Trouble in July (11 page)

There as a long pause over the wires.

“Consuetudo manerii et loci est observanda,”
Judge Ben Allen said wearily.

“What’s that, Judge?” Jeff asked quickly.

There was an even longer pause before Judge Allen spoke again.

“After getting a few scattered reports from around the county, the situation looks different than it did last night. It’s too early yet to make a forecast, but maybe it’ll be best if you lie low for a few hours. By that time I’ll have a better line on the situation. It’s a good thing you didn’t get out to Flowery Branch, but I still don’t understand why you didn’t make straight for the country like I told you.”

“It ain’t so easy to try to explain over the phone, Judge. But I’m glad I wasn’t needed out there, after all. I want to do my best to keep this lynching politically clean, Judge. If Mrs. Narcissa Calhoun would only keep out—”

“You stay where you are, McCurtain, so I can put my hands on you when I want you. I don’t want to hear of you going off fishing, or nothing like that. Good-by.”

“Good-by, Judge,” Jeff said weakly, replacing the receiver on the hook.

He turned and looked at Bert standing between him and the window. Bert’s face was pale and solemn.

“Bert,” he said, “sometimes I don’t know if I’m coming or going. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll get out of politics and never let yourself be tempted to sample a pollbook as long as you live. If I was you, I’d marry myself a loving wife and settle down to a peaceful way of living out on a little farm somewhere.”

“Why, Sheriff Jeff?”

“Because, Bert. Because!”

He got up painfully, pushing the sides of the chair from his hips. Once on his feet, he looked up at the ceiling, listening intently for Corra’s sounds. All was as quiet and peaceful as summer twilight. There was a faint aroma of boiling vegetables in the air. He tilted back his head, his nostrils flaring, and breathed deeply of it. He moved towards the door.

“I’m worried sick about Sam Brinson, the colored man,” he said. “As soon as I get a little bite to eat, I’m going to do some inquiring about him. I just can’t sit still and let something far-fetched happen to Sam.”

Bert got out of his way. He moved through the door and went to the bottom of the stairway in the hall. He listened for a moment before beginning to climb the stairs. Just as he mounted the first step, Corra came out of the bedroom and went into the kitchen. Jeff went on up, his nostrils quivering at the odor of boiling beans and freshly baked cornbread.

S
HEP
B
ARLOW, HIS
eyes bloodshot from loss of sleep, got back home at noon that day. He had been away, alone, since the evening before. His blue-black beard, which was already three days old when he left, was a mat of bristly stubble. Shep was a wiry little five-foot man, and his insignificant-looking stature made his face seem awesome in contrast.

The six or eight men standing under the umbrella tree in the front yard spoke to him cautiously as he went past. Everyone else had left, most of them to search for the Negro, some to eat dinner. The crowd had become restless and angry at the delay caused by Shep’s failure to come back within a reasonable length of time. He had told them not to do anything until he came back, and the men had expected him to be there by sunrise. A large party had gone to Oconee Swamp, while a smaller group had gone in the opposite direction towards Earnshaw Ridge. Those who remained at the house were disgusted with the dilatory methods still being used eighteen hours after the word had spread over the county.

Shep had hoped to find Sonny single-handed. He wanted to be the one to catch him, because he wished to have the satisfaction of tying a rope around the Negro boy’s neck and dragging him behind his car through the country before turning him over to the crowd. But during all that time he had not found a trace of Sonny.

The men under the tree watched Shep cross the yard. One or two of them spoke to him, but he did not even turn his head to reply. They knew by his behavior that he had not found Sonny, and that he was dangerously out of sorts.

After stomping up the front steps and across the porch, Shep threw his hat on the floor in the hall and walked into the dining-room.

He stopped abruptly at the door. A strange man sat at the table eating dinner with Katy. Shep was surprised to find a stranger there, although the longer he stared, the more certain he became that he had seen the man before. The stranger had a long white beard that reached almost to the top button on his trousers. His shirt-front was completely covered by the bushy hair. The old man raised a spoonful of blackeyed peas in his shaking hand, but before putting it into his mouth he parted the beard carefully around his lips.

