Home Fires

14

A hint is something we often drop

But rarely pick up

—Friendly Chapel Pentecostal Free Will Baptist

Word of the fires spread through the county, to the state, and leapfrogged Washington to New York.

During the night, news teams from all up and down the eastern seaboard swarmed through the Triangle. Microphones were stuck in the faces of everybody who answered a knock at the door or stood frozen in the camera lenses. Somebody thought they spotted Cokie Roberts in Raleigh that morning and another swore that Peter Jennings had been seen ducking into the ABC affiliate on Western Boulevard.

Cotton Grove itself, indeed the whole western part of Colleton County, seemed to be in shock, but everyone—everyone except the Reverend Byantha Williams perhaps—said it was a blessing that the arsonist had begun with Mount Olive. If Burning Heart of God had been torched first, the volunteer fire trucks would have been out there, trying to save that tumbledown excuse for a church while one of the most historically significant buildings in the county burned to the ground.

Instead, it was Sister Williams who was completely homeless and churchless when the sun came up red-hot on Monday morning.

“Praise God for Sister Avery here,” said the elderly preacher as television cameras zoomed in on the black hand that clasped the white hand of her rescuer. A hostile tabby cat sat in her lap and hissed at the interviewer. “She took me in and she saved my life.”

“Not I,” Grace King Avery said quickly, patting Sister Williams’s hand. “Smudge deserves all the credit. He was so restless last evening that he made me nervous.”

She smiled down at the dog that sat quietly on its haunches beside her, well away from the cat’s claws. Except for that dark patch of gray hairs between its ears, it was all white, and its black eyes gleamed with intelligence whenever she spoke.

“I’d already locked up for the night.” Mrs. Avery wore a fresh, pale blue shirtwaist and her gray hair was neat and tidy in its usual bun, but the lines in her face and her red-rimmed, puffy eyes attested to a stressful night without sleep.

“Smudge just wouldn’t settle down. He kept acting as if somebody were prowling around down by the barn, so I turned on all the outside lights and that’s when I heard a car start up across the branch and drive away. A minute later, the whole back of the church seemed to go up in flames. It was just sheer luck that I was watching.”

“Not luck, honey,” insisted the Reverend Williams, who looked larger than life-size in a capacious cotton robe splashed with bright red and orange flowers. “God was directing your eye last night. His eye is on the sparrow and He put your eye on me.”

Once again she launched into the story of how she’d gone to bed at nine-thirty last night and was already sound asleep when she heard Mrs. Avery banging on the door of her little trailer. “She was yelling Fire, Fire! and said I had to get out. Well, I couldn’t find Puffcake and—”

We had already seen Channel 17’s interview with these two women and heard Sister Williams’s tale of rounding up her various cats, so Uncle Ash set down his coffee cup and flipped to Channel 11 where Miriam Thomas in the studio was adding a question of her own to the remote interview with my ATF friend Ed Gardner and the resident FBI agent who’d hastily flown over from Charlotte. More racial epithets had been found on one of Mount Olive’s unburned walls.

“—so yes, Miriam, although it’s much too early to say with complete certainty, our preliminary investigations show enough similarities to make us think that these two fires may indeed be linked to Wednesday night’s burning.”

Miriam Thomas and her partner, Larry Stogner, reminded viewers that Wednesday night was when Balm of Gilead burned.

Every local news channel alternated between the smoldering remains of the two churches. At Burning Heart of God, the only visible signs left behind the yellow police cordon were sheets of twisted tin from the roof and the burned-out hulk of Sister Williams’s metal mobile home.

The cameras caught the fire chief shaking his head woefully.

“We’re just too short of equipment,” he said. “Way this part of the county’s growing, we need at least a substation and another truck.”

Standing behind him, Donny Turner nodded his head in strong agreement.

At Mount Olive, the damage looked awful, but much had been spared. The whole north end of the church was black and charred where only yesterday had been bright Sunday School classrooms, a robing room and the choir stall itself. Flames had destroyed the mural of Jesus with John the Baptist and had licked up against the ecclesiastical chairs before they were brought under control, but the fellowship hall next to the church looked like a total write-off. The fire had started there before jumping to the main building. The roof still stood, and so did an exterior wall with its crudely printed words in green spray paint—“Niggers back to Africa”—but the whole interior was a slurry of waterlogged charcoal.

