Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands (19 page)

Chapter 38

Hands fly out in front of me as Daddy hits the brakes and Mother cries, “There, behind the palmetto.”

From the floor of the back seat, the boys elbow their way up sleepily, asking, “Whuh? Whuh’s that?”

“Shhhh!” Daddy flicks the headlights to bright. There, in the narrow space below the big palmetto beside our walkway, are two pairs of dark pantlegs with heavy boots.

Daddy slides his shotgun from under the seat, says softly, “Doto, on the count of three, open your door and lean to the right. Buddy’s coming through.”

“One, two,
three
!” As his door and Doto’s fly open, front and back, Daddy yells, “
Get
’em
, Buddy,
get
’em!”

Buddy bounds over the back seat, out Doto’s door and tears up the driveway, barking like a banshee. Two men appear in the shadows, running, axe handles in hand. Daddy springs to the front of the car, carrying his shotgun, and rests an arm on the hood to steady his aim. I hear the small click as he releases the safety. Panic yanks me to the dash.

“Buddy,” I cry. “Don’t shoot Buddy!”

Suddenly, one of the men, shorter, gray-haired, stumbles on a tree root and falls. Grabbing his ankle, he turns and freezes in our headlights, a grizzly face pinched in pain.

Buddy closes in, snarling. I gasp as the other man slams Buddy’s head with his axe handle and yanks his partner to his feet. Buddy collapses, yelping, on the drive.

Without a word, with both men clearly in his sights, Daddy slowly shifts his aim up, above their heads, and fires both barrels into the night.

We watch them run, three-legged, away from us and around the car barn in the back. Buddy staggers to his feet, still whimpering in pain, and runs after them.

In a blur, Daddy hurls himself back into his seat, dropping the shotgun onto the floorboard, and jabs the car into gear, engine racing, up to the house.

“Quick, quick, quick!” he hollers, yanking arms, elbows, and Mitchell’s whole body up the walk, across the porch and into the living room, away from outside doors and windows.

Ren and Mitchell sit stunned on the sofa. I perch, numb, on the arm of Daddy’s chair. The adults race around the house checking locks and latches, crimping curtains, tucking blinds to seal out the night.

“Warren,” Doto blazes on the porch, “you had a clean shot!
Why
didn’t you take it?”

“I had two thoughts . . .” Daddy tells her flatly. “If I took the shot, I’d’ve killed them. If I’d killed them, the Klan would kill me, probably before I made it to Orlando to report the crime. Where would that leave Lizbeth and the kids?”

“Oh, Warren, what
now
?” Mother whispers. I’ve never seen her so pale.

Outside, somewhere in the back grove, an engine roars to life and recedes. Buddy’s hoarse bark turns into the howl that usually means whoever was here has left.

I shoot to my feet without thinking and run to the back door.

Daddy joins me and whistles for him from the porch. We hear his woof acknowledging the whistle. Then Buddy, tags jangling, tail wagging raggedly, limps out of the darkness.

“Good boy!” I say and drop down to pet and hug him. At my touch, Buddy yelps in pain.

Daddy moves in to inspect the bump on Buddy’s head, the gash on his shoulder and his apparently tender rib cage. “He’s bruised pretty bad,” Daddy tells me, “but nothing appears to be broken.”

What kind of monster beats a dog with an axe handle?
I want to rage, but the truth hits me, Buddy was not their intended target. And an even more awful idea follows:
This is what they
did to Marvin.

“C’mon, honey,” Daddy says softly as he leads Buddy and me back into the living room. “Those men are gone and there’s nothing more to do about it tonight. How about you kids watch a little television before you go to bed?” He turns it on and switches channels to an old movie, James Cagney tap dancing in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
. “We’ll be in the kitchen for a while,” he says, as Mother and Doto trail him out of the room.

I fall back within a whirling chair, straining to hear them in the kitchen. They decide to leave the bright overhead light off “just in case.” Their chairs scrape as they take their seats at the table. The talk is low-voiced, urgent. I know the topic is what do we do now. And, I can tell by their tones, they are
not
in agreement.