“Who’s that?” Shep demanded, coming slowly into the room and taking a long close look at him. “Who’s he, Katy?”

“It’s Grandpa Harris, Papa,” she said. “You haven’t forgotten him, have you?”

“I thought I told him to stay away from here,” his eyes on no one in particular.

Shep went to his chair at the head of the table, his eyes blazing.

“Where’d he come from?” he asked. He stood behind his chair for several moments before sitting down. “What does he want?”

The old man put down his spoon and looked up at Shep over the rim of his glasses. His beard grew in a peculiar sort of way, making him look as if he were grinning about something all the time. The snowy white hair on each side of his face grew in whorls under his cheek bones and then flowed down to his waist in folds like crinkled white tissue-paper.

“Howdy, son,” he said to Shep, speaking for the first time.

To look at him, there was no way of knowing whether he was actually smiling, or whether it was the beard that made him look as if he were. It made Shep angry to be grinned at like that.

Shep jerked out his chair and sat down without answering him. He filled his plate with blackeyed peas and began shoveling them into his mouth. It did not make him feel any better when he reached across the table with his fork to spear a piece of cornbread and found that it had all been eaten.

Grandpa Harris, with what looked to Shep like unseemly glee under the circumstances, parted his beard and took another mouthful of peas.

“Grandpa Harris walked all the way over here from Smith County when he heard what happened last night,” Katy spoke up.

“Heard what happened?”

“Why, Papa, the raping, of course.”

“I don’t believe there was no raping done around here, last night or no other time,” he said surily. “That woman who sells the tracts and you made up that tale. I ain’t found no trace of that nigger you said done it. It’s all a big lie.”

Katy caught her breath, looking at the two men bewilderedly. She did not know what to say.

“I ain’t seen Katy since the time her mother died,” Grandpa Harris said. “When the word reached me, I started out for here right away. I wanted to see Katy one more time before I went.”

“Went where?” Shep asked, looking at him.

“Went to die,” Grandpa Harris said. “I’m getting old.”

Shep studied him casually, his mouth curling.

“You’re pretty old to be traveling around the country like this,” he said. “Old people like you ought to stay at home where you belong.” He became angrier as he spoke. “I told you once before I didn’t want to see you around here again.”

“I don’t aim to be a burden on you, son,” the man said. “I’ll be starting back to Smith County before long. I just wanted to see Annie’s girl a little. I don’t reckon I’ll ever have another chance to see her.”

“See to it that you don’t forget to go back then,” Shep said, turning to his meal and lowering his head over his plate of blackeyed peas.

Grandpa Harris looked at Shep and Katy, but there was still no way of knowing whether he was angry or grinning under the beard. The whorls of white hair on his cheeks appeared to be spinning around like a pin-wheel in a breeze. The last time he was there, the time he was ordered to stay away, he had walked all the way from Smith County to attend his daughter’s funeral. That was when he had threatened to send for the sheriff if Shep did not take Annie’s body from the well and give her a decent burial. Shep had chased him off the place within five minutes after the funeral was over and had ordered him never to set foot in the house again.

“I don’t aim to put nobody to trouble over me,” Grandpa Harris said, grinning and chewing. He parted his beard as he took three spoonfuls of peas in quick succession. “Just as soon as I see Katy for a little while, I’ll quit and start back home. I don’t reckon I’ve got a right to say it, son, but just the same I hope nothing shameful happens over this trouble of Katy’s.”

Shep sat up, knocking his spoon from his plate.

“What in hell do you mean by that?” he demanded.

“Son, it would be a lot better to let the sheriff of the county take charge of this trouble, because I don’t like for Annie’s girl to be mixed up in a shameful lynching. I know if Annie was here, she’d say the same thing.”

“You keep your mouth out of this,” Shep said. “Nobody is going to come butting into my business and tell me that a nigger can rape my womenfolks and get away with it.”

Shep shoved his plate away and got up noisily.

“Now, son—” Grandpa Harris said calmly.

Halfway to the door Shep turned and shouted at Katy.

“Where’s that Calhoun woman?”

