by Terry Kay
*
Rev. Eldridge knew of his congregation’s split over the matter of Freeman Boyd. He could look from his pulpit and place the quarrelers—those who believed in Freeman’s innocence were on his right, and those who believed him guilty as charged were on his left. Rev. Eldridge’s congregation was split by an ax of opinion and the wound was a red carpet that divided the pews, running from the altar to the back of the church.
He did not speak of Freeman, not by name. He selected the story of Cain and Abel as his sermon topic, and he preached with such remembered vitality he seemed wholly different. His mind was rapid and sure, his presence strong as hypnotism, and his voice—his voice was thunder far away, rolling, rolling, rolling, entering the mind and blood and muscles and nerves. He abandoned his pulpit and stood with his head back and his eyes fixed on the ceiling of the sanctuary, where invisible angels praised him with the frost coolness of their breath.
He spoke a parable of brothers and forgiveness, and he challenged each member to read and remember the church motto hanging over the piano:
I am only one,
I cannot do everything,
But I can do something.
And what I can do,
By the grace of God,
I ought to do.
He closed the service with the first and last verses of “Just as I Am,” and a benediction that left every man, woman, and child limp with unworthiness. It was a benediction inscribed on the flint of our souls, a masterful solicitation of God’s wonderfulness and His power to heal the wounds of strife.
Outside, after services, there were mumbled, awkward apologies for misbehavior, and a few people whispered hope that Freeman would be found and the entire, ugly affair would be concluded as a dreadful mistake.
Dupree was there, standing sheepishly to one side and trying not to be affected by the influence of:
“Preacher’s right. Fightin’ among ourselves is wrong, bad wrong.”
“What I said last week, well, I didn’t mean nothin’. Y’all know I didn’t mean nothin’, I hope.”
“My fault as much as yours…”
“I guess I started it…”
“This is too good a community to be tore apart by arguin’.”
“Yeah…”
Dupree did not know how to accept this, people humbling themselves before other people. He edged away from the crowd, slipped away like a thief who has considered every risk except divine intervention. He looked queasy and ill.
Wesley saw him, read him, knew what Dupree was thinking. “C’mon,” he whispered to me.
We trapped Dupree beside the tall concrete steps. “Good sermon,” Wesley said. “Good sermon the preacher had.” Dupree turned his blushing face and spat into the shrubbery. “Yeah, I sure thought the preacher was right in everything he said,” continued Wesley.
Dupree dropped his head and jammed his hands into his pockets.
“Uh—I don’t know exactly how to say this, Dupree, but I guess I’m apologizin’ for all the bad feeling we’ve had between us,” Wesley added, offering his hand to Dupree.
Dupree was surprised. He ignored Wesley’s hand and tried to push past us, but I stepped in his path.
“Don’t see why we can’t be friends, Dupree,” Wesley said. “What’s happened is behind us.”
“I pick my friends,” answered Dupree arrogantly.
Wesley stared at Dupree and Dupree did a half-turn away from us.
“Well, I can understand that, Dupree. I surely can,” Wesley admitted.
“Nothin’ the preacher said makes me think no different,” Dupree snapped. “Nothin’. It’s not me that’s been buddy-buddy with a thief; it’s y’all. You not about to find a Hixon foolin’ around with no Boyd. But I guess you Wynns don’t care.”
Anger leaped into Wesley’s face, then vanished, and he said, “I guess that’s right. I always did think Freeman went out of his way to aggravate you.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?” I demanded. I thought Wesley had gone crazy. If Dupree ever wanted to make one of us crawl, Wesley was crawling.
Wesley did not answer me. He inched closer to Dupree. “I want you to know I never did believe what Freeman said about you and that night on your granddaddy’s farm,” he whispered.
The blood left Dupree’s face in a flash flood of embarrassment. He began breathing in short, uneven gasps.
“Nope. Never did believe it. And I want you to know I didn’t,” Wesley continued. “Besides, if it did happen, we all got to learn to forgive one another. That’s what it says in the Bible.”
Dupree was weak. He swayed into the concrete steps.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Dupree protested. “Nothin’ happened on my granddaddy’s farm. Nothin’. Where Freeman Boyd got that idea, I don’t know. But I’m tellin’ you, I’m sick to death of hearin’ about it. I mean it.”
“Well, you know Freeman,” Wesley sighed. “That boy’s a wonder.”
“That boy’s crazy.”
Wesley pinched off the leaf of a boxwood. “Now that might be right. That may be the truth. Nothin’ happened, huh? Nothin’ at all?”
Dupree stared hard into Wesley’s face. He pushed between us and walked away.
Dupree did not stay for Sunday school. He crossed Emery Road to the railroad track and turned toward his home.
The Sunday school lesson was about the Prodigal Son.
*
In the afternoon, Wesley and I wandered through Black Pool Swamp, searching and calling for Freeman. He did not answer and we could find no evidence of where he had been.
Finally, Wesley agreed to investigate the one cave we knew about.