After half an hour or so, the boys have nodded off. My parents return to carry them upstairs, bidding Doto a strained goodnight. Without a word, my grandmother mounts the steps, heavily, to her room.

Mother comes down first to see me off to mine. Her face is still pale, her eyes overbright. Her fingers under my chin, as she tells me “Buddy will sleep with you tonight,” are ice cold. When Daddy lets him in a few minutes later, calling softly “Goodnight, Rooster,” Buddy curls with a heavy sigh in his old spot, beside my bed.

In their bedroom, I hear Mother and Daddy undress without a word. Then, for what seems like hours, I hear my parents argue in the night.

Daddy thinks Doto’s right, Mother should take us home with her to Chicago. Nana’s there, too, he says, she’ll have plenty of help. Mother insists no,
that’s
not her home,
this
is, and she won’t leave him here alone. Back and forth, the argument goes: Daddy insisting, pleading, blazing, begging; Mother refusing, no matter
what
we will not go without him, she will not leave him or allow him, or Doto, or
anyone
, to split up our family. It would be like a death sentence. “These children need their father,” she tells him and I hear in her voice, as he must, the pain of her own too-early loss.

My grandmother’s pink sheets provide no refuge to me this night, as the very fabric of our lives stretches toward its breaking point. Everything I’ve ever known or valued seems to hang in the balance of my parents’ argument.

Worry, like a vise, tightens my chest.
Please, God
, I think, unable even to whisper a prayer,
I’ve not been good at this faith
thing, I don’t even know the words. Please, please help us, help them,
know what to do.

Daddy’s tried everything, every argument or approach he can think of; but the stronger-than-stone woman that is now my mother
is
not,
will
not be moved. Silence like a cavern sits between them until, at last, he gives into her. “All right,” he tells her, “we’ll get through this together.”

“We survived the polio,” she tells him, “we’ll survive this. Somehow, you’ll figure our way out.”

I hear tears in their voices and, burying my head in the pillow, cry my own.

Next morning, at Mother’s insistence, in the face of Doto’s poorly masked exasperation, any discussion of what happens next is “tabled until further notice.”

“Daddy needs time to think,” Mother tells us.

It takes him a week.

Chapter 39

Ren and I watch him from under our eyelashes, ears open wide for a clue, a sign, some kind of indication as to what he’s thinking.

He shows us the piece of dark cloth he pulled from Buddy’s mouth, and we tag along after him as he checks the dirt beside the old car barn. We see the tracks where Buddy caught up to the men the second time. There’s blood in the dirt where someone was bitten. One of the men dragged one foot behind the other. Daddy points out the tire tracks where they parked, and more where they drove off through the grove onto Wellwood Road.

Later, we see Daddy enter the car barn. Ren races outside, pretending to look for Buddy, and passes the door, peering slyly in.

“He’s unlocked the chest where he keeps the dynamite and he’s counting the sticks,” Ren reports to me, winded, having run all the way around the house, through the front rooms, then back to my bedroom.

We hear him whistling for Buddy and from my room’s window watch him stride, carrying the shotgun, into the grove behind the house. We follow him, as quiet as we can, and find him standing at the outer edge of Dry Sink, staring into the hole’s old, dried-up center as if there was something there to see. We try to sneak back before he sees us, but Buddy sniffs us out, tail wagging and barking. Daddy scowls when he sees us and tells us to “go home.”

We ride with him in his truck, aware that he slows unnecessarily as we pass Carney’s Coffee Shop, where Emmett Casselton and a few other Klansmen meet for breakfast.

In the morning, while we get ready for school, Daddy sits at the piano playing slow, quiet songs I’ve never heard before. He’s playing them from memory, without sheet music.

At supper, he seems himself. But afterwards, instead of joining us in the living room, he sits in the dark on the porch, sometimes front, sometimes back, cradling the shotgun with one arm, scratching Buddy’s ears with the other, staring off into the night.

Luther drops by twice, but not to see us. He and Daddy sit together on the pitch-dark porch, talking. We’re not allowed to interrupt.

