The Tree of Forgetfulness (6 page)

Round and round. There were good people here, Leland said, and Barrett found them too. One morning he sat in a lawyer's office near the courthouse as the man peered out the window and motioned him to stay out of sight while a few men from the depot strolled by outside. “I'd be shot through the window,” he said, “if any of them saw me talking to you.”

That afternoon on Laurens Street a woman beckoned him into a dark, stifling shop crammed with chairs and couches in every stage of breakdown and repair. Her advice was delivered around a mouthful of straight pins as she tucked and pinned heavy gold brocade onto a divan: “Don't go meddling in it. I'm telling you if they keep stirring it up, there will be more. And there isn't any use trying to get the straight of it. It's so crooked nobody will ever get it straight.”

“In what way crooked?” he asked, and for an answer got more tugging and tucking and pinning. He felt foolish now, remembering how
he'd stepped down from the train like an avenging angel come to bring justice to the dead. Now he felt more kinship with the dull yellow mule that turned the sorghum press in the vacant lot behind the lumberyard. On his way back to the hotel at the end of every day, he stopped to pat the animal on its thick plank of a nose. “Keep up the good work, pal,” he said. At least the mule had syrup to show for its endless circling. At the end of most days he returned to his room with blank pages in his notebook and a telegram from his editor, Bayard Swope, waiting at the desk. “What news?” the latest read, an ominous brevity.

The Aiken County courthouse was brick, two stories tall, with a palmetto tree on either side of the entrance and a second-story balcony with a wide railing just made for a demagogue to pound, the way Pitchfork Ben Tillman had done while he proclaimed the white man's right to lynch the black man, the black woman too, if it came to that, to kill every last one of them if that's what it took to keep the white man in his rightful place on top of the heap.

Lying on his hotel bed one night with a drink balanced on his chest, letting the fan move warm air around the room—even in November the days were sometimes warm and humid, and his room stayed stuffy—he remembered the cool of the reading room at the New York Public Library, the long polished tables, the shaded lamps. He'd gone there to look up Ben Tillman's 1900 speech before the U.S. Senate in the
Congressional Record
. Tillman's logic was ferocious: He blamed the violence used to bring down South Carolina's Reconstruction government on the hotheadedness of blacks and the efforts of Republicans to put white necks under black heels. “We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us,” Tillman testified, “but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it.” Why, he wondered now, were the evils here always necessary evils?

He remembered the shock of looking up from Tillman's words and finding creamy clouds and blue sky on the vaulted ceiling. The sky there had a heavenly cast, as though the pursuit of knowledge going on below was something holy, as though knowledge really were the
greatest power. He'd believed that once, but now he understood that the idea was an illusion, a trompe l'oeil, like painted clouds and sky on a ceiling. Now he leaned more toward Tillman's logic: Power is power, and power is gained and kept by force and intimidation, by deceit and brutality. Power rests, always, with the man or men whose boots are most firmly planted on the necks of others.

Then one night as he brooded in his room, someone knocked. He opened the door to find Zeke in the hall, holding a cardboard box of laundry and smiling, as usual, at some private joke. “Come in, Zeke,” he said, as usual, and as usual Zeke shook his head.

“No, sir, Mr. Barrett,” he said. He set the box down on the threshold and nudged it into the room with his foot. “Mind those shirts, captain,” he said over his shoulder as he clattered away down the stairs.

Under the stack of starched and ironed shirts, Barrett found a jar of whiskey. He held it up to the light, and for the first time since he'd gotten to town, he felt hopeful.

The next day more hope arrived. Just after noon a blue touring car appeared on Laurens, drove up one side of the street as slowly as a hearse, and turned onto Park Avenue, where it traveled three blocks at the same contemplative pace until it reached the courthouse and angled into a parking place out front. All along the route people stopped and turned and watched the car and its driver, a little man with a patch over one eye, sitting low behind the wheel.

