Home Fires (6 page)

One hand had printed every S and every N backwards. A different hand had mixed his capitals with lowercase, then dotted each capital I. And while Andrew’s son might have written his letters that way, April’s son had been taught to print his alphabet perfectly long before he started kindergarten.

I’ve heard SBI handwriting experts say it’s almost as hard for an educated person to mimic a crude writing style as it is for an uneducated person to mimic a correct style. Both groups almost always revert to true form somewhere in the document. I was pretty sure A.K. couldn’t have written those backward letters that consistently. Especially not after three or four beers.

But he’d certainly had a hand in tipping over half a dozen headstones and pulling over the angel.

“No real damage to the markers,” said Mr. Peacock after he’d walked around the little graveyard. “I can stand ’em back up, reseat them with a little mortar and they’ll be fine as new once that latex paint’s scrubbed off. Good thing they won’t using oil-base.”

“What about that there angel?” asked Daddy.

She was granite, not marble, about five feet tall, and she had fallen back at an angle. One wing was half-buried in the soft sandy loam, but the right wing had struck the stone wall and shattered into several chunks.

“Now that’s gonna take some work,” said Mr. Peacock, stroking his broad chin. “I gotta be honest with you, Mr. Kezzie. It’s gonna cost. First I’ve got to see if what’s left of that wing can take drilling.”

“Drilling?” I asked.

He was so absorbed in the mechanics he forgot to be shy and actually met my eyes for a brief instant. “I’ll have to put in at least two steel pins to hold the new wing tip on. Then if it’s sound enough to accept the pins, I’ve got to see if I can match the color. Every stone’s a little different, you know.”

He bent down for a chunk of the broken wing that must have weighed at least fifteen pounds and hefted it in one huge hand as if it were a two-pound sack of flour. The sun had already set and daylight was fading, but we could still see the color difference between the granite’s weathered surface and its freshly split interior.

His hands looked like boot leather but his touch was delicate as his fingers gently traced the feathers chiseled on the broken stone he held, as if he were smoothing real feathers instead of granite.

“And after I match the stone, I’ve got to carve the feathers so they match, too.”

“And if the pins won’t hold or you can’t match it?” asked Daddy.

“Then we’ll have to make a whole new pair of wings and pin ’em on back behind the shoulder blades. By the time I give her a good buffing all over and bring her back and stand her up, they ought to look all right, but it’s gonna cost you.”

“Durn them boys,” said Daddy, shaking his head.

“Could’ve been a lot worse,” Peacock said. “If she’d fallen on her face, we’d have to make a whole new head. You can’t never get a new nose to look exactly right.”

As they continued to talk, I wandered around in the twilight to read the names of Crockers long gone. Old Mr. Ham Crocker had been eighty-eight. His sister Florence, laid to rest here around the turn of the century, “died a maid of 14 yrs., 3 mos., 24 days.” And there was Daddy’s great-uncle Yancy Knott “and also his beloved wife Lulalia Crocker Knott,” both dead of typhoid in 1902.

Gardenia bushes had been planted on either side of the gate and they were in full bloom. Their heavy sweet fragrance filled the air and hummingbird moths were busily working the fleshy white blossoms.

Lightning bugs drifted on the still June air. Mosquitoes, too, I realized, and slapped at one that was biting my arm.

Suddenly the quiet evening was interrupted by a pager on Rudy Peacock’s belt. He squinted at the tiny screen in the failing light, then strode across the cemetery to his truck, pulled out a cell phone and punched in some numbers.

“Where?” we heard him ask urgently. The next minute he was stepping up into the cab.

“Sorry, Mr. Kezzie, Miss Deb’rah, but I got to go. I’m on the volunteer fire department and we just got a call-out. Sounds pretty bad.”

“Where?” asked Daddy, his long legs covering the ground between them.

Already we could hear sirens on the other side of the woods.

“Starling’s Crossroads,” said Rudy Peacock as he swung himself into the seat and switched on the flashing red light suctioned to his dashboard. “The church yonder.”

Storm Alert! Isaiah 29:6

—Pleasant Grove Freewill Baptist

“It must be Balm of Gilead,” I said as we sped through the lane behind Rudy Peacock. “Where that Mr. Freeman preaches.”

