Home Fires

21

LIVING WITHOUT GOD

IS LIKE DRIVING IN A FOG

—Nazarene Church

“Who is it?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Dwight said. “At the moment, all we’ve got are charred bones.”

That explained the dark smudges on his shirt.

As Dwight described it, work had begun today for Mount Olive’s reconstruction. Two members of the church were bulldozer operators and a construction company had given them the use of some earthmoving equipment to clear the site. Others had volunteered to come help, too.

With that low pressure system moving in from the west, they were double-timing to get as much done as possible before the rains got here.

Starting at sunrise this morning, two big yellow bulldozers worked to push off the remains of the fellowship hall and send it to the landfill in heavy-duty dump trucks. By lunchtime, they were ready to start the more delicate operation of pulling off the burned parts of the main building, beginning with the old Sunday School classrooms and the choir stall where the sexton’s body had been found. One forkload of burned choir benches and collapsed flooring went into the dump truck. When the second forkload swung up over the truck bed, a piece of debris fell from the air and landed a few feet from the man supervising the operation.

It was a leg bone.

The supervisor stopped the forklift in midair, took a look into the hole, and sent someone to call the Sheriff’s Department.

“And we put a tarp over it, then called the Medical Examiner and the Feds,” said Dwight. “Déjà vu all over again.”

“You didn’t recognize the body?”

“I wasn’t exactly down there nose to nose.”

“Male or female? Gunshot wounds or blunt trauma?”

“Give it a rest,” he said with a big yawn. The chair creaked again as he sank deeper into it.

I thought of how hot it’d been all week and wrinkled my nose. “Must have been quite a stench.”

He didn’t bite.

Of course, he didn’t just fall off the watermelon truck last week either. Before he and Jonna split, Dwight was with the D.C. police force and before that with Army Intelligence. I had the feeling he was holding something back, but he could keep his mouth shut when it suited him.

“The sexton was found in the choir loft, too,” I mused. “Wonder what they were both doing there? Hunt did die of smoke inhalation, didn’t he?”

“So the ME says.” Dwight yawned again.

“But he could have been hit over the head first.”

“Not according to the ME. Alcohol level was point-nineteen. Probably just passed out there,” he said sleepily.

His own eyes were half-closed. Another minute and he’d be gone.

I was ready to go see if the rain had let up enough to get to my car when Cyl DeGraffenried suddenly appeared in the doorway. She wore a tailored rose-colored dress today with a string of white beads and low-heeled white pumps.

“I just got a call that a skeleton’s been found at Mount Olive,” she said. “Is that true?”

A skeleton?

I kicked the desk drawer shut and Dwight lurched forward so abruptly that the chair almost slid out from under him. “You didn’t say skeleton. You said body.”

“A skeleton is a body,” he protested, wide awake now.

Cyl had no patience for a battle of semantics. “How long?”

He didn’t give her the runaround. But then she’s an ADA, with more right to ask.

“At least three years. Probably a lot more. Near as we can tell, it was lying directly on the ground underneath the church. No burned material under it, but parts of both the original floor and the false floor had caved in on top of it. There was no flesh left. Not much clothing either, but that section was pretty badly burned. All we got were some half-charred shoes and part of a belt with a corroded steel buckle.”

“In the shape of an M?” she asked harshly.

“M? We thought it was a W You know who it is, ma’am?”

“Oh, Cyl,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

She whirled around so fast that her string of beads swung out in an arc, then fell back into place with faint clicks as she half ran from the office.

I hurried down the hall after her.

“Hey wait!” Dwight called. “You know, too, Deb’rah? Who is it?”

His turn to wonder, I thought. Serves him right.

I caught up with Cyl at the elevator.

“You okay?” I asked, stepping into the car with her.

“No, but I will be soon as I talk to that lying s.o.b. Snake.” She punched the button for the DA’s office on the second floor. “I knew Isaac wouldn’t go without saying goodbye. Wouldn’t stay away without writing. He let me think Isaac went to Boston and all this time—”

Her voice wobbled and she shook her head, denying the tears that wanted to come.

On the second floor, I followed her down the deserted hallway to the equally deserted District Attorney’s quarters. She hauled out a phone book, turned to the motel listing and dialed the number for the Holiday Inn out at the bypass where she asked to be connected with Wallace Adderly’s room.

I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, of course, but it was easy enough to follow.

“Well, do you know when he’ll be back?... Is he registered for tonight?... Thank you very much… No, no message.”

She hung up with a muttered, “Damn!” and then tried the Reverend Ligon’s number.

Answering machine.

Another frustrated hangup.

Hesitant to play devil’s advocate, I said, “When you talked with Adderly Saturday, he didn’t actually say Isaac went to Boston with him, you know. You’re the one mentioned Boston.”

