Pale Horse Coming (7 page)

S
AM
sat in the prow of the boat, too angry to talk to Lazear, uninterested in the feeble excuses the man had thrown his way on the whys and wherefores of his seeming abandonment.

He felt two powerful, conflicting emotions. The first was relief. Thebes was enchanted, somehow, by evil. Who knew what secrets lurked there, what horrors had been perpetuated under its name, who was buried where and how they had perished? It was frightening, and escaping its pressures brought a sense of complete liberation.

So a part of Sam was happy. He was done, and now it was a mere progression of travel and he could return to his life, chastened, as it were, by exposure to the lurid and the raw, aware that the world in general was uninterested in his experiences and it would best be forgotten or filed away for distant future usage.

But there was also a powerful, seething anger. His mind was orderly yet not overly rigid. He understood that order was a value and from order all good, great things stemmed. Yet order was only a value when it guaranteed and sustained those good, great things. When it actively opposed them, where it destroyed them, where its rigidness was so powerful and its administration so violent that it was only concerned with its own ideas, something evil happened, and it filled Sam with rage.

He felt the thwack when the deputy’s two expert blows had smashed his arms, and the fear when under the influence of pain all will to resist had fled him. He remembered the helplessness of being bound and forced into the wagon, the wait for the sheriff as that man took his own sweet time, the fear on the faces of the Negroes whom he ruled so absolutely, the brazenness of the phony document that had guaranteed the end of his days in Thebes.

And Sam finally wondered this one last thing: Did he have the strength, the guts, the steel, to stand up to it, to oppose the ways of Thebes?

He knew the answer.

The answer was, No.

It wasn’t in him. It wasn’t in anybody. You just got out and didn’t look back and you went back to a better life, and soon enough the memories eroded and you won your election and you fathered your children and you won the approval of powerful men and you had a career, a set of memories, a fine tombstone, the respect of those who stayed behind when you had passed. That was enough.

He sat back, having at last faced and come to terms with his own weakness. On either side of the river, the piney woods fled by, diminished by the steady chugging of Lazear’s old motor, the day a bit cooler than before. Before him the river wove and bobbed, dark, calm and smooth. It was growing toward late afternoon; he assumed that in a few hours or so, when they had penetrated the great bayou, they would lay up as before, then continue in the morning.

He began to calculate. They’d be in Pascagoula then by late afternoon; he’d call his wife and alert her that everything was fine. He could spend a night in a fine hotel—if there was such in Pascagoula…wait, then, no, a better idea. He could hire a car and zip down the coast a bit, possibly to lush Biloxi, and take a room there, where surely there’d be fine hotels. Maybe he’d take a day or so; the stipend he’d earned would certainly cover it, and possibly he could even expense it, as the recovery time from his ordeal was a fair charge, was it not? He saw himself having an elegant meal under a slowly rotating fan, amid ferns and palms; outside there’d be a sparkling beach. The meal would commence with oysters fresh from Mother Gulf, move on to fresh sea bass or trout grilled or poached in butter, all served by an elegant black gentleman in a white cotton jacket. The room would be full of beautiful people, happy people, the best kind of people that our great country could produce.

What a riposte. What a recovery. Then, the next morning, on to New Orleans, refreshed and restored; from there by rail up to Memphis, the drive over to Blue Eye and home, home, home, home.

Home, he thought.

Home, home, home. Then he saw the body.

He happened to be looking down, in the black water, and the shock was such that perhaps it was an apparition, something that his momentarily deranged mind had conjured. But he knew in the next second that no, this was reality, no haunt, no ghost, nothing from the subconscious. It was a Negro boy, a few inches under the surface, bled white by immersion, his features puffy, his body in the cruciform as if inflated, his fingers abulge, his eyes wide and empty, his mouth open black and empty, his clothes in tatters, gliding by. Then he was gone.

Sam blinked, stunned.

He saw something just ahead, floating, its low silhouette just breaking the surface, and as Lazear’s old craft fled by, he made this victim out to be a girl child, also Negro, but facedown to spare him those open eyes staring into nothingness.

