The Tree of Forgetfulness (11 page)

Standing there, he'd heard a roaring in his head, but when he looked down, he saw that the shotgun in his hands was rock steady, and that had been a surprise and a relief. His arm still hurt like the devil where Bessie Long had torn a chunk out of it that morning, and whenever he closed his eyes, pictures flashed through his head: Bud lying dead in the Long's yard, lying dead in his casket in the courthouse not ten yards from the jail, while his orphaned children drooped and clung to their mother and she asked everyone who came to pay respects what in God's name she was going to do now.

Yes, sir, he would say to Mr. J. P. Gibson, that night he'd been tempted, and he made no apologies for that, he'd been
strongly
tempted, to step aside and let the mob get what they'd come for, but that would have been a smirch on the memory of the man who'd helped Aubrey Timmerman become the man he was that night. Only a few years earlier Aubrey had been a conductor on the trolley that ran from Aiken down through Horse Creek Valley and over the river to Augusta and back. Bud's people were from the valley too, and when he rode the trolley home, they'd talk about their families and this and that.

Then one day Bud said he was looking to hire a couple more deputies and would Aubrey like to throw his hat in the ring? You bet he would, he said, and Bud had hired him and schooled him about what it meant to uphold the law, to be a man who could resist the chance to do wrong when it was offered, which it would be, Bud said, because of the frequency with which a lawman rubbed elbows with the criminal element. “Lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” his mother used to say, but Bud had wanted his deputies flea proof.

“I have lost my best friend,” he told the mob on the night of April 25, 1925. “But if Bud was here, he would say ‘We are sworn to uphold the law,' and that's just what I intend to do. I ain't scared of heaven or hell,” he said. “And I'll shoot the first man makes a move for that door.”

He'd seen his share of bad situations. You couldn't kick in the doors of all the blind tiger joints he and Bud had raided or execute the liquor raids they'd gone on and not run into a couple of them. He and Bud had crept through many a thick stand of pines out in Little Hell Hole Swamp, hoping to surprise a solitary man running a steamer outfit,
only to find a dozen men lounging in a clearing, each with a pistol stashed in pocket or waistband and not one of them cowed by the sound of the word
law
or the sight of the two men who'd come in its name. Bud had taught him that at those times you stated your business, then you looked sharp and waited to see which way it was going to swing. Because there was always a moment in any showdown when you felt the cord of danger twist so tight it had to snap, and when it did, the people you were facing were either going to go for their guns or throw them down and surrender.

So, on that April night he'd stood in the jailhouse door and held his shotgun in plain sight with both hammers thumbed back, while Arthur and Mack stood beside him with their shotguns at the ready too. Not that three guns would have counted for much against the firepower in that crowd. He knew that, and he'd stood his ground, and what he'd felt then was as bare and clean and true as any feeling would ever be: It wasn't just his weapon that was holding back the crowd; it was
him
. It was hard to read their faces in the wavering torchlight, but he'd wanted them to see his, so he took off his hat and stood directly under the lightbulb that hung beneath the tin awning that shaded the jailhouse door. In a crowd like that one, there was always one man who threw the switch, and you needed to find him right quick and divine which way he was going to swing, so he peered around the torchlight until his eyes lit on a horse-faced man near the front of the pack. Yes, there he was.

Finally, the man spoke. “Stand aside, Aubrey,” he said, “we're taking those niggers.” The voice was familiar; he came from down in Horse Creek Valley—Graniteville maybe, Langley or Clearwater. Aubrey told the man again that he was sworn to uphold the law and that he intended to do that. He saw the man hesitate; then the long face sagged, and he looked around for someone to back him up. Aubrey felt a little give in the mob, and he pushed at the spot where it had gone soft. “You men go on home now,” he said. Back in the crowd other men began to shift their weight and spit on the ground, and he knew he had them. “Give us the niggers,” someone called from the back, without conviction.

“You all go on home now,” Aubrey Timmerman said. “Let's put an end to this long, sad day and let the law take its course.”

