A Fine Dark Line

10

WE CAME TO a red-brick street where the oaks grew thick and close on either side. When the wind blew the limbs of one tree it tapped against its cousin across the street.

As we walked, on our right, we passed a fenced-in park and a statue of Robert E. Lee on which jet-black crows nested and relieved themselves, splattering it with white goo. I noted that one pile of it had fallen into and hardened over Robert E. Lee’s right eye.

Behind the park was a cemetery containing the bodies of Civil War veterans. On some of the graves were little weather-faded Dixie flags and vases out of which poked the blackened and wilting stems of deceased flowers; on other graves were fresher blooms, among them roses bright as blood.

We hiked on until the street narrowed and there were bricks poking up willy-nilly where the weather had worked them loose and sometimes cracked them. Blades of grass had crept between many of the bricks, fallen over, and turned yellow.

Abruptly, the oaks changed. I realized for the first time the trees on Oak Street, as it was called, those closer into town, were pruned and preened and cared for. But as one went farther down Oak Street, into the Section, the oaks were twisted and some were diseased with blackened knots. All were as neglected as the old brick street.

It was the same tone for the colored graveyard that lay on the left side of the street behind the oaks, near where Dewmont Creek ran. There you could see stones leaning left and right. Many had fallen and some were busted. The grass was high and there were sprigs of trees growing, escaped from some stray acorn cast there by wind or a careless squirrel.

“It don’t look as good as that cracker graveyard, do it?”

“Sir?”

“The colored field. Where the colored are buried, boy. It don’t look as neat as that cracker yard where all them Dixie ducks is buried, does it?”

“No, sir.”

“We don’t keep it up. You know why?”

“No, sir.”

“ ’Cause come Halloween, white boys come in and push the stones over and break ’em. We better off not doin’ nothin’. Fixin’ a stone, cuttin’ down that grass, just attracts them fools. Ain’t nothin’ funnier or braver to them boys than pushin’ over some colored’s stone, or throwin’ it in the creek, breakin’ it up. They’re cowards too, boy. Tell you why. They know ain’t no colored gonna do anything to them out in the open, ’cause then you got the Kluxers, or some of their types. That ain’t brave, now is it?”

“No, sir. I guess not.”

“It ain’t. That’s what I’m tellin’ you. Listen to me. I’m learnin’ you somethin’ here.”

Along the street white faces began to disappear, replaced by colored faces. The cars at the curbs and up next to houses were for the most part older, the houses along the way less nice, some of them smaller than our living room back at the drive-in. They peeled paint, flapped porch boards, begged for shingles and window glass, leaned as if in desperate need of rest. There were outhouses out back of homes, no electric lines leading into most.

Sitting on porch steps, or porches, some settled in stuffed chairs from which the insides exploded in puffs of cotton like drooping nuclear clouds, were men, young and old. They wore their worn-out clothes with slouch hats like uniforms. Their faces looked as if they had survived a beating and expected another.

As we walked by one of the men called out.

“Did he follow you home, Buster?”

“He did,” Buster said.

“You gonna keep ’im?”

“Ain’t got no wife says I can’t.”

“I hear them little white boys is hard to train.”

“Naw,” Buster said. “Not if you whip ’em good with a sound piece of fishin’ cane and put down newspapers.”

“Whatcha gonna feed that boy?”

“Got it here in this cardboard box. Guts from the slaughterhouse. A hog’s head.”

“Hell, I want that hog’s head,” said one of the men. “Why don’t you kill him, Buster, let me have that bicycle?”

“Your fat ass would flatten that bicycle,” Buster said.

Laughter rose up, drifted away as we moved on.

I was, to put it mildly, becoming a bit nervous. What was I doing in the Section anyway? Had I lost my mind?

———

WE TOOK A SIDE STREET, passed some kids playing. One of them was a small boy with a snotty nose that had collected dust and made dirt roads from his nostrils to his lips. As we passed, he looked at us as if he might ask us for identification.

Alongside the railroad track we came to a small house the sick green color of our drive-in fence.

I pointed this out to Buster. He said, “It ought to look the same color. I took me some of the paint. It ain’t pretty, but it keeps it from peelin’ and it looks better than gray.”

There was a large stone step that led up to the porch. The house was simple but looked clean and cared for. The screen in front of the door was a new one and the windows were clean with shutters drawn back. There was a metal lawn chair on the porch. It too was painted the same ugly green.

