Sentinels (4 page)

Chapter Five

“For once the jails are empty, mostly.” Noah Chandler surveyed a line of unoccupied cells, save for a few, in the basement of Henderson's courthouse.

“The marshals chained up and took those Klansmen on Friday—you should've seen them marching into the stagecoaches for the trip north,” Sheriff Garrett Cole told his new deputy. “It must've crossed their itty-bitty minds that slaves felt equally confined not too long ago. I'm just thankful the weekend was quiet. That's not the norm around here. But then again, I suppose you know that.”

“What about our friends who didn't make the trip?” Noah counted six men scattered in three large cells with turnkey locks.

“Ah, don't mind them. Drunks, most of them. Heck, we see Beasley over there at least once a month for disturbing the peace at the Tavern, don't we?” Cole called to a stinking, red-bearded, middle-age man whose blue pants and shirt had become encrusted with filth.

Beasley, slouched against the brick wall, his head drooping at his belly, groaned, “Other guy swung at me first, Sheriff,” and drifted back into a stupor.

“Yeah, I'm sure he did.” Cole, a sergeant for the 37th New Jersey volunteer infantry out of Trenton, moved south with much prodding from the high command to help establish order. The overwhelming number of black citizens—who
weren't
prevented from voting—elected Cole in a landside to protect Henderson County in 1870. Tall, fit and trim at fifty, the only thing Cole had in common with many of the men around town was a bushy brown mustache and scraggily beard—he preferred to stay clean-shaven but thought facial hair could somehow endear him to the (in his mind) unkempt, angry lifers who hated Yankees and freedmen, mustaches or not.

“Beasley does odd jobs when he can, and whatever money he makes tends to wind up in the Tavern's till,” Cole said. “Tavern usually doesn't press charges and we let him sleep it off. But he'll be back. Always is.”

“You have to testify at all today?” Noah wandered ahead of Cole and shook the cell doors to check their sturdiness. None moved.

“Nah, court's out for the week,” Cole said. “Just means there'll be a backlog next week. I'll worry about it then.”

“So, you want me to babysit these guys?”

“No, I just wanted you to see where we keep the bad guys. And there
will
be more bad guys. I'm not certain if during your time upstairs doing your legal work you had the pleasure of coming down into the hold, so to speak.”

Noah assisted the county prosecutor adjudicate cases, sometimes even handling a few on his own. He soon tired of the monotony of paper pushing and felt bottled up. Truthfully, and somewhat perversely, he thought, he missed battlefield action, or as he saw it, stopping the bad guys cold. So when more seasoned attorneys found their way to Henderson, and a deputy's position opened, Noah leapt for it.

“I appreciate you showing me.”

“Come on back to the office,” Cole said of the brick building with its own small jail cells that stood next to the courthouse on Main Street. Unlike the western states, no seas of dry scablands swimming with tumbleweeds separated Henderson from Greenville or Spartanburg. Forests and rolling mountains—the Blue Ridge stood a few hours to the northwest—as far as the eye could see. Horseshoes and wagon wheels carved dirt roads for people to get where they needed. And in Henderson, a town of roughly one-thousand people, that usually meant Charlotte to the north or Athens or Atlanta to the south. Henderson served as a travel hub to those places, and grew with its mercantile, tannery, hotels, post office, bank, textile mill, restaurants and the Tavern—as the locals called it. And in 1872, northern soldiers, deployed by President Grant to keep the peace as new civilian governments got their footholds, seemed everywhere in North and South Carolina—or as the feds considered it: the Second Military District (the First being Virginia; the Third, Georgia, Alabama and Florida; the Fourth, Arkansas and Mississippi; and the Fifth, Texas and Louisiana).

“Do the soldiers even do anything you request of them, Sheriff? And do you ever feel like you're taking orders from them?” Noah and Cole exited the courthouse, its entrance flanked by two rifle-toting soldiers, who despite the oppressive heat wore blue wool trousers, shell jackets and forage caps, all of which commanded authority. They took turns patting down anyone who entered the courthouse and turned away anyone armed.

