The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (4 page)

“So
what
?
I don't like her!”

Henry Lee is pulling the red truck out of the fire station. “Oh boy, what a tragedy. The fire is
raging.
The fire truck gets stuck at the railroad crossing, quick decision: Do they let all the people die in the burning building, or do they take the chance of beating the train and saving all the people? Oh boy!” He starts setting it up.

I want to leave. But leaving he knows he got to me. So I sit through a few more heartbreaking disasters, then tell him I need to go home, get some Hawai‘i reading in. He waves bye without looking up. When I get to the top of the stairs, I'm surprised to see a folded piece of paper with my name on the seat of a corner chair.

25
¢ for 2 Cities til Mon after school?

Concealed under the message are five nickels.

“Roger stopped by quick on his way to work, left that note for you.” Sally entering, going straight to the sink and opening the doors underneath.

“Thank you.”

“Remember to close the basement door behind you so the cold don't escape up here.” She takes out floor cleaner and goes back into the other rooms.

I pocket the coins, flip the paper over and write “Roger,” then place it on the chair seat atop my copy of
A Tale of Two Cities
. I go to the basement door to shut it, and glancing down I see Henry Lee has set up the two cars on the crossing again, the approaching train now too close for me to stop it. “‘I love you Margaret!' and then ‘
I love you, Earl
!
' ” in Henry Lee's girliest voice, and those are Margaret Laherty's tragic last words.

 

6

In the living room, my father in his soft chair reads the paper while I look over my debate notes. 1898: America appropriates the islands of Hawaii (it was suggested by Mr. Hickory that I lose the backwards apostrophe), and same year in the Spanish–American we win Puerto Rico in the Atlantic and coulda also gained Cuba except we didn't want their debt (so mainly just started keeping a naval base there on Guantanamo Bay). Then in the Pacific America scores Guam and the Philippines, collecting all these archipelagoes sharing a sea with Japan, well we'd already been knocking on Japan's door, trying to make some annexation headway since the middle of the nineteenth, but Japan didn't seem like any intention of budging—

“Set em up, boy.”

I drop my notes and run to get the board. It's Saturday afternoon. School can wait.

“I'm a chess man in a checkers town.” He's said it before. Chess is one of the few activities where my father and I find common ground. Certainly not athletic pursuits, where he excelled throughout high school (despite his grumblings that they were four wasted years when he could have been pulling a paycheck) while I find all manner of balls suspicious. Certainly not hunting, something he hasn't done in years, but in the days he did he must have intuited it would only highlight in his son some new embarrassment for him, and thus he never asked me to come along.

“When I was your age”—I was eight at the time—“I seen somethin bout some foreign chess championship in the paper. Asked an asked, nobody knew nothin bout the game. Roun that time Prayer Ridge just built the public library, I went to see what was what an lo an behold. Checked out the book, took a piece a paper an cut out my own pawns an rooks an bishops, put em on a checkerboard an taught myself. Played against myself, which is a good way to learn. My challenger exactly good as I was, an the better I got, so did he.” Then he gave me my first lesson.

He's been patient over the years, working me up to worthy. Barely a word passing between us. “Chess is a thinkin game, not a talkin one.” Beyond our very first two bouts where he let me win to build up my confidence and encourage me to keep playing him, I have never succeeded in landing a victory. Now I make a nice L with my knight, and a millisecond after I remove my fingers he slant-slides his bishop right to that square, click, snatching my warrior up.

“Why'd you wait for me?” Something I'd always wondered. “Why'n't you teach Ma or B.J. or Benja?”

“They don't like chess, they prefer rummy.” He always called rummy a women's game, though occasionally he'd play it with my mother to have something to do with her.

“What about B.J.?”

“I wantchu to rethink where you jus moved that rook.” In some ways he still casts himself as his own opponent.

In the third endgame I stare at his king, incredibly in my rook's direct path. I look up at him. He grins. “Congratulations. You jus become my equal.” He winks. “I think your first win deserves some ice cream.” This is almost more father-son camaraderie in one day than I can stand, and I grab my sweater fast before he changes his mind. Strolling out on the sidewalk Pa lectures me about the moves in the first two matches, where I went wrong, and I turn around to see B.J. staring down at us from our bedroom window. We've scarcely seen each other since the water glass incident last week. That night I'd taken a chocolate chip cookie up to our room, turned out the light and got in bed quick, trying to beat him so we wouldn't have to communicate. I heard him coming up a few minutes later. Under the covers I munched, knowing he couldn't hear it, feigning sleep. When he walked in, he could have turned on the light to be mean but he didn't. Got into his pajamas and into bed. Something felt out of whack. I sneaked a peek. Usually he lies down and is instantly asleep, but he was sitting up, staring into space. His breathing heavier than usual, slow and even.

