Fireflies in December (26 page)

I saw the shock on Walt’s face, watched as the patch of blood on his shirt grew to become a river trickling down his front. Suddenly I could breathe again, and I inhaled with a screeching gasp as I watched Walt teeter to his left and slump to the floor beside me, his unseeing eyes looking into mine. Coughing and sputtering, I kicked my heels into the floor, sliding myself away from him. From my haven in the corner of the kitchen, I looked up to see Walt’s executioner.

His white robe wasn’t as pristine as when I’d first seen it less than an hour before. He was wearing no hood, showing me his worn, taut face. I couldn’t discern Otis Tinker’s expression just as I couldn’t understand how one who had betrayed me all summer long could now come to my rescue.

He simply lowered his gun and spit on the floor at Walt’s feet. “He gave us all a bad name, anyhow. Traitor!”

Then he walked out and left me alone with the dead.

Chapter 23

For the first time, I knew a little bit about such things. I, too, had felt the strain of broken trust. I’d had a summer of it.

All my daddy could say to Mr. Tinker as Jeb chained his hands together was “Why?”

“You’d never understand,” Mr. Tinker said. “You never did.”

“I understand more than you like to think,” Daddy replied. “It’s my understandin’ that kept me from becomin’ like you.”

“There you go again,” Mr. Tinker railed. “You act like we’re the ones stirrin’ up trouble, but ain’t you got the sense to see it’s you that’s got the trouble? Ain’t no way we can start lettin’ niggers run our country, Harley. Ain’t no way we can let that happen and keep civilized.” Mr. Tinker’s face was earnest, his tone pleading.

I realized he was as certain of his beliefs as my daddy was of his. “You sayin’ Gemma ain’t civilized?” I asked him suddenly. “My Gemma?”

His face changed when he heard my voice, a sort of softness creeping back in, reminding me of the opinion I’d had of him only a few short hours before. “Honey, you ain’t got to think ’bout none of this. It ain’t for children to worry ’bout.”

I studied him, dismissing his patronizing talk, and walked closer to him. “If I’m too young to worry about it, then how come you let me think I’d done your killin’?”

Mr. Tinker dropped his eyes in a slow, drooping way and stared at his feet. He’d run out of answers. He could look my daddy in the eye, even after all those years they’d been friends, and he could stand up against him sure and steady. But the minute he looked at my eyes that were too young to understand all the darkness that could inhabit a man’s heart, he lost some of his swagger.

I asked again, “How come, Mr. Otis?”

Daddy was the first to speak. “Otis don’t know why, baby girl. There’s a lot Mr. Otis don’t know about.”

Otis Tinker never said another word to me for the rest of my days. The law came down on him hard for killing Cy Fuller and Walt Blevins. It hadn’t been a colored man he’d killed but two white ones, and for that he was sentenced to pay with his own life. I couldn’t help but think of poor Elijah Baker and how he’d suffered at Walt Blevins’s hands. Walt had never paid a cent for what he’d done, at least not until the day he was shot through the heart by one of his own. The disparity of it muddled my head. For all my trying to understand some men’s minds, I couldn’t see any difference in people just for their color. But then I figured I was better off not understanding such things.

The morning after we’d watched Jeb lead Mr. Tinker away in chains, I poked my head out the window bright and early to see my daddy and Luke working their hands to the bone in the fields. I couldn’t quite believe the amount of work that would need to be done to restore all my daddy had toiled for over the years. But when I saw Momma there beside Daddy, dirtying the small hands that Daddy had always refused to let see hard work, I knew I had to skedaddle out of bed and do my part.

Gemma was already up, and I could hear her in the kitchen.

I stuck on my overalls and hurried downstairs. “You been up long?” I asked her. “I don’t want to look lazy.”

“I just got up, and anyways your momma and daddy don’t even know I’m up yet. I thought I’d get some coffee on. They’re sure enough bound to like some.”

I shook my head and got a few biscuits from the bin to take out with the coffee. “Ain’t no way to fix what’s been done out there. Just ain’t no way.”

“Ain’t nothin’ impossible, Jessie. That’s what my momma always said.”

I could never argue with anything Gemma told me when it came from her momma, rest her soul, so I kept my mouth shut and spread honey on the biscuits.

When the coffee was done, we put our fixings on a tray and carried them outside to Momma and Daddy and Luke. They dusted their hands on their britches and thanked us for the food, but little else was said as they ate wearily.

After Daddy gulped down his last bit of coffee, he smacked his hat back on his head with a loud sigh. “Gonna take us a couple years’ work to get half of this done ourselves. And I ain’t got the money to hire more help. I ain’t even got the money to pay the men I got.”

“We gotta try,” Momma told him. “Ain’t no other way but to try.”

Daddy dug his boot into the ground, scanning the fields critically.

I looked at Luke for reassurance that things would be better than Daddy said, but he just smiled weakly at me, and I could see in his eyes that he felt the same.

I heard Momma murmur one of her impromptu prayers—“Dear Jesus, send us help”—but I didn’t quite think it would do any good. We were in a bad spot, and nothing short of Jesus and His angels coming from the sky with picks and hoes would save my daddy’s farm.

But God taught me a lesson about angels that day. They don’t always wear wings and carry harps. Sometimes they can just be people. People who open their hearts up to do things God tells them to do. I saw some of those angels that morning as I stood with a tray of empty coffee cups. They came from the front of the house, all fifteen of them, carrying tools and wearing gracious smiles. Some were white, some were colored, but they were united by one purpose.

