False Entry (45 page)

“Maxon’s Grove. If you go through the backs, straight westerly from the whistle stop, you come out to two crossroads on the other side. Take the dirt one, about three quarters of a mile down, and you come to it. I came on it once, exploring, and after that I used to go there the way a kid will when he finds a place that looks secret; used to read there, try and slingshot rabbits, generally hang around. Built myself a kind of cave in the bracken.” Johnny had done that, found the place on one of the afternoons his mother had had to turn him out of the house because she had a man there.

“The grove was near enough to the backs, but the Negroes never went there. I was still new enough to the town so I didn’t know why. Maxon had been one of the organizers of the first Klan in the old Civil War days. Place had always been used by them. Still was. But of course I didn’t know that. Summer nights, I sometimes took my supper there, leaving by sundown, since I had to be home soon after dark.” Johnny used to camp there overnight. “One night, though, I fell asleep there. When I woke up it was dark, and they were not ten yards from me, the whole ring of them. They were holding a tribunal, and of course they were wearing the hoodwink. I was too scared to make a noise. But I’d not been brought up to believe in ghosts, and these talked like men—one with a voice I thought I recognized. Upshot of it was, I spied on them several times running, by getting there early. They had a guard of course, the Klexter, but he always watched the road. Then, one night, they caught me at it.” Johnny had spied on them for months, only being caught when he wanted to be, when he yearned for it.

“I let slip all I’d seen; I was even fool enough to address that one of the men by name.” Even now that scene, as it had come to me through Johnny’s lame pauses, still shook me. He’d let himself be brought out, collared and kicked forward in his fowl-stained overalls and boiled-out T shirt, into the center of their cleanly ring. Then he’d gone down on his knees to that seated figure, to the slit eyes in the peaked white hood above him. (“Oh, Exalted Cyclops,” he had said, “please let me belong. I could be the mascot.” And then, out of his simplicity and his longing, “Please, Mr. Semple, please!”)

I paused for breath. Following my double thread, I no longer saw my audience. “They saw I was harmless—and dazzled. Gave me a bloodcurdling warning—it only thrilled me the more, though I was scared enough—and turned me loose. But later on, the man I’d recognized tapped me on the shoulder one day in town. Started me out on small errands. Kept me on a string, like.” That last was Johnny himself speaking. I must be more careful. “It was supposed to be for him, but I soon knew it wasn’t. And as I got older, he—they—let me do more. They—just got used to me.” I stopped again, fighting my heartbeat for breath. I had done the first lap, come round the circle. “And that’s how it was that day.”

Dobbin spoke. “You were a kind of apprentice then. Till you were old enough to be eligible. That how they do it?”

“They may do. I only know my own history. And almost from the beginning I knew I couldn’t belong.”

“How’s that?” Softly he led me, toward what was to both our interests to make clear.

“I got to know their rule book by heart, all seventy-five or so pages of it. You know what parliamentarians boys are.” I smiled slightly. They would never believe the other—that I had seen it once. “I knew it as well as the baseball scores. I still do. You have to be native-born to belong to the Order. And I’m not.” At times, Johnny’s mother would tell him that he was the legal son of a husband in the old country, at others that he had been born a few years after that man’s death, in a town somewhere near Shamokin, Pennsylvania. He too had had his choices.

“I’ll ask you to quote from that book shortly. Meanwhile—just for my own interest—and no doubt the jury’s—what in God’s name is the ‘hoodwink’?” I had piqued him. For a moment his other world showed itself.

“It’s the official regalia of the Klan.”

“Question, Mr. Dobbin.” The voice, a ringing nasal, was not Anderson’s, but came from their side. I found its owner, a small man in their front row, bald as ivory. His heavy lips moved as slowly as if they were.

“Yes, Mr. Hake?” Hake, the general superintendent of the dams. He emanated the chill that came from all the absolutely hairless. A busy man, often in Washington. More chill was to be taken from the fact that he had found time to sit here.

“Of what country is the witness?”

Dobbin let me answer. I did so with impatience. “Great Britain. I came here at the age of ten.”

“I take it that his noncitizenship has no bearing on the legality of his testifying at this hearing?”

“None,” said Dobbin, grave to this absurdity. “None.”

“Thank you. Some of my colleagues here were doubtful.” A nucleus of men around Hake nodded. So they too had taken counsel among themselves.

