Seeing Red (21 page)

I felt my shoulders slump. “Beau. There are a ton of big flat rocks around here.”

Beau tugged his hair. “Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right about that. Maybe that’s why your daddy never found it.”

I sighed and leaned against the workbench, putting my Coke down. Plus, after a hundred years, even a big rock could be completely covered in these woods, what with ivy, Virginia creeper, moss, downed trees.

“You thinking of looking for it, Red?”

“Yeah, and I’m going to find it, too.”

Beau grinned. “That’d make your daddy real happy.”

I had to get as much information as possible about the Freedom Church, and Miss Georgia was the only one who’d know. I couldn’t risk getting into any more trouble with Mama, though, so I ran to the house first.

I stuck my head in the screen door. “Mama, I almost forgot. I’ve got to go interview Miss Georgia for our class project. It’s real important.”

She kept spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. “What have you accomplished in the shop?”

“I finished cleaning out the desk.”

Her knife stopped, but she still stared down at the bread. “Did you find anything interesting?”

“No,” I said quickly.

She turned her head to look at me. “If you find anything unusual in there you let me know.”

“Why?” I said. “What do you think is in there?”

“Nothing,” she said as quickly as I had. “But we can’t throw away any important papers about…the house or the land or insurance or anything like that.”

“I wouldn’t.” That was the truth, at least.

She let me go, eyeing me like she didn’t believe I was telling her everything. But there was no way I was going to share the map and Daddy’s drawing. It was like a special message from Daddy. Almost like he wanted me to find it because who else would look in the old Rambler envelope? Plus, I felt like if I solved the mystery, maybe it could help us stay right here. And even if it didn’t help, there was no way I was leaving Stony Gap until I made sure Mr Dunlop gave back the land he owed Miss Georgia. I was going to fix it right. I knew Daddy wanted that.

I ran all the way to Miss Georgia’s with the map safely in the back pocket of my jeans. I didn’t want to tell her about it, either. Maybe it was selfish. It was like a little piece of Daddy that I didn’t want to share with anyone else. But I told myself it was because I didn’t want to get Miss Georgia’s hopes up. What if I never found the church? I couldn’t stand to disappoint her.

Miss Georgia was on her porch, so I collapsed on the steps. “Can you tell me everything you know about the Freedom Church?”

“Good evenin’, Red. How are you today? Other than forgettin’ your manners?”

“Sorry. I’m fine, ma’am, how are you?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“So can you tell me about the church now?”

“Why are you all fired up to know?”

I had a good answer for her. I told her all about Miss Miller’s Foxfire project. “And I’m going to write down the whole story of the Freedom Church. Every bit of it.”

She wasn’t smiling any more. “Why you want to write about that?”

“Well, it was my great-great-grandaddy – Old Man Porter – who sold your grandaddy the land, right?”

She nodded.

“Then Old Man Porter gave the congregation a loan for the supplies to build the church.”

“That’s right.”

“I know the church burned down and your grandaddy died in the fire, but I don’t know how the fire started. Some people say lightning, but I’ve heard others say that Mr Dunlop’s great-grandaddy had something to do with it.”

“I suspect he did.”

“What else do you know? Like, do you know about where the church was?”

She stared out to the right, into the distance, the direction that the Freedom Church once stood, if that triangle on the map was right.

I could feel my heart start pounding louder because I had a feeling she knew something. She knew something more than I did. And if she told me I might be able to solve the mystery.

“I don’t know exactly where the church was, but –” she cleared her throat – “I know for sure my grandaddy didn’t die in no fire.”

I sat bolt upright. “What?”

She shook her head. “The fire had been put out that afternoon. In the evenin’ he went back after the metal collection box that was in the church, hopin’ to retrieve the money he owed your great-great-grandaddy.”

“Did he find it?”

“He didn’t get as far as the church. He was shot within three steps of it.”

“Three steps,” I breathed. The
3
s on Daddy’s drawing! And the stick figure – George Freeman – lying on the ground almost touching the church. It all made sense. “Who shot him?”

She shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. We think a Dunlop was involved.”

Of course, who else would it be? “How’d you find all this out, Miss Georgia?”

She blinked a few times and swallowed. “Because my daddy was there.”

I guess she saw my eyes grow big and my mouth drop open.

“Uh-huh. He was a boy about your age at the time. My grandmother, his mama, was worried about George Freeman goin’ back anywhere near that church because she knew it’d been burned down by a posse. So my daddy, he went after him, to try get him to come back home, forget about the money – which was probably either stolen or burned up. He’d almost caught up with his daddy…so he saw what happened with his own eyes.”

I swallowed hard. It was bad enough losing your daddy. I knew that. I couldn’t even imagine seeing him shot dead right in front of you. 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Ima Butt

Hearing about Mr Dunlop’s great-grandaddy shooting George Freeman made me even more bound and determined to find Freedom Church. And it made me think about Thomas and how things hadn’t changed much in a hundred years. You could do terrible things to certain people and nobody got too bothered about it, as long as those certain people were black.

I spent all day Saturday scouring the woods on the Dunlop property, staying low so Mr Dunlop wouldn’t see me. I tried to find a big flat rock that might’ve been an altar in the Freedom Church. The best one I could find was in the middle of the creek. I knew creeks could change their course a little bit over time, and it had been a hundred years, but it couldn’t have changed that much. It’s not like they would’ve built a church right on the banks of the creek.

As if my day weren’t bad enough, I got home to find Mr Harrison’s Chrysler parked by our house.
Shoot!

