Effigies (6 page)
It occurred to her that the rest of them could pack up and go home when their summer’s work was done, but Oka Hofobi would have to live here, among farmers who saw his work as a threat to their way of life. While she was pondering that uncomfortable possibility, she saw the young Choctaw take a staggering step to the right as he was jostled again, hard.
This had to stop.
A distinctive figure appeared in the distance, walking toward them. Unless Faye missed her guess, it was Davis, and she was glad. He must have seen Oka Hofobi’s discomfort. Older brothers weren’t known for tolerating mistreatment of their younger siblings, even when those siblings were past thirty.
Davis wore the traditional Choctaw broad-brimmed black hat with a beaded band, and so did the shorter man walking next to him. As they passed Oka Hofobi, the two men kept their eyes straight ahead, never acknowledging Davis’ own brother. If Faye wasn’t mistaken, the shorter man spit on the ground as they walked past.
She looked up at Joe, who said, “He’s okay, but I’m watching. I can get to him if he needs me, but I think he’d rather deal with this his own self.”
Oka Hofobi turned his head toward Davis and spoke a couple of words, but he kept moving. There would be no confrontation this morning.
The two men didn’t pause when they brushed past Faye and Joe, either. As they passed, Faye was almost sure she heard Davis say, “Graverobbers.” Then, as if he wanted to show off for someone he looked up to, the shorter man echoed him. As if afraid they hadn’t heard him, he raised his voice a little more and said, “Ghouls.” Then the two men were gone.
So the farmers saw Oka Hofobi as a threat to their property rights and the Choctaws—or two of them, at least—saw him as someone who’d be willing to desecrate their ancestors’ bones.
Poor guy. He was taking grief from everybody.
The Pavilion was crowded with people waiting for a look at one of Neshoba County’s most famous natives. Never mind that he hadn’t set foot in the county—no, in the state—since he graduated from high school forty years before. When a local boy does good, people like to bask in the reflected glory.
After a fawning and flowery introduction, Lawrence Johnson Judd, former U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan and high-ranking official in the Democratic Party, rose to address the excited crowd.
“My friends,” he began, “when you reach my advanced age, you develop mental clarity. Or,” he said as he chuckled and shook his head, “you try to do so.”
He pulled a pen out of his breast pocket and fumbled with it to avoid looking at his audience. Its gleaming gold metal contrasted with the cocoa-dark skin of his hands. Faye was intrigued. This was not the mannerism of a man who had spent his life in politics. It was as if coming home had transported him back in time and returned a shy boy to life.
“I guess I’ll come out and say this: I’m not here to talk politics. I’m more than sixty years old, and I’m looking old age in the face. My blood pressure and my cholesterol are high and heading higher, and I’m going gray. It is time to exorcise my past. When I was nineteen years old, I nearly died. Because I was a black man.”
It was as if everyone seated in the Pavilion expelled their breath simultaneously, stirring a breeze that had been absent from this sweltering day. Faye heard more than one person whisper, “Not again.”
“I was kidnapped from my own front yard by a man who threw a hood over my head and held a knife to my throat. He drove me so far into the woods that I thought my corpse might never be found. I was tied to a tree. Beaten. As the blows fell, I did my damndest to figure out what I’d done. Had I been so intoxicated by the speed of my souped-up car that I passed a white man who was driving a little too slow? Had I said hello to a white girl with the wrong light in my eye? I could hear my daddy’s voice telling me I needed to get right with God, just like he did every Sunday from the pulpit, God rest his soul, but I couldn’t concentrate on my salvation. I just desperately wanted to know what I’d done to earn an early death.”
Faye looked around and was gratified to see tears on cheeks of every color. Sheriff Rutland had clapped her hands over her father’s ears, as if he were a child who shouldn’t hear such things. The man sitting beside her grasped the wheelchair’s handles to help her, and the crowd parted to let the three of them escape. Faye’s heart went out to the young sheriff. She had shown such courage in the face of yesterday’s racial conflict. Somebody had taught her right from wrong, and Neely’s solicitude toward her father made Faye think it had been him. He deserved peace in his declining years.
“As the violence escalated,” Judd continued, “I heard footsteps approaching, fast and hard. If it was a lynching party, I dearly hoped they would do their work quickly. Then the voice of my rescuer rose up like the terrible and beautiful voice of Jehovah, and he shouted, ‘Are you out of your mind? Stop that right now!’” Faye could hear the ministerial tones of the Congressman’s father echoing in the man’s words. “As the two men struggled, like Jacob and the mighty angel who gave him a new name and a new life, I took the opportunity to yank myself free.”
