Daybreak (17 page)

“Good idea. You do that, and I’ll follow up on the next meeting.”

“Yes, but you should be at this one, too. Dudley’s going, so I’ll ride over with him, and we’ll pick you up at your house. West Oak Street, isn’t it? What number?”

He didn’t want Robbie to meet his parents, especially not Mom. When he asked himself why that was so, what difference it would make, he was unable to answer.

“No, I’ll wait for you on the corner. The folks are having relatives here next week, and I’d rather slip out quietly. Make it the corner of West Oak and Tilden Street. Let me know what time, and I’ll be there.”

On Wednesday his parents sat reading in the living room. His father looked up from the newspaper. “Going somewhere, Tom?”

“No place special.”

“Well, have a good time.” As he went down the walk, he heard his father’s laugh. “Going out to chase chip pies. What else at nineteen?”

Under a lamppost where moths bumped and burned themselves on the weak yellow bulb, he waited. Before long, a broken-down sedan appeared with Dudley at the wheel and Robbie next to him. She opened the door.

“I’ll shove over. There’s room for three in the front.”

“No need. I’ll hop in back.” There was something unappetizing, something greasy about Dudley, and he didn’t want Robbie to be pressed up against the man.

The car began to move. “You’ll have to direct me to Fairview. I don’t know this town too well,” Dudley said.

“Fairview!” Tom exclaimed. “I thought there was going to be a rally downtown in the Civic Auditorium.”

“No,” Dudley said. “Johnson had a conflicting date, so we’re going to this instead.”

“To what? What’s happening on Fairview? You didn’t tell me, Robbie.”

“I didn’t know until this morning when somebody came to the store and said we should go here. It seems some young guy is having a protest meeting at his house. It’s not an official campaign rally, it has nothing to do with Johnson,” she explained. “But he’s a Johnson supporter. Young and rich. Name of Anderson. A very important supporter, it seems.”

Greg Anderson. Tom had a general recollection of a flamboyant kid, said to be very smart, straight A’s, who had left high school in his junior year and had been sent away to a prep school in the North. He had a sense of uneasiness. Whatever this was, it was too close to home.

“It sounds cockeyed to me,” he said. “What’s he protesting?”

“Maybe it is cockeyed, but we won’t know until we see for ourselves, will we? Which way, left or right?”

In the few seconds while the car waited at the intersection, Tom’s thoughts coalesced. A protest on Fairview; possibly, very possibly, it had something to do with those blacks who had moved in there. And if so—

He gulped. “Gee, this is tough on me. I live here, a couple of minutes away. My father’s got friends on that street, his banker—gee, he’ll kill me if I get mixed up in a protest meeting.”

When Dudley turned around, Tom could see his
eyes glitter. “Which way?” he demanded, cutting the two words apart as with a knife. “I’m not going to stand here all night while you shake like an old woman.”

“Left. Then another four or five intersections and a tennis club on the corner. Turn left again there, and that’s Fairview.”

Alarm had definitely hastened Tom’s heartbeat. At the same time, the very existence of this alarm infuriated him. He had allowed himself to be insulted. “Old woman,” was he? He had shown weakness in front of Robbie, who was so vigorous and determined.

“I’m far from shaking,” he said stiffly. “And I’m not thinking only of my father. I’m looking a whole lot further. It won’t do our work any good at college, Robbie, or our work with the paper, if we get the wrong publicity, whatever this thing may be about.”

“Tom’s got a point, Mr. Dudley,” Robbie said thoughtfully after a moment. “And Jim Johnson wants to use us in the campaign. If we get our names mixed up in any mess on that street, he’s not going to like it at all.”

“Okay, we’ll drive along the street, see what’s happening, park the car and walk, depending on what’s going on. Should be interesting, anyway.”

It was quite dark, a cloudy night made darker by the heavy leafage of the old oaks that, meeting one another, arched a ceiling over these fine streets. On either side of Fairview, two or three dozen cars and vans, mostly vans, were parked with nobody in them. Far down the street a crowd had gathered, vague shapes in the lighted circles thrown by the streetlamps.

