Brambleman

A Novel

By

Jonathan Grant

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Jonathan Grant 2012

Thornbriar Press

Atlanta

Published by Thornbriar Press at
Smashwords

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places and incidents appearing in it are the result of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely
coincidental.

Copyright 2012 by Jonathan Grant

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States of America by
Thornbriar Press, Atlanta, Georgia. www.thornbriarpress.com.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

Grant, Jonathan, 1955-

Brambleman : a novel / by Jonathan Grant.
–1st ed.

p. cm.

LCCN 2012931583

ISBN 978-0-9834921-2-2

ISBN 978-0-9834921-3-9 (ebook)

1. Authors–Fiction. 2. African
Americans–Fiction.

3. Georgia History–Fiction. 4.
Landowners–Georgia–

Atlanta–History–20th century–Fiction.

5. Atlanta (Ga.)–Race relations–Fiction.

6. Forsyth County (Ga.)–Race
relations–Fiction.

7. Lynching–Fiction 8. Suspense fiction,
American.

9. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Title.

PS3607.R36292B73 2012

813'.6 QBI12-600019

Printed in the United States of America

Cover photo by Matthew King

Cover design by Jerry Dorris at
AuthorSupport

Books are available at quantity discounts.
For more information, contact Marketing Department, Thornbriar
Press, 3522 Ashford Dunwoody Road Suite 187, Atlanta GA 30319.

There was a man in our town, and he was
wondrous wise;

He jumped into a bramble-bush, and scratched
out both his eyes.

But when he saw his eyes were out, with all
his might and main,

He jumped into another bush, and scratched
them in again.

—Mother Goose

In memory of my parents,

Don and Jeanne Grant

Very early on the gray, drizzly morning of
January 24, 1987, Thurwood Talton put on his blue suit and ambled
into the bathroom of his brick bungalow in Atlanta’s
Virginia-Highland neighborhood. He trimmed his silver goatee and
taped a gauze bandage over the gash on his forehead, which had
required six stitches to close. He was rather proud of his
wound—his “badge of courage,” an admiring colleague had called
it.

The retired Georgia State University history
professor was preparing for the second Forsyth County
Anti-Intimidation March, a follow-up to the previous Saturday’s
disaster. On that day, Talton and seventy-five others, led by fiery
civil rights leader Redeemer Wilson, had been driven from the
county by a pack of rock- and bottle-throwing thugs. Klansmen,
neo-Nazis, and their Rebel-flag waving sympathizers had screamed at
the marchers: “Get out of town, niggers!” “Praise God for AIDS!”
“Forsyth County’s always been white, and it’ll always be
white!”

Talton had heard someone shout “nigger lover”
just before a beer bottle smashed his head. Although dazed and
bleeding, he’d stayed on his feet—barely. The photo of a sheriff’s
deputy helping him back to the bus had run in hundreds of
newspapers. After viewing several pictures of the mob, Talton had
pointed out a hulking youth in a tan coat as his assailant. There
had been no arrest. No surprise there. Forsyth County folks stuck
together, he knew.

Redeemer, a fearless man, had responded to
the violence by calling for a bigger protest. Now, nervous local
and state officials were bracing for a march on the Forsyth County
Courthouse in Cumming by an estimated 20,000 marchers from all over
the world. Talton, one of the few Southern whites who had
participated in the 1960s civil rights movement, would have an
honored front-row spot.

This was, in many ways, the last hurrah for
the old guard. Although the King Holiday had recently been
established in Georgia, the movement was facing its twilight during
the Reagan years. Talton had written in his journal of his hope
that the march would begin a revival. He was sure some good would
come of the fact that Forsyth’s nasty secret was finally out:
Blacks were not allowed there to live, work, play—or even breathe.
Needless to say, the attention was overdue. Long a sleepy rural
enclave, Forsyth had first been awakened by the impoundment of Lake
Lanier, the state’s favorite playground. Now, three decades later,
it was a fast-growing suburb, thanks to Atlanta’s boomtown growth
next door. That it was only a racist’s stone’s throw away from
America’s black Mecca made Forsyth County’s outright bigotry not
only ironic, but bizarre. Contrary to the catcalls, Forsyth had not
always been white. And no one better understood Forsyth’s peculiar
demographics than Dr. Talton.

At first, reporters wanted to talk to him
only about his head wound, but coverage shifted when they found out
he’d spent several years researching and writing a hefty manuscript
entitled
Flight from Forsyth
. After a dozen interviews, he’d
boiled the story down to a sound bite: In 1912, a sensational
rape-murder trial and lynching fueled the twentieth century’s worst
outbreak of nightriding, and more than a thousand black residents
were driven from Forsyth, never to return. Journalists misquoted
him, reporting that
all
had fled. There was more to it than
that. Talton had recently learned some horrible and fascinating new
information, but he wouldn’t share it just yet.

Unfortunately, his manuscript was
too
hefty. University Press had rejected it “primarily for reasons of
length” although the acquisitions editor had noted other problems
as well. But surely
Flight
’s prospects had improved in the
last week, given the publicity surrounding the marches. Believing a
book deal to be a sure thing, Talton planned to find an agent and
cut a deal with a major publisher. He’d already promised to use
part of the advance he would receive to take Kathleen on a cruise.
To Alaska, maybe. Or Norway.

Alas, none of these things would happen.

