Alex Cross's Trial

Chapter 70

“MY NAME IS HENRY.”

I could barely hear.

“Can you hear me? I said my name’s Henry.”

I could barely see.

I could, however, tell that the person speaking to me was a woman. An ancient, bent-over colored woman.

“Henry. My name is Henry,” she said. “You in there, Mist’ Corbett?”

Most of her teeth were missing, producing a kind of whistly lisp as she leaned closer and spoke to me.

“Come on now, eat this,” she said. She held out a spoonful of something. I opened my mouth. She stuck it in. God, it was delicious: black-eyed peas cooked to death, mashed to a paste.

While moving the food around my sore, battered mouth, my tongue discovered the gaping hole on the left side where two teeth had been.

“Where am I?” I croaked.

“Abraham house,” Henry said. She poised another spoonful in front of my mouth.

I will never forget the taste of those peas. They remain to this day the single most wonderful food I have ever encountered.

I heard a familiar voice: “Now would you look at Mr. Corbett, settin’ up and eatin’ baby food all by himself.” Moody came around from the head of the narrow cot where I lay, at the center of their parlor, in exactly the spot where Hiram’s coffin had been.

Perhaps I was still in the midst of my delirium, but I thought she looked happy that I was alive and awake.

“This is Aunt Henry who been looking after you,” she said.

“Henry?” I asked.

“Don’t you be calling me Henrietta,” she said.

Moody sat on the little footstool beside my bed. “You been through a pretty rough time, Mr. Corbett,” she said. “When they cut you down, we just knew you was dead. But Papaw felt a pulse on your arm. So he run and got Aunt Henry. She’s the one with the healing touch.”

“Don’t make him talk now, child,” Aunt Henry said. “He still wore out.” Every time I opened my mouth she stuck in more of the black-eyed-pea mush that was bringing me back to life, a spoonful at a time.

“She been pouring soup in you with a funnel,” Moody said. “She done washed you and powdered you, shaved your face. When your fever went up, she sent me to the icehouse for ice to put in your bed. When the cut places started to scab, she put salt water on ’em so they wouldn’t scar.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Eight days since they cut you down,” she said.

I felt the dull pounding ache in both knees. I remembered how those men had kicked my feet out from under me, then gone after my knees with the toes of their boots.

“Did they break my knees?”

Aunt Henry frowned. “Near ’bout,” she said. “But you got you some hard knees. All battered up and cut up. But ain’t broke.”

“That’s good.” I managed a weak smile.

“It is good,” Aunt Henry said. “Soon as you finish this here peas, you gonna have one more little nap, and then we gonna see if we can get you walkin’.”

Moody said, “You’d best get him up running, Aunt Henry.”

I shifted onto my side. “What do you mean?”

“The ones that hanged you gonna find you,” Moody said. “Then they gonna hang you again.”

Chapter 71

AUNT HENRY WAS RIGHT. My knees weren’t broken. But they certainly were not happy when called upon to do their job.

Armed with wobbly wooden crutches and a short glass of whiskey, I went for a late-afternoon stroll between Moody and Abraham. My body ached in a hundred different places, all tied together by the pain in my knees. When I bent my leg to take a step, the knee shot a white-hot arrow of pain to my hip. My neck was still raw from the rope, and the mangled fingers of my right hand were twisted and so blackish blue they might yet go gangrenous and have to come off. The sweat rolled down my back, into the swollen whip welts, stinging like fire ants.

But I kept on, hobbling down the muddy board walkway. I knew I was damned lucky to have survived, with no broken bones. My pain was nothing. It would be gone in a few days, or weeks at the worst. I could deal with that.

But inside, I felt another, more disturbing pain. I had been beaten and left for dead. I had disappeared from the world, and hardly anyone had come looking for me. I mattered to virtually no one. Meg. Elizabeth. My father. My daughters. Jacob, my childhood best friend. The entire town of Eudora. I had mostly been forgotten. A few people from town had come, good, kind folks. L. J. Stringer had actually visited a few times. But my own father hadn’t come once.

“Abraham,” I said. “Could I ask a favor?”

“Ask it,” he said.

“Can you stop by Maybelle’s and see if she’s got any letters for me?”

He shook his head. “I went by this morning. Nothing there.” Then he added, “Nothing for you from the White House, either.”

I kept on, but the pressure of the crutches under my arms was getting to be too much to bear. Everything from my neck down was one big aching mass of bruises.

“Does Maybelle know what happened to me?” I asked.

“Mr. Corbett, everybody in Eudora knows what happened to you. I’ll tell you something I believe. There’s good and bad in Eudora Quarters, good and bad in the town of Eudora – probably in equal numbers. Problem is, there’s cowards in both places. That’s why the bullies can have their way, Mr. Corbett.”

“Abraham,” I said with a sigh. “For God’s sake. We’ve been through a good bit together. Would you please call me Ben?”

He patted my shoulder. “All right, Ben.”

“Thank you.”

“You welcome.” He smiled. “But now you got to call me Mr. Cross.” Abraham laughed out loud at that.

As I picked my way past the door of Gumbo Joe’s, two old ladies looked up and waved at me. “I pray for you, sir,” one of them said to me.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

We went on a few more yards. “The colored folks appreciate what you was trying to do, Mist’ Ben,” he said. “We know your heart is not the same as some the rest.”

Moody spoke up. “Yeah, and the white folks know it too. That’s why they goin’ to kill him.”

Chapter 72

“YOU JUST PLAIN don’t need me no more.” Aunt Henry said it straight out as she dabbed at the wounds on my back with one of her secret potions.

“Fact is, Mist’ Corbett, you hardly even got any scabs left on you,” she said. “These is all healed up real good.”

I twisted around on my chair to pull on my shirt, wincing from the pain.

“Now don’t you be foolin’ with me,” Aunt Henry said. “You walkin’ good with no crutch.”

I knew she was right. Aside from the occasional shock of pain in my neck, or in my knees, I was feeling almost human again. I had no further need for Aunt Henry’s fussing and babying, which I had come to enjoy.

And it was time for me to go back to Eudora.

