True Fires (16 page)

Lila pulls in her feet, cradles both knees between her arms.
Was it possible that Daddy’s oath that night was true? That he had
no more knowledge of Mamma’s scheme, or Kyle’s connivance, than I
did? That, all these years, I’ve hated him for something he didn’t do?
The check, released, seesaws to the floor.

Of course.
Why hadn’t she seen it before? Louis’s public betrayal was too clumsy, too obvious, too out-of-control to have had the Judge’s hand. It violated one of the old bastard’s cardinal rules: “If you set out to trap an alligator, you better damn well be prepared to catch one!”

When did he find out? Why didn’t he tell me?
But, of course, after Louis left, she’d shut both of them out, then left herself. And when she returned, he was on his deathbed, unable to speak.
Except—EXCEPT—through this file, planted innocuously,
a deceit to Mamma’s prying eyes, yet here nonetheless, directly in my
path.
“The truth will out,” he always said.

Oh, Daddy.
Lila’s eyes stray back to the floor, the awful affront of the check’s amount. Fifteen hundred dollars.
How
could so much loss and su fering be purchased so damn cheaply?

With a cold hand, one careful thumb and forefinger, she reaches out, turns it over, sees the endorsement.

“Bill Roy Thompson,” it says, with a valiant flourish at the end. Underneath his name, Lynette’s father had added and underlined, in bold, block letters, the chilling pronouncement:

“BURN IN HELL!!!”

We did.
Anguished eyes rise to the ceiling, toward her mother’s velvet-draped, bottle-shaped cell.
We do.

32

Early afternoon, Daniel calls to Aunt Lu, who sits at the kitchen table reading library books—a whole stack of ’em brought out by the newspaper lady, Miz Barrows—to the girls.

Lu comes outside to check his work. “You done a fine job on them bean rows, boy,” she says, and releases him to the woods. “Supper’s at sunset. Don’t keep us waitin’, hear?”

Feeling like a noose unloosed, Daniel races out of the clearing, across the field, past the circle of Sampson’s beehives.
One
of ’em,
he notes,
looks woppy-jawed.
He stops briefly to investigate, spots the series of small tracks, five-toed, some with the inner toe splayed open like a thumb.
Dad gum possum,
he thinks, and sees with a shock the striped husks, piled ankle-high, in front.
Sucked the life plum out of ’em!

Daniel scans the field for signs of the possum’s path, a den or a burrow.
Mebbe Pap’ll come out on a possum hunt tonight,
he thinks. And he feels his taste buds swell and sweat in hopes of possum slow-cooked with carrots, onions, and sweet taters.

He slips a dozen or so of the husks into his pocket—
to show
the Ol’ Seminole, if I see ’im, or Pap, later on
—and, after straightening the hive top, runs on to the waiting woods.

The sandy trail, now hardened by the rain, is where he remembers it, narrow and hugged by pines. He slows to a lope. Shafts of sunlight sift through the high branches, speckling the ground with bright flecks of light, like powdered sugar on a griddle cake. Dozens of birds caw and chitter.

“Woods is woods,” Sampson had said. But these are mightily different from the ones up home. Missing are the hardwoods, so colorful this time of year, the hickory and sassafras, dogwood and maple. Here are oaks of a different kind, and scrawnier pines, and the tall brooding sentinels he knows to be cypress. But there’s the familiar flicker of redwing; the ratchet of woodpecker; the thrum and drone of a million insects, and, everywhere, the spring of ferns, the thrust of seedlings, the determined clutch of vines. The lushness of life never fails to set his heart leaping like a grasshopper from stem to stalk.

Daniel finds it easy to retrace his steps, to find the big tree root that, just two days ago, sent him sprawling through the bushes to the river where Sampson caught the catfish. Aunt Lu had soaked that fish overnight, as Sampson had said, and fried it crispy with cornmeal, the meat flaky and sweet. Beyond the root, the path parallels the whisper and scent of the river, then hooks right, over a rise, into denser growth.

At a fork in the trail, Daniel hesitates.
The left,
he thinks,
crooks back toward the water; the right ambles deeper inter the woods.
In the midst of his decision making, he hears, off to the distant right, the whistle of an almost whippoorwill. “It’s him!” he yelps and sets off like a dog to the hunt.

Up ahead, in the heart of a clearing, surrounded by pines as high as a church house, Sampson stands grinning welcome.

