The Steep and Thorny Way (24 page)

“I know you did, and I still hate you for that, to tell you the truth.” I smacked my hands against the floorboards and wiggled myself up to a seated position against the wall. “But Uncle Clyde said some things that made me feel absolutely certain that something more occurred that night. He told me that you were a sacrifice back then. He also spoke of sending you off to a better life—up to a job in Seattle—to appease his guilt.”

“When did he say all of that?” asked Joe.

“Today, right after the Fourth of July picnic—after I thought you'd died, and he was trying to reassure me you hadn't.” I shifted myself in Joe's direction and braced my palms against the floor in front of me. “Somehow, Uncle Clyde was still involved, even if he didn't administer poison. I'm certain the Klan was involved, too, including the Junior Order of Klansmen. I don't think it was ever a simple case of a white boy hitting a black man with a car.”

“That's what I've been telling you all along.”

“I know. But I don't think you had the details quite right.” The muscles in my neck stiffened. I grabbed my left shoulder and massaged a spot that ached. “I feel I should go to the Dry Dock. There's that big old tree sitting between it and Ginger's . . .”

“You can't just wander into a restaurant and ask if anyone there tried to lynch your father.”

“What else am I supposed to do? Sit around and wait for someone to finally tell me the truth about what happened that night? No one is ever going to explain it to me. You've hidden parts of the night from me yourself.”

“What parts?”

“The part about Deputy Fortaine letting you drive off with just a warning. Why didn't you tell me he helped you?”

Joe squished his lips together and scratched at his knee through a hole in his trousers. “He didn't help me. He still ended up blabbing about what he saw to Sheriff Rink. The sheriff came marching up to my holding cell the next morning and called me a . . .” He winced as though the sheriff had just struck him. “He called me every vicious word he knew. And he talked the judge into raising my bail. I couldn't go home before my trial because of them. I just sat there in that cell with local drunks and thieves who liked to run their fingers through my hair.”

I sank against the wall and remembered what Mildred had said about telling the sheriff about Joe and the boy from the party. I even opened my mouth to say it wasn't the deputy who'd blabbed, but I soon closed it, not wanting any more hate passing between people.

Joe tilted his face toward the ceiling, his jaw tight. His outstretched
throat looked vulnerable and pale in the light of the flame, and I experienced the terrible image of a knife slicing across it.

“People hurt you, didn't they?” I asked. “You've got those scars above your eye and on your lip . . . and those bruises on your ribs.”

“I haven't been touched by kind hands since I was with that boy on Christmas Eve 1921—let's put it that way.” He lowered his eyelids. “I'm just glad they let me out on good behavior before anyone in that prison got wise to how I am.”

“Did you know anyone who went through the”—I softened my voice—“procedure?”

Joe nodded. “A fellow not as young as me, but still pretty young for a prisoner. A college student. They put him in jail specifically because he got caught with another man in a Portland hotel.” Joe opened his eyes and blinked in the direction of the ceiling. “The guards and a doctor took him out of his cell one day. They promised to relieve him of his urges. They spoke of eugenics saving the country from all its problems. ‘Sterilization for the good of all,' they said. ‘The purification of America.'” Joe rubbed a knuckle against the inner corner of his right eye. “Then they brought him back in pain . . . all the life in him, gone. Just”—he shook his head—“gone.”

I slid my hand across the dusty floorboards that divided us. “I'm sorry.”

Joe cleared his throat and pushed himself up higher against the wall. “That's when I straightened up and made sure I didn't make a peep of complaint or get pushed into any fights. People beat on me and humiliated me, but I just let them—I just took it—because I wanted to get the hell out of that place before anyone took a scalpel to me.”

“And then you came home to your father calling you terrible words . . . and me, shooting a bullet past your ear.”

“I probably would have shot at me, too, if I were in your shoes.” He turned his face toward mine. “We've got to be very, very careful about putting you in situations like that, though—ones that could get you arrested. They're operating on women, too, and the fact that your skin is dark will only make them want to stop you from having children all the more.”

I drew my knees to my chest and sank my chin against my right wrist. “People are really doing that sort of thing? Stopping other races from procreating?”

“There's rumors that's a major part of eugenics. Cleansing the country of anyone who isn't white, middle- or upper-class, and fit enough to perpetuate the ‘master race.'”

“Are you sure?”

His voice dropped to a frightened whisper. “Yes. I'm sorry, but . . . yes.”

I tucked my chin against my chest and shivered. “I don't want my life to end in tragedy, Joe.”

“I don't want it to end that way for you, either.”

“And I don't think it should.”

“No, it shouldn't.”

“What's wrong with people out there,” I asked, “deciding who gets to have children and who has to be stopped from living the type of life that feels right to them? What's wrong with them?”

“Hanalee . . .”

I glanced his way when he didn't continue, realizing he wanted me to look him in the eye. “What?”

“Have you ever gotten the chance to love someone?”

My face warmed, and my hair burned white-hot again, despite its shorn length. “H-h-how do you mean?”

“Have you had the chance to experience what it's like, despite all the obstacles against you?”

I squirmed and felt my mouth go dry, but I didn't avert my face from his.

“I don't know.” My voice sounded small and naked in that empty horse stall. “A boy and I used to kiss when we were younger. A white boy, of course. I've never even seen a black boy my own age in Elston.”

“Who'd you kiss?”

I turned away.

He snickered. “Oh, come on—tell me. You're not going to find me running out and gossiping.”