He looked: on the surface of the water appeared to be the remnants of a massacre by drowning; bodies floated everywhere, as if a vessel had capsized and all perished. There had to be at least ten, drifting, riding the currents, bobbing this way and that.

“
Stop the boat! Goddamn you, stop the boat!
” he screamed, over the beating of the engine.

Lazear looked up, surprised, yanked from whatever crude reverie had occupied him.

“
Stop the boat, you idiot!
” Sam cried, and rushed back. Lazear didn’t stop it, but reined in the throttle so that the boat merely idled, drifting.

“What you say?”

“There’re people in the water! Look, look around, people. A Negro family, all gone, all lost, stop the boat.”

Lazear just shook his head.

“Sir, I done tol’ you. In de river, de currents is ugly and mean. Suck people down all de time. Send ’em back bloated and dead. Nothing we can do but press on. Can’t do them no good. Make a report when you gets back to civilization if it makes you feel good. I can’t be wastin’ no time on this.”

And with that he bent forward and readjusted the throttle to a steady roar and the boat lurched back into—

But Sam took him in two strong hands, shook him once malevolently, then almost quite literally threw him into the rear of the boat.

The old man raised a hand in fear as Sam advanced upon him.

“Don’t hit me, sir! I didn’t do nothing to them people, I swear. They’s fleeing the Store, they got in trouble, and the river done et ’em up, is all.”

Sam declared, in the full stentorian powers of his voice, “You slimy little maggot, you turn this boat around and we will recover those that we can. Then we will head back to Thebes and we will get that good-for-nothing sheriff off his fat ass and all his deputies and we will come back here with full lights running. There may be a child out here, clinging to a branch or ashore in the weeds. We will save that child, or by God, we will die trying, and that is the way it’ll be.”

Now he bent, and with one hand pulled Lazear up, and propelled him toward the boat’s cockpit, and the old man hit it, and sank to the deck.

“Get your ass up, and get going, sir, or I will make you wish you had never ever been born.”

“Yes sir, yes sir,” said Lazear, pale with terror.

A
S
it turned out, Sam quickly realized there was no point in recovering any bodies. It would take too much time, and it was a job for professionals with the right equipment. He realized those bodies therefore might never be recovered.

Thus, as newly proclaimed captain of Lazear’s vessel by right of mutiny, he determined that the correct course of action was to return to the Thebes dock as swiftly as possible. He gave these directions to Lazear.

“And if de motor burn out, what then?”

“Then I will whip your scrawny ass until it bleeds. You just get us there faster than you got us here, you wretched old fool.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you mean when you said ‘fleeing the Store.’ What was the meaning of that comment?”

“Sir, I don’t recollect saying nothing ’bout dat.”

“Listen here, you brainless idiot, you said it flat out in plain English just minutes ago. Now explain it, or once again I will shake you ’til your teeth, all three of them, rattle like dice in a cup.”

Glumly Lazear looked ahead. A bitterness settled over him. He acted as though God had selected him alone to bear this monstrous cross. He sighed.

Sam kicked his scrawny ass.

“Does that help? Clear the memory, does it?”

“You din’t hear nothing from me. Dey kills me dey know I talkin’ their business. Okay? Kill me dead. Kill you dead as well.”

“Talk, damn your soul.”

“The Store own everything the nigs got. Nigs take credit from the Store, fall behind, they don’t get this interest thing, the Store forecloses, and then they owned by the Store. Heard the nigs talking ’bout it once.”

“Yes. And so?”

“And so, dey gots to work it off. Dey works for de man. Never can leave, never can go nowhere, tell nobody, no nothing. Stay and work for food is all.

“Every once a while, nigs git fed up and sneak off at night. Some make it, some don’t. Dat family, dey no got no luck. The river et ’em. Maybe dey’s better off, though.”

“Good Lord,” said Sam, disgusted.

H
OW
did they know?

But they did. Somehow, in Thebes, they always knew.

