Flowers in the Snow (7 page)

Betty leaned back in her chair and took a long sip of her bourbon. Every wide eye was fixed on her, and she felt compelled to finish the story even though her heart was aching.

“Were they hurt?” Bobby asked, breaking the silence that had enveloped them all as they sat motionless on the porch waiting to hear more.

“Maybe we should take a break and come back tomorrow to finish the story,” Michael suggested, running his eyes over Betty appraisingly. He was usually the one in the crowd who could sense someone’s angst. As a lawyer, his time in the courtroom gave him the ability to read a situation before almost anyone else.

“But I want to know what happened. Was Alma hurt? What were those people doing there that night? I don’t get it.” Frankie’s voice was splintered with confusion and worry that sent chills down Betty’s spine.

“You don’t hear this from me too often, but I think maybe I made a bad judgment call tonight. You might not be old enough yet to hear all this,” Betty said, running a hand over Frankie’s cheek.

Frankie huffed out her frustration. “You said I’m not much younger than you were while this was happening. I’m just listening to the story. You
lived
it.”

“I didn’t have a choice. Everything I’ve told you up until this point is tame compared to where this story goes. I think maybe I made a mistake. You don’t even need to know this darkness exists.”

“I want to hear,” Frankie insisted, folding her arms across her chest defiantly. “You wouldn’t leave Winnie’s kitchen when you wanted her to tell you all about the world. She tried to tell you to go and you didn’t. Everyone tells me all the time how much I’m like you. I won’t leave either.”

“I know I’m supposed to scold here, but as a lawyer I’m impressed with her argument,” Michael interjected as he dodged a glare from Betty and a slap to the ribs from Jules.

“She does have a point,” Piper added. “There’s no one on this porch more like you than Frankie. I think it’s important for her to hear what it was like for you back then.”

Betty downed the last sip of amber liquid in her glass and groaned. “Piper and Michael, you’re the biggest troublemakers. I feel like we should just get that out now. When you two are together I always know I’ll be dealing with nonsense. But let’s hear what her mama thinks about it.”

Jules shifted in her seat, her eyes darting between a pathetically pleading Frankie and everyone else on the porch. “It’s a part of Edenville’s history. It happened. Whether she learns about it on this porch or out in the world, she’ll hear it eventually. I’d rather have her here where she can ask questions and understand what that time was really like.”

“Good,” Frankie said victoriously but toned it down instantly when her mother shot her a look of warning.

“Do any of y’all have any questions for me?” Betty asked, holding her glass out so Clay could refill it.

“I do,” Piper interjected. “The first time I sat at your table you told me your recipes were handed down from past generations, and your mother was the first person to put sour cream in her potatoes. But you just said Winnie taught you to make her special potatoes.”

“I’ll never take away the fact that my folks gave me life. They brought me into the world, and I truly believe they did the best they knew how. But when I close my eyes and think about a mama I think of Winnie. That’s where I learned to cook. That’s where I learned how to be a person, a real human being. There’s a big difference between a mother and a mama. Those recipes, the ones I said were handed down . . . they were Winnie’s.”

“How did you get to be nearly a teenager and still not know what was going on in the world?” Jules asked. “It was such a tumultuous time throughout the country, but you didn’t seem to realize it.”

“I sure didn’t know what the hell was happening. Edenville was very insulated and my household even more so. We didn’t have a television, and my parents could hardly read, so we weren’t much for sitting around with the paper. Once I started to learn more about it from Winnie, things I’d heard in the past started to make sense. I guess I just didn’t know people had that capacity to hate each other. But once I knew, there was no turning back.”

“I thought the Supreme Court ruled on segregation in the late fifties. You’re talking about four or five years later.” Bobby shook his head as though the entire idea of the history of Edenville made him feel ill.

“I don’t know the legal mumbo jumbo of it all. I just know Edenville held out until they couldn’t anymore. But that night the people stormed through what was known as the west side shacks and wreaked havoc. They made it clear while the courts had ruled it illegal to keep blacks out of their white school, they weren’t going to swing their doors open and give a warm welcome.”

“People must’ve been so scared back then,” Frankie remarked quietly as she squeezed in tighter to her mom. “I can’t imagine having to sit in our house while a bunch of angry people came shouting at us for something we didn’t even do. You wouldn’t let that happen would you, Daddy?” Her eyes were wide and begging for Michael to assure her he’d always be there to protect her.