Frankly, I felt a bit reluctant to leave. There was something good about life as it happened in this modest little house. Certainly, the opportunity to see Moody every day was something I had enjoyed. But as much as that, I had enjoyed getting to know Abraham. With everything going against him – the death of his grandson, the increasing fear in the colored community, the lifetime of bigotry he had endured – Abraham was a man at peace with himself.

Just the night before, on a warm rainy evening when the mosquitoes were at their droning worst, we sat on a bench underneath the overhang of the porch.

We were working our way through a basket of hot corn muffins Moody had just brought out of the oven. I smiled up at her. She ignored me and turned back inside.

“Sometimes a man can sense something,” Abraham said. “Something small that can blossom up into trouble.”

“You mean, because we haven’t heard from Roosevelt?” I asked. “I don’t understand that at all. I almost got hanged for him.”

“This got nothing to do with the president,” he said, gazing off into the darkness. “I’m talking about another kind of business. Right here in my house.”

I swallowed the rest of the muffin and wiped my mouth, inelegantly, on the back of my hand. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had been hoping he wouldn’t notice.

“Nothing has happened, Abraham,” I said softly. “Nothing is going to happen.”

He didn’t look at me.

“I love that girl just about as much as I ever loved anybody,” he said. “Including her mama. And including even my dear departed wife. As for you – well, I done took you into my house, hadn’t I? That ought to show you, I hold you in high regard. You a fine man, Ben, but this just can’t be. It can’t be. Moody… and you? That is impossible.”

“I understand that, Abraham. I don’t think you ought to worry. Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but Moody hasn’t spoken a kind word to me since the day we met.”

He put his hand on my shoulder.

“And maybe you hadn’t noticed,” he said, “but that’s exactly how you can tell when a woman is in love with you.”

Chapter 73

FROM THE DAY after my hanging, someone was always awake and on guard at Abraham Cross’s house. During the day and the evening, Abraham and Moody took turns keeping watch from the front-porch rocker. Since I was the cause of all this, I took the dead man’s shift, from midnight till dawn.

Some nights I heard Abraham stirring, and then he would come out to sit with me for an hour or two.

One night, along about four a.m., I thought I heard his soft tread on the floorboards.

I looked up. It was Moody standing there.

“Mind a little company?” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

She sat down on the bench beside the rocker. A foot or two away from me – a safe distance.

We sat in our usual silence for a while. Finally I broke it. “I’ve been busting to ask you a question, Moody.”

“Wouldn’t want you to bust,” she said. “What is it?”

“Is that the only dress you own?”

She burst out laughing, one of the few times I’d made her laugh.

It was the same white jumper she’d worn the day I met her and every day since. Somehow it stayed spotless, although she never seemed to take it off.

“Well, if you really want to know, I got three of these dresses,” she said. “All three just alike. Of all the questions you could have asked me, that’s the one you picked?” she said. “You are one peculiar man, Mr. Corbett.”

“I sure wish you would call me Ben. Even your grandfather calls me Ben now.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t do everything he does,” she said. “I’ll just keep on calling you Mr. Corbett.”

At first I thought it was moonlight casting that delicate rim of light around her face, lighting up her dark eyes. Then I realized that it was dawn breaking, the first streak of gray in the sky.

“I’ll be moving back to Maybelle’s tomorrow,” I said. “It’s time.”

Moody didn’t reply.

“It’ll be better for Abraham once I’m out of here,” I said. “And for you.”

No answer.

I said, “The only reason those bastards come around is because I’m here.”

Nothing. She stared out at the street.

“Thanks to y’all, I’m much better now. I’m feeling fine. I’ve got some decisions to make.”

Her silence and stubbornness just went on and on, and I gave up trying to pierce it. I sat back and watched the gray light filling in all the blank dark spaces.

I think we sat another ten whole minutes without a word. The sun came up and cast its first shadows of the day.

At last Moody said, “You know I ain’t never gonna sleep with you.”

I considered that for a moment.

“I know,” I said. “Is it because I’m white?”

“No,” she said. “Because I’m black.”

Chapter 74

“I AM JUST AS SORRY AS I can be, Mr. Corbett, but we simply have no rooms available at this time,” Maybelle said to me. “We are full up.”

The dilapidated rooming house seemed strangely deserted for a place that was completely occupied.

“But Abraham came by and paid you while I was incapacitated,” I said.

“Your money is in that envelope on top of your baggage,” she said, pointing at my trunk and valises in a dusty corner of the center hall. “You can count it, it’s all there.”

“You accepted my money,” I said, “but now that I need the room, you’re throwing me out? That makes no sense.”

Up till now, Maybelle had maintained her best polite southern-lady voice. Now the tone changed. Her voice dropped three notes.

“Look, I ain’t gonna stand here and argue with the likes of you,” she said. “I don’t know how I could make it any clearer. We got no rooms available for you. So if you don’t mind, I will thank you to go on and leave the house now.”

“I can’t carry this trunk by myself,” I said.

“Why don’t you get one of your nigger friends to help you,” she snapped. “That’s what I would do.”

“I’ll take the valises and send someone back for the trunk,” I said.

I stuffed the envelope in my pocket, picked up a bag in each hand, and walked out into the blazing noonday sun of Eudora. Now what?

Sweet tea. That’s what I needed, a frosty glass of tea. And time to think things through. I went to the Slide Inn Café and sat at my usual table. I sat there for almost twenty minutes. I could not seem to get the attention of a waitress. Miss Fanny wouldn’t even meet my eye.

Oh, they saw me. The waitresses cast glances at me and whispered among themselves. The other customers – plump ladies in go-to-town dresses, rawboned farmers, little girls clinging to their mamas’ skirts – they saw me too. When I dared to look back at them, they turned away. And I remembered what Abraham had said: There’s cowards in both places. That’s why the bullies can have their way.

Finally, Miss Fanny approached with a glass of tea, dripping condensation down its sides.

She spoke in a quiet voice. “I’m sorry, Mr. Corbett. We don’t all feel the same way about you. Personally, I got nothing against you. I like you. But I ain’t the owner. So you’d best just drink this tea and be on your way. You’re not welcome here.”

