Summer of the Redeemers (2 page)

Two

JUNE 7, 1963

T
HE
attic fan was pulling in a good breeze from the kitchen window, and me and Mama Betts were skinning the tops off strawberries for a pie while Effie read aloud to us.

Mama Betts stood at the sink, her knife nicking back and forth so fast that I stopped to watch her. Her left hand was bent and gnarled from arthritis, but it didn’t interfere with her work. The warm, sweet taste of a berry exploded in my mouth as I watched and listened and idled. Mama wasn’t happy that I was using a sharp knife for anything, but Mama Betts had decreed that I was old enough. Effie read the last page.

“Well, what do you think?” Mama stacked the pages neatly. Her voice was catchy, excited and a little apprehensive.

“For a woman who writes so well about allowing children to grow up, it would seem you could practice it.” Mama Betts’ knife clattered in the sink. She dried her hands on a dish towel and then went to the table where Effie sat, dark curls unbrushed and glasses perched on the end of her nose. “It’s a beautiful story, Ef. Each time you get better and better.” She kissed her daughter’s head.

“Nothing like a prejudiced opinion.” Mama looked up at Mama Betts, and the tiniest pink touched her cheeks. “If it was two-bit trash, you’d love it.”

“I’d
say
I loved it. Lucky me, I don’t have to lie. Now that you’ve finished the masterpiece, how about rolling out some pie crust for me?”

“Yeah, yeah, a man can work from sun to sun, but Effie Rich’s work is never done.” She put the pages in a neat stack on the table.

“What about it, Bekkah?” “It was great.”

“It’s written for a child younger than you, but you’ve always been my best audience.”

“I wish things could work out like they do in your books.” I snipped the last berry, washed it and popped it into my mouth. “Everybody always understands each other in your books.” Only the night before, my request to go with a school friend and her family to the Gulf for the weekend had been denied. Mama didn’t know the family well enough. They might not watch me. The undertow in the Gulf was deadly. A young girl had disappeared from the beach the summer before. It might rain and the roads would be slick and dangerous. She didn’t know what kind of driver Mr. Nyman was. Castro or a Kennedy—they were both equally odious—might snatch me. The list went on and on. The end result was always the same. No.

The breeze from the kitchen window became hot, suffocating. “I’m going outside.”

Mama Betts’ hand rested on Mama’s shoulder as I walked past the table and out the back door.

“You’ve got to ease up a little,” Mama Betts said softly. “Bekkah’s thirteen now. Won’t be long before …”

The slam of the screen door drowned out the last of it, and I went out to the old live oak tree and sat down on one of the big roots. Arly and I had played there as little children, building dirt roads and making secret caves and towns in the root structure. Fancy in-town yards always had grass growing around all the trees. Our side yard, where the oak, magnolia and cedar trees were, was raked up neat and clean, a brown dirt in contrast to the red ribbon of Kali Oka that ran only fifty yards in front of the house.

For the past thirteen years, Kali Oka had been my road, my territory, my place. I’d ridden the entire fifteen-mile length of it, from where it joined Highway 364 to where it dead-ended in the church cemetery just past Cry Baby Creek. I knew the ditches and the fields and the berry patches and plum trees all along its banks. The property lines were common knowledge. The fact that Marvin Shoals slapped his wife, Connie, around on weekends when he was drinking and that Carrie Sue Parker’s third baby died from an RH factor were part of the road. I could read the signs of past and present just the same way I
could tell which animals had journeyed down Kali Oka during the night by the evidence they left. I could even tail Arly to wherever he was hiding out by the bicycle tire tracks in the dirt.

Kali Oka was the world. It had always been plenty for me, until this summer.

Black army ants marched along the roots of the old oak. They didn’t bite, so no one seemed inclined to bother them. Besides, Daddy said it was “instructional” to watch them. All they did was work. One ambitious yeoman had a piece of grit or stale bread twice as big as he was, and he was truckin’ it along the tree roots making for home. The moral Arly and I were supposed to pick up on was that work and discipline were good things.

I put a stick down across the ant’s path, hoping to add a bit of adventure to his life. He never faltered, just climbed over. I was considering an aerial attack to take the ant’s goody when I heard the sound of a car coming down the road. One thing about Kali Oka, there wasn’t a prayer that a robber could come down the road and get away. Everyone on the road watched like hawks whenever a car or truck came along. We knew who owned what car, and when a strange one entered the road, all alerts were given.

This didn’t sound like anybody’s car I knew. It took a few seconds of listening to realize it was more than one vehicle, and it was something big. Like the school bus coming every morning to get me and Arly. Except this bus was coming fast.

The screen door banged, and Mama and Mama Betts walked out onto the porch. They looked like they needed some air and an end to whatever conversation they’d been having. Both were flushed, and there was that wary distance, only inches but so telling, that indicated there’d been words between them.

When the first bus came into view, we each stood in our places, watching. It was a rickety old bus, yellow but faded. The spot where the school’s name should have been was painted over, and the words Blood of the redeemer had been hand-lettered on. It ended with a cross dripping blood. Up above the name were gray faces at dirty windows. Women and children, mostly. A few hollow-faced men. They stared at us. Sort of the way Arly and I would stare at cows in a field. Not with much thought about it at all. The idea entered my head that maybe they were some kind of prisoners. Like those people on trains
in World War II who were being taken off to gas chambers. These folks looked about that happy. Before I even knew I was doing it, I was standing at the outside screen door, close to Mama and Mama Betts.