Standing in silence before a crowd listening rapt to his story, he raised an arm clad in an impeccably tailored shirt and rolled back the cuff to display the scars where he had flayed his own skin with the confining ropes. “I ran away, still ripping at the hood tied to my head, running headlong into trees, just getting away any way I could. I didn’t get a look at my attacker or my rescuer. I hid in a cave for a night and a day, like a beaten animal afraid to raise its head. There was a spring in the cave and I might have stayed there a week before I got hungry enough to crawl out into the light, but something in my gut told me it was time to be a man again. I found my way out of the woods and to my Mama. She gave me all the money she had, enough to get me on a bus to Detroit. I haven’t been home since.”
He rolled down his sleeve and fastened the cufflink. “Here’s what I know. My attacker took me far into the country, down miles of dirt road. Then he walked me deep into the woods. My savior came from even deeper in the woods, in the opposite direction from the way we came. I have no idea how he knew what was going on. There was a creek nearby, and a cave. I never knew about any caves around here, except for the one in the mound by Nanih Waiya Creek, and this wasn’t it. Maybe somebody here knows where it is. Maybe they know who tried to kill me and why. Or maybe they can find out. And, while they’re at it, I hope they find out who saved me, so I can thank him.”
He spread his hands and shrugged. “Or maybe they’re both dead. Even so, two people besides me knew what happened that day. I cannot believe that neither of them ever opened their mouths. Or that nobody ever noticed two white men coming home beaten and bloody on April 3, 1965. My guess is that they are both at least in their sixties. I’ve spent my career seeking justice for others. Help me find it for myself.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Faye saw Carroll Calhoun and his cronies step out of the thunderstruck crowd and disappear into the distance.
The house party was still rocking when Faye and Joe dragged themselves out of the crowd fighting to shake Congressman Judd’s hand. The partygoers who had taken time from their drinking to go hear his speech were readily identifiable. Their faces were blank with shell shock, which is quite a different look from simple intoxication.
Sheriff Rutland emerged from a bedroom, backing through the door and hauling her father’s wheelchair over a high threshold. Parking him next to a bright window right beside Faye and Joe, she sank into an armchair vacated by a woman smart enough to recognize total fatigue when she saw it. Neely turned her face to the window long enough to rake the heel of her hand across her eyes and Faye looked away. It wasn’t seemly to watch a sheriff cry.
“The man that did the beating would have to be someone at least as old as Mr. Judd,” said a man in a Molly Hatchet tee-shirt. “Late fifties at the youngest.”
Several people nodded. An underage boy holding a root beer said, “He could be a lot older, too. Could’ve been middle-aged at the time. Older, even.”
“Judd himself already said it,” said a woman with bottle-blonde curls. “The man who beat him could be dead. Probably
is
dead.”
“Well, if he’s not, let’s put him up for a medal.” The barest quaver in his voice gave a hint of the speaker’s age. It was Calhoun’s friend, the one whose lizard eyes gave Faye the willies.
A queasy silence fell. Most everyone in the room developed a consuming interest in their toes, but Faye kept her eyes focused on their faces. They didn’t all agree with this man’s racist poison. She knew it. All the way back from the Pavilion, they had talked about Judd’s ordeal and she’d heard the revulsion in their voices. How did this dried-up little old man turn them into cowards?
“Preston Silver…” began the least lily-livered man in the room, but a quick glance silenced him. Faye watched Silver’s lizard eyes rake the room, lingering on her own dark face longer than she liked.
Sheriff Rutland, the only person in the room that Faye was sure had the gumption to stand up to him, hid her face by bending over the bag hanging on the back of her father’s wheelchair. Pulling out a spoon and a jar of puréed peas, she asserted her authority only far enough to say, “Stop stirring things up, Preston. It’s not constructive.” She opened the baby food jar. Faye was close enough to smell the sick-sweet, green odor of the peas.
Watching Neely’s father’s visible enjoyment of his jar of green paste and noticing a bulge in his trousers in the shape of an adult diaper, Faye was inclined to forgive the woman for her temporary cowardice. She wasn’t clear how far she herself wanted to go in stirring up a confrontation, but it wasn’t in Faye’s nature to slink away and let a bigot dominate an important conversation.
“Speaking of medals,” she piped up, “I hear that Congressman Judd’s up for the Congressional Medal of Freedom—the highest honor our country can give a civilian. If his speech today doesn’t make the national news, you know it will if that medal comes through. It will look a lot better for Neshoba County if Judd’s attacker is behind bars, and you’re throwing a parade for the man who rescued him.”