By this time J. P. Gibson would have finished one cigarette, but Aubrey would wait while he rolled another; he had more to say. When Gibson lit up again and said, “Proceed,” he'd say that the reason he'd gone on at such length and in such detail about that first night was to focus Mr. J. P. Gibson's cold amber eye and his shrewd cold mind on one question: Why would Aubrey Timmerman risk his life to save those people on one occasion and then invite the mob in to take them on another? Such an act would be evidence of a corrupted character, he would say, and he was not prepared to hand down that verdict against himself.

Had he made mistakes on the night in October? No doubt about it. He shouldn't have gone home and left Robert Bates alone at the jail, knowing that Robert sometimes lost his head in a pinch. That had been a lapse that he would answer for at God's great judgment seat. And maybe he didn't fight as hard as he could have when the men swarmed into the jail, their faces wrapped to the eyes in dark cloth. But the electric line had been cut; they'd knocked his flashlight out of his hands. They'd overpowered him and marched up the steps and ordered him to unlock the cells.

Now, he wasn't saying that those three Longs didn't deserve to die for murdering Bud. They were guilty as sin, and everybody knew it. The boys would have been long dead by now if that colored lawyer hadn't started poking holes in the first verdict until the high court sent them back down to Aiken for another trial. Had anyone thought to ask N. R. Latham what his part had been in getting three of his own people killed? Yes sir, he'd say, Aubrey Timmerman had prayed for justice, the way any other law-abiding, red-blooded, Anglo-Saxon man in any town or county in the state would have done. And yes, he was mad as hell when the judge set Dempsey Long free and made a liar of the one man—himself—who'd tried all day to keep a lid on the situation by advising the riled-up citizenry to let the law take its course. And yes, he'd sent Arthur out to pick up Dempsey Long again and serve him with the outstanding warrant for assault and battery and put him back in jail. He'd done all that, yes sir.

But it was a hell of a leap from there to what the Rainey girl said he'd done. It was a far cry from being mad as hell at a miscarriage of justice to climbing those steps, talking and laughing, to unlock Bessie Long's cell and hand her over to a mob. What kind of man would do something like that? No man like the man he knew himself to be. And he was no human buzzard either.

The sheriff opened the desk drawer again, pulled out a wooden ruler, and used it to guide the pencil down the middle of the next page of his pad of paper. In times like these a man should be able to tell friend from foe. In the left-hand column he listed the names of the men he could count on. Frank Bell, he wrote, and McLendon and Robert Bates, James Edwin Manning and Finley, the lumberman. He might be fond of the sound of his own voice, but he would stand with you. To the right of the line, in the enemy's column, he wrote John Moseley and Ella Rainey and Charlie George, the stationmaster down at Warrenville, who'd been almost as loud as Moseley in running his name into the dirt. Col. Earl Henderson, he wrote. The man who'd hustled up to the bench after the judge dismissed the charges against Dempsey Long and told him that lynching was in the air. Then he lifted the pencil. The next name he needed to decide where to put was harder to place than any other: Howard Aimar. Mr. High-and-Mighty himself, who only last week had turned from his office door when Aubrey Timmerman called out to him and looked down at the sheriff like he'd never seen him before.

Now when the sheriff closed his eyes and let the scene run, he saw himself speeding north out the Columbia Highway, passing car after car heading back toward town. But he'd driven on anyway, found the dirt track that ran along the edge of a field, and followed it until he came to a clearing in the pines. He remembered dust smoking in the headlights and a dog that barked and barked.

He remembered getting out of his car, looking up at the sliver of moon, and thinking God Almighty, somebody bring a light. The woman was on the ground with her dress on fire, and by its light and by the light of a lantern set on a pine stump he'd seen the two boys
lying dead and a few men prowling the outskirts of that dim province. He will tell any jury in the land that Howard Aimar was among the prowlers. He'd drawn his pistol, said, “Stop in the name of the law.” The others ran, but Howard Aimar just stood there like he'd been turned to stone while the sheriff beat at the fire in Bessie Long's clothes with his own two hands, and when it was out and he looked up again, Aimar had disappeared. But he was sure it was him; he will put his hand on the Bible and swear that the man was there that night. What troubled him was that Aimar could return the favor.