“He’ll just have to get mad about us knowin’,” Wesley reasoned. “If he’s hidin, then we ought to know why.”
“We already know he’s hidin’,” I argued.
“Well, not from us, he’s not. He knows if we were goin’ to tell on him, we’d already have done it.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
The cave was deep in the swamp and we had to cross through a fort of blackberry briars before the woods fell off in a sharp drop to its watery bottomland. Halfway across the strip of blackberry briars, we heard voices and Wesley signaled for me to squat down out of sight. The voices were distant and we could not understand what was being said.
“Willie Lee and Baptist,” Wesley whispered, motioning with his hand in the direction of the swamp.
The voices were moving, skirting the edge of the woods and traveling away from us. They were too far for their words to hold shape, and we did not know what they were saying, but I knew by their heavy tones that Willie Lee and Baptist were serious, and I felt uneasy about eavesdropping on these two men who had spent hours with us in the happy, restful play of fishing.
We waited until the voices disappeared and then we waited another ten minutes, not moving.
When we were certain they were not returning, we slipped quietly into the woods.
“Wonder what Willie Lee and Baptist was doin’ out here?” I asked.
“Who knows? Maybe fishin’ down by the beaver dam.”
“They didn’t sound like they was fishin’.”
“How do you know what they sound like when we not around them?” Wesley replied sharply. “They’re always cutting up with us, but that’s just the way colored people are around white people. You’d be surprised how they are when they’re all alone, just talkin’ to one another.”
“Willie Lee’s not different,” I insisted.
“Willie Lee may be the most different of them all, Colin. He’s the strongest one man around here and he’s colored; that makes him different.”
“What’s different about being colored?”
Wesley paused and pushed away a cobweb stretched in a lacy bridgework between two sassafras trees. “You know, sometimes I wonder about you. You know that? It’s not easy, being colored. How’d you like to have Dupree give you his nigger treatment? Or to
have to buy stuff at the back door of Hixon’s store? You think about that, and then you’ll see how they feel.”
We picked the tiny spears of blackberry briars from our clothes, then dropped into the swamp and headed for Freeman’s cave. Ten minutes later, we were there, stepping silently across beds of moss that grew like a royal carpet leading to a royal throne.
For a moment, Wesley stood frozen, staring up at the covered mouth of the cave head-high above him. He seemed to be listening for a heartbeat, a faint warning that Freeman was there and did not want to be found. Then he called, barely in a whisper, “Freeman?”
There was no answer. Wesley stepped closer. I followed, touching him. “Freeman? You there?” I called.
No answer. Wesley pulled quickly up the slight incline and pushed away the doorway of brush leading into the cave, and crawled inside. “C’mon,” he said.
Freeman was not in the cave, but he had been there. We could feel his presence, as though the heat of his body had coated the hard clay walls. Just enough light slipped in under the lip of the opening to prove Freeman had spent his hiding there. There were dead coals of a fire, a mattress of pine needles, squashed-out rabbit tobacco cigarettes, and wadded wax paper from the sandwiches Mother had prepared.
“Wonder how long he’s been gone?” I asked, rolling over on Freeman’s pine-needle bed.
Wesley was on his knees, studying the cave. He touched the dead embers. “Don’t know,” he decided. “Don’t think he’s been here today.”
Wesley crawled on his knees to one side of the cave, where Freeman had dug out a shelf for his Grit newspapers and rabbit tobacco. There were two paper sacks rolled into bundles and shoved back on the dirt ledge. Wesley picked up one of the paper sacks.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Don’t know.”
Wesley rolled nearer to the opening, in the light, and gently squeezed the bundle. “Feels like clothes.”
“See if it is,” I urged. “Freeman won’t care.”
Wesley did not like this invasion of privacy, but he had a commitment: he must find Freeman, or at least learn if he was safe. “Well, I guess,” he mumbled. He peeled open the sack and shook its contents onto the ground. It was a pair of pants, rolled into a tight wad.
“Just his pants,” Wesley said. “Guess he changed when he got them clothes off his mama’s clothesline.”
I picked up the pants and unrolled them. There was a long tear on the thigh of the right leg.
“Wait a minute,” ordered Wesley. “What’s that?”
He slipped nearer to the light and pushed the pants down into the cave’s opening. He mumbled something I did not hear.
“What?” I demanded.
“Blood. That’s blood on his pants,” answered Wesley, his voice suddenly tense and worried. “Blood all over that leg. Lots of blood.”
A quick, warm breeze whipped over my face. Wesley looked at me. He was holding his breath. The pupils of his eyes widened. “Wes?” I whispered, “Did you feel that?”
Wesley moved instinctively away from the opening of the cave. “It’s nothin’,” he answered, trying to regain his courage. “Nothin’. Just your imagination.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “No, it’s not. You felt it, and you can’t say you didn’t. You saw that cat last night, too, Wesley. You saw it, and you were thinkin’ the same thing I was thinkin’. Willie Lee told us about cats.”
“Maybe we did feel somethin’, but maybe it was just the wind.”
