The Last Juror

Chapter 21

In a sweeping ruling that left no room for doubt or delay, the Court ordered the immediate termination of the dual school system. No more stalling, no more lawsuits, no more promises. Instant integration, and Clanton was as shocked as every other town in the South.

Harry Rex brought me the Court’s opinion and tried to explain its intricacies. It wasn’t that complicated. Every school district had to immediately implement a desegregation plan.

“This’ll sell some newspapers,” he predicted, unlit cigar crammed in his mouth.

All sorts of meetings were instantly arranged around town, and I covered them all. On a sweltering night in mid-July, a public gathering took place in the gym of the high school. The stands were packed, the floor covered with concerned parents. Mr. Walter Sullivan, the Times’s lawyer, also served as the attorney for the school board. He did most of the talking because he wasn’t elected in any way. The politicians preferred to hide behind him. He was blunt and said that in six weeks the Ford County school system would open and be fully desegregated.

A smaller meeting was held at the black school on Burley Street. Baggy and I were there, along with Wiley Meek, who took photos. Again Mr. Sullivan explained to the crowd what was about to happen. Twice his remarks were interrupted by applause.

The difference in those two meetings was astounding. The white parents were angry and frightened and I saw several women crying. The fateful day had finally arrived. At the black school there was an air of victory. The parents were concerned, but they were also elated that their children would finally be enrolled in the better schools. Though they had miles to go in housing employment, and health care, integration into the public schools was an enormous step forward in their battle for civil rights.

Miss Callie and Esau were there. They were treated with great respect by their neighbors. Six years earlier they had walked into the front door of the white school with Sam and fed him to the lions. For three years he was the only black kid in his class, and the family paid a price for it. Now it all seemed worth it, at least to them. Sam wasn’t around to interview.

There was also a meeting in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church. Whites only, and the crowd was slightly upper middle class. Its organizers had been raising money to build a private academy, and now suddenly the fund-raising was more urgent. Several doctors and lawyers were there, and most of the country-club types. Their children were apparently too good to go to school with black children.

They were quickly putting together a plan to open classes in an abandoned factory south of town. The building would be leased for a year or two until their capital campaign was complete. They were scrambling to hire teachers and order books but the most pressing concern, other than running from the blacks, was what to do about a football team. At times there was an air of hysteria, as if a 75 percent white school system would pose grave dangers for their kids.

I wrote long reports and ran bold headlines, and Harry Rex was right. The newspapers were selling. In fact, by late July 1970 our circulation topped five thousand, a stunning turnaround. After Rhoda Kassellaw and desegregation, I was getting a glimpse of what my friend Nick Diener said back at Syracuse. “A good small town weekly doesn’t print newspapers. It prints money.”

I needed news, and in Clanton it was not always available. In a slow week, I would run an overblown story on the latest filing in the Padgitt appeal. It was usually at the bottom of the front page and sounded as if the boy might walk out of Parchman at any minute. I’m not sure my readers cared much anymore. In early August, though, the paper got another boost when Davey Bigmouth Bass explained to me the rituals of high school football.

Wilson Caudle had no interest in sports, which was fine except that everyone else in Clanton lived and died with the Cougars on Friday night. He shoved Bigmouth to the back of the paper and rarely ran photos. I smelled money, and the Cougars became front page news.

My football career ended in the ninth grade, at the hands of a sadistic ex-Marine my soft little prep school had for some reason hired to coach us. Memphis in August is the tropics; football practice should be banned then and there. I was running laps around the practice field, in full gear, helmet and all, in ninety-five-degree heat and humidity, and the coach for some reason refused to give us water. The tennis courts were next to the field, and after I finished vomiting I gazed upon them and saw two girls swatting tennis balls with two guys. With the girls in the scene everything was very pleasant, but what really got my attention were the large bottles of cold water they drank whenever they wanted.

I quit football and took up tennis and girls, and never for an instant regretted it. My school played its games on Saturday afternoons, so I was not baptized in the religion of Friday night football.

I happily became a later convert.

When the Cougars assembled for their first practice, Bigmouth and Wiley were there to cover it. We ran a large front page photo of four players, two white and two black, and another of the coaching staff, which included a black assistant. Bigmouth wrote columns about the team and its players and prospects, and this was only the first week of practice.

We covered the opening of school, including interviews with students, teachers, and administrators, and our slant was openly positive. In truth, Clanton had little of the racial unrest that was common throughout the Deep South when schools opened that August.

The Times did big stories about the cheerleaders, the band, the junior high teams — everything we could possibly think of. And every story had several photos. I don’t know how many kids failed to make the pages of our paper, but there weren’t many.

The first football game was an annual family brawl against Karaway, a much smaller town that had a much better coach. I sat with Harry Rex and we screamed until we were hoarse. The game was a sell-out and the crowd was mostly white.

But those white folks who had been so adamantly opposed to accepting black students were suddenly transformed that Friday night. In the first quarter of the first game, a star was born when Ricky Patterson, a pint-size black kid who could fly, ran eighty yards the first time he touched the ball. The second time he went forty-five, and from then on whenever they tossed it to him the entire crowd stood and yelled. Six weeks after the desegregation order hit the town, I saw narrow-minded, intolerant rednecks screaming like maniacs and bouncing up and down whenever Ricky got the ball.

Clanton won 34–30 in a cliffhanger, and our coverage of the game was shameless. The entire front page was nothing but football. We immediately initated a Player-of-the-Week, with a $100 scholarship award that went into some vague fund that took us months to figure out. Ricky was our first honoree, and so that required yet another interview with another photo.

When Clanton won its first four games, the Times was there to stir up the frenzy. Our circulation reached fifty-five hundred.

One very hot day in early September, I was strolling around the square, going from my office to the bank. I was wearing my usual garb — faded jeans, rumpled cotton button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, loafers, no socks. I was then twenty-four years old and because I owned a business I was slowly turning my thoughts away from college and toward a career. Very slowly. I had long hair and still dressed like a student. I generally gave little thought to what I wore or what image I portrayed.

This lack of concern was not shared by all.

Mr. Mitlo grabbed me on the sidewalk and shoved me into his small haberdashery. “I been waiting for you,” he said with a thick accent, one of the few in Clanton. He was a Hungarian and had some colorful history of escaping from Europe while leaving behind a child or two. He was on my list of human interest stories to pursue as soon as football season was over.

“Look at you!” he sneered as I stood just inside his door, by a rack of belts. But he was smiling and with foreigners it’s easy to dismiss their bluntness due to translation problems.

I sort of looked at myself. What exactly was the problem?

Evidently, there were many. “You are a professional,” he informed me. “A very important man in this town, and you are dressed like, uh, well...” He scratched his bearded chin as he searched for the proper insult.

I tried to help. “A student.”

“No,” he said, wagging an index finger back and forth as if no student had ever looked that bad. He gave up on the put-down and continued the lecture.

“You are unique — how many people own a newspaper? You are educated, which is rare around here. And from up North! You are young, but you shouldn’t look so, so, immature. We must work on your image.”

We went to work, not that I had a choice. He advertised heavily in the Times, so I certainly couldn’t tell him to take a hike. Plus, he made sense. The student days were gone, the revolution was over. I had escaped Vietnam and the sixties and college, and, though I wasn’t ready to settle down to a wife and parenthood, I was beginning to feel my age.

“You must wear suits,” he decided as he went through racks of clothes. Mitlo had been known to walk up to the president of a bank and, in a crowd, comment on a faulty shirt and suit combo, or a drab tie. He and Harry Rex didn’t get along at all.

I was not about to start wearing gray suits and wing tips. He pulled out a light blue seersucker suit, found a white shirt, then went straight for the tie rack where he picked out the perfect red-and-gold-striped bow tie. “Let’s try this,” he announced when his selections were finished. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a dressing room. Thankfully, the store was empty. I had no choice.

I gave up on the bow tie. Mitlo reached up and in a skillful flourish had it fixed in a second. “Much better,” he said, examining the finished product. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time. I wasn’t sure, but then I was intrigued by the transformation. It gave me character and individuality.

Whether I wanted it or not, the outfit was about to become mine. I had to wear it at least once.

To top it off, he found a white Panama hat that fit nicely on my shaggy head. As he adusted it here and there, he tugged at a patch of hair over my ear and said, “Too much hair. You are a professional. Cut it.”

He altered the slacks and jacket and pressed the shirt, and the following day I arrived to collect my new outfit. I planned to simply pick it up, take it home, then wait and wait until there was a slow day around town and wear it. I intended to walk straight to Mitlo’s so he could see me in his creation.

He, of course, had other plans. He insisted I try it on, and when I did he then insisted that I walk around the entire square to collect my compliments.

“I’m really in a hurry,” I said. Chancery court was in session and downtown was busy.

“I insist,” he said dramatically, wagging the finger as if he would not negotiate for a second.

He adjusted the hat, and the final prop was a long black cigar which he cut, stuffed in my mouth, and lit with a match. “A powerful image,” he said proudly. “The town’s only publisher. Now off.”

No one recognized me for the first half block. Two farmers in front of the feed store gave me a look, but then I didn’t like the way they were dressed either. I felt like Harry Rex with the cigar. Mine was lit, though, and very strong. I sprinted by his office. Mrs. Gladys Wilkins ran her husband’s insurance agency. She was about forty, very pretty and always well dressed. When she saw me she stopped dead in her tracks, then said, “Why, Willie Traynor. Don’t you look distinguished.”

“Thank you.”

“Sorta reminds me of Mark Twain.”

I walked on, feeling better. Two secretaries did double-takes. “Love that bow tie,” one of them called to me. Mrs. Clare Ruth Seagraves stopped me and talked on and on about something I’d written months earlier and had forgotten. As she talked she examined my suit and bow tie and hat and didn’t even mind the cigar. “You look quite handsome, Mr. Traynor,” she said finally, and seemed embarrassed by her candor. I walked slower and slower around the square and decided that Mitlo was right. I was a professional, a publisher, an important person in Clanton even if I didn’t feel too important, and a new image was in order.

We’d have to find some weaker cigars, though. By the time I completed my tour of the square, I was dizzy and had to sit down.

Mr. Mitlo ordered another blue seersucker and two light gray ones. He decided my wardrobe would not be dark like lawyers’ and bankers’, but light and cool and a bit unconventional. He dedicated himself to finding me some unique bow ties and proper fabrics for the fall and winter.

Within a month Clanton was accustomed to having a new character around the square. I was getting noticed, especially by the opposite sex. Harry Rex laughed at me, but then his own outfits were comical.

The ladies loved it.

Chapter 22

In late September there were two notable deaths in one week. The first was Mr. Wilson Caudle. He died at home, alone, in the bedroom where he’d secluded himself since the day he walked out of the Times. It was odd that I had not spoken to him once in the six months I’d owned the paper, but I’d been too busy to fret over it. I certainly didn’t want any advice from Spot. And, sadly, I knew of no one who’d either seen him or talked to him in the past six months.

He died on a Thursday and was buried on a Saturday. On Friday I hustled over to Mr. Mitlo’s and we had a wardrobe session regarding the proper funeral attire for someone of my stature. He insisted on a black suit, and he had just the perfect bow tie. It was narrow with black and maroon stripes, very dignified, very respectful, and when it was tied and I was properly turned out, I had to admit that the image was impressive. He pulled out a black felt fedora from his personal collection and proudly loaned it to me for the funeral. He said often that it was a shame American men didn’t wear hats anymore.

The final touch was a shiny black wooden cane. When he produced it I just stared. “I don’t need a cane,” I said. It seemed quite foolish.

“It’s a walking stick,” he said, thrusting it at me.

“What’s the difference?”

He then launched into a baffling history of the crucial role walking sticks had played in the evolution of modern European male fashion. He felt passionately about it, and the more worked up he got, the thicker his accent became, and the less I understood. To shut him up I took the stick.

The following day, when I walked into the Methodist church for Spot’s funeral, the ladies stared at me. Some of the men did too, most of them wondering what the hell I was doing with a black hat and a cane. In a whisper just loud enough for me to hear, Stan Atcavage, my banker, said behind me, “I guess he’s gonna sing and dance for us.”

