Chaneysville Incident (37 page)

He looked at me sharply.

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s why they’re doing it. Because there isn’t any power. There’s only fear. The only people you can overpower are sniveling little people who are afraid you can do something they won’t like. It’s like a garter snake. A copperhead comes along and bites a man, and he dies. And for the rest of the summer garter snakes have power, because other people do all kinds of damage running away from something that can’t hurt them. Now, if you raised a son that runs from garter snakes, that’s your problem. And if he has a lot of friends that run from garter snakes, that’s his problem, and theirs. Me, I’m just crawling along.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But you’re no garter snake. You’re a rattlesnake. You rattle, and make people run because they’re afraid you’ll strike. But I was wrong about the power; it’s not power, it’s terrorism.”

“No,” I said. “It’s just exactly what I said it was. Grown men running from something that can’t hurt them.”

He looked at me sharply. “Are you telling me you won’t use that—”

“I’m telling you,” I said, “that there is nothing there to use.”

He peered at me, his brow furrowed.

“There was nothing in that folio that would implicate anybody. No list of names and dates and amounts.”

He stared at me then. “I don’t believe you.”

“You might as well. Because that’s what I’m here for, to tell you that there’s nothing more to fear.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I wish I didn’t have to,” I said. “But that was part of the package. One more of his little instructions: ‘Tell Lucian what’s past is ashes.’ He burned it. And I’m a garter snake.”

He started to shake, gently, almost imperceptibly, and then he began to make a strange, squeaking sound, and I thought that he was having some kind of seizure, but before I could get up he turned his head and I could see the shape of his mouth and the tears streaming down his cheeks; he was laughing.

So I settled back and waited for him to stop. He did, eventually. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s very good.”

“I’m glad you find it funny.”

“Oh, God, yes,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” he said, “of course not. You were all ready to come tearing through this town like an avenging angel, but you won’t get to do that, will you? I guess you’re a little disappointed.”

“No,” I said.

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Ah,” he said. “He left you something else.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It wasn’t exactly a gift, was it? It’s just something you can’t say no to. Something he knew you couldn’t walk away from. It’s not surprising; that was how Moses got his way, by putting things in front of people they couldn’t walk away from, and then being there handy to collect. If it had been him who tempted Jesus in the wilderness—”

“Spare me,” I said.

He looked at me and smiled a wintry smile, then he leaned forward and took my cup. He set it beside his, uncorked the bottle, and began to mix fresh toddies. “That damned woman,” he muttered. “I don’t mind her pretending this is afternoon tea, but I wish she’d set out decent-sized cups.”

“You’re not angry,” I said.

“Me? Why should I be angry? It’s nothing to do with me.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “Because he knew what you couldn’t walk away from. Power. You used the folio.”

He stopped his mixing and looked at me. “I told you—”

“You lied. Oh, not right out. You’re a lawyer; you probably never told a real lie in your life. You’re too good for that. You tell the truth and let the poor fools make up their own lies. You said two things. You said the financial portion of the estate was intact. You were being specific because you couldn’t really say the nonfinancial portion was intact.”

“That’s a little feeble,” he said.

“And you ‘demonstrated’ the folio hadn’t been used because the seal was intact. But you didn’t need to open it to use it; I used it this morning and I knew there wasn’t anything to speak of inside it. Because everybody in the County knew about that folio, knew what he kept in there. And everybody was wondering where it was. So all you had to do was let somebody see it. Accidentally. Somebody comes into the office and you look upset and hide it just a second too late. That’s all it would take. And they wouldn’t know your name was in there. So you had all the power. Rattlesnake power. It wouldn’t have occurred to anybody that you didn’t have any venom in your fangs.”

He looked away, and finished the mixing, pouring the hot water carefully over the whiskey and sugar. He set the pot down. “You couldn’t prove any of that, of course.”

“Why bother? There’s no law involved that I know of. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not a lawyer, I’m a historian. I don’t have to prove anything, I just have to know.”

“And that’s what you came for? To have me confirm that?”

“Among other things.”