Seventy-five to a hundred people were standing on a lawn that sloped up toward a great stone house. At the
crest of the lawn on a podium improvised out of boxes, a young man wearing a red shirt was haranguing the audience. The scene was theatrical: the imposing house with its balustraded terrace and its flare lights on the corners that, illuminating the crowd, only deepened the blackness of shrubbery as dense, as secretive as a wilderness. The scene was eerie.

“That’s Greg Anderson. I was in high school with him until he left,” whispered Tom.

The speech must have been going on a long time, for the listeners were restless, milling about and whispering among themselves, while the speaker’s voice as he tried to keep their attention and struggled to rise above the rustle of the wind in the trees, verged almost on the soprano.

“What do these people want? Preference in jobs, in the universities, in government—what else? Shoved ahead by the liberals, they’ll end up owning us, body and soul. Look at that house across the street, turn your heads and take a good look at it. Then ask yourselves how many of you can afford to live in a house like that. How much farther do they want to go? To the White House, maybe? Well, and they will if we keep electing the dolts and fools who’ve been running this state and are running it right now. I hope you will all have brains enough to do something about the muddle we’re in, to get out and put more men like Jim Johnson in office. Then maybe, just maybe, we will be able to turn this evil tide—”

As if the listeners had become one body, every head turned toward the street. For a second, Tom thought he was hearing the clatter of horses, but then came the hoot and cry of young male voices; a troop, no more than twenty strong, wearing heavy military boots and
dark glasses, was racing down the middle of the street. In the next second, all twenty had vaulted over the low wrought-iron fence of the property that had once belonged to the Blairs.

The house had been dim, as if the occupants were readying for bed, but suddenly the entire front flared into light so that Tom could see the figures racing over the lawn with caps drawn down over their faces. They were screaming. The hideous, wordless cry raised gooseflesh on Tom’s back. He saw their upraised throwing arms, he heard the crash of glass, and he heard the wail of a child. In seconds they had smashed every first-floor window of that elegant Georgian house.

“What the hell—” cried Greg Anderson. “Quiet, folks! Let’s mind our own business, this has nothing to do with us, you hear?”

But his audience was already fleeing, melting away into the darkness. It was every man for himself.

“Who? What?” Tom panted as, with Robbie, he went stumbling back toward the car.

Dudley grumbled under his breath, “Damn idiots. Fools.”

Cars parked on both sides of the street were trying to pull away, backing, filling and bumping, in a rush to vanish before the certain arrival of the police. A van tried to make a U-turn; drivers entering the street, who were naturally unaware that anything out of the ordinary was taking place, blew horns frantically and tried to back up, inching away from the chaos.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Robbie said anxiously, as they stood helplessly beside Dudley’s car, which was blocked in.

Tom blinked into the headlights of a car that was
slowly approaching. When it passed, he had a glimpse of the occupants and ducked.

“God Almighty, Robbie, that was the minister and his wife. She’s a friend of my mother’s.”

“So what? You haven’t done anything.”

“My God, if she saw me!”

“Get in the car. Nobody saw you. It’s black as hell unless somebody shines a light directly in your face.”

“I’m sure she saw me, though.”

“Get in the car, will you?” Dudley was in a rage. He got behind the wheel, started the engine, and began to rock the car back and forth until he had squeezed it out of the space.

“Listen,” Robbie said, “you didn’t break any windows. It’s not the end of the world. If they did see you, well, they were here on this street, too.”

“That’s different. They live near here, just around the corner.”

With furious defiance, Dudley had forced his way into a U-turn, and, grazing a fender, ignoring protests and curses, fled out of Fairview Street. Bent over the wheel as he sped, he said to himself, “Goddamn mess …”

The car screeched around a corner, raced and squealed around another corner. From a distance behind them, police sirens wailed.

Tom spoke. “You’re going toward the highway. I live the other way.”

“For Christ’s sake, give me directions, then.” Dudley was scared. You could smell his sweat.

“Next right and down the hill. You can stop at the bottom. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

Dudley kept muttering. “Last thing we need is to be mixed up in an attack on blacks. Last thing.”

The car went hurtling down the hill, and Tom gripped the seat. These last few minutes had the feel of unreality, the shattered summer night, shouts, cries, the running feet in unified attack upon that house, the broken glass … He saw his parents as he had just left them, reading in the silence and safety of their home, then stones slamming through the windows … His mother would scream …

“I wonder whether anybody in that house was hurt,” he said.