Silver’s gaze swiveled her way, then everybody else in the room lifted their eyes from their toes and focused them on her. Dr. Mailer had brought the team to the Fair to get acquainted with the locals. Well, she may not have strictly made their acquaintance, but she surely had their attention.
Thinking of Dr. Mailer, she realized that she’d barely seen him since they’d arrived at the Pavilion. Oka Hofobi, Toneisha, Chuck, and Bodie—they’d all faded away after Judd’s speech. She and Joe should probably ease out of this party, too, but she couldn’t bring herself to slink away and let Silver think he’d intimidated her. She decided to have one more beer and leave when it was empty. Joe, who knew her well, leaned far to the left and accessed the nearest cooler with his long, rangy arm. He grabbed the can on top, without checking to see whether it was the tastiest cheap brand, and opened it for her. Faye drank slowly, trying to calculate how long she should make her twelve-fluid-ounce stalling tactic last.
Silver rose from his chair with a grunt and disappeared into the kitchen. Calhoun and their friends followed him. Faye took a long sip.
The blonde woman handed Faye a bag of chips. “I didn’t know that Congressman Judd was up for the Medal of Freedom. That is so cool. And he’s from right here in Neshoba County.”
“Too bad we didn’t treat him better when we had him,” said the Molly Hatchet fan, passing Faye the French onion dip. “I’m Todd and this is my wife, Jennifer.” He gestured to the blonde. “What’s your name, anyway? You’re not from around here, are you?”
“I’m Faye and this is my friend, Joe. We’re with the archaeological team working out at the Nail place.”
“You folks ran into a little trouble yesterday, didn’t you?” Jennifer said. “Is everybody okay?”
“Everybody’s fine,” Sheriff Rutland said, still spooning mashed peas. “I gotta say that I never thought a bunch of scholars would have such guts. You two in particular. I believe you could chew the heads off nails.”
“Faye eats nails for breakfast.” Joe popped open a beer of his own.
“That’s how I get my minimum daily requirement of iron.” Faye quaffed about half the beer. She was gratified to hear laughter come from all corners of the room. If Silver felt like lynching her, he wouldn’t be able to count on these people to help him.
Faye leaned close to Neely’s ear, so that she couldn’t be heard by Calhoun in the next room. Or by any spies remaining behind. “You know, Sheriff, Mr. Calhoun’s mound is really important. I spent just a minute on top of it yesterday, and I got a new perspective on the lay of the land all around it.”
“I know what you mean. I spent last night up there, you know.”
“I do know, and I want to shake your hand for what you did yesterday.” Neely stuck out a hand and Faye pumped it once. “As I was saying, you get a good feel for the topography of the land when you’re standing up on that mound, and I saw some decent evidence that Calhoun’s mound is both bigger and more important than it looks at first sight.”
“What does your professor think about that?”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell him yet. But he’ll agree. So do you think you can get me permission just to go up there once? All I’ll do is stand still and look around. Truly.”
“No way.” The authority of an enforcer of the law had crept back into Neely’s tired voice.
“Mr. Calhoun’s got a right to be mad, but he knows you, and—”
“To hell with Carroll Calhoun. I don’t care about his property rights. I don’t care about your historical preservation. I just care about keeping the peace. Neshoba County is chock-full of good people, and they come in all colors, but there are a few Neanderthals who would shoot you right off the top of that mound. Nobody goes up there but me.”
An odor like incense wafted out of the kitchen, along with laughter and the voices of a covey of old men. Could they possibly be smoking pot in there? With the sheriff in the next room?
The cabin’s windows were open. They looked out on another cabin so close that Faye could have reached out her window and snagged a piece of coconut cake off the kitchen table. Smoking pot in such close quarters was nuts.
Everybody got interested in their toes again. Faye couldn’t get a good look at Neely’s face. After a few minutes, the sheriff closed the empty jar and wiped off the spoon. Sliding them into the bag, she pulled out a wet wipe and cleaned her father’s mouth. “There, Daddy. Did that taste good?” She wheeled the old man’s wheelchair out into the night.
Fragrant smoke continued to fill the room.
It was dark and she couldn’t see his face, but Faye could tell that Joe was perturbed. His disapproval filled the still evening air.
What made him so special that nobody else could play his little lookout game with him? Anyone with eyes could see that Neely Rutland would not be spending tonight perched atop Calhoun’s mound. Nobody was superhuman, though Neely would like to be. She was probably even now lying face-down and dreamless on a cot at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds.
