The Tree of Forgetfulness (5 page)

“It was the word
scintilla
that crawled into my ear and started buzzing. When the judge recessed the court soon after Latham uttered it, I walked over to my office and pulled down the
Webster's
dictionary from the shelf behind my desk and looked up the word. ‘A spark, a particle, a trace,' it read. That was all the respect this N. R. Latham had for the truth of the Longs' guilt. I've often thought I'd like to find N. R. Latham now, ask him how he liked the fire that spark started. ‘Your own people were the ones who got burnt,' I'd say. ‘What do you think about that?'

“After the judge dismissed the guilty verdict against Dempsey Long and adjourned the court, I wanted more than anything to drive Dr. Hastings to his house and then go home myself, to my paper, my supper, my son, my wife, and my bed. But Dempsey Long would not stop grinning or talking or shaking N. R. Latham's hand, and every time I heard Latham's voice, I remembered that word
scintilla
and what it meant, and I got riled up all over again at that colored lawyer in his good suit, and soon, without knowing exactly how it happened, I found myself and Dr. Hastings in the crowd of men who flooded out of the courthouse and ended up in a lawyer's office across the street.”

“Because I had to,” he says. “Because that's the way the tide was running. If you've ever been caught in a riptide, then you know that you can't swim against it. You'll wear yourself out and drown trying. I expect your father taught you—because I taught both my children—if you're caught in a current, you go with it until you can ease yourself around crossways to the current, then you can swim clear of it.

“So I let that current carry me into the lawyer's office. What does it matter now whose office it was? When no more men could fit inside, someone pulled down the thick yellow shades over the front windows; someone closed and locked the door. And I waited for a chance to work myself crossways to the current that had carried us there. These men were not strangers to me, no. Most of them were men I saw, men who saw me, every day on Laurens Street. Men I knelt beside in church and sat beside at the Rotary Club meetings, who trusted me to sell
their homes and insure their lives against catastrophe. But I couldn't name names now, no. My memory's not that clear.

“Dr. Hastings was shaking, his face was brick red, and my first concern was to find him a chair and bring him a drink of water. ‘By God,' the old man kept saying. ‘By God.' By the time I got him settled, the men in the room were saying that Dempsey had flown the coop, but the sheriff was out looking for him now, to serve him with a warrant for assault and battery that he'd dug up. Before nightfall Dempsey would be back in jail with the rest of his murdering kin, one man said, all three of them locked up safe and sound, and what are we going to do about that? And before I knew what was happening, the men were talking guns.

“ ‘Now hold on just a minute,' I said when the man next to me finished talking. ‘Let's think this thing through. Let's take them out of jail and up to Monetta. We'll round up the whole sorry family, hustle them out to the county line, and kick them across and tell them that their shack, their plows, their mules, every last one of their possessions, is forfeit, and they're never to set foot in Aiken County again.'

“A couple of men nodded as I spoke, and when I was done, one or two raised their hands, as though they were voting with me. But the rest folded their arms and studied the carpet like they'd never seen a threadbare Oriental rug before. ‘Count me out,' I said. That was when Dr. Hastings offered me the .45 that his own father had made good use of at Gettysburg. The one sent home to the family after the Wilderness by another soldier, whose letter is still kept in the gun case, tucked under the velvet lining. The gun that Dr. Hastings himself carried, eleven years after the war, when he rode with the Red Shirts at Hamburg to break up the Reconstruction government and put the white man back on top.

“He offered, but I refused. There was no call or need for guns, I said. And the whole time I talked, I felt Dr. Hastings studying me the way he'd been studying me since I took Libba across the Savannah River to Georgia and brought her back my wife.
Is he for us or against us?
he was thinking.
Is he one of us or not?

“That was the question every man in this town had to answer in
those days, the one he must answer now and go on answering until the last breath leaves his body and he rests in peace. Because men stand together here, they speak with one voice and act with one will, and the hand of one is the hand of all. When a choice is presented to you that clearly—are you for us or against us? are you one of us or not?—how would you answer? And don't be so quick to say you know, because you don't.