“Been hangin’ around Mitlo’s again,” someone whispered back.

I accidentally whacked the cane on the pew in front of me, and the noise jolted the mourners. I wasn’t sure what one did with a cane while one was seated for a funeral. I squeezed it between my legs and placed the hat in my lap. Portraying the right image took work. I looked around and saw Mitlo. He was beaming at me.

The choir began “Amazing Grace,” and we fell into a somber mood. Reverend Clinkscale then recited Mr. Caudle’s basics — born in 1896, the only child of our beloved Miss Emma Caudle, a widower with no children of his own, a veteran of the First War, and for over fifty years the editor of our county weekly. There he brought to an art form the obituaries, which would forever be Spot’s claim to fame.

The reverend rambled on a bit, then a soloist broke the monotony. It was my fourth funeral since landing in Clanton. Except for my mother’s, I had never attended one before. They were social events in the small town, and often I heard such gems as, “Wasn’t that a lovely service,” and “Take care, I’ll see you at the funeral,” and, my favorite, “She would have loved it.”

“She,” of course, was the deceased.

Folks took off work and wore their Sunday best. If you didn’t go to funerals, then you were downright peculiar. Since I had enough oddities working against me, I was determined to properly honor the dead.

The second death occurred later that night, and when I heard about it on Monday I went to my apartment and found my pistol.

Malcolm Vince was shot twice in the head as he left a honky-tonk in a very remote part of Tishomingo County. Tishomingo was dry, the tonk was illegal, and that’s why it was hidden so deep in the sticks.

There were no witnesses to the killing. Malcolm had been drinking beer and shooting pool, behaving himself generally and causing no trouble. Two acquaintances told the police that Malcolm left by himself around 11 P.M. after about three hours in the tonk. He was in good spirits and was not drunk. He said good-bye to them, walked outside, and within seconds they heard gunfire. They were almost certain he was not armed.

The joint was at the end of a dirt trail, and a quarter of a mile up the road a sentry guarded a passageway with a shotgun. In theory his job was to alert the owner if the police or other unsavory characters were approaching. Tishomingo was on the state line, and there had historically been feuds with some hoodlums over in Alabama. Tonks were favorite places to settle scores and such. The sentry heard the shots that killed Malcolm, and he was certain no car or truck had fled the scene afterward. Any such vehicle would’ve had to pass by him.

Whoever killed Malcolm had come from the woods, on foot, and carried out the hit. I talked to the Sheriff of Tishomingo County. He was of the opinion that someone was after Malcolm. It certainly wasn’t a garden-variety honky-tonk flare-up.

“Any idea who might be after Mr. Vince?” I asked, desperately hoping that Malcolm had made some enemies two hours away.

“No idea,” he said. “The boy hadn’t lived here long.”

For two days I carried the pistol in my pocket, then, again, grew weary of that. If the Padgitts wanted to get me or one of the jurors, or Judge Loopus or Ernie Gaddis or anyone they deemed guilty of helping send Danny away, then there was little we could do to stop them.

The paper that week was devoted to Mr. Wilson Caudle. I pulled out some old photos from the archives and plastered them all over the front page. We ran testimonials, stories, and lots of paid announcements of sympathy from his many friends. I then rehashed everything I’d written about him into the longest obituary in the history of the newspaper.

Spot deserved it.

I wasn’t sure what to do with the story about Malcolm Vince. He was not a resident of Ford County, thus not entirely eligible for an obituary. Our rules were quite flexible when it came to that issue. A prominent Ford Countian who’d moved away would still qualify for an obituary, but obviously there had to be something to write about. One who’d just passed through the county and either had no family or contributed little could not qualify. Such was the case of Malcolm Vince.

If I exaggerated the story, the Padgitts would get the satisfaction of further intimidating the county. They would frighten us again. (Of those who’d heard of the killing, no one thought it might be the work of anyone other than the Padgitts.)

If I ignored the story, then I would be running scared and shirking my responsibility as a journalist. Baggy thought it was front page material, but there was no room when I was finished with our farewell to Mr. Caudle. I ran it at the top of page three, with the headline PADGITT WITNESS MURDERED IN TISHOMINGO COUNTY. My first headline had been MALCOLM VINCE MURDERED IN TISHOMINGO COUNTY, but Baggy felt strongly that we should use the Padgitt name with the word “murdered” in the headline. The story was three hundred words.

I drove to Corinth to snoop around. Harry Rex gave me the name of Malcolm’s divorce lawyer, a local act who went by the name of Pud Perryman. His office was on Main Street, between a barbershop and a Chinese seamstress, and when I opened the door I immediately knew that Mr. Perryman was the least successful lawyer I would ever meet. The place reeked of lost cases, dissatisfied clients, and unpaid bills. The carpet was stained and threadbare. The furniture was left over from the fifties. A rancid haze of old and new cigarette smoke hung in layers, dangerously close to my head.

Mr. Perryman himself showed no signs of prosperity. He was around forty-five, potbellied, unkempt, unshaven, red-eyed. The last hangover was wearing off slowly. He informed me he was a divorce and property guy, and I was supposed to be impressed by this. Either he didn’t charge enough or he attracted clients with little to sell or fight over.

He hadn’t seen Malcolm in a month, he said as he looked for a file among the landfill that covered his desk. The divorce had never been filed. His efforts to work out an agreement with Lydia’s lawyer had gone nowhere. “She flew the coop,” he said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“She’s gone. Packed up after the trial over there and hit the road. Took the kid, vanished.”

I really didn’t care what happened to Lydia. I was much more concerned with who shot Malcolm. Pud offered a couple of vague theories, but they broke down after a few basic questions. He reminded me of Baggy — a local courthouse gossipmonger who’d make up a rumor if he doesn’t hear a new one within an hour.

Lydia had no boyfriends or brothers or anyone else who might want to shoot Malcolm in the heat of a bad divorce. And, of course, there was no divorce. The bad blood hadn’t even begun!

Mr. Perryman gave the impression of one who preferred to prattle and tell lies all day, as opposed to tending to his files. I was in his office for almost an hour, and when I finally managed to leave I ran outside for fresh air.

I drove thirty minutes to Iuka, the Tishomingo County seat, where I found Sheriff Spinner just in time to buy him lunch. Over barbecued chicken in a crowded café, he brought me up to date on the murder. It was a clean hit by someone who knew the area well. They had found nothing — no footprints, no shell casings, nothing. The weapon had been a .44 Magnum, and the two shots had practically blown off Malcolm’s head. For drama, he unholstered his service revolver and passed it over. “This is a forty-four,” he said. It was twice as heavy as my meager weapon. I lost what little appetite I had.

They had talked to every acquaintance they could find. Malcolm had lived in the area for about five months. He had no criminal record, no arrests, no reports of fistfights, no dice shooting, disturbances, or drunken brawls. He went to the tonk once a week, where he shot pool and drank beer and never raised his voice. There were no loans or bills past due for more than sixty days. There appeared to be no illicit affairs or jealous husbands.

“I can’t find a motive,” the Sheriff said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

I told him about Malcolm’s testimony in the Padgitt trial, and about how Danny threatened the jury. He listened intently, and said little afterward. I got the clear impression he preferred to stay in Tishomingo County and wanted no part of the Padgitts.

“That could be your motive,” I said when I finished.

“Revenge?”

“Sure. These are nasty people.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of them. Guess we’re lucky we weren’t on that jury, huh?”

Driving back to Clanton, I could not erase the image of the Sheriff’s face when he said that. Gone was the swagger of a well-armed man of the law. Spinner was truly grateful he was two counties away, and had nothing to do with the Padgitts.

His investigation was dead. Case closed.

Chapter 23

The only Jew in Clanton was Mr. Harvey Kohn, a dapper little man who’d been selling shoes and handbags to ladies for decades. His store was on the square, next door to the Sullivan law firm, in a row of buildings he’d bought during the Depression. He was a widower and his children had fled Clanton after high school. Once a month Mr. Kohn drove to Tupelo to worship in the nearest synagogue.

Kohn’s Shoes aimed at the higher end of the market, which was tricky in a small town like Clanton. The few wealthy ladies in town preferred shopping in Memphis, where they could pay higher prices and talk about it back home. To make his shoes attractive, Mr. Kohn put shockingly high prices on them, then slashed them with deep discounts. The local ladies could then throw out any price they wanted when they showed off their latest purchases.

He ran the store himself, opening early and staying late, usually with the help of a part-time student. Two years before I arrived in Clanton he hired a sixteen-year-old black kid named Sam Ruffin to unpack inventory, move stock, clean the place, answer the phone. Sam proved to be bright and industrious. He was courteous, mannerly, well dressed, and before long he could be trusted to run the store while Mr. Kohn went home every day at precisely eleven forty-five for a quick lunch and a long nap.

A lady by the name of Iris Durant dropped in around noon one day and found Sam all alone. Iris was forty-one years old, the mother of two teenage boys, one in Sam’s class at Clanton High. She was mildly attractive, liked to flirt and wear mini-skirts, and usually selected shoes from Mr. Kohn’s more exotic inventory. She tried about two dozen varieties, bought nothing and took her time about it. Sam knew his products and was very careful with her feet.

She was back the next day, same time, shorter skirt, heavier makeup. Barefoot, she seduced Sam on Mr. Kohn’s desk in his small office just behind the cash register. Thus began a torrid affair that would change both their lives.

Several times a week, Iris went shoe shopping. Sam found a more comfortable spot upstairs on an old sofa. He would lock the store for fifteen minutes, turn off the lights, and dash up.

Iris’s husband was a sergeant in the Mississippi Highway Patrol. Alarmed at the number of new shoes in her closet, he became suspicious. Suspicion had been a way of life with Iris.

He hired Harry Rex to investigate. A Cub Scout could’ve caught the lovers. Three straight days she walked into Kohn’s at the same time; three straight days Sam quickly locked the front door, eyes darting in all directions; three straight days the lights went off, etc. On the fourth day, Harry Rex and Rafe sneaked in the back of the store. They heard noises upstairs. Rafe barged into the love nest and in five seconds gathered enough evidence to send both of them packing.

Mr. Kohn fired Sam an hour later. Harry Rex filed the divorce that afternoon. Iris was later admitted to the hospital with cuts, abrasions, and a broken nose. Her husband beat her with his fists until she was unconscious. After dark, three uniformed state troopers knocked on the door of Sam’s home in Lowtown. They explained to his parents that he was wanted by the police in connection with some vague embezzling charge at Kohn’s. If convicted he could be sentenced to twenty years in prison. They also told them, off the record of course, that Sam had been caught having sex with a white lady, another man’s wife, and there was a contract on his head. Five thousand bucks.

Iris left town disgraced, divorced, without her children, and afraid to return.

I had heard different versions of Sam’s story. It was old gossip by the time I arrived in Clanton, but it was still sensational enough to find its way into many conversations. In the South, it was not unusual for white men to keep black mistresses, but Sam’s was the first documented case of a white woman crossing the color line in Clanton.

Baggy had been the one to tell me the story. Harry Rex had confirmed much of it.

Miss Callie refused to talk about it. Sam was her youngest, and he couldn’t come home. He had fled, dropped out of high school, and spent the past two years living off his brothers and sisters. Now he was calling me.

I went to the courthouse and dug through drawers of old files. I found no record of an indictment against Sam Ruffin. I asked Sheriff Coley if he had an outstanding warrant. He dodged the question and wanted to know why I was poking around in such an old case. I asked him if Sam would be arrested if he came home. Again, no direct answer. “Be careful, Mr. Traynor,” he warned, but would not elaborate.

I went to Harry Rex and asked about the now legendary contract on Sam’s head. He described his client, Sergeant Durant, as a former Marine, an expert marksman with any number of weapons, a career cop, a hothead who was horribly embarrassed by Iris’s indiscretion, and who felt the only honorable way out was to kill her lover. He had thought about killing her, but didn’t want to go to prison. He felt safer killing a black kid. A Ford County jury would be more sympathetic.

“And he wants to do it himself,” Harry Rex explained. “That way he can save the five grand.”