He nodded slowly, then he leaned forward and handed me my toddy, looked at me for a long minute. “All right,” he said at last. “I used it. I used it just that way.” He shook his head. “I suppose nowadays that seems unremarkable, but I have lived with the guilt…. The worst part of it was before, though. I wish now I had kept a record of all the times I looked at that thing. For a while I was afraid to touch it. I put things on top of it and tried to forget it was there. But then I got so I’d take it out and stare at it. What I’d think then was that maybe I could take out some of the evidence, the part that had to do with me and a few others. We weren’t the real crooks, you know; we just bought the stuff. I know, you think we’re all the same. But there were things that went on in this County that went beyond questions of who held power and who made money. I know for a fact that at one point there was a power struggle going on between the Party and the Klan, and it looked for a while like the Klan was going to win. So some bright boys down at the Courthouse hatched out a scheme to arrange to have some colored boy lynched, and they had it all set up to blame it on the Klan. It never happened—somebody got wind of it and called it off. But that was what there was to choose between—men who were ready to lynch somebody for no good reason and men who were ready to lynch somebody for politics. That’s what we were fighting against. And I suppose that’s why I never opened that folio, even after I realized that I could pick and choose who got hurt; I figured if I was going to violate that kind of trust on the grounds that I was just a hypocrite and not a real criminal, I was going to be just as bad as the real ones. Well, that lasted for a while. Then I stopped caring about using it, I just wanted to destroy it. And then…” He paused and sipped at the toddy. “I used it only twice. In the spring of 1959. June fourth. And in the winter of 1960. January twenty-seventh. Before then I hadn’t really needed it, but by that time I was a little too far out of things to protect people I hadn’t planned on protecting. The only thing I could have done then was to compromise myself as a judge; I compromised myself as a lawyer instead.” He seemed to shrink a little, hunching his shoulders, staring at the fire.

“You were supposed to use it,” I said. “He expected you to use it. He expected you to use it just as you did. He knew you would keep your word. He knew you wouldn’t open it. And you didn’t.”

“It was a compromise,” he said. “I wanted to keep my integrity and have my way too. You can’t often do that. I think sometimes it would have been better to have done one thing or the other. Less cowardly.” He smiled and shook his head. “And now you know.”

“I knew,” I said.

He looked at me. “So you came all the way over here because a dead man left you note? I doubt that.”

“There are other things I want to know,” I said.

“Such as?”

“Such as why, if you were so damned worried about your reputation, you went to his funeral.”

“He was my friend,” he said.

“He didn’t have any friends.”

“I didn’t say I was his friend. I don’t know, but I suspect you’re right, he didn’t have any.” He stopped, stared into the fire. “To say that about most men would be a terrible thing. But not for Moses. If he didn’t have any friends it would be because he didn’t want any. But he wanted to know me. That was why he’d come to see me, usually, because he wanted to know me. It wasn’t anything he needed, not anything he wanted like a man might want a woman, or a drink of whiskey, or anything; he had a reason there in his head, something that said Moses Washington ought to get to know a white man. I just happened to be the white man that he picked. That’s the way it seemed. And I never knew why he picked me. I know that in some ways I didn’t suit him; he kept…guiding me. I recall one time when I wanted to…use power. I was in a good place; I had some backing, and a little money, and some men were going to come to me, ready to give me anything I wanted. Well, I thought I knew what I wanted, some big, flashy things that would have done, I thought, a lot of people a lot of good. So I sat and waited for them to come—I didn’t know exactly when it would be. But Moses did. He showed up one evening just about dusk and he told me they’d come the next day. I thought maybe he was going to ask me what I was going to do, but he didn’t. He told me. He didn’t give me any orders, or even make suggestions, or say he was giving advice. He just…told me. As if it were something somebody now had written down about what happened then: how Lucian Maccabeus Scott had done this and that and the other, and people did this and that and the other, and what was funny about that was that what he said they were going to say and do wasn’t anything that I would have wanted to have happen. And everything he said sounded true. I think that was because he wasn’t making predictions. He didn’t know anything, and he wasn’t pretending to; he was just looking at the situation and imagining how it was going to work out, people being people. He believed he was right, and he didn’t give a damn whether I did or not. And I didn’t. Because I knew I wasn’t going to do anything he said I was. Well, when he was done he finished his toddy and he went away. He made me mad, not asking if I agreed with him, even. And I said to myself, that bastard’s going to be surprised when he finds out what I did. But he wasn’t. Because when those men came I found myself doing exactly what he said. I don’t really know why—I wasn’t afraid of him. Well, when the news got out, people acted just the way he said. But I didn’t care, because Moses had said it would be that way, and…I don’t know. It was comforting. He’d never said things were going to work out all right, and I didn’t necessarily believe they were going to. But I got through the bad part because Moses had told me what was going to happen. Later on, it was the same; I’d tell him what I planned, and he’d imagine the future for me. I don’t think I ever changed my course again because of what he said—that wasn’t even what I did the first time. But when the bad times came, after I’d done something, I could stand back and just watch it happen, because Moses had made it seem inevitable. That’s what he did for me. It was precious. And that’s why I went to his funeral. I owed him that.”

