Daybreak (34 page)

I don’t want you, he cried silently. Can’t you understand that I don’t? Yes, I believe it’s all true. I was born
to you, DNA doesn’t lie and I do look like you, too. God damn it, I’ve studied my face, and I know. But it’s too late. You can’t come barging into my life like this to tell me I’m a Crawfield. I’m not a Jew! Never. And as long as I don’t feel I am, and as long as nobody knows about this mess, I’m really not. I’m Tom Rice. That’s who I’ve been all my life, and that’s who I’m going to remain. So go away, Margaret Crawfield, will you? Go away and let me be.

He tore the letter into little pieces, threw them away and sat for a while just staring at the wall. Then his eyes lighted on Robbie’s picture, an enlargement of a snapshot he had made at college last winter. Dressed in a big red sweater, she was perched on a low stone wall; on her head was a knitted cap with a pom-pom, and on her face, a bright laugh. He remembered that he had just been telling jokes and so had caught the laugh.

He felt such longing for her! Some people would say that at nineteen he wasn’t ready for the “real thing,” that he’d have “a dozen girls” before he was through. The workmen, talking over their lunchboxes, had already given him some kidding when, in a rash moment, he’d hinted about Robbie. But history told reverently of the pioneers, teenage married couples with babies who came south over the Natchez Trace or who went west over the Oregon Trail. For that matter, how old had Mom been when she married Dad?

He was still sitting there when Bud came into the room.

“What’s wrong, Son? I had to go to the bathroom, and I saw your light.”

“Nothing much. Couldn’t seem to fall asleep, that’s all.”

Bud glanced at Robbie’s picture and back at Tom.
“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “sometimes too many things creep up on you at once, and it seems as if you’ll never be able to carry the load. But you’ll carry it. You’ll be back at school with your girl—she is at school with you, I take it?”

Tom nodded.

“And about this other affair, well, you—and me—we’ll all get through that, too. We got through the last couple of weeks with Timmy, didn’t we? And this is just one more hurdle to jump over.”

Tom closed his eyes to blink away a rising wetness. The unexpected visit in the middle of the night, the kindness, made him fill up.

“But listen. This house still feels like a funeral parlor, and right now it would do you a lot of good to get out of it more often. I have to go tomorrow night on some business, and I’ve been thinking anyway that it’s time I took you with me. How about it? You’re a man now, and I want to bring you with me on a man’s business. You and I think alike on most things, don’t we? Father and son. How about it?” Bud repeated, laying his warm hand on Tom’s shoulder.

It felt so good to hear the words “father and son.” “Yeah, Dad, I’d like to go.”

When Bud left, Tom turned off the light. Father and son, he thought as he lay down. Bud had really steadied him. And now at last, he was able to sleep.

Bud drove home the next night in a small company van, a four-wheel drive with muddy fenders, explaining that they were going to the country and this was a country car.

Timmy asked, “How about me? Am I invited?”

“Not this time. You need rest, and we’ll be home too late for you. Hop in, Tom.”

The sinking red sun cast a hot glow over the familiar streets and glittered on the windows of familiar houses as they passed through their suburb, crossed the interstate on an overpass, and headed northward on a two-lane blacktop road. Tom asked where they were going.

“You’ll see.” Bud reached over and slapped Tom’s knee. “You’re my boy, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am, Dad.”

“I’m going to trust you with some very important information tonight.”

“What is it?”

“Never mind. You’ll see.”

“How far are we going?”

“About twenty-five, thirty miles. Out to the sticks, the real country, where I grew up. Right near my home place, where our family’s roots were planted two hundred fifty years ago. That’s a long time. Makes for deep roots. Not a whole lot of people these days can say that. Well, I guess you’ve heard me say it often enough, though. But you have to admit it’s something to be proud of. Two hundred fifty years.”

For some absolutely crazy reason, a recollection of that emotional old man, Albert, ranting about “a thousand years in Germany” popped into Tom’s head. He wished to God that such thoughts would stop popping, those and dreams like the one he’d had a few nights ago: Margaret Crawfield had stood over him saying something horrible about his having lived nine months with her. Horrible. A nightmare.

The van jolted over holes so deep that they bounced in their seats.

Bud laughed. “Rattles your teeth, doesn’t it? Must be mighty hard on a haywagon, these holes.”

