Mystery Walk Read online

  She sat very straight and motionless; there were tears in her eyes, and she regarded him for a long time before she spoke, making him feel like a bug that had just crawled from beneath a rock. She said softly, “I hear you.”

  “You better!” He released her chin, then he was out of the car and hurrying into the house, not daring to look over his shoulder at either of them because anger and guilt and fear were chewing him up inside like a dull plow on wet earth. He had to clench his hands around the Good Book, had to find something that would soothe the tortured ache in his soul.

  When Ramona and Billy came in, John was already sitting before the hearth with the Bible on his lap. He was reading silently, his brow furrowed with concentration, but his lips were moving. Ramona squeezed her son’s shoulder in reassurance and also as a warning to walk quietly, then she went quietly to the kitchen to finish the vegetable pie—made of leftovers from the last few meals—she was baking for their supper. Billy added another hickory log to the fire and positioned it with the poker. He could still feel the storm in the air, but most of it had already struck and he hoped things would be all right now; he wanted to find out from his father exactly what had happened to Will and the Bookers, and why those men were tearing up the front porch, but he knew it was something very bad and it might cause another fight between his momma and daddy. He replaced the poker, glanced at his father for approval—John was reading in the Book of Daniel and didn’t look up—and then went back to the little secondhand desk next to his cot to start on his spelling homework.

  The house was quiet but for the soft crackling of the flames and the sounds of Ramona working in the kitchen. Billy began on the words he was supposed to learn, but he kept thinking about something his daddy had said in the can death and evil…death and evil…haven’t you had a gutful of death and evil yet? He chewed on the pencil’s eraser and wondered what Daddy had meant by that: did death and evil go together all the time, like the Massey brothers with the same haircuts and same clothes? Or were they kind of the same but somehow different, like if one of the Massey brothers was claimed by Satan and went around doing Satan’s works, and the other brother turned toward the Lord. He found himself looking in through the short hallway to where his daddy sat reading the Bible, and he hoped that someday he’d understand all these things, just like grown-ups did. He turned back to his homework and forced himself to concentrate, though the image of that dark, silent house and the men tearing up the front porch stayed in his mind.

  John admired Daniel’s strength. He liked to think that he and Daniel would have gotten along just fine. Sometimes John felt as if the whole of life were a lions’ den, ravenous beasts snapping and roaring on all sides and the Devil himself laughing fit to bust. At least, he thought, that’s how it had turned out for him. He leaned forward and read Daniel’s speech of deliverance to King Darius: “My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not hurt me, because I was found blameless before him…”

  …blameless before him…

  John reread it and then closed the Good Book. Blameless. There was nothing he could’ve done about Julie Ann, or Katy, or Will, or Dave Booker. He felt that in his choice of this scripture he was being told everything was all right, he could let the worry melt away from his mind and put it in the past where it belonged.

  He stared into the crackling flames. When he’d married Ramona—and God only knew why he had, except that he’d thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, and was all of twenty, not knowing anything about love or duty or responsibility—he’d stepped into the lions’ den without knowing it, and it seemed to him that he had to guard himself every day to keep from being swallowed whole down the Devil’s throat. He had prayed over and over again that the boy wasn’t touched by her darkness too. If that ever happened, then… John was startled, because he’d had the mental image of himself in Dave Booker’s place, bursting their heads open with a Louisville Slugger and then putting a shotgun underneath his chin. Lord God, he thought, and shunted that awful image away.

  Putting the Bible aside, he rose from the chair and went into the bedroom. His heart was beating harder; he was thinking of Reverend Horton, creeping over the tracks to Dusktown. He didn’t want to join in what had to be done, but he knew the others expected him to. He opened the closet and took out a cardboard box tied with twine. John cut the twine with his penknife, took the top off the box, and laid his Klan robes across the bed. They were dusty and wrinkled, made of heavy yellowing cotton; he clenched the material in one fist and felt the power of justice in it.

  And in the kitchen, kneading dough between her brown hands, Ramona heard the distant call of a bluejay and knew that the cold weather had broken.