“All right, Miss Fanny,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”

I drank the tea in a few gulps. I put a quarter on the table. I hoisted my valises and walked out into the street.

As I passed Miss Ida’s notions shop, I saw Livia Winkler coming out.

“Miz Winkler,” I said, touching the brim of my hat.

She suddenly looked flustered. Averting her eyes, she turned around and hurried back into the shop.

I crossed the street, to the watering trough in front of Jenkins’ Mercantile. I scooped up a handful of water and splashed my face.

“That water is for horses, mules, and dogs,” said a voice behind me. I turned.

It was the same fat redheaded man who with his two friends had jumped me at this very place, when they were holding those boys’ heads underwater.

This time he held a branding iron in his hand.

I was too exhausted to fight. I was hot. I was still a bit weak and wobbly from everything I had been through. But Red didn’t know that. I straightened up to full height.

“Use your brain,” I said. “Turn around and walk away. Before I brand you.”

We stared each other down. Finally he broke it off – shook his head in disgust, spat on the sidewalk near my shoes, and walked away. He looked back once. I was still there, watching him go.

Then I turned and headed in the direction of the one person in Eudora I believed would help me.

Chapter 75

“WELL, DAMN, BEN! I could have used some warning, you know? I got about the biggest family and the littlest house in the whole town, and you want to move in here? Damn it all to hell, Ben!”

That was the warm greeting I got from Jacob Gill, my oldest friend in the world, my hope for a roof over my head that night.

“Sorry, Jacob,” I said, “but I didn’t know anywhere else to go.”

He looked me over. I looked right back at him. Finally he crossed some line in his mind. He sighed, picked up one of my valises, carried it through the tiny parlor and into the tiny dining room.

“I reckon this is the guest room now,” he said, and finally offered up a half smile. “I’ll get some blankets; we can make a pallet on the floor – unless you want to sleep out in the smokehouse. Got nothing hanging in there, it might be more private for you.”

“This will be fine,” I said.

Jacob’s house was a sad sight on the inside. The few pieces of furniture were battered old castoffs held together with baling wire and odd ends of rope. The cotton batting was coming out of the cushions on the settee. In the kitchen, a baby’s cradle gave off an unpleasant aroma. A skinny cat nosed around the pantry, no doubt hoping to meet a mouse for lunch. Jacob said, “You want a drink?”

“Just some water would be good for me.”

“The pump’s on the back porch,” he said. “I need me a finger or two myself.”

He didn’t bother to pour the whiskey into a glass. He pulled the cork and took a big slug right out of the bottle.

“Well, that’s just fine, ain’t it? Drinking straight from the bottle, and it ain’t even lunchtime yet.”

This observation belonged to Charlotte, Jacob’s wife, who came in from the back porch with an infant in one arm and a pile of laundry in the other.

“Hello, Charlotte. Ben Corbett.”

“Yeah, I know who you are.” Her voice was cool. “I heard you were back in town.”

“Ben’s gonna be staying with us for a few days,” said Jacob. “I told him he could sleep in the dining room.”

“That’s grand,” Charlotte said. “That’s just wonderful. That oughta make us the most popular family in Eudora.”

Chapter 76

THE SECOND NIGHT I WAS at the Gill house, after a supper of leftover chicken parts and grits, Jacob suggested we go for “a walk, a smoke, and a nip.”

First he poured whiskey from the big bottle into a half-pint bottle, which he stuck in his trouser pocket.

He walked and drank. I walked and looked anxiously down every dark alley.

“You sure are one hell of a nervous critter tonight,” Jacob said.

“You’d be nervous too, if they beat you half to death and strung you up and left you for dead,” I said. “Excuse me if I tend to be a bit cautious after almost being lynched.”

A man came down the steps of the First Methodist church, looking as if he had been waiting for us.

I recognized him: Byram Chaney, a teacher at the grammar school. Byram had to be well up in his seventies by now; I had thought of him as elderly years ago, when he was teaching me how to turn fractions into decimals.

“Evening, Jacob,” he said. “Ben.”

Jacob turned toward the streetlight to roll a cigarette. “I hope Byram didn’t startle you, Ben,” he said.

“Glad you could join us this evening, Ben,” Byram said. “I think getting a firsthand look at things will be worthwhile for you. Jacob spoke up for you.”

Suddenly I realized that Byram Chaney had, in fact, been waiting for us. I turned to Jacob to find out why.

“I haven’t told him yet,” Jacob said to Byram.

“Told me what?”

“You’d best go on and tell him,” said Byram. “We’ll be to Scully’s in a minute.”

I knew Scully as a man who owned a “kitchen farm” on the road south of town. Everybody who didn’t have his own garden went to Scully’s for whatever vegetables were in season.

“What’s going on here, Jacob?”

“Calm down, Ben. We’re just going to a little meeting. Me and Byram thought it might be a good idea if you came along. I did speak up for you.”

“What kind of a meeting?”

“Just friends and neighbors,” he said. “Keep your mind open.”

“Pretty much half the people in town,” put in Byram.

“But they don’t like to be seen by outsiders,” said Jacob. “That’s why you’ll have to wear this.”

From his knapsack he pulled a white towel.

Then I realized it wasn’t a towel at all. It was a pointed white hood with two holes cut for eyes.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“A Klan meeting?” I said.

“Keep your voice down, Ben,” Jacob said. “We’re standing right here beside you. We can hear.”

“You must be insane,” I said. “I’m not going to any Klan meeting. Don’t you know it’s illegal? The Klan’s been outlawed for years.”

“Tell the sheriff,” said Jacob. “He’s a member.”

As soon as I got over my shock at finding that my old best friend was a Ku Klux Klansman, I knew Chaney was right. I had to go along. This was exactly the kind of information Theodore Roosevelt had sent me down here to uncover.

Chapter 77

THROUGH THE HOLES in my hood I saw at least fifty men in white hoods and robes, walking in loose ranks along the dirt road. Jacob, Byram, and I fell right in with their step.

No one said anything until we were all inside Scully’s large old barn and the doors had been closed.

One man climbed up on a hay bale and ordered everyone to gather around. I followed Jacob toward the back wall of the barn.

