Seeing Red (20 page)

“And,” said Emma Jean, “my mama said we shouldn’t be listening to him, anyway.”

Miss Miller swallowed hard and tried to smile, but it looked more like she had one of Mama’s sick headaches. She picked up the eraser and started wiping Mr Reynolds’s name off the blackboard.

Bobby piped up, “My daddy said Mr Reynolds is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Miss Miller dropped the eraser and it bounced off her green dress, leaving a big chalky white mark down the side of it. It felt like we were all holding our breath, except Bobby, who had a big smirk on his face. I wanted to smack him.

“Why does your daddy say that?” Miss Miller’s face was pink, but her voice was real quiet and even.

“Because he spouts off dangerous stuff.”

“Dangerous?” she said.

“Yeah, he’s one of those Black Power people, demanding rights for no good reason.”

“Well, apparently, you weren’t listening very well, Bobby,” Miss Miller said, “because people have been dying in the past decade just to earn equal rights.”

“Still, like my daddy said, they’re happier in their own place.”

I wheeled around in my desk to face Bobby. “How do you know they’re happier? Did you ask them?”

“My daddy knows what’s best for them.”

“That’s plain ignorant, Bobby! How can he know—”

“Are you calling my daddy ignorant?” Bobby stood up.

“Boys!” Miss Miller said. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Mr Reynolds is only telling people what the court decisions are and what the law says. I’m sorry if your daddy doesn’t like it.”

“Dumb-ass lawyer,” Bobby muttered.

“What did you say?” Miss Miller asked.

“If the lawyers hadn’t messed things up, everybody would be happy.”

“What?” Lou Anne said, her voice all screechy. “What about all the kids who couldn’t even go to school for five years? You think they were happy?”

Bobby grinned. “Sure. They were lucky!”

“Some of them probably wanted to learn something,” she said, “unlike you, Bobby.”

“Nah,” he replied, “they’re not that smart, and we shouldn’t go wasting our money on them. They’ll just end up as janitors, anyway, like Monkey Man.”

I stood up fast. “Shut up, Bobby! And his name is Mr Walter!”

“Aw, quit acting like you care, Porter. We all know you’re part of –” he stopped to give the class a sly grin before turning back to me – “the Brotherhood.”

I lunged across my desk at Bobby and everything was a blur of arms and faces, and I honestly don’t remember what happened, exactly, but I know my fist hurt something fierce and I felt the pain on my chin as my head jerked to one side and then the other.

I do remember hearing a lot of voices, including Miss Miller’s, until there was banging on the door and Mr Walter burst in, booming, “WHAT’S GOING ON?” We got quiet real quick and that’s when I heard the principal’s high heels clicking down the hall. And her voice. “I will not continue to have this mayhem in my school!”

Miss Miller went white and clutched her peace necklace. She opened her mouth like she was going to say something to Mr Walter but closed it again.

Mr Walter turned back to the hallway. “It’s just what I thought, Mrs Pugh,” he called out. “It’s that mouse again. That’s why they’re all in an uproar. I’ll set some traps this evening and hope to get it this time.”

The high heels stopped and there was sputtering until we heard, “Well, see that you do!” and the high heels started up again, but got further away.

Mr Walter turned back to the classroom and said loudly, “Sorry about the interruption, Miss Miller.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He nodded as he backed out of the room, his voice still loud, maybe for Mrs Pugh to hear, or maybe for me, “Go on back to your learning, now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Map

Mama was real mad about me getting in a fight at school and spent so much time on the phone talking with Miss Miller you’d think they were best friends. Miss Miller talked Mama out of punishment at school because she said I was only defending myself and trying to show “the other boy” what was right. Mama knew it was Bobby and that helped my case a little because she wasn’t overly fond of the reverend or his family.

She did give me a punishment at home, though.

“Red, you’re going to clean out that shop so it’s ready for selling!” She slammed the kitchen door after me, and I slammed the shop door loud enough for her to hear. No way was I packing up the shop. We were staying right here in Stony Gap.

I decided I could do one thing, though. I’d clear out the desk, because if we did move I wanted it empty and ready for the truck. We wouldn’t need all the receipts and invoices, anyway. I got an old oil-filter box and threw in all the stuff from the top of the desk and the middle drawer – pencils, stapler, paper clips, scissors, rubber bands. The bottom drawer was Daddy’s file system and had all those envelopes with the notes about each car we serviced, sort of like how a doctor keeps track of each patient’s problems. I threw them all in the trash, except for the one that said
RAMBLER
, Miss Georgia’s car.

I dumped out the contents of the Rambler envelope – a bunch of invoices, receipts, and Daddy’s drawings about how to fix things. Seeing his drawings made me realize how much I missed them. Mama said it wasn’t doodling, it was the way Daddy thought things out. I could remember watching his series of drawings as he was figuring out what kind of car to buy after the Plymouth ended up in that ditch and was too rusted out to bother repairing. He started with Corvettes, which I was real pleased about, moved on to Camaros, and finally ended up with the Chevy Biscayne. I’d wrinkled up my nose. “A station wagon?”

“It’s the most practical, with two growing boys.”

“How about the Corvette?”

“That’s only a two-seater.”

“That’s all we need. Mama says those kind of cars scare her, and J’s a mama’s boy, so he can stay home with her. Me and you can go out riding.”

He’d laughed and roughed up my hair and called me his partner. But we still got the station wagon.