Behind the house, above all this, between railway and structure, rose an old billboard that had probably not been changed since World War II. It was a happy white woman holding a Coke, a smile as bright and wide as an idiot’s hopes.

At the corner of her smile was a rip. The wind and rain had caught the rip, torn it back a piece. Crows gathered atop the billboard, and just above the woman’s head they had done what they had done to Robert E. Lee.

The crows looked down on us as if we might be something to eat. I leaned my bicycle against the porch. Buster took out a key, pulled back the screen, unlocked the door.

“Welcome to nigger heaven,” he said.

Inside, the place was dark and smelled like stale paper. As Buster turned on the one weak overhead light, it became evident the smell was due to much of the walls being covered in shelves filled with books and magazines.

There was a closet and a little table near the wall that held a hot plate, dishes, and eating utensils. In the middle of the room was a large plank table with chairs. Against one wall, next to a bookshelf, was a narrow bed. Off center of the room was a heating stove made from an oil drum. A crooked pipe ran from it, exited through the ceiling. There was a pile of split wood lying beside it, ready for winter.

I said, “You read all these books?”

“What kind of question is that, boy? ’Course. Do you read?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You got this many books?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, you get you a collection of books. Read them, or at least try to read them. I’d offer you some cake but I don’t have any.”

“That’s all right.”

“I got coffee.”

“I don’t drink coffee much.”

“Me neither. Except every morning, during the day, and in the afternoon. I think I got a warm RC though, you want it.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Buster put the box on the plank table, gave me the RC, started coffee. He sat at the table, removed a number of folded newspapers and clippings from the box.

“Sit down, boy. Grab a chair.”

I did, said, “What is this?”

“I told you Jukes was the janitor at the newspaper. Also the janitor at the police station and the high school. Just does the police station on the weekends. At the high school, he don’t have to do anything in the summer. When school starts up, he’s got a crew works for him. Old Jukes does all right.”

“How do these clippings help us?”

“You aren’t thinkin’, boy . . . And quit lookin’ out that back window. That girl on the billboard there, you ain’t gonna see no titties fall out or nothin’. She’s just paper.”

I blushed. Buster said, “Now don’t get upset or mad. I’m just kiddin’ with you. A man’s got to learn to joke and he’s got to learn to laugh at his own self and know it’s okay to think about titties. You don’t do that, you ain’t gonna be worth the powder it would take to blow your ass up. Thinkin’ on titties too much is preoccupation, not thinkin’ on them is sign of some kind of anemia. You listenin’?”

“Yes, sir.”

“One of the things you better learn to laugh at is the women you can’t have, ’cause they’re gonna be plenty. Now, think. Why would we want clippin’s that go back all these years?”

“I guess to read about the murder.”

“All right. Now you’re startin’ to fan the fire. But we got clippin’s here before that murder, and after it. Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Things like this, sometimes they just happen. Man does the murder don’t even know why he does it. When I was in Oklahoma, time I was tellin’ you about, there was an Indian went off one morning and beat his wife to death with a stick of stove wood and set fire to the house, burned up their baby girl in her crib. He went out then and shot their dog and shot himself in the head. He wasn’t as good a shot when it come to shootin’ himself. He lived, but without his jaw. Asked why he done it. He didn’t know. Said they hadn’t been arguin’, and in fact, she was quite lovin’, and he really loved the baby, and the dog was second to none. But one mornin’ he got up and seen his wife bent over the stove, tryin’ to make his breakfast, and it just come on him. He took the stove wood and went to work. Said it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Did they shoot him in the heart too?”

“Didn’t execute him. Was considered made mad by the gods, or some kind of Indian evil. He was set free. Besides, he had to live with that face of his, and the bullet had punched a hole in his head and hit his brain and he wasn’t good for nothin’ after that. Limped, drank liquor, shit on himself when he wasn’t falling down. Maybe he’d have been better with a shot through the heart.

“Just because he didn’t have no pattern, rhyme, or reason, don’t mean most of this murderin’ business don’t. It usually has. Money. Love. Or more often than not, just some kind of pride gone wild. Pride makes you want money, or lack of pride does, and it makes you want love and not want to take insults. Pride is at the bottom of everything, boy, except stone crazy.”

“Does the murder of Margret and Jewel have a pattern?”

“Can’t rightly say yet, but I figure it did. What we got to figure is are these two murders linked up, or did they happen separate-like. You know, a coincidence.

“If they’re tied together, there was some reason behind it. You can figure that, you can kind of work backwards, or forwards, dependin’ on the situation. You followin’ me, boy?”