“Touching,” I said. “Should I cry now, or wait for intermission?”

He didn’t say anything.

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe you. And no, I don’t know exactly why. Because I can’t imagine things like you say he could, but I know people, and there’s only a few things that could bring you up there like that, make you take a chance like that, and friendship isn’t one of them.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Loyalty is one,” I said. “But you’re a politician.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Greed is one,” I said. “But you already had everything you were going to get from him.”

He still didn’t say anything.

“The only thing left is guilt.”

He looked up at me. “You forgot love, didn’t you?”

“I never forget anything,” I said. “There’s a lot of things I can’t do, and forgetting is one of them. And walking away is another. I can’t forget you know something. And you’re going to tell me what it is, because I’ll sit here until you do.”

“Funny you can’t figure it out,” he said.

“Maybe I can. Maybe I just want to be sure.”

“Maybe you can’t. You said you couldn’t imagine.”

I didn’t say anything. I just looked at the fire.

“And if I lie?” he said.

“I’ll know.”

He sipped his toddy silently. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. I’m too old to lie anymore. But you like puzzles; I’ll give you a puzzle. A man like Moses Washington comes in one day to make his will. Not the kind of man you would expect to make that kind of move, and not the kind of man to do it out of the blue. But he comes. And he dies a month later.”

“I imagine that happens often,” I said carefully. “Old people have a premonition—”

“Moses was sixty-seven, but he wasn’t an old man by any other standard. And if he had thought Death was trailing him he wouldn’t make a will; he’d take his shotgun and go up in the hills and try to sneak up on Death before it could sneak up on him.”

“Maybe that’s what he was doing,” I said.

“I know what he was doing.”

I didn’t say anything.

“When they found him they knew it was trouble, so they sent a man—I guess there were phones down there then, but they were party lines, and God knows saying something over a party line is just about like putting it in the paper. And God knows they didn’t want to have everybody in the County knowing that some farmer named Ames had seen something up on a hillside and gone up and found Moses Washington shot deader than a doornail. They didn’t want anybody to know that. Not in an election year. Not when they found the body in Southampton.” He looked at me. “It had to be Southampton, of course.” He paused, sighed, sipped his toddy. “I lied to you before; they didn’t just talk about lynching a man, they actually tried it. I don’t know why they didn’t do it—I’m not even sure they didn’t. I just know it never came out. And I know that they picked Southampton Township to do it in, and I know they picked well. Because it’s a little piece of the South down there. It started out being Virginia. It was Virginians who settled down there; I forget the name of the man who led them, but I used to know. I recall that it was a dozen or so men who came. Somebody gave me a book once. I don’t know why whoever it was gave it to me, but I suppose it was because the man who wrote it lived around here and was a judge. There was something in there about Southampton, about how it was the most primitive part of the County, and how they didn’t have a single piano or an organ, or a buggy or a carriage, in the whole township, and how nobody down there took any paper but the
Gazette
, and only six of them did that. I don’t know when he was writing about—”