I picked up one of Daddy’s drawings of the Rambler’s brake system and smiled, even though my throat was blocked and sore. I was about to put everything back in the envelope and throw it out when I noticed one really old brownish piece of paper that was folded into thirds. When I opened it up it crackled, and one of Daddy’s drawings fell out. I stared at it because what I saw first was a stick-figure person. It was weird to see a sketch of something that wasn’t mechanical. Plus, the stick man was lying sideways next to a church, his head almost touching it. I could tell it was a church because it was a big square with a cross on top. In random places around the page, Daddy had written the number
3
.

“Why?” I asked Daddy, but I didn’t get an answer.

I couldn’t figure out what it meant, but then I realized that the old paper it had fallen out of might be a clue. When I opened the crackly old paper up all the way I discovered it was a map! It was a pretty bad map, real roughly drawn, like whoever did it was in a hurry. It had the squiggle of the creek, but it didn’t really follow the flow. It had
PORTER
written on the left side of the squiggly line and
DUNLOP
on the right. That’s the only reason I knew it was the creek because that’s what divided our property. There was a triangle of land on the top right, the Dunlop side, that stretched from the creek to the top of the paper. It was shaded in with a few diagonal lines and underneath the triangle it said
NO CONSIDERATION
.

At the top left, the old-fashioned flowery handwriting said,
DECEDENT
,
G. FREEMAN
, and underneath that, something that looked like
FIERI FACIAS
. Fiery faces, maybe? Either the person that wrote it didn’t know how to spell or it was some foreign language. What did it mean? “I wish you could explain it to me, Daddy.”

Then I looked at the bottom left-hand corner. It was hard to read because there were brown splotches and tiny, pale scratchings, but I recognized the initials
F.S.P.
They were the same as mine! Frederick Stewart Porter. It had to be Old Man Porter!

I looked down again and saw
D.R.D.
and figured it had to be a Dunlop. I squinted at the numbers that were partly covered by the brown splotches…
4 JULY 1867
. Independence Day. More than a hundred years ago. And then I realized something… This had to be that old brown piece of paper Mr Dunlop gave Daddy when they had that fight at Easter! The one that made Daddy so mad.

But I still didn’t know what it meant. I wished Thomas were around to work on this puzzle with me. I picked up Daddy’s drawing. Maybe it was the Freedom Church because that was George Freeman’s church, and George Freeman’s name was on the map. I tried to remember all the details of the Freedom Church. I knew Old Man Porter loaned the congregation the money to build. Miss Georgia’s grandaddy was the minister – that must’ve been the G. Freeman at the top of the map – and he died in the church fire. I guess that’s why Daddy had him lying down dead next to the church. But why would Daddy need to draw a picture? What did he need to figure out? Except for the
3
s, the story was pretty clear. Church burns. Minister dies in fire.

Another thing that was curious was the triangle of land marked on the Dunlop side of the creek. And the words
no consideration
. Did that mean the church had been on that triangle of land? Was Old Man Porter trying to hold old Mr Dunlop responsible for what he did – like burning down the church? Was he trying to take the land away from the Dunlops and give it back to the Freedom Church people? He made the old Mr Dunlop agree to something because he made him initial the map, and it was dated, too. You only do that with important stuff.

I wasn’t sure what
decedent
meant, but Daddy had a dictionary lying down on one of the shelves in the desk because he never could spell too well. I looked the word up and it meant a dead person. So, the paper was from after George Freeman had died and the church had burned. I wondered if the
3
s on Daddy’s drawing meant three acres or some other kind of survey measurement where that triangle of land was. At any rate, it made me mad to think that the Dunlops had gotten away with something for more than a hundred years.

I thought about our sign:
PORTER’S: WE FIX IT RIGHT
. And I thought about something else. Daddy’s words.
Maybe you should, son.
This was what he was talking about! He’d given me that long look and realized that I was almost a man and could help him,
should
help him.

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” I said, “you can count on me.”

The shop door opened, and I quickly stuffed the map and Daddy’s drawing in my back pocket. I breathed easier when I saw it was Beau, not J or Mama. Still, even with Beau, I wasn’t ready to share this just yet.

“I know your mama wants you to pack everything up in here and you must be working real hard…” He looked around as he said it, wrinkles lining his forehead as he noticed, I guess, that I hadn’t packed up anything. He tugged his hair with one hand and held out a bottle of Coke in the other, as his voice trailed off, “so I bought you a Coke.”

“Thanks, Beau.” I walked down the steps from the office two at a time, took the Coke, and had a few gulps. “I’ve been working on clearing out the desk.”

“Ooh,” he said, smiling, as he let go of his hair.

“Hey, Beau? Do you have any idea where the Freedom Church was that burned down a hundred years ago?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Nobody knows. Not even Miss Georgia, and she’s the oldest person around.”

I guess I hadn’t really expected to find out that easily.

I was tipping my head back, taking another big swig, when Beau said, “But I know your daddy was looking for it.”

My throat closed up and the Coke came out my nose. Coughing and sputtering, I managed to choke out, “He was?”

Beau was patting me on the back, only being as big and strong as he was, I was practically falling over. “I’m okay, Beau.” I wiped the Coke off my nose with my sleeve. “When – when was Daddy looking for the church?”

“Just recently, like a couple months before he passed.”

So the map was definitely what Mr Dunlop handed to Daddy. “Do you know why he was looking for it?”

“Nope. He just said it was important to him, that he had to make things right.”

I touched the envelope in my back pocket. I knew this was a special message from Daddy! “Where was he looking?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

“Well, how did he even know what to look for?”

Beau brightened. “The Freedom Church altar! It was a big flat rock.” He spread his arms wide as he said it. “They built the church around it.” His arms arched up to join above his head. “Your daddy, he figured that he should be looking for a big flat rock.” He drew his arms out to the side again.