“Our first order of business,” he said, “is to announce that we have a special guest attending our meeting this evening.”

He waved his hand – was he waving in my direction? There was no way he could know who I was, not under that hood.

Without a word Jacob reached over and snatched the hood off my head.

I stood revealed. The only man in the place without a mask covering his face.

A murmur ran through the crowd.

“Benjamin Corbett,” said the man on the bale. “Welcome, Ben. You are among friends here. We’re not the ones tried to hurt you.”

I sincerely doubted that. But then he took off his hood and I recognized Winston Conover, the pharmacist who had filled our family’s prescriptions for as long as I could remember.

One by one the men around me began taking off their hoods. I knew most of them. The Methodist minister. A farm products salesman. A conductor on the Jackson & Northern railroad. A carpenter’s assistant. The county surveyor. The man who did shoe repairs for Kline’s store. Sheriff Reese and his deputy. The man who repaired farm implements at the back of Sanders’ General Store.

So this was the dreaded Ku Klux Klan. As ordinary a group of small-town men as you’re likely to come across.

“Ben, we appreciate you showing up to let us talk to you.” It was Lyman Tripp. Jovial, chubby Lyman had the readiest smile in town. He was the undertaker, so he also had the steadiest business of anyone.

“Maybe you’ll see that we ain’t all monsters,” he said. “We’re just family men. We got to look out for our women and protect what’s rightfully ours.”

I didn’t quite know what he meant by “rightfully ours.”

Byram Chaney tied a gold belt around the waist of his robe. He climbed up on the hay bale from which Doc Conover had just stepped down.

“All right, let’s get it started,” he said.

The men stood around in their white sheets with their hoods off, conducting the most ordinary small-town meeting. They discussed the collection of dues, a donation they’d recently made to a widowed young mother, nominations for a committee to represent the local chapter at the county meeting in McComb.

Just when it began to seem as harmless as a church picnic, Byram Chaney said, “Okay now, there must be a recognizing of new business related to the niggers.”

Doc Conover spoke up. “I had two colored girls come into the drugstore last week. They said they was up from Ocean Springs visiting some kin of theirs. They wanted to buy tincture of iodine. I explained to ’em, just as nice as I could, that I don’t sell to coloreds. Then one of ’em started to lecturin’ me on the Constitution. When I told her to get the hell out of my store, she said she’d come back with her daddy and her brother, and they’d make me sell ’em iodine.”

“You say they’s from Ocean Springs?” said Jimmy Whitley, the athletic coach at Eudora High.

“That’s sure what they said.”

“Johnny Ray, ain’t you got a cousin in the chapter down in Ocean Springs?”

“I do, that’s Wilbur Earl,” said Johnny Ray.

Byram Chaney said, “Johnny Ray, why don’t you talk to your cousin, find out who those girls might have been. Then we can see about getting ’em educated.”

The crowd murmured in agreement.

Another man spoke. “I only want to report that that old nigger Jackie, you know, the one that used to drive the carriage for Mr. Macy? He come into my store again, looking for work.”

I recognized the speaker as Marshall Farley, owner of the five-and-dime.

Jacob leapt to his feet and spoke with passion. “There you go,” he said. “Niggers looking for jobs that belong to us! That old coon’s had a perfectly good job all this time, driving for one of the richest men in the county. Now he wants more. He wants a job that could go to a fella like me, a good man with a family to feed.”

In place of the polite murmur, a wave of anger now rolled through the crowd. I understood something new about these men. They weren’t filled just with hate; they were filled with at least as much fear. Fear that the black man was going to take everything away from them – their jobs, their women, their homes, all their hopes and dreams.

Then I realized Jacob was talking about me. “So if you ask me, I think it’s high time we teach our guest a thing or two,” he was saying. “He needs to know we aren’t just a bunch of ignorant bigots. I make a motion that we give over the rest of our meeting to the proper education of Ben Corbett.”

I looked around and couldn’t believe what I saw. Half a dozen men, in a rough circle, were coming right at me. Then they were upon me, and they had me trapped for sure.

Chapter 78

FEELING SICK TO my stomach now, my brain reeling, I rode in the back of an open farm wagon with Jacob, Byram Chaney, and Doc Conover. I was the one with hands bound behind his back.

Cicadas made a furious racket in the trees, their droning rhythm rising and falling. We were driving south out of town into the swamp, an all-too-familiar journey by now.

I was almost as terrified as I was angry. When I spoke to Jacob, I could barely keep from screaming.

“How could you do this? The one man I thought I could trust!”

“Stay calm, my friend.”

“I’m not your friend,” I said.

“Ben, you can’t help it if you got some mistaken ideas about us,” he said. “You’ll find out, we’re nobody to be scared of. We’re fair-minded fellows, like you. I just ask you to keep an open mind.”

“By going to the swamp to watch you lynch another black man?”

“I said, stay calm.”

After a time we came into a clearing. I could have sworn this was the place where somebody hanged me. Where I almost died. But it was a different spot altogether.

Two men in white robes stood near a crude wooden platform. Between them they held a man in place, with a rope around his neck.

His face was turned away from me.

“Let’s go closer,” Jacob said.

“This is close enough,” I said.

But it wasn’t my decision to make. Byram Chaney lifted his reins and drove the wagon into the clearing for a better view of the murder.

Slowly the man on the platform turned to face the crowd. He was a small man. Frightened. Pathetic. On his nose he wore gold-rimmed spectacles.

The man was white.

Chapter 79

“HIS NAME IS ELI WEINBERG,” Byram Chaney told me in confidential tones. “He’s a crooked little Jew from New Orleans. He talked three different widow ladies out of a thousand dollars each. He was selling deeds to some nonexistent property he said was down in Metairie.”

“And he would have got away with all that money,” Jacob said, “but the fellows found him yesterday, hiding in the out-house at the McComb depot.”

Eli Weinberg decided to speak up for himself. “Those are valid deeds, gentlemen,” he said in a quavery voice.

“What are you doing?” I said. “You can’t hang him, he might be telling the truth!” I felt my whole body shaking. “Why don’t you look into what he says?”

“We did look into it,” said Doc Conover. “We got word from our brothers that he’s been fast-talking his way into towns all over this part of the country.”