“Which is not to say that some of our own didn't turn against us. Even some of the South Carolina papers printed letters and editorials about us from people who felt high and mighty enough to place blame. ‘There is a great company of men down in Aiken who know they are murderers,' one man wrote. ‘And knowing that, they have destroyed their own self-respect. They will live and die knowing full well that they are not worthy to associate with their wives and children and are entitled to no respect from decent people. They have fixed their own penalty.'

“Of course I resented that. We all did. Because they had no right, that's why. And I say to you now what I said to your grandmother then, and a hundred times since: Thank God I am not one of those men. Not then, not now, not ever. And to prove it, I will walk you through it. I will take you where I went that night and after so that you will know the truth and it will make you free.

“It was after midnight when I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table and slipped on my brand-new dress shoes.

“Do you think I don't know I had no business wearing them? Well, because I didn't want to rummage and wake Libba, and they were the first pair that came to hand when I reached into the bedroom closet.

“When I had my shoes on and laced up tight, I made my way across the kitchen, taking care to miss the squeaky spots. With one hand I squelched the small bell that hung at the top of the kitchen door, opened the door with the other, stepped out onto the screened porch there, and closed the door behind me. God, it was dark that night, moon no bigger than a paring, but I knew where I was and what was all around me. A set of unpainted wooden shelves stood against the far wall, lined with Libba's canning jars and flowerpots, all neatly
stacked, the way Libba likes things kept. Next to the shelves was a wooden crate full of kindling and small sticks, ranked by length and thickness. The air on that porch smelled richly of pine, and I stood for a while, breathing it in, until I remembered why I was going out that night. I was going for your grandmother and for your father. I was going for Dr. Hastings too, who was no longer young enough to ride around the county late at night, keeping the peace and righting wrongs like the one that had been done us that very afternoon when the colored lawyer stood in that courtroom, bold as brass, and told us there was not one scintilla of evidence against those three murderers and convinced the judge to set one of them free.

“I went to the jail that night—I'm not ashamed to say it—but that's as far as I went. I had to park at my office and walk three blocks to the courthouse, that's how many cars were parked along the streets that night. But when I saw those people brought down, it turned my stomach, and so I did not go where everyone else was going; I went back to my office, and I stayed there.”

“What did I do? What does it matter what I did while I was there?” he says. “Call it what you like. Say: ‘For the rest of the night he worked his way through the pile of paperwork in the wire basket on his desk. He wrote checks and signed letters and initialed contracts. From time to time he went out and stood on the stoop and watched Orion climb one side of the sky while the new moon fell down the other.'

“I worked all night, and at first light I went home. Libba was waiting for me in the front room. She was wearing her old green flannel bathrobe, and her hair was down around her shoulders, and when she saw me, she jumped up and ran to me. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight. ‘Oh, thank God,' she said, when I told her what I've told you. ‘Thank God.' She must have said it half a dozen times.

“Because I didn't go—what else would she have to thank God about?

“ ‘The many innocent cannot be held responsible for the irresponsible actions of the guilty few.' Austin Eubanks, editor of the Aiken paper, wrote in an editorial the week after that night. Libba cut the story out of the paper and put it next to my plate at breakfast time.
That's the kind of wife she has always been to me.”

“That's all I have to say, for now,” he says, and then he stops, while
for now, for now
tolls in his mind, frightening him.
Now
promises a
later
, when more words will come, and yet it feels as if the words he's just spoken are the last in line; what's left is a fog of silence spreading and deepening inside him the way dusk moves across a field.