The old boat maneuvered its way in and Lazear lined it up just fine and laid it up next to the dock. There, Sheriff Leon Gattis and no less than four deputies, all uniformed and heavily armed, awaited. Their horses, lathered and nervous, milled behind them. Together, men and horses, they looked like some apocalyptic drawing out of Doré, along the four-horsemen-of-death motif.

But Sam did not care.

“Sheriff,” he cried, as he climbed up, “you’d best get your boys onto the river. A Negro boat has overturned some miles down, and there yet may be survivors. You’ll need powerful flashlights, for I fear the light will be gone by the time—”

“Didn’t you and me reach a agreement, sir? You’s to leave town, and not never come back on no account. And on that bargain, you would not be prosecuted for resisting arrest or generally stirring up the population.”

“Sir, I am not here to quibble. People’s lives may be at stake. For God’s sake, time’s wasting. Get those boys of yours on to the goddamn water and get them going. This is a river town, surely you have boats. This is not some paltry charge, this is a public safety emergency.”

“Goddammit, Mister, you must be thick of the skull or water-brained or some such. Didn’t know they growed such knotheads in Arkansas. Heard it was an all right place, though I can see now it produces too many of the daft persuasion.”

“Sheriff, I insist that—”

“Mister, I am not sending boys out on that dark river to look for fleeing Negroes. The currents are tricky, the fog comes in and twists things around, and before you know it, you have white men in trouble as much as black ones.”

“My God, we are talking about human beings!”

“If they go out there after dark, they know damned well the chance they take.”

“Sheriff,” a merry deputy called, “bet it’s Jimmy and Glory and them all.”

“That Jimmy, never was no good,” said another. “That one always be in trouble. Lord, he done got Glory and the chilluns drowned, too.”

“We’ll ride over and check in the morning.”

“Sheriff,” Sam implored, “am I to understand you’ll do nothing? Nothing at all. Possibly a child—”

“Ain’t no children out there, sir. The children are all dead. These people flee their responsibilities and they make plumb fool decisions and take terrible chances, and they pay the price, most of them do. Jimmy owed money, he should have stayed like a man and worked off his debt, ’stead of running off to welch on it.”

“Sir, I have to tell you: If I don’t see evidence of public safety activity on your part, I will myself make a report to the governor of Mississippi and—”

“Haw!” laughed one of the deputies, “ain’t that a good one. He’s gonna go to Jackson and tell old Bilbo ’bout a drownded nigger!”

The others hooted.

“Sir,” the sheriff said, “tell who you wish whatever you want. In Jackson they consider that we do our job well down here. We handle the uppity niggers, or rather the prison does. We make the state run, and we do our part to keep order, and I’m a proud man because of it. Now I warned you to leave this town.”

“Mr. Leon,” Lazear suddenly proclaimed, “don’t make us leave now. I don’t know de river in de dark; we end up dead as them nigs.”

About three different conversations seemed to explode simultaneously: the deputies continued to enjoy the humorous idea of Sam’s audience at the state capital; Lazear enjoined the sheriff to let them stay the night so that he did not have to face the river in the dark; and Sam continued to demand action on the missing family.

The sheriff finally reached to his holster, pulled out a big revolver, and fired a single shot to quiet them all. Its boom clapped and whanged, rolled and reverberated. Total silence followed as all looked at the large man with the revolver in hand.

“Y’all, you git back on patrol,” he told his deputies. “Old man, you stay here, moored to that dock. At first light, you be gone, or by God, I’ll make you wish you had. And you, Mr. Lawyer, you git back on that boat, and don’t you come off to step on the dirt of my county ever agin. If you do, I will personally have a knot beaten into your head that will last forever, and you can tell all your fancy Arkansas people, I got this knot in Thebes, Mississip, on account of some drownded niggers. And I don’t care to speak again on this subject, no more, never.”

“Sheriff, you are making a big mistake.”

“Jed, you stay down here, make sure these two don’t roam. And make sure they put off with the light. They give you any trouble, you can whip up on them any old way you want. Now I’m going home to get my supper.”