“So have him arrested,” I said.

“This is better,” Conover said. “We get the job done, no waiting, no money wasted on lawyers and trials and such. And we let them other Jews know they better think twice before coming to Eudora to steal from the likes of us.”

“The likes of you?” I said. “Hell, you’re all murderers!”

Eli Weinberg heard my voice. He twisted around in the hands of his captors to see who might have spoken in his defense. “Murderers! Yes, that man’s right! You are all murderers!”

Jacob said, “You’re missing the point, Ben. The Klan is here to fight against all injustice. We’re not here just to educate niggers. We’re here to educate anyone who needs educating.”

I narrowed my eyes and shook my head. “You’re crazy, Jacob. You and your friends are just a bunch of crazy killers.”

Eli Weinberg shouted out, “Listen to him! He’s right! You’re all crazy killers!”

Those were the last words he spoke.

Someone jerked hard on the rope, and Eli Weinberg’s body flew into the air. His cheeks inflated. His eyes bugged in their sockets. His face turned an awful dark crimson, then slowly faded to gray. Vomit spilled from his mouth. His body jerked and trembled horribly.

Within seconds he was dead.

A few seconds after that, the brilliant flash of Scooter Willems’s camera illuminated the dark night.

Chapter 80

THE HANGMAN’S BOWIE KNIFE made quick work of the rope. They let Eli Weinberg’s body fall to the ground with a thud. I had seen ailing farm animals put down with more respect.

“You reckon we oughta bury him?” a man said.

“Leave him where he lies,” said Chaney. “He said he had a son in Baton Rouge. We’ll get word to our brothers down there. The son can come fetch him.”

“Jews are supposed to be buried before sundown on the day they die,” I said.

“It figures you would know all about Jews,” said Doc Conover.

Chaney climbed aboard the wagon and took the reins. As we jolted out of the clearing, Jacob reached down to untie my ankles. “Turn around and let me do your hands,” he said.

I will confess it – I felt a wash of relief. They didn’t intend to kill me tonight.

Without any warning a stiff breeze swept over us, along with a spatter of oversized raindrops. The breeze died for a moment, then the rain was on us, lashing us with windy sheets of water.

I noticed that Doc’s wet white robe had become translucent, so I could read his name stitched on the pharmacist’s jacket he wore underneath.

“What you think, Ben?” Jacob asked as the wagon wheels slogged through the mud. “Is the Klan making a little more sense to you now?”

If Jacob hadn’t been a friend my whole life, I would have punched him right then. “Listen to yourself, Jacob. You just killed a man. Do you hear me? You killed him.”

I thought he was going to snap back at me, but the fire suddenly died in his eyes. He shook his head, in sorrow or disgust. He stared down at his callused hands.

“You… will… never… understand,” he said. “I’m a fool to even try. You’re not like us anymore. You don’t understand how things have changed.”

“Let me tell you what else I don’t understand,” I said. “How you – the one I always thought was my friend – how could you do this to me, Jacob? Jacob, I was your friend.”

“I did it to help you,” he said. “To keep you alive.” His voice was weak, pathetic.

The rain was beginning to slacken. The wagon slowed to a stop outside Scully’s barn, where the evening’s festivities had begun.

“Come on, Ben,” Jacob said in a low voice. “Let’s go home.”

“I don’t think so.” I turned away and set off walking in the direction of Eudora.

“Where the hell you going?” he called after me.

I didn’t answer or even look back.

Chapter 81

A SILK BANNER with elegant black letters ran the length of the wall.

WELCOME HOME, BEN

This was the banner that had hung in the dining room for the big family celebration the day I returned from my service in Cuba. Half the town turned out to cheer the decorated Spanish-American War veteran who had distinguished himself under the famous Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.

Now the banner was dingy, the silk stained brown with drips from the leaky roof. I was standing not in my father’s house on Holly Street but in the “long house” out back, a former slave quarters.

It was to the long house that I had come after I left Jacob. It hadn’t housed an actual slave since well before I was born. At the moment it seemed to be serving as a storage room for every piece of castoff junk my father didn’t want in the house.

It was also home to the dogs, Duke and Dutchy, the oldest, fattest, laziest bloodhounds in all of Mississippi. They didn’t even bother to bark when I opened the door and stepped inside.

I lit an old kerosene lantern and watched the mice scurry away into corners. As the shadows retreated, I realized that all the junk piled in here was my junk. My father had turned the long house into a repository of everything related to my childhood.

The oak desk from my bedroom was shoved against the wall under the welcome banner. Piled on top of the desk were pasteboard cartons and the little desk chair I had used before I was old enough to use a grown-up one.

I lifted the lid of the topmost carton. A musty smell rose from the books inside. I lifted out a handful: A Boy’s History of the Old South, My First Lessons in Arithmetic, and my favorite book when I was a boy: Brass Knuckles, Or, The Story of a Boy Who Cheated.

Next to the desk stood my first bed, a narrow spool one decorated by my mother with hand-painted stars. It was hard to believe I’d ever fit on that little bed.

In the far corner was another pile of Benjamin Corbett’s effects: football, basketball, catcher’s mitt, slide trombone, the boxer’s speed bag that once hung from a rafter in the attic.

I lifted the corner of a bedsheet draping a large object, and uncovered the most wonderful possession of my entire childhood: a miniature two-seater buggy, made perfectly to scale of white-painted wicker with spoked iron wheels. I remembered the thrill it gave me when our old stable hand Mose would hitch up the old mule, Sarah, to my buggy. He would lift me onto the driver’s seat and lead the mule and me on a walk around the property. I must have been all of six or seven.

Before I knew what was happening, I was crying. I stood in the middle of that dark, musty room and let the tears come. My shoulders shook violently. I sank down to a chair and buried my head in my hands. I was finally home – and it was awful.

Chapter 82

A FAMILIAR VOICE brought me out of a deep sleep. These days I came awake instantly, and always with an edge of fear. It was only when I blinked at the two figures smiling down on me that I was able to relax.

“Near ’bout time for breakfast,” said Yvella, my father’s cook. Beside her was Dabney, the houseman. Each held a silver tray.

