3 Day Terror (12 page)

W
HAT MAN,
darling?”

“A man in the back yard,” the boy said. “He came in through the gate. I heard the gate squeak, and he said it was a present for me and I should go tell you.”

Cass bent down and took the thin, square package from him. There was a black bow tied around white tissue paper. “Did he say who he was, darling?”

“Nope! Open it, Mama! What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, tearing the wrapping away. “Now, just be patient, honey.”

“Maybe it’s a clay set, Mama. Is it a clay set?”

In her hands Cass held a record folder, the sort that holds a thirty-three-speed record. There was a piece of brown paper pasted over the original cover, and at the bottom there was a crude drawing of a sheet done in white paint, with holes for eyes cut in it, and the three bold letters K.K.K. printed across it in black paint. Opposite that, there was a yellow-painted noose, hanging from a black tree limb.

“Is it, Mama?”

“Hush, honey, a moment — hush, Johnny-Bob.”

Cass read the legend painted across the brown paper:

She stared at it, while Johnny-Bob tugged hard at her skirt.

“Mommie, please tell me.”

“It’s not a present,” she said. “It’s not a present, Johnny. It’s just a joke.

“Why isn’t it a present?” the boy whined. “The man said it was.”

She reached inside the folder and felt a small seventy-eight-size record.

“Honey, run to the kitchen and ask Ginny Lee to give you some milk and cookies,” she said.

“The man said it was.”

“Please, Johnny-Bob, do as I say.”

“I’d rather go back outdoors. I was building a house in the sand, Mama.”

“I don’t want you to go outdoors, Johnny,” Cass Chadwick said. “I want you to go in and ask Ginny to give you some milk and some nice raisin cookies.”

“It was wrapped like a present,” the boy said, turning, starting toward the kitchen. “I felt the ribbon.”

Standing in the hallway, Cass pulled out the record from its folder. It was a recording of “Dixie,” and pasted to it was a note:

“You’ll be hearing the same music, Chadwick, if you print any more in your rag about niggers going to school in Bastrop!”

“… but it wasn’t a present at all,” she heard Johnny-Bob’s voice from the kitchen. “It was just a joke.”

Ginny Lee said, “Hoop! I saw dat dumb dope Suggs from de window. He slunk ‘cross de yard like a suck-egg hound!”

“… yes, they’d like to see it happen! The flat-chested, mannish women who wear pants and cut their hair like men and read books on Lenin! Yes, they’d like to see nigger boys teach innocent little white girls dirty things in the recess yard! And what’s that? Hah? What’s that?”

“Sick!”

“And the limp-wrist lavender boys that lisp and wiggle like girls when they walk down the street. Yes! They’d like to see the nigger boys sitting in the classroom with their eyes watching the little white girls, watching the way they sit and waiting until they see something that’ll get their nigger blood racing! What’ll happen after school, hah? After school when they follow the little white girls home? Good, God-fearing people, I beg you to tell me, what kind of a situation is that? Tell me!”

“Sick! It’s sick!”

“You know it’s sick! Oh, Lord, you know it is! Help me! Don’t let this happen. Yes, yes, the men that sit and pass laws that make little white girls have to be subjected to black nigger boys pushing them up against school lockers — yes, their little girls are grown up, and they don’t care because their little girls are all grown up — those that were man enough to have any — and because now their minds are all they got left, and their minds have rotten thoughts. Yes, yes, their little girls are grown up, and they don’t care a damn about the little girls in Bastrop, Alabama, who got to go to school on Monday with niggers! What do they care if the niggers smell and crawl with lice and know dirty words even I don’t know, even you don’t know, hah? What do they care! They passed a law, ladies and gentlemen, they say you got to abide by that law! I say that law is a sick law, and God help me, Lord God help me, I care about those little white girls! I’ll fight for their honor! I’ll defend their honor! God, help me, I’ll kill that sick law! I’ll kill that law! Help me to! I’m asking you to help me! I’m asking you because that’s a sick, sick, law! Do you know it?”

“Yes!”

“Will you tell me? What is that law?”

“Sick!”

“Oh, say it!”

“Sick! It’s sick!”

“God, yes, believe me!”

“It’s sick!”

