The Orphan Mother (5 page)

July 6, 1867

On returning to town, Tole got to work on Dixon's errand. He went by his little shack of a house and took his rifle, which he wrapped in a quilt and stuck in a kindling carrier, the kind one would not be surprised to see a Negro carrying through the town on bended back. He went scouting for a perch, but none of the first buildings were right, so Tole went farther, into the white section of town, stepping out of the way of the brand-new carriages that rolled and clattered over the streets. He wove between the proprietors out on the sidewalk offering free samples: molasses, cheese, swatches of cloth, printed cards. They didn't offer any to him.

Unimpressed by the possibilities, he continued into the residential streets, always keeping the courthouse in a direct line behind him. Here there were more interesting places, fewer flat roofs and more cupolas and pitched slopes and dormers and attics. An attic window in Dr. Cliffe's house had a direct line of sight to the courthouse and the stage.
That's the spot
, he thought.

He put the kindling carrier down, under a pecan tree and concealed by a privet hedge, and pushed his way through the Cliffes' picket gate and into their backyard. But he heard voices from the house. He withdrew to the shadows across the street, waiting.

Up the hill, the white boys at the military institute marched across the drill yard keeping time, shouting at each other as if what they were doing was deadly serious and not some insignificant playacting, a pastime for fools and cowards. The Negroes hammered up the stage over in the square.

Dr. Cliffe stepped out with his wife, down the steps, her arm in his, her skin a soft Scotch-Irish pale. As they headed west, away from the soaring sun, into the shadows cast by blooming trees, Tole noticed the way her strawberry hair fell down her back, and how it matched the freckles that dotted the backs of her arms.

He waited a long ten minutes, worried that some routine slip of mind, something forgotten, would cause them to turn back. He waited, and when he felt they were good and gone, he crossed the street.

The weight of his government rifle pulled against his shoulder. On the stock he'd once carved
GT
, so that he could keep the other men in the company from claiming it—they who didn't spend near as much time polishing and cleaning theirs. They called his rifle ol' GT, and teased him about it, but they didn't ever pick it up as their own. Because of this he had known one thing at least, at all times: that his rifle would always fire. That had been no small achievement.

Tole slipped into the doctor's backyard as quietly as he could. The gate had been left unlatched. There, under the eaves, the attic window looked out across the street, above a few low buildings, and unobstructed into the square.

He quietly stowed his kindling carrier under the hedge, pulled out the rifle in its cloth, and moved quickly across the yard to the back door. It was unlocked, these being overly trusting people. He walked quietly down a narrow central hallway, which was broken by only one doorway. He guessed, correctly, that this was the door to the attic. He went through and up.

Hanging from one of the beams of the attic was a collection of men's hats, bowlers and slouch hats, tall stovepipes hardly ever worn. In one corner stood a dressmaker's dummy, a headless and legless curve of a monstrous half-woman.

He had no attic in his shack down in the Bucket. His neighbors painted their houses awful bright colors and were always tap-tap-tapping at the roof and the walls with their hammers, like they were all hell-bent on building up their own creation. He lived surrounded by a crowd of manic colored doers and builders, cobblers and carpenters. They tolerated him well enough for an outsider. He tolerated
them
well enough for a lot of folks who couldn't leave well enough alone.

Every once in a while he checked the crowd that had begun to gather in the square. What he was about to do, he'd been told, would be a great service.
We'll see about that
. Tole unlatched the attic window and pushed it open. Wind and voices blew in with the late morning sun. He unwrapped ol' GT from the blanket, raised the butt against his shoulder, sat down cross-legged with his elbows on his knees, and looked through the rear sight and stared at the front sight. He lowered the rifle, adjusted his position until he was aligned with the podium set up in the courthouse square. He breathed in deep and sighted in again.

Across the way, in the square, men gathered, buzzing like ants. Two crowds, really, the Colored League men hard by the stage and the Conservatives across the street, standing on the corner, under cover of a shop's front wall, facing the square. The crowd by the stage was almost all Negroes, former slaves now freedmen with their drums held close to their chests and banners clasped in some of their hands.

One skinny black man held his banner out toward the crowd at the corner like a dare:
The Radicals Build School Houses—The Conservatives Burn Them
.

Another, right at the head of the crowd, proudly held an American flag. Tole thought of the Union boys carrying the stars and stripes into battle, how the other boys had rallied around it, eyes raised to watch it wave. He remembered, too, how many of those Union boys later lay bleeding on the ground with that flag at their sides.

There weren't as many Conservatives at the corner—no more than thirty overall—but they all had a similar look to them. All those hard white faces. Pistols clipped to their belts or strapped to their chests. A smattering of Negroes stood among them.
Always somebody to disagree
, Tole thought.

As the time for the speeches got closer, he could tell that words were being lobbed between the groups, thrown like stones into separate pools, but he was too far away to hear what they said.