While Neely’s deputies would surely be arriving any minute now for another night’s watch, there could be no substitute for having a sentry on the high ground. Yet she had plainly said that nobody would be climbing the mound but her. Her deputies would need help. Joe was more than happy to provide it, but he had proved notably resistant to the idea that Faye might be able to help. Too bad. She was crouched beside him beneath a tree made invisible by the moonless night. He’d just have to learn to live with it.
Her supper roiled in her stomach. The plateful of roast beef, gravy, rice, macaroni salad, and green beans, while undeniably delicious, was not sitting well atop the afternoon’s beers. Or the afternoon’s interpersonal nastiness. She and Joe had escaped the Fair as quickly as they could manage it, without showing weakness in the face of Silver and his cronies.
Stopping at a diner where they could linger over tasty food loaded with grease and salt had seemed comforting at the time. For dessert, she and Joe had enjoyed a tremendous argument over whether he needed her to help him in his self-appointed role of Chief Mound Protector. She had won, since Joe wasn’t in the habit of telling her No, so now she sat beside him, suffering from indigestion and his festering disapproval.
A tremendous grind and roar split the night. Beams from twin headlights jiggled frantically as the tractor behind them raced across the uneven terrain between Calhoun’s house and the mound.
“He’s doing it again,” Faye said out loud, knowing that Calhoun wouldn’t hear her over the tractor’s din. “He’s stoned, and he knows Neely’s half-dead with fatigue, and he thinks he can get away with it.” She yanked her phone out of her pocket and dialed 911. “We’ve got an emergency. I don’t know the address, but we’re in a field right across the road from the Nail house. We’re on Carroll Calhoun’s land. He’s, um…he’s threatening people with his tractor.” That seemed close enough to the truth, and it should bring a prompt response. She listened a moment. “Yeah, you can send an ambulance, just in case, but what we really need are some armed deputies. And Sheriff Rutland.”
The tractor’s gears shrieked, and it took an abrupt right turn. When Faye saw where it was now headed, she hurled the phone to the ground and started running. She needed to stop this.
How could she stop it? The destructive edge of the tractor’s blade was headed for the faint remnant of one of the berms she thought she’d seen from atop the mound. A wing. He was going to scrape up one of the eagle’s wings.
Faye put her head down and ran harder. She could hear Joe behind her, but now, just this once, she might be able to outrun him, because she was on the side of the angels. Come hell or high water, she was going to save this magnificent bird built out of earth. Presuming it was really there. But how would she ever know if this man destroyed it before she got a chance to see?
“Faye, it’s not worth getting killed over.” Joe’s voice came closer. “He’s mad, and he’s high. He might be sorry later, but you’d still be dead.” She kept running. When she felt Joe’s arms wrap around her chest and slam her to the ground, she was mightily perturbed that he could overtake her and tackle her, with enough wind left over to talk to her while he was doing it.
The tractor ground to a halt a few feet from the mound’s wing, and Faye was jubilant. He’d seen them and he didn’t want witnesses to the destruction. Then the headlights swung around and the beast started rolling in their direction.
“Get up, get up, get off me!” she chanted, shoving at Joe. “He’s coming this way.”
The tractor was moving at four times the speed Calhoun had used to intimidate the archaeologists only a day before. This was not simple intimidation. He was announcing his intention to roll right over them.
Jumping up in one motion, Joe grabbed Faye by the hand and yanked her onto her feet. By stumbling and sliding and taking impossibly long strides, she managed to keep up with him, but where would they go? Oka Hofobi’s house lay across the road, hidden in the dark. Its cozy safety beckoned her, but Joe had other ideas. A dense forest was his notion of safety, not a homey brick house. If she could have gotten a breath, she would have reminded him that Calhoun’s tractor could eat trees for breakfast, but Joe was in no state to listen to reason. They plunged into a forest so dense and dark that only Joe’s sharp eyes kept them from slamming headfirst into a waiting tree.
A tree crashed to the ground behind them. Still, Faye was beginning to feel some hope. They were moving a lot faster than the tractor now, since it took a considerable amount of time for Calhoun to pause and batter down the trees in his way.
Joe kept dragging her deeper into a sheltering thicket that she couldn’t see. When he stopped, she crashed hard into his back. Only then did she realize why their flight had ended so abruptly. The tractor had stopped moving.
A flashlight beam wavered in the air, swinging back and forth in a search pattern that said Calhoun didn’t know where they were. Joe firmly pushed her behind a tree, but he did it slowly, so that she wouldn’t put a foot down on a twig and give them away with a dry, wooden snap. Then he vanished behind a tree located precisely between her and danger, because that was simply who he was.