Darktown (33 page)

The Ellsworth property was the sort of place that made Boggs deeply grateful for his many blessings. It looked like it had once been a one-floor house, its attic since expanded to become a bedroom, the nave a few feet taller than seemed proportionate. The white paint was chipping and the steps leading up to the porch were leaning to the right. Rusty
wheelbarrows and pieces of boards that had once been an unrealized carpentry project leaned against the side of the building. The front lawn was recently mown and quite large—the house was set a good fifty yards from the road—and in the back Boggs saw rows of cotton and vegetables filling out what must have been a five-acre plot, or larger, shaped like a wide bowl, dipping a bit in the center and then opening out again to bake in the sun before hitting up against piney woods on three sides.

They hadn't passed an electric or telephone pole in miles. The furrows in the ground had no doubt been ploughed by mules, not tractors. And the truck that had aroused so much envy in his neighbor was not in the driveway.

They could see one figure far off in the cotton, but apart from that there was no sign of life except the loud barking of a dog.

Boggs drove to the end of the driveway and shut off the engine. Before they could get out, two enormous hounds, one of them dark brown and one a lighter, mottled white-and-tan mix, were circling the car and furiously trying to tell them something. The lighter dog leaped up onto the passenger side, spittle streaking Smith's window.

“Maybe I'll take my gun back out,” Smith said.

Sweat was rolling down Boggs's cheek when he heard a voice calling out.

The dogs let out a few more barks, as if to warn the newcomers that their opinions still counted, but they otherwise calmed as a man walked toward them. He was slight and not tall, yet the beasts had been transformed to mere pets by his command. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, a white T-shirt, and dungarees gone deep orange in the legs from kneeling in Georgia clay. He walked closer to the car and Boggs could see now he was young, in his teens, with the same sad but watchful eyes Boggs had seen on Otis's face.

As Boggs sat in the Ellsworths' cramped parlor, he realized that he'd been so preoccupied with the physical risks he was taking that he had failed to brace himself for how emotionally difficult these conversations were going to be.

It hit him when he saw Jimmy Ellsworth's eyes up close. The kid was far too young to have eyes like that.

The water Jimmy had handed them was barely cold and there was no ice and it tasted of the earth and Boggs would have gladly drunk ten more glasses like it, but he made himself nurse it slowly so he wouldn't have to ask Jimmy to fetch more.

The parlor was spartan, the furniture obviously homemade, some with threadbare upholstery and others with none. Extinguished candles in the corner gave evidence to the lack of electricity. The light was provided by open windows, which let in air and flies. In an unframed photo on one wall, Jesus looked down beatifically from what may have been the torn-out illustration from a magazine, and nearby were old photos of kin. A few throw rugs curled up at the edges from the humidity. It was threadbare, yet no dirt or rocks crackled beneath Boggs's shoes as he walked across the wood floor. They didn't have much, but they'd taken care of what they had.

Jimmy told them his mother wasn't feeling well. She was in her bedroom upstairs and hadn't been about much lately. He and his brother had been taking turns tending to her, with help from neighbors, but those neighbors were at their homes right now.

“My brother, David, he out in the fields with a buddy of his. He's helping us out, there's a lot to do and just the two of us now.”

He had looked tall and in his element outside, but now that he sat indoors his lanky physique vanished into a slouch and he fidgeted in the seat. It was like he reverse-aged ten years by entering the house.

“Y'all really policemen?”

“Yes, from Atlanta,” Boggs said. “So to be up front about things, we don't really have any authority out here. In fact, I can about guarantee you that your local cops wouldn't want us here and wouldn't want you talking with us. So you can tell us to git if you want to. We'll respect that.” The kid had broken eye contact after speaking and was staring at the floor. “But we've been looking into what happened to your sister, and now that we've heard what's happened here, we wanted to see you.”

“Did the police come by after your father was killed?” Smith asked.

Such a long pause, Boggs wondered if the kid hadn't heard.

“They come by the next morning, tell Mama to come fetch his body.” Jimmy's voice broke. The hounds wandered over and protectively sat on the floor beside him.

Smith asked, “What did they tell you happened to your father?”

Eye contact, blurred by tears. “They didn't need to tell me anything. I know what they done.”

“Tell us,” Smith said. Neither officer held a notebook, trying to keep this as informal as possible.

“We were going to leave for Chicago next day. But we couldn't tell, Pa said. We went to the general store to buy a few things he say we'd need for the trip. It was just me and him. We went there round lunchtime and the owner, Mr. Snelling, was asking him all these questions, why you buying all this, what you need that for, that kinda thing. Pa . . .” The kid wiped his eyes.

Waiting for him to regain his composure was about the hardest thing Boggs and Smith had done.