“Way past time,” said Dabney. “In another hour it’ll be time for dinner.”

Among the items on Dabney’s tray were a silver coffeepot emitting a tendril of steam from its spout and a complete place setting of Mama’s best china.

Yvella’s tray offered just about every breakfast item known to southern mankind: grits, fried eggs, spicy link sausage, homemade patty sausage, griddle cakes with sorghum syrup, a basket of baking-powder biscuits, butter, watermelon pickles, and fig preserves.

“Yvella, you don’t expect me to eat all this?”

“Yes, suh, I sure do,” she said. “You too damn skinny.”

“I have lost some weight here recently,” I said and rolled my eyes.

“Yeah, I heard all about it,” she said.

“How’d y’all know I was here… in the guest quarters?”

“Duke come and told me,” Dabney said.

I realized that I was standing in front of them shirtless, wearing only my drawers. I looked around for my clothes.

“Don’t you worry about it, Mister Ben,” Yvella said. “I seen plenty worse than that. I took your clothes to the wash.”

Dabney brought over a filigreed iron tea table I remembered from Mama’s flower garden.

“I didn’t tell your daddy you’s here,” he said. “I figure you’d want to tell him yourself. But why don’t you come on and sleep in the house, Mister Ben. That big old house just rattling around with hardly nobody in it, you out here sleepin’ with the dogs.”

“We’ll see,” I said. “Thank you for the invitation.”

Along with the coffee, Dabney had brought me a straight razor, shaving soap, a tortoiseshell comb and brush, and a stack of fresh clothing – my old clothes, laundered and folded. I was probably skinny enough to fit into them now.

“God bless you both,” I said.

“You the one that needs the blessin’, from what I hear,” Yvella said. “You best keep out of trouble.”

“I will try,” I said. “Listen, I have a favor to ask both of y’all.”

“Your father don’t need to know, and we ain’t gonna tell him,” said Dabney.

“The same goes for me,” said Yvella. “And now I got a favor to ask of you.”

“What is it?”

“Would you eat them damn biscuits before they get cold?”

Chapter 83

AS SOON AS I POURED the last of the coffee, Duke and Dutchy started barking – insistent, urgent, annoying barks. They ran up and down along the wall underneath the cobwebby window.

I went over and was astonished to see Elizabeth in the bushes and with her none other than L. J. Stringer.

I motioned for them to go around to the front door.

“Damn, Ben,” L.J. said, “if we wanted to come through the front door, we would have done it in the first place.”

I shut the door behind them. “How’d you even know I was here?”

They looked annoyed at my stupidity.

“Don’t you think those Klan boys had somebody follow you home last night after their meeting? The whole town knows, Ben. Everybody knows who you are and where you are. All the time.”

I felt stupid. Of course they had followed me.

L.J. straightened. “Ben, let me put it to you as simply as I know how. Your life is in danger.”

“He’s right. Actually, it’s a miracle you’re still alive,” said Elizabeth. She reached out and touched my shoulder, eyes wide with concern.

L.J. spoke in a no-nonsense voice. “People are really angry, Ben. I mean angry. You forget what a small town this is. Folks know you’re up to something, and whatever it is, you ain’t here to make them look good.”

“I don’t have to defend myself, L.J. There’s murder going on in this town. Hell, I’ve seen six people with my own eyes who’ve been murdered, just in the short time since I got here! They nearly killed me, just for seeing what I saw.”

Elizabeth spoke, her voice as gentle as L.J.’s was harsh.

“Ben, these are, or were, your neighbors,” she said. “These are your friends. Most of them are good, decent people.”

“Elizabeth, I don’t see anything decent about men who murder innocent people. You put neighborliness ahead of simple humanity? Forgive me if I disagree.”

I realized that I probably sounded like a defense attorney pleading a case. Another hopeless one?

L.J. seemed to read my mind. “No point in discussing it any further,” he said. “We came here because we’re afraid for you, Ben. We want to try to help. It’s just a matter of time before they come for you again. And hang you good. I’ll figure out some way to keep you safe.”

“Thank you, L.J., Elizabeth. I really do appreciate your concern. More than you can possibly know.”

“Until then, Ben, listen to me. Do not trust anyone. And that means anyone.”

I knew that “anyone” included Jacob Gill, and even my father. It probably meant Dabney and Yvella too. But did it also mean the very people giving me this cautionary advice? Could I trust L.J. and Elizabeth?

“We’d best be on our way,” L.J. said. “Isn’t there a back door out of here?”

I pointed to it.

“Don’t forget what I said, Ben. Keep your head down.”

L.J. opened the little door that let onto the alley. He glanced around, then turned back. “Nobody around. Let’s go, Elizabeth.”

She turned to me with a smile that spoke of her concern.

“Ben, please let us help. We’re your friends. Maybe your only friends.”

Chapter 84

ALMOST MIDNIGHT. Another knock came on the rear door of the long house.

I shot the bolt and the door swung open.

Moody Cross was standing there in a white jumper. And not a little terrified. She pushed past me and slammed the door shut.

“Papaw sent me.”

“I guess my secret hiding place is the worst-kept secret in Mississippi,” I said.

She was out of breath. “We need help. A lady from the Slide Inn sent her colored girl out to warn us. Said they’s a group of men coming out to kill me and Papaw and Ricky.”

“Who’s Ricky?”

“My cousin, you met him at the funeral. He got run out of Chatawa, where he lived all his life. He been staying with us since you left – you know, like for protection.”

Now I remembered him, a boy about the same age as Hiram, with a family resemblance to Hiram and Moody.

“What happened in Chatawa?” I asked.

“Two white men said they saw Ricky staring at a white woman. Said he was thinkin’ evil thoughts. I guess some white folks can even see inside of a black boy’s brain. There’s this group of ’em – the White Raiders, is what they call ’em up there. They s’posed to be the ones coming to get us.”

This seemed like more than coincidence. The horror raining down upon Abraham’s family simply would not stop, would it?

“There’s something else.”

What else could there possibly be?

“Papaw is sick,” she said. “He can’t get out of his bed, got the fever and the shakes, and Aunt Henry’s been there nursing him.”

