Brambleman (4 page)

“That’s sad,” Charlie mumbled. “I’m sorry to
hear that.”

“Yes. Yes it is. … Well, where are my
manners?”

Kathleen told them to make themselves
comfortable while she got tea. Charlie stood by the fire to warm
himself and looked at her photos. A family portrait with two kids,
a girl and a boy. A framed black-and-white snapshot of a young man
in a combat helmet, grinning in front of a palm tree. There were
several pictures of the daughter, from gap-toothed girl to
middle-aged woman. None showed her with a child or man, though she
appeared in pictures with two different women.

“Kathleen needs someone to take care of her,”
Trouble said.

“Someone like you?” Charlie felt queasy,
fearing that when Kathleen returned, the conversation would turn to
her bank account and the whereabouts of her jewelry. What if she
ended up dead? The halfwit accomplice was always the one that was
caught and convicted. If Charlie could just figure out what the
bastard was doing, he’d stop this nefarious plot.

“No, someone more down to earth. Like you, to
talk to her and wreak vengeance, that sort of thing.”

“Wreak vengeance?” Charlie’s face contorted
in disbelief. He whispered harshly, “You’re fuckin’ crazy, you know
that? This is insane.”

“At least she’s not shooting at us, eh?”
Trouble gave him a rotten-tooth smile.

Kathleen returned with a tea tray, placing it
on the coffee table. Charlie watched Trouble from the corner of his
eye. The old cadger and Kathleen were talking, but he couldn’t make
out what they were saying—it was as if they were speaking
Greek.

Charlie asked to use the bathroom. Kathleen
pointed toward the hall, and Charlie squished his way through the
dining room and into the hall.

When Charlie returned to the living room,
Trouble was gone. Disconcerted, he checked his companion’s cup.
Empty. And the box of shortbread cookies Kathleen had offered them
had disappeared, as well. “Where’d, uh, Trouble go?”

“He said he had to go see a man about a mule.
Or maybe a horse. I don’t remember things as well as I used to. I
have Alzheimer’s, you know.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Comes with the territory,” she said with a
shrug. “He said his job was to get us together, and his work here
was done, for the moment.”

“You might want to check your purse.” Charlie
opened the front door and looked out. No sign of Trouble. He
returned and sat in a wing chair by the fireplace, then stirred
some sugar in his cup of tea. “You don’t know him, do you?”

“I don’t suppose I do, but here you are, and
you are an editor, aren’t you?” She hummed a few notes and picked
at some lint on her sweater.

Charlie took a sip. “I’m a writer. I’ve been
a newspaper editor. I don’t know that I can do this. Or
should.”

She gave him a pleading look. “You’ve come so
far. You may as well look at the manuscript. Please.”

But he was still perplexed. “Ma’am, aren’t
you concerned about your safety? I mean, letting strangers in …
it’s after midnight!” He pointed to the clock and shook his
head.

“If you were going to hurt me, you would have
already done so. I can tell you’re good.”

“Aren’t you afraid of what you’re getting
into?”

“Not at all. You’ve been sent here to help
me. It’s Providence, you know. He told me we’re not supposed to
tell anyone about him, by the way.”

Even if Charlie wanted to talk about Trouble,
what could he say about a thunderstruck stranger who suddenly
appeared during his life’s lowest moment and offered him salvation
in the form of a scam? No, he wouldn’t have any problem keeping his
mouth shut. And while he didn’t understand what was happening, he
realized that, no matter how weird it seemed, he was getting a
second chance of some sort. So, there it was: stay here, or walk
back into the night.

Charlie listened to the rain, which had just
started falling harder. “All right. Show me the book.”

She led him into the study and pointed to the
massive manuscript on the fine old desk—three times the size of any
of the novels Charlie had written. “Sit down.”

Charlie took a seat. “Ma’am?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Are you sure you’re not afraid of me?”

“Oh, quite sure. You’re the one. I know that
now.” She smiled. “And you fit
just right
at the desk.”

While Charlie looked through a pile of
rejection letters, she talked about her husband. “Thurwood was
murdered. They never caught the racist who hit him on the head with
that … thing he threw. That’s what caused the blood clot that
killed him. My dear husband would still be alive today … ” She
trailed off, tears welling in her pale blue eyes. She jabbed the
air with her finger. “It was a beer bottle. I won’t forget
that.”