He stopped short of a blind assurance made just for the sake of comforting her. Betty knew Michael to be rooted in reality, and his answer was no surprise. “You never know what the world is going to bring, but that’s why I work so hard. The law is there to protect us and make sure things like that never happen again.” He reached his arm over and pulled Frankie tight to him.

Frankie’s worries were still not warmly tucked away as her eyes danced between the adults. “What about the police? Where were they that night? Couldn’t Winnie have just called them? Uncle Bobby wouldn’t let something like that go on,” she reasoned, the wheels in her head clearly spinning to make sense of something Betty knew couldn’t be figured out by anyone.

“You’re damn right I wouldn’t have let that go on,” Bobby shot back, looking as though his anger was growing by the minute. “It’s a disgrace how long this went on here. That it ever happened at all. You’d think this was hundreds of years ago, but it’s not. It’s within your lifetime, Betty. It pisses me off.”

“Back then,” Betty started, softening her face as not to bring about any useless anger that wouldn’t do anyone any good, “if a white man did something bad, even killed a black man, he rarely went to prison for it. If the police were around they either joined right in or looked the other way. The police were there for us, not for them.”

“You sure you want to go on with your story?” Clay asked, lacing his fingers with Betty’s as her voice grew more agitated.

“Telling it won’t change the outcome. It won’t heal all the hurt, but at least y’all will know the people who shaped me.”

“And we want to know that, Mama,” Jules said earnestly. “I’ve never asked before. I could always tell you didn’t want to talk about the letters from Alma. You didn’t want me to know about all the hurt that happened to you, so I’m glad to be hearing it now. I’ve always wanted to know.”

“Well I guess I can’t argue with all these big eyes and gaped mouths staring at me. If you want to know the ugly truth of it all, then I’ll tell you. That night Winnie, Nate, and Alma did not escape the mob of angry people, and it was a good thing Nate turned me out when he did, otherwise it would have been much worse.”

Edenville 1961

Coming home late on a night when such big news had broken did earn Betty a few slaps on her way up to bed though her mother did look relieved to see she was not harmed in all the commotion in town. As usual when sent to bed, she camped out at the top of the stairs and listened hard to hear all her parents had to say.

“It’s slipping away,” her father snarled. “Everything we’ve been doing is breaking up and falling apart. They’re letting five Negro teachers come into the school and teach our kids. It’s sinful.” There was a loud thud Betty recognized as her father’s hand slamming down on their large oak table.

“Can’t you do nothing? The Klan isn’t planning anything? I don’t want our daughter getting taught by some idiot,” her mother answered in a shrill and worried voice.

“You’re the idiot,” Betty whispered and then quickly repented and did the sign of the cross twice. Little did her mother know, even though she hadn’t started working at Edenville East yet, Winnie was already teaching Betty. She’d learned more in the last two weeks than she had in all the years leading up to it. From current events to the perfect buttermilk biscuit recipe, her brain was more full than it had ever been before. So was her heart.

Betty tried her best, but three days of staying away from Alma’s house was all she could manage. The more talk that circled the town, the more she needed to see her friends. The first chance she had to slip away she took it.

“Not today, Betty,” was all Winnie said through the door. “It’s not safe.”

Betty wanted to sit there in protest but the truth in Winnie’s words couldn’t be ignored. The whole world felt unsafe now. Betty could see the burned out shacks just around the corner from Winnie’s. There was a noose hanging from the tree at the foot of the hill Betty ran down to get to them. Hate had touched the place Betty had imagined was protected by love. She turned away from Winnie’s porch and drudged back to the woods. Shacks that weren’t burned were covered in spray paint, curse words and hateful things marked on every available surface. If the people who did this understood how kind everyone here was then surely they’d stop. Betty considered parading down Main Street and educating everyone. But now, thanks to Winnie, she knew better.

When she turned on her heel to leave she prayed things would go back to the way they were before. If only she could keep coming to Alma’s and making bracelets and learning to cook. The world wouldn’t be perfect, she understood that, but her little piece of it could be good.

She could still smell the smoke of Winnie’s cooking fire when she saw him. About ten yards to the left of the path to her home was a person wobbling without much sense of direction. Looking more like an animal than a man, the sight of him made her heart stiffen with fear.

Betty crouched down and held her breath until she could get a better look at the figure moving toward her. The tightness in her chest faded away instantly when she saw the familiar face.

“Simpson,” she shouted as she shot up to a standing position. “What are you doing out here?”

“Beatrice?” he asked, seeming to look through her rather than at her. “What are you . . .?” his voice trailed off as he swayed on his feet.

