Cicada (22 page)

“I’m sorry, Casey,” Frances said and began to go back inside. When the boy didn’t reply and simply turned back to lean against the house once more, Frances paused. His little frame shuddered briefly and the mother recognized his grief.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she sighed and went to him.

As she sat beside him, Casey inched even closer to the house almost like a dog too familiar with beatings. Gingerly, Frances put an arm around him and after only a slight hesitation Casey fell into her and wept. As he did she noticed his right arm wasn’t in his suit jacket sleeve, but held to his chest by a sling.

“It’s going to be okay, honey. It’s going to be okay,” she consoled the child, and in so doing, herself.

“He was my best friend.”

“I know. I know,” she said, rocking him gently.

“Why’d them men have to do that?” Casey begged. “I hate ‘em. I’m glad they dead! I hope they stay that way!”

Frances wanted to tell the boy not to give in to such anger. She couldn’t.

“Shh, now. It’s going to be okay,” she said again, and dried first his tears and then her own. “Say, how’s this arm doing?” She brought her hand up but didn’t quite touch it.

“Okay. I’ll live,” he said.

The choice of expression took her back. But then she realized it was without malice, or sarcasm; without thought, even. Simply the words of a child.

“I heard you had yourself a little spill.”

“My leg still smarts some. Ruint my bike for good. Didn’t even take it home.”

Looking down, Frances noticed for the first time that Casey’s right dress pant had been parted at the outer seam and that his calf was heavily bandaged in white gauze.

“Oh, sweetheart.”

“I’m alright,” he said. And then after a moment, “I was coming over to see Buckshot. I heard…well, I was comin’,” was all he could manage.

The two sat quiet for a long while, Casey curled into her side, until Frances wasn’t sure if the boy hadn’t fallen off to sleep. As he lifted his good arm to wipe his nose with his sleeve, Frances had an epiphany.

“Here, now. You know better,” she said, putting her handkerchief to his nose. “Blow,” she told him. He cupped his smaller hand over hers and trumpeted mightily three times. “You hold onto that and you wait here a half a jiff. I need to fetch something,” she said when he’d finished. He nodded and took the cotton handkerchief. “I mean it now. Don’t you go off nowhere.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Frances walked off around the house towards the barn and a few minutes later she reappeared. At her side she pushed Buckshot’s bicycle.

“Buckshot would’ve wanted you to have it,” she said to Casey, resting it against the porch next to him.

“For real?”

“Well, I certainly don’t need it, now do I? Why don’t you try it out? We just got it for him last Christmas. He’s kept it like new.”

“Oh, yeah,” Casey nodded emphatically, “Buckshot was real particular ‘bout Ol’ Blue.” He let his fingers run along the handlebars as he spoke.

“
Ol’ Blue
? Really? ” Frances questioned, not hiding her amusement. “You learn something new every day.”

“Uh-huh. Here ya go,” Casey said, handing her the soiled handkerchief.

“Why, thank you.”

“Can I ride it now? I’d kind of like to be alone for a little whiles anyhow.”

Frances smiled and combed his hair lightly with her fingertips. “Are you sure you can?” She said with a nod to his injuries.

“I’ll just ride real slow an’ careful like. No wheelies or such.”

“What about your Sunday best?”

“I’ll be careful, honest.” He made the Scout sign. “Please? Please?”

“Alright then. You just stay around the house though. I’ll let your mama know where you are.”

Casey eased onto the seat with a reverent chewing of his bottom lip. After the briefest pause he leaned into the pedals and started off as best his one good arm and leg could send him. Frances watched him go to be sure he seemed capable, and once satisfied, she turned for the porch steps.

As she reached them, Casey stopped from several yards off and called back. “Hey, Mrs. Sayre?”

“Yes, Casey?”

“I promise, I ain’t ever gonna forget Buckshot. You promise too?”

“Yes, sweetheart, I promise,” she sighed. “I promise I won’t ever forget him, either.”

“Thanks for his bike. I’ll take real good care of it. Just like he did. I promise that too,” Casey said and then took up the pedals once more as best he could and slowly rode off.

As she watched Casey wobbling away, Frances had what would be her second epiphany of the evening.