“How’d you know I was in the woods?” Daniel asks, breathless.

“Got my ways, heh?” Sampson tells him, pointing to a saw-grass basket suspended by a string off a tree limb.

“What’s that?” Daniel peers up at it. Then adds, with a sharp intake of breath, “A beehive in a basket?”

“Small one, guards camp.”

Daniel feels his face scrunch up in disbelief.

“Hive has guards all over th’ woods,” Sampson patiently explains. “Fly faster than a man can walk. Sets off a warnin’ dance for the others, shakes the bones for me.”

Daniel studies the quivering basket, and the jangle of dried fish bones dangling beneath it. “It’s a signal,” he marvels. “And you knowed it was me?”

Sampson shrugs. “ ’S why I whistled.”

Behind the old man, Daniel sees something else that fills him with wonder. “That your house?”

“Chee-kee,” Sampson says, giving a name to the three open-air structures of cypress poles, supporting peaked roofs of palmetto thatch. “Sleep, eat, work, heh?” Sampson points, each one containing objects that bear witness to its use. “Thirsty?” He turns to the fire in the clearing’s center, ladles a liquid out of an iron pot into a tin cup.

Daniel follows him, takes the warm cup and asks, “What’s this?”

“Sofkee, Seminole, drink,” he says, with an encouraging wave of his hand.

Looks like tea,
Daniel thinks. “Tastes like corn,” he tells him.

“Yes.” Sampson pours himself some, sits on one of the two log stools beside the fire. Daniel joins him, openly staring ’round the clearing where Sampson lives, taking in the jumble of deer hides and hammock where he sleeps, the pinewood bench and table where he eats, and the cast-iron pots, the racks of honey jars, the odd tools and frames and stacks of wood for constructing hives. Off to the side of the work structure—
chee-kee, he called it
—is the three-wheeled cart he used to transport his hives into their field.

“You live here alone?” Daniel asks.

“Yes.” The Ol’ Seminole nods, sipping his drink. “ ’Cep’ for Mose.”

“Mose?” Daniel scans the camp again, as if he missed someone.

“Mose, heh?” Sampson laughs and pats the hump beside his stool that Daniel had thought to be a rock.

“A turtle?” Daniel exclaims. “Biggest ol’ turtle I ever seed!” he says and gets up to examine the thing.

Mose’s head, halfway out of its shell, casts an angry eye at Daniel, then retracts back into rocklike stillness.

“Look at him!” Daniel rubs a hand across the ancient hump, traces the shape of a brown six-sided section.

“Hex,” Sampson says, softly.

“What?” Daniel looks up.

Sampson points to the shell section beneath the boy’s finger. “Hex,” he says. Then, in explanation, “God’s Eye.”

“God’s what?”

“Eye, eye, heh?” the old man points to one of his own dark eyes, then back to the turtle. “God’s Eye.”

“You talkin’ Indian stuff?”

Patient, Sampson spreads his wide smile. “God,” he explains gently, “loves ever’thin’. Some more’n others. Fav’rites have the hex, called God’s Eye. Turtle shell . . .” he traces a six-sided section of Mose’s shell lightly. “Honeycomb, snowflake . . .”

“Feldspar?” Daniel asks quickly, remembering the familiar six-sided shape in the mineral’s creamy crystals.

“Yes. And you.” Sampson holds up a hand, palm forward, separates his thumb from his fingers, and his fingers in the middle, two from two. Daniel, curious, does the same. The old man bends forward, and, softly, traces the six-sided shape that outlines the boy’s palm: little finger to center, one; center to pointer, two; pointer to thumb, three; thumb to wrist, four; across wrist, five; wrist to little finger, six. “God’s Eye, on
you,
heh?”

Daniel studies his palm, wondering what it means, to have a hex on your own hand? It was, indeed, the identical shape, almost the same size, as the six-sided hex on the old turtle’s back. The same shape that defines a honeycomb, and a hornet’s nest, and so many of the rock crystals he’d collected up home. What does it have to do with God? And with this ancient Indian who seems to know more than any man he’s ever met?

“God’s Eye means special,” Sampson says, in answer to Daniel’s thoughts. “Special to God, heh? Means honor the Most High. Means protect the Least Low. In children, means grow. And live!”

“Live?” Daniel says, baffled. “Ever’one does that.”

“No. Some families fall apart. Hives fail. Children die young.”