Jed detached himself from his chums and swaggered down. He was a big ol’ boy, with three guns, and cords and leathers and belts everywhere. He looked just dumb enough to take all this seriously, and wouldn’t be convincible elsewise. He’d as soon hit you with the club he carried as listen.

He spat a wad into the water, where it popped wetly as it hit.

“Don’t you worry, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll take care of these boys, you can bet on it.”

S
AM
awakened in the dark.

He had reached his conclusion at last.

He’d been building toward it for a long piece, fighting its implications, aware that he was troubling with the very stuff of his life, his destiny, his fate.

But now he knew he could not spend his time in Blue Eye, Arkansas, pretending to represent law and order, while three hundred miles away this chancre perpetuated itself, unseen, unmolested, uncontested.

He knew: Thebes must fall.

Somehow, some way, it must fall. In his mind, he sketched out a plan. It was orderly and well founded, almost certain to succeed. He would have to form a committee of well regarded, unassailably moral Southern prosecutors—he knew many of them—and very carefully review and accumulate the evidence. An unassailable report had to be created. Then, carefully, copies of this document must be given to selected press, which would reveal the findings on the day that his committee presented the report to the governor of the state of Mississippi, the speaker of the house in the Mississippi state assembly, Mississippi’s two senators and five congressmen, hell, maybe even, for the publicity value alone, Harry S. Damn Truman himself, or, since all this was some years off, whomsoever bigwigged war general was in the White House.

It had to be done square and legal, one step at a time, with an eye toward reality, so that the final product had a rightness to it that transcended the seething angers of the South. He wanted the white Southern mill worker and small-patch farmer, the sharecropper, the feed-store clerks, the small-town politicos, the damn women (if they could control their goddamn crying!), the MacWhatevers and the Joneses and the Whites and the O’Whomevers; a new Confederacy, if you would, of the same ol’ boys who marched up Peahawk Ridge or across the wide-open ground at Gettysburg behind the fool Pickett or thrashed and perished in the cornfields of bloody Antietam. They could do it, for they had it within them, if they were ably led; they and they alone could bring Thebes down and make the world a better place.

But he knew this too: he had to start with a document.

It was all so much palaver without a piece of evidence, a piece of paper, that made it clear as a bell’s last dying dingdong: this is evil. This is wrong. This must be stopped.

He had to have something. He knew it, and that there was no way around it.

He thought: I have to get into that store.

And then he thought: that is insane. It is in a prison, it is carefully guarded, it will not give up its secrets easy, it is a mile away down a dark and windy forest road that I have never traveled and, top it all, I am no man for breaking and entering. I would get caught, and if caught I would be in deep trouble.

He thought again: I need someone to help me. I need someone to take the risk, to get me a document.

Then he remembered the old lady whose chicken coop he’d rented. She spoke a gibberish at first, but as he listened more carefully and got used to the rhythms and strangenesses in her words, he had begun to understand her. It was she who told him about the Store. She must understand the legal underpinnings of Thebes County, the original crime that indebted its citizens to work for little or nothing for the benefit of a bossman who kept his expenses in that way to a minimum while raking off the top, whose iron system of rule by violence lined his own pockets.

She must have a piece of paper. He remembered now, the weathered old face, the fierce eyes, the watchfulness; why, that old mama was the only one in the town whose spirit remained secretly intact, and Sam knew this to be in accordance with Negro ways, where authority frequently devolved on the sagacity of an old woman, who was smart and just and well-tempered by experience.

Sam squinted in the dark, and saw that it was near 4:00
A.M.
If he could get by that behemoth on the dock, he could get to her house by 4:30 and back again by 5:00, and then he’d have it, something upon which to build. It was how a lawyer worked: go for the paper. Get the paper. Get the evidence. If there was any evidence.

He rose from his length of blanket on the prow of the boat, and carefully put on his shoes. Though it was warmish, he took his coat, which had been his pillow, and threw it on, to blot out the whiteness of his shirt. Rising craftily, he crept down the length of the boat, and stopped for just a second to listen to the easy sawing of old Lazear’s aged lungs as he snoozed away in the cockpit, in some impossible position that no civilized being could find rest in. But Lazear snored as if lung-shot and producing death rattles, each a mighty shudder through bubbles of phlegm, but otherwise unwakeable.