“Ben, can I have a word with you?” Frances asked from the kitchen doorway.

On the couch, Sheriff Gladwell now sat between his wife and Dennis Hart, where the old sailor had brought in the lawman to console him in his drunken grief.

“I didn’t do my duty,” he was sobbing. “They’d be alive if I’d just done my duty.”

He started to take another gulp from his bourbon, but his wife eased it from his trembling hand. He didn’t protest. Instead he reached into his suit pocket and produced the photo Nugget had taken of the Klan boys surrounded around the corpse of Raymond Stout.

“This was in Perkins’s desk,” he explained to Dennis Hart.

“Maybe you should put that away for now,” was all the man could think to say.

Ben looked over the spectacle playing out before him and seemed relieved to have an excuse to leave it.

“Let me get that for you,” he offered to the Sheriff’s wife, taking the highball glass and crossing to follow Frances into the kitchen. As he entered he was a bit put off to discover the women gathered there. All their eyes fell upon him in silence and Ben thought they looked like a herd of nervous gazelles uncertain whether he was a predator or no cause for concern.

“Here,” Frances said as she relieved him of the Sheriff’s drink and led him out onto the porch where they might share some privacy.

“Ladies,” Ben nodded politely as he passed through with the comfort of knowing he’d not jumped over the devil just to land in hell, as his Uncle Nef liked to say.

As she was closing the screen door behind her, Frances paused and leaned her head in to address one of the women. “Barbara, Casey’s just out back here. I thought I’d give him Buckshot’s bike. Don’t worry, I got my eye on him.”

“Oh, umm, okay, that’s fine, I guess.” And then as a quick after-thought, Barbara added calling out through the closed screen door, “Thank you, Franny. That was very sweet of you!”

The morning following the shooting of Timothy Sayre found Cicada seated alone in the back row of the outbound Greyhound bus, leaving Melby for good in the same way she’d arrived some few months earlier. She’d no idea of the boy’s passing. Word of the tragedy wouldn’t spread into town for another half an hour. Once it did, however, the gossip would roll through like a violent storm. By the afternoon, when the massacre at the Feed ‘n’ Grain had transpired, the levy would break. But that had yet to pass.

The bus was all but empty. Only Cicada and a young white couple with a colicky infant filled the cracked leather seats to keep the driver company until the next stop in Wheedling where more would climb aboard. Countless stops would fall along the way before Chicago, the final destination. Cicada was certain her current fellow passengers would depart long before then, however. That the couple in front of her was poor was all too evident, him in faded, patched blue jeans, frayed T-shirt and a sparse beard of red prickles, she in a church thrift store dress that had never been fashionable, and the troubled babe, their finest and only treasure in the world, clad only in a cloth diaper.

Hardly even with the means to flee poverty, Cicada thought sympathetically. She hoped for the baby’s sake that they were off to settle greener pastures. Perhaps with relatives that somehow had managed to eke more out of life.

The bus shuddered to life and Cicada turned her head to the window and her thoughts to what she was leaving behind. If she’d only been aware of the events that had transpired and those soon to follow she wouldn’t have whispered the carefree farewell she did.

“Y’all be sweet like tea.”

It was something she thought her mother used to say, but in truth those were her father’s words, not that it really made any difference.

…

“We don’t need none of Mrs. Sayre’s charity, thank you,” Violet Stout, Raymond’s widow, told Ben matter-of-factly.

“No, ya don’t. But she’s offerin’ it, an’ I don’t see no harm in takin’ it,” Ben said. From off in the front yard children squealed in play. “Wouldn’t hurt for them none neither,” he added.

“I suppose you gettin’ something out of this all.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’m buying fifty acres off her and if you take the rest and agree to it, I keep my job and work the whole farm.”

“And she’s just gonna give it away to me like that for free? The house, the barn, land, the whole thing?” Violet pressed incredulously.

“Mrs. Sayre said she got family off in Michigan and don’t want to stay here no more. And, and I guess she figures it might help put things right.”

Violet stared out the window while Ben waited for her to protest more. When she didn’t, he played the one card he’d held out for last.

“You ask me, I think she ain’t really doin’ it for you. I think she just be doin’ it to get back at them folks that hurt her. Them folks what don’t want us around.”

