American Ghost (32 page)

He looked even more pained, as if she'd brought up a most inappropriate subject—discussing tampons at the supper table or the like. But to his credit, he didn't evade her, just grunted. “Sister, everybody in this town uster claim they had a piece of thet rope. Why you worrying thet old mess?”

“It's just, suddenly, come to my attention, and I am having a heck of a time getting a straight answer, I'll tell you that.”

“That's 'cause there wasn't nothing straight about him—ol' Kite. He was crooked as the devil's toes—kilt that German, and Mr. Goss—shot 'em like yard dogs, and they were good men. Had wives and younguns, and there wasn't such a thang as the gov'mint to feed 'em, like it is today. Back then, you lost yo deddy, you went hungry. Didn't have a
dog's
chanch.”

To Jolie, it was a surprising confession, spoken with such passion by a man who'd been fatherless from conception and knew of what he spoke. It made her wonder if that hadn't been Kite's real crime, the reason they'd flayed him alive with such roaring viciousness: not for cuckolding white men, or stealing hogs, but for killing a father in a land where there
were
no fathers.

“Were you there, when they hung him? Was Daddy?”

He snorted at the very idea. “
Naw,
sister, none of us. Not for the hanging,” he amended, in a bit of dissemination inaudible to anyone but Jolie. She was beginning to understand that the Great Hendrix Lynching had been a two-part affair, with a Hendrix side and a Cleary one.

Chances were, none of her kin were part of the Cleary part of the ordeal, but they sure as hell had been there for the Hendrix party. She was so sure that she asked no more questions, but just leaned in and started him in the right direction, with the bit of historical record that was agreed on, in and out of town: “Uncle Jimmie turned him in.”

The old man didn't deny it. “It's a long story,” he muttered, gathering a handful of damp shells and tossing them into the fire with a hiss of smoke and ash.

Jolie tapped her watch. “You got five minutes.”

•  •  •

She was so matter-of-fact that Ott didn't bother with a lie; why should he? He had nothing to hide and spoke slowly, careful to keep his story purely his own—nothing but how it came upon him, Octavius LeRoy Hoyt, a younger son of an enormous, fragmented family, who had been twelve years old at the time and had been pulling his own wages, more or less, since he was eight. He'd quit school the year he almost died of rheumatic fever and never grew an inch further, making him a target for the local bullies, and the butt of many a cruel joke.

He wasn't physically strong enough to work at the mill, but managed to keep busy with lesser work: gathering crooks, tending the gum pots, and working for his uncle Jimmie, who owned 106 acres that he had planted in peanuts.

Old Jimmie was a well-known hard-ass, and when some of the hands hadn't shown up that morning in October 1938, he'd worked himself into a good and foul temper, which he was quick to share with the rest of the crew, shouting and threatening to take a belt to them if they didn't move it along. Ott was used to Jimmie's swagger, and as long as Ray was with them, it was an empty threat, as Ray was nearly grown and too big for anyone, even a cousin, to beat. He had let it be known that anyone who laid a hand on his brothers would have to lay a hand on him, and such was his growing reputation with a straight razor that Ott and Obie had been blissfully free of the humiliation of casual violence that had dogged their young lives.

Jimmie's bawling only slightly quickened Ott's speed, not in fear, but because big happenings were afoot in town, all of Hendrix abuzz. The evening before, Henry Kite had crossed the line from hog thief to murderer and put two men in their coffins. No one was talking of anything
else, as Kite was a well-known figure around town. A gambler by profession, he spent his days lolling around his mother's kitchen, his nights shooting craps and running with women no better than himself.

The night before, hundreds of white men had been out combing the woods, with torches and rifles and dogs. They were men from the mill, mostly, and the woods riders from Camp Six, and the high sheriff from Cleary, who had nothing but contempt for the slack-jawed locals and was laying bets that Kite had got cleanly away, though Ray said the river was too high to cross.

Ott had sided with the high-hats for once and bet against his brother at the post office the night before, just to be contrary. Ott and Obie had sat up all night speculating, and Ray had promised to take them back to town that night, to hear the latest. The excitement of it all made Ott dig with uncommon vigor, till late in the afternoon, nearing six, when Obie caught him at the end of a row, breath heaving, and told him they'd caught him.