“Say it to the heavens. Let God hear you!”

“Sick, sick, sick!”

“Don’t wait for me to ask you! Say it and say it!”

T
HE CROWD
across the street at the Wheel was still yelling and milling around under the ginkgo tree. Duboe stood outside Porter Drugs near Richard Buddy’s car, and watched the stranger cross the street. There was almost no traffic along Court now; all who passed the Wheel in their trucks and cars had pulled over and parked, got out and listened — or stayed, leaning on their windows, watching.

The stranger was smiling as he approached. He clasped a hand on Duboe’s shoulder.

“I got them going,” he said. “I’ll give them a rest for a while, and then I think you ought to take over.”

Duboe said, “Hell, I ain’t no talker. You are, though. You’re great!”

“But now we need someone from here in town to talk,” Richard Buddy said. “I got them worked up for you. You won’t have any trouble.”

“What the hell am I going to say! I ain’t talked before a crowd.”

“Tell them what you told me this morning. That’s the stuff I can’t tell them about. You know, Chandler, about the land getting poorer and the expense of fertilizer, and the way the niggers were living high off the hog back in forty-one when the Southwest was paying four cents more per pound of cotton.”

“No one was living high off the hog, mister.” “Well, you know, Chandler. What you said this morning. It was you and your daddy running to the bank ass-licking for loans, and sitting up all night figuring out costs. The niggers were up all night drinking and screwing. It was the whites figuring out a way to make ends meet. Just tell them like you told me — if the niggers want equal rights so bad, how come they’re willing to leech off the white man, and let the white man worry for them.”

“People know that,” Duboe said. “Everyone around here knows that. Hell, mister, we live with niggers! We know what they’re like!”

“Chandler, to get these folks willing to go out and work for their rights on Monday morning, you got to remind them in every way you can think to that a nigger is a nigger, and that the Supreme Court up in Washington, D. C., is trying to make you people believe black is white.”

Duboe said, “Well, I sure hate to get the niggers sore during in-season. It’s a bad time to get niggers sore at you. They can slow up like nothing you ever saw ‘less you saw a slowed-up nigger.”

“If you give in to the niggers now, you might as well give up your place out there, Chandler. What the hell makes you think the niggers aren’t going to slow up once they know they can go to school with whites? Let them niggers know their strength, Chandler, and you’re going to have a thing happen here in Bastrop like what’s happened down in Birmingham with the bus strike. Hell, the niggers can cripple you, if you give them an inch. You got to scare them, Chandler. Scare the living hell out of them!”

Duboe nodded slowly, “You got a point. Yeah, we got to keep them niggers in their places from the word go, or we ain’t going to git nothing.”

“So after a bit, you go on over and just talk to them. Just like you did to me this morning.”

“Yeah,” Duboe said. “You’re right.”

The pair stood watching the crowd. The stranger had left the pamphlets under the ginkgo, and people were grabbing them and standing in little groups reading them; passing them back to those in cars, shouting and discussing.

Duboe looked down Court and saw Delia Benjamin turning the corner on West Tennessee. She still strutted like a countess of some kind walking over the heads of prostrate serfs; long legs and long steps. He’d had his hands full with that behind she was shaking — once he had, when she was drunk and picked him up in the road that rainy night, and asked him where he was going. Duboe knew women; knew them well enough to know that if it was Ginny Lee Towers you wanted to jog, you took her out of the dump down at the Nelly, drove her to a view and conned her with candy-talk, until it was sweet like spring water and laughing in husky tones, until it was nice and you lie back sighing in the grass — smiling. But Delia Benjamin was a wildcat lay, and you didn’t talk when you took the wheel and headed for the dump, down in the Nelly, and you didn’t talk after, but in between you did, and she did, until she dug your back with her nails, and rode and cried; until it was silent and you heard her purse click and smelled the cigarette smoke. That one time.

The stranger said, “Here comes Dee.”

“You know her? You work fast, mister.”

“I’d like to know her.”

“She wouldn’t like this,” Duboe said, pointing toward the Wheel. “She’s uppity.”

“A nigger-lover?”

“Her and her whole family. ‘Cept her mother. Mother don’t love anybody.”

“What’s Dee like?”