“Sort of . . . Well, not completely.”

“You see, they got what they call a morgue at the newspaper, but not for dead folks. For dead papers. Things happened long ago. These start before the murder, and after the murder. This is just the first box. Juke’s gonna get me others. But this one, it’ll take some time to look through.”

“What are we lookin’ for?”

“There’s some things we know we’re lookin’ for, and some things we don’t know about yet.”

“How will we know the things we don’t know?”

“That depends on us.”

“What do we know we’re looking for?”

“We know we’re lookin’ for any mention of the Stilwind family and this Wood family that Margret belonged to. Don’t care if it’s just somethin’ about them goin’ some place, we want to study it.”

“Goin’ some place?”

“Stilwinds. They have money, boy. They did travelin’. Society section might have somethin’ on that.”

“Why do we care where they went?”

“Maybe we don’t. But we’re gonna look at it. Gonna look at anything has to do with them. We’re gonna look for any kind of crime resembles the crimes we’re interested in, before or after. Railway killin’s, people burned up in fires, even if it’s an accident. Then, we got maybe some police files to look at.”

“Really?”

“I’m gonna trust you, Stanley. You got to be quiet about that. And you don’t want to mention the papers either, hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Find out I got Jukes takin’ out old police files, well, he’ll not only lose his job, he got a good chance of bein’ hurt. Or worse. I’m askin’ him a big thing just to figure on some dead white folks some years back just so you and me got somethin’ to do.”

“Why is Jukes doing it?”

“ ’Cause I once helped him out. In a big way.”

“What kind of way?”

“That’s between me and him.”

“Why are you doing it?”

“I’m bored. I wanted to keep bein’ a lawman, Stan. But after them old days, wasn’t no place for me as a colored to do nothin’ like that. I didn’t want to move up North where I might do it, ’cause it’s cold up there. Besides, they ain’t no better than here. Just say they are.”

“When do we get the police files?”

“When Jukes can nab ’em. They’re old enough, I don’t think they’re gonna be missed. Least not right away. We’ll put them back when we’re finished.”

“What if we do find out who did it?”

“Cross that bridge when we get to it.”

———

THERE WERE ALL MANNER of things about the Stilwinds in the papers. There were buildings they bought, weddings they attended, travels abroad, an announcement the older daughter had moved away to England, general society stuff, the charities they gave to.

But nothing jumped out at me and said murder.

Buster read carefully and wrote from time to time on a yellow pad with a fat pencil. I said, “You finding anything?”

“Don’t know. All has to come together like a puzzle. You get a piece here. You get one there. You find some things look like pieces and almost fit, but don’t, so you toss ’em. But you don’t toss ’em far. Sometimes you have to go back and get them. Most of the time, you solve business just by doin’ business. You chip here, you chip there. You think about it. You want to make a statue, you start with a block of stone. You get through chippin’ on it, you’ve cut away a lot of stone to make that statue.”

“But we’re not making a statue.”

“Stan, it’s what they call a comparison. It ain’t supposed to mean just how it is. It’s a metaphor.”

“The way you talk, kind of words you use, changes a lot, Buster.”

“It do, don’t it?” He grinned at me. “Thing is, when it starts to come together, it’s like tumblers in a safe. You know. Click, click, click. Now, tuck your head into them papers, boy, think about what you’re reading.”

———

A COUPLE HOURS LATER, Buster said, “I’m gonna take me a little break, take some of my medicine. Might be a good idea if you run along home.”

Buster went to the bookshelves, pulled back some paperback books, removed a small, flat bottle of liquor from behind them. “Keeps my heart pumpin’.”

“Is it okay to go back by myself?”

“You scared colored gonna get you?”

“A little.”

“At least you’re honest. They won’t bother you none. Just wave at them men on the porch. Besides, they’re probably havin’ their medicine ’bout now. Ain’t much else for them to do. All the doctorin’ jobs is filled up.”

I got up to leave.

He said, “Take this home and read it. It’ll get you thinkin’ way you need to be thinkin’.”

He handed me a paperback book with the title: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

“Holmes, he had the mind for it, boy. He thought around corners and under rugs.”

“How’s that?”

“Read it. You’ll figure what I mean.”

I put the book in my back pocket, got my bicycle off the porch. The ride was rough along the busted brick streets. I came to the porch where the men had been, but they were gone.

I rode on until the trees spruced up and the bricks lay flat, on past the wrecked colored graveyard, on past the kept white graveyard, on into Dewmont, and from there I rode home.