True Fires (6 page)

14

Sixteen miles south of the County Fairgrounds, in the hammock part of their property, Daniel drops to his knees beside his father. He watches Pap steady a short green stalk of root stock in one hand and, wielding a sharp knife in the other, make the small, smooth vertical cut. Flipping the blade horizontally, Pap cuts a second slit at the base of the first, creating the shape of an upside-down “T.”

Working quickly, Pap grabs a piece of loose budwood, expertly slices off a single bud shield, and slips it gently off the knife into the T-shaped slit. “That’ll do ’er,” he murmurs, picks up a strip of white muslin soaked in grafting wax, and wraps the graft with surgical precision.

“What’s it gonna be, Pap?”

“This whole batch’ll be the sweetest bunch of tangerines you ever tasted. We’ll plant ’em next to the house so we kin pick a fair apron-full whenever we take a mind to.”

The words “fair apron-full” were Mam’s favorite way of saying “plenty.” Many’s the time she’d sent Daniel out to the orchard for a fair apron-full of Winesaps, which, if measured, meant enough for three apple pies. A fair apron-full of eggs made eggnog for the whole hollow. And a fair apron-full of strawberries kept their family in jam for weeks. Now, the words hurt Daniel’s heart to hear them. And he drops his chin, hastily, so Pap won’t see.

Behind them, Daniel hears Uncle Will hammering split shingles onto the roof of the smaller cabin that will be theirs in a few weeks. On the rise above them, he hears the squeals and squawks of the girls—’Becca, bossy Minna, lisping Sara-Faye, and baby June—as they pick and poke their way through the pea cover in search of four-leaf clovers. In her garden, its rows as neat and tidy as Pap’s root-stock seedlings, Aunt Lu chops collards for their supper. Daniel can hardly wait to sop up the juice, pot-licker green, with a hunk of Aunt Lu’s skillet-baked cornbread.

He closes his eyes and, for the briefest moment, this strange flat land feels almost like home. But the picture won’t hold. The air’s too thick, the sky’s too close, the lacy gray moss that hangs off the live oak is too strange to hold it. Other strange things, too, push against his innards. And, without warning, as if a giant hand reached into his gut and ripped them out of his own private hollow, he hears his words flung into the space between them. “Pap,” he hears his own voice asking, “was Ol’ Granpap part Nigger?”

Pap, squatting, rocks back on his heels, turns his gray hawk eyes to get a bead on Daniel’s face. “I don’t rightly like that term,” he says. “It’s a mean word, nasty, sorta like the words ‘dumb hillbilly’; meant to make one fella feel less than ’nother. There’s folks that’d call ever’body ye know up home ‘a dumb hillbilly.’ And, I’m asking ye, are they? Do ye know any ‘dumb hillbillies’?”

In Daniel’s mind’s eye, he sees the face of ol’ Jack McKenna, which can turn plum silly on a jar full of ’shine. Most Saturdays, ol’ Jack’s a pure, blamed fool, but dumb? As a fox.

“No, sir.”

“I’d just asoon not hear either of those words outta yore mouth, ever again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But, ye got a question, son. And, considerin’ what ye been through, ye got a answer comin’.”

Daniel sees Pap rock back off his heels and onto his hind end. He closes his grafting knife with a well-oiled click, slides it into his shirt pocket, then twines his hands together around one knee.

