False Entry (49 page)

“Murder,” he said. The voice was a reed still, but the manner, dealing every Sunday with like deeds, ennobled it—as did the word. Out of habit, the ring finger pointed, as if accusing, at Dobbin. “You have all the evidence needed to put ten men on trial for the murder of Lucius Asher—to show that he was abducted, held, driven through the backs as hostage and taken up to the dam, in whose rubble his burned body was later found. You lack only one thing.” He paused, wheezing, but from habit too—where in that self-apostasizing bulk would one come to the kernel of him; where would he ever come to it? “You lack only the corroboration to two questions. When was he taken? And by whom? And I presume that the wire telling you this is what you have been holding in your hand.”

“Yes, it is, Mr. Evans.” Dobbin had long since released my shoulder. He was leaning back, one eyebrow scowled high, now at last watching the disorder that might be visited on the law and by it. “It’s an affidavit sworn to by two former clerks of the hiring office here, identifying a car and two men in it—one a dam employee, both known to the parties swearing—who picked up Lucius Asher when he came off the three o’clock shift that day. Half the shift saw the struggle, some of them forming an aisle through which Asher, who had been kicked in the groin, was carried to the car. The assailants made no attempt to conceal who they were, and were cheered by some of the crowd by name. Two federal clerks, neither now in Alabama, have so sworn.” He coughed. One could see the strain in him now; he was a man who, when tired, stood that much more stiffly. “And you’re right, Mr. Evans. That was about all that needed to be filled in. Only we shan’t need to put ten men on trial. Two will do.”

“‘Evans’ is it now, Neil?” the minister said lightly. “It was ‘Charlson’ years ago, even back as far as when you used to come to summer Sunday school.” He looked past Dobbin, past us all. “Years ago.”

In that region, the time elegy, more than ordinarily elsewhere, is a part of normal conversation, being the recurrent chime of a place where friendship can revisit, fresh as ever after twenty years, on a street corner, where the talk of men, prowling the network of cousinship dead or alive, ticks away in those old houses of Usher as comfortably as a kitchen clock. No one in that room underestimated its importance. As Charlson began his ponderous move from the dais, everyone took for granted what he was after—to sound that chime in old Neil’s ear, to get him to play one of those tricks of fealty which were as common as coinage here—to get him somehow “to keep all this dark.” That it could be, in the county of old Fourchette, who would doubt? And if Dobbin did so, all reared here, whether or not in agreement, would understand it—as the final coincidence. So, in the spell of this knowledge, all were quiet as Charlson stepped down, carefully choosing his footing beneath the vast stomach, moving his arms like a prince regent. But it was not Dobbin he went to. He came to me. His great hands, planted down, starred the table in front of me.

I can smell him yet—the odor of revelation—a fat man sweating after his own grace on a hot day. He didn’t betray
them
, only himself—from moment to moment. That was his vibration. His chin stretched forward, the pouch under it quivering like a tenor’s. “You saw the crosses. Tell us what they looked like.”

We had reached the fundament. I knew it at once. The room knew it, as over and over in its chronicle it must have known such. Dobbin knew. His tired face, no longer wary, said it to me. Here’s your disorder. Relish it. There’s a chance, peered from history and gone again, that it may be divine. And back there in the faceless shadows, Johnny raised his eyes.

“There were four.” I spoke from that long-gone hill. Before my eyes and Johnny’s the crater line of the dam site crested its tidal wave in an arc that took in half the world. Its four peaks rose like pediments. “One for each dam.”

“Yes, yes, go on.
Describe
them.” He swung his head at me, fleshy Iaokanann, chestnut-curled.

“It was a clear night. There wasn’t much wind—but it was enough.” I turned up my palms, almost in supplication. “That’s all.”

“Is it?” The head swung. Suddenly he stretched his arms wide. “A cross looks like this, doesn’t it? And a Christian always sees a man on it!”

I turned my head from that spectacle, that mouth agape. I saw him.

The jury heard his whisper, not a question. “Doesn’t he.” All bent their heads away. No one wanted his exegesis. Leave us in our sty. All did except one.