Sam made the climb to the dock and discovered that the guardian deputy, of course, had grown bored with the passing of the nighttime hours and had departed for whatever recreation he wanted, probably a willing colored gal in a crib somewhere, for all the deputies had the look of men who’re whup-ass on colored in the daylight and cuddle with it in the night.

Sam climbed the slope from the riverside area to what amounted to the town’s main drag, not really much of either main or drag, just shuttered storefronts behind which, on either side, lay the dogtrot cabins that made up the domiciles of the place before yielding to the all-encompassing piney woods. He tried to remember. This way or that? It’s not that Thebes was a complex metropolitan zone, with byways and alleys that could lure a man to ruin, or at least get him lost. Still, in the dark, it seemed all different, and the vistas down the few streets were closed off to his eyes. But then he saw the public house where the two bitter old men had been and remembered…no, he didn’t get to the woman’s house until
after
he’d been there. Why hadn’t he paid attention? It hadn’t seemed important then, but it surely did now.

At last he thought he had it, as he projected a three-dimensional map of Thebes in his mind. He passed the public house, turned down an alley, walked amid silent cabins. Dogs scuffled and scurried, and occasionally barked, and he heard the slithery, feathery rattlings of chickens twitching in their coops. A pig or two was up, for whatever reason, maybe to shit in the mud or whatever. But of people the place was forlorn and empty.

It was a balmy Southern night. Above, towers of stars spangled in the pure black sky and a zephyr whispered through the pines, bringing relief from the day’s brutal heat. The smell of the pines was everywhere, bracing and pure, almost medicinal. With the squalor and the despair blocked out by the darkness, Sam could almost convince himself he was in some healthy place, some nonblasphemed ground.

And then, yes, there it was. That was hers. It was different from the rest, being set farther back, almost in the woods themselves. But he recognized it by its shape and location, and as his eyes adjusted, and he moved just a bit, he made out that coop out back where he’d had the corner suite with the chickens and the disgruntled rooster.

Sam approached stealthfully. He didn’t want it noted that the white lawyer from the North had visited old granny in the night. It would do old granny no good at all in Thebes County, Mississippi.

Of course the door was not locked. He slipped in and stood motionless for a bit, waiting for his eyes to adjust yet again, this time to the closer dark of the interior space.

When at last he could pick out impediments and chart a passage in the dark—say, the doorway into the bedroom to be aimed for, the stove in the middle of the room to be avoided, the rickety furniture not to be knocked asunder—he moved quietly, and slipped into her bedchamber. He was a prince come a-calling.

No, he was a soldier of the Lord, come to bring righteous vengeance and God’s wrath to Sodom.

No, he was a scared white man in way too deep and playing with forces he could not even begin to understand.

He approached the bed, wondering how to waken her without making her scream and alerting the locals and the gendarmerie.

“Madam,” he whispered, in a low voice.

There was no response.

“Grandma? Grandma, wake up, please, it’s me, Mr. Sam, come for a talk.”

That was louder still, but there was no response.

He bent to the bed where she lay swaddled and touched her arm, gently as he could, and rocked ever so slowly, crooning, “Mama, Mama, please awaken, Mama.”

But Mama remained mute.

He became aware of an odor, and then, through the bedclothes, his fingers sensed damp.

He recoiled, but had to go forward.

He turned to the candle next to the bed and found a few stick matches next to it. He struck one on the bedpost, cupping the sudden flare, and brought it to the wick, where it clung, then held fast. Again, he kept his hand cupped around it, to cut down on the light, and brought it to her, and pulled back the bedclothes.

She had been smashed all to hell and gone. Her skull had the shocking aspect of deflation, for its integrity was breached mightily. Whatever oozed from it oozed black onto the bedclothes. Her eyes were distorted by the trauma done to her skull, and one had a bad eight-ball hemorrhage to it. It was too cool for the flies, but by midmorning they’d be here in waves.