“Oh, hives.” Daniel suddenly remembers and reaches in his pocket to retrieve the bee husks. “Possum got inter one of yourn. Left a pile of these outside.” He shows Sampson the empty, weightless remains.

“Ohhh.” The old man says it sad, mournful. He takes the husks, cradles them in both hands, lifts them up. “Honor the Most High,” he says, his voice like smoke rising skyward. “Protect the Least Low,” he whispers, lowering his palms reverent as a prayer. Then, with a look that Daniel recognizes as genuine sorrow, he bows his head, lets each husk slip slowly, silently into the fire.

33

A few years ago, when Ed Cantrell, Principal of Lake Esther Elementary, volunteered to take on the Tuesday Night Youth Group at Lake Esther Methodist, his wife, Alice, had railed, “Are you
nuts
? You spend all week with kids. You’ve got three of your own. Why take on the teenagers, too?”

He’d found it hard to tell her the truth: that these same teenagers had been among his first students. That he relished the opportunity to see what kind of people they’d become. That their honesty, and earnestness, and painful striving, was a powerful antidote to the increasingly mind-numbing bureaucracy of his day job. That their youthful idealism reminded him of his own, before he’d got snookered out of the classroom, into administration. And, that, on an almost weekly basis, they needed him to remind them who they were, before puberty, and their parents’ private battles, and the whole country’s postwar posturing, pushed them into The Box he now called his life.

Instead of trying to explain any of these things to Alice— whose entire life’s goal was a new split-level outside of town— he’d merely shrugged and said, “I’ve known these kids most of their lives. I know it sounds odd, but it’s like we grew up together.”

He rarely prepares a text. They inevitably present one of their own. And, the anticipation and surprise of it, what things they choose to discuss, from serious to absurd, is the highlight of his week.

As is his custom, Cantrell arrives early, unlocks the Youth Room door, turns on the lights, and arranges twelve folding chairs in a circle. The kids arrive in spurts.

“Hey, Mr. C.,” Bobby Reid, the burly high-school fullback, calls from the door. “This here’s Lois Ann.” He proudly introduces the tiny, ponytailed blonde who wears, and appears lost in, his big scarlet-and-white varsity jacket. “She’s a Lutheran, but I told her you wouldn’t mind.”

“Promise not to bite,” Cantrell assures her, as the two take their seats opposite him.

“Hey, Brainiac,” Bobby turns to greet skinny, pasty-faced David Getz, arriving just behind them. “Meet Lois Ann.”

David Getz nods, flushing red, and moves awkwardly to the seat on Cantrell’s left as three more girls—Gwen Moore, Janet Giles, Connie Wells—all brunettes, billow in together, pastel skirts swinging wide above their black-and-white saddle shoes. “Hey, everybody!” they call, wave, make their way gracefully to side-by-side chairs on Cantrell’s right.

Behind them, the Gardener cousins, Jim and Jerry, shuffle in, in clashing plaid shirts, holding the door for pretty, raven-haired Mary Lou Meyers, in a slim blue shirtwaist, soft Capezios, and a waft of Shalimar.

Cantrell notes, and relishes, the palpable rise in energy, the rush of noise as the group—rounded out by gangly, spectacled Charles Patterson, who places his Bible and a magazine on the only empty chair—settles into the circle.

At seven o’clock, they bow their heads for Cantrell’s brief opening prayer. Afterwards, he looks up and, smiling ’round, asks, “What’ll it be tonight, folks?”

Across from him, Bobby Reid, one arm draped around the back of Lois Ann’s chair, shrugs, and looks to the others to name the game. On Cantrell’s right, the three girlfriends— Gwen, Janet, and Connie—smile prettily and cast their eyes sideways to direct attention elsewhere.

Next to David, Charles, intensely earnest, clears his throat and reaches for the magazine on the chair beside him. “Well, um, Mr. C.? David and I were talking outside, about this week’s Time magazine? Y’all seen it?”

Charles flips open to the Viewpoint page, shows the column headlined “In Lake Esther, Florida, Nobody Cares.”

Cantrell, who’d secretly hoped this might come up, asks the others, “Everybody seen it?” Two of the three girls, both Gardener cousins, Mary Lou—nod their heads. Others— including Bobby Reid and his girlfriend—shake theirs. “It’s fairly short. Why don’t you read it to us, Charles?”