Barrett was standing outside Holley Hardware when the car went by, and he cut through two vacant lots and sprinted across Park Avenue to beat the car to the courthouse so that he could be the first to shake hands with the man in the tweed suit who slid out from behind the wheel. “J. P. Gibson?” he said. He'd heard that Governor Arthur McCormick's investigator was en route at last, now that Barrett's badgering presence and the stories that appeared in almost every edition of the
State
and the
Charleston News and Courier
had made it too embarrassing for the governor to ignore what he called “the situation” down in Aiken.

The man's uncovered eye looked back, a feral shade of golden amber. His hand was pudgy and soft, but his grip was strong, and he
held on as he leaned toward Barrett as though he had a secret to tell. “Correct,” he said. The word seemed fired from him, and the force of it lifted him onto the balls of his feet then set him down again.

In New York men like J. P. Gibson were his allies: private eyes, house dicks, and police detectives, bodyguards and men who stood at the speakeasy doors; they were skillful with a blackjack, indifferent to fear, some of them veterans like himself. Barrett was so happy he whistled all the way from the courthouse to the depot, where he wired Swope: “Dam cracks. Hoping for flood. More to follow.”

He waited two days before he went to see the sheriff again, allowing enough time for J. P. Gibson to rattle the lawman's chain, allowing him time to think through his own strategy. The jail was situated in back of the courthouse, surrounded by a high stone wall. He went in through a gate at one end of the wall, crossed the sandy yard, whistling, and stepped up onto the limestone stoop. The sheriff's back was to the door; he and the jailer, Robert Bates, sat across from each other at a table in mid-room, reading newspapers. When he knocked, the sheriff didn't turn.

“Come on in the house, Mr. Barrett,” he said, sounding bored.

“How'd you guess?” Barrett stepped inside and waited for his eyes to adjust. The only light came from one bare bulb hanging by a frayed cord.

“It's my job to know who's coming up behind me,” the sheriff said. “I know your walk and your whistle and your knock.”

“Of course you do,” he said. This morning Zeke had told him that the sheriff was a veteran too, and that made him a different kind of adversary, one who grasped the logic of survival as well as he did: If it comes down to me or you, it's going to be me. The sheriff stood up from the table and turned around. Barrett had never seen gravity so hard at work on a living man. His eyes, mouth, the flesh of his face itself, all trended south. He wore a black suit coat and dark trousers, a shirt with a tight, narrow collar band buttoned all the way up to his chin, round eyeglasses.

“Look who's here, Robert,” the sheriff said out of the corner of his mouth. “This Yankee reporter can't get enough of us. I'd shake your hand,” he said, holding up two bundles of bandages, “but I won't.”

Robert Bates snickered, shrugged, hunched lower over his paper.

“Robert, go see that those prisoners get fed,” the sheriff said without shifting his eyes from Barrett's face.

When Robert was gone, the sheriff looked somber, as though he had weighty news to tell. “I sent my jailer away so we can talk in private,” he said. “I'm going to tell you something, Mr. Barrett, and I want you to write this down.” He watched like a hungry man eyeing food as Barrett retrieved notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket and laid them on the table. “You know,” he said, “when a man has been trying to administer the law the best way he can and them dirty political dogs say things, it's tough, I can tell you. All the time I've been sheriff, I've been giving the bootleggers hell, and now they're trying to drive me out. But I haven't the blood of them Longs on my hands. I wouldn't do a thing like that. I'm going to heaven; nobody's going to meet me in hell. No sir.”

He looked at the notebook, but Barrett let it lie. “Did you tell that to Mr. Gibson?” Barrett said.

“I haven't had the opportunity yet, but I sure-bud plan to.” When Barrett still didn't make a move toward his notebook, the sheriff trudged on. “I have something to show you,” he said, and he crossed heavily to the rolltop desk next to the window and pawed out a few typewritten pages, clapped them between his bandages, and slid them down onto the table in front of Barrett. “My sworn testimony to the coroner's jury,” he said. “Go on, read it out loud.”