“A
N AMBULANCE DRIVER
?” some people asked when they learned he'd served in the medical corps, and every time he had to calm himself before he could explain that he had not been a college boy, doing his bit at the rear. He'd been a boy, that much was true—nineteen when he shipped out for France—but he was a medic. He'd carried a bag of tourniquets, needles, and powders as he'd charged, unarmed, toward the German lines, along with his armed comrades, who begged and screamed for him to piece them back together after the machine guns ripped them apart. He did not even attempt to tell the bystanders who gawked at his service that every time he climbed out of the trenches with the other men and lined up for the charge, he watched the muzzles of the German 8's swing around to point at the red cross on his uniform. This morning in his room at the Hotel Aiken, he'd felt amazed and ashamed to see his reflection in the mirror above the small sink where he was shaving.

Now, as he did every morning, he stood at the window and looked across Park Avenue to the Southern Railway depot, where a varying group of men from Leland Dawson's list of perpetrators waited to collect newspapers out of the bundles unloaded from the Columbia train. The “Famous Seventeen,” Leland had called the men who planned and carried out the Long killings, and Howard Aimar had not been one of them, but every morning there he was, standing a little way down the platform from the rest, taking no part in the backslapping, the quick, urgent conversations they held with one another.

Thanks to Zeke, those men's names were attached to faces now. For five days after Barrett arrived in town, whenever Zeke drove him somewhere in his wagon, he wore a top hat and frock coat, as though driving Barrett were an honor and a celebration. “Morning, Mr. Manning. Hope you're keeping well, boss,” he'd called out loudly, tipping his brim to the man in the tweed hat walking the white collie. The man nodded, fuming, and walked faster, and Barrett understood that he'd just met James Lee Manning, reporter for the
Augusta Chronicle
, author of the letter in the
Aiken Standard
that blamed the lawyer Wise for riling up Aiken's citizens by strutting and bragging in front of Sheriff Glover's widow and orphaned children. “Close around,” Leland had written next to Manning's name.

“Evening, Mr. Owen, sir,” Zeke said to the rotund man with the heavy-lidded eyes standing on the courthouse steps.

“On your way to the ball, are you, Zeke?” the man said. Deputy Arthur Owen, Barrett thought.

Surely, Barrett thought, Zeke wasn't deliberately pointing out the men on Leland's list; he couldn't know who was on it, and he yelled out to almost everyone they passed, black or white. After a week on Zeke's wagon, Barrett could recognize the black meat merchant John Bush and the builder Wesley Ford, and he knew their stories too; he knew that Ezra Jones tailored riding habits for the rich and that the black druggist, Dr. M. M. Hampton, had sold quinine to the government during the war. Still, he remembered Leland's warning, and he was sure that Leland would say that just by pointing out these men, Zeke had put himself in danger. So one day he said, “No need to name names, Zeke. I can't keep track of them all.”

“Can't?” Zeke shouted, amazed. “Well, what's that notebook for?” After that he wore his overalls and a faded blue shirt, shouted mostly at his horse.

Every day for two weeks Barrett made his rounds, in Zeke's wagon or alone, on foot. He went to Finley's Lumberyard, where the air was full of flying sawdust. He stood next to a tall stack of yellow pine boards beaded with resin and shouted questions to Jesse Finley over the high,
ringing whine of the saws. “I understand you were tending the drying kiln that night,” he said, pointing to the tin shed leaking smoke from every crack and seam. “And you didn't see or hear anything unusual?” Finley cupped his hand to one ear, shook his head.

He went out to Gregorie's cotton gin and shouted his questions over the clanking roar of the machinery, imagined his words smothered in the lint that clung to every surface there. Then back to Hahn's for a conversation about English biscuits and on to Holley Hardware, where nobody would wait on him, no matter how long he stood at the front counter, holding a paper bag of tenpenny nails or a peppermint stick taken from the big clear jar beside the register.

Round and round and round he went, learning nothing that Leland Dawson hadn't already discovered. People talked to Leland, he told himself, because Leland had arrived while the shock was new and people were still trying out different versions of the story. But that time had passed; the story had hardened into the official line: The dead sheriff and justice served, then betrayed, and finally, rightfully, carried out by a faceless group of outraged citizens. Deeply regrettable but unavoidable. A necessary evil. A dozen times a day he heard those opinions.