“I know it was the wind. Wind of The Doom.”
“Shuttup.”
“Let’s go home, Wesley,” I pleaded.
“We’re not goin’ anywhere until we look this place over good. Get that other sack up there.”
“You get it. I’m not touchin’ anything.”
Wesley turned in disgust and knee-crawled to the shelf. “I should’ve left you at the house. You get scared at the drop of a hat, you know that?”
The other paper sack was far back on the ledge. Wesley pulled it out and opened it. He rolled to his left and shook out Freeman’s shirt in the light. The shirt was caked with dried blood, brown-red and sickening.
“Oh, Lord,” Wesley sighed.
“Somethin’s happened, Wes. Somethin’ bad. You think Freeman’s dead?”
“No, he’s not dead,” Wesley said, tugging at my arm. “C’mon, let’s take these things to Daddy.”
“What if somebody’s out there?” I resisted. “What if somebody’s out there waitin’ to kill us, Wesley? Waitin’ to cut our throats.” I was becoming hysterical.
“Nobody’s out there. Nobody. Now, c’mon…”
Wesley broke the sentence in half. He looked toward the opening of the cave, and then looked at me. His face was ashen.
And then I felt it: a cool, kissing breeze, stroking my face with invisible, icy fingers.
13
“THAT’S WHAT THE BOYS SAID and that’s what they found, Odell. Don’t know what it means, but I thought you’d better be told.”
Odell Boyd listened in silence to my father. He was sitting on a sack of fertilizer in his barn, holding a cigarette with long, dead ash hanging stubbornly to the burning stub. He looked old and lost. His face was sunken from sleepless nights, and the gray of his hair and second-day beard was a gray of burden and hopelessness that had been suppressed by false good times as a dealer in premium corn whiskey. Odell Boyd had never learned to protest his reputation as a community fool and a harmless jester. Sadly, he had accepted that reputation as his calling and he had learned to glow in the backslapping, good-timing moments of recognition when he would be called on to perform his sorry comedies. Freeman was not like his father; Freeman had learned early to fight, and his determined individualism had won respect. Freeman refused to suffer in private and pretend in public that nothing bothered him; he refused to do stunts for a laugh. Freeman understood what it meant to be regarded as a joke. He had lived with it all his life.
“I appreciate y’all comin’ to tell me,” Odell Boyd said slowly. “You guess the boy’s hurt bad?”
“He could be,” my father said. “That’s a lot of blood on his clothes. My boys should’ve said somethin’ about him not playing his flute last night, Odell. Maybe we could’ve been out already, lookin’.”
“Yessir,” Wesley said. “We should’ve said somethin’, Mr. Boyd.”
“That’s all right, boys,” answered Odell Boyd. “Y’all been mighty good to Freeman.”
My father began to pace, thinking. He said, “Was there anything else, boys? Anything about where that cave is? Anything at all?”
I remembered Willie Lee and Baptist. “Yeah, Daddy,” I said. “We…”
Wesley interrupted. “The Pretlows live down that way. Maybe they saw somethin’.”
“Wesley,” I said. “What about…?”
“You know the Pretlows, Daddy.”
“Wesley…” I repeated. “What about…?”
“Yeah, son. I know them,” answered my father.
Wesley glared at me and I knew he meant for me to be quiet.
Odell Boyd fumbled with his tobacco tin. “They’s mean, them Pretlows. Freeman never had much to do with that bunch.”
“Me and Colin can look around this afternoon and early tonight. Maybe we can run across Freeman, or where he’s been,” Wesley said, ignoring me.
My father agreed. “Odell, I guess we can stop around at some houses this afternoon and get some people out by in the morning.”
“Get Dover,” advised Wesley. “He’ll be glad to help out.”
*
Wesley and I left to cross the swamp from Odell Boyd’s house. We walked, not talking, until we were well into the woods, then Wesley stopped and sat on a cushion of needles.
“Look,” he said, “I knew what you was wantin’ to tell Daddy, about Willie Lee and Baptist, but that might’ve got ’em in trouble.”
“But, we heard…”
“I know what we heard. Now, think
about it a minute. If Willie Lee and Baptist are mixed up in them bloody clothes, it can’t mean but two things: either they did somethin’ to Freeman or they helped him out.”
“They didn’t do nothin’ to Freeman,” I protested.
“Well, I don’t believe that either. So, that leaves helpin’ him, if they’re mixed up in it at all.”
“Wesley, I know that,” I said. “I’m not that dumb. And it seems to me Daddy ought to know it, too.”
Wesley picked up a pine needle and began to braid it. “All right, so we tell Daddy about it,” he reasoned. “What’s gonna happen? Daddy and Mr. Boyd’s gonna go straight to Willie Lee and ask him, and what’s Willie Lee gonna do?”
It was a good question. “I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“Well, he’d just stand there like he was deaf and dumb and not say the first thing, that’s what.”
“Why?”
“Willie Lee’s not about to get involved in somethin’ that may get the law on him.”