He enjoyed delivering such dire news to me, but he did admit that he hadn’t seen his client in a year and a half, and he wasn’t sure if Mr. Durant hadn’t already remarried.

Thursday at noon we settled down at the table on the porch and thanked the Lord for the delicious meal we were about to receive. Esau was at work.

As the garden ripened in late summer, we had enjoyed many vegetarian lunches. Red and yellow tomatoes, cucumbers and onions in vinegar, butter beans, snap beans, peas, okra, squash, boiled potatoes, corn on the cob, and always hot corn bread. Now, as the air was cooler and the leaves were turning, Miss Callie was preparing heartier dishes — duck stew, lamb stew, chili, red beans and rice with pork sausage, and the old standby, pot roast.

The meal that day was chicken and dumplings. I was eating slowly, something she had encouraged me to do. I was half through when I said, “Sam called me, Miss Callie.”

She paused and swallowed, then said, “How is he?”

“He’s fine. He wants to come home this Christmas, said everybody else was coming back, and he wants to be here.”

“Do you know where he is?” she asked.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“He’s in Memphis. We’re supposed to meet tomorrow, up there.”

“Why are you meeting with Sam?” She seemed very suspicious of my involvement.

“He wants me to help him. Max and Bobby told him about our friendship. He said he thinks I’m a white person who can be trusted.”

“It could be dangerous,” she said.

“For who?”

“Both of you.”

Her doctor was concerned about her weight. At times she was too, but not always. With particularly heavy dishes, like stews and dumplings, she took small portions and ate slowly. The news of Sam gave her a reason to stop eating altogether. She folded her napkin and began talking.

Sam left Clanton in the middle of the night on a Greyhound bus headed for Memphis. He called Callie and Esau when he arrived there. The next day a friend drove up with some money and clothing. As the story about Iris broke fast around town, Callie and Esau were convinced their youngest son was about to be murdered by the cops. Highway patrol cars eased by their house at all hours of the day and night. There were anonymous phone calls with threats and abusive language.

Mr. Kohn filed some papers in court. A hearing date came and went without Sam’s appearance. Miss Callie never saw an official indictment, but then she wasn’t sure what one looked like.

Memphis seemed too close, so Sam drifted to Milwaukee where he hid with Bobby for a few months. For two years now, he had drifted from one sibling to the next, always traveling at night, always afraid that he was about to be caught. The older Ruffin children called home often and wrote once a week, but they were afraid to mention Sam. Someone might be listening.

“He was wrong to get involved with a woman like that,” Miss Callie said, sipping tea. I had effectively ruined her lunch, but not mine. “But he was so young. He didn’t chase her.”

The next day I became the unofficial go-between for Sam Ruffin and his parents.

We met in a coffee shop in a shopping mall in south Memphis. From somewhere in the distance, he watched me wait for thirty minutes before he popped in from nowhere and sat across from me. Two years on the run had taught him a few tricks.

His youthful face was showing the strain of life on the lam. Out of habit, he continually looked right and left. He tried mightily to hold eye contact, but he could do it only for a few seconds. Not surprisingly, he was soft-spoken, articulate, very polite. And quite thankful that I had been willing to step forward and explore the possibility of helping him.

He thanked me for the courtesies and friendship I’d shown his mother. Bobby in Milwaukee had shown him the Times stories. We talked about his siblings, his movements from UCLA to Duke, then to Toledo, then to Grinnell in Iowa. He couldn’t live like that much longer. He was desperate for a resolution to the mess at home so he could get on with a normal life. He finished high school in Milwaukee, and planned eventually to go to law school. But he couldn’t do it living like a fugitive.

“There’s a fair amount of pressure on me, you know,” he said. “Seven brothers and sisters, seven PhD’s.”

I described my fruitless search for an indictment, my inquiries to Sheriff Coley, and my conversation with Harry Rex about Mr. Durant’s current mood. Sam thanked me profusely for this information, and for my willingness to get involved.

“There’s no threat of being arrested,” I assured him. “There is, however, the threat of catching a bullet.”

“I’d rather be arrested,” he said.

“Me too.”

“He’s a very scary man,” Sam said of Mr. Durant. A story followed, one in which I did not get all the details. Seems as though Iris was now living in Memphis. Sam kept in touch. She had told him some horrible things about her ex-husband and her two teenaged boys and the threats they’d made against her. She was not welcome anywhere in Ford County. Her life might be in danger too. The boys repeatedly said they hated her and never wanted to see her again.

She was a broken woman who was racked with guilt and suffering a nervous breakdown.

“And it’s my fault,” Sam said. “I was raised better.”

Our meeting lasted an hour, and we promised to get together in a couple of weeks. He handed me two thick letters he’d written to his parents, and we said good-bye. He disappeared in a crowd of shoppers and I couldn’t help but ask myself where an eighteen-year-old kid hides? How does he travel, move around? How does he survive day to day? And Sam was not some street kid who’d learned to live by his wits and fists.

I told Harry Rex about our meeting in Memphis. My lofty goal was to somehow convince Mr. Durant to leave Sam alone.

Since I was living under the assumption that my name was on a not-so-favored list somewhere on Padgitt Island, I had no desire to have it added to another list. I swore Harry Rex to secrecy, and had no trouble believing he would protect my role as the intermediary.

Sam would agree to leave Ford County, to finish high school up North, then stay there for college and probably for the rest of his life. The kid simply wanted to be able to see his parents, to have short visits in Clanton, and to be able to live without looking over his shoulder.

Harry Rex didn’t care, nor did he want to get involved. He promised to relay the message to Mr. Durant, but he wasn’t optimistic it would get a sympathetic ear. “He’s a nasty sumbitch,” he said more than once.

Chapter 24

In early December, I returned to Tishomingo County for a follow-up with Sheriff Spinner. I was not surprised to learn that the investigation of the murder of Malcolm Vince had produced nothing new. More than once, Spinner described it as a “clean hit,” with nothing left behind but a dead body and two bullets that were virtually untraceable. His men had talked to every possible friend, acquaintance, and coworker, and found no one who knew of any reason why Malcolm would meet such a violent end.

Spinner had also talked to Sheriff Mackey Don Coley, and not surprisingly, our Sheriff had expressed doubt that the murder had anything to do with the Padgitt trial over in Ford County. It appeared as though the two sheriffs had some history, and I was relieved to hear Spinner say, “Ol’ Coley couldn’t catch a jaywalker on Main Street.”

I laughed real loud and added, helpfully, “Yeah, he and the Padgitts go way back.”

“I told him you’d been over, snoopin’ around. He said, ‘That boy’s gonna get hurt.’ Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Me and Coley see things differently.”

“Election’s a few months away.”

“Yes it is. I hear Coley’s got two or three opponents.”

“Just takes one.”

Again, he promised to call if something new developed, but both of us knew that was not going to happen. I left Iuka and drove to Memphis.

Trooper Durant had been quite pleased to learn that his threats were still hanging over the head of Sam Ruffin. Harry Rex had eventually delivered the word that the boy was still on the run but desperately wanted to come home and see his momma.

Durant had not remarried. He was very much alone and extremely bitter and embarrassed about his wife’s affair. He ranted at Harry Rex about how his life had been destroyed, and worse, how his two sons were subject to ridicule and abuse because of what their mother did. The white kids at school taunted them daily. The black kids, their new classmates at Clanton High, were smug and made wisecracks about it.

Both boys were expert marksmen and avid hunters, and the three Durants had vowed to put a bullet into Sam Ruffin’s head if given the chance. They knew exactly where the Ruffins lived in Lowtown. Durant commented on the annual pilgrimage many blacks from the North made at Christmastime. “If that boy sneaks home, we’ll be waitin’,” he promised Harry Rex.

He also had some venom for me, and for my heartwarming stories about Miss Callie and her older children. He guessed correctly that I was the family’s contact with Sam.

“You’d better get your nose outta this mess,” Harry Rex warned me after his meeting with Durant. “This is a nasty character.”

I wasn’t anxious to have someone else dreaming of my painful death.

I met Sam at a truck stop near the state line, about a mile into Tennessee. Miss Callie had sent cakes and pies and letters and some cash, an entire cardboard box that filled the other seat in my little Spitfire. It was the first time in two years she had been able to touch him in any way. He tried to read one of her letters, but became emotional and put it back in the envelope. “I’m so homesick,” he said, wiping huge tears while at the same time trying to hide them from the truckers eating nearby. He was a lost, scared little boy.

With brutal honesty, I recounted the conversation with Harry Rex. Sam had naively thought his offer to stay away from Ford County but visit occasionally would be acceptable to Mr. Durant. He had little grasp of the hatred he had inspired. He did, however, seem to appreciate the danger.

“He’ll kill you, Sam,” I said gravely.

“And he’ll get by with it, won’t he?”

“What difference will that make to you? You’ll be just as dead. Miss Callie would rather have you alive up North than dead in the Clanton cemetery.”

We agreed to meet again in two weeks. He was doing his Christmas shopping, and he would have gifts for his parents and family.

We said good-bye and left the dining area. I was almost to my car when I decided to step back inside and use the men’s room. It was in the rear of a tacky gift shop next to the café. I glanced out a window and saw Sam, very suspiciously, jump into a car driven by a white woman. She looked to be older, early forties. Iris, I presumed. Some people never learn.

The Ruffin clan began arriving three days before Christmas. Miss Callie had been cooking for a week. She sent me to the grocery store twice for emergency supplies. I was quickly adopted into the family and given full privileges, the highest of which was to eat whenever and whatever I wanted.

Growing up in that house, the children’s lives had been centered around their parents, each other, the Bible, and the kitchen table. And for the holidays there was always a fresh dish of something on the table, and another two or three on the stove or in the oven. The announcement “Pecan pies are ready!” sent shockwaves through the small house, across the porch, and even into the street. The family gathered at the table where Esau rather quickly thanked the Lord yet again for his family and their health and for the food they were about to “partake;” then the pies would be cut into thick wedges, laid on saucers, and carried off in all directions.

The same ritual was followed for pumpkin pies, coconut pies, strawberry cakes, the list went on and on. And those were just the light little snacks that carried them from one major meal to the next.

Unlike their mother, the Ruffin children were not the slightest bit heavy. And I soon learned why. They complained that they were unable to eat like this anymore. The food where they lived was bland and much of it was frozen and mass-produced. There were a lot of ethnic foods they simply could not digest. And the people ate in a hurry. The list of complaints grew.

My hunch was that they had been so spoiled by Miss Callie’s cooking that nothing would ever measure up.

Carlota, who was single and taught urban studies at UCLA, was especially entertaining when telling stories of the latest wacky food trends sweeping California. Raw foods were the current rage — lunch was a plate of raw carrots and raw celery, all to be choked down with a small cup of hot herbal tea.

Gloria, who taught Italian at Duke, was considered the luckiest of the seven because she was still in the South. She and Miss Callie compared notes on the different recipes for things such as corn bread, Brunswick stew, and even collard greens. These discussions often turned serious, with the men offering opinions and observations, and more than one argument erupted.

After a three hour lunch, Leon (Leonardo), who taught biology at Purdue, asked me to go for a ride. He was the second oldest, and carried a slight academic air that the others had managed to avoid. He had a beard, smoked a pipe, wore a tweed blazer with worn arm patches, and used a vocabulary that he must’ve spent hours practicing.

We roamed the streets of Clanton in his car. He wanted to know about Sam, and I told him everything. In my opinion, whatever that was worth, it was too dangerous for him to enter Ford County.

And he wanted to know about the trial of Danny Padgitt. I had sent copies of the Times to all of the Ruffins. One of Baggy’s reports had emphasized the threat made by Danny to the jurors. The exact quote had been highlighted, “You convict me, and I’ll get every damned one of you.”

“Will he ever be released from prison?” Leon asked.

“Yes,” I said, reluctantly.

“When?”

“No one knows. He got life for murder, life for rape. Ten years is the minimum for each, but I’m told weird things happen in the Mississippi parole system.”

“So it’s twenty years minimum?” I’m sure he was thinking about his mother’s age. She was fifty-nine.

“No one’s sure. There is the possibility of good time, which reduces the minimum.”