Ott didn't bother to ask who, just breathed,
“Here?”

“Corn crib. Taking him to town. Come on.”

Ott was so excited that he left his hoe in the field—a beating offense, in Hendrix—and raced to Jimmie's with a winded Obie trailing. Ray was already there, standing in the shade of a yellow-leaved fig tree, a battered straw hat on his head.

He was a grown man by local standards and conscious of his bad eye, always keeping himself a little apart. He had always been a bit of a loner and didn't comment on the hoopla, other than to grunt at his red-faced brother and remind him of their bet. “You owe me money, little man. I won't forgit, come payday.”

He said it by way of teasing, poking fun at his runt younger brothers, who were filthy and winded and cow-eyed at their first glimpse of Kite, bloody, but subdued, kneeling in the back of a high peanut wagon, bound with baling cord at his wrists and ankles. Word had traveled fast, and a crowd was already forming, a dozen or more neighboring men and wives and a few children, who jockeyed with Ott and Obie for a closer
look, one of the smaller boys poking Kite with a stick, as if he were a raccoon in a cage, till his father made the boy stop.

Ott was more curious than vindictive and stared at Kite through the slats, inches from Kite's sweat-streaked, coffee-colored face, which wasn't as terrorized as it was calculating, his hazel, Injun eyes darting here and there like those of a gambler trying to weigh his odds and beat a bad hand. When the bigger boys jostled Ott aside, he returned to Ray, who was older and less excitable, smoking one of the store-sold cigarettes they'd taken off Kite when they found him, possibly the very cigarettes that had cost the German his life.

Ray peered at Kite across the yard with pity. “Jimmie found him in the corn crib, sleeping like a baby. Kite let 'em take him,” Ray said in wonder and contempt, then commented drily, “He'll wish diff'rent, by morning.”

Ray said it with offhanded, intricate knowledge, as he had put in his time at the Camp with the bosses, who were mostly hired from out of state, veterans of the old wars, who took a bit of sport with the locals. When Ray was fourteen, one had accused him of back-sassing and, in punishment, had tied him down in the river, his nose just above water. They'd left him there all night to choke and howl and beg, to teach him a lesson, a standard punishment not infrequently fatal that Ray had never forgiven, nor forgotten.

He'd quit the next day and went to work for their uncle Jimmie, who was blood kin, but hardly better. He'd made his money early, as a moonshiner, and among the Hoyts was known to be a wife-slapper and a son-beater, and even worse, an ass-kisser. He had money enough, and sons enough, for respectability, but was always looking for a chance to impress his fellow landowners, or anyone else in town who had something he wanted—including the bosses at Camp, who had never been anyone's friend.

Kite would have been better off turning himself over to Mr. Goss and seemed to realize it belatedly, as Jimmie came out, dressed for town in his good collar, accepting the backslaps and congratulations of his
neighbors with a broad, smug complacency, as if it were nothing more than his due. Ott was close enough to read the knowledge in Kite's wild eyes and suddenly pitied him, so sharply that Kite detected it among that wall of gawking, sweating faces and called out in a mild voice, “I wish one of you white gentlemen would be Christian enough to cut my throat.”

He made the entreaty to all of them, but his eyes were on Ray, who was known to be a cutter and carried a razor in his hatband, and one in his shoe. If he'd have wanted to, he could have reached out and made short work of it with a single swipe.

But Kite had no truck with Ray, who'd never had any patience with trash and didn't dignify his request with a reply. He spit on the ground in answer and Jimmie mounted the wagon with a handful of his hired men and turned the mules toward town.

Ott and Obie were hot to follow, and Ray worked hard to talk them out of it, but could hardly be heard over the crush. The two outpaced and ignored him, caught up in the ragtag procession that was a considerable parade by the time they made the bridge, which was hardly wider than a single lane and unexpectedly jammed with Model T's and braying mules, and swarms of country folk, come to town for the latest on Kite. The bosses had posted deputies on all the bridges, and the deputies here, once they understood the enormity of Jimmie's catch, fired off rounds in celebration, and to clear room for the wagon to pass. Obie was caught in the crush, while Ott was lithe and quick enough to hop back aboard, out of reach of Ray, who shouted for him to let go, to come back!

