Rainwater (22 page)

The lane was pocked with deep ruts. It was littered with debris, an attraction for rats, tomcats, and other nocturnal scavengers. Two men were running down the center of the alley, their backs to her. One knocked over a trash barrel, but he didn’t stop.

In the fence that bordered the alley, she noticed that several of the boards were missing, creating an opening. Gripping Solly’s hand, she squeezed him with her between the slats, wondering if Mr. Rainwater had created that opening when he passed through only moments ahead of her.

On the other side of the fence was the backyard of an abandoned house that looked even more neglected and derelict in the darkness. Without decreasing her speed, she forged a path through the weeds and across the uneven ground, her heart in her throat and her lungs already burning with exertion.

A car was coming down Oak Street. She and Solly ran through the twin beams of its headlights as they crossed that street. She heard the squeal of brakes, but she didn’t stop to apologize to the startled driver.

She had gained on Mr. Rainwater. He was still running, but he seemed to have a stitch in his side. He had a hand to it as he crossed Elm Street and entered the churchyard. Ella was only steps behind him by the time he climbed the stairs to the door of the church. Inside, the screams had been reduced to keening.

Before going in, he glanced back at Ella. “Don’t look.”

His warning came too late. Through the open door, she saw Brother Calvin hanging by his neck from a ceiling beam.

Margaret was inconsolable.

Mr. Rainwater drew her up from her huddled position and guided her across the threshold onto the stairs. Ella sat down beside her on the top step and embraced her, murmuring words of comfort that she knew were banal and useless.

Mr. Rainwater and she had been the first to reach the church, but others, alerted by Margaret’s screams, converged from every direction of the colored community. Mr. Rainwater had closed the church door, but the hanging body could easily be seen through the windows. Cries of horror and outrage punctuated the low buzz of hushed voices. There was weeping. Children, who ordinarily would have been running about and chasing lightning bugs, were standing wide-eyed and subdued, staring at the lighted sanctuary. The dog that Ella had seen earlier was barking ferociously.

A car stopped at the curb, and the lawyer Ella had seen leaving his office minutes before got out. He hung back, obviously concerned but not to the point of wanting to become involved. Then he spied Ella.

Reluctantly, he threaded his way through the crowd. Approaching the church stairs, he removed his hat. “Mrs. Barron? Miss Lillian and I heard screams. I almost hit you and your boy with my car.”

“The pastor has been lynched, Mr. Whitehead.”

“Oh.” He released the word on a sigh of deep regret and sympathy, making Ella feel sorry for all the times she’d given even a thought to the gossip about him and his secretary.

“Could you notify the sheriff, please?” Mr. Rainwater asked.

The lawyer looked beyond Ella at him and must have sensed his trait of calm command. “Right away, sir.” He replaced his hat and ran back to his car, where his secretary anxiously waited.

Mr. Rainwater knelt down beside Ella. His face was damp with sweat, and he looked pale. She remembered him holding his side and running with an uneven gait. “Are you in pain?”

He shook his head. “Just winded. Here is the key to my car.” He opened her hand and pressed the key into it. “I’ll wait for the sheriff. Take Margaret home. You can come back by here and pick me up.”

“Won’t he need her to tell him what she saw? For his investigation.”

His lips formed a thin line. “There won’t be an investigation.”

Ella arrived at Margaret’s house, surprised to find a gathering of her friends and relatives. Although she shouldn’t have been surprised. Word of something this tragic had a way of spreading quickly.

Men stood in the yard, smoking and talking among themselves. Children, too young to understand what had taken place, were sleeping on pallets that had been spread on the porch. One elderly woman with a corncob pipe clamped in the corner of her toothless mouth was fanning the sleeping children with a newspaper.

Other women were waiting inside the house for Margaret’s return. Ella left Solly in the front seat of the car, where he seemed content, and helped Margaret alight. The men removed their hats and stood aside respectfully as Ella guided Margaret up onto the porch. Margaret’s son, Jimmy, in whom she thought the sun rose and set, was waiting just inside the door. As soon as they cleared it, Margaret let out a wail of grief and collapsed into his arms. They were then surrounded by the women who’d come to render aid and share her sorrow.