“Oncet, when I was ’bout yore age, I asked Ol’ Granpap how come his skin was so dark. He had gray eyes like mine but skin darker than most Cher’kees. He told me then, and I’m tellin’ ye now, I don’t know. He said the Croatans, his Indians, were tender-hearted folk—had to be to help out a bunch of blamed fool Englishmen who had no business bein’ there in the first place. We’s lucky, he said, that Ananais Dare was jus’ a boy. It wasn’t in them Croatans to let the children starve, he said. Or, after that, to turn away runaway slaves who weren’t of a mind to let their fam’lies be sold off like cattle and treated worse. Ye come with me to Robeson County, Ol’ Granpap said, and ye’ll see Croatans come in all colors, from pale as hominy to pot-burnt molasses. But seein’ a man, and knowin’ what he is, are two diff’rent things.” Pap looks up to watch a hawk circling high above their heads. “Ol’ Granpap useter make big talk ’bout his ‘wild side.’ But, truth is, he was the kindest, gentlest man I ever knowed. He had goodness in his blood, and God knows what else. But”—Pap leans forward, giving Daniel the eye—“whatever ’twas, ’tweren’t no shame in it, boy. Not one single drap.”

Daniel nods and sees Pap’s gaze wander back to the row of root-stock seedlings. He wonders if their talk is over.

“Y’know, Daniel,” Pap continues abruptly, “not up home, but in most places, the Nigra was the root stock onter which th’ whole South bloomed. Everythin’ ye hear about th’ Gran’ Ol’ Confed’racy happened because Nigras sank their arms elbow-deep, their legs thigh-high in the dirt and let things bloom on their back. That there tangerine bud couldn’t grow by itself anywhere near here. But, ye graft it on the roots of a rough lemon and ye get yoreself a mighty fine tree. Thing I hain’t never understood is the way some people, grafted here from somewheres else, resent the very root that helped ’em grow. This meanness from whites onto Nigras, or anyone who looks like they might have a drap or two of Nigra blood— Well, I reckon, it’s ’bout the most ignorant thing I ever seed. Miss Lila says not ever’one ’round here’s as ignorant as that Sheriff. Think we’ll see for ourselves next Wednesday night, get ye and ’Becca back in school where ye belong.”

At that, Pap rocks forward, quickly up onto his heels, fishes out his grafting knife, grabs a stalk, and gets back to work.

Standing, Daniel feels somehow both lighter and heavier. He looks around—at the girls, Aunt Lu, Uncle Will—and decides to climb up on the new roof, lend Uncle Will a hand with the shingles. But suddenly, something way off yonder, moving out of the uncleared pine woods, catches his eye. He lifts a hand to shade his face against the slanting sun. Walking their way is the biggest, blackest human being he’s ever seen. And, from this distance, it appears he’s carrying something shiny, golden, in his hands.

“Comp’ny comin’, Pap.” Daniel says it quietly, and points at the dark figure crossing the field. The girls, startled by the stranger, scoop up baby June, and run to the garden to hide behind Aunt Lu. Pap folds and stows his grafting knife and stands, hand on Daniel’s shoulder, to watch the big man walking lightly, just like a Cher’kee, into their clearing.

He’s dressed in a simple homespun shirt, some kind of ancient military pants tucked into tall boots, and a dark hat with two crossed metal arrows on the front of its crown. His face is pitch black, broad and flat across the cheeks, his hair and beard cottony white.
Up close,
Daniel thinks,
he looks even
older than th’ Ol’ Cher’kee, which folks up home’d say t’aint possible.
They say Ol’ Will Wolf’s the oldest thing on two feet. But, Daniel thinks,
this ’un’s got ’im beat
.

“How do,” the man says to Pap and, seeing Aunt Lu and the girls, gently tips his hat. “Name’s Sampson. Brung you some honey.”

“Mighty nice of ye,” Pap says and offers up his hand. “Franklin Dare.”

When the old man holds out the jar of honey, Pap takes it with his other hand and continues to offer up a handshake. Sampson stands still, mute.

Pap’s open hand indicates Daniel. “This here’s my son, Daniel. Up-air on the roof’s my brother Will. His wife, Lu, and the girls, ’Becca, Minna, SaraFaye, and baby June.”

With a slow grin, the old man nods all around and, finally, accepts Pap’s grip. “Seen your field full of peas,” he says.

“Cover crop,” Pap tells him. “Hopin’ to help out the soil so’s we can plant our trees next spring.”