C
ECILE KISSES HIS
forehead. “Papa,” she whispers, as though Papa were a saint's name, like the name he'd taken at Confirmation: Stephen, the church's first martyr.

“Get some rest, my love, you'll feel better in the morning,” Libba says slowly, softly, as if she were calming a child. Her lips brush his forehead; her hand smooths his hair. Fresh air and sunshine, optimism, exercise, and rest: these are Libba's prescriptions for health and well-being. At home he likes to tease her and Cecile while they touch their toes twenty-five times in front of an open window. Sometimes Cecile flounces off, and Libba scolds him: “Can't you stop, Howard? You always go too far.” He wants to promise her that when he comes home well and strong he will never tease either of his girls again; he will take everything they do and say seriously.

If they are leaving, it must be night. “Don't go,” he says, but they go anyway; everybody leaves except for Lewis's daughter, the curious grandchild. When the door closes behind them, he lets out the breath it seems he's been holding all day. With Libba and Cecile gone, he does not have to be brave. He can let himself feel the sickness break his bones and burn away everything but his mind, which stays clear and full of light, like a bright room inside a dark house.

Lewis's daughter sits beside his bed, her green coat buttoned up under her chin. It must be cold where she's come from, or else she makes it cold because he feels chilled now, too, on this warm summer night. If Libba were here, she would notice his shivering and find a blanket, but Lewis's child doesn't seem to care. There's something quick
and hungry about the way she watches him and waits, the way women always seem to wait for him to make something right. She's just the latest in the long line of women whom he must please. Well, he's sorry, but he does not have the strength for it any longer. “What do you want?” he says. “Why dredge up that awful time again?” he says.

Because it's part of the silence that was handed down to me
, she says.
Like the old gun that went to my brother, like our mother's china came to me. I'm taking an inventory. I want to know what you left me
.

“You think I didn't regret what happened to those people?”

From the way she ducks her head and frowns, he sees that is exactly what she thinks.

“Now you listen to me,” he says. Perhaps if she understood how things were for him back in 1926, she would be gentler, kinder, more forgiving; understanding and a little sympathy are all he's ever wanted, from anyone. He tells her that first and foremost, there was the pressure to make sufficient money to feed and clothe and house Libba and Lewis and Cecile. To buy laying mash for the chickens, a new Ford automobile, and everything in between. Enough money to keep them safe and sound and convince Libba's parents that their daughter had not made a disastrous marriage.

Before it could be spent, of course, money had to be earned. And unless a man's family was able to give him money, which his family was not, he had to hustle. He couldn't sit back and wait for opportunity to knock; he had to run after it, which was exactly what he'd done. Not long after the killings, he'd gone out and offered his services to a prominent member of the tribe of rich men who spent a pleasant few months in town every spring.

They'd sat in leather chairs on opposite sides of a long table in the rich man's paneled library, its shelves lined with green, maroon, and brown leather bound books, and the man had outlined what was needed. Could Howard supervise the upkeep of the big brick house and see that the polo ponies and the riding horses stood on fresh straw everyday in their long brick stable with the white cupola on top? “I can do that for you, yes sir,” he said. Would he guarantee that the clay tennis
court was dragged and sprinkled with water and rolled after every match? “Without fail,” he said.

“Look here, Aimar,” the rich man said. “How long before that business with the colored people gets straightened out?”

“Any day now, sir,” he answered. “I'm sure of it.” He poured the rich man a small glass of spirits. “My own private reserve,” he said, and the rich man had rolled the whiskey in his mouth, swallowed and smiled and held out his hand.

To make money, you had to hustle, and you had to make a place for yourself that no one else could occupy. That was why, when the president of the Lions Club asked him to offer the toast at their annual banquet, he said consider it done. And when an officer of the Rotary Club invited him to chair a committee, he never turned him down.