“You didn’t hear him deny it, did you?”

“Well, no, but coming out of the blue like that? He’s a political animal. He wouldn’t speak without weighing all the ramifications.”

She continued to riffle through the phone book, then slammed it down on her desk. “I can’t think where he’d be in this one-horse town. Maybe Raleigh?”

Angrily, she reached for the book again.

I glanced at my watch. 5:45.

“You up for more barbecue?” (In the North, it’s the chicken and hot dog circuit; in the South, it’s barbecue—endless plates of hushpuppies, coleslaw and vinegar-laced barbecue.)

My question caught Cyl off balance. “Barbecue?”

“The Harvey Gantt rally,” I reminded her. “Out at the community college.”

“Adderly’s supposed to be there?”

“So far as I know, that’s the only thing happening tonight that would bring him out.”

Cyl nodded, then looked at me helplessly as the grief that had been building suddenly crumpled her lovely face. Her dark eyes pooled with tears that spilled onto her rose-colored dress, making little dark wet spots.

“All this time he was right here,” she said brokenly, reaching for the box of tissues behind her. “Never got out of Colleton County. Never had a life.”

Sometimes, the only thing you can do is just put your arms around a person and hold on tight.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather try to catch him after the rally, back at his motel?” I asked Cyl as we drove through town.

I had convinced her that she shouldn’t be driving alone in the rain in her emotional state, but I couldn’t convince her to go back downstairs and tell Dwight everything she knew or suspected.

“I’ve waited twenty-one years to know what happened to Isaac,” she said fiercely. “I’m not waiting any longer.”

Colleton County Community College had begun life back in the mid-fifties under Governor Luther Hodges as part of the state’s string of technical and vocational schools designed to give rural kids a chance to learn a trade or pick up two years of college credits on the cheap while living at home.

It was still raining on Harvey Gantt’s parade when we got there, but the organizers had rallied their forces and regrouped.

Instead of a pleasant picnic supper in the oak grove next to the administration building as the sun went down, the pig cookers had been moved out of the rain to the other side of the building where a wide covered walkway connected to the auditorium. There, a spacious lobby accommodated buffet tables, and a podium backed with red, white and blue bunting stood waiting at the far end. Also waiting were a couple of television cameras. This was Harvey Gantt’s first visit to Colleton County since the burnings and reporters would be wanting his reaction to events, no matter how predictable that reaction would be.

Gantt was a man of solid Democratic values and he probably would make a pretty decent senator given the opportunity, but he lacked that fire in the belly that would let him get down in the mud and wrestle with Jesse Helms on Jesse’s level, so I didn’t have good vibes about his chances this time around either.

But optimism springs eternal in a yellow dog’s heart and I hoped the thin crowd was more reflective of the rain than of Gantt’s following. Although soggy gray skies could be seen through the clear skylights overhead, someone had turned on all the lights to brighten things up.

Minnie and Seth waved to me from across the lobby. I shook the worst of the rain from my bright yellow umbrella, raised it to furl it closed and wound up fencing with someone doing the same thing.

“En garde!” I said and Ralph Freeman laughed as he snapped the tab on his and stood it in the corner where other umbrellas were dripping.

“Lashanda and Stan weren’t up to more barbecue?” I asked, adding mine to the lineup.

“They’d eat it every day,” he said, “but my wife’s taken them to visit her parents back in Warrenton for a couple of weeks and I’m not all that crazy about my own cooking.”

His smile broadened to include Cyl. “Ms. DeGraffenried. I hope Stan told you how much he appreciated you driving him home Saturday?”

“Your son has impeccable manners,” she said. She stood on tiptoe and scanned the crowd, which seemed to be growing as classes broke and the smell of roast pig floated across the campus.

“I don’t see him.”

“See who?” asked Ralph.

“Wallace Adderly.”

“Just look for the flash of cameras,” I said and pointed toward the front.

Sure enough, Harvey Gantt and Wallace Adderly were sharing media attention up at the podium. Print and television were both there and I recognized the kid who worked out at the AM station on the edge of town. He had a microphone stuck in Adderly’s face and even from here, body language told me that the attorney was answering earnestly and graciously.

I followed Cyl across the width of the lobby, though I was slowed by more people putting out their hand to me for a word of greeting.

As we came up, a pretty young reporter from WRAL must have just asked Adderly a question about quotas because I heard him say, “—new right-wing buzzword. I believe in merit and a fair chance for everyone and in a perfect society there would never have been a need for quotas. You’re too young to remember when the quota for African-Americans was zero. And for women who wanted to report on-camera,” he added, flashing her his famous charming smile, “it was less than zero.”

As he turned toward the next questioner, Cyl stepped between them and spoke into his ear. I don’t know what she said to him—“My Uncle Isaac’s bones have been found”?—but whatever it was, he excused himself with another smile, quickly took her by the elbow and led her through a nearby door to a covered areaway outside.