“Tell him, my son,” said my uncle. “The whole truth. You will remember.” He knew I would remember—and more. He knows me, as in his lifetime I was never to know him. He was the listener from behind.

But I, who at twenty-one knew so much, did not recognize him. I was sick with another kind of learning. Back there in the shadows, Johnny stood very still.

“I—I watched them for a long time.” Each cross streamed backward, image of a running man, his flesh a yellow mane behind him. “For a long time.” And in the end I had held out my arms to that Biblical glory. Here now in front of me, held out in place of mine toward it, were Charlson’s, at his side the young clerk’s face, lifted like an acolyte, reflecting it. Gathered round them were all who had assisted me, the men from the left as well as the right, Dobbin, my uncle and Semple. The truth had trumped me up to serve it. I had come to the top of the hill.

“One of the crosses—the one on Dam Number Three—it was thicker than the others.” I whispered it. The apocalypse hits the eyes—long before it reaches the heart. It had taken seven years to reach mine.

“I watched it,” I said. “I watched it until it fell.”

Charlson had his face buried in his palms. Dobbin leaned toward him but did not touch him. A fly buzzed once, twice, between them. “Charlson,” said Dobbin. “It’s nearly six.”

The great, bleared face lifted. “The two you’ll try,” it said. “Am I one?” Already it had shifted; petulance dyed it. “No? I should be!”

“That reminds me,” said Hake. The words seemed absurd, his aspect no longer chilling; he was merely a man somewhat smaller, balder than the rest. “You realize there’s one name we haven’t yet on record?” It was typical of the way vengeance shrank as one went toward it—that this little man who wetted a forefinger as he turned each page should have to remind us of the one we had all forgotten. “The Exalted Cyclops.”

They turned on him to look at him—all the jury on the left-hand side. Even I had forgotten him. To me he would never be ordinary. But even I must begin to doubt that the man sitting there was the one neck to squeeze, the One to stand
in loco parentis
to all the dread in the world.

“The Exalted Cyclops is the supreme officer of a Klan and its official head,” I said. Give him his due; his head did not sink; the crescent eyelids gave me stare for stare. “He is to be a pattern for Klansmen … and he shall do such things as may be required of him by the laws of this Order.” And he had done them. But try as I might, I could not revive him in his original horror. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I had always taken this to mean that the Lord would avenge. Now I began to see its real meaning. Vengeance is never ours. “E. V. Semple,” I said.

Hake’s voice came, lagging too. “Check.”

And now the room was already dispersing like an audience rustling at the coda, although everyone still remained in his chair. Anderson and Davis, speaking in twinned breath, moved for adjournment; in the low growl of assent, Dobbin went to the door. Everyone scuttled toward it with the strange, ragged seeking of crabs when the box is opened; sidling through it, no one, not even the righteous, seemed to wish to touch his brother. Outside, in tableau, Felix the guard gaped at the young clerk, just reverently giving up the minutes to Dobbin, who handed them in his turn to the pug-jawed man flanked by two unknowns—the judge.

In the room with me, Nellis and his master remained, heads together, conferring. As quickly as anything in life, men sense their separation from the general. I too was once more only the witness. I walked the few steps to the window which had drawn me all the stages of that afternoon. Now that the heat of the day was over, the caretaker was mowing the green space between this wall and his cottage, moving in and out between the lines of his wife’s wash—faded nightdresses, child’s jumpers, pantaloons. This was all the mirror reflected when one drew near it—once again the world outside one at its passions and completions, once again the inner, monologuing eye. Had I expected that one brilliant burst of light to impose a helium noon here forever, hoped to look up, up—here at six in the evening—to a meridian quiver of larks?

Behind me, those two, murmuring, evidently were finding words enough now. How should I pass them? When I turned they stopped talking. Then Nellis made as if to speak, but Semple, lifting an uncertain hand, stayed him.

The hoodwink had raised. We took each other’s measure. Why had I troubled, asked that beaten face? Who was I? Who was he, around whose neck I had twined murder? Was he the accidental man? Was I?

Where then was the adversary? If I gave Semple up, then I reentered the difficult, uncodified world. In that vast indiscriminate of pain wherever a child screamed, a neck or a mind was squeezed, a god or a man was hung—I would never find such another.