She pointed at the wall, but Charlie didn’t
look up, absorbed as he was in the task of figuring out what kind
of work the professor had written. Kathleen went to the kitchen to
fix coffee. After reading two pages of Talton’s dry-as-dust
introduction, Charlie glanced up and saw the newspaper clipping
Kathleen had pointed at. He positioned the lamp to spotlight the
yellowed paper taped to the wall. It was dated Sunday, January 18,
1987. The photo showed a crowd of white rowdies taunting civil
rights marchers. It was an ugly-looking bunch: the great-great
grandsons of Confederate deserters, their faces grim under baseball
caps like the one Trouble had pitched into the flames. One man wore
a Confederate soldier’s slouch hat. A bareheaded boy in the
foreground had a serene, inbred look. Beside him, poised like a
baseball pitcher on his follow-through, was a huge, round-faced
youth who glared at the camera. His face was encircled by ink, with
the hand-lettered caption: “J’ACCUSE!”

Charlie groaned in disgust and disbelief. He
knew the guy. Oh, he didn’t just know him. The asshole was family—a
varmint, Susan’s cousin, Rhett “Momo” Hastings, Jr. In the
foreground, two steps away from a ducking Redeemer, stood Talton,
raising his hand to his head. Charlie cursed Momo (who had once
nearly killed him, too). “You bastard, I can’t believe you followed
me here.”

But there they were. Charlie briefly
considered telling Kathleen that he knew the guy who threw the
thing, then decided against it. After all, what could he say? There
was nothing anyone could do now. Besides, cause and effect didn’t
jibe. An old man keeled over a week after he was conked on the
head. That wasn’t exactly murder in his book. Anyway, that was
twenty years ago. Momo had done time for his misdeeds back in 1987.
Just not for this one.

And so, with nothing else to do and nowhere
to go, Charlie settled in with the cup of coffee Kathleen had fixed
for him and began reading Talton’s work. He was vaguely familiar
with the events of 1912 and knew that, nearly a century later,
locals were still tight-lipped about them. He certainly remembered
the two 1987 marches, which had been major media events. During the
second one, Charlie and Susan had opened up their home as a refugee
camp for Susan’s Forsyth County kin, who fled the invading civil
rights protesters. With characteristic gall, Charlie had pointed
out to his mother-in-law Evangeline that, unlike black
sharecroppers in 1912, she could return to Forsyth any time she
wanted. He’d stopped short of telling her he’d considered joining
the march. That would have incurred her eternal enmity as well as
that of her brother, State Rep. Stanley Cutchins, a Reagan
Republican and barely closeted racist who’d flown to Hawaii on a
lobbyist-paid junket rather than welcome the civil-rights
marchers.

Soon after the event, Oprah herself had
traveled south to tape her show in Forsyth County, which by then
had become known worldwide as a racist, redneck backwater. Of
course, locals believed they’d been vilified unjustly. (Cumming
residents told reporters, “We didn’t do nuthin’ to nobody.”)
Certainly there had been some progress in the seventy-five years
since 1912. For one thing, subdivision signs advertising “Gracious
Lake Living” had replaced the infamous county-line postings that
said,
Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here
.

Charlie knew that since 1987, a few blacks
and increasing numbers of Hispanics had moved to Forsyth County.
He’d seen photos of an African-American high school track star on
the Cumming newspaper’s sports page. This showed acceptance, but
also suggested that speed was essential for blacks who chose to
live there.

Most blacks he knew rolled their eyes in
exasperation at the mention of the place. African-Americans
certainly couldn’t be too comfortable in Atlanta’s ultimate suburb.
After all, Forsyth’s reputation drew the sort of white person who
wanted to escape crime, drugs, poor schools, and welfare this and
welfare that, but who didn’t necessarily use racial pejoratives,
preferring to speak in code. Forsyth recently had become the
nation’s fastest-growing county, a paradise for people of paleness.
It also happened to be Georgia’s wealthiest and one of the twenty
richest in the nation. That was no mere coincidence. There were now
polo fields in Forsyth, once the home of
Hee-Haw
’s Junior
Samples.