I was right behind.

Adderly gave me an annoyed glance. “Could you excuse us, Judge? This is a private matter.”

“I’m her friend,” I said above the dripping of the rain. For some reason Cyl seemed even more surprised by that than Adderly.

“Besides,” I added, “if you had anything to do with Isaac Mitchiner winding up under the floorboards of Mount Olive, it’s not going to stay private very long.”

For just an instant, Wallace Adderly looked as if he’d been sucker-punched. He recovered instantly though and said, “Look, is there somewhere we can go talk?”

“Need time to get your new story straight?” Cyl asked.

Nevertheless, she looked around vaguely as if expecting to see a place open up.

“This way,” I said.

While still in private practice with Reid and John Claude, I had come out here to speak to various paralegal classes—this is where Sherry Cobb got her training—so I knew a bit of the layout.

A quick splash down a bricked walkway took us to an unlocked door and the stairwell of a classroom building. At the top of the first flight was a small study lounge that was usually empty. We went inside, I flipped on the light and closed the door behind us. Inside were a black leather couch, three leather armchairs and a badly scuffed coffee table in between, handy for books, coffee cups or feet. A single window overlooked the front of the auditorium, where people were lining up with their plates for servings of the chopped pork.

Adderly took one of the armchairs, Cyl another. I opted to perch on the window ledge. To Adderly’s annoyance. For some reason, he seemed to think I was the one he had to worry about.

He didn’t realize that Cyl was no longer the trusting little Silly he remembered and her question came like a whiplash across his face. “Why did you kill him?”

“Hey, now, wait a minute here,” he protested. “A judge and a DA? Maybe I ought to have an attorney present.”

“You tell her what she needs to know,” I said, “or I guarantee you’ll be hearing the same questions from those reporters down there before you can get out of the parking lot. And ‘No Comment’ always sounds so much like ‘nolo contendere,’ don’t you think?”

He took a long moment to consider. “What I say stays here?”

I looked at Cyl but I couldn’t read her eyes.

“You’re an officer of the court,” the preacher reminded me.

Alarm bells were going off for the pragmatist, too.

“You’re stepping in quicksand here,” he warned.

I took a deep breath. Trust had to start somewhere. “It’s her call,” I said.

“Weird,” Adderly said at last. “I spend twenty years staying out of Colleton County and the first time I come back?” He shifted in the chair and crossed his legs.

What you have to understand is that things weren’t bad enough here. I never understood why the leadership sent me here in the first place. Yeah, this was Klan country—used to be big signs on both sides of Dobbs bragging about it, but not like other parts of the South or even parts of the North where we’d been ground down so far there was nowhere to go but up, nothing more to lose if we stood up for our rights. Desegregation had gone smoothly enough here. You had the usual prejudice and casual bigotry that’s still around today, but it wasn’t organized and systematic and black people here did have something to lose. They didn’t appreciate outsiders like me coming in to rock the boat, either.

“In two weeks, I maybe persuaded ten people to register to vote. ’Course, it might’ve been me, too. I was getting frustrated with NOISE. Seemed like all the effective action was happening somewhere else.”

“All the same, when word came down to get my butt up to Boston ’cause they were expecting violence with the new busing regulations, I just couldn’t get revved up for it. Isaac though, he would’ve caught the next Greyhound out of here if he’d had the money and a place to go. He wanted to leave in the worst way. You knew that?”

Silent tears ran down Cyl’s smooth brown cheeks as she nodded.

“I’m sorry,” Adderly said, “but I didn’t create the situation. There was a girl he loved, daughter of a preacher or an elder or somebody else whose shit didn’t stink, if you’ll forgive my crudeness. Her parents were dead-set against him so he got her pregnant, figuring they were so respectable they’d have to allow a wedding so that the baby wouldn’t be a bastard. Instead, her mother sent her somewhere up North to have an abortion.”

“Abortion?” Cyl looked shocked. “My grandmother said the baby was supposed to be given up for adoption.”

“That was what he let your grandmother think. Truth is, the girl’s mother told Isaac that he was about ten shades too dark. No daughter of hers was going to marry back into Africa or have his pickaninny baby either. Those where her exact words.”

“Isaac was hurting so bad, he took up with some white girl just to prove he could. ‘Too black for a black girl, just right for a white.’ That’s what he told me. He knew she came from a rough family, but he didn’t care.”

“Her cousin threatened to tell her brother and Isaac broke his nose with a two-by-four.”

Adderly stood up and walked over to the window where I was and stared down at the crowd that was laughing and talking and digging into the barbecue. He stood there for a long minute, then walked away. There was barely room to pass between the coffee table and the couch and the room wasn’t really long enough for pacing, but somehow he managed.