“Oh, they've been plenty helpful. Especially the men posted at the courthouse. Unlike in Alabama and North Carolina, we've not had one instance of someone sneaking in a gun to take down a Republican-appointed judge.”

“Did someone actually try that here?”

“Not yet—not in the courthouse, anyway. But right after my first election a Klansman gunned down a judge as he was leaving his home for work. Now we post soldiers near the homes of government officials. Some of the troops have been here awhile and know the most heavily traveled routes better than me. I still feel like I'm the new guy around here, even though I'm going on three years. Until we get enough deputies I can actually trust, the Army'll patrol the town and its outskirts, protecting areas where the freedmen live, the railroad station. It's bedlam in other states—some police forces are part of the lynch mobs. At least that's not the case here.”

The Sheriff's Office occupied a free-standing, two-story building—Cole slept in the second-floor apartment. The office had a small reception desk (with no receptionist), and off to its side stood Cole's actual office. A couple of smaller rooms served as the deputies' offices, and in the back were three tiny jail cells—Cole wished the place had been bigger, and thanked the Lord the county jail stood a stone's throw from him.

“I'm interviewing a couple of candidates for deputy later this morning,” he said from behind his desk. Noah sat before him. “I'll be here in the meantime, so I suppose I'd like you to go to the black neighborhoods to introduce yourself, let them know they can come to you if they feel threatened, that's paramount. Once you're done doing that, hit up the white folks who
don't
want to kill us. Let the soldiers know who you are too. I told Lieutenant Billings about you and said you'd go talk to him. Hell, I should've had you do that when we were in the courthouse—that's where he's set up shop.”

“I can do it now.”

“Nah, visit him on your way back. Oh, you should also hit the Lawson, Cherington and Diggs plantations—they're the three closest to town to the north, one right after the other, boom, boom, boom—all cotton. A lot of the blacks who haven't left town sharecrop there. So talk to the plantation owners—shoot the shit. They can be a bit prickly, though. They're still reeling over the loss of labor. But that lovely accent of yours could help you win them over a little, they might take you for a native.”

“With all due respect, Sheriff, I know those plantations well. I grew up down here. My folks' plantation borders Diggs's place. I
am
a native.”

“A southern man who switched sides? Nossir.” Cole, a New Yorker born and bred, picked up a drawl during his time in the South. “You're a native in spirit, but not in reality. Not anymore. Some of the folks around here might think you fought for the Confederates with your brother, but not everyone's in the dark about that.”

“I know. I would expect most people know the truth. I ain't no traitor.”

“Never called you one.” Cole thought for a second before asking, “What made you do that? Side with the North. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you fought with us, but how'd that all come about?”

“My education in Massachusetts, but even before that I never felt right about the way my folks kept slaves. They treated them fine, I suppose, compared to how others did. When I was a kid I visited the Diggs plantation. He was sadistic to the ones that tried to run away. He'd catch them, tie them up to a tree, lash them until their backs looked like something out of the slaughterhouse. And their cries: Ah-woooo, Ah-woooo.” Noah kept his voice down, but let the faux cries linger. “Over and over again. Diggs whipped the women, too. He didn't care. Smiled the whole time. ‘You run, you bleed, boy.' I'll never forget him saying that. Stayed with me. I never accepted keeping slaves the way my brother did. That's why I made the decision to go north.”

“Your folks lost a lot of slaves, didn't they?”

“They had near a hundred, at the peak, after they bought the Greer plantation, which my older sister now oversees with her husband. They have sharecroppers, too.”

“Well, Thanksgiving dinner must be a bitch around your house.”

“You could regard our relationship as frosty, that's fair. But they don't hate me.”

“Course not, you're their boy. At most they probably thought you misguided. Forgive me for asking, but you and your wife share the same, let's see, philosophy?”

“I don't mind. It took some doing, but I got her to come around to my side. Her parents were teachers and never needed slaves, so she never felt too drawn to the concept. I guess she grew up thinking that's the way it always was.”