The second bus rolled by, then the third, the fourth, the fifth. The sixth bus came along in a great cloud of dust.

“Locusts,” Mama Betts said mostly under the breath.

We couldn’t see the faces in the last bus’ windows, but we could make out that Blood of the Redeemer name. Then the blood-dripping cross, leaning just a little bit to the right, as if someone hadn’t set it up properly.

“Carrie Sue said her husband heard it in Jexville that someone had bought that church property.” Mama Betts wiped her hands on her apron.

“The summer was going along too peacefully.” Mama pushed her glasses up her nose.

“I’m going over to Alice’s.” I wanted to know if she’d seen the buses and what she thought about it.

“Be back in an hour,” Mama said. “And take Picket with you.”

Picket was a part collie, part shepherd mix who would take anybody’s head off who came within ten feet of me. I didn’t bother to point out that I never went anywhere without Picket. She was my closest friend, after Alice Waltman.

“Don’t make me come over there after you,” Mama called as I walked around to the back for my bike. It was only a short ride through the pecan orchard and a brief stretch of woods. If I’d had to go the road, it would have taken longer, and been a lot hotter baking on the red clay.

We didn’t farm our property like most of the others. We had the pecan orchard and some woods, and that was it. Daddy said he’d live on the land, but he wouldn’t work it. Not that he didn’t like the idea, but he was never home and he killed everything he planted. Besides, he said the wild things needed a place to hide out. Every time they tried to walk across an open stretch of ground, some jackass blew them to bits. At least they could hide in our woods and be safe. He said every living thing needed a sanctuary.

I loved the woods. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to talk with Alice, I’d have stopped to play at the spring where we made wishes
and confessed our deepest secrets. But the six buses loaded with churchers was burning a hole in my mouth. I had to talk.

Our land bordered the Waltmans, which was little more than a scraggly acre, mostly dirt with a weedy garden. Alice was sitting in a swing made from a two-by-eight and chains. She was holding Maebelle in her arms, singing softly.

Since her back was turned to the woods, it was the perfect opportunity for a sneak attack, but I was afraid she’d scream and drop the baby. Maebelle VanCamp hadn’t been unexpected, but she was something Alice and I couldn’t help but resent. In the hierarchy of Waltmans, Alice was born fifth, and at the age of thirteen, she was considered old enough for permanent child care. Maebelle VanCamp was Alice’s total responsibility. Mrs. Waltman was already pregnant again, and the children younger than Alice had been assigned to some of the older kids for care. At least Maebelle was an infant and couldn’t listen in on our private conversations the way some of the other children did.

Kali Oka was only a rock’s throw from the Waltmans’ front door, so I knew Alice must have seen the buses.

“Let’s ride down to the end of the road.” I grabbed the bottom of the swing and gave her and little Maebelle a push.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Alice asked, indicating her sister.

“We could leave her in the woods.”

Alice laughed. “Yeah, and she’d choke or some critter would drag her off. Then I’d be in trouble.” “Might be no one would notice.”

We both laughed. It was a joke between us, the idea that there were so many Waltmans one missing wouldn’t matter.

“You think those folks are gonna live down at the old Lifers’ church?” Alice asked. She shook her head to thwart a pesky gnat that was determined to get near her eyes. Strawberry blond bangs bobbed on her freckled nose.

“Looks that way. Carrie Sue’s husband heard in Jexville that they’d bought the property. Mama Betts said so today.”

Alice nodded. “Folks ain’t gonna like it. Not a bit. Not after those last church people who lived down there.”

“Think they’ll have another commune?” I was proud of the word that made everybody so upset.

“What’s that?”

“Where they all live together, like a tribe or something.”

The idea struck Alice as too stupid for words. “None of them must have nine brothers and sisters, or they wouldn’t want to be a tribe.”

“We could put the baby in my bicycle basket.”

Alice pushed the swing slightly with her toes. Maebelle VanCamp slept on, her rosebud face turned to Alice’s flat chest.

“You know why Mama named her VanCamp?” Alice asked.

I had my theories. Brighton was my middle name, sort of a family tradition, as Mama Betts said, but she snorted when she said it so I couldn’t tell if she was fibbing or not. “She liked the name?”

“The whole time she was pregnant with Maebelle, she craved VanCamp’s pork and beans. She couldn’t think of anything else, so when they asked her for the baby’s name, that was the first thing she came up with. Daddy made her put the Maebelle first.”

“It sounds like something out of a history book.”

“I hope she’s not thinking about a loaf of bread when the next one comes. Can you imagine a kid sister named Sunbeam?”

“Or Clay!” I was laughing.

“Clay! That’s a California name. What’s Clay got to do with anything?”

Her laughter had disturbed the baby. Maebelle’s solid brown eyes turned toward me, and she stared as if she, too, were waiting for an answer.

“Mama Betts said that some of the black women eat clay from Chalk Gully when they get pregnant. She said it was like some kind of awful craving, and that the doctors try to keep them from doing it because it sucks the blood out of the babies, or something like that.”

Alice’s laughter was dead. “That’s terrible, Bekkah. Why do they eat it if it sucks the blood out of their babies?”

“They can’t help themselves. They’ve just got to have it.”

“If this next one is a boy, I won’t let Mama name it Clay. That’s a promise.”