He seemed as confused by this as I had been. Truth was, no one connected to either the judicial system or the penal system had been able to answer my questions about Danny’s sentence. Parole in Mississippi was a vast dark pit, and I was afraid to get too close.

Leon told me that he had quizzed his mother at length about the verdict. Specifically, did she vote for the life sentence, or did she want death? Her response had been that the jury vowed to keep its deliberations a secret. “What do you know?” he asked me.

Not much. She had strongly implied to me that she had not agreed with the verdict, but it was nothing definite. In the weeks after the verdict there had been an avalanche of speculation. Most courthouse regulars had settled on the theory that three, maybe four, of the jurors had refused to vote for the death penalty. Miss Callie was generally considered not to be in that group.

“Did the Padgitts get to them?” he asked. We were easing into the long shaded front drive of Clanton High School.

“That’s the prevailing theory,” I said. “But no one really knows. The last death penalty in this county for a white defendant was forty years ago.”

He stopped his car and we looked at the stately oak doors of the school. “So it’s finally integrated,” he said.

“It is.”

“Never thought I’d see it.” He smiled with great satisfaction. “I used to dream of going to this school. My father worked as a janitor here when I was a little boy, and I would come over on Saturdays and walk those long hallways and see how nice everything was. I understood why I wasn’t welcome here, but I never accepted it.”

There was not much I could add to this, so I just listened. He seemed more sad than bitter.

We finally drove away and crossed the tracks. Back in Lowtown, I was amazed at the number of fine automobiles with out-of-state tags that were parked tightly in the streets. Large families sat on porches in the frigid air; children played in the yards and the streets. Other cars arrived, all with brightly wrapped packages in the rear windows.

“Home is where Momma is,” Leon said. “And everybody comes home for Christmas.”

As we stopped near Miss Callie’s, Leon thanked me for befriending his mother. “She talks about you all the time,” he said.

“It’s all about lunch,” I said, and we both laughed. At the front gate, a new aroma wafted from the house. Leon froze, took a long whiff, said, “Pumpkin pie.” The voice of experience.

At various times, each of the seven professors thanked me for my friendship with Miss Callie. She had shared her life with many, had lots of close friends, but for more than eight months had especially cherished her time with me.

I left them late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve as they were preparing for church. Afterward, there would be gifts and singing. There were more than twenty Ruffins staying in the house; I couldn’t imagine where everyone slept, and I was certain no one really cared.

As accepted as I was, I did feel the need to leave them at some point. Later, there would be hugs and tears, and songs and stories, and, though I was certainly welcome to experience all of it, I knew there were times when families needed to be alone.

What did I know about families?

I drove to Memphis, where my childhood home had not seen a Christmas decoration in ten years. My father and I had dinner at a Chinese joint not far from the house. As I choked down bad wonton soup I couldn’t help but think of the chaos of Miss Callie’s kitchen and all those wonderful dishes being pulled from the oven.

My father worked hard to seem interested in my newspaper. I obligingly sent him a copy each week, but after a few minutes of chitchat I could tell he had never read a word. He was concerned with some ominous connection between the war in Southeast Asia and the bond market.

We ate quickly and went in different directions. Sadly, neither of us had given any thought to exchanging gifts.

Christmas lunch was with BeeBee, who, unlike my father, was delighted to see me. She invited three of her little blue-haired widow friends over for sherry and ham, and the five of us proceeded to get tipsy. I regaled them with stories from Ford County, some accurate, some highly embellished. Hanging around Baggy and Harry Rex, I was learning the art of storytelling.

By 3 P.M., we were all napping. Early the next morning, I raced back to Clanton.

Chapter 25

One frigid day late in January, shots rang out somewhere around the square. I was sitting at my desk, peacefully typing a story about Mr. Lamar Farlowe and his recent reunion in Chicago with his battalion of Army paratroopers, when a bullet shattered a windowpane less than twenty feet from my head. A slow news week thus came to a sudden end.

My bullet was either the second or the third in a fairly rapid sequence. I hit the floor with all sorts of thoughts — Where was my pistol? Were the Padgitts assaulting the town? Were Trooper Durant and his boys after me? On my hands and knees I scrambled to my briefcase as shots continued to crack through the air; they sounded like they were coming from across the street, but in the horror of the moment I really couldn’t tell. They sounded much louder after one hit my office.

I emptied the briefcase and then remembered the pistol was either in my car or my apartment. I was unarmed and felt like such a weakling for not being able to defend myself. Harry Rex and Rafe had trained me better.

I was scared to the point of not being able to move. Then I remembered Bigmouth Bass was in his office downstairs, and like most real men in Clanton he had an arsenal close by. There were handguns in his desk and he kept two hunting rifles on the wall, just in case he got the urge to run out and kill a deer during lunch. Anyone trying to get me would encounter stiff resistance by my staff. I hoped so anyway.

There was a pause in the assault, then shouts of panic and chaos on the streets. It was almost 2 P.M., normally a busy time downtown. I crawled under my desk like I’d been taught in tornado warning drills. From somewhere below I heard Bigmouth yell, “Stay in your offices!” I could almost see him down there, grabbing a 30.06 and a box of shells, ducking into a doorway in great anticipation. I couldn’t imagine a worse place for some nut to start shooting. There were thousands of guns within arm’s reach around the Clanton square. Every pickup had two rifles in the window rack and a shotgun under the seat. These people couldn’t wait to use their guns!

It wouldn’t be long before the locals returned fire. That’s when the war would really get ugly.

Then the shots resumed. They weren’t getting any closer, I decided as I tried to breathe normally under the desk and analyze things. As the seconds slowly ticked by I realized that the assault was not aimed at me. I just happened to own a nearby window. Sirens approached, then more shots, more shouting. What in the world!

A phone rang downstairs and someone grabbed it quickly.

“Willie! You okay!” Bigmouth yelled from the bottom of the steps.

“Yeah!”

“There’s a sniper on top of the courthouse!”

“Great!”

“Stay low!”

“Don’t worry!”

I relaxed a little and emerged just enough to grab my phone. I called Wiley Meek at home, but he was already headed our way. Then I crawled across the floor to one of the French doors and opened it. Evidently this caught the attention of our sniper. He shattered a pane four feet above me and the glass fell like heavy rain. I dropped to my stomach and stopped breathing for what seemed like an hour. The gunfire was relentless. Whoever he was he was certainly perturbed about something.

Eight shots, each sounding much louder now that I was outside. A fifteen-second pause as he reloaded, then eight more. I heard glass shatter, bullets ricochet off bricks, bullets split through wooden posts. Somewhere in the midst of the barrage, the voices became silent.

When I could move again, I gently pulled one of the rocking chairs over on its side, then crawled behind it. The porch had a wrought-iron railing around it, and with that and the chair in front of me, I was concealed and protected. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to move closer to the sniper, but I was twenty-four years old and owned the newspaper and knew that I would write a lengthy story about this dramatic episode. I needed details.

When I finally peeked through the chair and the railing, I saw the sniper. The courthouse had an oddly flattened dome, on top of which was a small cupola with four open windows. He’d made his nest there, and when I first saw him he was peeking just above the sill of one of the windows. He appeared to have a black face with white hair, and this sent more chills through my body. We were dealing with a world-class psycho.

He was reloading, and when he was ready he rose slightly and began shooting completely at random. He appeared to be shirtless, which, given the situation, seemed even stranger since it was around thirty degrees with a chance of light snow later in the afternoon. I was freezing and I was wearing a rather handsome wool suit from Mitlo’s.

His chest was white with black stripes, sort of like a zebra. It was a white man who’d painted himself partially black.

All traffic was gone. The city police had blocked the streets and cops were darting about, squatting low and hiding behind their cars. In the store windows an occasional face popped out for a quick scan, then disappeared. The shooting stopped and the sniper ducked low and disappeared for a while. Three county deputies dashed along a sidewalk and into the courthouse. Long minutes passed.

Wiley Meek bounded up the steps of my office and was soon beside me. He was breathing so hard I thought he’d sprinted from his house out in the country. “He hit us!” he whispered, as if the sniper could hear. He was examining the broken glass.

“Twice,” I said, nodding up at the broken panes.

“Where is he?” he asked as he moved a camera with a long-range lens into position.

“The cupola,” I said, pointing. “Be careful. He hit that door when I opened it.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Male, white, with black highlights.”

“Oh, one of those.”

“Keep your head down.”

We stayed huddled and crouched for several minutes. More cops scurried about, going nowhere in particular and giving the distinct impression that they were thrilled to be there but had little idea what to do.

“Anybody hurt?” Wiley asked, suddenly anxious that maybe he’d missed some blood.

“How am I supposed to know?”

Then more shots, very quick and startling. We peeked and saw him from the shoulders up, blazing away. Wiley focused and began taking pictures through the long-range lens.

Baggy and the boys were in the Bar Room on the third floor, not directly under the cupola, but not far from it. In fact, they were probably the closest humans to the sniper when he began his target practice. After the shooting resumed for the ninth or tenth time, they evidently became even more frightened and, convinced they were about to be slaughtered, decided they had to take matters into their own hands. Somehow they managed to pry open the intractable window of their little hideaway. We watched as an electrical cord was thrown out and fell almost to the ground, forty feet below. Baggy’s right leg appeared next as he flung it over the brick sill and wiggled his portly body through the opening. Not surprisingly, Baggy had insisted on going first.

“Oh my God,” Wiley said, somewhat gleefully, and raised his camera. “They’re drunk as skunks.”

Clutching the electrical cord with all the grit he could muster, Baggy sprung free from the window and began his descent to safety. His strategy was not apparent. He appeared to give no slack on the cord, his hands frozen to it just above his head. Evidently there was plenty of cord left in the Bar Room, and his cohorts were supposed to ease him down.

As his hands rose higher above his head, his pants became shorter. Soon they were just below his knees, leaving a long gap of pale white skin before his black socks bunched around his ankles. Baggy wasn’t concerned about appearances — before, during, or after the sniper incident.

The shooting stopped, and for a while Baggy just hung there, slowly twisting against the building, about three feet below the window. Major could be seen inside, clinging fiercely to the cord. He had only one leg though, and I worried that it would quickly give out. Behind him I could see two figures, probably Wobble Tackett and Chick Elliot, the usual poker gang.

Wiley began laughing, a low suppressed laugh that shook his entire body.

With each lull in the shooting, the town took a breath, peeked around, and hoped it was over. And each new round scared us more than the last.

Two shots rang out. Baggy lurched as if he’d been hit — though in reality there was no possible way the sniper could even see him, and the suddenness evidently put too much pressure on Major’s leg. It collapsed, the cord sprang free, and Baggy screamed as he dropped like a cinder block into a row of thick boxwoods that had been planted by the Daughters of the Confederacy. The boxwoods absorbed the load, and, much like a trampoline, recoiled and sent Baggy to the sidewalk, where he landed like a melon and became the only casualty of the entire episode.

I heard laughter in the distance.

Without a trace of mercy, Wiley recorded the entire spectacle. The photos would be furtively passed around Clanton for years to come.

For a long time Baggy didn’t move. “Leave the sumbitch out there,” I heard a cop yell below us.

“You can’t hurt a drunk,” Wiley said as he caught his breath.

Eventually, Baggy rose to all fours. Slowly and painfully, he crawled, like a dog hit by a truck, into the boxwoods that had saved his life, and there he rode out the storm.

A police car had been parked three doors down from the Tea Shoppe. The sniper fired a burst at it, and when the gas tank exploded we forgot about Baggy. The crisis stepped up to the next level as thick smoke poured out from under the car, then we saw flames. The sniper found this sporting, and for a few minutes he hit nothing but cars. I was certain my Spitfire would be irresistible, but perhaps it was too small.

He lost his nerve, though, when fire was eventually returned. Two of Sheriff Coley’s men stationed themselves on roofs, and when they unloaded on the cupola the sniper ducked low and was out of business.

“I got him!” one of the deputies shouted down to Sheriff Coley.

We waited for twenty minutes; all was quiet. Baggy’s old wing tips and black socks could be seen from under the boxwoods, but the rest was hidden. Occasionally, Major, glass in hand, would look down and yell something at Baggy, who could have been dying for all we knew.