It's just a little stand on the corner. There's a low cement wall nearby and we sit, me licking chocolate, Pa with his vanilla. He starts talking about his previous attempts to bring out the athlete in me, and for some reason this usual source of irritation to him he now finds sociably funny. “I'd pitch that damn ball an you'd whip the air,
hard
swingin.” His tongue all white. “You'd give that bat the dirtiest look, like you all made some pact an the bastard didn't hold up his end a the bargain.” We're laughing. “No worries, boy. After you graduate this spring an I get you on at the mill, ain't nobody there gonna be askin boutcher battin average.” My fingers suddenly clutching hard, the cone goes crack. Now a toddler screaming and hollering, empty cone in his hand, his entire strawberry scoop on the ground at his feet. “Didn't I tell you to stop holdin it like that?” asks his mother. “Didn't I?”

The next Saturday, only six days till debate, my father wakes me. “Get dressed,” he whispers. I look at the clock—12:40, the house dark. I'd been in bed since ten. B.J., oblivious to noise, sleeps through Pa's disturbance. Ma, early riser, usually also likes to turn in by ten, except Friday and Saturdays when she waits up for Benja to make her eleven curfew. I hop out of bed and grab the clothes I just slipped out of two and a half hours ago.

In the kitchen he rummages through the icebox. Pops a chicken leg into his mouth, “Want one?” his consonants swallowed by the drumstick. A duffel flung over his shoulder.

It's a long walk. They're looking at gasoline rations for the spring, but the rubber rations already here and Pa's taking extra care with his truck tires: no waste. We carry lanterns to see once we get to the edge of town where there's no streetlights, and I think of how dark it must be in the cities on the West Coast where the war blackouts are in effect. I munch on a wing while Pa twirls a toothpick round his mouth. He doesn't talk which is fine by me, I'm not yet in the wakened world. My father doesn't do things like this, clandestine, so these steps, these moments feel real and not. After an hour we're at the foot of Lowden's Mountain and hit the steep incline, then halfway up veer off to a path in the woods. I see a flash, hear a crackle, smell it: Fire! I turn to Pa, my eyes, mouth wide, but he just keeps walking in the direction of the flames.

As we come closer, into a clearing, I'm relieved to see the inferno is contained. The forest is not on fire. It's only one large burning cross. About forty people, mostly or all men, mill about in Klan robes.

“Shit,” my father says. “Never knowed em to start on time before. Wanted you to see em light it.” Out of the duffel he pulls his own uniform, slips it on. “Let's go.”

As we approach, I see that all eyes are fixed on a man near the cross, screaming a tirade.

“And who are they!”

“The niggers!” comes the reply. Like the responsive readings in church, but here more passion to it.

“The niggers. They get hired on fore a white man cuz a nigger'll work for peanuts! The few of em willin to work at all.”

My father waves to three men standing near us. They look at him, look at me. One I know is Mr. Wright who works with my father because of the man's missing two right-hand fingers that got cut off at the mill. One I know is Mr. Stewart because he always clears his throat about once a minute. The third has to be Mr. O'Brien because Mr. Wright and Mr. Stewart and Mr. O'Brien bowl together and shoot pool together and sip Coca-Cola together in front of the Woolworth's. None of em acknowledges us.

“Go over there,” my father says soft, indicating a clump of trees beyond the clearing.

From my vantage point I can hear and see all, even better from this more secluded spot since no one's paying any attention to me so I feel less rude staring.

“And who tells the niggers what to do?”

“The Jews!”

“I was strollin down the street the other day,” says the orator, now speaking in a more cordial anecdotal tone that allows me to recognize him as Reverend Pitsfield, “arm in arm with my wife who bared my four children who bared my fourteen grandchildren.” Some of the men laugh, apparently the ones who go to our church and know Reverend Pitsfield brings to every sermon a brief census of his progeny. He never seems aware that we've heard it a thousand times though because now, like in church, he appears momentarily startled, trying to figure out the joke. “An this nigger come by, couldn'ta been more n twenty-five, an passes right by us. Steada steppin off the sidewalk, he passes right by my wife, she swore he near brushed up against her!”

Stars. The blazing cross diminished a heap of them, but still hundreds sparkling. There's peace where I am, part of the goings-on and separate from them at the same time. I don't understand everything being said by the reverend or the audience, some of it in secret code.