As he looked in the bathroom mirror and
adjusted the knot on his silver-and-red tie, Talton felt an
overwhelming pain in his chest. He cried out in alarm and lurched
into the narrow hall, bouncing off the wall, knocking down
photographs, and stumbling into the front bedroom, where he died in
his loving wife’s arms. His last words were “not done.” He was 68
years old.

The cause of death was an embolism of the
left pulmonary artery: a blood clot. Kathleen Talton was certain
that the man who threw the bottle had caused her husband’s death,
but no one listened to her pleas for justice. She grieved with her
daughter Angela and a few friends. After the Unitarian funeral, she
grieved alone.

Kathleen was certain that Talton had been
talking about his book when he died, and she considered it her duty
to see his work published. She tried to interest editors in
Flight from Forsyth
, to no avail. It needed extensive
editing, she was told. Unfortunately, no one was willing to
dedicate the time and effort necessary to fix it.

Many years passed. The manuscript gathered
dust on the handsome walnut desk in Talton’s study. Kathleen
retired from her job as a high school English teacher in Decatur.
Dementia crept into her life with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease,
and her world grew darker and lonelier. She feared becoming
dependent on unreliable people. When unfamiliar faces showed up at
her door, there was always a debate in her mind: Did she know them?
Should she let them in?

One winter night nearly two decades after her
husband’s death, she wandered into the study and sat down at the
desk, struggling to remember why she had come there. She was
lonely—and angry at Angela for spending Christmas in Florida with
her young girlfriend.

The manuscript sat where Thurwood had left it
long ago. With a trembling hand, she lifted the title page, then
put it back in place atop the pile of paper. She sobbed when she
realized she’d let the book die and had failed in her duty to the
man she’d loved for so many years. It would take nothing less than
a miracle to get Thurwood’s life’s work published now. And what
about justice? What about the man who’d killed him? She looked up
at the faded newspaper clipping and its picture of that young punk,
captured in an enduring grimace of hatred.

She wanted her late husband’s work to be
completed and published.

She wanted his killer to be brought to
justice.

And it would be nice to have someone to talk
to on desolate winter nights.

With the weight of loss and loneliness
bearing down on her soul, she did something she hadn’t done since
she was a little girl who wanted a pony. She bowed her head and
prayed. This time, she asked for vengeance, justice, companionship,
completion, and closure.

It was a careless and jumbled-up prayer, but
a most interesting one.

In the silence between the clatter of dishes
and the waitress’s barked order, Charlie Sherman heard himself
dripping. He counted tiny splashes on the laminated menu: one, two,
three. Waving to get the server’s attention accelerated the patter.
Interesting.

It was late on the night after Christmas, and
less than an hour before, Charlie had been a semi-respectable
stay-at-home suburban father, failing novelist, and not-so-loving
husband. Now he was homeless, and he looked the part, in a torn
blue nylon bomber jacket, tattered beige Henley shirt,
paint-spattered gray sweat pants, and holey black basketball shoes.
To top off his grungy appearance, he wore basketball goggles—a
necessity after he’d broken his tortoise-shell frames during a
Christmas Eve wrestling match with his four-year-old son, Ben. Not
only did they make him look like a devolved alien, but the
prescription was ten years old, so they gave him a headache,
too.

He’d been thrown out of the house following
an ugly domestic dispute that was not, at this fragile time,
resolvable. Upon bitter reflection during the driving rainstorm,
Charlie had concluded that Susan had wanted him out for months.
Still, the eviction had come as a surprise. A shock, actually.

He’d been in the garage minding his own
business, plunking bolts into a can, straightening up his workshop
in preparation for his next home improvement project—just two days
after he’d finished renovating the master bath. When he heard Susan
hollering, Charlie thought his wife was being assaulted. Armed with
a mini-sledgehammer, he’d rushed to her side, only to learn that
he
was the problem—one she’d decided she could do
without.

She was standing in his office, pointing at
his computer screen. Dumbfounded, Charlie stared at it. Honestly,
he had no idea how that picture had become his screensaver. Due to
the vagaries of Microsoft Windows, he had unwittingly turned a
photo of a mournful-looking young blonde being gangbanged by a
basketball team into his desktop background. An anti-virus icon
covered her left nipple, but she was otherwise completely exposed.
Damn you, Bill Gates
.

Meanwhile, Susan let loose. “You fucking
asshole,” she said. “Get out of my house.”

That was just her opening statement. When she
unloaded, she could carry on for days on end, just like her mother.
Before Charlie could properly formulate a response to her
rapid-fire accusations, the cops arrived. Almost instantly, it
seemed. Of course, she invited them inside.

While Charlie never swung the mini-sledge at
anyone, hit anything, or even threatened Susan with it, he was
still holding it when the cops came in, and they didn’t like that
very much. One of them drew his gun, and they ordered Charlie to
put it on the floor—and his hands on his head. Her face pinched and
flush, dark eyes throwing daggers in her husband’s direction,
blonde hair flying as she wagged her head and shook her fist, Susan
then accused her husband of threatening her with the hammer, or
more precisely, wielding it in a menacing way. “He acts like he
wants to use it on something, maybe me,” she said. Then she
launched into her longstanding complaint: “It would take a miracle
for him to get a real job instead of writing books no one will ever
read.” She delivered this pronouncement in that hateful North
Georgia twang that was the hallmark of her family.