“Got bees,” Sampson says. “Peas’re good for bees in winter. Pay you in honey.”

“Fine by me. Reckon they’d be good for the garden, too. What y’think, Lu?”

“Reckon they’d be fine. I like bees.” Lu’s smiling wide inside her sunbonnet.

“Need some help gettin’ ’em here?” Pap asks.

Sampson shakes his head. “Got a cart. Bring ’em over next week?”

“Anytime ye want,” Pap tells him, smiling.

“Orange blossom, heh?” Sampson points to the jar of sunlit honey.

“Never had it but we’ll give it a whirl.”

“Good. Be back soon.”

“Thank ye, Mr. Sampson. We’ll keep a lookout fer ye.”

Sampson nods his silent good-bye, lifts his hat to the females and, as hushed and light-footed as he’d come, he’s gone. Daniel watches the tall dark figure slip across the field and into the far line of woods, which seem, for a moment, to leap with the flames of the fiery red sunset.

15

In the dead of Saturday night, in the small, unadorned room just off the kitchen of the Charmwood Guest House, Betty Clayton Whitworth dreams of her other life. In 1918, she was twenty, the pretty, eligible daughter of one of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest families, and, like Isabel Amberson, heroine of that year’s most popular novel, she wore nothing but silk or velvet. Her dream of that life is not unlike the opening sequence of Mr. Welles’s 1942 film of Mr. Tarkington’s novel. In fact, although the dream’s images are personal—of her family’s great brick Gothic mansion, her father’s black silk stovepipe hats and gray frock coats, her pink parasol cocked over her pink silk shoulder—in her mind’s ear, she hears, as if just for her, Orson Welles’s opening narration of the popular film (she saw it seven times):

“They had time for everything,” Mr. Welles intones.
Yes,
yes, we did.
She smoothes her skirt, adjusts her matching pink parasol, and smiles prettily. “Time for sleigh rides, and balls, and assemblies, and cotillions, and open house on New Year’s, and all-day picnics in the woods, and even that prettiest of all vanished customs: the serenade.”

Yes,
Betty smiles in her sleep. But, unlike the fictional Isabel—who rebuffed the advances of the wild rogue Eugene, to marry dull, passionless Wilbur, and thereby received her comeuppance—twenty-year-old Betty, in a naïve interpretation of the popular story, chose dashing and more-than-a-little-drunk Cash Whitworth. The logic of Mr. Tarkington’s tale was unmistakable: marry the daredevil instead of the dullard and live passionately ever after. Betty tosses uncomfortably in her sleep, not wanting the pretty pinkness of her dream to fade into the eventual gray of her present state. But the truth of her life is inescapable: she and Isabel, through entirely opposite routes, arrived at a similar, unhappy end.

The sudden ring of the telephone beside her bed snatches her awake. Relief at having the dream-turned-nightmare interrupted gives way to wondering concern. The man’s voice at the other end is oddly familiar.

“That you, Miz Betty?”

“Yes, who’s this?” she asks.

“Outta respect for Clay, ma’am, we’re callin’ ahead. This ain’t about you, it’s about them Nigger Dares. You gotta cast ’em out. Y’hear me, Miz Betty? You gotta cast them Niggers out!”

Somewhere, out of the bottom of Betty’s groggy brain, a name swims up to her. A friend of Clay’s from long ago.

“Leroy? Leroy Russell, is that you? What’s this all about?”

The caller clicks off. And, in the widening silence that follows, Betty hangs up the phone and shakes her head, trying to clear the confusing jumble of thoughts.

What was that about?
Unable to make sense of things in the dark, Betty turns on the light to think.
Why would Leroy
Russell—I’m certain that’s who it was—call me now, in the middle
of the night? “Outta respect for Clay,” he said—and “Cast them
Niggers out!” Didn’t the story in the
Towncrier
explain they were
part Indian? And, besides, they have references—Lila Hightower,
the Judge’s own daughter, after all!!!