But Ott was carried away by the excitement of the shouting and milling crowd and clung like a monkey to the slats, ignoring the receding figure of his brother, who paced the far end of the bridge like a pinned Frankenstein monster, his shouted rebuke swallowed up in the roar of victory that went before them. The crowd parted like the Red Sea, opening up the road to the commissary, a high-raftered, old hall—once a mule stable, then used to grade tobacco—behind the Masonic lodge.

The smell of mules and manure and unwashed bodies was strong in the heat of the old barn, which was packed from door to ceiling with a chattering, smoking mob of mostly men—not just locals, but city men, too. Ott was shorter and smaller than most and got swept along in the press till midway through the hall, when Kite jerked to a halt, as if yanked on a rope, and began flailing and shouting in earnest, his cries those of a madman. Ott ducked and bobbed to stay clear of the flailing and was practically lifted off his feet by the buckling crowd, then nearly dropped and trampled. When he looked up, he saw what had driven Kite mad: a row of bodies that were strung up from the high center rafters from a single, looped rope, as lifeless as slaughtered hogs, five of them, straight across.

They must have been hanging all day. Their faces were piteously uncovered and hideously swollen, the color of old pumpkins. So distended and abused, the faces were hard to recognize, even to Ott, who'd grown up in Hendrix and knew everyone in Camp, at least by sight. Standing there beneath them, buffeted by Kite's flailing, he made out Willie and Hiram Kite—both so bloated they were hardly human—and a girl, surely, in a long skirt. Dear Jesus, Polly Kite, who was big with her first child.

Ott was dumbfounded by the sight, as Polly was a churchgirl, quiet as a mouse—her brother's near-opposite. He couldn't see how she'd been drawn into his mess and was shoving back against the jostling crowd when he recognized the body next to hers. Not nearly as swollen, it was without a doubt her husband, George Washington, a skinny, sixteen-year-old turpentiner who'd worked the gum pot with Ott. He was too skinny to have been rendered unrecognizable in death, but hung there on a broken neck, with a missing eye and a protruding tongue.

Ott was close enough to childhood to burst into tears at the merciless prank death had played on his friend, his twisted neck and battered face dangling uncovered before the jeering mob of men. Ott refused to see more and kicked and clawed the wall of bodies around him, trying
to escape the heat and slaughterhouse stink and get back to the door. But he'd allowed himself to be jammed like a cork in his hot little corner of hell. He fought as desperately as Kite, punching and kicking and crawling over the backs of fallen men till he finally found a free spot, narrow and unsought, at the front, where they'd managed to pin Kite. Ott found his feet and was casting about for a door to escape when he realized he was standing barefoot in a shallow, namelessly foul puddle that had formed under the dripping bodies in their decomposition—wider under Polly, the waters from her baby. He leapt back in horror and, above him, not five feet away, recognized the last of the dangling forms, the one that had sent Henry Kite flailing around on his chain and shouting like a madman: his mother, old Miz Kite—a fat, hardworking, old colored woman who like Ott's own mother did laundry for a living. She was so heavy that her neck had become grotesquely stretched, like a fat old turkey's. Ott's heart was clutched with terror and pity as they all knew Miz Kite around Camp—a good enough woman, who gossiped like a magpie, but kept a clean house. She had sacrificed Polly to her pretty Henry, always putting him first, but by God she didn't deserve this, her bare, calloused feet hanging lifeless, covered in waste and alighting flies. The hellishness of the night—the roar and stink and bits of scattered laughter—was encapsulated in her image. Ott pitched forward and vomited a stream of yellow bile on the backs and legs of the men around him, adding the stench of his own foul waste to the rising reek.

It earned him slaps and booted kicks and curses as he stumbled down the wall, crawling over stalls and through mildewed hay and weathered dung, still retching like a dog, till he was at the side door, where Ray stood, a head taller than the crowd, searching for him. Ray let out a shout when he saw Ott, and waded in, sweating and furious, swatting people away like flies. He was big enough to physically grip Ott by the neck and muscle him outside like a puppy, through the mobbed sidewalks and side streets to Obie, who waited at the bridge, red-faced and prancing, angry at having missed the fun.