“Well, good for you. How soon after your little one pops out is she gonna go back to teaching? She picked the right damned state for that profession.” Cole alluded to South Carolina mandating in its constitution a statewide public education system.

“God, I don't know. I guess I'll be working overtime every so often, if that's okay.”

“I expect that'll be the case. Come school time you'll be sticking close by the schoolhouses. A lot of people frown upon blacks learning to read and write, especially in a classroom with white kids. We'll need you there early, well before the bell rings. But that ain't for another few weeks.”

“Fine by me.”

The office's front door opened, and a black man entered, looking around for someone official.

“I'll be right out,” Cole called, and then to Noah, “The day has begun.”

The sheriff walked out of his office, followed by Noah, who spoke first.

“Toby Jenkins? Is that you?”

“Well, I'll be damned.” Toby smiled and politely ignored the sheriff to shake Noah's hand. “I haven't seen you in—good Lord, how long's it been?”

“You two know each other?” Cole looked back and forth at them.

“At least a decade,” Noah answered Toby's question first, then the sheriff's. “My family bought corn every year from Charlie Stanhope, and me and my brother would ride over there and pick it up. Toby was always there to help us out.”

“Because you never demanded it, like it was expected of me to drop everything and load up your wagon,” Toby said. “I always appreciated that.”

Toby removed his hat out of respect and shook the sheriff's hand, introducing himself, and then described the previous evening's events, and his suspicion that Thomas Diggs had sent them.

“I didn't get a good look at any of them,” Toby said. “Just that there were three of them. One of them somehow got shot. There was blood on my porch.”

“Wait, you didn't shoot them?”

“No, sir. I heard a couple of shots. One must've accidentally shot another.”

“How'd you fend them off?”

“I've been keeping that property safe for years, Sheriff. I have my ways.” Toby plowed ahead to keep the sheriff from focusing on it. “My fear is that next time it won't be three men, but a mob. I've got a baby boy and a wife.”

“Can you prove Diggs sent them?”

“Nah, just a hunch. He didn't take too kindly to me rejecting his offer to buy my land. Maybe with me and my family out of the way, he'd figure on buying it from, I don't know, the county, I guess. I really should make out a will and designate it for someone.”

“All right, here's what I'll do,” Cole said. “I'll talk to the Army lieutenant and get regular patrols up your way for a little while. I think they would even post a lookout there these next few nights. Just give me directions to your house and I'll get that done today.”

“Thank you.”

A young man about Noah's height and age with short-cropped black hair entered the office and removed his cowboy hat.

“Let me guess,” Cole said. “You're Drew Preston?”

“Yessir, Sheriff Cole, I presume,” the man said.

“First interview of the day. Go into my office there and take a seat, I'll be right with you.” Preston did, and Cole turned to his deputy and Toby. “Noah, you know what I want you to do, and Mister Jenkins, I promise we'll look out for you.”

Cole walked into his office and closed the door.

“Noah, I know about you,” Toby said. “It's brave what you're doing.”

“And dangerous and stupid, in some people's eyes.”

“Not mine. Stop by in a week or so, we'll have some corn for you—that ain't a bribe, mind you.”

“I might just take you up on that. Tell Sarah I said hello, and good luck with your son. My wife's in the family way. Hopefully by month's end.”

“Oh, boy—you think your life's already changed? Not yet it hasn't. Not yet.” Toby winked at Noah and the two parted ways.

“Wait, Noah, don't go!” Noah heard from Cole's shuttered office. The sheriff opened the door and said “Catch” while flipping a shiny object that Noah caught mid-air.

“Put that on, will ya?” Cole disappeared behind his door.

Noah grinned upon seeing an ornate silver star wreathed in a circle. “Deputy” arched across the top of the circle. “Henderson County” smiled along the bottom. He pinned it above his left breast pocket.

He exited to conduct his meet-and-greet, but before doing so he walked to Doctor Wendell Richardson's office, a two-story Victorian home painted white with black shutters that was the first building on Main Street to greet Henderson's visitors.