  5

  AT THE WHEEL OF his racketing old Ford, Reverend Jim Horton rubbed his eyes wearily and tried to focus on the highway ahead. It had been a long and terrible week; tomorrow was Sunday, and he had yet to go over his material for the sermon, which he’d titled “Why Does God Let It Happen?” Tonight he would stay up late again at his desk, and his wife Carol would come in to rub the kinks out of his shoulders and neck before it was time for bed. He felt he’d been a stranger to her lately, but he’d told her a long time ago that being the wife of a country preacher was definitely not going to be a bed of roses.

  The Ford’s headlights cut white holes in the darkness. The heater chirred ineffectively, though it wasn’t nearly as cold out now as it had been a few days before. He remembered how the sunlight and shadows had lain across the Hawthorne cemetery as the bodies of Dave Booker, Julie Ann, and Katy were lowered into the hard red-clay earth. The coffins had been closed, of course, during the memorial service at the Fayette funeral home, and Julie Ann’s mother, Mrs. Mimms, had been almost overcome with grief. Tonight Horton had driven the fifteen miles to Mrs. Mimms’s house to sit with her awhile, because she lived alone and was getting on in age, and it was obvious that this tragedy had almost destroyed her. He’d offered to have someone bring her in for church in the morning, and as he’d left she’d clutched his hand and cried like a baby.

  Sheriff Bromley, Horton knew, was still searching for Will’s corpse. Just yesterday the sheriff had poked a stick in the ground and brought up the odor of decaying meat; but when the shovels had finished it was Boo, the Bookers’ dog, that lay moldering in the earth. Bromley had told him in private that most probably Will would never be found, that there were too many places Dave might have buried the body. Perhaps it was for the best, Horton thought, because Mrs. Mimms couldn’t stand any more strain, and for that matter neither could Hawthorne itself.

  He was aware that he walked a dangerous line. Things were changing in the world, due to people like Dr. King, but it wasn’t fast enough to help the people of Dusktown. These last few weeks he felt he’d made a little progress: he’d been helping the Dusktown elders rebuild their burned-out box of a church, and he was on a committee to plan a potluck supper, raising money for purchase of lumber from the sawmill. There was still hard work to be done.

  Horton was jarred out of his thoughts when a pair of headlights stabbed into his eyes. He instinctively swerved before he realized the headlights had reflected out of his rearview mirror. A red Chevy roared past him as though he were sitting still, and he had the fleeting impression of a pale face glaring at him before the car whipped around a curve up ahead. He could hear the Chevy’s horn honking—once, twice, three times—and he thought, Wild kids on a Saturday night. He would be in Hawthorne in just a minute; he hoped Carol would have coffee ready for him. When he took the curve the Chevy had disappeared around, Horton thought he saw something red flicker on the road before him. A strange thought flashed through his mind: Ramona Creekmore, at the Bookers’ funeral, stepping forward from the assembly of people and standing right at the edge of Julie Ann’s grave. Her hand had come up and out; dozens of red petals, picked from wild flowers that must’ve grown in some secret, protected grove of the forest, had floated down into the ground. Hort
on knew that the woman wasn’t well liked, though in the eight months he’d been Hawthorne’s minister he hadn’t been able to find out exactly why. She never came to church, and he’d only seen her a few times in town, but she’d always seemed pleasant and certainly not a person to fear…

  Something moved on the road ahead, just out of range of his headlights. He thought of red petals floating, floating, floating down, and then…

  The headlights picked out two large bales of hay that had been dragged into his path. He knew with a surge of fear that he couldn’t stop the car at this distance, he was going to hit; and then he’d swerved the car to the right, the tires squealing, and slammed into one of the bales with a jolt that cracked his teeth together and struck his shoulder a bruising blow into the steering wheel. The Ford, out of control, left the highway and plowed into deep weeds. The car crashed into a three-foot-deep ditch and hung at an angle, its tires digging into the thawed mud. The engine rattled, and came to a dead stop.