More cops sprinted into the courthouse. We relaxed and sat in the rockers, but we did not take our eyes off the cupola. Bigmouth, Margaret, and Hardy joined us on the balcony. They had watched Baggy’s descent from the front window downstairs. Only Margaret was concerned about his injuries.

The police car burned until the fire department eventually showed up and doused it. The doors of the courthouse opened and some of the county employees came out and began smoking furiously. Two deputies managed to retrieve Baggy from the boxwoods. He was barely able to walk, and was obviously in great pain. They placed him in a patrol car and took him away.

Then we saw a deputy in the cupola, and the town was safe again. The five of us hurried over to the courthouse, along with the rest of downtown Clanton.

The third floor was sealed off. Court was not in session, so Sheriff Coley directed us to the courtroom, where he promised a quick briefing. As we were walking into the courtroom, I saw Major, Chick Elliot, and Wobble Tackett being escorted down the hall by a deputy. They were obviously drunk and laughing so hard they had trouble staying on their feet.

Wiley went downstairs to sniff around. A body was about to be removed from the courthouse, and he wanted a shot of the sniper. The white hair, black face, painted stripes — there were a lot of questions.

The deputy sharpshooters had evidently missed. The sniper was identified as Hank Hooten, the local lawyer who had assisted Ernie Gaddis in the prosecution of Danny Padgitt. He was in custody and unharmed.

When Sheriff Coley announced this in the courtroom, we were shocked and bewildered. Our nerves were pretty raw anyway, but this was too much to believe. “Mr. Hooten was found in the small stairwell that leads up to the cupola,” Coley was saying, but I was too stunned to take notes. “He did not resist arrest and is now in custody.”

“What was he wearing?” someone asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Absolutely nothing. He had what appeared to be black shoe polish on his face and chest, but other than that he was as naked as a newborn.”

“What type of weapons?” I asked.

“We found two high-powered rifles, that’s all I can say right now.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Not a word.”

Wiley said they wrapped Hank in some sheets and shoved him in the backseat of a patrol car. He shot some photos but was not optimistic. “There were a dozen cops around him,” he said.

We drove to the hospital to check on Baggy. His wife worked the night shift in the emergency room. Someone had called her, woke her up, summoned her to the hospital, and when we met her she was in a foul mood. “Just a broken arm,” she said, obviously disappointed that it was not more serious. “Some scrapes and bruises. What’d the fool do?”

I looked at Wiley and Wiley looked at me.

“Was he drunk?” she asked. Baggy was always drunk.

“Don’t know,” I said. “He fell out of a window at the courthouse.”

“Oh, brother. He was drunk.”

I gave a quick version of Baggy’s escape and tried to make it sound as if he’d done something heroic in the midst of all that gunfire.

“The third floor?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“So he was playing poker, drinking whiskey, and he jumped out of a third-floor window.”

“Basically, yes,” Wiley said, unable to stop himself.

“Not exactly,” I said, but she was already walking away.

Baggy was snoring when we finally got back to his room. The medications had mixed with the whiskey and he appeared comatose. “He will wish he could sleep forever,” Wiley whispered.

And he was right. The legend of Bouncin’ Baggy was told countless times in the years that followed. Wobble Tackett would swear that Chick Elliot let go of the cord first, and Chick would argue that Major’s good leg buckled first and caused a chain reaction. The town quickly believed that, whoever let go first, the three idiots Baggy left behind in the Bar Room had intentionally dropped him into the boxwoods.

Two days later, Hank Hooten was sent to the state mental hospital at Whitfield, where he would remain for several years. He was initially indicted for trying to kill half of Clanton, but with time the charges were dropped. He allegedly told Ernie Gaddis that he was not shooting at anyone in particular, didn’t want to harm anyone, but was just upset because the town had failed to send Danny Padgitt to his death.

Word eventually drifted back to Clanton that he had been diagnosed as severely schizophrenic. “Slap-ass crazy,” was the conclusion on the streets.

Never in the history of Ford County had a person lost his mind in such a spectacular fashion.

Chapter 26

One year after I bought the newspaper, I sent BeeBee a check for $55,000 — her loan plus interest at the rate of 10 percent. She had not discussed the matter of interest when she gave me the money, nor had we signed a promissory note. Ten percent was a bit high, and I hoped it would prompt her to send the check back. I sent it, held my breath, watched the mail, and sure enough, about a week later there was a letter from Memphis.

BeeBee’s first husband had died of some colorful illness in 1924. She then married a divorced cotton merchant and they had one child, my poor mother. The second husband, my grandfather, died in 1938, leaving BeeBee with a nice bundle. She stopped marrying and had spent the last thirty-odd years counting her money, playing bridge, and traveling. As the only grandchild, I was set to inherit all she had, though I had no clue as to the extent of her fortune.

If BeeBee wanted more letters from me, then she could certainly have them.

I happily tore up the check, walked down to the bank, and borrowed another $50,000 from Stan Atcavage. Hardy had found a slightly used offset press in Atlanta, and I bought it for $108,000. We ditched our ancient letterpress and moved into the twentieth century. The Times took on a new look — much cleaner print, sharper photos, smarter designs. Our circulation was at six thousand and I could see steady, profitable growth. The elections of 1971 certainly helped.

I was astounded at the number of people who ran for public office in Mississippi. Each county was divided into five districts, and each district had an elected constable, who wore a badge and a gun and whatever uniform he could put together, and if he could afford it, which he always managed, he put lights on his car and had the authority to pull over anyone at any time for any conceivable offense. No training was required. No education. No supervision from the county Sheriff or the city police chief, no one but the voters every four years. In theory he was a summons server, but once elected most constables couldn’t resist the powerful urge to strap on a gun and look for folks to arrest.

The more traffic tickets a constable wrote, the more money he earned. It was a part-time job with a nominal salary, but at least one of the five in each county tried to live off the position. This was the guy who caused the most trouble.

Each district had an elected Justice of the Peace, a judicial officer with absolutely no legal training, in 1971 anyway. No education was required for the job. No experience. Just votes. The J.P. judged all the people the constable hauled in, and their relationship was cozy and suspicious. Out-of-state drivers who got nailed by a constable in Ford County were usually in for some abuse at the hands of the J.P.

Each county had five supervisors, five little kings who held the real power. For their supporters they paved roads, fixed culverts, gave away gravel. For their enemies they did little. All county ordinances were enacted by the Board of Supervisors.

Each county also had an elected sheriff, tax collector, tax assessor, chancery court clerk, and coroner. The rural counties shared a state senator and state representative. Other available jobs in 1971 were highway commissioner, public service commissioner, commissioner of agriculture, state treasurer, state auditor, attorney general, lieutenant governor, and governor.

I thought this was a ridiculous and cumbersome system until the candidates for these positions began buying ads in the Times. A particularly bad constable over in the Fourth District (also known as “Beat Four”) had eleven opponents by the end of January. Most of these poor boys eased into our offices with an “announcement” that their wives had handwritten on notebook paper. I would patiently read them, editing, decoding, translating along the way. Then I would take their money and run their little ads, almost all of which began with either “After months of prayer...” or “Many people have asked me to run...”

By late February, the county was consumed with the August election. Sheriff Coley had two opponents with two more threatening. The deadline to file for office was June, and he had yet to do so. This fueled speculation that he might not run.

It took little to fuel speculation about anything when it came to local elections.

Miss Callie clung to the old-fashioned belief that eating in restaurants was a waste of money, and therefore sinful. Her list of potential sins was longer than most folks’, especially mine. It took almost six months to convince her to go to Claude’s for a Thursday lunch. I argued that if I paid, then we wouldn’t be wasting her money. She wouldn’t be guilty of any transgression, and if I got hit with another one I really didn’t care. Dining out was certainly the most benign in my inventory.

I wasn’t worried about being seen in downtown Clanton with a black woman. I didn’t care what people said. I wasn’t worried about having the only white face in Claude’s. What really concerned me, and what almost kept me from suggesting the idea in the first place, was the challenge of getting Miss Callie in and out of my Triumph Spitfire. It wasn’t built for hefty folks like her.

She and Esau owned an old Buick that had once held all eight children. Add another hundred pounds and Miss Callie could still slide in and out of the front seat with ease.

She was not getting smaller. Her high blood pressure and high cholesterol were of great concern to her children. She was sixty years old and healthy, but trouble was looming.

We walked to the street and she peered down at my car. It was March and windy with a chance of rain, so the convertible top was up. In its closed state, the two-seater looked even smaller.

“I’m not sure this is going to work,” she announced. It had taken six months to get her that far; we were not turning back. I opened the passenger door and she approached with great caution.

“Any suggestions?” she said.

“Yes, try the rear-end-first method.”

It worked, eventually, and when I started the engine we were shoulder to shoulder. “White folks sure drive some funny cars,” she said, as frightened as if she were flying in a small plane for the first time. I popped the clutch, spun the tires, and we were off, slinging gravel and laughing.

I parked in front of the office and helped her out. Getting in was far easier. Inside, I introduced her to Margaret Wright and Davey Bigmouth Bass, and I gave her a tour. She was curious about the offset press because the paper now looked so much better. “Who does the proofreading around here?” she whispered.

“You do,” I said. We were averaging three mistakes per week, according to her. I still got the list every Thursday over lunch.

We took a stroll around the square and eventually made it to Claude’s, the black café next to City Cleaners. Claude had been in business for many years and served the best food in town. He didn’t need menus because you ate whatever he happened to be cooking that day. Wednesday was catfish and Friday was barbecue, but for the other four days you didn’t know what you would eat until Claude told you. He greeted us in a dirty apron and pointed to a table at the front window. The café was half-full and we got some curious stares.

Oddly enough, Miss Callie had never met Claude. I had assumed that every black person in Clanton had at one time bumped into every other one, but Miss Callie explained that was not the case. Claude lived out in the country, and there was an awful rumor over in Lowtown that he did not go to church. She had never been anxious to meet him. They had attended a funeral together years earlier, but had not met.

I introduced them, and when Claude put her name with her face he said, “The Ruffin family. All them doctors.”

“PhD’s,” Miss Callie said, correcting him.

Claude was loud and gruff and charged for his food and did not go to church, so Miss Callie immediately disliked him. He took the hint, didn’t really care, and went off to yell at someone in the back. A waitress brought us iced tea and corn bread, and Miss Callie didn’t like either. The tea was weak and almost sugarless, according to her, and the corn bread lacked enough salt and was served at room temperature, an unforgivable offense.

“It’s a restaurant, Miss Callie,” I said in a low voice. “Would you relax?”

“I’m trying.”

“No you’re not. How can we enjoy a meal if you’re frowning at everything?”

“That’s a pretty bow tie.”

“Thank you.”

My upgraded wardrobe had pleased no one more than Miss Callie. Negroes liked to dress up and were very fashion conscious, she explained to me. She still referred to herself as a Negro.

In the wake of the civil rights movement and the complicated issues it had spun, it was difficult to know exactly what to call blacks. The older, more dignified ones like Miss Callie preferred to be called “Negroes.” A notch below them on the social ladder were “coloreds.”

Though I had never heard Miss Callie use the word, it was not uncommon for upper blacks to refer to the lowest of their kind as “niggers.”

I could not begin to understand the labels and classes, so I adhered strictly to the safety of “blacks.” Those on my side of the tracks had an entire dictionary to describe blacks, little of which was endearing.

At that moment, I was the only non-Negro in Claude’s, and this bothered no one.

“What y’all eatin’?” Claude yelled from the counter. A blackboard advertised Texas chili, fried chicken, and pork chops. Miss Callie knew the chicken and pork would be sub-par, so we both ordered chili.

I got a gardening report. The winter greens were especially nice. She and Esau were preparing to plant the summer crop. The Farmer’s Almanac predicted a mild summer with average rain — same prediction every year — and she was excited about warmer weather and lunch back on the porch, where it belonged. I began with Alberto, the oldest, and half an hour later she ended with Sam, the youngest. He was back in Milwaukee, staying with Roberto, working and taking classes at night. All children and grandchildren were doing well.