Just as Betty’s about to dismiss the whole thing as a young man’s craziness—
God knows my Clay did worse things
—the ring of metal hitting metal sings outside the house. It’s another sound that swims up to her from the faraway past, when Cash was posting For Sale signs at the drained swamp lots on the other side of the lake. It is, no doubt, the song of a post-hole digger forcing its way through the dense clay hardpan just beneath the earth’s sandy surface.

Betty pulls on her pink robe and, hand on her hip, crosses stiffly through the darkened kitchen—
No need to disturb the
first-floor tenants
—to peer out the dining room’s big front-facing windows.

The scene on the lawn sends her hand, clutching thin cotton, to her throat. Outside, in a ghostly circle, ten, maybe twelve, men, dressed head to toe in white robes, hold fiery orange torches above their heads. The air reeks of flaming kerosene. In their center, a man wields the singing post-hole digger up, then down, then jams it in the earth, then yanks up two dark shovelfuls of dirt. At his signal, two other men hand off their torches and join him. Something like a huge hammer rises high above their heads, then straightens, then drops with a wooden thud into the hole. Betty feels fear, like cold metal, the taste of copper, on her tongue. She sees the sudden sweep of torch, the flash of vertical flame, the streak of yellow fire. She recoils in horror at the blazing, crackling fifteen-foot cross before her. One of the men turns, lifts his torch toward the house. “Cast them Niggers out!” he yells. “Or, next time, we’ll burn ’em out!” Panic balloons inside her chest, bursts in a high screeching howl as Betty faints and falls onto the diamond-patterned parquet floor.

WHEN SHE COMES TO—thanks to smelling salts thrust beneath her nose by old Mrs. Wexall of Minneapolis, Room Four—she grasps the woman’s papery arms and attempts to haul herself up screaming, “Fire! The house! On fire!! Help me, PLEASE!!!”

“Calm down, Miz Betty!” Bunny Collins, the young manicurist from Room Five, tells her. “It’s all right!” But, stumbling outside, she must see for herself. The men in white have vanished into the night. And the men of the house— welder Tim Wallace, winter fishermen George and Henry Howell, regional sales manager Graham Firth, frail Mr. Wexall and his brother-in-law Mr. Lindstrom—have organized a bucket brigade from the side yard’s big cistern. The flaming cross is mostly extinguished, sputtering sparks into the shadows.

She runs to them, weeping. “Has anyone checked the roof? The house! It’s all, ALL I have left!!!”

“It’s okay, Miz Betty. Look!” they tell her, sloshing buckets. “See for yourself !”

By the light of the moon, she sees Charmwood—all that remains of the dream and the nightmare that has been her life— stands unharmed.

THEY CROWD AROUND HER at the big dining-room table, oddly out of their accustomed places. Betty sees them as if from a distance, as if she were somehow outside herself.

On her right, in the spot normally reserved for Mr. Wexall, on account of his “good ear,” sits a twitching, walleyed Bunny Collins, bobby pins poking every which way off her head. Next to her, a dark-eyed Graham Firth appears almost pirate-like for want of a shave. Beside him, the poor displaced Wexalls and their in-laws, the Lindstroms; all four of them, usually pale, gone pasty gray over the evening’s excitement.

On Betty’s left, in ’Becca’s place, sits Sara Chambers, the third-grade teacher who practically missed the whole thing taking time, while the others rushed outside, to wash her face and comb her hair. Beside her, in blue overalls pulled hastily over plaid pajamas, is a lock-jawed Tim Wallace, his powerful welder’s hands clasped rigidly on the table in front of him. Next to him are the fishing Howell brothers, George and Henry from upstate New York, who, always unkempt, look most like themselves. Beyond them, the five remaining empty chairs sit silent witness for Mr. and Mrs. Colkannan, who drove to Daytona for the night, and the three Dares—’Becca, Daniel, and their father—who normally spend weekends “working out at their property.”