The men at the corner bristled as the speakers filed onto the stage. Tole thought he recognized one of them, high up above the crowd. He wasn't sure at first—the angle and the hat obscured the man's face—but once he turned, he knew for sure it was him: his neighbor, Theopolis Reddick. The cobbler. Tole wasn't sure why Theopolis was there. He assumed he would speak. Tole himself was never one for great oratory and had respect for any man who did, especially young Negroes, many of whom were taking advantage of the new opportunities opening up to them—becoming politicians, business owners, and who knew what other possibilities.
No slave ever did that
, Tole thought. The young had a courage that made him proud and envious. He'd been born free in New York City, but somehow the opportunities had never really presented themselves to him—and then the war came, and the possibilities had been defined by the notches of a rifle's sight.

Near Theopolis, but not speaking to him, were two white men—politicians, Tole could tell, important men from out of town. Another white man came behind them, with another Negro by his side.

The mayor trailed at the very back, near the sheriff and his deputies, stalking around the stage like guard dogs, keeping the Colored League men back. Even from this distance Tole could hear the beat of drums and the cheers ringing out.

From the group of white men at the corner he heard nothing at all. Near them a pair of mockingbirds worked out their disagreements, which among birds meant a whole lot of fierceness, pecking and clawing, feet first. It was always over quick, which was one thing different about birds. Men never wanted to get things sorted out for good. They liked their blood feuds.

There must've been a few hundred folks gathered in the courthouse square by two o'clock: businessmen and homeless vagrants, disenfranchised Confederate boys and members of the Colored League, conservative loyalists and Republicans. It was a rally of sorts, Republicans and Conservatives, politicians shouting over each other, over jeers and riotous yelling. Tole sat up straight.

He hadn't anticipated a gathering this large, a killing this public.
Mr. Dixon must want to make an example outta this man
, he thought to himself. In the right corner, at the back of the stage, almost obscured by picket signs and tall hats, he saw a white man with a round face, his upper lip swallowed by a graying, upturned mustache, and a black top hat pulled down tight.

Tole's gaze would have shifted, seeking other pale faces in the crowd for his mark, had it not been for a flash of color that caught his eye on the mustached man's hat. There, at the top, sprouting from the base like some sort of extraordinary flower, curled a bright orange feather.
The man Mr. Dixon wants dead. Jesse Bliss.

He repeated the name in his head, the next man he would kill: Jesse Bliss. One moment Bliss would be breathing, speaking, yearning; and the next Tole would squeeze a small metal lever and, like some type of terrible magic, a metal ball would puncture the front of Jesse Bliss's forehead and all of his breathing, speaking, and yearning—his hopes and his cheating at cards when he got drunk and his laughing too loud at his father-in-law's jokes, the things Tole imagined white men did with their time—all that would end.
Click
.

Tole made minute adjustments to the angle of the barrel, judging the direction and strength of the breeze by the soft billow of the nation's flag in his periphery. His hands stilled as he cocked the trigger and squinted, eyes trained on that orange feather as his heartbeat slowed. One more instant and—

Just then, Theopolis walked out onto the stage and stood behind the podium. A roar from the crowds. Tole heard, or thought he heard, men shouting,
Get back in the field where you belong.
But he was too far away to hear distinctly.

These boys gonna reignite a war right here, they ain't careful
. The crowd seemed suddenly much more unruly as it condensed toward the front of the stage.

Theopolis, he could tell, was trying to yell over the crowd.

And then Tole's nightmare really began.

July 6, 1867

A rumble, like the earth clearing its throat, came drifting over from the courthouse square. Down the wide expanse of Fourth Avenue, where she stood in the doorway of the dim little quilt shop, Mariah could see the fringe of the crowd clustered around the stage, though not the stage itself. She could see the great brick courthouse, with its grand cast-iron columns and long windows, its long smooth steps and the round clock face that stood out in the middle of the pediment, looming over the gathered figures like History itself. The courthouse made everything around it look smaller—the surrounding buildings, squatter and made from darker brick, that bordered the square; the pair of elm trees that framed its entryway; and the people, black and white, who stood in its shadow. For a moment she just looked toward the square and listened to the swelling sound.

“They got theyself started I guess,” Minnie Bostick, the chimney sweep's wife, said from behind her table, arms crossed, short and wide-set, cheeks full and dark. Her eyes said,
What you doing here?

Mariah didn't answer—neither the spoken nor unspoken. “Someday I'm getting one of these here quilts, Minnie, but not today.”
How she keep them quilts so clean with Mr. Bostick's dust all over everything? He as coal chalky as they come
, she thought. She walked on, letting Minnie eyeball the back of her head.

More cheers and groans wafted over from the courthouse square. Mariah wondered if Theopolis had given his speech, and whether the others had liked it. She took another two steps, toward the courthouse, yet safely far away.

