Chaneysville Incident (26 page)

She didn’t say anything.

“I thought they’d have to delay the funeral, but you know what they’re going to use to dig the grave? A ditchdigger. Same thing they use for sewer lines.”

“I want to come,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

“On account of the roads?”

“On account of the roads.”

She didn’t say anything.

I waited her out, listening to the sighing wire.

“You don’t want me there, do you?” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“I know it,” she said. “I just want you to know I know it.”

“All right,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t do this to you now. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I miss you,” she said.

“I’ll be back soon.”

“John?”

“What?”

“Are you… Never mind.”

“Am I drunk?”

“I know you’re not drunk. You never get drunk.”

“Am I drinking?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Don’t you know?” I said.

She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “No,” she said. “You’re not drinking. Not yet.”

“What I love about you is your faith,” I said.

“Cut that out,” she said. “You know I don’t care if you drink.”

“Oh, boy,” I said.

“I care about what makes you do it,” she said. “I care about what makes you need to do it.”

“Reality makes me do it,” I said. “Now let’s drop it.”

“If I were there,” she said, “you wouldn’t need it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I just want you to be all right,” she said. “I just want you to get through whatever it is that you’re going through and be all right. Do that, will you?”

“Sure,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You don’t sound right.”

“I can’t help the way I sound,” I said.

“I wish you’d let me come,” she said.

“I’ll be back on Wednesday,” I said.

“Please, John,” she said.

“Let me be,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“I love you,” I said.

“John, I’m worried about you. You don’t sound—”

“I love you,” I said.

She was silent, then she sighed. “I love you,” she said, and hung up. I held the phone for a minute, keeping the connection open as long as I could. The line echoed and buzzed, and then there was a click and the dial tone came back; Ma Bell was getting impatient. I cradled the receiver. I looked at it for a while, wondering if I should call her back, wondering if it would make any difference. I decided it wouldn’t. I stood up then, and turned out the light and went back towards the kitchen, to make a toddy. And it occurred to me that she did not understand—she thought that he was dead.

I
T WAS EVERYWHERE. IT
had sifted into every cranny, drifted into every crack. It lay thickly on the horizontal surfaces. It clung tenaciously to the vertical ones. It was a deep rich gray in color, with little iridescent highlights of turquoise and pink, like rat fur. It was ancient and implacable, deceptive and dead. It was remorseless; irresistible. And it was everywhere.

Once I would have hated it, for it would have been a reminder of my failure. But now it was different. Now I was not a naive boy struggling to give shape to amorphous data, hoping to discover what a legend had been up to, and, in my wildest fantasies, hoping to finish what he had begun, hoping, by doing so, to measure up. Now I was trained to order facts, to control data. And now I was a man, and I could take my own measure; a lesser one, perhaps, but my own. And now I knew that Moses Washington had had plans for me. More than plans; a will. I did not know yet what he had wanted me to do. I did not know if I could do it the way he would have wanted it done—I could not imagine how he would want it done. But this I did know: I was going to understand. He had left me the means for that. And if I found that even now I could not build up the truth out of facts, then I would have the means to tear away at the lies they told, to tear away at them, to find my understanding that way. If I could not imagine, I could, by God, be ruthless. And if, in the end, I found that I still could not understand, there would still be something. Not the best of things, but something; if there was not going to be understanding for me, there could at least be revenge. Because he had left me more than books and papers; he had left me power.

And so I put aside the things I had brought with me and set about my business. By the light of the flashlight I laid a fire in Moses Washington’s hearth and I filled the reservoir of the lamp. When that was done I extinguished the flashlight and took the matches from their keeping place and found my way across the floor. I knelt by the fireplace. I lit the match and thrust it in against the kindling. The wood was dry, and caught quickly; I knew in a moment the fire would not die. And so I rose and went to the table. I took up the cloth I had brought with me and sent it sweeping over the table and the chair. I struck a second match and lit the lamp and waited patiently as the glow from the flame spread out into the dark corners of the attic.

And then I laid out the tools of my trade: a fountain pen; a bottle of black india ink; a bundle of arrow-sharp pencils; a half-dozen yellow legal pads; stacks of three-by-five index cards, red, gold, blue and orange and white. And to that array I added the worn leather folio with the clasp of greened and ancient brass, the clasp broken and the flap therefore held down with a seal of candle wax.

I knew that folio. I had heard Old Jack talk about it, about how it was once the most feared artifact in the entire County. For in that worn leather folio Moses Washington had kept his records: the lists of names of those from whom he bought and to whom he sold, and how much, and at what price; the lists of those to whom he gave bribes, and precisely what services he exacted. And about how, before his carcass was even in the ground, they had come, the pale-skinned, pale-eyed men who had never before set foot on the Hill (except, of course, to visit Miss Linda Jamison), sniffing around like a pack of well-fed hounds, smiling, offering, bartering, bribing, begging, finally threatening. About how they had gone away finally, to sit in their book-lined studies and wood-paneled offices and sweat into their collars, praying to whatever gods white men have that it would never see the light of day. For none of them could have stood that, not in a county where a few South County preachers could stand before their congregations and say that betting on horses was the recreation of the Devil, and the people would go to the polls to defeat a referendum to establish a racetrack that would have made property taxes a thing of the past. They may have been rednecks, but those people were not hypocrites: they did not hold with bribes, and they did not hold with drinking, and they believed it right and proper and Christian that the sons be held accountable for the sins of their fathers.