Charlie knew Forsyth’s saga was interesting.
Talton’s manuscript, not so much. “This work is not publishable in
its present form,” stated one rejection letters he read.

While the old woman thought he could rescue
the book, all Charlie wanted was to survive the night. That meant
staying as long as he could—until his hostess asked him to leave or
the police arrived. But Kathleen didn’t tell him to go. Instead,
she asked, “How long can you stay?”

“I got nowhere else to go,” he confessed. “I
have all night.”

“You can rest on the couch if you get tired.
Use the quilt.”

Kathleen retired at 1:30 a.m. Completely at
peace with his presence, she was soon snoring gently in the front
bedroom. The Seth Thomas wall clock ticked in counterpoint to the
rain’s wavering beat. Wrapped in a quilt—his clothes remained
incredibly damp—Charlie continued reading, mainly to justify his
existence.

He reached the hundredth page. There was
nothing remarkable written on it; so far, none of what Talton had
written was special. Weariness overcame him. He couldn’t continue.
The scope of this mission was beyond his skills. The past was not
within his power to change. The only thing Charlie could do was get
some rest and try to save his own life. In frustration, he banged
his head on Dr. Talton’s desk.

The old sofa was inviting. Perhaps he could
sleep off his dampness. He got up and shuffled over to it. The
window trembled in its frame. The wind was rising, chasing the
storm away. Charlie stood for a moment and considered his plight.
He knew a couple of guys who might put him up for few days. Or not.
The local Home Depot might hire him. Everyone who worked there knew
him already, anyway. Then maybe he could rent a room. But he
wouldn’t return to the house on Thornbriar Circle, not until things
changed. Not until Susan apologized and begged him to come back.
But what about Beck (Rebecca) and Ben? What would he tell his
children? He didn’t know.

Charlie collapsed on the musty old couch. The
dust he’d raised made him sneeze. He closed his eyes and dozed off.
Soon he was dreaming that he was standing just a few yards away
from an unpainted cabin. The world was sparsely furnished and
small. He felt like he was on an old, cheaply designed movie set.
Trees were bare-limbed silhouettes painted on canvas.

A family of black sharecroppers loaded up a
mule-drawn wagon as a mounted gang of masked men watched them from
under a spreading oak tree. The nightriders held reins in one hand,
rifles and shotguns in the other, all aimed at heaven. Their
skittish horses danced to crashing thunder that sounded like sticks
hitting tin pans. The scene was illuminated by handheld torches.
Charlie suspected that there was a Cutchins in the mob when he saw
beady eyes glinting through holes in a makeshift white hood.

The children tearfully protested being
dragged from bed in the middle of the night. Their mother, her body
wrecked by childbirth and field work, snapped: “Get goin’, ain’t
time to dawdle.”

The father, wearing a look of utter defeat,
knew his life depended on bowing before the hooded men. He said
“Yassuh, yassuh,” as he threw his meager belongings into the
wagon.

Charlie knew what the sharecropper was
thinking: Get to Hall County by nightfall tomorrow, got a cousin
there, figure out what to do.

The wagon lurched off with the cotton still
in the field. It was a scam: Drive them off at harvest time and
take their crops. Affirmative action for white folks. A big,
cruel-hearted swindle you couldn’t perpetrate on humans and call
yourself a moral being. But there was an easy solution: Make the
victims less than human. That family became no more important or
deserving of reparation than a steer from which you’d carve a
steak.

Charlie had to stop this outrage, but how?
The book he held in his hand had something to do with it, but when
he looked at it, the cover was blank.

“Darling, you’ve been working too hard on the
book. Come to bed.” Charlie opened his eyes and looked up at the
ancient woman gazing amorously upon him. Her hair dangled loosely,
and the curtain’s shadow formed phantom grizzle on her face. For a
moment, in the soft glow of reflected streetlight, Kathleen looked
like country singer Willie Nelson.

“Mrs. Talton? It’s me. Charlie Sherman.”

“Oh.” She let out a woeful little moan and
stood up straight. “I thought you were … I’ve been diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s, you know.”

“Yes ma’am, you told me. Do you know why I’m
here?”

She brightened. “You’re the man he brought to
finish the book.” She went to the desk and turned on the lamp.
“How’s it going?”