The closer he got the more Betty could tell what was wrong. Simpson’s eyes were rimmed purple and the skin of his brow was split open. Slumping shoulders and a limp in his step let Betty know he’d been beaten up. One of his hands was pressing tight to a rag on his other wrist.

“What happened to you?” Betty asked, running up to help steady him. He stood six inches taller than her and during the last summer his shoulders had filled out. She’d have no real shot of holding him up if his legs gave out completely, but she had to try.

“I pissed off my jerk of a dad again,” he grumbled as he leaned himself against a tree. “Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

“I can’t leave you here. Your arm is bleeding. If I go get help you might pass out, stop putting pressure on your arm, and bleed to death. And there’s no way I can get you all the way back home by myself.” Betty’s mind was racing through her options. Simpson had been a pain in the ass over the years but she’d also known him since they were babies. No matter how much of a jerk he’d tried to be, every single time it came down to helping her, he always did. She wanted to repay the kindness he’d always tried to pretend he wasn’t giving her.

“Leave me alone. I don’t want anyone’s help.” With a halfhearted swat of his hand, Simpson tried to shoo her away. In doing so he exposed the cut that was spurting blood from his wrist.

“Cover it,” Betty shouted, grabbing the rag and using her hand to press down on his wound. “Come on, I know where we can go.”

Simpson opened his mouth to protest but no words came. His eyes fixated on Betty’s tiny fingers clutched around his wrist. When his mouth clamped shut again she grabbed the collar of his shirt with her free hand and yanked him along.

At the top of the hill at the edge of the woods she looked down over Winnie’s house and then back at Simpson. This was a terrible idea. No one would be pleased with her. Surely she’d lose more than one friend by the time the sun set this evening. But at least no one would die.

“Who lives there?” Simpson asked as he tripped his way down the hill toward the shack.

“They’re my friends. They’ll help you,” Betty explained, praying she was right about both those statements.

Simpson tried to pull away but it only made him less steady. “We can’t, Beatrice.”

“Don’t call me that. Round here they call me Betty. You best do the same. Now you can either stay up in those woods and die, or you can let them help you.”

Rather than knocking on the door, Betty pushed her way right in and shoved Simpson into a kitchen chair as Winnie came barreling around the corner. “Betty, what in God’s name are you doing here? And who is this?”

“His name’s Simpson. He’s my friend, and he’s hurt bad. He’ll bleed to death unless we fix up his arm. I couldn’t get him all the way back home, and I didn’t know what else to do. You ain’t gonna turn us out like this are you?” Betty made her face fierce and determined as Winnie’s eyes danced between her and Simpson.

“You’re gonna be the death of me, child,” Winnie sighed. “Alma, come on out here. You need to fetch Cynthia. Tell her there’s a boy here who needs stiches.”

When Alma rounded the corner she gasped and hid behind her mother. “That’s the boy who chased me with the bat,” she cried, clutching her mother’s apron.

“He’s hurt bad,” Betty argued. “He doesn’t have a bat now. He couldn’t do anything to you. He can barely stand.”

Winnie reached a hand back to comfort Alma who was shaking with fear. “You brought the boy who tried to hurt my daughter into my house, Betty? In what world does that sound like something you should do?”

“In the world where we don’t let people die alone in the woods. Simpson told us where the other boys were that day and gave us a chance to run. He saved us both, really.” Betty looked down at Simpson, whose color was fading away, and implored him with angry eyes to speak up.

“I wasn’t gonna hit you. I saw you there, and I chased you in a different direction away from the group I was with. I was trying to get you back over to this side of town before they had a chance to catch up. You don’t want to know what would’ve happened if you crossed their path.” Simpson’s words came slowly as he tried to muster his strength. “I couldn’t hit no little girl with a bat. There’s a lot I can’t do, just ask my pa. He’ll tell you. It’s why he beat me like this.”

“My great grandmamma used to say the way people treat their kids is a reflection of how they feel about themselves,” Winnie offered, as she seemed to give the boy more thought.

“If that’s true my daddy hates himself,” Simpson muttered.

“Go on and get Cynthia,” Winnie insisted as she shook Alma off her and shoved her toward the door. “Tell her to come alone.”

“But Mama,” Alma protested angrily.

“He’ll be the least of your worries if you disobey me right now. Go on,” Winnie snapped, raising a threatening brow at her daughter.

Betty used her free hand to tilt Simpson’s head back and examine the cut over his eye. “Why’d you come all this way through the woods? Why not just go to Dr. Peters? You know he’d have fixed you up.”