Chandler said, “Easy. Uppity but easy. Get her drunk first, though.”

Richard Buddy smiled. “She’s waving at me.”

“Sure,” Duboe said. “You’re her type. She married a Northerner.”

“I think I’ll just — ”

“Sure,” Duboe said. “You go on and meet her.” He chuckled, “A-yeah, get her drunk.”

“I’ll see you at your place at five-thirty,” Buddy said, turning.

Duboe raised his hand in a mock “heil Hitler” salute: “Sick!” he said.

Richard Buddy clicked his heels and returned the salute. “Sick! Sick! Sick!” he said.

I
MUST BE,
Arnold Belden thought, or I wouldn’t be here. He sat on the edge of the flower-splotched sofa uncomfortably, a thin, short man with a good head of white hair, deep brown eyes which were darting periodically from his hands to the mantle clock, and a lean, pensive countenance. It was the first time he had been in the Chadwicks’ home, and he did not enjoy the fact that he was forced into a position in which he was obliged to be amiable with Jack. Cass, he admired — all the more as he glanced around the room and saw the vases of daisies and black-eyed Susans, the framed photographs of Johnny-Bob and Jack and herself which hung in various spots around the white wood walls, and the knitting bag beside the end table, the straw sewing basket in the corner; the books everywhere, and the unpretentious but comfortable Early American furniture. Cass, he felt, was a woman in the old-fashioned sense, unlike Poppy, who lived outdoors and had to be constantly on the go.

Where Jack was concerned, Arnold Belden neither particularly liked or disliked him, if he were honest with himself; but as a father who did not forget easily, and as a father who had resisted the urge countless times to kill Chadwick in cold blood, he would rather not have any occasion to be in his company.

Now there was such an occasion, and Arnold Belden sat there with Jud Forsythe and Jack and Cass, feeling as though he were going to blurt out, “There’s no sense waiting for Poppy, Jack. She’s not thoroughly insensitive, you know,” because Poppy had told him about the visit with Jack. And afterwards, after Poppy took the twins and went home, Pam had said, “She isn’t over him yet,” in that matter-of-fact voice she used to say shocking things. “I’ve always suspected as much.”

“It’s eight-thirty,” Jack Chadwick said, “Should we call again?”

Arnold Belden said, “Obviously Troy’s not home yet.”

“She could come alone, couldn’t she?”

“She could,” Belden said, “but I don’t think she will.”

“When I talked to her, she said she’d try.”

What else could she say, Belden thought. Poppy’s a cream-puff, not a Benjamin steamroller.

“I think we should go ahead,” Jud said. “We can always call them tomorrow.”

Chad stood by the mantle, spread-legged, smoking a cigarette. He said, “We’ve all been briefed on what’s happened since noon. What we’ve got to do now is decide what we can do about it.”

“I want to stay out of it,” Cass said. “Monday morning I want to lock the doors and stay out of it.”

• • •

Beyond the living room and the hallway, in the dining room, Ginny Lee Towers stood dusting the table, leaning forward so she could hear.

“… whether or not we like it, we’re already involved,” Jud Forsythe was saying,”

“Then let’s not get more involved” — Cass Chadwick.

“Cass, let Jud talk!”

Ginny Lee clapped her hand to her mouth. Lawd, dat tole dat woman. She been in some state all day, Miz Cass, talking on de telephone wid her daddy. Nebber even tole Mister Jack she knew de whole time Miss Dee done marched herself in and paid de visit to his office. When Mister Jack say dis evening dat folks think Miss Dee in wid dis troublemaker stranger, Miz Cass jest sit on de chunk of ice. “Oh?” she say. “Really?” she say. Haw-de-daw, Gawd, he better tell her soon, or she gonna get de long puss and sleep in Mastah Johnny-Bob’s room.

“Who is he anyway?” Cass Chadwick asked. “Someone Dee Benjamin brought down here!”

“We don’t know that’s true,” Jack snapped.

“We know pretty well.”

“We don’t know that’s true, Cass!”

Hee-haw, Gawd! You don’t know you’s walking in de quicksan, Mister Jack. Miz Cass daddy done told her what he saw down West Tennessee dis afternoon. You gonna need de heatin’ pad in de bed t’night.