I ran across the gravel but stopped at the kitchen door, which wasn’t all the way closed. I listened through the screen and heard Mama and Mr Harrison talking in the dining room, but it was hard to hear them because J had the TV on loud watching this new programme,
Kung Fu
. After we watched the pilot back in February, he’d wanted to shave his head like that
Kung Fu
guy, Caine, but Daddy said J had to watch a bunch of episodes first to see if he still really wanted to.

I tried to concentrate as hard as Caine in
Kung Fu
and pick out just the voices of Mama and Mr Harrison from the background noise. It was hard, but I heard Mr Harrison say, “Believe me, that’s what your husband would tell you.”

“My hus-band,” Mama said, pronouncing every syllable like she does when she’s mad, “wanted to do the right thing.”

“Betty, I think you’ve been under a lot of strain lately, so you’re a little misguided. No man would want to sell his family short.”

“It’s not selling us short,” Mama hissed. “All I’m saying is that we should—”

I pulled the screen door open so I could stick my head inside and hear what Mama was about to say and,
shoot
, that thing made such a loud creak I froze on the step.

“Red?” Mama called out. “Is that you?” She looked out from the dining room, and I quickly acted like I was just walking in.

“Yeah, hi, Mama. Is Mr Harrison here?”

“Yes,” she said, her lips tight. “He was just leaving.” She looked over to where Mr Harrison must’ve been. “We’ll talk more about this later, Gene.”

Mr Harrison walked into the kitchen, jerked his head to the dining room, where Mama still stood, and rolled his eyes, smirking at me. I stared him down. It was one thing for me to roll my eyes at Mama, but it was a whole different thing for a snake like him to do that to her.

Mama held her hand to her forehead, squeezing her temples. “I have a terrible headache. I’m going to bed. There’s fish in the fridge that Mrs Scott brought by. Good night, Red.”

There was so much I wanted to ask her about what she was saying to Mr Harrison. What did she mean about Daddy wanting to do the right thing? And why did Mr Harrison think that was selling us short? But it’d been so long since me and Mama had done any real talking that all I said was, “Good night.”

She went in the living room, and I heard her kiss J good night. “As soon as that show is over, off to bed, okay? We have church in the morning.”

“Do we have to?” he whined. “How come you don’t make Red go to church? I want to stay home and play, too.”

“Good night, J,” Mama said.

“But how come—”

“Look, the ads are over and your show’s back on,” was all she said.

I wondered if she knew how I felt. I couldn’t look at that pew. It reminded me too much of Daddy and how I’d disappointed him.

It was when I was eight and still stupid. Bobby Benson, being the preacher’s son, couldn’t afford to get in trouble himself but loved getting other kids to do his dirty work. He dared me to scratch
IMA BUTT
into the back of the pew we usually sat behind and see how long it took people to notice. I don’t know why I did it except that he said, “Ain’t you man enough?” So, during the church picnic, I snuck in with my penknife and did it.

It didn’t take long at all for someone to notice. Reverend Benson starting calling families that very afternoon. Daddy kept bringing it up all week. It was like he knew I’d done it. He asked me what he thought that kid was thinking, and if I were the parent of the kid who’d done it, what would I do, until we talked about it so much that the kid became me without our even saying so.

“Why’d you do it, son?”

“Bobby wanted to see if I was man enough.”

He looked down at me. “Do you feel like a man now?”

“No.”

“Next time, you think for yourself and decide what makes you a man, a good man.” He sighed. “Now, what are you going to do about it?”

“Cover it up,” I said.

He shook his head. “Covering it up doesn’t make it go away.”

“No, I mean, sand it down good and put some stain on it. No one will ever know.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, people will know, all right, because you’re going to tell them. Then you can fix it.”

Daddy took me to the preacher to apologize, and when Reverend Benson said, “I’m shocked to find it was a Porter,” I couldn’t even look at Daddy because I was so ashamed.

“So was that hard?” Daddy asked me afterwards.

I nodded. “Especially the part about him being shocked it was a Porter.”

“Really,” Daddy said, “I think that was the best part.”

“What?”

“That means we have such a good name in our community he didn’t expect that kind of behaviour from us.”

Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better.

“Son, we’re all going to do stupid things we regret. Any common person can pretend he didn’t do it. It takes a real man, a Porter, to stand up to what he did, admit it, and apologize, and fix it as best he can. That’s how you gain respect.”

When I got home from sanding and staining the pew, he took the afternoon off of work to take me and Thomas fishing, so I guess he wasn’t that mad at me. Thomas was quietly singing, “Big Red’s a butt-head,” and Daddy pretended he didn’t hear except I could see him twisting his lips trying not to smile. And when Thomas started laughing, Daddy couldn’t hold back any longer because that’s what Thomas’s laugh does. Even I couldn’t help laughing. When we dropped Thomas off, he looked at me real serious and said, “Don’t be like Bobby Benson. Don’t be…a butt-head.” Then we both cracked up.

J came in the kitchen even though
Kung Fu
was still on TV. “Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“Why aren’t you watching your show?” I said.

“It’s boring. There’s no fighting.”

“Does that mean you’re not shaving your head?”

“Not unless he starts fighting some more. Are you making supper?”

“Not making it, but there’s some food the sheriff’s wife brought by.” I opened the fridge and took out the casserole dish.

“I wish I could have a Coke,” J said.

“Well, you can’t.” I took the lid off the casserole. “How about some—” At first, I didn’t even know what it was. Once I figured it out, I knew I didn’t want to eat it.