She wanted to talk about “poor Mr. Hank Hooten.” She remembered him well from the trial, though he had never spoken to the jury. I passed along the latest news. He was now living in a room with padded walls, where he would remain for some time.

The restaurant filled up quickly. Claude walked by with an armload of plates and said, “Y’all finished, time to go.” She pretended to be insulted by this, but Claude was famous for telling people to leave as soon as they were finished. On Fridays, when a few whites ventured in for barbeque and the place was packed, he put a clock on his customers and said, loudly, “You got twenty minutes.”

She pretended to dislike the experience — the idea itself, the restaurant, the cheap tablecloth, the food, Claude, the prices, the crowd, everything. But it was an act. She was secretly delighted to be taken to lunch by a well-dressed young white man. It had not happened to any of her friends.

As I gently pulled her out of the car back in Lowtown, she reached into her purse and took out a small scrap of paper. Only two typos that week; oddly, both were in classifieds, an area that Margaret handled.

I walked her to the house. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” I said.

“I enjoyed it. Thank you. Are you coming next Thursday?” She asked the same question each week. The answer was the same too.

Chapter 27

At noon on the Fourth of July the temperature was 101 degrees and the humidity felt even higher. The parade was led by the Mayor, even though he was not yet running for anything. State and local elections were in 1971. The presidential race was in 1972. Judicial elections were in 1973. Municipal elections were in 1974. Mississippians loved voting almost as much as football.

The Mayor sat on the rear seat of a 1962 Corvette and threw candy to the children packed along the sidewalks around the square. Behind him were two high school bands, Clanton’s and Karaway’s, the Boy Scouts, Shriners on mini-bikes, a new fire truck, a dozen floats, a posse on horseback, veterans from every war that century, a collection of shiny new cars from the Ford dealer, and three restored John Deere tractors. Juror number eight, Mr. Mo Teale, drove one. The rear was protected by a string of city and county police cars, all polished to perfection.

I watched the parade from the third-floor balcony of the Security Bank. Stan Atcavage threw an annual party up there. Since I now owed the bank a sizable sum, I was invited to sip lemonade and watch the festivities.

For a reason no one could remember, the Rotarians were in charge of the speeches. They had parked a long flatbed trailer next to the Confederate sentry and decorated it with bales of hay and red, white, and blue bunting. When the parade was over, the throng moved tightly around the trailer and waited anxiously. An old-fashioned courthouse hanging couldn’t have drawn a more expectant audience.

Mr. Mervin Beets, president of the Rotary club, stepped to the microphone and welcomed everyone. Prayer was required for any public event in Clanton, and in the new spirit of desegregation he had invited the Reverand Thurston Small, Miss Callie’s minister, to properly get things going. According to Stan, there were noticeably more blacks downtown that year.

With such a crowd, Reverend Small could not be brief. He asked the Lord to bless everyone and everything at least twice. Loudspeakers were hanging from poles all around the courthouse, and his voice echoed throughout downtown.

The first candidate was Timmy Joe Bullock, a terrified young man from Beat Four who wanted to serve as a constable. He walked across the flatbed trailer as if it were a gangplank, and when he stood behind the mike and looked at the crowd he almost fainted. He managed to utter his name, then reached into a pocket where he found his speech. He was not much of a reader, but in ten very long minutes managed to comment on the rise in crime, the recent murder trial, and the sniper. He didn’t like murderers and he was especially opposed to snipers. He would work to protect us from both.

Applause was light when he finished. But at least he showed up. There were twenty-two candidates for constable in the five districts, but only seven had the courage to face the crowd. When we finally finished with the constables and the Justices of the Peace, Woody Gates and the Country Boys played a few blue-grass tunes and the crowd appreciated the break.

At various places on the courthouse lawn, food and refreshments were being served. The Lions Club was giving away slices of cold watermelon. The ladies of the garden club were selling homemade ice cream. The Jaycees were barbecuing ribs. The crowd huddled under the ancient oak trees and hid from the sun.

Mackey Don Coley had entered the race for Sheriff in late May. He had three opponents, the most popular of whom was a Clanton city policeman named T. R. Meredith. When Mr. Beets announced that it was time for the Sheriff candidates, the voters left the shade and swarmed around the trailer.

Freck Oswald was running for the fourth time. In the prior three he had finished dead last; he appeared headed for the bottom again but seemed to enjoy the fun of it. He didn’t like President Nixon and said harsh things about his foreign policy, especially relations with China. The crowd listened but appeared to be a bit confused.

Tryce McNatt was running for the second time. He began his remarks by saying, “I really don’t give a damn about China.” This was humorous but also stupid. Swearing in public, in the presence of ladies, would cost him many votes. Tryce was upset at the way criminals were being coddled by the system. He was opposed to any effort to build a new jail in Ford County — a waste of taxpayer money! He wanted harsh sentences and more prisons, even chain gangs and forced labor.

I had heard nothing about a new jail.

Because of the Kassellaw murder and the Hank Hooten rampage, violent crime was now out of control in Ford County, according to Tryce. We needed a new Sheriff, one who chased criminals, not befriended them. “Let’s clean up the county!” was his refrain. The crowd was with him.

T. R. Meredith was a thirty-year veteran of law enforcement. He was an awful speaker but he was related to half the county, according to Stan. Stan knew about such things; he was related to the other half. “Meredith’ll win by a thousand votes in the runoff,” he predicted. This caused quite an argument among the other guests.

Mackey Don went last. He had been the Sheriff since 1943, and wanted just one more term. “He’s been saying that for twenty years,” Stan said. Coley rambled on about his experience, his knowledge of the county and its people. When he finished, the applause was polite but certainly not encouraging.

Two gentlemen were running for the office of tax collector, no doubt the least popular position in the county. As they spoke, the crowd drifted away again and headed for the ice cream and watermelons. I walked down to Harry Rex’s office, where another party was in progress on the sidewalk.

The speeches continued throughout the afternoon. It was the summer of 1971, and by then at least fifty thousand young Americans had been killed in Vietnam. A similar gathering of people in any other part of the country would have turned into a virulent antiwar rally. The politicians would have been heckled off the stage. Flags and draft cards would’ve been burned.

But Vietnam was never mentioned that Fourth of July.

I’d had great fun at Syracuse demonstrating on campus and marching in the streets, but such activity was unheard of in the Deep South. It was a war; therefore real patriots were supportive. We were stopping Communism; the hippies and radicals and peaceniks up North and in California were simply afraid to fight.

I bought a dish of strawberry ice cream from the garden ladies, and as I strolled around the courthouse I heard a commotion. From the third-floor window of the Bar Room, a prankster had dropped down an effigy of Baggy. The stuffed figure was hanging with its hands above its head — just like the real Baggy — and across its chest was a sign that said “SUGGS.” And to make sure everyone recognized the butt of the joke, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s protruded from each pants pocket.

I had not seen Baggy that day, nor would I. Later, he claimed to know nothing about the incident. Not surprisingly, Wiley managed to take numerous photos of the effigy.

“Theo’s here!” someone yelled, and this excited the crowd. Theo Morton was our longtime state senator. His district covered parts of four counties, and though he lived in Baldwin his wife was from Clanton. He owned two nursing homes and a cemetery, and he had the distinction of having survived three airplane crashes. He was no longer a pilot. Theo was colorful — blunt, sarcastic, hilarious, completely unpredictable on the stump. His opponent was a young man who’d just finished law school and was rumored to be grooming himself for Governor. Warren was his name, and Warren made the mistake of attacking Theo over some suspicious legislation that had been “sneaked through” the last session and increased the state’s support for nursing home patients.

It was a bristling assault. I was standing in the crowd, watching Warren blast away, and just over his left shoulder I could see “SUGGS” hanging from the window.

Theo began by introducing his wife, Rex Ella, a Mabry from right here in Clanton. He talked about her parents and her grandparents, and her aunts and uncles, and before long Theo had mentioned half the crowd. Clanton was his second home, his district, his people, the constituents he worked so hard to serve down in Jackson.

It was smooth, fluid, off-the-cuff. I was listening to a master on the stump.

He was chairman of the Highways Committee in the state senate, and for a few minutes he bragged about all the new roads he’d built in north Mississippi. His committee handled four hundred separate pieces of legislation each session. Four hundred! Four hundred bills, or laws. As chairman, he was responsible for writing laws. That’s what state senators did. They wrote good laws and killed bad laws.

His young opponent had just finished law school, a notable accomplishment. He, Theo, didn’t get the chance to go to college because he was off fighting the Japs in World War II. But anyway, his young opponent had evidently neglected his study of the law. Otherwise, he would’ve passed the bar exam on the first try.

Instead, “He flunked the bar exam, ladies and gentlemen!”

With perfect timing, someone standing just behind young Warren yelled out, “That’s a damned lie!” The crowd looked at Warren as if he’d lost his mind. Theo turned to the voice and said incredulously, “A lie?”

He reached into his pocket and whipped out a folded sheet of paper. “I’ve got the proof right here!” He pinched a corner of the paper and began waving it about. Without reading a single word of whatever was printed on it, he said, “How can we trust a man to write our laws when he can’t even pass the bar exam? Mr. Warren and I stand on equal footing — neither of us has ever passed the bar exam. Problem is, he had three years of law school to help him flunk it.”

Theo’s supporters were yelping with laughter. Young Warren held his ground but wanted to bolt.

Theo hammered away. “Maybe if he’d gone to law school in Mississippi instead of Tennessee then he’d understand our laws!”

He was famous for such public butcherings. He’d once humiliated an opponent who’d left the pulpit under a cloud. Pulling an “affidavit” from his pocket, Theo claimed he had proof that the “ex-reverend” had an affair with a deacon’s wife. The affidavit was never read.

The ten-minute limit meant nothing to Theo. He blew through it with a series of promises to cut taxes and waste and do something to make sure murderers got the death penalty more often. When he finally wound down, he thanked the crowd for twenty years of faithful support. He reminded us that in the last two elections the good folks of Ford County had given him, and Rex Ella, almost 80 percent of their votes.

The applause was loud and long, and at some point Warren disappeared. So did I. I was tired of speeches and politics.

Four weeks later, around dusk on the first Tuesday in August, much of the same crowd gathered around the courthouse for the vote counting. It had cooled off considerably; the temperature was only ninety-two with 98 percent humidity.

The final days of the election had been a reporter’s dream. There was a fistfight between two Justice of the Peace candidates outside a black church. There were two lawsuits, both of which accused the other side of libel and slander and distributing phony sample ballots. One man was arrested when he was caught in the act of spray painting obscenities on one of Theo’s billboards. (As it turned out, after the election, the man had been hired by one of Theo’s henchmen to defile the senator’s signs. Young Warren still got the blame. “A common trick,” according to Baggy.) The state’s Attorney General was asked to investigate the high number of absentee ballots. “Typical election,” was Baggy’s summary. Things came to a peak on that Tuesday, and the entire county stopped to vote and enjoy the sport of a rural election.

The polls closed at six, and an hour later the square was alive and wired with anticipation. People piled in from the county. They formed little groups around their candidate and even used campaign signs to stake off their territory. Many brought food and drink and most had folding lawn chairs as if they were there to watch a baseball game. Two enormous black chalkboards were placed side by side near the front door of the courthouse, and there the returns were tallied.

“We have the results from North Karaway,” the clerk announced into a microphone so loud it could’ve been heard five miles away. The festive mood was immediately serious.

“North Karaway’s always first,” Baggy said. It was almost eight-thirty, almost dark. We were sitting on the porch outside my office, waiting for the news. We planned to delay press time for twenty-four hours and publish our “Election Special” on Thursday. It took some time for the clerk to read the vote totals for every candidate for every office. Halfway through she said, “And in the Sheriff’s race.” Several thousand people held their breath.

“Mackey Don Coley, eighty-four. Tryce McNatt, twenty-one. T. R. Meredith, sixty-two, and Freck Oswald, eleven.” A loud cheer went up on the far side of the lawn where Coley’s supporters were camped.

“Coley’s always tough in Karaway,” Baggy said. “But he’s beat.”

“He’s beat?” I asked. The first of twenty-eight precincts were in, and Baggy was already predicting winners.

