Summer of the Redeemers (5 page)

“Run!” Alice pushed me ahead of her. “We’ll catch up! Run!”

Cursing myself for everything I was worth, I ran. I didn’t feel the briars or the limbs. Picket’s howl of pain came again, and I thought my heart would burst. She was defenseless. I had left her that way.

Five

T
HE
tall boy was backing away from Picket when I crashed through the undergrowth. His hand was bleeding, and every hair on Picket’s body was standing on end. She wasn’t making a sound.

“Get away from her.” I went to stand by Picket. Very carefully I began to run my hands over her fur, to check and see where they had hurt her. She gave a sharp whine of pain as my fingers pressed her lower spine, at her rump. Beside her were two heavy sticks.

The boys had shed their white shirts, and their skin was alabaster in the shade of the woods. Ribs protruded on all but the plump boy, making them look helpless, somehow shamed. Blood streaked the tall boy’s hand. It ran down his middle finger and dripped to the ground very slowly.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and the others followed him as he backed away.

“What did you do to my dog?” Picket was tense, ready to strike, but she wasn’t barking. Deep in her throat she growled, a sensation I felt more than heard. No one answered my question, and I wanted to strike them, to pick up the heavy sticks and whale away at them until they would never hurt another dog again. Not a single one of them answered me. They stared until the tall boy turned away.

“I said let’s go,” he commanded. The boys fell in with him in a ragged line.

“If you ever hurt my dog again, I’ll get even. You’ll burn in hell, Redeemer boys!”

The tall boy paused as if he was considering my words. Then he turned and faced me. He was smiling. “You’d better be careful who you threaten, girl. Don’t you know you shouldn’t be out in the woods alone. No tellin’ what might happen to you. No tellin’ …”

“Bicycles!” The cry rang out over whatever else the tall boy had intended to say. The plump boy had found them, the one who earlier had been defending his sister.

They pulled the bikes from the foliage where Alice and I had hidden them. They were jubilant with the discovery, intent among themselves. One of them danced and hollered like an Indian around my Schwinn. Very carefully I loosened Picket’s rope from around the magnolia tree. If I let Picket loose, she’d go after them. It would be worse than one small bite. But even as much as I wanted to let her go, I was afraid of the tall boy. He might really hurt her. Or me, and he might enjoy doing it. There was also Alice and Maebelle V. to consider. I held Picket tight.

The boys picked the bicycles up and started running across the creek with them. They meant to keep them.

I spoke softly to Picket, pressing my fingers along her back once again. Except for that one sensitive spot she seemed to be okay.

“Bekkah!” Alice broke through the tangle of huckleberries behind me. She took in the disappearing boys and our bicycles. “Oh, my God,” she whispered as she leaned against the magnolia. “What are we going to do now?”

I didn’t know. I still had Picket on the rope, and I got her to walk with me. She could move, and she didn’t limp. My biggest worries began to disappear, replaced by a fire that was new. Something in the center of my chest burned. I wanted to hurt those boys. I picked up the bigger of the two sticks they’d thrown at Picket. It weighed as much as a small bag of sugar. It must have hurt when it hit her.

“Mama’s gonna skin me when she finds out about the bicycle.” Alice’s voice wavered. Maebelle V. echoed her sentiment with a lusty cry.

I held the rope to her. “Hold Picket and I’ll go get them.”

“No!” Alice’s face registered shock and fear. “No, Bekkah!”

“They stole our bikes. We can’t let them take them. Take Picket and Maebelle and head back to the road.”

Alice pushed my hand with the rope away. “I won’t do it. No
matter what you say, I won’t.” Her blue eyes didn’t flinch as she looked at me, and I knew she wouldn’t budge.

“Those little bastards.” I wanted The Judge to be at home. But the whole summer might be gone before he came back, and I needed him now. Effie wouldn’t do, and Mama Betts wouldn’t be any help either. Tears prickled and burned. I could tell by the noises Alice was making that she was fixing to cry too. “We’ll get them back.”

“How?” Alice pointed across the creek. “They’re gone.”

“They can’t take them to the church. How’re they going to explain where they got them? And they can’t ride them in the woods too easily. They’ll have to get out on Kali Oka to ride. We’ll get Arly and some of his friends to help.” Arly didn’t warrant a lot of my faith, but in a crisis he could be useful. Especially a mess like this. Alice was justifiably concerned. It would be impossible to tell our folks that the church boys had stolen our bikes. We weren’t supposed to be around the church.

Something white fluttered across the creek. “Hold Picket.” I gave her the rope before she could decline again. In a flash I’d waded the creek and was climbing the other bank. Those stupid boys had gone off and forgotten their white shirts. I gathered the five shirts, all hanging together on a scrub oak branch. Clutching them like valuable treasure, I hurried back to our bank of the creek. Panting, I held them out. “Now we have something to barter with.”

Alice smiled. Even Maebelle V. paused in her crying. “They can’t go home without their shirts, can they?”

“Not likely.”

“Then we’ll wait.”

“Nope. We’re going home. We can get around the bicycles for a few days. They can’t. If they go back to that church without their shirts, everyone will know they’ve been in the woods with their clothes off. Maybe this is a lesson those boys need to learn.” I took Picket’s rope from Alice. We all started walking home. It would take better than an hour, probably closer to two with the baby. There would be lots of time to plot revenge.

Before we broke out of the woods, I bundled the shirts up and hid them in a clump of dogwood trees. The boys weren’t likely to find them, but I’d know where they were. Just to be on the safe side, I broke off two huckleberry limbs at the roadside to mark the spot. When I’d
finished we started walking. As we were leaving squatty footprints in the sandy part of Kali Oka, I kept thinking about the tallest boy. He was about my age, or maybe Arly’s. He was the leader. He was the one who’d thrown the sticks at Picket while she was tied.