My parents rarely argue, least not in front of us, but a year ago there was a major ruckus on laundry day when my mother threw my father's Klan robe in with the colors and turned it pink. “It oughtn'ta
been
in the goddamn machine
no
way!” I was in my bedroom and could hear him hollering from the kitchen. “Delicate.
Han
wash!” (His current robe is a replacement.) Just how accidental the accident was is debatable, given that my mother has always thought of my father's Ku Kluxing as silliness. She's told us when she was a kid her best girlfriend was colored, though naturally they parted ways once they got to high school. Both grew up to be maids, then my mother joined the navy. “What?” she'd asked Pa once as he was fixing his truck. “Yaw scared the coloreds in this town plannin some big revolt?” He grunted, then stuck his head back under the hood.

At one point a kid in a robe, looking not much older than I am, turns around to stare at me, and I stare back, then his daddy next to him puts his hand on the boy's shoulder, and the kid turns back around to face the speaker. Reverend Pitfield's speech threatens to be long as his sermons, but in the middle of a sentence the cross suddenly breaks, falls over. The men cheer, and in a show of cooperation that touches me, begin to pass ready pails of water to douse out the conflagration, like volunteer firemen called to quell a campfire gone wild. When there is little left but glowing embers, my father waves at me, and we head on home.

At some point, he takes a detour further into the woods. “Pa?” He ignores me. Looking for something.

“Ah! Wa'n't sure I'd find it in the dark.”

A big old tree, all these carvings in the bark. When he speaks, his voice carries the quiet of reverence. “Happen aroun aught-three. Since I come in with the century that make me three, too little to remember but my pa tole me. That nigger workin Whitacre's farm violated this white girl, nineteen an married with a child. The whole town took after him: Dr. Brinkley who'd just pulled out my brother's appendix, Mr. Peterson the district attorney, Judge Healey, Reverend Longwood, most a the farmers and most a the merchants, the girl's family naturally though for some reason their name I can't recall, all together, all hands on. The culprit took to runnin but they snagged him quick. Beat him, burned him, dragged him aroun, back of a cart. Practically dead by the time they slipped the noose round his neck. All the while to the end, ‘I didn't do it, I didn't do it.' ‘Did he?' I asked your granpaw. ‘Sure he did,' answered my pa, ‘an if he didn't was a lesson to any of em thought maybe they might sometime.' When it was over, Mayor Rook looked at the pack of all of em an said, ‘Yaw behaved like honorable men tonight. I'm privileged to be amongst ya.' This was the tree. You fine your granpaw?”

A dizzying maze of carved initials but not hard to locate the imprint of my deceased elder, given name Ebenezer. Big, like John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence:
E.E.

Still a ways to trek down the mountainside, and not until long after we're back on flat ground does he speak again. “You're thirteen, baptized in the church this year. This is parta growin up too.” I'm looking at the Big Dipper. And there, that star with a slight orangey tint. Mars.

“They were cautious. Not about you bein a boy, you mighta noticed a handful there bout your age. What was bothersome was you without a robe which clearly identified me, and the meetin speakin all sortsa inner sanctum things, they wonder do I take it all serious, what a secret society is. Well how you make decisions about what you wanna do, you don't firs taste it? I ain't forcin you into nothin.” I wonder if Grand Wizard Pitsfield gets on Pa for never being in church. Or do they call it Grand Dragon? “So whatcha think?”

“It was nice.” It was, though I imagine if that cross toppling hadn't interrupted the reverend and I'd've had to stand for another hour of his discourse, the charm might have worn off.

My father shrugs. “I ain't forcin you into nothin.” Some rustling off to the left but before my light catches it I'm hurled, flying, deer hooves on me on my chest, Pa yelling slapping its rump, its head turns its antler cut my face and it's gone, vanished into the forest.

“You al
right,
boy? You al
right
?”

“Uh-huh.” I touch my forehead, look at my fingertips. Blood.

“We'll get you patched up at home. Goddamn dumb buck!”

My father tells me to sit in the kitchen while he brings down bandages and antiseptic. If he'd brought me up to the bathroom medicine cabinet, we would have wakened my mother who would have flown into hysterics at the sight of my wound and blamed my father for his foolish Klan business. In the light of day and with the gash properly dressed, he must figure her panic will be somewhat abated. The grandfather in the living room dongs—4:15.

“Pa, you said you don't wanna force me into anything.” The ointment he dabs on my forehead stings and I flinch. “I was thinking. Maybe I'll go to high school next year. I can always get on at the mill later, but I was thinking. Maybe I'll finish school, get my diploma.” He takes my hand and puts it on the bandage to hold it in place while he tears the tape with his teeth.