“Yep. For T.R. to run strong in a place where he has no base shows folks are fed up with Mackey Don. Wait’ll you see the Clanton boxes.”

Slowly, the returns dribbled in, from places I’d never heard of: Pleasant Hill, Shady Grove, Klebie, Three Corners, Clover Hill, Green Alley, Possum Ridge, Massey Mill, Calico Ridge. Woody Gates and the Country Boys, who seemed to always be available, filled in the gaps with some bluegrass.

The Padgitts voted at a tiny precinct called Dancing Creek. When the clerk announced the votes from there, and Coley got 31 votes and the other three got 8 combined, there was a refreshing round of boos from the crowd. Clanton East followed, the largest precinct and the one I voted in. Coley got 285 votes, Tryce 47, and when T.R.’s total of 644 was announced, the place went wild.

Baggy grabbed me and we celebrated with the rest of the town. Coley was going down without a runoff.

As the losers slowly learned their fate, they and their supporters packed up and went home. Around eleven, the crowd was noticeably thinner. After midnight, I left the office and strolled around the square, taking in the sounds and images of this wonderful tradition.

I was quite proud of the town. In the aftermath of a brutal murder and its baffling verdict, we had rallied, fought back, and spoken clearly that we would not tolerate corruption. The strong vote against Coley was our way of hitting at the Padgitts. For the second time in a hundred years, they would not own the Sheriff.

T. R. Meredith got 61 percent of the vote, a stunning landslide. Theo got 82 percent, an old-fashioned shellacking. We printed eight thousand copies of our “Election Edition” and sold every one of them. I became a staunch believer in voting every year. Democracy at its finest.

Chapter 28

A week before Thanksgiving in 1971, Clanton was rocked by the news that one of its sons had been killed in Vietnam. Pete Mooney, a nineteen-year-old staff sergeant, was captured in an ambush near Hue, in central Vietnam. A few hours later his body was found.

I didn’t know the Mooneys, but Margaret certainly did. She called me with the news and said she needed a few days off. Her family had lived down the street from the Mooneys for many years. Her son and Pete had been close friends since childhood.

I spent some time in the archives and found the 1966 story of Marvin Lee Walker, a black kid who’d been the county’s first death in Vietnam. That had been before Mr. Caudle cared about such things, and the Times coverage of the event was shamefully sparse. Nothing on the front page. A hundred-word story on page three with no photo. At the time, Clanton had no idea where Vietnam was.

So a young man who couldn’t go to the better schools, probably couldn’t vote, and more than likely was too afraid to drink from the public water fountain at the courthouse, had been killed in a country few people in his hometown could find on a map. And his death was the right and proper thing. Communists had to be fought wherever they might be found.

Margaret quietly passed along the details I needed for a story. Pete had graduated from Clanton High School in 1970. He had played varsity football and baseball, lettering in both for three years. He was an honor student who had planned to work for two years, save his money, then go to college. He was unlucky enough to have a high draft number, and in December 1970 he got his notice.

According to Margaret, and this was something I could not print, Pete had been very reluctant to report for basic training. He and his father had fought for weeks over the war. The son wanted to go to Canada and avoid the whole mess. The father was horrified that his son would be labeled a draft dodger. The family name would be ruined, etc. He called the kid a coward. Mr. Mooney had served in Korea and had zero patience for the antiwar movement. Mrs. Mooney tried the role of peacemaker, but in her heart, she too was reluctant to send her son off to such an unpopular war. Pete finally relented, and now he was coming home in a box.

The funeral was at the First Baptist Church, where the Mooneys had been active for many years. Pete had been baptized there at the age of eleven, and this was of great comfort to his family and friends. He was now with the Lord, though still much too young to be called home.

I sat with Margaret and her husband. It was my first and last funeral for a nineteen-year-old soldier. By concentrating on the casket, I could almost avoid the sobbing and, at times, wailing around me. His high school football coach gave a eulogy that drained every eye in the church, mine included.

I could barely see the back of Mr. Mooney, in the front row. What unspeakable grief that poor man was suffering.

After an hour, we escaped and made our way to the Clanton cemetery, where Pete was laid to rest with full military pomp and ceremony. When the lone bugler played “Taps,” the gut-wrenching cry of Pete’s mother made me shudder. She clung to the casket until they began to lower it. His father finally collapsed and was tended to by several deacons.

What a waste, I said over and over as I walked the streets alone, headed generally back to the office. That night, still alone, I cursed myself for being so silent, so cowardly. I was the editor of the newspaper, dammit! Whether I felt entitled to the position or not, I was the only one in town. If I felt strongly about an issue, then I certainly had the power and position to editorialize.

Pete Mooney was preceded in death by more than fifty thousand of his fellow countrymen, although the military did a rotten job of reporting an accurate count.

In 1969, President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, made the decision that the war in Vietnam could not be won, or, rather, that the United States would no longer try and win it. They kept this to themselves. They did not stop the draft. Instead, they pursued the cynical strategy of appearing to be confident of a successful outcome.

From the time this decision was made until the end of the war in 1973, approximately eighteen thousand more men were killed, including Pete Mooney.

I ran my editorial on the front page, bottom half, under a large photo of Pete in his Army uniform. It read:

Using bad language would be good for a few slaps on the wrist, but what did I care? Strong language was needed to give light to the blind patriots of Ford County. Before the flood of calls and letters, though, I made a friend.

When I returned from Thursday lunch with Miss Callie (lamb stew indoors by the fire), Bubba Crockett was waiting in my office. He wore jeans, boots, a flannel shirt, long hair, and after he introduced himself he thanked me for the editorial. He had some things he wanted to get off his chest, and since I was as stuffed as a Christmas turkey, I placed my feet on my desk and listened for a long time.

He’d grown up in Clanton, finished school here in 1966. His father owned the nursery two miles south of town; they were landscapers. He got his draft notice in 1967 and gave no thought to doing anything other than racing off to fight Communists. His unit landed in the south, just in time for the Tet Offensive. Two days on the ground, and he had lost three of his closest friends.

The horror of fighting could not accurately be described, though Bubba was descriptive enough for me. Men burning, screaming for help, tripping over body parts, dragging bodies off the battlefield, hours with no sleep, no food, running out of ammo, seeing the enemy crawl toward you at night. His battalion lost a hundred men in the first five days. “After a week I knew I was going to die,” he said with wet eyes. “At that point, I became a pretty good soldier. You gotta reach that point to survive.”

He was wounded twice, slight wounds that were treatable in field hospitals. Nothing that would get him home. He talked of the frustration of fighting a war that the government would not allow them to win. “We were better soldiers,” he said. “And our equipment was vastly superior. Our commanders were superb, but the fools in Washington wouldn’t let them fight a war.”

Bubba knew the Mooney family and had begged Pete not to go. He had watched the burial service from a distance, and he cursed everybody he could see and many he could not.

“These idiots around here still support the war, can you believe that?” he said. “More than fifty thousand dead and now we’re pulling out, and these people will argue with you on the streets of Clanton that it was a great cause.”

“They don’t argue with you,” I said.

“They do not. I’ve punched a couple of them. You play poker?”

I did not, but I’d heard many colorful stories about various poker games around town. Quickly, I thought this might be interesting. “A little,” I said, figuring I could either find a rule book or get Baggy to teach me.

“We play on Thursday nights, in a shed at the nursery. Several guys who fought over there. You might enjoy it.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah, around eight. It’s a small game, some beer, some pot, some war stories. My buddies want to meet you.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, wondering where I could find Baggy.

Four letters were slid under the door that afternoon, all four scathing in their criticism of me and my criticism of the war. Mr. E. L. Green, a veteran of two wars, and a longtime subscriber to the Times, though that might soon change, said, among other things:

Mr. Herbert Gillenwater’s brother was killed in the Korean conflict. He wrote:

Mr. Felix Toliver from down in Shady Grove suggested that perhaps I’d spent too much time up North where folks were notoriously gun-shy. He said the military had always been dominated by brave young men from the South, and if I didn’t believe it then I should do some more research. There were a disproportionate number of Southern casualties in Korea and Vietnam. He concluded, rather eloquently:

I planned to run every single letter to the editor, but I hoped there might be one or two in support of my editorial. The criticism didn’t bother me at all. I felt strongly that I was right. And I was developing a rather thick skin, a fine asset for an editor.

After Baggy’s quick tutelage, I lost $100 playing poker with Bubba and the boys. They invited me back.

There were five of us around the table, all in our mid-twenties. Three had served in Vietnam — Bubba, Darrell Radke, whose family owned the propane company, and Cedric Young, a black guy with a severe leg injury. The fifth player was Bubba’s older brother David, who had been rejected by the draft because of his eyesight, and who, I think, was there just for the marijuana.

We talked a lot about drugs. None of the three veterans had seen or heard of pot or anything else prior to joining the Army. They laughed at the idea of drugs on the streets of Clanton in the 1960s. In Vietnam, drug use was rampant. Pot was smoked when they were bored and homesick, and it was smoked to calm their nerves in battle. The field hospitals loaded up the injured with the strongest painkillers available, and Cedric got hooked on morphine two weeks after being wounded.

At their urging, I told a few drug stories from college, but I was an amateur among professionals. I don’t think they were exaggerating. No wonder we lost the war — everybody was stoned.

They expressed great admiration for my editorial and great bitterness for having been sent over there. Each of the three had been scarred in some way; Cedric’s was obvious. Bubba’s and Darrel’s was more of a smoldering anger, a barely contained rage and desire to lash out, but at whom?

Late in the game, they began swapping stories of gruesome battlefield scenes. I had heard that many soldiers refused to talk about their war experiences. Those three didn’t mind at all. It was therapeutic.

They played poker almost every Thursday night, and I was always welcome. When I left them at midnight, they were still drinking, still smoking pot, still talking about Vietnam. I’d had enough of the war for one day.

Chapter 29

The following week I devoted an entire page to the war controversy I had created. It was covered with letters to the editor, seventeen in all, only two of which were even somewhat supportive of my antiwar feelings. I was called a Communist, a liberal, a traitor, a carpetbagger, and, the worst, a coward because I had not worn the uniform. Every letter was proudly signed, no anonymous mail that week; these folks were fired-up patriots who disliked me and wanted the county to know it.

I didn’t care. I had stirred up a hornet’s nest and the town was at least debating the war. Most of the debates were one-sided, but I had aroused strong feelings.

The response to those seventeen letters was astounding. A group of high school students came to my rescue with a hand-delivered batch of their own. They were passionately against the war, had no plans to go fight in it, and, furthermore, found it odd that most of the letters the prior week were from folks too old for the armed forces. “It’s our blood, not yours,” was my favorite line.

Many of the the students singled out particular letters I’d printed and went after them with a hatchet. Becky Jenkins was offended by Mr. Robert Earl Huff’s statement that “... our nation was built by the blood of our soldiers. Wars will always be with us.”

She responded: “Wars will be with us as long as ignorant and greedy men try to impose their will on others.”

Kirk Wallace took exception to Mrs. Mattie Louise Ferguson’s rather exhaustive description of me. In his final paragraph he wrote, “Sadly, Mrs. Ferguson would not know a Communist, a liberal, a traitor, or a carpetbagger if she met one. Life out in Possum Ridge protects her from such people.”

The following week, I devoted yet another full page to the thirty-one letters from the students. There were also three late arrivals from the warmongering crowd, and I printed them too. The response was another flood of letters, all of which I printed.

Through the pages of the Times, we fought the war until Christmas when everyone suddenly called a truce and settled in for the holidays.

Mr. Max Hocutt died on New Year’s Day 1972. Gilma knocked on my apartment window early that morning and eventually got me to the door. I’d been asleep for less than five hours, and I needed a full day of hard sleep. Maybe two.

I followed her into the old mansion, my first visit inside in many months, and I was shocked at how badly it was deteriorating. But there were more urgent matters. We walked to the main stairway in the front foyer where Wilma joined us. She pointed a crooked and wrinkled finger upward and said, “He’s up there. First door on the right. We’ve already been up once this morning.”

Once a day up the stairs was their limit. They now were in their late seventies, and not far behind Mr. Max.

