True Fires (4 page)

10

Daniel sits on the hard wooden bench in front of ol’ Miss May’s desk sucking the last sliver of his peppermint candy. ’Becca’s already finished hers and is casting big fawn eyes at Miss May in hopes of another.

That’s what ’Becca’s always reminded him of—a fawn who looks at you, shy and trusting, with those round brown eyes and long black lashes above that nose that’s big for a girl but just the right size for a half-grown fawn. She even has the spindly legs, bumpy at the knees, and that delicate toe-then-heel, sort of skippy way of walking that all fawns have. She loves her sweets, same as they do. And she’s skittery, too, inclined to freeze and shake at the first sign of trouble—which is what she done yesterday in the Sheriff’s car, and most of the way here, today.

On Daniel’s part, he’s not worried a bit. Truth is, between the Sheriff not liking ’Becca’s nose and his hair, and the principal not liking trouble at the school, he’s hoping to get off coming back altogether.
Wouldn’t it be fine to never come back? To
be, like the song says, a “Free Little Bird”!

Bored with watching Miss May answer the constantly ringing telephone—“No, ma’am.” “Yes, sir. I’ll give him your message soon as I can,” she tells the callers—Daniel’s mind wings off to the heavily wooded ridge up to Uncle Dolph’s place; to last fall, when he and Pap, Uncle Dolph, and Cousins Jack and Frank caught their limit of quail and, in the soft light of the slanting sun, made their way back for a pickin’and-cleanin’ party. They’d released the dogs to run on home, let Aunt Angie know they were on the way. Cousin Jack was on point, holding his 12-gauge in one hand and his sack of fifteen birds in t’other, and he started it, in a tenor high and clear:

I’m as free a little bird as I can be,
I’ll never build my nest on the ground;
I’ll build my nest in the highest oak tree,
Where the wild boys cain’t never tear it down.

All the rest of ’em had joined in on the chorus, their voices finer than a choir on the rising wind:

Take me home, little bird, take me home.
Take me home, little bird, take me home.
Take me home to my mother, she is sweeter than the others.
Take me home, little bird, take me home.

Cousin Frank walked behind Jack. He’d piped in with another verse, same as the first, ’cept for changing one word to suit himself:

I’m as free a little bird as I can be,
I’ll never build my nest on the ground;
I’ll build my nest in a chinkapin tree,
Where the wild boys cain’t never tear it down.

After the communal chorus, it was Uncle Dolph’s turn, and he chimed in with a mulberry tree. Then the chorus, then Daniel with his weepin’-willer tree. Then one more chorus—with Uncle Dolph’s cabin in sight, Aunt Angie’s welcoming ribbon of chimney smoke winding toward them in the wind—and Pap had finishin’ rights. Pap, never one to follow the crowd, dismissed the trees altogether and, howlin’ like a hound, sang:

I’m a pretty little star in the sky at night,
A-smiling down on the world;
I’ll shine my light on my true-love bright
And play on her beautiful curls.

Aunt Angie, who looked enough like Mam to be her sister and was, had heard their approach and joined them for the final chorus. From the porch, her voice rang like a bell:

Take me home, little bird, take me home.
Take me home, little bird, take me home.
Take me home to my mother, she is sweeter than the others.
Take me home, little bird, take me home!

The sudden wrench of a door handle, the creak of its hinges jerks Daniel off Uncle Dolph’s ridge and back to his bench in front of Miss May’s desk. As he gauges the expression in Miss Lila’s eyes, the jut of Pap’s jaw, the wings of his wish unfold and flap inside his chest:
I’m a-free-little-bird from school
today!

Principal Cantrell, whose face looks like a setter dog that’s been caught chasing rabbits, makes a big show of kindly escorting them out the little half door and into the lobby, then out the office door with maybe the intent of opening both doors of Miss Lila’s green grove truck.

At the sidewalk from the office to the driveway, however, all five of them stop short. On the concrete walkway, someone’s used school chalk to draw a wobbly white line flat down the middle, with the word “WHITES” and an arrow on one side, and “NIGGERS” and an arrow on t’other.

Daniel feels Pap stiffen. ’Becca freezes and begins to tremble. Inside Daniel’s chest, there’s a sudden explosion of feathers. Beside a furious Miss Lila, Principal Cantrell is hopping mad.