The waiting, the not-knowing grates on Ren. He argues about stupid, long-settled things: who sits where on the sofa, who clears the table, who bathes the dog. He picks on me and gets nowhere, then turns on Mitchell and makes him cry, which brings the wrath of Doto down instantly on both of them.

On her part, Mother’s mostly quiet. I watch for the signs of her slipping away from us, but she’s surprisingly peaceful and still present. Her belief that Daddy will “find our way out” shields us from Doto’s darker doubts. My grandmother’s not talking. But her face, when she thinks we’re not looking, says volumes.

My habit over these days has been to escape to the shelter of the old tree beside the sinkhole, or, after supper, the privacy of my room. I have the oddest memory from the other night, after the men left and my parents argued and decided to stay together. I heard something inside my head. A sort of whisper—not by my parents, not by me. But clearly:
Be still
and know
, the whisper said. These four words, half of a half-forgotten Bible verse, hum inside my head—not singsong, more like a circle—
Be still and know
, the circle says. And somehow, it helps.

Today, I’ve climbed the old tree higher than I’ve been in years, past my favorite limb shaped like a hammock, past the heart carved in the trunk, up into the newer, younger branches where the tree spreads out below me as if upended. The sky has flattened from a bright blue bowl into a pale gray plate. Charcoal thunderclouds crowd its rim. Rain falls in a smoky river from the sky onto the palmetto flats east of here. South toward Opalakee, patches of blue show through breaks in the cloud cover. And there in the west, sunlight pours through a great wide crack; slanting columns of light turning the grove tops glittering emerald.

This patchwork sky suddenly reminds me of my family: Doto’s stormy doubts, Ren’s rainy anxiety, and Mother’s shining faith in Daddy’s bright promise. All of us appear so different. Yet we’re stitched together in a crazy quilt, draped across the blueness that shields us from the black beyond.

It’s the blueness that gets me. Vast enough to create and sustain this bowl brimming with life, rimmed with death; bright with sunlight, dark with rain. It’s the blueness I feel, coursing like a river through this tree and me, from wherever I came from, to wherever Marvin went. Not a driving force. But a pull, like a magnet, that knows the way from here to that place where all things end, and begin again.

Is this
, I wonder, sitting perfectly still,
is this what the
whisper in the dark wanted me to know?

On Saturday morning, Daddy stops me on my way out the back door to the big oak. “Find Ren,” he says, “and meet me in the truck.”

Chapter 40

Isit on the truck seat beside Ren, wondering what’s next, watching my parents. Daddy walks Mother to the station wagon, opens the door for her, closes it after she slides in. He leans in and kisses her, not in the usual way, but longer. She starts her engine, backs out and drives away. Daddy walks toward us carrying his shotgun.

“This is it, boys and girls,” Daddy says as he climbs into the truck, and lays the gun across our laps. “Reesa, Ren, I know this has been hard, not knowing what’s going on, but your mother and I decided it was best. After today, hopefully, it’ll all be over. We’ll get our lives back on track.”

“What are you going to do?” Ren asks him, quietly, man-to-man.

“What
we
are going to do is have a chat with the Exalted Cyklops. We all have a part in this. Let me tell you yours.”

When Daddy, Ren and I drive by the coffee shop, we see them clearly, in the corner where they always sit. As our truck passes, one of them stands up with the check in his hand and walks to the cash register, pulling out his wallet.

“Good,” Daddy murmurs, wheeling the truck left to circle the block.

When we pull up again, I see Mother’s station wagon parked at Voight’s across the street. She’s sitting behind the steering wheel, but none of us wave. On the opposite corner, Luther stands talking to Miz Lillian, looking at the half-dozen citrus trees in front of her beauty parlor as if they’re discussing a pruning job.

Daddy’s timed it perfectly. Two of the men have left the coffee shop and are driving away. Emmett Casselton, moving slower, stands beside his truck. The gold lettering of Casbash Groves on the door glitters in the sun.

Daddy pulls in crosswise behind him. As Mr. Casselton looks up, Daddy says evenly, “Good morning, Emmett. Might I have a word?”