Knowing that Margaret would be well taken care of, Ella turned to go. As she stepped out onto the porch, Jimmy followed her. “Thank you, Miz Barron,” he said.

“This is terrible for her, Jimmy. She thought so highly of Brother Calvin. We all did.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He looked across the yard for a moment, then his eyes came back to her. “We all know who did it.”

The young man looked more angry than mournful, and his anger made Ella afraid for him. She looked at him with appeal. “Don’t make trouble for yourself, Jimmy. Your mother would never recover if something happened to you.”

“I’ll be careful.”

That wasn’t exactly a promise not to seek reprisal for the lynching, but Ella knew it wasn’t her place to admonish him. “Tell Margaret not to come back to work until she feels up to it.”

“I will.”

“And let me know when the funeral is.”

“Thank you again for bringing her home.” Then he looked at her with puzzlement. “How come y’all were in town tonight?”

She told him about Mr. Rainwater taking them to get ice cream and sending Margaret to invite Brother Calvin to join them. Jimmy lowered his head, and when, after a moment, he raised it, she saw tears standing in his eyes. He thanked her again, then turned and went back into the house.

“He seemed very touched by your kindness to his mother,” Ella told Mr. Rainwater, concluding her account to him of what had happened when she took Margaret home. “It was amazing to me that so many people already knew about the lynching and had gathered at her house.”

Only a few people were still at the AME church when she returned to pick him up. The sheriff’s car was parked in front. He was talking to the justice of the peace, who’d been summoned to pronounce Brother Calvin dead. A few curious onlookers were milling about.

Mr. Rainwater was standing apart from everyone else, near the street. He got into the car as soon as Ella brought it to a stop, leaving her to drive. Now, he glanced down at Solly, who was sitting between them docilely. “He looks almost asleep.”

“He ran along beside me all the way from the drugstore to the church. Through it all, he’s been a real trouper. I couldn’t have asked for him to behave any better.”

“Maybe he sensed you needed him to.”

“Maybe.”

Solly was asleep by the time they arrived at the house. Ella welcomed the sweet pressure of his head against her arm and almost hated having to get out. “I’ll get him,” Mr. Rainwater said.

Gently he lifted Solly into his arms, being careful not to awaken him.

Both Dunne sisters rushed to the front door to let them in. They were dressed in nightclothes, slippers, and hairnets. They were twittering, speaking over each other.

“We’ve been scared out of our wits!” Miss Pearl exclaimed.

“What’s going on in town? We heard sirens.”

“Mr. Rainwater, you look peaked.”

Ella looked at him. As Miss Violet had observed, he did look peaked.

“What’s the matter with the boy?”

“Nothing, Miss Pearl. He’s only sleeping. And I’m fine, just a bit winded.” Mr. Rainwater carried Solly past them in the direction of Ella’s room.

She followed him, saying over her shoulder, “You can go to bed. There was a … a situation on the other side of town tonight. Sheriff Anderson was summoned. Everything is fine now.” Soon enough they would learn of the lynching and Margaret’s unwitting involvement, but Ella didn’t want to go into it with them tonight. “I’m sorry you had to stay up later than usual to let us in.”

“We couldn’t have slept anyway with God knows what all going on in colored town.”

Ella bit back an angry retort. They were old. Their attitude was wrong and ignorant, but hopelessly ingrained. “Good night, ladies. I’ll see you at breakfast.” She left them at the foot of the staircase and continued on toward her room.

Mr. Rainwater was standing in the center of it, holding Solly in his arms. “Through there.” Ella pointed him toward the small room in which Solly slept. He squeezed through the narrow doorway and laid Solly carefully on the bed. She slipped off Solly’s shoes but decided to forgo pajamas tonight and let him sleep in his clothes. “Thank you, Mr. Rainwater.”

“Will you join me on the porch?”

“I don’t think so. It’s late.”

“Please? There’s something I need to tell you.”

SEVENTEEN

“Conrad Ellis has been deputized.”

Mr. Rainwater broke that to her the moment she joined him on the porch, before she had even sat down.

“What?”

“I’m afraid you heard me right. The sheriff made him a deputy. At his request, I’m sure.”