“May!”
he yells, loud enough for her and the whole school to hear. “Get Floyd out here with a mop.
Now!
”

AGAINST PAP’S PROTESTS (“I got work to do, ma’am”), Miss Lila parks her car beside a storefront downtown. Over the door, in fancy letters, the sign says
The Lake Esther Towncrier,
with the picture of a man, one hand holding a bell, and the other cupping his mouth in a yell. Three lines of smaller letters say
Your Hometown Bi-Weekly Newspaper,
and
Ruth Cooper
Barrows, Publisher, Editor in Chief
.

“You got to trust me on this, Franklin,” Miss Lila tells Pap as she hustles them out of the truck and into the office, asking the skinny, yellow-haired girl at the front, “Is Mrs. Barrows in, please?”

“May I say who’s askin’?” the girl wants to know.

At the reply, “Lila Hightower,” the girl nods, asks them to “Please be seated,” and moves through the dark wood door off the lobby.

Miss Lila turns ’round to face ’Becca and Daniel, puts a pretty hand on each of their shoulders, and bends down to speak softly to them. “You kids have been awful patient this morning. Can you wait a few minutes more while your daddy and I talk to the nice newspaper lady?”

’Becca nods her okay.

“Will you be long?” Daniel asks, not liking the strange oily smell of the place or the rapid
thrum-thrum
of machinery somewhere in the back.

“Shouldn’t be long atall,” Miss Lila replies.

The wooden door opens and the girl returns with an older woman who’s short and squat, round-shouldered in a red-brown suit, with chopped red-brown hair flecked with gray.
Looks like a li’l ol’ barn owl,
Daniel thinks.
Got the same kinda
heart-shaped face, long beak, sorta hooked, and brown see-all eyes behind them black-rimmed glasses.

Miz Ruth Cooper Barrows introduces herself in a voice raspy as a man’s, shakes hands all around, then turns to lead Miss Lila and Pap into her office.
Haw! Got knocky-knees, too—
just like the barn owls up home!

11

As the striking young woman
(A real looker. Judge How-High’s
only o fspring?)
and the small glowering man
(What the hell’s a
“tree man”?)
settle into her office chairs, Ruth Cooper Barrows checks the clock on the wall behind them.
Nine-seventeen. Forty-three minutes to get these two in and out and make it to the Town
Council meeting around the corner.
The vote on a Highway 441 bypass, to route heavy trucks off the city’s main street, away from the downtown merchants, should be a real corker.

Miss Lila Hightower—early thirties, gorgeous, heiress to the Judge’s
fortune, and unmarried—what’s your story?
Mentally, Ruth reviews everything she’s heard, in the three years since she and Hugh came to Lake Esther, about the Hightower daughter. It’s a file short on details, long on rumor and courthouse innuendo.

First time Ruth actually laid eyes on Lila was ten days ago, at Judge Howard Hightower’s huge public funeral. Whispers and raised eyebrows rippled through the crowd at the First Baptist Church when Lila and her mother entered the rear double doors. Lila inscrutable in dark glasses and an impeccably tailored black jacket and pants (“Pants at a funeral!” the whisperers remarked behind flat, black-gloved palms), her gleaming head of auburn hair uncovered, beside her mother, Violet Hightower, dressed and veiled in deep purple, head to toe. Rose had watched them make their way down the aisle, the daughter shoring the mother up with a determined, shoulder-to-shoulder, locked-forearm grip. Was Mrs. Hightower overwhelmed by grief or completely drunk at ten o’clock in the morning? It had been hard to tell till after the overlong service, made even longer by the Governor’s rambling “Good-bye, old friend” graveside eulogy. Later, at the massive white-columned house in the middle of the Judge’s grove, it was abundantly clear that Mrs. Hightower was a heavy drinker, and a bad one at that. And Miss Hightower, who’d hustled her upstairs in short order, was one cool cookie.

The family’s info for the Judge’s obit said only that he was “survived by wife Violet Randall Hightower, and daughter Lila, Washington, D.C.” What’s the scoop on this young woman, whom courthouse wags call “the kind of W.A.C. reserved for the four-
star sacks,” who’s suddenly appeared with a rawboned escort and two
children in tow?
On instinct, Ruth launches an opening volley, meant to separate fact from local fiction.

“Miss Hightower, you
are
the prodigal daughter of Judge How-High?”

“Yes, I am.” Lila Hightower lifts her chin, narrows green eyes, but the look is more amused than defiant.