Emmett Casselton’s eyes rake over Daddy, then Ren, then me last. His weathered face is expressionless but his pale, lashless eyes show a hint of surprise. He plants his feet, folds his arms across his chest, then he nods.

Daddy opens the door and gets out. Emmett Casselton’s alligator eyes take in the shotgun pointing out, across Ren’s lap and mine. He doesn’t blink.
He’s not a monster, he’s a man,
same as me
, Daddy had told us.

“Had a visit from your friends the other night,” Daddy tells Mr. Casselton. “Unfortunately, their stay was cut a little short.”

Emmett Casselton doesn’t move, except for the tiniest squint.

“The way I see it, Emmett,” Daddy says, “your men started this thing when they fired on my son. Take a look at his head and you’ll see he was about two hairs shy of losing an eye.”

As the older man shifts his pale stare to Ren, my brother stares back. His summer-buzzed head shows the trail of red welts from his eye to his ear.

“You can’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same as I did, or worse, if someone took a shot at your flesh and blood.”

Daddy waits to let his argument sink in. I watch the old man for some sign of agreement. Without changing his expression, Emmett Casselton drops his chin, a definite nod for Daddy to
go on
.

“At that point, I would’ve called us even, but clearly you didn’t agree. You sent those Klavaliers after me. Which unfortunately, Emmett, makes it
my
turn.”

Daddy takes a step closer and drops his tone. “I know a few things, Emmett. For instance, I know for a fact that the F.B.I. took all your dynamite. But they didn’t take mine. I’ve got
plenty
, more than enough to blow one, maybe two buildings sky-high. There’s your fishing camp, of course. And there’s the building you own in downtown Opalakee. And I know you have a warehouse over on Votah Road. What I
thought
, Emmett, is since you went and made it my turn . . . you might help me decide.”

Emmett Casselton’s eyes drill into Daddy, who doesn’t flinch a bit. “You threatenin’ me, McMahon?”

“Oh, no, not at all. But you’re the Exalted Cyklops, aren’t you? The big decision-maker, right? Who better to help decide where we go from here?” Daddy asks.

“Where would you like us to go?”

“Well, that depends on you . . . Emmett. Other people seek your counsel, so do I.”

“You askin’ me to pick?”

“I’m asking your opinion, looking for advice. You could say here or there. Or, you could suggest something else entirely.”

“Entirely what?”

“Well, you could surprise me by suggesting we declare this thing over, right here, right now. We could make an agreement that it’s ended. Of course, I’d want your word on it, as a gentleman. You give me yours, I’ll give you mine. Then we’d both be done with this.”

Old Emmett Casselton stares at Daddy for forever. I realize I’m holding my breath, and when I let it out in a loud hiss, Ren glares at me. Daddy stands steady, ready for anything.

“What guarantee do I have that you’ll keep yours?” Emmett Casselton asks.

“I figured you might have a problem with the word of a Yankee. I could arrange to deliver you a guarantee in . . . well, let’s say fifteen minutes? If you’d wait right here, I could do that.”

“What kind of guarantee?”

“You have to trust me on that, Emmett. Do we have a deal or not?” Daddy asks.

Emmett Casselton’s eyes troll over the parking lot. They flicker to Ren and me and the shotgun. They slide back to Daddy standing firmly, legs wide apart. I try to breathe slow and stay calm, like Daddy told me. But inside I’m churning like Mother’s Maytag.

A lifetime later, Emmett Casselton slowly, deliberately, extends a bony hand with enormous black freckles. My head spins as the two men clasp and shake each other’s hand.

Without another word, Daddy turns to the truck. He gets in beside Ren, closes the door and starts the engine. As he leans with his right hand to shift into first, he lifts his left wrist out the window, indicating his watch. “Fifteen minutes,” he nods to the man standing by his truck.

We exit the parking lot, glancing at Mother in her car across the street, then turn off the Trail toward the Old Dixie Highway and home. Passing Luther and Miz Lillian, Daddy lifts just the first two fingers of his right hand up off the steering wheel, in Marvin’s “V-for-Victory” sign. At the house, we head down the driveway, past the car barn, onto the dirt road that leads to the lower grove. Luther’s old Dodge appears behind us.