Moody started to cry, and I remembered something Mama always used to say: When the time comes you want to start crying, that’s the time to start moving.

It was time for me to go get L.J. and Elizabeth.

Chapter 85

L. J. STRINGER’S six-seater spring wagon flew down the road, stirring the motionless air of a sticky-hot Mississippi night.

“You’re going straight to hell, Ben Corbett, and you’re taking me with you!” L.J. raised his crop to urge on his team.

As soon as I had gotten Moody to stop crying, we’d sneaked over to the Stringer place and surprised the whole household with our late-night knock on the kitchen door. I’d asked L.J. to help me protect Abraham, Moody, and Ricky. He’d listened and he hadn’t hesitated. “I said I’d help you, Ben, and I will.”

Yes, he’d heard of the White Raiders. Yes, he knew them to be a gang of killers. Finally he sighed heavily and sent his man Luther out to hitch up his team.

And now here we were, bumping and rolling our way out to Abraham’s house in the Quarters. Crammed together on the back bench were Moody, Luther Cosgrove, and his brother Conrad.

Luther and Conrad were L.J.’s assistants – “my man Friday and his brother Saturday,” he joked – on call twenty-four hours a day to do whatever the boss wanted done. They drove Allegra Stringer on her errands. They ran packages to McComb and Jackson and Shreveport. If L.J. needed anybody “brought into line,” as he put it, it was the Cosgroves who did the bringing.

“What we’re doing here is extremely foolish,” said L.J. “You know that?”

“I know that,” I said. “But if we don’t help these people, nobody will. And they’re all going to die.”

L.J. shrugged and said, “Well, we can’t have that. This has to stop somewhere. Might as well be right here and right now.”

Chapter 86

POOR ABRAHAM WAS in the parlor of his house, sleeping fitfully when we arrived. Half a dozen men came from the Quarters, as volunteers, even though they had only a couple of rifles. “Guarding Father Abraham,” that’s what they called it. Abraham was that beloved here.

As it turned out, the White Raiders didn’t come that first night, but we continued guarding Father Abraham. As the sun went down the second evening, L.J. and I took our places on the porch. We’d been friends for a long time, but he’d gotten better and better with the years, the exact opposite of Jacob.

I arranged the other men as carefully as a Civil War general planning his lines of defense. I put two of the new men on the roof, despite Moody’s protest that the sheets of tin were so old and rusty that they would almost certainly fall through.

Then L.J. dispatched five of the men in an enfilade line among the old willow trees at the edge of the woods.

“Stay awake. Stay alert,” he told everyone. “Don’t leave your post for any damn reason. If you need to pee, just do it in place.”

As the second night watch began, our fears were as high as on the first.

Around eleven L.J. and I decided a finger of sour-mash whiskey was what our coffee needed to take the edge off. After midnight Moody came out with a fresh pot. She told me Abraham was awake.

Through the window I saw him propped up on his pillow. Between his hands he held a bowl of steaming liquid, which he raised to his lips.

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s got a little more energy tonight. But I ain’t getting my hopes up. Aunt Henry says he’s on his way.”

I nodded and walked inside.

“How are you feeling, friend?” I asked.

He smiled. “How are you, is the question,” he said. “I ain’t doing nothing but laying on this bed, trying not to die. You the one doing somethin’.”

“I’ll keep doing my job, as long as you do yours,” I said.

I was surprised how sharp he seemed, and I seized the opportunity.

“Still no word from the White House, Abraham,” I told him. “Makes me angry.”

“The Lord and the president, they both work in mysterious ways,” he said.

“How did you ever come to know him, Abraham?” I asked. “The president, that is.”

“Mr. Roosevelt’s mama was a southern lady, you know. Miss Mittie.[6] From over where I’m from, in Roswell, Georgia. And see, my sister Annie went to work for Miss Mittie, eventually went with her up to New York. She was still up there, nursing Mittie, the day she died. Died the same day as Mr. Roosevelt’s first wife, Alice.[7] Did you know his mama died the same day as his wife? I was there that day, helping Annie. That was a terrible day. I guess he never forgot it.”

“Ben!” L.J. shouted. “The sons o’ bitches are here! They’re everywhere!”

From all around the cabin came a clatter of hooves, then an explosion of gunfire.

I lunged for the front door. I was almost there when one of the Raiders came crashing through the roof, landing on my back.

Chapter 87

BULLETS WERE WHIZZING through the air as the confused-looking man picked himself up off the floor, still clutching a scrap of rusted tin he’d brought with him on his fall through the roof.

L.J. ran into the house and aimed a rifle at the fallen Raider. “Get the hell out of here or die. I see you again, you die!”

In the darkness outside I could see eight men wheeling about on horses. They wore no sheets, no hoods. They weren’t bothering to hide themselves. I recognized the redheaded troublemaker I’d encountered at the trough in front of Jenkins’ Mercantile.

One lout, on a big dappled quarter horse, must have weighed in at four hundred pounds. The horse struggled to keep from collapsing.

The fat man was agile, though, hopping down from his saddle like somebody a third his size. The other Raiders were getting down too, yoking their horses together.

One aimed his shotgun at the house. Ka-blam!

“Goddammit,” L.J. grunted. He poked the barrel of his fine hand-carved rifle through the window, squeezed the trigger, and dropped the shooter in his tracks.

This was war, just like I remembered it from Cuba, except the enemy was from my own town.

L.J. called, “Take the back of the house, Ben!” So I ran to the tiny kitchen and onto the stoop.

Behind the trunk of a giant pecan tree stood Ricky, with his shotgun trained across the yard on an oak where a White Raider huddled with his rifle trained on him.

Neither of them had a clear shot, but they were banging away at each other, riddling each other’s tree trunk with bullets and squirrel shot.

As I burst headlong onto that stoop, I presented a clear target for the White Raider.

He swung his gun toward me, and time seemed to slow down while I watched him turn. He squeezed off a shot. I saw the spark of the bullet strike a rock near the stoop.

The man ducked behind the oak, but he was big enough that the trunk didn’t entirely conceal his belly. I braced my pistol hand on my other arm and fired.