“What’s this about a phone call?” Graham Firth’s demanding to know. Betty hears herself explaining as best she can.

“Your son’s friend, you say?” George Howell asks. At his elbow, his brother Henry mutters, “Some friend.”

Beneath glowering black brows, Firth’s eyes narrow to a fierce flicker.

“I—I thought it was a prank. He and my Clay—well, they were always . . .” Betty loses her train of thought. She looks for it in the faces around the table.

Tim Wallace continues to stare down at his clenched hands. “Leroy’s a little old t’be pullin’ pranks.”

A distant memory darts like a swallow across Betty’s mind. Wallace had a big brother, Frank, who was Clay and Leroy’s age, joined the Army same time they did. Except Frank Wallace never made it home.
Corregidor, wasn’t it?
Betty wonders.

“Could’ve burned the house down!” Mr. Wexall attempts outrage but his reedy-thin voice falls short of it. He turns watery eyes onto Graham Firth.

“Fascists!” Firth hisses, glaring around the table.

“It’s all that Sheriff DeLuth’s fault,” Sara Chambers says. “He’s got the whole town in an uproar over whether or not the Dares are part Negro.”

“But the paper explained all that; they’re part Croatan!” Bunny Collins is fond of ’Becca and was the first in the house to see the article and show it around to the others.

“Those men said if you didn’t turn ’em out, they’ll burn ’em out,” Mrs. Wexall murmurs, her face fearful. “I heard them, didn’t you?”

“They should be shot,” Firth says. “Lined up against the wall and shot!”

“Who?” Bunny says, eyes wide.

“Those men, whoever they were, who did this thing, said those things about
children
!” Firth tells her.

“Thank God the Dares weren’t here to see it! Poor little ’Becca would’ve been scared to death,” Bunny agrees.

“But, of course, they must move.” Everyone turns in surprise to old Mr. Lindstrom who rarely says anything. “You can’t let them stay.”

“But, what—I mean, what if—how could I?” Betty hears herself stammering.

“And let the Fascists
win
?” Firth turns dagger-sharp eyes onto Mr. Lindstrom, but the old man holds his ground.

“This house, it’s all Mrs. Betty has. You heard them say they’ll burn it down. A house like this would catch like matchsticks. And all of us with it.”

“But, surely, they’re just bluffing,” Sara Chambers stammers. “They wouldn’t really—”

“Hard t’say.” Tim Wallace shakes his head. “Enough time, enough ’shine, these ol’ boys are likely to try anythin’.”

“Oh!” Betty’s beginning to feel faint again.

“Which is why they must go.” Mr. Lindstrom casts a shaming glance at the still smoldering Graham Firth. The older man points his chin, prickly with white stubble, in Betty’s direction. Beside him, pale as a specter, Mrs. Lindstrom nods her timid encouragement.

Around the table, the others, one by one, all but Graham Firth and Bunny Collins, nod their agreement in Betty’s direction. Betty Clayton Whitworth, watching herself from somewhere else, hears again the silent, searing wail of her soul:
If
only Clay was here——If only——If——

One way and now the other, the colony is moving.

The Old Ones recall that this has happened
before, that She Who Decides, whose wish is
law, may change Her mind. The others, younger,
mask their worries behind a more careful attention to their daily duties. And keep their eyes
open for anything.

It happened this way: First, upon answering
The Quickening’s central question, She Who Decides decreed a Divergence. Preparations began
immediately to provide for the safety of those who
would go and, more important, those who would
stay. She even went so far as to select Her successor and that initiation was begun in earnest.

Then, the unthinkable happened. He Who
Provides arrived at eventide in a web of smoke,
redressed Her chambers, wrapped a wire net
around their ramparts. And She announced the
dangerous Divergence was o f! The Quickening
is complete. Above all, the children, their treasures, will be safe.