“Guess so,” Tom mumbled.

The gray thoughts, like wisps of cloud, were still trailing, going nowhere. The dusk, gray too, now that the last pink streaks of afterglow were gone, hung over drab, impoverished fields among which lay, far apart, an occasional scattering of meager bungalows.

“You’re awfully quiet. Must be the first time in your life you ever went five minutes without opening your mouth.” When this teasing brought no response, Bud changed his tone. “Ah Tom, I know you’re all worked up. And no wonder. Those tricky sons of bitches won’t let you alone. But I’m going to put a stop to them, you’ll see. Monday morning first thing I’m going to call Fordyce and tell him to muzzle those bastards once and for all. What the hell do I have a first-class lawyer for? He knows how to get after those bastards. So let him do it, and be quick about it. He knows. ‘Crawfield’! ‘Crawvitsky’ is more like it!”

“There’s nothing that Mr. Fordyce can do, Dad. He told you so. I heard him.”

“Oh, that blood business. Why, any crook can cook up stuff like that, pay somebody, phony it up. Why, do you really believe it all, Tom? I know your mother does, but she’s just scared, poor woman, so shocked that there’s no fight left in her. But do you really believe it, Tom?”

“Dad, we’ve gone over this too often. I can’t think of anything more to say.”

“There’s plenty to say. If you want to sit back and believe a lot of crap, that’s one thing. But I don’t want to, and I won’t.”

“Dad, you just said it yourself: You won’t. You don’t want to believe it. But you’re too quick and smart not to see that it’s true, all the same.”

Tom swallowed something in his throat, a lump or a
sob. He felt such tenderness. Surely Dad was able to put two and two together: Timmy’s sickness and Peter Crawfield’s. He felt such pity for him.

“It’s because you love me,” he said. “I understand.”

“Yeah,” Bud said roughly. “Yeah. I love you, all right.”

They rode on. There was a hot stinging in Tom’s eyes, and he kept them closed until it subsided. Shifting in discomfort, stretching his arm to rest on the back of the seat, he jumped and cried out.

“For Pete’s sake, Earl’s in the back. I just felt his cold nose, and for a second I thought it was a snake.”

Bud groaned. “The little bugger must have jumped in while we were in the house. Now what’ll we do? Timmy’s probably tearing up the neighborhood looking for him right now.”

“There’s got to be a phone somewhere.”

“Okay. There’s a little jerkwater town at the next crossroads where we turn.”

Earl was scratching to get into the front seat. Tom leaned over and lifted him onto his lap, where he settled himself in luxury. Fingering the shaggy hair, hugging the small, warm body, Tom imagined that he knew how Timmy got such comfort from a dog.

“Hasn’t changed at all,” Bud remarked as they approached the center of a town, whose nearness was heralded by a store with a Coca-Cola sign and a gas pump in front of it.

Two rows of unpainted houses, each with a front veranda, faced each other on either side of the road. Lights were on in all the back kitchens. Pickup trucks were parked, while in a few of the yards, near a shed, either behind or at the side of the house, lay a rusting wreck. At the four corners stood a wooden church, also
in need of paint. Bud stopped between a beer joint and a garage.

“Toss-up. I’ll try the garage first.”

Tom waited. The silence here was oppressive. It was like a dead place with no one walking—but what would they be walking toward? A pickup passed, going too fast at a crossroads, its radio blasting. And when it had gone, the silence closed back, a stillness as tight as a woolen muffler around one’s neck. It was queer to think of Bud growing up in a place like this, Bud who went out in the Mercedes to address the Chamber of Commerce, Bud who wore a white carnation in his buttonhole when he passed the plate at the Memorial Methodist Church on Summerhill Avenue.

Somebody dropped a metal object inside the garage, making a clang and clatter, which were followed by a dirty curse, an answering curse, and a slammed door that blocked out sounds. After that, abruptly, as if to make purposeful contrast, rose a surging choir of crickets.

And from a place like this, Dad had gone away and married the beautiful young woman—for Mom was beautiful in her bridal photograph and was still beautiful—who lived in the old Paige house with the fine British library and could play for sheer pleasure a Beethoven sonata on the piano.

Bud’s cheerful voice broke into these reflections. “Okay. I set Timmy’s mind at rest. The poor guy was beside himself.”