So the fear of those sons and those fathers must have been an exquisite fear, wondrous in all its facets. First, they would have to fear chance discovery by someone who was smart and avaricious and who would see the potential for profit that the folio represented. That was not much of a fear: they could all afford to pay; or at least, none of them could afford not to. More than that, they would have feared that the discoverer would not be smart enough to use the folio, but only stupid enough to talk about it, or that he would be righteous instead of avaricious. Either way, the end would be the same: exposure. But what really must have made them quake in their spit-shined oxfords was the thought that the folio wasn’t lost at all; that Moses Washington had placed the material in the hands of someone he trusted, along with instructions to make it all public should he die under suspicious circumstances, and that that someone would decline to accept the verdict of coroner and sheriff—functionaries who could surely be counted on to say precisely what they were told to say—that his death had been an accident. In the weeks following the event they must have sweated long and hard, and I wondered idly if a survey of the political and business dealings of the County during that period might not have indicated a marked incidence of poor judgment, or if the doctors’ records might not show a high number of wives and children who fell downstairs.

But the fear must have dissipated in time. They had no doubt reasoned—or rationalized—that if anybody were going to question the verdict of accidental death they would have already done so, and that if nobody could find any of Moses Washington’s hideyholes in forty years, it was not terribly likely that somebody was suddenly going to do so now. They would have relaxed. But not entirely. No, they could have never relaxed entirely. For there was always the possibility of that chance discovery. Worse, there was the possibility that someone did have the folio, someone who would know how to use it, someone who would wait until one of them had taken a particularly righteous stand and then reveal to those sections of the County that still took their Bible literal and preferred their leaders clean and un-hypocritical that the man who stood before them with a Testament in one hand and a flag in the other had been not only drinking bootleg whiskey for years, but had been taking a dollar or two in tribute. And so the leaders would have had to tread softly, for any man they offended might be precisely the man who could bring their political house tumbling down around their ears. They would have had to be careful of everybody. For that man might have the folio. Or that man. Or that one over there.

And that man over there was a black man.

It could not have been better if he had planned the whole damned thing.

The funny thing was that it still frightened them, even though most of those whose names would have been on any such list were no longer wielding any kind of power. The thought of exposure still frightened them. And not only them—it frightened those around them, who had come to count on the status quo for… something. It frightened my mother. Frightened her beyond words. I had seen the fear when the Judge had dropped it in the center of his desk, the leather making a soft, flat slapping sound on the wood. She had stared at it for an instant, and then she had almost jumped out of the chair in which she had been sitting, and had backed away, so swiftly that it seemed she did not even use her legs—she just
went.
She might have kept on going right out the door, but there was another chair in her way, and it had caught her behind the knees and she sat down in it, hard.

I did not look at her; I was looking at the folio and, beside it, the Judge’s hands, pale white and lifeless-looking, with the green-blue of the veins sharp lines that ran up and vanished beneath the slightly frayed edges of his perfectly starched cuffs.

“Your legacy, John,” he said. Pronounced. He may have stepped down from the bench, but his voice was still a judge’s voice; a voice that ordered, a voice that decreed. “Your legacy. If you acknowledge that you have come to call for it.”

But I had not. I had not done anything of the kind. I had come tripping into the law offices of Scott and Scott with my heart set on a little innocent revenge, and nothing more. It had begun with an image that had come to me while I was shaving: Old Jack laughing at the thought of a whole bunch of respectable white men begging for the honor of paying to have his moldering carcass laid away in style. It had been such a good image that I had laughed aloud, and the plan had formed in my mind as I finished shaving and dressed in jeans and an old sweat shirt: not only would I allow Scott to talk me into letting him pay for the funeral; I would let him commit himself to the cost of coffin, casket, cemetery plot, headstone, footstone, and maybe even a historical marker to be placed over Old Jack’s shoeshine stand. And then I would get him to corral all the courthouse crooks over whose shoes Old Jack had bent for all those years into getting their beloved oxfords muddy trooping up the Hill to attend the services.
And
the burial. The idea made me almost euphoric. I pulled on my old hunting boots and shrugged into the field jacket Bill had spirited away from the Marines, and went down the stairs, plotting strategy.

I stood on Moses Washington’s porch and looked at the thick gray clouds that boiled around over the mountains to the south. The storm was still stalled; the snow that had fallen had turned to slush or, on the Hill, to mud. But the storm was still there, and even though the air was warm enough to melt the snow, it chilled me to the bone. I pulled the field jacket close around me and I went slogging down Vondersmith Avenue, the mud tearing at my shoes. I reached the bottom of the Hill and negotiated the deceptive little gully there, the one that made bringing a car off the Hill in foul weather an exercise of some difficulty and no little danger, for the walls of the warehouses—all unused now, but still standing—that lined the railroad tracks—also unused—loomed close on the other side of the cross street. The fact that nobody had ever piled into those walls was probably due solely to the fact that there had never been more than a dozen cars on the Hill at any one time. Of the total number—perhaps fifty over the years—only two had been new. The first of those had not been purchased until 1958, when, about a week after she buried her husband, Yvette Stanton Washington borrowed money from her father and bought a Chevrolet sedan. She probably did not need to borrow the money; Moses Washington had left a goodly supply, and the only reason I could ever see for her taking out the loan was that she wanted the car as quickly as possible. The speed with which she completed the transaction—she went to the bank in the late morning and bought the car in the early afternoon and by sundown she had got Simon Hawley to drive it up the Hill and park it beside Moses Washington’s house—might lead one to infer that she felt some burning need for an automobile, but the fact that she let it sit there, unused, for the next three years, which was how long it took her to get around to learning how to drive, seems to introduce some doubt as to the accuracy of the inference. In fact, it is incorrect. It wasn’t the car she needed; it was the keys.