“She went away right after breakfast, Papa. She said she had some work to do somewhere else.”

He turned and glared at Grandpa Harris. The old man was cleaning and stroking his silky white beard with his handkerchief.

“You keep out of my business,” he shouted at him. “I don’t want to hear no more talk about turning this thing over to the sheriff. If Jeff McCurtain comes sticking his nose into my business, I’ll make him wish he’d never seen a ballot-box. I’d shoot McCurtain down as quick as I’d shoot that nigger I’m looking for.”

He turned from Grandpa Harris and glared threateningly at his daughter.

“I don’t want to find you siding with him, do you hear me! I’m your paw, and you do what I tell you!”

Katy nodded quickly, drawing away from him.

Before she could get out of the way, her father had grabbed her with his left hand and had struck her with his right. His fist struck her on the side of her head, sending her crashing against the wall.

He looked down at her sprawled at his feet for a moment and then turned and walked out of the house.

Two automobiles filled with men had driven into the yard a few minutes before. Another car could be seen a quarter of a mile away, jolting over the rough road.

Shep stood in the yard looking across the fields choked with grass. His cotton was stunted and starved. In another few days his crop would be too far gone to save. Almost everyone else in that section of the country had finished laying-by, and he wondered what Bob Watson would say and do if he should happen to see one of his tenant’s crops in that condition.

Several men came across the yard while he was looking at the grass in the field.

“Howdy, Shep,” one of the men said.

“Howdy,” he answered without looking at them.

There was silence for a while. The noonday sun beat down unrelentingly. All the men looked at the grass-choked cotton without comment.

The car that had been coming up the lane towards the house reached the yard. Several men got out carrying shotguns and rifles.

One of the men standing around Shep nudged him with an elbow.

“We’ve been thinking, Shep,” he said haltingly. “And we want to ask you a question.”

Shep turned on his heel.

“What!” he said angrily.

“You didn’t say anything to the sheriff about this, did you Shep?”

“Hell, no!” he shouted, glaring at the faces around him.

The tension on the men’s faces vanished.

“What we waiting for, then?” one of them said, throwing his shotgun under his arm. “If a nigger raped one of my womenfolks, I’d shoot every last one of them in the whole country till I got the right one.”

“The sheriff will be out here with bloodhounds, taking that nigger right out from under our noses, if we don’t stir around and grab him first,” another man said.

“No sheriff is going to take that nigger while I’m alive,” Shep said.

“That’s the way to talk, Shep!”

Shep pushed the men out of his way and went towards the road where the cars were standing.

“There’s a big crowd down in Oconee Swamp,” one of the men said, running and catching up with him. “And there’s quite a sizable crowd over in them woods on the side of Earnshaw Ridge. What you figure on doing, Shep? That nigger can’t be in but one place at a time. Where do you figure he’s at?”

Shep did not reply.

“A lot of them got tired waiting for you to come back this morning, and they split up into bunches to go out looking. I stuck right here waiting for you, Shep, because I don’t believe in quarreling at a time like this.”

Katy came out on the porch, looking at the men scattered over the yard. She went to the post beside the steps and leaned against it. Two or three of the men turned around and watched her. She smiled at them.

A man who had been sitting alone in one of the cars got out and crossed the yard to meet Shep. It was Clint Huff, a carpenter, from Andrewjones.

“Hold on, Clint,” somebody said. “You and Shep ain’t got no cause to scrap each other at a time like this. A white girl’s been—”

Clint pushed him aside and went towards Shep. He and Shep had been quarreling and fighting since they were old enough to carry knives. The last time they had come together was at the sheriff’s annual barbecue the summer before. Shep had a scar three inches long on his chest to remind him of it.

They faced each other, keeping a distance between them.

“What you mean by trying to get this lynching party all balled up?” Clint said. “You act like you’re trying to boss it, don’t you?”

Clint drew his knife from his pocket and opened the blade.

“Now, wait a minute, Clint,” somebody said, stepping between them. “This ain’t no way to catch a nigger. Besides, everybody’s got a clear chance at catching him, anyway.”