“Pa was nervous. He didn't seem so good at lying.” Then the damnedest thing: the kid managed a half smile. “He always tell us not to lie, and he was there doing it, and he wasn't too good at it.”

The half smile didn't last long.

“This Mr. Snelling give you any trouble before?”

“No, sir, not usually. He's not all friendly but he never be like that before.”

“Then what happened?” Boggs asked.

“We'd almost made it back home when the police pulled us over. Said we'd stolen something from the store. Pa didn't want to get out, but they made him. They told me to walk home, and they put him in the back of their car. They wouldn't let me carry the groceries home, neither.”

The ceiling creaked from footsteps above.

“We were up most that night, waiting. Me and my brother wanted to go to the neighbors and get a ride to the police station, but Ma forbid it. Lot of cars on the road that night, lot of them just stopping up there,” and he pointed out the window, toward the end of the driveway, “like they watching us. Then in the morning, the sheriff come by.”

They waited to hear if there was more. There wasn't.

Smith asked, “Where's your father's truck?”

Jimmy shrugged. “I ask Ma for us to ask the police about it, but she say not to. Say they only give us more trouble.”

The futility was stifling. Boggs and Smith could never inspect the body. They couldn't investigate the crime scene, even if they could find it. They had no authority to question witnesses. Even if they tried anyway, they would only be able to question the Negro witnesses—if there were any, and only if those witnesses were brave enough to talk to them. And why should they be? Boggs and Smith could offer them nothing: not protection, not justice. The only thing they might possibly offer was the remote chance of a future in which such events would not recur, though this, too, seemed so unlikely as to be absurd.

Jimmy leaned forward then, elbows on knees, and sunk his head into his hands. The sound of his weeping was like a glimpse into a world Boggs never wanted to go anywhere near.

Smith stepped out onto the porch. He needed air. He needed to be farther away from this family and their pain. He needed to think.

He put on his sunglasses and gazed out at the front lawn, trying to imagine life out here. The town he'd been born in couldn't be so different from this. If his father hadn't been killed, perhaps Smith would call a place like this home. Maybe he'd be a blacksmith or a carpenter, hammering nails in the roof of a farmhouse as sweat poured from his body. Maybe a lawn like this would be his most prized possession, if he was lucky enough to own one.

Cobwebs clung in the corners of the porch beneath the awning, tiny insect caskets suspended there. Dirt dauber nests dotted the front of the house.

One of the hounds had followed Smith out and it approached him silently, the creature so tall its head was level with Smith's belt buckle. Its tongue was hanging out and it was panting loudly. Smith placed a hand on its head and stroked it slowly, unable to muster the kind of assurances a dog might want to hear.

Smith had been out there but two minutes when a tan Chevrolet slowly drove down the street. It stopped in front of the Ellsworths' driveway.

From the distance he could just barely see two figures in the front seat. White men. He stared at the car and willed it to drive away. After ten long seconds, it did.

Inside, Boggs waited for Jimmy's sobbing to at least slow down, or grow quieter. It took a while.

“You said your family was going to Chicago?”

“Yes, sir. Pa's big plan. Try things up there.”

“He had mentioned that to me, too. But I hadn't realized it was coming so soon.”

“About a week ago, he told us after dinner it would be in a couple of days. Caught us all by surprise. I mean, he'd already told my ma, I could tell that, but she didn't seem too happy about it.”

Boggs heard the sound of weary footsteps on old stairs.

Then the front door opened and Smith walked back in. The darker hound leaped into action as if a new intruder had broken in, and the other hound darted in from the porch. Jimmy called out for them to hush. He stood; the dogs' misbehavior had given him a purpose and returned him from the isolated place he'd curled into.

“Let those dogs out, Jimmy,” a woman's voice said.

Boggs turned and saw Mrs. Ellsworth standing at the foot of the stairs, thin arms crossed before her as if bracing for the next blow. Her hair was pulled back and her jaw was set tight and lines were etched across her forehead. Everything about her looked like it was on the verge of snapping.

She wore a blue housedress and the tips of her bare toes were startlingly white. But not the rest of her: Boggs had expected her to be light-skinned, yet she was as dark as her husband.

Boggs introduced himself and his partner. “We're very sorry for your loss.”

“Why are you here? The police have already brought enough trouble.”

She was eyeing them as if convinced they were complicit in the local cops' crimes. Boggs tried to explain what he'd said to Jimmy, about their not having any power but wanting to find the truth nonetheless. It sounded even more pathetic the second time. So much worse was seeing those words glance harmlessly off a face that had already stared into more pain than most can imagine.

“I don't want you here. I know you've driven a long way, but you can't help us. I'd like you to go now.”

“I understand this is difficult, ma'am, but if we could ask you just
a few things, it might help us in the investigation into what happened to your daughter.”