From behind her Ginny heard — ”Psssss!”

She turned. “Nigger!” she hissed. “What yo’ doin’ in Mister Jack’s? Yo’ get outa here!”

Duggan Allen stood in the kitchen doorway. “You gets yo’ hide out where I can talk, or I come in dere and drag yah.”

“You nervy nigger!” she said, but she went toward the kitchen.

Out in the back yard, Duggan let go of her hand. “I like to kill you!”

“Mutual —
and
— mutual!” She stood up against the house, still carrying the duster.

“You was out wid Duboe at de dump last night.”

“You was in dat dump, not me. De dump is for de rubbish, not me.”

Duggan said, “Listen, I don’t have time to argue wid you. Dere’s trouble! Big trouble! De deacon says for everyone to come down to de church t’night at ten o’clock! White folks got eyes to make big trouble! Duboe got eyes!”

“I knows it! Dey’s in dere talkin’.”

“You go back and here what dey say,” Duggan said. “And you be at de church with the information.”

“I knows it!” Ginny Lee answered. “And Miss Dee was in to Mister Jack’s today, and Miz Cass know it but — ”

Duggan said, “You silly nigger, you listen! Don’t care about Miz Cass business with Mister Jack. Dere’s trouble, hear!”

“I hear. I knows it.”

“You g’wan back and listen, and you be at de church. Tappy say you be dere too.”

“I be dere.”

“I got my own listenin-post ‘tend to,” Duggan Allen said. He darted back behind the tulip trees, on his way out and down the drive.

Ginny Lee went back up the porch steps, and paused. Someone was in the kitchen.

Jack Chadwick was saying, “Thank you for coming, Poppy. Here, I’ll get the ice cubes. This always sticks.”

“I wasn’t going to come, and then — ”

“Poppy, when you came to see me this afternoon, I was in a jam. Look, Poppy, Cass doesn’t even know. Dee came to see me.”

“I can get it all right,” Poppy Porter said. “Here, give me a glass.”

“I was upset, Poppy.”

“I know you were. I just didn’t know why. I thought it was — me.”

“I knew you did. God, Poppy, I’ve always wanted to say something to you about — well, about how rotten I acted toward you. I wasn’t myself then — after Benny left, I just wasn’t.”

“And now that she’s back?”

“I don’t know. Poppy, I plain don’t know!”

“You know what they’re saying. About this stranger and her.”

“I can’t believe it! Poppy, can you?”

“Troy’s dad said they came into the drugstore this afternoon. Said they talked for an hour or so over a soda in back.”

“Oh … Well, well — ”

“It’s hard to give up the old idol, Jack. I know. I used to think I’d never get over you. When the radio played love songs, I used to run all the way across a room and snap it off. Used to walk out of movies when there was any romantic scene. Gaw, I was in such a state, Jack.”

“I’m sorry, Poppy. Sorry is all I can say.”

“It was so boring,” Poppy said.

“Huh?”

“Here’s your glass, Jack. I said, it was boring. I finally woke up and realized I was bored to tears.”

Jack Chadwick laughed, “Poppy, Poppy, you always make such sense, don’t you? It is boring, isn’t it? It is boring to be all wrapped up in the past.”

“Up to a point,” she said, “the past improves. The more you think about it, the better it seems. But if you keep at it as long as I did, pretty soon all the days you wasted thinking about it are in the past too, and you have to consider them.”

“I’m glad you came, Poppy. I’m glad we had a chance to talk.”

“We better go back now. Daddy’s probably in there sure I’m having my heart broken out here in the kitchen.” “He doesn’t still think that!”

“Daddy likes the idea of protecting his only daughter. With Troy taking such good care of me, he doesn’t get much chance to think that way, so whenever he can, like right now — ”

Jack said, “We’ll go on in, and you better smile!” “Jack,” she said. “I hope you get bored! I pray God you do!”

“Thanks, Poppy,” he said. “Thanks, girl.” The kitchen door swung shut after them. Ginny Lee Polk Ann Towers wiped her face with the dust rag. Working dis house gonna make me a nervous wretch, she thought, hee-haw dong, roof gonna blow off any day de week now.