I got him, and he hit the dirt with a thud, screaming, holding his abdomen.

His fellow Raiders had circled behind the house in a ragged line, and now attacked, sweeping the ground with gunfire, round after round. These men had come well armed; they were good with their guns. I remembered that Colonel Roosevelt called this kind of fighting “sweep in and sweep up,” a strategy, he said, that was “generally used by butchers and fools.”

These fools were shooting and yelling as they came, catcalling, “We got you now, niggers!” and “Run, boy! Look at him go!”

A shout came from the swamp: “They got Roy! Goddamn niggers done shot Roy!” This news provoked a fresh round of shooting. L.J. glanced at me; we had the same thought at the same instant.

We waited until the last shot, when all their weapons were unloaded at the same time.

Then we charged around the house, weapons leveled at the Raiders. “Drop ’em!” L.J. hollered.

They obliged, and I rushed to pick up the rifles, yelling, “Don’t move – not one of you move!”

Soon two of the black men who’d been concealed along the fence line appeared, lugging a prone, struggling Raider they had lassoed and hog-tied.

“Where y’all want this one?”

“Put him down right here by the rest,” said L.J.

When they came riding in, the Raiders hadn’t realized they were outnumbered, but they were finding it out now. I saw a couple of smart ones leap on their horses and ride off.

But here came the huge fat man, lumbering around the side of the house with a shotgun in one hand, a pistol in the other.

“Drop your guns!” L.J. yelled.

The fat man did not obey. Instead, he pulled the trigger on the pistol. The bullet hit L.J. in the right cheek. I swear I heard the crack of his cheekbone breaking, then he fell to the ground.

I fired at the fat man and he went down hard. Stayed down, didn’t move.

“L.J.! Are you all right?” I knew he was not.

“Oh, hell, yeah,” L.J. said. “The damn thing just grazed me.” I could plainly see that it had taken a sizable chunk of flesh out of his cheek; blood oozed down his chin. That side of his face was black with gunpowder.

I heard more commotion in front of the house, then hoof-beats. The remaining Raiders had taken this opportunity to get the hell out of there.

“Moody!” I called.

There was no answer.

L.J. made a kind of whistling sound as he breathed through the new hole in his cheek.

“Moody, they’re gone! Come on out now, I need you!”

Again all was silent.

“You’d better… go see…,” L.J. mumbled.

I rushed through the back door and stopped short at the threshold of the parlor. Abraham lay on his bed with the long barrel of a pistol pointed at his head. The man holding it had his other arm around Moody in a choke hold.

“You stop right there, Corbett,” said the Raider. “They’s nothin’ would give me more pleasure than to finish off this old troublemaking nigger, and then you.”

I didn’t move.

I didn’t have to.

I watched Moody’s hand gliding into the pocket of her jumper. She pulled out a kitchen knife and in one smooth motion plunged it into the White Raider’s back.

Chapter 88

“BEN CORBETT HERE is a well-known nigger-lover, so I don’t expect him to know any better – but L.J., for the love of God, I never in this world thought I would find you pulling such a stunt.”

It was four in the morning, and we were standing in the dogtrot of the log cabin that belonged to Phineas Eversman and his family. Phineas was the chief of the Eudora police department, which consisted of him, Mort Crowley, and Harry Kelleher, who worked only part-time.

“Just hear us out, Phineas,” L.J. said. When he lifted the bloody rag from his face, his voice had a sickening whistle in it. “Your town is out of control.”

“Look, Phineas, you can call me every name in the book,” I said. “You can hate me and everything I stand for, but we still have five men in the back of our wagon who attacked and murdered innocent people in the Quarters tonight. We are witnesses, and we are here to swear out a formal complaint against these men. That means you are required by law to arrest ’em, hold ’em, and see that they’re brought to trial for murder.”

Eversman looked past me and out the front door. In the back of the wagon he saw five White Raiders tightly bound, hand and foot, by the very ropes they had brought with them for hanging Negroes.

Standing guard over these men were Cousin Ricky and eight of the ten surviving volunteer guards. Luther Cosgrove and a man named Jimmie Cooper had been gunned down. The captured men had laughed and hooted all the way downtown, promising us that their pal Phineas Eversman would soon set them free.

“Now, wait a minute, Corbett,” said Phineas. “The first thing out of your mouth was that you and these Nigras killed some of the men.”

“They attacked us!” I bellowed. “We had to fight back or we’d all be dead! Are you listening?”

“There’s no need to get ugly,” said Phineas. His voice was mild, but his eyes kept flicking outside to the tied-up men, as if he were weighing the risks on all sides.

L.J. pressed the bloody cloth against his cheek. “Phineas, you listen to me, now,” he said quietly. “It’s time, Phineas. It’s time to put an end to it – the violence, all the hatred against coloreds in this town. These Ku Kluxer gangs are tearing Eudora apart, limb from limb. People are living in fear, black and white. You know me, Phineas. I’ve lived here all my life. I was there tonight. I saw what happened. I demand as a citizen of this town that you arrest these men for murder. Right now.”

Eversman pulled his chenille bathrobe snug around his skinny body. He refashioned the knot in the belt, then made his way past us, outside to the wagon.

“Evenin’, Phineas,” said one of the Raiders with a chuckle. “I sure am sorry these bastards decided to wake you up for no good reason.”

Eversman didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. I thought I heard a quiver in his voice, but he spoke loud and clear.

“You men are under arrest for… for trespassing, assault with a deadly weapon, and… and…”

He couldn’t seem to get the words out, so I helped him.

“And first-degree murder.”

Eversman glanced at me. He swallowed hard. “And first-degree murder,” he said.

The men set up a howl. A dour, wiry man yelled, “Because that nigger-lover Corbett says so?”

Eversman’s voice had lost its tremor. “And because his complaint is supported by our most upstanding citizen, Mr. Stringer,” he said.

“Mr. Stringer is indeed upstanding,” I said. “But Chief Eversman will also find that my complaint is fully and completely supported by a person even more esteemed than L. J. Stringer, if you can imagine that.”

The wiry man in the wagon cast an ugly eye on me. “And who the hell that?”

“His name,” I said, “is Theodore Roosevelt.”