We were coming up on the McInnis place when Alice finally spoke. Maebelle V. had been crying for the last half hour and there wasn’t a thing we could do. We’d stopped and given her the rest of her bottle. She wanted some food, and so did we, but we still had another two miles to go at least.

“Do you still believe that place is haunted?” Alice asked, nodding at the old yellow house and the barn that had once been home for some of the finest blooded walking horses in the South. The roof sagged in several places. Alice and I had spent a lot of the past summer exploring around the barn. It had been vacant for about two years. Mama Betts said everyone who moved in there fell on hard times and couldn’t stay.

“Mama Betts says it is.” A ghost story would help pass the last half hour. The driveway was lined with chinaberry trees, and I squatted down in the shade of a big one for a few minutes. My feet were burning hot from the sand and clay of Kali Oka. It was June 8. Our twentieth day of summer vacation. Daddy had said the cities were even hotter, especially this summer when Negroes and whites were eyeing each other like hungry dogs.

“Hey, do you want to take a minute and go look in the barn? Remember last summer we left some soft drinks hidden in there.”

“They’ll be hot.” I leaned against the tree trunk and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to move, but I could hear Maebelle V. frettin’ and gurglin’. She was bound to be half starved, and a little hot Coca-Cola would tide her over until we got home.

“I know you’re not afraid of the Redeemers, but you might be afraid of old Sheriff Sidney Miller.” Alice nudged me with the toe of her shoe. She was already standing up, and I could hear Picket breathing at her side.

The McInnis barn did bother me. It was big, with a loft and twenty stalls, and doors that were locked but were said to lead down to underground living quarters. Mama Betts said it was all a crock of bull. At one time the McInnis place had been the premier plantation in Jexville. Rathson McInnis, the original, had arrived in Jexville in the
early 1800s, along with his slaves and family, and started the farm tradition in the county. We’d studied about Rathson McInnis in Mississippi history. He was famous for his ideas in farming, and later for getting himself killed in the Civil War.

He carved out more than three thousand acres of the best land in the county and built a plantation house and the old barn. The plantation had been burned by the Yankees after the war. Mama Betts said that a cease-fire had been negotiated when a band of Yankee troops rode through and burned the house to cinders while Mrs. Rathson McInnis stood in the yard with a portrait of her husband, the only thing she’d been able to save before the fire was set.

After there was nothing left of the house, the Yankees ran their swords through the portrait as Mrs. McInnis held it. The story goes that one blade cut her palm, and as the blood dripped onto the ground, she cursed anyone other than a McInnis who would ever attempt to live on their land.

But it wasn’t the Rathson McInnises, either the mister or the mistress, that made me feel ill at ease in the old barn. It was Sheriff Sidney Miller. I was eight years old when he lost his mind, shot his wife and two children and hung himself from a chinaberry tree. It was his ghost, the sheriffs badge glinting in the sun, that I’d seen in the barn. He’d been holding the end of his rope in his hand.

“Hey, come on.” Alice nudged me with her toe.

It was pointless to hang back any longer. My eyes were sun-blinded for a moment as I stood. Behind me a soft breeze ruffled the chinaberry leaves. An old sign, hung by rusty chains, creaked a warning.

“Let’s just go on home,” I said.

“Maebelle needs the sugar. We left those Cokes behind that old tire, remember? It won’t take but a minute. Last year you weren’t too scaredy cat to even walk in the barn.”

Last summer Arly had dared me to go into the barn alone. Alice and I had been in every stall and even climbed into the loft where the old bales of hay smelled like dirt and Mama Betts’ herb plant, that curly purple-leafed one that she said smelled like an angel’s armpit. “Last year I hadn’t seen old man Miller.”

Alice rocked back and forth on her toes. Maebelle V. was shaking her fists and crying now, a thin, tired wail that was beginning to worry me. She might starve or die of thirst or something even worse. We
hadn’t thought to bring diapers, and she was sorely in need of a change.

“Let’s go get the Cokes.” I didn’t want to. Alice was looking for a rush of goose bumps. She’d wanted to go into the barn ever since I’d told her about the ghost business last summer, but I’d never go back in there no matter how much Arly teased me. Now I was going.

The double doors creaked, and once again I wondered who would paint a barn white with pale blue trim. It was awful-looking. Barns were red with white trim. This just made the bigness and the oldness of the place seen even more peculiar.

The plantation had never been rebuilt, and even the stone chimney had been picked clean by fortune hunters over the past thirty years. Sometime during the 1920s someone had built a small cottage beside the barn, and that was the house Sidney Miller and his doomed family had occupied. He’d shot his wife on the back steps and his two children in their beds. Folks said he just lost his mind for no reason. Or as Mama Betts said, no one ever found the reason. He’d been right popular, for a sheriff.

The barn was dark. Slats of light fell through the bars of the stall windows, making narrow trapezoid patterns on the red earth floor. Alice pushed the door open wider, a hiccuping Maebelle V. making her shadow seem two-headed and sinister.

“Just behind the old tire near the last stall,” Alice said. She wasn’t coming in with me. She was going to stand at the door, holding the baby and watching me. It was fair. If she had the baby, she wouldn’t be able to run fast enough, just in case we saw something we didn’t want to hang around and talk with.

Off to either side there was the scurry of small creatures, rats more than likely, unused to the tread of a human foot in their barn. Above, the loft creaked, as if the great weight of hay was being shifted ever so slightly. As if some sleeping entity had been roused by the smell of three small girls below. Shift. The groan of old, tired boards. Or bones. At the end of the barn a clump of moldy hay fell. It had to be rats. They could climb as good as any cat when they took a notion.