He was lying in a large bed with a dirty white sheet pulled up to his neck. His skin was the color of the sheet. I stood beside him for a moment to make sure he wasn’t breathing. I had never been called upon to pronounce someone dead, but this was not a close call — Mr. Max looked as though he’d been dead for a month.

I walked back down the stairs where Wilma and Gilma were waiting right where I’d left them. They looked at me as if I might have a different diagnosis.

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” I said.

“We know that,” Gilma said.

“Tell us what to do,” Wilma said.

This was the first corpse I’d been called upon to process, but the next step seemed pretty obvious. “Well, perhaps we should call Mr. Magargel down at the funeral home.”

“I told you so,” Wilma said to Gilma.

They didn’t move, so I went to the phone and called Mr. Magargel. “It’s New Year’s Day,” he said. It was apparent my call had awakened him.

“He’s still dead,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I just saw him.”

“Where is he?”

“In bed. He went peacefully.”

“Sometimes these old geezers are just sleeping soundly, you know.”

I turned away from the twins so they wouldn’t hear me argue about whether their brother was really dead. “He’s not sleeping, Mr. Magargel. He’s dead.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Is there anything else we should do?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Notify the police, something like that?”

“Was he murdered?”

“No.”

“Why would you want to call the police?”

“Sorry I asked.”

They invited me into the kitchen for a cup of instant coffee. On the counter was a box of Cream of Wheat, and beside it a large bowl of the cereal, mixed and ready to eat. Evidently, Wilma or Gilma had prepared breakfast for their brother, and when he didn’t come down they went after him.

The coffee was undrinkable until I poured in sugar. They sat across the narrow prep table, watching me curiously. Their eyes were red, but they were not crying.

“We can’t live here,” Wilma said, with the finality that came from years of discussion.

“We want you to buy the place,” Gilma added. One barely finished a sentence before the other started another one.

“We sell it to you...”

“For a hundred thousand...”

“We take the money...”

“And move to Florida...”

“Florida?” I asked.

“We have a cousin there...”

“She lives in a retirement village...”

“It’s very lovely...”

“And they take such good care of you...”

“And Melberta is nearby.”

Melberta? I thought she was still around the house somewhere, sneaking through the shadows. They explained that they had placed her in a “home” a few months back. The “home” was somewhere north of Tampa. That’s where they wanted to go and spend the rest of their days. Their beloved mansion was simply too much for them to maintain. They had bad hips, bad knees, bad eyes. They climbed the stairs once a day — “twenty-four steps” Gilma informed me — and were terrified of falling down and killing themselves. There wasn’t enough money to make it safe, and what money they had they didn’t want to waste on housekeepers, grass-cutters, and, now, a driver.

“We want you to buy the Mercedes too...”

“We don’t drive, you know...”

“Max always took us...”

Once in a while, just for fun, I would sneak a glance at the odometer of Max’s Mercedes. He was averaging less than a thousand miles per year. Unlike the house, the car was in mint condition.

The house had six bedrooms, four floors and a basement, four or five bathrooms, living and dining rooms, library, kitchen, wide sweeping porches that were falling in, and an attic that I felt certain was crammed with family treasures buried there centuries ago. It would take months just to clean it before the remodelers moved in. A hundred thousand dollars was a low price for such a mansion, but there were not enough newspapers sold in the entire state to renovate the place.

And what about all those animals? Cats, birds, rabbits, squirrels, goldfish, the place was a regular zoo.

I had been looking at real estate, but, frankly, I’d been so spoiled by paying them $50 a month that I found it hard to leave. I was twenty-four years old, very single, and I was having a grand time watching the money accumulate in the bank. Why would I risk financial ruin by buying that money pit?

I bought it two days after the funeral.

On a cold, wet Thursday in February, I pulled to a stop in front of the Ruffin residence in Lowtown. Esau was waiting on the porch. “You trade cars?” he asked, looking at the street.

“No, I still have the little one,” I said. “That was Mr. Hocutt’s.”

“Thought it was black.” There were very few Mercedes in Ford County and it was not difficult keeping track of them.

“It needed painting,” I said. It was now a dark maroon. I had to cover the knives Mr. Hocutt had painted on both front doors, and so while it was in the shop I decided to go with a different color altogether.

Word was out that I had somehow swindled the Hocutts out of their Mercedes. In fact, I had paid blue-book value for it — $9,500. The purchase was approved by Judge Reuben V. Atlee, the longtime chancellor in Ford County. He also approved my purchase of the house for $100,000, an apparently low figure that looked much better after two court-appointed appraisers gave their estimates at $75,000 and $85,000. One reported that any renovation of the Hocutt House would “... involve extensive and unforeseen expenditures.”

Harry Rex, my lawyer, made sure I saw this language.

Esau was subdued, and things did not improve inside. The house, as always, simmered in the sauce of some delicious beast she was roasting in the oven. Today it would be rabbit.

I hugged Miss Callie and knew something was terribly wrong. Esau picked up an envelope and said, “This is a draft notice. For Sam.” He tossed it on the table for me to see, then left the kitchen.

Talk was slow over lunch. They were subdued, preoccupied, and very confused. Esau at times felt the proper thing to do was for Sam to honor whatever commitment his country required. Miss Callie felt like she had already lost Sam once. The thought of losing him again was unbearable.

That night I called Sam and gave him the bad news. He was in Toledo spending a few days with Max. We talked for over an hour, and I was relentless in my conviction that he had no business going to Vietnam. Fortunately, Max felt the same way.

Over the course of the next week, I spent hours on the phone with Sam, Bobby, Al, Leon, Max, and Mario, as we shared our views about what Sam should do. Neither he nor any of his brothers believed the war was just, but Mario and Al felt strongly that it was wrong to break the law. I was by far the biggest dove in the bunch, with Bobby and Leon somewhere in the middle. Sam seemed to twist in the wind and change daily. It was a gut-wrenching decision, but as the days dragged on he appeared to spend more time talking to me. The fact that he had been on the run for two years helped immensely.

After two weeks of soul-searching, Sam slipped into the underground and surfaced in Ontario. He called collect one night and asked me to tell his parents he was okay. Early the next morning, I drove to Lowtown and delivered the news to Esau and Miss Callie that their youngest son had just made the smartest decision of his life.

To them, Canada seemed like a million miles away. Not nearly as far as Vietnam, I told them.

Chapter 30

The second contractor I hired to transform the Hocutt House was Mr. Lester Klump from out in Shady Grove. He had been highly recommended by Baggy, who, of course, knew exactly how to restore a mansion. Stan Atcavage at the bank also recommended Mr. Klump, and since Stan held the mortgage for $100,000 I listened to him.

The first contractor had failed to show, and when I called after waiting for three days his phone had been disconnected. An ominous sign.

Mr. Klump and his son, Lester Junior, spent days going over the house. They were terrified of the project, and knew it would be a regular nightmare if anybody got in a hurry, especially me. They were slow and methodical, even talked slower than most folks in Ford County, and I soon realized that everything they did was in second gear. I probably didn’t help matters by explaining that I was already living in very comfortable quarters on the premises; thus I wasn’t going to be homeless if they didn’t hurry up.

Their reputation was that they were sober and generally finished on time. This put them at the top of the heap in the world of remodeling.

After a few days of scratching our heads and kicking at the gravel, we agreed on a plan whereby they would bill me weekly for their labor and supplies, and I would add 10 percent for their “overhead,” which I hoped meant profit. It took a week of cursing to get Harry Rex to draft a contract reflecting this. At first he refused and called me all sorts of colorful names.

The Klumps would begin with the cleanup and demolition, then do the roof and porches. When that was over, we’d sit down and plan the next phase. In April 1972 the project began.

At least one of the Klumps appeared every day with a crew. They spent the first month scattering all the varmints and wildlife that had made the property home for decades.

A carload of high school seniors was stopped by a state trooper a few hours after their graduation. The car was full of beer, and the trooper, a rookie fresh from school where they had alerted them to such things, smelled something odd. Drugs had finally made it to Ford County.

There was marijuana in the car. All six students were charged with felony possession and every other crime the cops could possibly throw at them. The town was shocked — how could our innocent little community get infiltrated with drugs? How could we stop it? I low-keyed the story in the paper; no sense beating up on six good kids who’d made a mistake. Sheriff Meredith was quoted as saying that his office would act decisively to “remove this scourge” from our community. “This ain’t California,” he said.

Typically, everybody in Clanton was suddenly on the lookout for drug dealers, though no one was quite sure what they looked like.

Because the cops were on high alert, and would love nothing more than another drug bust, poker the next Thursday was moved to a different location, one deep in the country. Bubba Crockett and Darrell Radke lived in a dilapidated old cabin with a nonpoker-playing veteran named Ollie Hinds. They called their place the Foxhole. It was hidden in a heavily wooded ravine at the end of a dirt road that you couldn’t find in broad daylight.

Ollie Hinds was suffering from every manner of postwar trauma and probably several prewar ones as well. He was from Minnesota and had served with Bubba and survived their horrible nightmares. He had been shot, burned, captured briefly, escaped, and finally sent home when an Army shrink said he was in need of serious help. Apparently he never got it. When I met him he was shirtless, revealing scars and tattoos, and glassy-eyed, which, I would soon learn, was his usual condition.

I was grateful he was not playing poker. A couple of bad hands, and you got the impression he might pull an M-16 and even the score.

The drug bust, and the town’s reaction to it, was the source of much humor and ridicule. Folks were acting as though the six teenagers were the very first drug users, and since they’d been caught then the county was on top of the crisis. With some vigilance and tough talk, the plague of illegal drugs could be diverted to another part of the country.

Nixon had mined the harbor at Haiphong and was bombing Hanoi with a fury. I brought this up to get a reaction, but there was little interest in the war that night.

Darrell had heard a rumor that some black kid from Clanton had been drafted and fled to Canada. I said nothing.

“Smart boy,” Bubba said. “Smart boy.”

The conversation soon returned to drugs. At one point Bubba admired his marijuana cigarette and said, “Man, this is really smooth. Didn’t come from the Padgitts.”

“Came from Memphis,” Darrell said. “Mexican.”

Since I knew zero about the local drug supply routes, I listened intently for a few seconds then, when it was evident no one would pursue the conversation, said, “I thought the Padgitts produced pretty good stuff.”

“They should stick to moonshine,” Bubba said.

“It’s okay,” Darrell said, “if you can’t get anything else. They struck it rich a few years back. They started growin’ long before anybody else around here. Now they got competition.”

“I hear they’re cuttin’ back, goin’ back to whiskey and stealin’ cars,” Bubba said.

“Why?” I asked.

“A lot more narcs now. State, federal, local. They got helicopters and surveillance stuff. Ain’t like Mexico where nobody gives a shit what you grow.”

Gunfire erupted outside, not too far away. The others were not fazed by it. “What might that be?” I asked.

“It’s Ollie,” Darrell said. “After a possum. He puts on night-vision goggles, takes his M-16, goes lookin’ for varmints and such. Calls it gook huntin’.”

I luckily lost three hands in a row and found the perfect moment to say good night.

After much delay, the Supreme Court of Mississippi finally affirmed the conviction of Danny Padgitt. Four months earlier it had ruled, by a majority of six to three, that the conviction would stand. Lucien Wilbanks filed a petition for rehearing, which was granted. Harry Rex thought that might signal trouble.

The appeal was reheard, and almost two years after his trial the court finally settled the matter. The vote to affirm the conviction was five to four.

The dissent bought into Lucien’s rather vociferous argument that Ernie Gaddis had been given too much freedom in abusing Danny Padgitt on cross-examination. With his leading questions about the presence of Rhoda’s children in the bedroom, watching the rape, Ernie had effectively been allowed to place before the jury highly prejudicial facts that simply were not in evidence.

Harry Rex had read all the briefs and monitored the appeal for me, and he was concerned that Wilbanks had a legitimate argument. If five justices believed it, then the case would be sent back to Clanton for another trial. On the one hand another trial would be good for the newspaper. On the other, I didn’t want the Padgitts off their island and running around Clanton causing trouble.

In the end, though, only four justices dissented, and the case was over. I plastered the good news across the front of the Times and hoped I would never again hear the name of Danny Padgitt.