“Tha-at’s right!” Lemon spoke without looking up. Cigar in mouth, ever a man for activity, he was now trimming his nails with a pocket-knife. He leaned forward, easily flicking one hand, and the tiny, invisible gauntlet fell on the papers on the desk before me, with an almost inaudible
pip.
“What’s he down here pimpin’ for trouble for spyin’ on us? Him and his uncle.”

“I already said—my uncle had nothing—”

“Uh-huh. I heard you.” He was trimming the last nail. “How come you here then?”

“The witness was called,” said Dobbin. “He is not required to explain why he is here.” Did he suspect that I could not? “If he’s allowed to go on, no doubt that will appear. Do you wish to question him yourself, Mr. Lemon?”

“Nah-h. I
was
born here, Mister Dobbin. But not yesterday.” He looked up for the first time. “And I say—
that
for your witnesses!” In the same instant the knife left his hand with a hard swish and embedded itself, handle up, a perfect mumblety-peg throw, in the desk just in front of me.

I flinched back in reflex, then thrust my hand out for it. Lemon out-reached me.

“Boys! Boys!” It was the minister who spoke, a curious reed from that bulk.

“Tha-at’s right, Charlson, you tell us.” Lemon was standing. His head moved only an inch sideways on its fulcrum. “He’p us separate the me-en from the boys.”

Men as fat as Charlson redden clearly; even Dobbin could not help staring for a minute without shame. Lemon lost none of his swagger. Coarseness freed him, allowing hits so low and near that men more tangled in decencies could only be jealous of it. Lemon, born so deft with the knife, had long since learned the uses of words that were unanswerable otherwise. Now he snapped the jackknife shut, balanced it on his palm for a second, then slapped it away in a pocket. “Well, who’s for leaving?” There was no doubt of whom he was addressing, although he still half faced Dobbin. Ignoring Charlson, he let his gaze rest on each in turn. “Well? You all going to sit on here, listen to this thing right through to the end? You just going to sit here?” He bent forward, nursing his thigh. “Now. There’s twenty-three men present on this jury. If just nine of us leave—no, even eight—there can’t be no further business. I say it’s time to break things up, maybe talk over our rights and privileges in private.” Lowering his voice, he spoke almost as if they were already alone. “Whether this fellow’s lyin’ or not—that won’t make no difference—you know that, don’t you?” He swept a fist in front of him. “Come on, what say!” He waited. “Rollins? Only takes two.” Hesitated. “Nellis?” One further corner his eye still refused. “Who’s to say we can’t walk right out if we want to, and not come back? Who’s to say we got to sit here?”

Because Lemon was looking at Dobbin now, everyone looked there. Head cocked back, lips parted, Dobbin seemed to be waiting. While we watched, he slipped a cigarette from his pocket—quietly—as if the packet within must not be crackled, held his lighter in abeyance. Turning to the window, he seemed to take a respite from the room. Because he breathed like a man counting his breaths, we breathed with him. The wait, interminable to us, seemed not to bother him. Did he know what would come, or only gamble that something might? It came from behind him.

“Sit down, Lemon,” said Semple.

I heard Dobbin sigh.

When Lemon sat down, it was almost as if he sank to his knees.

Over on Hake’s side, the men around him stirred for the first time collectively. They had lived all their lives under a dominion of invisibles—governments, powers, subornations they had heard to exist, but never expected to see. But, even up to now, perhaps, they had only idly believed.

Dobbin lit his cigarette. “I think possibly—there might be more interrogation on the part of the jury.” He surveyed them, lingered, as if with regret, on Hake, went past the assistant foreman—a stammerer, passed quickly over Charlson, as charity for the moment should, stopped at Nellis—who bent his head, and came to rest as all along intended. “Mr. Semple?”

Semple. I have described him elsewhere—and can do it over and over: brown features, none of prominence, hair cut short, thick white hair, the look of extra energy this often gives a middle-aged man. Or did I err there, only interpret? Hair cut short—I had not said that before. Each time round, a detail adds itself, subtracts, but the whole avoids, like that retinal after-image the scudding eye can catch only by not pursuing, can never hold still and square. Dobbin’s head, that good medal, aligned itself at once in any light; Semple’s, struck over and over, remained—even when I faced it—blurred. He was a man of the most ordinary description—of that I am persuaded—but like all whom the mind raises to a special niche of good or evil, his description had already been given elsewhere. Even there that day, he sat in its nimbus, seen through the same vibrating haze that surrounds an object of love. He wore the hoodwink still. Only once, at the end, did it raise.