About to climb back into the front seat, he suddenly changed his mind, saying, “Wait a minute. I might as well do it now. Come back here and let me show you something.”

A grocery carton filled with canned goods and cereal boxes lay on the backseat. Bud started to empty it.

“Here, give me a hand. Just lay this stuff on the floor.”

Wondering, Tom helped remove the groceries. From the bottom of the box where it had been concealed, Bud withdrew what appeared to be a length of white cloth.

“Got to keep this out of sight,” he explained. “You never know when you might get stopped or something. You have a fender-bender and some cop goes searching the car for drugs. Not that I blame him, but we people have to be careful. Especially a man in my position.”

“I don’t understand. What is this about?”

Bud laid the folded material in Tom’s arms. There was a red circular insignia on the cloth, but in the dim light, Tom was not able to read its lettering. And he asked again what this was.

“You have no idea?”

Perhaps—perhaps he did have the glimmer of an idea. But it was so absolutely wild, so fantastically extreme to associate in any way with Mr. Homer Thomas Rice that he was embarrassed, for fear of seeming ridiculous, to tell it. So he shook his head.

“Son, I told you before we started out that I was going to admit you to a solemn secret. You’re old enough, wise enough, and trustworthy enough to hold it secret.” Bud’s voice grew deeper, even hushed, even here on this deserted roadside. “Tom, it’s the Ku Klux Klan.”

A cold thrill trembled up Tom’s spine. All at the same time he was feeling a shock of disbelief, some
troubling distaste, a good deal of excitement, curiosity, and a sense of adventure. Also a considerable fear …

“I never guessed,” he said.

Bud laughed. “That was the general idea. I keep all this stuff hidden in my locker at the office. Come on, we have to get started. I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

Tom kept taking surreptitious glances at Bud’s profile. It made no sense that Bud should suddenly look different, and yet it was true that he did. There was an image now in the eye of Tom’s mind, an incredible image of Bud in a white robe with a tall peaked witch’s hat, performing some occult rite before a burning cross. They were on the way right now to such a place. His heart began to pound.

“How long have you—” he began.

“I was a young man, about the time you were born. But I’ve been interested in it unofficially since I was a child. I had an uncle, my great-uncle actually, who used to tell me things, things he wasn’t supposed to tell. He was a great talker. Everybody knew Henry could never keep a secret. Either he trusted me, or as I said, he just didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. By the way, I’m telling you because you can keep your mouth shut. And I mean completely, Tom. No word even to Timmy, hear?”

“I hear.” Certainly not to Timmy, Tom thought. And he asked, “What about Mom?” Surely Mom wouldn’t know about this.

“For God’s sake, you know better than that. Your mother would disown me, I swear; she’s so against what the Klan stands for.” Bud sighed. “I wish I could talk openly to her—there are women auxiliaries in the Klan, you know—but it’s impossible. She and those aunts of hers, good women, smart women, still don’t
see what’s happening in the world around them. Yes, I wish I could be frank with her, bless her. This is the only thing I’ve ever kept from her.” Bud sighed again. “Well, to get back to Uncle Henry. He used to tell stories about rallies back in the twenties, with concerts and picnics where they’d sign up new members by the hundreds. Once he smuggled me to a spot where I could watch a meeting. They had a burning cross, it must have been a hundred feet high. There was an electric feeling in the air, the whole mass of people united. I never forgot it.”

Tom became aware that the cold fingers were still running up and down his spine. It was the way he had felt that night on Fairview, when the mob, screaming like banshees, had assaulted the house where the blacks lived. Could it have been the Klan’s work that night? He had an eerie feeling, a sense of unreality now, about Bud’s words, about the box on the backseat, and the lonely road curving through aisles of live oaks a hundred years old or more, with the moss hanging from them like the long gray hair of an old mad woman. And he hugged Earl closer to his chest.

Bud was reminiscing. “My dad was a preacher, as you know, but a lot of his folks picked cotton not far from here. Gosh, how my dad hated the Pope!” He gave his familiar chuckle. “Well, times change, and these days we don’t hate the Pope all that much anymore. But Jews—that hasn’t changed. Or blacks—my God, that never will.”

Two needs warred in Tom: the need, born of fear, to hear no more, and the need at the same time to know the whole story.