Home Fires (21 page)

“Why didn’t you let him?” Cyl asked harshly.

“Girl, you forgetting the times? The circumstances? You think I had what I have now? That Isaac had two quarters to rub together?” He made another restless circuit of the room. “All he had was your grandmother’s generosity and some odd jobs he picked up in the neighborhood before barning season started. All the same, I did tell him that if he could get together the money for a bus ticket by the time I was ready to leave, I’d take him with me. There was no sexton at Mount Olive back then and they’d hired Isaac to do the yard work once a week. I walked over to help him that afternoon because I’d decided to leave for Boston the next day and I hoped that if he couldn’t come with me, maybe he could keep up the work, try to get out the vote that fall.”

His constricted pacing put my nerves on edge but Cyl sat motionless.

“He was cutting the grass when I got there, so I went back to what used to be the storage room, picked up the pruning shears and starting trimming that row of shrubs around back. I didn’t even realize anybody’d come up till I heard the lawnmower shut off and car doors slam, then loud male voices. I walked down to the corner and peeped through the bushes. There were five white men. Two had grabbed Isaac and a big guy was hitting him and yelling about his sister. Then he punched Isaac in the chest—right on the heart, I’d guess—and Isaac just sort of folded over like a rag doll.”

“The two guys holding him let go and he fell on the ground and one of them said, ‘Jesus, Buck! You’ve killed him!’ And Buck said he was faking, but the other guys were running back to their cars so Buck ran, too.”

He paused, as if expecting Cyl to speak.

She didn’t say a word. Just looked at him so steadily that he had to turn away.

“Okay, yeah, but that was twenty-one years ago. Easy enough now to say I should have gone running to the white sheriff and told him about five white guys I’d never seen before killing a black kid. I was a NOISE activist, for God’s sake! You think they’d take my word against theirs? And if I just walked away and headed for Boston, it would have been real easy for the white authorities around here to find a dozen reasons to come after me for Isaac’s death. I wouldn’t even have known who Buck Ferguson was if he hadn’t kept yelling about niggers fucking his sister.”

“All I could think of was getting the hell away without getting involved. I carried him into the storage room, then I got the mower and clippers and stuck them there, too. The room was just sheets of plywood nailed to two-by-four studs. I took a hammer and pulled one of them off and got Isaac into the crawl space under the church. I pushed him as far in as I could, back to a part that didn’t have any electric wires that people might have to get to. There wasn’t much room to dig, but I managed to scoop out a little hollow and cover him over and that’s where I left him. Your grandmother didn’t say much when he didn’t come home that night. It wasn’t the first time.”

Even with air-conditioning, the little lounge was beginning to feel hot and humid. Beads of perspiration stood out on Adderly’s face and he took a handkerchief and wiped them away.

“Next morning, I don’t know if you remember, but you and your grandmother and your cousins went off to pick dewberries for a truck farmer down the road?”

Cyl shook her head.

“Well, you did. Which was a good thing, because lying in bed that night, I realized I hadn’t thought of something. Then I remembered seeing a dead hound out by the side of the road—a big stray that got hit by a car. After y’all left that morning, I found a burlap sack in your grandmother’s garage and I waited till the road was clear and stuck the dog in the bag and carried it through the woods to Mount Olive.”

“There were sacks of quicklime in the storage room—that stuff they used to sprinkle down the hole to keep outhouses smelling sweet? I layered a whole sack of it over Isaac’s grave, then I made a little hole in that lattice skirting at the back of the church behind the shrubs and pushed the dog through it. I figured if the quicklime didn’t do the whole job, they’d find the dog first and think it crawled up under there to die and they wouldn’t look any farther.”

“Afterwards, I went back to the house, packed up my clothes and a few things of Isaac’s so y’all would think he’d gone with me, then I hitchhiked into Raleigh, cashed in my bus ticket to Boston and bought another one home to Wilmington.”

“Where you quit NOISE, studied for the bar and started preaching about people needing to take responsibility for their actions,” Cyl said.

