Fallen Land

ALSO BY PATRICK FLANERY

Absolution

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2013 by Patrick Flanery

First published in the United Kingdom by Atlantic Books

First American edition by Riverhead Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flanery, Patrick, date.

Fallen land / Patrick Flanery.—First American edition.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-62673-3

1. Real estate development—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3606.L358F36 2013 2013015004

813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For the grandmothers:

ETHEL MARGUERITE LINVILLE

—who asked to be remembered as a farmer’s daughter—

1909–2000

&

LUCILLE KATHERINE FEY

—who lost everything—

1903–1985

1919

I
n what the writer and polymath James Weldon Johnson called the “Red Summer” of 1919, race riots swept through cities across the country, and here, in this regional city between two rivers with what was then, outside of Los Angeles, the largest urban population of blacks west of the Mississippi, the county courthouse was set ablaze by a mob of five thousand angry whites bent on lynching two black men, Boyd Pinkney and Evans Pratt. Pinkney and Pratt worked in one of the city’s meatpacking warehouses and had been arrested for the assault of a twelve-year-old white girl who recanted as an adult, confessing that the men had done nothing more than say hello to her when she called out to them. The two friends were hanged from a tree outside the courthouse, their bodies skinned and burned before being thrown in the river, turned over in the wash of paddleboats and caught up on snags rising like disembodied limbs in the muddy shallows that spread out from the bank-side, festering with mosquitoes amid a weltering stench of decay.

That same day, Morgan Priest Wright, the sixty-year-old mayor and gentleman farmer who had been elected in the previous year on a reformist plank, was lynched for trying to intervene on behalf of the men, whom he and a number of local officials believed to be innocent of any crime. The courthouse was set ablaze and Wright fled in his blue Studebaker, driving out of town and taking refuge on his farm, where he sheltered in the stone storm cellar beneath his house with the tenants who worked his land. History is silent about the exact chain of events that saw Wright and one of the farmers, twenty-five-year-old George Freeman, pulled from the cellar and hanged from a cottonwood tree next to Wright’s house, which was subsequently set alight by parties unknown. Freeman was dressed in women’s clothes, and the two men were tied together facing each other, left hanging after the mob retreated. Freeman’s brother John and sister-in-law Lottie, who were also Wright’s tenants, had been away from the farm at the time of the riots, visiting Lottie’s extended family in the next county. Driving home in Wright’s Model T, which he had lent them, they could see smoke from some distance and, having heard news of the riots, feared the worst. They could not have guessed that both their landlord and brother would be dead, or that the house where they had been discreetly entertained on several occasions would no longer be standing. By the time John and Lottie arrived home, Wright’s house had burned to the ground while their own small bungalow, down a hill and on the edge of the farm, remained standing and untouched, save for a few broken windows. Looking up at the forty-foot cottonwood tree in which George and Mr. Wright hung dead, bodies tied together and twisting as the wind blew up into a late summer thunderstorm, John told Lottie to wait in the house with their children while he investigated.

As John walked away from the hanging tree and the ruins of the mayor’s place, back down the hill toward the barn, intending to fetch a ladder so he could cut free the two bodies, he heard a thunderous whooshing sound, “calamitous and catastrophic, an almighty cataract of noise,” and felt the earth vibrate under his feet. When he turned around, the forty-foot cottonwood tree on the crest of the hill was gone, and from John’s vantage, the earth appeared barren, wiped flat. It had been a traumatic return to the farm, and he thought perhaps he was suffering from some derangement of loss. Approaching the place where the tree should have been, he began to discern a shadow of expansive darkness on the surface of the earth, as if the grass had been scorched in a perfect circle; he suspected a divine and purgative fire had taken up the tree and the two dead men together in an all-consuming blaze, an event of spontaneous combustion brought on by God. John had seen haystacks go up in flame during drought years, knew the smoldering of the compost heaps on the edge of the farm, had even heard tell of great pine trees exploding in sudden and inexplicable conflagration. But as he drew closer, he saw that the earth was not scorched at all: instead, it was gone. Where the tree had been there was a hole, a gaping cavity, and as he peered over the edge of this hole, he could make out the crown of the tree, its entire height and the men bound and hanging from it swallowed up by the earth. Freeman called out to Lottie, who came running, and the two of them stood at the edge of the hole for a long time trying to decide what to do, looking at the submerged branches of the tree and listening to the wretched peace of the farm where even the grackles and red-winged blackbirds had silenced themselves. As the wind picked up and a pocking rain began to shoot holes in the earth, striking the couple’s skin so hard it stung, they decided nothing could be done until the following morning.

The next day, as rain curtained the low undulating roll of the farm, soaking the burned-out ruins of Wright’s house, John and Lottie Freeman drove back into town with their children in Wright’s Model T to report the deaths of brother George and the mayor. The local law enforcement, backed up by the National Guard but nonetheless overwhelmed by the events of the preceding three days in which no fewer than thirty houses in the city and surrounding area burned, were not unsympathetic to John and Lottie’s predicament. With the sheriff and several deputies escorting them, they returned to the farm where two of the lawmen, harnessed and lowered on ropes, descended into the sinkhole, climbing through the branches of the cottonwood tree, where they confirmed the presence of the bodies and the identity of the mayor. The sheriff understood that John and Lottie had nothing to do with the deaths, were in no way responsible, and that justice would never be done: it was suggested that disinterring the men from their unusual resting place would raise questions the community could not face, might never be able to answer, and would only create more tension between the races, since the spectacle of a black man and a white, tenant and landlord, bound together in death, could not easily be explained. It was agreed that the best thing for all concerned was to leave the bodies as they were, to fill the sinkhole with the smoking remains of Wright’s house and soil from the adjacent fields. The deputies assisted John, and in the process of clearing the ruins of the house, discovered Wright’s strongbox, jimmied it open, and found a charred but still legible last will and testament, leaving the estate in its entirety, including the farm and all its buildings, to George Freeman, and in the case of George Freeman’s death, to his brother and fellow tenant John. The sheriff himself had been named as executor, and being a man who wanted nothing more than the return of peace to a city that had run away from him, he saw no point in brooking any contestation of the late mayor’s stated last wishes, unorthodox as they were. And thus Poplar Farm passed, with no public announcement, into the hands of John and Lottie Freeman, the children of slaves.

The county courthouse was rebuilt in the following year. No white man stood trial for the events of the previous autumn, while on a farm to the west of the city two small slabs of granite were laid in the ground to mark the place where a tree and two men lie buried in land stark with promise and death.