  Dazed, Horton touched his lower lip with a trembling hand; when he looked at his fingers he saw bright red petals blooming, and he numbly realized he’d bitten into his tongue. Fireflies were bobbing in the dark around the wrecked car, circling closer.

  The driver’s door opened. Startled, the minister looked up into the blinding glow of flashlights; behind them were white figures with black, ragged-rimmed eyes. Someone shouted, “Get that shit outta the road! Hurry it up!” He remembered the hay bales now, and swallowed blood. His right eye was swelling, and he was getting one whopper of a headache. A voice beside him said, “He’s all bloody!” And another, muffled by a mask, answered, “Ain’t nothin’! You ready to heave him out? Horton, you stay real quiet now, you hear? We don’t want to have to get rough.”

  He was pulled out of the Ford by the hooded white figures, a blindfold of coarse burlap slipped around his eyes and knotted behind his head.

  The Klansmen hauled him up into the bed of a pickup truck and covered him with gunnysacks. The engine started, and the truck headed for a backwoods road. Horton was held down by several men, and he imagined what they would probably do to him, but he was too weary to try to escape. He kept spitting blood until someone shook him and hissed, “Stop that, you damn nigger-lover!”

  “You don’t understand,” he said with his mangled, bloody mouth. “Let me…”

  Someone grabbed his hair. From the distance, perhaps at the end of the road, Horton heard a high-pitched Rebel yell. “You think we don’t know?” a voice rasped into his ear. Horton could almost make out whose voice it was: Lee Sayre’s? Ralph Leighton’s? “The niggers are tryin’ to take over the country, and it’s sorry white trash like you that’s helpin’ ’em! You get ’em in your schools and your cafés and your churches, and they drag you down to where they are! And by God as long as I’ve got breath in my body and a pistol at my side no damned nigger is gonna take what belongs to me!”

  “You don’t…” the minister began, but he knew it was no use. The truck slowed, jarring over a last crater in the road, and stopped.

  “We got him!” someone yelled. “Easy as pie!”

  “Tie his hands,” a harsh voice commanded.

  6

  CAROL HORTON KNEW HER husband had probably stayed longer than he’d planned at Mrs. Mimms’s house, and might have stopped somewhere else between here and there as well. But now, at twenty minutes before midnight, she was very worried. There might’ve been car trouble, a flat tire or something. Jim had been tired and disturbed when he’d left home, and Carol had been concerned for a long while that he was just trying to shoulder too much.

  She looked up from the book she was reading on antebellum history and stared at the telephone. Mrs. Mimms would be asleep by now. Perhaps she should call Sheriff Bromley? No, no; if the sheriff had heard anything he would’ve called…

  There was a quick rapping at the front door. Carol leaped up from her chair and hurried to answer it, trying to get herself composed. If it was Sheriff Bromley standing out there, bringing the news of an accident on the highway, she didn’t think she could take it. Just before she opened the door she heard a truck roar away, and a chorus of male laughter. She unbolted the door, her heart pounding.

  Ina way, she was relieved to find that no one was there. It was a joke, she thought; somebody was trying to scare her. But then her breath froze in her lungs, because she saw the mottled black-and-white bundle of rags out under the pines, at the edge of the light cast from the front-porch bulb. A few bits of white fluttered away on the chilly breeze.

  Feathers, she thought suddenly, and almost laughed. Now who would dump a bundle of feathers into our front yard? She stepped off the porch, her gown windblown around her, and approached the mass; when she was five paces away she stopped, her legs gone rubbery, and stared. A crudely hand-lettered sign hung around the thing’s neck: NIGGER-LOVER (THIS IS WHAT THEY GET).

  Carol did not scream when the eyes opened, wide and white like the eyes of a painted minstrel. She did not scream when the awful swollen face lifted toward her, shining in the light and oozing fresh tar into the grass; nor when the arm came slowly out, gripping at the empty air with a black-smeared hand.

  The scream burst free, ravaging her throat, when the thing’s tar-crusted mouth opened and whispered her name.