“I just wanted to go out in the woods and walk and lie down.” Simpson closed his eyes and bit at his bloody lip.

“That ain’t no plan. Lie down and what?” Betty asked, assuming he must have some kind of brain damage to be talking so dumb.

Simpson’s stare was blank and unemotional as he explained. “Lie down and die. I just wanted to walk where no one would be looking for me and put my head on a pile of leaves and sleep forever.”

“Simpson, that’s stupid. Why would you wanna die?” Betty let go of his arm and moved her hands angrily but remembered quickly the blood squirting from his wrist.

“Pull some clean towels in from the clothes line,” Winnie ordered as she used her hip to bump Betty aside. She gripped the towel and held it in place, putting pressure on it.

Betty hustled outside, yanked the towels from the line, and bolted back through the door. She didn’t want to be seen outside, and she didn’t want to miss Simpson’s explanation, because as far as she was concerned there couldn’t be one.

“I’m gonna die anyway,” Simpson proclaimed, staring Winnie dead in the eye. “That’s how it is now. I’m either with them, or I’m against them, and if I’m against them, I’m dead. I wanted to go out on my terms, not dragged behind some car or hung from a damn tree. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Betty heard his words but they didn’t compute. The only way she could tell for sure what he was saying was profound was by the look on Winnie’s face. Her jaw was clenched tight and her nostrils flared, and Betty couldn’t tell if Winnie was angry or just overwhelmed.

“What’d you cut yourself with?” Winnie asked, matching his fierce stare. Betty felt as though she was watching two gladiators about to face off.

“His daddy beat him,” Betty chimed in, assuming she was helping, but it was as if she’d suddenly become invisible. Neither of them even blinked at the sound of her voice.

“Pocket knife,” Simpson answered flatly. “It was too dull I think. It didn’t quite do the job.”

“The job?” Betty asked, tossing her hands up as though they were all speaking another language now.

“What’d he want you to do that was so bad you were willing to end it all?” Winnie took the clean rags from Betty’s hand and wrapped his wound tightly.

“A few days ago they all come down here hooting and hollering. They were trying to scare y’all off from coming to our school. I told him I’d be here. I was just going to go into town and round up a few more boys like he asked. I never showed up. I told him I got hung up messing with this kid from the west side that wandered over to our farm. One of my brothers ratted me out though and told my pa I was in town laying low.”

“Whatcha gonna do?” Winnie asked, as though the topic didn’t weigh a thousand pounds.  As if there was some kind of simple answer. “I’m not gonna let you die here, so what’s your plan then?”

“I just wanted to hang on a couple more years. I’ll be fourteen at the end of this year. I can get a job, sock some cash away, and get out of here. Nothing’s ever gonna change here, and if I stay the only thing I can ever be is like my pa or dead. Now I can see I don’t have a couple years, there ain’t no such thing as too young anymore. We’re all supposed to take up the fight. We’re all supposed to be soldiers.”

“Can’t you just stay out the way? That’s what I’m doing,” Betty interjected, peeking out the window to see if Alma was on her way back yet.

“It don’t work like that for me. I tried.”

Winnie still seemed to have an air of skepticism as she probed Simpson for more. “You’ve been hearing the same junk over and over again since you were little, I’m sure. What makes you any different than your pa? I wouldn’t think you’d know any better.”

“I got eyes and a brain of my own. Look at this right here,” Simpson grunted back defensively, gesturing around the room with his uninjured hand. “You know what woulda happened if this had been the other way around? You think any of my kin would have fetched help for your daughter if she were hurt? They’d probably’ve been the ones to hurt her in the first place. I read the newspapers. I see what’s going on in the world. I’ve known for years my family wasn’t on the right side of this.” 

Winnie nodded her head but didn’t say another word. They waited in silence until Cynthia, a trained nurse, came charging through the door with a small satchel over her shoulder. Her short black hair was pulled back in rollers as if she’d been pulled out of bed.

“What the hell?” she asked, freezing so quickly when she saw Simpson that Alma slammed into her back. “You wake me up in the middle of the day, knowing I’ve worked all night, for
this
?”

“His wrist is cut. He needs some stiches,” Winnie directed, the sternness in her face not leaving any room for debate.

“It seems like he should have a doctor of his own to help him. This here is Merle’s boy. If he don’t like the way I stitch him up, what’s he gonna do to me?” Cynthia’s halfhearted protest didn’t stop her from opening up her bag and taking a seat next to Simpson.