“Yep,” said Daddy.

Despite the warm evening, we had the pickup windows rolled tight to keep from breathing in the clouds of dust Peacock’s truck was kicking up. It was like driving through fog and Daddy kept his beams on low so he could see the way.

When we reached the blacktop, our windows came down and we heard sirens converging from all directions. We followed as Mr. Peacock made another quick turn onto a clay road with deep, sunbaked ruts that hadn’t been scraped since the last heavy rain. A car was ahead of him and another turned in behind us. The red clay made it even dustier than the lane we’d just come from, and at that speed we were jounced around so hard that we had to shout to hear each other. Between rising dust and falling darkness, it was hard to make out the old converted gas station until we were right on it and could see the front lit up in kaleidoscopic flashes from the red lights in a couple of volunteers’ pickup trucks.

Flames were already jetting through the back left corner of the roof and Daddy pulled in behind Peacock just as the West Colleton volunteer fire truck swung in next to the building itself.

Ignoring Daddy’s command to stay in the truck, I jumped out to see if I could help salvage anything from inside.

Like hundreds of small two-pump gas stations built in the 1940s, this one had the usual low-pitched A-line roof that extended out over a narrow pull-through to cover the gas pumps plus a smaller pump for kerosene, none of which was still here.

A fireman called out, “Reckon they’s still any gas in them old tanks?” and I hoped Daddy had heard and that he’d stand well back in case something set off the tanks that were probably still there beneath the ground.

Two barred windows flanked the center door, and I followed a burly volunteer in protective gear into the large open space once lined with shelves of canned goods, sugar, flour and cereal, with room for a counter to one side, a drink box at the front and a potbellied stove in the middle. A narrow door at the rear would have provided cross-ventilation in summer.

Now the single room held ten or twelve long wooden pews, an old-fashioned upright piano and a homemade wooden pulpit, and the cross-ventilation fed the flames blazing in the far left corner. I saw that one of the pews was ablaze on its own in the middle of the room, but what with the heavy pulpit Bible and grabbing up anything else I could lay my hands on, I was too busy to think just then what that might mean.

“Get out! Get out! Get out!” cried the man with the pulpit on his shoulders, but there were hymn books scattered along the pews—how could this impoverished congregation buy new ones? And fans. No air-conditioning here—I had to save the fans. Sparks showered down, stinging my bare arms.

Gasping for air, choking on smoke, I heaped hymnals and fans on top of the huge pulpit Bible and stumbled through the door just as rafters began to crash down behind me.

I was no sooner out into the fresh air than Daddy grabbed me roughly as if I were ten years old again and he meant to shake some sense into me.

“Don’t you never do nothing like that again as long as you live,” he raged as he brushed at the singed places where burning sparks had fallen onto my hair.

Between coughs to clear my lungs and trying to assure him that I wasn’t hurt, I almost didn’t see those ugly words spray-painted in dark green across the front of the white clapboard structure.

As soon as I did see them though, I knew that this was no accidental electrical fire. Those letters were too similar to the ones sprayed across the Crocker family cemetery. And while I still didn’t think A.K. had written either set, I could only pray that he’d spent the evening repenting in his room tonight and that he hadn’t stepped foot out of the house since he got home from court—that he hadn’t been out with any racist friends.

“Back! Get back!” shouted the young man who’d rescued the pulpit. He was sweating profusely inside his heavy fire suit, but his eyes flashed with excitement as he ordered us further away. The interior was now such a fiery furnace that even Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego couldn’t have rescued anything else from its depths.

The rear of the building suddenly sagged and the rusty tin roof crashed in with sharp creaks and bangs. Geysers of sparks shot up twenty feet or more into the night sky, and the old dry wood beneath the tin burned like heart pine light-wood. Rafters pulled loose from their nails and sheets of tin buckled in the heat as more oxygen fed the flames. Clearly there was no saving any of the building and now the firemen turned their efforts to confining the fire to the structure itself as they drenched the scorched trees and bushes around the edges to keep them from catching.

There was nothing to do but stand and watch it burn to the ground.

