegrams in my head. Then the circle of bloodstained dirt where Henry had fallen came into view, and I nearly went to my knees. It will be gone tomorrow, I thought. Just like that man they killed in Denver. People will walk over that spot like nothing worth noticing ever happened there.
The sheriff took my elbow, and we went up the steps like we were entering chapel.
The telegraph operator sat in a bramble of ticker tape. It was all around him on the floor, left over from the fight. Had it really been that short a time?
I cleared my throat and said, “Her name is Ellen McCombs.” The little man scribbled on a pad of paper. “Wakenda, Missouri.” I spelled it for him. Then I looked to Paul, but he said nothing. “Let’s see. Um, ‘Sorry to report Henry dead stop.’” At least telegraph language made the message seem more official, less personal. “Um, ‘Please advise stop.’” The operator wrote this down, and everyone looked at me. “That’s all, I guess.”
Paul spoke up. “Died a hero stop. Be proud stop.”
The operator looked at me, and after a couple seconds, I nodded.
The sheriff waved away my offer of money for the wire and walked us back to the jail, promising to lock the front door and come back for us as soon as a reply came through.
For the third time since leaving home, we laid back on bunks in a jail cell and tried to get some rest. Every time I closed my eyes, I watched Henry’s head explode. I saw his face disappear over and over in a spray of blood and flesh until I thought I would be sick. I sat up to let my stomach settle. Paul was laying as still as a corpse himself, and there was no way to tell if he was sleeping. I laid back down and tried again.
This time the whole sequence repeated itself again and again. The first shot up in the air, the shot in the chest that stood him up tall, the one in the stomach that had him bow to the crowd, the straightening up and the smile . . .
“He was smiling,” I blurted out.
“Huh?” Paul sat up fast. He hadn’t been close to sleep either.
“Right before— Right before the last shot, Henry straightened up and looked our way. I swear he was starting to smile.”
Paul’s head cocked, and then he nodded. “He’d gotten his answer.”
“His answer? What are you talking about?” I was too exhausted for riddles.
“That night you spent in Burlington and we were out in the desert with the car stuck in the creek.”
I nodded and waited. Then I prodded him, “Yes?”
“We talked about a lot of things that night, and somehow we got around to talking about things that scared us. I had a lot more than he did, but that probably doesn’t come as a surprise.” Paul grimaced. “He told me the thing he was most afraid of was dying without ever doing anything worthwhile. That when he was gone, the time he’d spent here wouldn’t count for anything or have made any difference.” Paul’s eyes welled up. “He died knowing it did. That’s why he smiled. He knew he was saving someone else’s life.”
I wanted to argue that it happened too fast for all that to go through Henry’s mind. I wanted to admit I didn’t know if he really saved the girl’s life or not, that I’d said so just to keep from saying what I’d seen. That it was stupidity, not bravery, that killed Henry.
I wanted Paul to have to share the weight of knowing exactly what it looked like when Henry met his death. But looking at his face, I couldn’t tell him.
And it came to me: This is how heroes are made—in the memories of those left behind. Henry was a hero, could be one for all eternity, just because Paul said he was.
And that was enough said.
We heard the front door
open, and we froze. The sheriff came back where we were with a piece of paper in his hand. “Either of you know a Jonas Hartmann?”
Somebody else might have felt some relief knowing his dad had taken charge. “Yeah,” I said.
The sheriff handed me the telegram, and I read it out loud for Paul. “‘Ellen says no money for funeral stop. Do your best stop. John come home stop. Wiring money for train stop. Urgent stop.’” I crumpled the paper into a ball and closed my fist around it.
The sheriff’s face held a question.
“My father,” I told him.
He hesitated, then nodded.
He walked us down the street to the undertaker’s. Paul and I tried to pay for a coffin, but the man there told us the colored people in town had already taken up a collection. I didn’t know what to say to that, and there weren’t any other arrangements to be made, so we went back to the jail and spent the night not sleeping there.
Sometime past midnight, Paul spoke up as though we’d been talking all along. “I keep thinking it was written in the big book.”
I was glad to break up the quiet but didn’t know what to make of that. “What do you mean? What was written where?”
“Henry dying.”
I thought about that for a minute. “You talkin’ about God’s big book?”
“Yes. Fate.”
I turned this over a few times. “You think everything’s already planned out for us? You don’t think we have any say over what happens in our lives?”
“No, no, no. I believe in free will. But truth be told, I never could picture Henry as an old man. Could you?”
It was another reminder that Paul had a lot more experience making pictures in his head. I stared into the darkness to see what I could call forth. There was Paul with white hair. There I was, with grandkids crawling all over me—and a woman nearby whose face I couldn’t quite see. But when I thought about Henry, all I saw was red hair. Freckles. Seventeen years old.
“I guess not,” I admitted. “But what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense to me, Paul. How can you believe in destiny and free will both? Seems to me like you got to pick one or the other.”
Seeing America Page 23