“It was all coming down on him and he begged to come to Boston with me.”

“Why didn’t you let him?” Cyl asked harshly.

“Girl, you forgetting the times? The circumstances? You think I had what I have now? That Isaac had two quarters to rub together?” He made another restless circuit of the room. “All he had was your grandmother’s generosity and some odd jobs he picked up in the neighborhood before barning season started. All the same, I did tell him that if he could get together the money for a bus ticket by the time I was ready to leave, I’d take him with me. There was no sexton at Mount Olive back then and they’d hired Isaac to do the yard work once a week. I walked over to help him that afternoon because I’d decided to leave for Boston the next day and I hoped that if he couldn’t come with me, maybe he could keep up the work, try to get out the vote that fall.”

His constricted pacing put my nerves on edge but Cyl sat motionless.

“He was cutting the grass when I got there, so I went back to what used to be the storage room, picked up the pruning shears and starting trimming that row of shrubs around back. I didn’t even realize anybody’d come up till I heard the lawnmower shut off and car doors slam, then loud male voices. I walked down to the corner and peeped through the bushes. There were five white men. Two had grabbed Isaac and a big guy was hitting him and yelling about his sister. Then he punched Isaac in the chest—right on the heart, I’d guess—and Isaac just sort of folded over like a rag doll.”

“The two guys holding him let go and he fell on the ground and one of them said, ‘Jesus, Buck! You’ve killed him!’ And Buck said he was faking, but the other guys were running back to their cars so Buck ran, too.”

He paused, as if expecting Cyl to speak.

She didn’t say a word. Just looked at him so steadily that he had to turn away.

“Okay, yeah, but that was twenty-one years ago. Easy enough now to say I should have gone running to the white sheriff and told him about five white guys I’d never seen before killing a black kid. I was a NOISE activist, for God’s sake! You think they’d take my word against theirs? And if I just walked away and headed for Boston, it would have been real easy for the white authorities around here to find a dozen reasons to come after me for Isaac’s death. I wouldn’t even have known who Buck Ferguson was if he hadn’t kept yelling about niggers fucking his sister.”

“All I could think of was getting the hell away without getting involved. I carried him into the storage room, then I got the mower and clippers and stuck them there, too. The room was just sheets of plywood nailed to two-by-four studs. I took a hammer and pulled one of them off and got Isaac into the crawl space under the church. I pushed him as far in as I could, back to a part that didn’t have any electric wires that people might have to get to. There wasn’t much room to dig, but I managed to scoop out a little hollow and cover him over and that’s where I left him. Your grandmother didn’t say much when he didn’t come home that night. It wasn’t the first time.”

Even with air-conditioning, the little lounge was beginning to feel hot and humid. Beads of perspiration stood out on Adderly’s face and he took a handkerchief and wiped them away.

“Next morning, I don’t know if you remember, but you and your grandmother and your cousins went off to pick dewberries for a truck farmer down the road?”

Cyl shook her head.

“Well, you did. Which was a good thing, because lying in bed that night, I realized I hadn’t thought of something. Then I remembered seeing a dead hound out by the side of the road—a big stray that got hit by a car. After y’all left that morning, I found a burlap sack in your grandmother’s garage and I waited till the road was clear and stuck the dog in the bag and carried it through the woods to Mount Olive.”

“There were sacks of quicklime in the storage room—that stuff they used to sprinkle down the hole to keep outhouses smelling sweet? I layered a whole sack of it over Isaac’s grave, then I made a little hole in that lattice skirting at the back of the church behind the shrubs and pushed the dog through it. I figured if the quicklime didn’t do the whole job, they’d find the dog first and think it crawled up under there to die and they wouldn’t look any farther.”

“Afterwards, I went back to the house, packed up my clothes and a few things of Isaac’s so y’all would think he’d gone with me, then I hitchhiked into Raleigh, cashed in my bus ticket to Boston and bought another one home to Wilmington.”

“Where you quit NOISE, studied for the bar and started preaching about people needing to take responsibility for their actions,” Cyl said.

“Makes me sound like a hypocrite, I know,” said Adderly. “But if I preach, it’s from experience. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Isaac and feel ashamed because I didn’t take responsibility for bringing his killer to justice. Maybe after all these years, we can find the men who held him down. Maybe they’re ready to accept their part in it and testify against Buck Ferguson.”

“Very noble,” I said. “And I suppose you’re willing to tell the Sheriff your part in all this and testify, too?”

“If that’s what it takes,” Adderly said.

“Even though Buck Ferguson died in prison at least eight years ago?”

“What?”

Most good lawyers are actors and Adderly’s certainly a good lawyer. Even so, his surprise looked genuine to me.

So did the expression of relief that immediately followed.