More cars and trucks had pulled in, several of the arrivals members of this small congregation. Tears trickled down the face of a gray-haired black woman as she filmed the blaze with her video camera, but there were angry mutterings from others of the men and women standing apart from us whites.

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

—Park Methodist Church

The fire was still smoldering when we left and the fire truck was packing up its gear, but people continued to arrive as word spread through the black community. One of the deacons took the big pulpit Bible from me and he thanked me for rescuing it. His wife smoothed the white lace runner. “My grandmother crocheted this when I was a little girl. Thank Jesus, you saved it.”

Another member of the congregation smiled when she saw those stick-and-cardboard giveaway fans. “You don’t mean to say you walked through fire for these raggedy old things, do you?”

“You just grab up whatever you see at a time like that,” I said, feeling as foolish as old Mrs. Crocker must have felt once the emergency was past and she realized she’d risked a neighbor’s life for a fifty-cent milk pitcher.

“I hope you ain’t going to make a habit of that,” Daddy said gruffly as we walked back to the truck.

“No, sir,” I said and squeezed his work-rough hand in mine.

Neither of us had much to say as we drove home through the warm still night. The odor of smoke was on us both and every time I touched my hair where sparks had landed, a singed-feathers smell reached my nose. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing the damage in a mirror.

When we came to Old Forty-eight, Daddy turned in to a farm lane that led past Jap Stancil’s old house. It was dark and deserted, though there was a light on up at his daughter-in-law’s house where she still waited trial for shooting Mr. Jap’s son.

A half-moon was up and the air was full of the summer sounds of frogs and cicadas and crickets. We crossed Possum Creek onto Knott land over a homemade bridge of logs and boards, then took a west-branching lane that led past a twenty-acre tobacco field. It must have been topped that afternoon, for the smell of green tobacco was strong on the air and wilted pink blossoms littered the ground between the rows.

We came up to Andrew’s house from the rear and his rabbit dogs announced our coming. By the time Daddy pulled into the yard and cut off his motor, my brother had turned on the back porch light and was standing there waiting for us, barefooted and shirtless.

It wasn’t much past ten o’clock, but most farmers are up at first light during barning time. Andrew yelled at the dogs and they hushed barking before I had my door open.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“Where’s A.K.?” said Daddy.

“In bed, I reckon. Why?”

“You want to wake him up?”

Of all the boys, Andrew’s the one who favors Daddy the most, especially now that streaks of gray are appearing in his thick dark hair. He nodded curtly and stepped back into the house.

Daddy flicked one of those wooden kitchen matches with his thumbnail to light his cigarette and I smelled the familiar pungent blend of sulphur and tobacco smoke that always conjures up a hundred random memories. Into the silence came the lonesome call of a chuck-will’s-widow from the woods down by the barns. That lopsided moon was caught in the branches of the pecan trees beyond the pumphouse.

Several minutes later, a sleepy A.K. stumbled out to the porch in his underwear, all arms and gangly legs now, but a man’s height and starting to fill out. “Granddaddy?”

“Where was you this evening, boy?” His voice was stern.

“Right here.” A.K. glanced uneasily at his father, who took a seat on the edge of the porch. “I been grounded till August.”

“You didn’t sneak out somewhere?”

“No, sir.”

“Talk on the phone with them two friends of your’n?”

“I might’ve with Raymond Bagwell for a minute.”

Andrew gave him a sharp look. “Didn’t you hear me say I didn’t want y’all talking together anytime soon?”

“That’s why I called him,” A.K. said sullenly. “I needed to tell him not to call over here for a while.”

“ ’Bout what time was that?” asked Daddy.

A.K. shrugged. “Right after supper. Around seven maybe? Jeopardy was just coming on.”

“What’s happened?” asked April, pushing open the screen door and joining us on the porch. Her short sandy brown hair stood up in tufts because she was forever running her fingers through it when worried or distracted. She has a small neat body and good legs, but I knew that she wore that oversized T-shirt because middle age was thickening her waist in spite of all she could do to stop it. “Is it more trouble?”

“Somebody set fire tonight to that colored church over at Starling’s Crossroads,” Daddy said.