“This is bad,” said Aunt Zell, who was too distracted to fix anything more complicated than toast for our breakfast. “This is really just too bad.”

Uncle Ash shook his head as he pulled a burned slice from the toaster and handed it to me.

I put it on the plate in front of me and tried again to call Andrew and April, but once again the operator came on the line: “We’re sorry. All our circuits are currently busy. Please hang up and try your call again later.”

It was the same when I tried Seth’s number, Daddy’s and Haywood’s. Nothing was getting through to their exchange.

I left the toast on my plate and headed for Cotton Grove. If I didn’t get caught behind any tractors, there was just enough time to make it there and back to Dobbs before court convened.

I may have pushed the speed limit a little as I drove west in the early morning sunlight. Traffic didn’t seem much heavier than usual, but then I was zipping through back roads and shortcuts. I took the homemade bridge across Possum Creek so fast that for a minute I thought I’d busted one of my shocks.

When I pulled up to the back porch of Andrew’s house, Dwight Bryant was standing by his departmental car there in the yard and Daddy was leaning against his pickup. A.K. and Andrew were on their tractors, ready to head out to the field as if nothing had happened, and April’s smile was serene and unworried.

No one seemed surprised to see me.

“I figgered you’d be out here once you seen the phones was all tied up,” Daddy said.

“We’ll go on then, Dwight,” Andrew said, giving me a wave before he cranked his tractor and trailed A.K. down past the barns. Time and tobacco wait for no man.

“Everything’s okay, then?” I asked inanely.

April’s smile widened. “If you’d gone to church last night, you’d have known.”

“Huh?”

“New Deliverance opened their revival last night.”

Enlightenment dawned. New Deliverance is the borderline charismatic church over in Black Creek with a borderline Ayatollah for a preacher. Not my favorite place to worship by a long shot. But that’s where my brother Herman and his wife go—Nadine’s one of those strait-laced Blalocks from Black Creek—and she’s always badgering different ones of us to come fellowship with them. To keep family peace, we occasionally do.

“Andrew went and promised Nadine we’d come,” April said with a wicked grin, “and we decided it wouldn’t hurt for A.K. to sit through one of their preacher’s hellfire and brimstone sermons either.”

“Ain’t that cruel and unusual punishment?” Daddy asked me with a wink.

“And guess who was sitting in the row behind A.K. till almost ten o’clock?” asked Dwight.

“Who?”

“My mother.”

I hooted with laughter and relief.

Emily Bryant is one of my favorite people. She has bright orange hair and drives a purple TR—a real catbird. But she’s also the highly effective principal of Zachary Taylor High School, and her word carries weight.

“What about the other two boys?” I asked. “Raymond Bagwell and Charles Starling?”

“We’re looking into that,” he said repressively.

Normally I would have badgered him for more details but right now it was enough to know that A.K. wasn’t involved and that I could drive back to Dobbs with a lighter heart and, with a little luck, maybe even get to court on time.

Provided Dwight or a highway patrolman didn’t follow me, of course.

✡ ✡ ✡

Cotton Grove’s a twenty-minute drive to the west of Dobbs if you follow the posted speed limits, and with most of Colleton County’s law enforcement agencies buzzing around out there, directing traffic around the two churches, Dobbs itself was relatively calm when I got back.

There was much head shaking in the courthouse halls and everyone had a theory. One of the records clerks postulated that the fire had been set by skinheads on their way back to Fort Bragg. “You know how violent they are.”

My nominal boss, Chief District Court Judge F. Roger Longmire, was sure it would turn out to be kids high on drugs.

“No, no,” said attorney Ed Whitbread. “The first fire might have been done out of white racism, but what if these last two were copycats looking to stir up more excitement?”

“Or,” said a white bailiff, and here his voice dropped almost to a whisper, “what if they was set by somebody to make it look like things are bad here for colored folks?”

“By somebody, you mean someone from the black community?” I asked.

He shrugged and hitched up his pants. “It happens. Besides, I hear they can’t find the guy they had living over at Mount Olive to take care of the place. Maybe he really did take care of the place, you hear what I’m saying?”