“And if they were, what difference?” Robbie’s tone was sharp.

“You can make your point without
hurting
people.”

Dudley laughed. “Listen, those people knew they’re not wanted there and yet they forced their way in. So you have to use force to get them out. Nobody
wants
to injure anyone, but that’s the chance you have to take to get your message through. Those people don’t belong in that neighborhood any more than you belong in Buckingham Palace.”

Well, probably so. Those people really didn’t belong there with the Ordways, the minister, and the Andersons, families like that. And as Dad always said, if this kept up, they’d be taking over the whole neighborhood. Everything would change, and Tom didn’t want things to change. Things were fine as they were now.

That guy Greg has guts, he thought. My age, and he holds a meeting for Johnson on his lawn. His parents, naturally, are behind him. Not like my parents. Then he wondered aloud, “What do you suppose is happening back there now?”

“They’ll arrest the guys if they catch them. And your friend Greg may be called as a witness. That’s all,”
Robbie said. “But right across the street from a Johnson rally! Tough luck.”

Dudley reprimanded her. “Don’t worry about Jim. He can take care of himself. Here’s your corner, Tom. You won’t have to walk far.”

   The “Fairview incident,” as it came to be called, was the talk of the city and beyond. Tom rose early the next morning to catch the newspaper as it thumped onto the front lawn. Stunned by the headline, he sat down on the veranda steps and read about the night’s events.

By the time the police arrived, the stone-throwers had left. A photograph showed the shattered windows and the family gathered, huddled at the front door talking to the police. But that was not all. Much later, after the police had left, another attack had been made upon the house, this time with bullets that had gone through the broken windows and embedded themselves in a baby grand piano.

When Laura and Bud came out onto the veranda, Tom gave them the paper.

“We just heard it upstairs on the radio. Some excitement,” Bud said.

Well, they have to be crazies to do that, Tom thought. Protests are one thing, but bullets are something else again.

“What do you think? The Klan?” he asked.

Bud shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe some neighbors—no.” He laughed. “I can hardly imagine Ordway creeping out at night with a rifle slung over his hand-tailored shoulder.”

“You’re laughing?”

At his mother’s tone, Tom, still seated on the steps, looked up. There were tears in her eyes.

“Those animals! No, that’s wrong. Animals don’t do such things.” She wiped her eyes. “I will never understand. Not as long as I live.”

“What won’t you understand, Mom?” asked Timmy, coming onto the veranda.

“This. In the paper. It’s unbelievable. If I could get my hands on those people, I would—I don’t know what I’d do. Scum of the earth. They deserve to die.”

“Death penalty? That’s pretty strong. They didn’t kill anybody,” Bud said.

“I’m talking morals, not laws. I’m no lawyer,” Laura said vehemently. “Oh,” she cried, “don’t you see, it’s not only the cruelty to that one family? It’s much more. It’s a whole poisonous atmosphere, like a cloud.” She made a wide gesture with her arms. “A cloud that spreads and spreads. Don’t you see?”

“I see,” Bud replied, “that if—listen, I’m not saying it’s right to shoot up somebody’s house—but if people upset the applecart, they shouldn’t wonder why the apples are smashed all over the ground. Anyway, I’m sick of hearing about blacks. I’m sick of them, every damn one of them. Blow them all up into space or drown the lot in the Atlantic. I won’t miss them.”

Timmy had a puzzled, worried expression, looking from father to mother and then to Tom. The atmosphere was heavy; you felt, Tom thought, as if an actual storm were coming, when the wind stirs the quiet trees and the leaves turn inside out. With a glance at his mother he saw the storm rising. And then as quickly as it rose, it sank.

Her cheek muscles tightened; she spoke with measured calm.

“I’ve got the pancakes mixed. Blueberry this morning.
So come on. The Rice family’s front-porch arguments aren’t going to solve the world’s problems.”

   “Your mother gets too upset. She takes everything too much to heart,” Bud said as Tom and he rode to work. “I hate to see it.”

“Betty Lee told me Mom brought cake and stuff over to those blacks on Fairview.”