Charles jabs a finger at the bridge of his horn-rimmed glasses and, again, clears his throat. “Well, it’s about those Indian kids, the Dares,” he says, by way of introduction, then goes on to read the four paragraphs, which Cantrell, since yesterday, has virtually memorized. At its end, Charles looks up. “I don’t know about you, Mr. C., but seems to me, these kids got a raw deal.”

“I have to agree with you,” Cantrell says quietly. And finds he’s relieved to admit it.

Solemn David Getz tells the group, “My little sister had one of their cousins—SaraFaye—in her class. Sheriff barred her and her sister, too.”

“Their daddy works for mine down at the lumberyard.” Mary Lou Meyers leans forward. “Like Miz Barrows at the
Towncrier
says, they’re not Nigra, they’re Croatan Indian.”

Bobby Reid squints. “So why’d the Sheriff yank ’em out of school?”

“You know Sheriff DeLuth.” David frowns and shakes his head.

“But, they ain’t Nigra, right?” Bobby is persistent, determined to understand. “Why don’t he let ’em stay? ’Steada makin’ us the laughin’stock of the whole durn country!”

Ruefully, Charles closes the magazine, stares down at the glossy cover.

“This stinks.” Bobby looks hurt by the whole thing.

Gwen and Janet nod in agreement. Beside them, Connie rearranges her dress pleats.

The two pimply-faced cousins eye each other uncomfortably. Jerry, the one on the right, wiggles a blue-sneakered foot on his chair rung.

“What can we do?” Bobby asks no one in particular.

Cantrell, not wanting to assume the leadership role, looks expectantly around the circle of young faces. David, the one nicknamed Brainiac, doesn’t let him down.

“We have free speech, right?” David asks. “Couldn’t we write
Time
magazine and tell ’em we disagree?”

Yes!
Cantrell thinks, but keeps his face impassive.

“But, there’s not very many of us,” Mary Lou Meyers protests. “What if we drafted a petition and got the whole high school to sign it? Wouldn’t that be something?”

Good girl!
Cantrell thinks but, keeping his tone neutral, asks, “What’s everybody else think?”

“Well, nobody would
have
to sign it, if they didn’t want to, right?” Connie sounds nervous.

“Of course not,” Gwen says impatiently.

Charles—who initiated the discussion—swallows hard.

Beside Gwen, Janet shifts into organizing. “We could set up a table outside the auditorium.”

“Or the lunchroom?” Gwen suggests.

“Nah, nah, the gym!” Bobby says. “Everybody takes P.E. I’ll square it with Coach myself.”

“But what would this petition say?” Charles wants to know.

“Good question,” Cantrell answers.

Connie, pouting, examines her nail polish.

“Lois Ann, you got any paper in your purse?” Bobby Reid asks.

FORTY MINUTES, and a heated discussion later, David, who’d reluctantly, but at Bobby’s insistence, served as the group’s “team leader,” asks Lois Ann, who wrote everything down, to read the finished draft.

“ ‘Dear
Time
magazine,’ ” she begins.

“ ‘In your October twenty-seventh issue, under the ‘Viewpoint’ section, reporting the Dare family story, you say that Lake Esther is: “. . . a town, where nobody, not one person, cares.” We would like to correct that statement. WE CARE.

“ ‘We have not been asked our opinion, but we would like to state it anyway.

“ ‘Our country was founded on principles set forth in the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the Sermon on the Mount. We are proud of our country.

“ ‘The Constitution says all persons are innocent until they are proven guilty, and that a man is to be considered truthful until he is proved to be a liar.

“ ‘We feel Daniel, ’Becca, Minna, and SaraFaye Dare got a raw deal. Their right to an education has been taken away because of the opinion and prejudices of one man.

“ ‘To be expelled for violation of Florida segregation laws is one thing; to be expelled because of unfounded suspicion is another.

“ ‘Therefore, we believe the Dare children should be permitted to remain in school until the Sheriff can prove they don’t belong there.

“ ‘That is our position and we want the world to know it.’ ”

At this, Lois Ann looks up, around the circle. Her smile is tremulous. The others—except for Connie and the plaid-shirted cousins, who have remained silent throughout the discussion— burst into spontaneous applause.

Ed Cantrell, watching, feels his chest ache with pride. He keeps his eyes, which have unexpectedly turned watery, on the speckled linoleum floor as a resolute Charles suggests, and leads them in, the closing prayer.