At that very moment—at least, this was the way Mariah would always remember it—she heard the first screams and shouts from the courthouse square.

And then, unmistakably, gunfire.

She spun on her heel and ran toward the square.

July 6, 1867

At the base of the podium, the crowd surged. Tole could not see the cause—the press of bodies was too tight—a whirl of heads and arms reaching out.

A bottle crashed near the stage. Gunshots rang out from the corner, and from Sykes's grocery, too. The Colored League boys ran for cover, pulling pistols from bootstraps.

The white Conservatives were firing.

A Negro in rough blue homespun staggered and fell, shot in the back. Women were screaming. The Leaguers fled the square, some turning to return fire. The courthouse bell rang out. A few white boys went down, some trampled, some shot in the legs or shoulders. A stampede of whites and Negroes, gunfire and burning flags. A riot of shouts. Three white men stormed the stage. Another smashed a bottle. One man set fire to a washrag and threw it into the mob.

Jesse Bliss and his hat loomed bright and clear in the midst of the chaos.

Tole's mind tumbled over itself. He sighted back in. He calmed his heart and his breath. This was the only thing that gave him any power, that rifle and its ball seated in the chamber, his eye, his knowledge of wind and angles. He felt the stock smooth on his cheek. Beyond the straight line between that window and the stage, the world faded away and time stopped.

Bliss's men tried to get him down from the stage, but it was all happening too fast. Tole had only a few moments to take his shot. This was his only chance. He had nearly squeezed the trigger when his chance disappeared.

He lost sight of Bliss in the raucous ebb and flow of people. He swung the front sight post over the crowd, past a white man with a twisted, two-fingered hand raised to shield his face, past the burning washrag, past the men fighting on the stage, and on to the front left corner of the platform. There was Bliss. He sighted in on the man's face, and let his eyes focus one last time on the target before he entered that loneliness of eye and front sight post, when the world was reduced down to a small piece of metal and a slow draw of breath. He looked one last time at the target, to make sure it was indeed a man and that he could tell his head from his ass end.

A head, blond, with a heavy-brimmed dark hat, loomed up between Tole and Bliss. Then Bliss's hat disappeared in the mob. Reappeared.

Again and again Tole sighted, aimed, but couldn't get a clear shot.

The hat disappeared again.

Tole could see Theopolis Reddick, young and vibrant and waving his hands for calm and a stop to the disruption.
Good luck
, Tole thought. Mariah's son very obviously had no idea what to do.

As Tole searched through the chaos, the man with the missing fingers raised a bottle in his good hand and threw it toward the stage. This one shattered over the head of the young black man who'd been trying, desperately, to speak before the chaos erupted.

After the bottle hit him, Theopolis seemed to sway a moment, and then crumpled. Several other men—white men, all—leaned in over him.
They'll help him
, Tole thought,
they'll pick him up and carry him out to safety
. That Negro was an innocent, they would know that.

And then one big man with a reddish-auburn beard pulled back his arm and his shoulder and let loose a powerful roundhouse punch at Theopolis's face.

The mob swarmed in, kicking.

They had the boy surrounded. Tole could see one man choking him from behind while another leaned in with a club, aiming for his face. Tole could imagine the brittle crack of jaw and bone. They were beating the boy to death, Tole had seen it before. It wasn't just the violence, it was the looks on their faces. They couldn't stop themselves if they tried; they'd crossed a terrible line Tole knew very well.

Why kill him? Was it because of his politics or simply because he was a nigger in the wrong place and they had come to kill as many as they could? He wondered if even they knew. The crowd was so dense that Theopolis disappeared beneath flying fists and boots; for a moment all Tole could see was the pale blur of all those white faces closing in. He focused in on one of the faces, gaunt with a cleft lip, and the lip was smiling. Tole imagined the kicks to the ribs, the kidneys, hands reaching for the eyes, clawing.

There was a moment that George Tole would relive till the end of his days, a moment that he recognized even as it happened as a moment dividing all others, creating a world contained entirely in the words
before
and
after.
A redtail hawk wheeled overhead, and although George Tole was fixed upon the scene in the courthouse square, he also remembered the bird's flight, its slow, lazy circles, imprinted on him forever.

For the briefest moment the mob parted and Tole had a clear line of sight to Theopolis, bloody and screaming and mangled. A man raised an axe.

If anyone had been listening, they would have heard a single shot ring out. In the clamor and the dust Theopolis quit moving. His arms lay twisted at his sides and blood flooded the stage. The white men slowly backed away.

Afterward—his whole life would now be, it seemed, an
afterward
—he fled to the river and thought of leaving ol' GT right there on the bank and wading in to die, to finally be bathed in the blood for good. Instead he headed home through the shaded grove and by back alleys, drinking in deep gulps until his flask was empty, trying to stop the trembling of his hands. He took GT with him, as if it were attached.