Everything about her
—hair, makeup, simple gold pendant (a French fleur-de-lys?), white silk blouse with covered buttons, black wool slacks—
is an elegant understatement
.
No doubt she fits
right into the Capital, but here in Lake Esther,
Ruth thinks,
she’s a
dahlia in the daisy patch.
“My condolences to you and your mother,” Ruth adds, and after she accepts Lila’s nodding
(guarded?)
acknowledgment, lets another salvo fly across the desk.

“Come home just in time to block the Sheriff’s seizure of the Golden Fleece?”

Lila Hightower laughs. Not a polite, “Why-Miz-Brown-ah-never!” tea-party titter. No. Lila’s laugh is, like her voice, a throaty alto, laced with rich humor. “Guilty, as charged, Counselor,” she tells Ruth with a sly grin.

“You were in the W.A.C.’s, right?”

“Still am,” Lila says, straightening her spine. “On Temporary Emergency Leave.”

“Really?” Ruth’s mind crackles with potential questions. “So when will you be returning to D.C.?”

“Just as soon as I can.”

“What can I do for you?” Ruth asks, leaning forward, arms criss-crossed.

Lila Hightower lays out the story with cool, quick precision, spiked with red-hot derision for K. A. DeLuth (Fire and ice, Ruth thinks): the Sheriff’s uninvited visit to the grammar school at the behest of Clive Cunningham, his unauthorized removal of the Dare children from their classrooms, his accusations “based on nothin’ but the narrow confines of his own mind, assuming, that is, he has one,” his subsequent “stirring up of the local pea-brained pot with every race-hating hothead he can think of, including most members of the school board,” and this morning’s inflammatory chalking of the school sidewalk. Ruth has picked up her pen and begun making notes. Occasionally she looks up, sometimes at Lila, sometimes in quick, studied glances at Franklin Dare, and, through the open doorway, at the two dark-haired children sitting stiffly in the lobby.

“Mrs. Barrows . . .” Lila lays an anchoring hand on Ruth’s desk and leans forward. “May I call you Ruth?” Ruth nods. “I read your article last week about the Cape Hatteras light-house, got the impression you’re from the Carolinas?”

“Philadelphia, actually. But I spent six years in Raleigh.”

“Then you’ve no doubt heard of the Roanoke Colony, the arrival of Mr. Dare’s ancestors on American soil?”

“Every schoolchild in the state knows the story. I’ve even been there, seen the pageant they put on every summer.
The
Lost Colony,
it’s called. Quite a show.”

“Well, Franklin here is tenth-generation Dare,” Lila keeps on. “And, contrary to our local Race Relations expert, part Croatan Indian.”

“On my granpap’s side, and tain’t no shame in it, for me or mine.”

Franklin Dare’s dialect calls up instantly, for Ruth, the beautiful, uncompromising border of blue peaks that rim the western Carolinas. The hooded intensity of his eyes tells her this is a man needing to set things straight.

Ruth checks the clock.
Nine twenty-nine.
“Smoke? Mind if I do?” She shakes a Pall Mall loose, taps it briskly on the desk, lights it with the flick and snap of her Zippo, and inhales greedily. “Was it your grandfather who moved up-country then?” she asks Dare gently.

“ ’Twas,” Dare says. The hard lines between his dark brows soften. “Granpap was a gray-eyed Indian, fought with the Confederates under General Leventhorpe. After the War, wasn’t much left of Robeson County, so he took a notion to walk the state east to west. Wound up layin’ train track inter Asheville. Traded mules for a while outta Tennessee. Sold one to Granmam who was a young widder with a fine ol’ orchard of Winesaps just beyant Pigeon Ridge. She was a red-haired woman lookin’ for a white mule to change her luck. Set her mind on tyin’ up ol’ Granpap who ’lowed he weren’t cut out to be no woman’s straight shingle, on account of his wild side. Granmam told him she’d been married to an ol’ man since she was fourteen, she could do with a li’l wildin’. Tied up Granpap for good. We’s all born there, middle of that same orchard.”

“Still there? The orchard, I mean?” Ruth rests her cigarette in the brass, bulging-with-butts-already ashtray on her desk, picks up her pen again.

“Well . . .” Dare’s eyes shift focus from Ruth’s face to some faraway point. “ ’Bout a year ago, Pres’dent Gen’ral Eisenhower ’nounced he’s goin’ to build the parkway slab through our property. Gov’ment man give us a check, and six months to move off. It was my brother Will got the idea comin’ here, gettin’ inter citrus. Reckon we woulda come when he did, ’cept my wife, Rachel, took sick. Will came on, found us twenty-five acre nigh ’bout the county line; good pine land drainin’ into hammock, should be fine for melons come spring.”