“It wasn’t
you
,” said Semple. “Then—
why
?”

I examined his face like a lover. Silently I answered, and left him. It wasn’t
you.
Then—who?

Outside on the steps, I found my uncle waiting for me. Dusk had already spread its webs, through which my uncle’s features were tenuous, as mine must be. I was grateful for this, able to feel no other emotion. We fell into step without any exchange. Lights were being turned on for the spectral hour so protracted here at this season; through the open windows supper sounds came, gentled by it, to porches that seemed to drift, waiting. It was the kindest hour of the day. My uncle walked without haste, at a pace consonant with his evening reappearance. As we walked, I felt him to be recharging himself with the burden of my mother, after the day’s business. Between that, just done, and what we walked to, words would have fallen idle. A valuable moment was passing forever for both of us; later it did not seem to me that we had made less of it than we would have, had we known.

Two blocks from home, his hand on my arm stopped me where I was. We stood there, while he chose his words. By now I knew from what a granary these came, but I was not dwelling on it in my present state, only expectant of what I thought he meant to tell me: what we were to say, how we were to bring the news to my mother. I had to leave it to him.

“You’re not to tell her you were there,” he said at last, as if he had heard me thinking. He brooded. “We’ll say nothing of this day.
Nothing.
”

“Yes.” My mind was suspended, a blank thoroughfare. “What will you say to her? I mean, how will you—?” Far off, at the other end of exhaustion, I saw the evening before us. There was fear in her interest now. And she was so keen.

We stood there for a fair time, two men pausing naturally on a street corner, while one chose his words. Finally, he found them.

“I can lie,” he said in a low voice. The addendum came even more quietly. “Too.”

So, in those final moments, we came to our understanding. It is a measure of his power that still, after all these years, I find it enough.

We came almost to our own porch before we could make out the high, eccentric form of the wheel chair, which meant that she was there waiting in the shadows behind the railing, muffled in her scarves. Lucine had not yet lit the lamp. My mother, to spare us the sight of herself, had recently found herself fond of the gloaming. Through it her voice could come still untouched, as it came now.

“You’re late. How is it you’re together? Is anything wrong?”

We had stopped at the bottom of the steps. He also may have been grateful for the dimness, preparing the face which, expressionless as it seemed to others, was not so to her. But his reply cut the dusk cleanly, deftly explaining all, even preparing for me, its only error in that it came too quick—for him.

“Naught’s wrong. Mind, you might find your son a bit tiddly. We had a couple, down to the pub.”

A shot from a rifle makes a clean kind of noise also, as any sportsman will tell you. The sound of the reloading, if you are near enough to hear it, is a little like a man clearing his throat. The first of the shots went through the latticework under the porch, into the dirt. With the second shot, or just before it, a broad light illumined us, trained from a porch several houses down on the opposite side. My uncle pulled me down with him; as we dropped, I thought he cried “Ireland.” I think neither of us was hit by that shot either. There was a third. The light went out with the last.

Then we were left to the dimness, which, after the light, was almost dark. If “we” might still be said. I was not sure. Hit in the leg somewhere, I crawled to my uncle, but in the curious tie of instinct, it was for my mother, only inches and days away from death, that I was fearing. Then I heard her scream, the long, strong, hopeless cry of the chairbound. None of the shots had hit her then—or all of them.

For he had preceded her. A slug from a gun of a size to hunt squirrels with can be minor, in certain parts of the thigh. But he had received it perfectly, from the hand of a good gamesman, in the chest.

If I leaned forward, holding my smeared thigh, I could just barely make out his features. He was a man without effluence. What he liked, if he suffered, no man knew. Yet, sometimes, he moved. Most honest of men, his last words had been a lie for my mother’s sake, if one did not count the scarcely caught “Ireland” that had been meant to warn me. So he died, with all his virtues on him, and such sins as might be.

“Who—who is there? Who?”

I looked up. Tears blinded me, sprung from eyes which had not paused to note they had them. I had forgotten she was there.

“Will no one come?” she said, in the small voice that converses with itself. “Then I must walk—somehow.” I heard her struggle. Then I heard her scream again for Lucine.