“Would you care to question the witness, Mr. Semple?”

The telling thing was that he had stayed, and not only to quench Lemon. I thought I knew why—each of us drawn in his own way to the scene of the crime. It might be tactic for him to stay; it would be torture to leave our whispering phalanx behind him. The dreadful itch to revisit had come upon him. He longed to comprehend what he had done, as it looked in the eyes of others.

“I could,” Semple said. “Along the lines of that day.”

“Hold on there.” It was Hake again. “Aren’t we going to hear from that rule book first?”

Dobbin, as if reluctant, checked his watch. I glanced at the clock up above; I had been here one hour. “Three-thirty,” said Dobbin. He raised his eyebrows, shrugged. “The day’s yet young.” Afternoon sessions ran until five-thirty. But I would have bet anything that Neil Dobbin almost never needed a watch to tell him the time. “Well—we did say, didn’t we?” He said. “Not all seventy-five pages, please—and I must ask the jury to restrict its questions as much as possible to what’s salient. That telegram from Washington might still get here today. And I’d like for us to get through the heart of the testimony before that.”

I heard him with awe. “Whatever we do,” he had said the night before, “I want them to hear you reel off from that manual. Christ. It chills the blood, doesn’t it. There’s a man there, Hake, who may worry at you like a terrier. Let him. He knows what he’s doing. Let him take as long as he wants. Those other boys from Charlotte are sober and willing enough—but maybe it’s time the iron entered their souls.” Drawing the paper ring from his cigar, he had placed it carefully on the cloth. “And from then on,” he had said, touching its red and gold coronet with the tip of a finger, “they’re not likely to doubt your powers of recollection.”

“We can check it later on, I trust, Mr. Dobbin?” said Hake. “By means of a copy?”

“Yes,” said Dobbin. “Later on this afternoon, perhaps. I trust.” And lifting his chin, he nodded at me to begin.

I could hear my heart beat as if it were across the room from me, the room a cave. I was on my own now, Johnny the mascot. I looked at Semple. Just as one dreams it—the wild image of what could never believably come to be. Once in one’s life just as one dreamed it. It had come to be. “Klansman’s Manual,” I said with dry lips. “Nineteen twenty-four. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. P. S. Etheridge—Chief of Staff and Imperial Klonsel.” I heard the men on Hake’s side stir in the small crepitations of the tense; I heard the absolute quiet on the other. My tongue was dry also. “Klonsel,” I repeated, and stopped. My tongue clove to my mouth, filling it.

“Go on!” Dobbin spoke sharply.

I could see the white page in front of me, bird-tracked with K’s. Down the page they went, like the track of feet, set down one after the other, of a long line of men stalking in secret procession. But I could not see the letters between them. Like underbrush, the gray, long sentences between. “I—” Here and there the fabric of silence gave way—the creak of a chair, a man shifting his knees. “I—just need the first line.”

A titter came from the left. Frazer.

Dobbin shielded his eyes with his hand.

My hands were fisted in front of me. I pressed one thumb, bent at the knuckle, against the other straight one—K. What came next? K. I glanced upward.

“The Order.” Semple spoke it softly. “The Name.”

Had he too been waiting, hoping in spite of himself for what could never—? How could one tell? His face had not changed. I noted a detail I had forgotten—the sharp fold of the eyelids, like halves of nutshells, that kept the pupils unfringed. These were brown, the color of the cul-de-sac. I saw it again, the annex room, heard the wardrobe door, big as a coffin lid, creaking. Past bladder-shapes of leather, iron and shadow, I walked to where twelve chairs enclosed a circle with exemplary neatness. Once again I leaned over their center, the hairline cross stirring at my breath. The pins came out easily. And now I no longer needed him. I turned to Dobbin, smiling. “The Order,” I said, “The Name. Forever hereafter it shall be known as KNIGHTS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN. Its Divisions: There shall be four Kloranic Orders of this Order, namely: The Order of citizenship, or K-UNO (Probationary) … Knights Kamellia, or K-DUO (Primary Order of Knighthood). Knights of the great Forrest, or K-TRIO (the Order of American Chivalry). Knights of the Midnight Mystery, or K-QUAD (Superior Order of Knighthood).