“Makes me sound like a hypocrite, I know,” said Adderly. “But if I preach, it’s from experience. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Isaac and feel ashamed because I didn’t take responsibility for bringing his killer to justice. Maybe after all these years, we can find the men who held him down. Maybe they’re ready to accept their part in it and testify against Buck Ferguson.”

“Very noble,” I said. “And I suppose you’re willing to tell the Sheriff your part in all this and testify, too?”

“If that’s what it takes,” Adderly said.

“Even though Buck Ferguson died in prison at least eight years ago?”

“What?”

Most good lawyers are actors and Adderly’s certainly a good lawyer. Even so, his surprise looked genuine to me.

So did the expression of relief that immediately followed.

Praying hands
Aren’t preying hands

—Sandy Hill United Christian

“So what are you going to do, Ms. DeGraffenried?” Adderly asked. “March out there and throw me to those reporters?”

“No,” Cyl said slowly. “Destroying you doesn’t bring Isaac back.”

“You’re going to keep quiet about this?” I asked indignantly.

“You said it would be my call.”

“But you’re letting him get away with—”

“—with what exactly?” Cyl interrupted sharply. “He didn’t kill Isaac.”

“So he says now.”

“He had no reason to kill. And as for hiding his body and running away, there’s probably a statute to cover it, but I don’t know what it is off the top of my head. Do you?”

“No,” I admitted, although preacher and pragmatist were both frantically flipping through all the cases filed at the back of my skull.

She gave an impatient twitch of her shoulders. “If anything, it’s probably just a misdemeanor that the statute of limitations ran out on years ago.”

I shook my head. “Hiding a body and covering up a violent death? That’s more than a misdemeanor, Cyl. We’re talking felony here and there’s no statute of limitations on felonies in this state.”

When I’d said it would be her call, it was because I’d been so sure she’d go by the book. I had no grudge against Adderly, but neither was I ready to sacrifice my career for him and no way did I like where this situation was headed. Cover-ups are stupid and they never work if more than one living person knows what’s being hidden.

Somewhere a little bell went off, but Cyl made it hard for me to hear.

“Prosecute him for that? What’s the point? Isaac’s still dead, the man that killed him is dead, his accomplices scattered and even if we could round them up, the worst we could charge them with is involuntary manslaughter.”

Smart enough to know that any comment by him might tip the balance scales of justice either way, Wallace Adderly watched us silently, motionless except when his dark eyes shifted from Cyl’s face to mine and then back again as we argued it out between us.

“You’re willing to risk censure if this comes out?” I asked her. “And what about your grandmother? Is she this forgiving?”

“My grandmother admires the man he’s become,” Cyl said stiffly. “She doesn’t know that he’s the same person who stayed in her house twenty years ago.”

“And if she did know?” I persisted.

Her voice hardened with scorn. “You whites can pull a leader off his pedestal every time you notice a clay foot because you’ve got a whole row of men waiting to take his place. We don’t have that luxury. Our leaders have been bombed and shot and lynched and I’m sorry, but I’m not ready to help this culture destroy another one just because he panicked and did something stupid before he was fully mature. Something he could have denied till the day he died, if he’d wanted to, because who could prove anything? You? Sheriff Poole? Doug Woodall?
I
certainly couldn’t and I was there.”

The little bell was ringing like a fire alarm as the pragmatist tried to get my attention. Something about Wilmington stirred in my memory. Adderly was from Wilmington. Was that it?... No, not Wilmington exactly ... but something that happened in the Fifth Judicial District? Pender County? No. It was something I’d heard about when I was in Pender County.
Yes!
A Wake County ruling? Something about a fire and someone confessed to setting it, but his conviction was vacated because—

“Well, I’ll be damned!” I said as I finally remembered.

They both stared at me.

“You’re right, Cyl. It’s a naked confession and an uncorroborated, extrajudicial confession cannot sustain a conviction. I forget the case but we can look it up. No witnesses, nothing to show how your uncle died, no evidence of manslaughter, no way to prove or disprove any felonious acts, including how he got under the church.
Nada
.”

I gave Adderly a congratulatory tip of my imaginary hat. “Lucky you. Nothing worse than a small PR problem if rumors should start.”