We heard.

“On the other hand,” said Roger as we walked down the hall to our respective courtrooms, “we both know weirder things have happened. Did you see that sexton yesterday? Pickled worse’n Peter’s peppers. Louise Parker told me that Ligon was going to recommend that the deacons fire him. Maybe he did get mad and decide to get even.”

All I could think about was that green spray paint and the fact that the fires began well after A.K. and his cohorts were released from jail at five o’clock yesterday afternoon.

And then there was Dwight’s evasive answer to my question.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised when lunch time rolled around and a bailiff told me that Bagwell and Starling were on ice downstairs in Sheriff Bo Poole’s office while Ed Gardner was hunting up a U.S. magistrate to sign an arrest warrant. The newly enacted Anti-Church Arson Act makes burning a church a federal offense now, so ATF had jurisdiction.

“They were drunk as skunks and got themselves thrown out of a shot house at eight-thirty last night, less than three miles from Mount Olive,” the bailiff said. “And nobody saw them after that. They say they went straight to Starling’s trailer and slept it off there, but it’s down at the very end of the trailer park and our people canvassed the place. So far, none of the neighbors can put Starling’s car there before ten o’clock.”

“Same green paint they used in the Crocker family graveyard?” I asked.

“Same green, same lettering. Good thing your nephew wasn’t hanging with ’em last night.”

By the time Starling and Bagwell were actually bound over in a federal courtroom so jammed with reporters that all cameras were banished, the charges had escalated. Under the new and tougher laws, death as a result of deliberate arson was now a capital offense and they were being held in our local jailhouse without bail.

As Ed Gardner described it for me later, the investigation had started in earnest that afternoon after all the coals cooled off enough and everybody’d gathered at Mount Olive.

“It was a real team effort,” Ed said, ticking the participants off on his finger.

In addition to Ed and an ATF Special Agent In Charge who’d helicoptered over from Charlotte with the resident FBI agent, there were about twenty other ATF agents (twenty-one if you counted four-legged accelerant-sniffing Special Agent Sparky), two SBI arson investigators, a handwriting expert from the SBI who would measure and photograph the new graffiti and compare the results with the Polaroids taken at the graveyard—“He was sure wishing your brother hadn’t made those boys clean it up so fast”—a couple of detectives with arson experience from Sheriff Bo Poole’s department and a couple of members of the local volunteer fire department.

“What about Buster Cavanaugh?” I asked. “Don’t tell me our county fire marshall wasn’t there?”

“Yeah, well, we sorta forgot to call him and his nose was bad out of joint when he caught up with us.”

Patrol officers kept reporters and cameras back behind the lines, but they couldn’t do much about the two news helicopters that circled overhead all day.

“Least they didn’t fly into each other and crash down on our heads,” Ed said dryly.

They began with a physical examination of the whole exterior, paying particular attention to the graffiti, then moved over to the most damaged area of the fellowship hall, trying not to disturb any evidence that might still be there.

“Ol’ Sparky hit on accelerant right away. We took samples from the floor and wall areas. This time there was no attempt to make it look like an accident. No electrical wires in that area, no appliances with heating elements, and no fancy delay devices either. They just broke in somehow—maybe busted a window. Judging by the pour patterns, once they got inside, they started sloshing gasoline or kerosene around. Soaked the rug and the curtains and some wooden chairs that were there, then put a match to the curtains.”

With all that wood, it hadn’t taken long.

Mr. Ligon had told them of his disgruntled church mouse and how drunk he’d been the afternoon before. He was worried that if Arthur Hunt hadn’t started the fire, maybe he’d perished in it? They had probed the area around his room with no success.

“We’d about decided he’d taken off, then one of my buddies hollered from inside the church.”

Sometime in the past, well before 1900, a false floor had been installed so that the choir could sit on tiered risers behind the minister. When the wall burned, so did the chairs and the risers and the false floor.

They found Arthur Hunt where he had fallen through both floors to the dirt beneath the church.

Video cameras whirred with new energy and there was a frenzied buzz from all the electronic still cameras when the sexton’s charred body was rolled out on a draped gurney to the ambulance and sent to the Medical Examiner over in Chapel Hill.