I sighed against my wrist and warmed my flesh with my breath. “It doesn't even matter. We were just kids playing fairy-tale games. It didn't mean anything.”

I heard a piece of wood creak and I jumped, but I quickly realized the sound came from Joe leaning his head farther back against the wall.

“Do you hope to get married someday?” he asked.

“As long as I don't fall in love with a man the wrong color.”

He exhaled a steady stream of air through his nostrils. “I think
love
and
wrong
are two deeply unrelated words that should never be thrown into the same sentence together. Like
dessert
and
broccoli
.”

I laughed.

Joe moved the lamp to the other side of himself and scooted toward me. The sides of our arms and legs bumped against each other.

“No matter what happened the night your father died, Hanalee,” he said, “you need to go to a place that will treat you better.”

“I know.”

“Elston's got nothing to offer you.”

“I can't go anywhere before I know the full truth about my father. I don't care if I get hurt in the process. I've got to find out what happened and learn who was there with him. Otherwise . . . I know he'll keep wandering that road.” I relaxed my shoulders against the wall. “
I'll
keep wandering.”

Joe closed his mouth and nodded. “All right. I'm still not entirely convinced Dr. Koning doesn't own the largest share of responsibility, though. I don't trust him in the slightest.”

“We can't kill him, Joe. Not until I find out what happened at the Dry Dock.”

“I know.” He picked at the hole in the knee of his trousers. “What am I supposed to do, then? Just sit here and pretend to be dead?”

“I'll see if I can get my mother to take me to the restaurant tomorrow morning. I know she doesn't want to let me out of her sight, so I'll see if she'll help me. And then I'll find you and tell you what I learned. Where do you think you'll be late tomorrow morning?”

“Here, maybe.” His eyes shifted toward the shadows surrounding the front door. “Or at the pond.”

“Bathing again?”

“I just can't seem to get the stink of that prison off me,” he said with a chuckle that carried a weight to it.

I pushed my arm close against his. “You don't smell like prison. You smell of these woods. You smell nice.”

He lifted his face to mine with a startled look in his eyes, and I worried I'd accidentally just sounded as though I loved him.

“I like honeycombs,” I said with a wiggle of my feet, and a second later I burst out laughing.

“What?” he asked with a smile that seemed confused.

I shook my head. “Nothing. Just proving that it might not be my skin color alone that's a hindrance to relationships.” My face sobered. I stretched out my legs in front of me and let his arm warm mine.

We both turned our gazes toward the empty stable in front of us, and we just sat there, side by side, until the oil burned out and the lamplight died without even a sigh of warning. The sudden darkness made a small knot tighten in my lower back. I couldn't see my own hands and legs in front of me.

“I'll bring you some oil and food tomorrow,” I said, scooting up to a kneeling position, my knees slipping on hay. “Stay as hidden as you can. I don't want anyone finding and hurting you.”

He nodded. I couldn't see him in the slightest, but something about the way he breathed showed me the movement of his head.

I reached my hands into the blackness and found the sturdy slope of his shoulders, and then his neck and the line of his jaw.

“What are you doing?” he asked with a nervous snicker, pulling away a little. “You're tickling me.”

I leaned forward and kissed his forehead, grazing part of an eyebrow with my lips.

His snickering stopped. He went still below me. I let my mouth linger a moment longer before I pulled away and sat back on my heels.

“What was that for?” he asked in a whisper.

“Christmas Eve 1921 is far too long a time to go without a kind touch, Joe.” I cupped his cheek in my hand, and then I slipped away into the darkness and found my way home.

CHAPTER 20

BE EVEN AND DIRECT WITH ME

MAMA WOKE ME UP THE NEXT MORNING
by shaking my right shoulder.

“What's this?” she asked.

I opened my eyes to find her dangling one of the clipped locks of my hair in front of my face.

“When and why did you cut off your hair, Hanalee?”

I shrugged. “I just . . . I got too warm last night.”

“Hanalee Denney!” She squeezed her fist around the curl. “Every night it's some new cause for alarm with you.”

“I spent most of yesterday thinking Joe Adder had been murdered. What do you expect from me?”

“Stop worrying about Joe Adder.”

“Everyone in this town who's different seems to die.”

“Joe's not dead. Reverend Adder called this morning to tell us the body wasn't his. The authorities in St. Johns now believe it was the body of a young rumrunner who fell off a boat.”

I pushed myself up to a seated position and didn't make a peep about spending time with Joe in the shed the night before. “Well . . . I'm relieved it wasn't him.”

“I know you must be”—she sat down on the edge of my bed—“
confused
about how you're supposed to feel about Joe.”

“I'm just worried about him. A shocking number of people seem so passionate about wanting to hurt him.”

“After all that talk of an elopement, though . . . I don't want you to get your heart broken.”

I picked at the edge of my quilted bedspread.

She stretched my brown curl across the width of her right thigh. “I know how it feels to be told you're not supposed to love a certain person.”

I swallowed down a thickness in my throat and changed the subject. “Why didn't you ever tell me Daddy was a bootlegger?”

She lifted her head. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mildred said Daddy picked up a crate of whiskey from their house that Christmas Eve.”

She swiveled to her right and faced me directly. “Why must we keep dwelling on that night, Hanalee? It was just a terrible, tragic accident, for heaven's sake.”

“But some parts about it still don't feel right.” I wrapped my hand around her left wrist. “Be honest with me, Mama. Was Daddy a bootlegger?”