Cyl shook her head. “It’s not a complete pass. I guess I do have to tell my boss even if there’s nothing official he can do. And you,” she said to Adderly, “have to tell grandmother.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I owe her that.”

“How quiet it stays is up to them. And to Judge Knott too, of course.” She gave me an inquiring look.

“Your call,” I said again, feeling better about it this time, now that some solid legal ground had appeared beneath that ethical quicksand.

Cyl stood then and smoothed the wrinkles from her linen dress. “I’ll be in touch.”

He nodded and the last of my indignation dissipated.

I’d been flippant about the damage to his reputation, but Cyl was right. It would be a real waste if the act of a scared young man twenty years ago did indeed damage the reputation of the leader he’d become.

Isaac Mitchiner wasn’t the only victim here.

Rain was still falling when we left the building and scurried over to the covered portico in front of the auditorium.

Ralph Freeman was just coming out with his umbrella in hand and he shook his head as we drew nearer.

“I can understand why you might skip the political speeches, but don’t tell me you aren’t eating either?”

“Hungry?” I asked Cyl. “Or do you want to leave?”

She shook her head. “Don’t take this wrong, Deborah, because I do appreciate what you did, the things you said, but—” She turned to Ralph. “If you’re ready to go, Reverend, would you mind giving me a lift back to the courthouse?”

“I’d be glad to.” He opened his umbrella and held it over her.

I watched them go and yes, damn it, I was taking it wrong... if feeling as if I’d been slapped was taking something wrong.

“She didn’t mean it personally,” said Adderly, who had come up behind us and witnessed the whole scene. “Sometimes being with whites is just too stressful.”

“Now you’re going to argue for reverse segregation?” I asked.

“No, but I wouldn’t mind if white folks could appreciate that it isn’t a one-way street, that integration brings losses for us, too. I’m never going to quit working for a North Carolina where all blacks can feel comfortable everywhere, no matter who’s sitting at the table with us—a North Carolina where we can quit having to be a credit to our race every minute of every day because there’s always some honky ready to say ‘Ain’t that just like a nigger?’ if we aren’t. But until that happens, there have to be times and places where we can sink down and lay our burdens aside and know for sure that nobody’s sitting in judgment but God.”

“Black churches,” I said.

He nodded. “And black friends.”

I could see his point, but bedamned if I had to like it.

Disconsolately, I stepped inside the lobby to retrieve my umbrella just as Reid was coming in. He grabbed my arm with a big smile.

“Hey, Deb’rah! Sherry said you saw Langston King’s will, too. Guess what?”

“Sister Williams is going to let the land revert?”

His face fell. “How’d you guess?”

“Just a wild stab.”

“I drove over to Cotton Grove—the rain was coming down in buckets, too—and explained it to Mrs. Williams and then she and I went to see Mrs. Avery. She didn’t know about the reversion clause and she wasn’t real sure it was the right thing to do, Mrs. Avery, I mean. We really had to sell the idea to her and then she and Mrs. Williams had to pray on it awhile before she finally agreed. We’re going to start the paperwork first thing tomorrow morning.”

“That’s nice.”

“Hey, you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look a little down.”

“It’s the weather. And it’s been a long day.”

“I don’t suppose you got a chance to talk to Dwight?”

“Actually, I did,” I said. “Unfortunately, half your client’s alibi is over in Dobbs Memorial with his jaw wired shut and the other half’s on her way back to Massachusetts.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Trust me. I’m not,” I said and related what Dwight had told me earlier that afternoon.

He listened intently, shaking his head in dismay. “I’ll see if we can get a court reporter there tomorrow to take his deposition.”

“It’s none of my business,” I said, “but if it were me, I wouldn’t be in too big a hurry about this.”

“How come?”

“Dwight may want to believe that Starling and Bagwell set those fires, but he won’t disregard a solid alibi and last night’s beating ties in with the story A.K. told me at least three hours before the beating occurred. Give him a chance to convince himself and Dwight’ll turn around and convince ATF. Bet you a nickel he’ll have talked with Jerry Farmer and Bobbie Jean Pritchett, too, by tomorrow night.”

“Bet,” said Reid. “And I hope I lose.”

Real angels never look for the angles.