“Ain’t got enough hands, as I see it,” Miss Cleta said, a basket of baked goods slung over one arm. “S’pose you’ll have to let us lend you some.”

Daddy took his hat off and stood there with it in both hands, tears threatening his eyes. “Can’t pay you a cent. Can’t do a thing for you.”

“Ain’t a one of us who wants nothin’, Mr. Lassiter,” said a colored man I recognized as Jimbo Turner, a dishwasher at the Rocky Creek Diner. “We’s just come to help, is all.”

The pastor of Gemma’s old church and our pastor Landry stood side by side. Miss Cleta held the hand of Toby Washington, the colored teenager who ran errands for her, in a display that would surely have turned the stomachs of some.

Tears stung my eyes to see them there, our ragtag, multicolored band of angels, and I stepped forward to accept Miss Cleta’s basket. “I best make some more coffee,” I squeaked out, my throat tight. And before the tears could come in front of everyone, I rushed past them and into the kitchen.

As I poured more cups of coffee, I said a prayer of thanks. Some tiny part of Calloway had started to heal, and though I didn’t yet understand much about prayer, or about God for that matter, I figured I owed my thanks for such a thing.

Miracles didn’t just happen on their own.

I remember clear as a bell the day they hung Otis Tinker. He was hung just like many a colored man had been, only Mr. Tinker wasn’t innocent as so many of those colored men had been. He had blood on his hands, blood that I had once imagined was on my own. And on that day, a day when Daddy refused to leave the house to witness the final decree, Mr. Tinker breathed his last at noon on the mark.

As the time neared, Daddy rocked on the front porch slowly and methodically, his pocket watch in his hand, watching the seconds tick by. He opened that watch at eleven forty-five, and he sat for the next fifteen minutes staring at it without uttering a word. I sat on the porch steps next to Luke, who was keeping an eye on his own watch, which he had opened and laid on the step between us. Gemma was on the step below me, her back resting against my legs.

By eleven fifty-five, Momma was standing at the screen door, whispering prayers I couldn’t understand, but I guessed at what she was saying. She’d be praying for his soul till the very last, hopeful until the end that Mr. Tinker would repent of his ways. “Weren’t all of that man wicked,” she’d said to me that morning. “Ain’t no man with some good in him that shouldn’t have a chance of escapin’ an eternity of hellfire. He saved you in the end, don’t forget.”

I didn’t have enough of a grasp on the situation to judge one way or another, so I hadn’t replied to her declaration. But when I heard her whispered pleas just before noon on that first day of November, I whispered my own prayer for the man I’d thought of for most of my life as a kind, decent person.

Daddy’s watch stayed open as the seconds ticked down. But with two minutes to go, he stopped rocking the chair, Momma stopped whispering her prayers and stepped softly onto the porch, and silence filled the air. Luke put an arm around me, and I let my head rest on his shoulder, my heart thumping in time with the watch. At noon, I jumped as the chimes started to ring inside the house like a death knell. Each clang of the clock made my stomach sink further.

The moment the last bell rang, Daddy snapped his watch shut, stood up quietly, and walked over to lay a hand on Momma’s shoulder. “I’m gonna take a little walk, darlin’,” he said, his husky voice barely audible.

Momma was crying softly, and it wasn’t until Luke handed me his handkerchief that I realized I was crying too. Daddy put a gentle hand to my head and then to Gemma’s as he walked down the steps beside us, and then he wandered off with a gait that spoke of his heavy heart. He disappeared past the shed and into the woods.

Momma had once said to me, “Daddy takes his thinkin’ walks because sometimes a man needs to be on his own to figure things out and find some peace again.” That autumn afternoon, I hoped more than ever that my daddy would find some peace amid those half-leafed trees.

We sat that way for a good hour, with no sign of Daddy, not one of us saying a word, likely because no one knew what to say at times like those. Momma had just murmured something about getting the stew started when we heard footsteps crunching around the bend in the road. Luke stood to see who was coming, and I climbed to the top step to see over his tall frame.

I was torn in two as I caught sight of Mrs. Tinker coming into view, her hair pulled tightly away from a tearstained face, the skirt of her black dress rippling in the breeze. Momma gasped and gripped her collar before running past us and down the steps to embrace Mrs. Tinker.

At first I wasn’t sure how Mrs. Tinker would take that. After all, we were the ones who had stirred things up that summer. But Mrs. Tinker did nothing but melt into my momma’s arms, her sobs coming in long, wheezing exhales. There wasn’t a dry eye between the four of us when Momma calmed her down long enough to coax her inside for tea. Even Luke had tears in his blue eyes, and I made a mark in my memory of the first time I saw Luke Talley cry.

Daddy returned within another half hour, and I ran to him when I saw him, my arms outstretched.

For the first time since I was five, my daddy picked me up and held me, even though I was tall enough for my toes to touch the tops of his shoes. “It’ll be all right, baby girl,” he whispered into my hair.

“Mrs. Tinker’s here. She’s awful tore up,” I said, my voice shaking. “Mr. Otis did what he did, and now Mrs. Tinker ain’t got a husband, and her boys ain’t got a daddy. Why do people do things that cause so much hurt?”

“I ain’t got an answer for that.” He set me down and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “Ain’t no one but God got an answer for that. Best we can do is pray we don’t do the same.”