  Feathers danced on the breeze. Hawthorne lay nestled in the valley like a sleeping child, only occasionally disturbed by nightmares. Wind moved like a living thing through the rooms of the dark Booker house, where brown blood stained the floors and walls, and in the profound silence there might have been a footstep and a soft, yearning sob.

  TWO

  The Coal Pile

  7

  “THERE SHE IS, BILLY!”

  “Why don’t ya go catch her, Billy?”

  “Billy’s got a girlfriend, Billy’s got a girlfriend…”

  The singing of that dreaded song was more than he could bear. He took after his three tormentors—Johnny Parker, Ricky Sales, and Butch Bryant—swinging his schoolbooks at the end of a rubber strap like a makeshift knight’s mace. The boys scattered in three directions, jeering and thumbing their noses at him while he stood sputtering like a live wire, atop the pitcher’s mound at the center of Kyle Field, spring’s dust rolling around his sneakers.

  They couldn’t fathom why Billy had started noticing Melissa Pettus. Maybe she did have long pretty blond hair done up with ribbons, but a bird-dog pup was pretty too and you didn’t make a fuss about one of those, did you? So today, when they’d all been walking home across Kyle Field beneath a blue late-April sky and they’d seen Melissa walking up ahead through the green weeds, the only thing to do was to have some fun at Billy’s expense. They hadn’t expected such a violent reaction, but it gratified them, especially since they were aware Melissa had stopped and was watching.

  Ricky Sales crowed, “Loverboy, loverboy, Billy’s a loverb—” He had to dodge fast, because Billy was suddenly coming at him like a steam engine, swinging his schoolbooks.

  Suddenly the strap broke with a moaning sound and books were flying through the air as if fired from a slingshot. They spread open like hard kites and sailed into the dustclouds.

  “Oh…damn!” Billy said, instantly ashamed that he’d cussed. The other boys howled with laughter, but all the anger had seeped out of him; if there was anything Mrs. Cullens hated, Billy knew, it was a dirty arithmetic book, and he was certain some of the pages had been torn too. The boys danced around him for another moment, careful not to get too close, but they saw he didn’t care anymore and so they started running away across the field. Ricky looked back and shouted, “See ya later, Billy! Okay?”

  He waved halfheartedly, distressed about the battered books, and then began picking them up. He turned to pick up his arithmetic book, and Melissa Pettus, wearing a dress as green as the new grass of April, held it out to him. There were flecks of yellow pollen on her rosy cheeks; her hair shone in the sunshine like waves of spun gold, and she was smiling shyly.

&
nbsp; “Thanks,” Billy said, and took it from her. What do you say to girls? he asked himself, as he dusted the books off on the front of his shirt. Then he started walking for home again, aware that Melissa was walking a few feet to his left. She made him nervous down in the bottom of his stomach.

  “I saw your books fall,” Melissa said after another moment.

  “Yeah. They’re okay, though. Just dusty.”

  “I made a hundred on the spellin’ test today.”

  “Oh.” He’d only made an eighty-five. “I missed a couple of hard words.”

  Yellow butterflies swooped through the grass at their approach. The noise from the sawmill sounded like a big cricket humming up in the woods, interrupted by the chugging of conveyor belts hauling cut lumber. Before them, heatwaves shimmered across the field.

  What do you say to a girl? he asked himself again, feeling panic-stricken. “Do you like the Lone Ranger?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Last Saturday night we went to the movie in Fayette and know what we saw? The Lone Ranger and the Canyon of Gold, but I fell asleep before it was over. There was too much talkin’. He rides on a horse named Silver and he shoots silver bullets.”

  “Why?”

  He glanced at her, startled by the question. “’Cause silver bullets kill the bad guys faster,” he explained. “There were Indians in the movie too, they were ’Patchee Indians. I’ve got some Indian in me, did you know that? I’m part Choctaw, my momma says; they were the forest tribe that lived around here a long time ago. They hunted and fished and lived in huts.”