Barrett got out his glasses and slipped the wire stem over one ear, then the other. He cleared his throat. “I got to the jail, and fifteen or twenty men I guess were in front. I got on the steps there, and I said, ‘Men there is nobody in Aiken County that has been hurt worse over Sheriff Glover's death than I am, but I am the sheriff now, and sworn to protect these prisoners, and I am neither scared of hell or heaven, and the first man that tries to go in this jail is going away from here tonight.' ”

Barrett read the rest quickly, the facts so familiar he could have written the affidavit himself. Another version of the official story. The sheriff dispersed the crowd, but when he turned his back, they
swarmed into the jail like a flock of blackbirds and overpowered him and Robert Bates. The electric lights were out, and it was dark in the jail, confusion and darkness on every hand.

They tied him and Robert up back in the kitchen and dragged the Longs from their cells. By the time the sheriff freed himself and found his gun, figured out where they'd gone, and raced after them out the Columbia Highway, found the turnoff and made his way up the edge of that field into the piney grove, the three of them were dead. All that was left for him to do was to beat out the fire in Bessie Long's dress. “Et cetera, et cetera,” Barrett said, setting the paper down on the table.

“That there is the God's honest truth,” the sheriff said, holding up his hands again.

Barrett shrugged. The notebook stayed closed. “How are those hands healing?” he asked.

The sheriff studied them, back and front. “Coming along,” he said. “They're starting to itch, and Dr. Hastings tells me that's a good sign.”

“Dr. Hastings, the coroner's physician? He takes good care of you, does he?”

“He's a doctor,” the sheriff said. “That's his job.”

“And you're the sheriff.”

“Now who do you suppose has been spreading
that
rumor about me?” he said.

“It's all over town,” Barrett said. The sheriff's name was at the top of Leland's list. Barrett wanted him to know he knew that.

The sheriff wanted him to know something too. He settled his bandaged hands on his belly, looked up with his sharp green eyes. “You and Mr. Gibson have a pleasant outing with the Rainey girl yesterday, down there in the valley with old James Moseley?”

“You tell me.”

“All right. You did.”

Barrett said nothing, trying to regain the high ground. He'd hoped to be the one to spring the news about the girl's affidavit. She'd been a prisoner in the jail on the night the Longs were killed. Gibson hadn't wanted to let Barrett go with them—so much for allies—but he'd talked his way into the car, and he and Gibson and the Rainey girl had
driven down to Graniteville to swear her affidavit in front of Moseley, the justice of the peace. They'd avoided the Augusta Highway, found their way down to Graniteville along the hard clay back roads. The two men in the front and the girl in the back, a tired-looking girl with wary eyes, a dark shingle of hair, a necklace of puckered gold berries on a dirty string around her neck. “Chainy-berries,” she called them when he asked, then looked at him as though she'd never seen anything like him before.

“You being a stranger and all, there's a few things about old Moseley that you need to put in your hopper,” the sheriff said. “I don't know what he's got against me, but he's always had imaginings. He told me once he thinks he's the reincarnation of some general from three thousand years ago. Him and that Charlie George down at the Graniteville train station, they both have it in for me.”

“He said the same about you,” Barrett said. “That you have it in for him, I mean. Some Klan business from way back when?” Moseley protected himself from his imaginings with loaded guns. A shotgun leaned against a doorjamb, a pistol on a table. Moseley himself wore a .45 in a holster, and his three sons each carried a revolver. He'd watched them through the window of Moseley's stuffy office, patrolling the yard while his wife served them iced tea from a pitcher on a tray.

“Ah, hell,” he said. “Like I said, he's always had imaginings.”

“The Rainey girl said you gave her a pair of shoes when you let her out of jail,” Barrett said.

“The poor sorry thing didn't have any,” he said. “All's I'm saying is that there's things you should know about that little old girl that it's not Christian of me to divulge, and I wouldn't, if it wasn't my duty and you a stranger here and unfamiliar with a lot of things.” He was a deacon in the Baptist church down in Graniteville. A God-fearing, Bible-reading man, his pastor said.

“Shoot,” Barrett said, and for a second the sheriff's face lit up the way a match flares in a dark room. Don't I wish?