“So you’re a local property owner?” Ruth asks, scribbling.

“Yes, ma’am. Will spent the spring and summer cuttin’ out pine, clearin’ stumps. When I hain’t top-workin’ Miss Lila’s trees, I’m buddin’ out seedlin’s for a grove of our own.”

“Franklin’s forgot more about trees than most people know,” Lila puts in.

Dare shrugs. “ ’Cept for the diff ’rence in fruit, trees is trees.”

“And your wife?” It’s a hard question to ask.

Everything about him—eyes, expression, voice—downshifts. “She passed last month.”

“I’m sorry.” Ruth pauses, casts a sympathetic glance at the children in the lobby. “Your brother Will have kids?”

“Three of ’em, two in the same school as mine.”

“But the Sheriff has no quarrel with them?”

“They’s red-haired, ma’am. Took after Granmam’s Irish. We’s dark-headed like t’other side.”

The story is beginning to take shape in Ruth’s mind. “Were you in the war, Mr. Dare?”

“Yes, ma’am. What they called a infantry sharpshooter, Second Battalion, Two Hundred Fifty-Third.”

The boy, Daniel, has drifted across the lobby, listening, and now stands boldly in the doorway. “Got hisself a Silver Star, a Purple Heart and everythin’. Show ’er yer scar, Pap.”

Dare turns around to eye his son into silence. Daniel retreats to his post beside his sister.

Nine-forty,
the clock reads. Ruth taps the ash off her neglected cigarette, drags, and asks, “So you’re a war hero, too, Mr. Dare?”

Dare shrugs. Apparently his response to any sort of compliment.

Lila lays a silky forearm on the edge of the desk. “Ruth, what we have here is a fine little family being hung out to dry by the Sheriff’s showboatin’.”

Ruth sends a smoke ring circling toward the ceiling before replying. “Couldn’t agree with you more.” She picks up a sheet of paper from her inbox and slides it across the desk. “Fellow who works for Clive Cunningham, named—let me see,”—she adjusts her glasses higher on the bridge of her nose, squints at her handwritten note—“Leroy Russell, dropped this off earlier ‘with the Sheriff’s compliments.’ ”

Both Lila and Dare stiffen before they’ve even looked at the paper she’s placed in front of them. “What?” Ruth asks.

Lila’s stare hardens. “Leroy’s working for Clive now?”

“That’s what he said. Who is he?”

Her eyes shine with fury. “Leroy Russell is the pussel-gutted fool I fired in order to hire Franklin!”

“When was this?”

“What’s today—Thursday? It was two days ago, Tuesday.”

“And on the following day, Wednesday, at Rotary”—Ruth checks her notes—“Clive Cunningham suggests the Sheriff stop by the school.”

“Sonofabitch!” Lila explodes. Over her shoulder, Ruth sees little ’Becca’s eyes widen. Young Daniel grins in admiration.

“So now there’s at least two cooks heating up this kitchen, and, by the looks of things, three’s going to make it a crowd.” Ruth taps the paper on the desk.

The flyer from the Committee to Re-Elect Sheriff K. A. DeLuth invites one and all to “hear, live and in person, patriot Billy Hathaway, Founder and President of All White is All Right, this Saturday, 2:00 P.M. at the County Fairgrounds.”

At the bottom of the page, the verse in script reads:

“The Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.” Deuteronomy 7:6

“Great! So, in addition to the crazies, Kyle thinks he’s got God on his side, too,” Lila sneers.

Nine-fifty one.
Ruth flicks her notebook closed with a snap, returns her desk pen to its holder, and considers, not for the first time, how the spiral of darks and lights in the wood grain reminds her of the swirl of truths, both secret and revealed, that surround every story. How patterns of past injuries often shape present conflicts.
Way more here than meets the eye,
she reasons. But, to see the grain, reveal the pattern, one has to make the first, all-important cross-cut.

In five minutes flat, she tells Lila and Dare what she plans to do, calls her husband, Hugh, out of the back—“He’s the real brains behind this place,” she explains—to snap a Dare family photo, and is out the door and on her way to the Town Council’s controversial vote on the highway bypass. Which is, as she predicted, a real corker.