Stunned by this news, she moved to the railing where Solly’s dominoes had been left standing in their precise row. “How do you know?”

“He arrived with the sheriff, sporting a badge, carrying a shotgun. He made certain I saw both. He had the honor of being appointed to cut down Brother Calvin.”

“From the beam on which he’d hanged him.”

“Almost certainly.”

She turned, and they stared at each other across the distance separating them. But the enormous inequity of the situation had left Ella speechless. Apparently Mr. Rainwater had nothing to say, either. He looked dispirited and tired. His face was gaunt. She noticed that, when he stood up, he was holding his side. He walked to the door, pulled open the screened door, then looked back at her.

“I don’t need to tell you what this means.”

“Conrad has been given authority to run roughshod over anyone he chooses and to get away with it.”

“You must take care.”

“And so must you.”

Mr. Rainwater nodded, then went inside.

Ella picked the dominoes off the railing one by one and stacked them neatly inside their box. Solly would appreciate her orderliness. She smiled at the thought.

But, in spite of her smile, an unheralded sob escaped her. She secured the lid on the box of dominoes and clasped it to her chest as though it were a lifeline in a sea of sorrow.

Tears formed, then flowed. She covered her mouth with one hand in an effort to suppress the sobs, but they wouldn’t be contained. She cried for Margaret, who’d had the misfortune of making that ghastly discovery. She cried for Brother Calvin, who’d been kind, generous, idealistic, and courageous. While she admired him for standing up to Conrad, and warning him of damnation, she knew he’d died because of his outspokenness. And what of his young wife? Did she know that bigotry had made her a widow?

She wept for Jimmy, who, because of this incident, would become embittered and angry, filled with hatred and a thirst for revenge. For Ollie and Lola. For the Hatchers and the Pritchetts, for all those who’d had to destroy their herds in order to hang on to the farms and ranches that were supported by that livestock. She wept over the cruel and bizarre irony of that.

She wept for poor Doralee Gerald, who would probably grow old without her unhappy situation ever changing, who would always be an object of either pity or ridicule. She even shed compassionate tears for the lawyer, Mr. Whitehead, whom she barely knew but who seemed like a decent man trapped in a moral dilemma and hopelessly sad circumstances.

Eventually her tears subsided, and she brought the sobs under control. This morning she had prided herself on being able to contain her tears. But lately, that ability had deserted her. Bouts of weeping were becoming more frequent and exponentially turbulent. She’d cried that night in Solly’s room following his fit over the spools that had interrupted the gentlemen’s chess game. She’d been reduced to tears last night when Mr. Rainwater gave her the book. Tonight’s sobbing had been the most extreme emotional outburst so far. She must reverse this trend. Starting now.

She went inside and locked the screened door, then went through the house checking the other doors and turning out lights. In her room, she undressed down to her slip and pulled on her summer-weight wrapper. Ashamed of her red, swollen eyes, she bathed them with cold water until they looked more normal, then cleaned her teeth and finally pulled the pins from her hair and uncoiled the heavy bun.

She was turning down her bed when the knock on her door came, so softly that, at first, she thought she had imagined it. But it came again, just as softly, but undeniably.

Making certain that her wrapper was securely belted, she went to the door and opened it a crack. “Mr. Rainwater.” Instantly concerned, she opened the door wider and looked him up and down, wondering if the difficulty in his side had been more than a stitch, if he was more than just winded. “Are you ill?”

“I heard you crying.”

“Oh.”

“My room is just above the porch.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“My windows were open.”

“I didn’t think. I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

“You didn’t. Not in the way you mean.” He paused a beat, then asked her why she’d been crying.

“It was silly.”

He said nothing, just stood there looking down into her face, patiently, or stubbornly, waiting for her to explain.

She made a helpless gesture. “Several reasons.”

“Like what?”

“There just seems to be …”

“What?”

“So much cruelty, and pain, and sadness in life. And I was just wondering why that is.” Of course the ultimate unfairness was his circumstance. The reminder of that brought fresh tears to her eyes, which she impatiently wiped away with the back of her hand. “Thank you for your concern, but I’m fine.”