Together we walk into the clearing that surrounds the old sinkhole. Doto and Mitchell stand in the deep, dry center, beside Mitchell’s red Christmas wagon.

“So far, so good,” Daddy says as he and Luther unload the dynamite onto the dirt. “Wait a minute, Doto, we’re missing some. Where are they?”

“We left them in the car barn,” Mitchell says proudly.

“Just in case,” Doto adds, with a defiant look.

“In case of what?” Daddy asks, carefully stacking the sticks.

“In case your Southern gentleman turns out to be a scalawag,” she shoots back.

“Doto,” Daddy eyes her, “I had no idea you could be so suspicious.” He and Luther twist the fuse strings into two separate cords. “How’s our time, Roo?”

“Four minutes,” I say, checking the watch he’d handed me in the truck.

“Okay, grab the wagon and head for the hills,” Daddy tells us, pulling a lighter out of his pocket. “Way over there, sit down behind the truck.”

“Is that far enough?” Doto asks. “Are you sure the children will be safe?”

“They’ll be fine, Miz Doto,” Luther tells her. His lighter is out too.

“Sit down, on the ground,” Daddy calls as we run across the clearing. He waits until we disappear behind the truck.

“All set over there?” Daddy yells.

“Okay,” Doto hollers back.

We duck and watch between the wheels as Daddy and Luther light the extended fuse cords, then run our way. They squat down beside us; Daddy quickly, quietly counting seconds. I hold up the watch and one finger, for one minute remaining. It’s been fourteen minutes since we left the coffee shop. Daddy keeps counting: seven-one thousand, six. We cover our ears and join him, mouthing five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

The blast of the dynamite rocks Daddy’s truck like the floor of a fun house. The noise is loud beyond anything I’ve ever heard. Dirt clods fly above us, raining dust and dirt and small stones onto the truck, the trees. Later, we learn they heard it in Wellwood three miles north, and five miles south in downtown Opalakee. It rattled the shopping carts in Mr. Voight’s grocery store and rang the church bell at St. John’s A.M.E. But now we wait and watch for Mother.

We hear her wagon and at last I see her, stumbling through the dust.

“What’d he do?” Luther asks her anxiously.

“He
waited
,” she answers. “Stood there, staring at his boots, and once in a while checked his watch. It was fifteen minutes
exactly
when we heard it. People came running out of everywhere, Voight’s, Carney’s, Lillian’s, yelling ‘What was that?’ ”

“And Emmett?” Daddy asks her.

“Stood there for a second or two,” Mother says, “then threw back his head and laughed.”

“He laughed?” Luther says, smiling.

“Yes, he did.” Mother’s grinning back at him.

“Laughing’s good?” Doto asks, still shaken by the blast.

“Believe it or not, Doto, it’s
great
,” Daddy says, tracing a smile onto Mitchell’s dirty face.

“Warren?” Mother’s eyeing the thick fog of dust on the other side of the truck. “Is there anything left of our grove?”

“I think it’s safe to take a look,” he replies.

We stand up and peer over the truck bed into the mist where the clearing should be. That’s when I hear it. Over the sound of dust softly sifting down through the trees, there’s a sudden upward rush of . . . “Warren?” Mother says, uncertainly.

But Daddy doesn’t answer. He grabs her hand, pulling her around the truck and through the trees that rim the old sinkhole. The rest of us plunge after them into the dust-clouded clearing.

We hear it first. Then, pressing closer, we see it. In the center of a sinkhole that’s been dead dry for thirty years, where minutes before Daddy and Luther stacked and lit our sticks of dynamite, a fountain of fresh water gushes up and onto the earth.

Water glitters and sparkles and splashes onto us. I reach out my hands to catch it, icy cold against my palms. I form a cup to drink it, surprised by the sharp taste of rocks and leaves and the roots of old trees. I stand in wonder as the underground river somewhere deep beneath my feet, released, rushes up to greet the treetops. High above my head, all the colors, Genesis through Jude, arc across the blue, blue sky.