Violet turned to him and steeled her gaze. Ben couldn’t have read her if his life had depended on it. He couldn’t help but startle back when Violet suddenly burst out gleefully like a morning rooster.

…

Nugget hadn’t slept and was covered in sweat as he lay atop his bedspread still dressed from the night before. The sound of his mother’s return from her shift at the drugstore diner was nothing unusual, but her animated speech to her husband was.

“Somebody killed that Sayre boy last night. Shot him like a hog while he sat in the back of his daddy’s truck. Wouldn’t you know it, they was out there with them coloreds.”

“Probably one of them that did it,” Nugget’s stepfather Earl snorted from his recliner. “That’s what ya get messin’ around with those sorry asses.”

“What?” Nugget said, although he’d heard every word of it.

“Well, if it ain’t sleepin’ beauty,” Earl crowed.

Nugget put one hand out to steady himself against the living room archway and asked again. “What happened?”

“One of them coloreds shot a little boy in the back of his daddy’s truck last night,” his mother said as she waved him off dismissively with her cigarette. “The Sayre boy, Birdshot, or whatever fool thing they called ‘im.”

“Ought a hang the bastard out to dry when they catch ‘im. I told ya they trouble,” Earl said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Nugget only needed four minutes to make up his mind. His mother was cleaning a chicken to fry for lunch and his stepfather was getting drunk in front of the television when Nugget snipped the cord leading to the phone. Neither noticed. Nor did either of the two think anything of it as he walked past them carrying a grocery bag and went outside.

“What the world does he think he’s doin’?” Nugget’s mother exclaimed as she saw him drive off in her car.

Minutes later, Earl picked up a cinder block—one of the many objects of refuse that littered the front yard—and hurled it down the road in anger. Nearby, beside a rusted washing machine, his truck’s mangled distributor cap sprouted up like a little black octopus amongst the weeds.

He went on to tear apart the trailer when he discovered the phone line was cut as well.

…

Cicada had been dozing on and off when she woke as the bus pulled into a small town she didn’t recognize. The bus only paused long enough to pick up a single passenger. She wouldn’t have paid him much mind, except she was surprised to recognize him as someone from Melby.

“This is the bus for Chicago, right?” Nugget asked the driver as he boarded.

“All the way,” the driver said.

“Can I sit wherever I….”

“Wherever you want,” the driver said, closing the door behind him and ferrying the bus from the curb.

As Nugget came down the aisle, he was shocked to see Cicada, who smiled at him in her own nervousness. She was relieved when Nugget tucked in his chin and looked to the bus floor as he turned away, abruptly sinking into his seat never to look back. After several hours and many other passengers came along, Nugget was no more than the back of a company of heads for the rest of their journey. At some point along the way, he disappeared entirely.

…

It was a Tuesday, six weeks after John and Timothy had been laid to rest, three since Frances had left, and two since Violet Stout had brought her children to their new home, when late one afternoon Peter Kane arrived with the black community’s reverend, Isaiah Cole.

“Minister Joshua Lee Scott has been asked to step down,” Kane explained to Ben and Violet. “Mr. Cole will be taking his place. Church board decision.”

“We’re come around to invite one an’ all to form a new congregation in the name of Christ,” Cole beamed.

“One an’ all?” Ben said, almost in disbelief.

“One and all,” Kane confirmed with a nod.

Two hours later, out in the far field perched atop his tractor, Ben caught himself chuckling at the thought and repeating the words. “One an’ all. Like musketeers….”

As he did, he spotted a green Chevy pickup truck driving up to the house from the blacktop. He didn’t recognize it and that troubled him enough to turn the tractor around and head in. The lone driver had gotten out and disappeared around the side of the house before Ben had made it halfway back.

Violet was out in the backyard as the truck pulled up and probably wouldn’t have known of its arrival if not for the dog barking an alarm.

“Hol’ up there, Buttercup,” she said. John’s old dog, that had only ever been called ‘dog,’ obeyed and wagged its tail passively and nosed at her hand, seeking praise for having done its job.

“Sorry to come out uninvited,” Dennis Hart said as Violet met him at the side of the house. “I’m a friend of Ben’s. He about?”