The Steep and Thorny Way (18 page)

“Hanalee,” said Mama in a near whisper. “What did you just say?”

Uncle Clyde ran a hand through his hair and leaned his elbows on his thighs. “She's referring to the eugenics movement.”

“We just . . .” The reverend's fingers slipped off the rocking chair. “We just want the boy to make the right choices. None of this has been easy for any of us.”

I sank my head into my hands and swallowed down a bitter taste. The weight and shape of a missing person impressed itself upon the room. Instead of my mother, I wished Fleur sat beside me. Or Joe. Or my father. All the wrong people were gathered around me.

“Are you all right, Hanalee?” wheezed the sheriff.

“I'm not feeling well right now. I don't want to talk about this anymore.”

No one responded at first, so I stared through my fingers at my black-trimmed Keds. Mud streaked the white canvas. Leaves in the shape of dead moths caked the sides.

“Dr. Koning told me,” said the sheriff, “he worries that you and Joe have gotten the wrong idea about him. He fears Joe might want to hurt him.”

“
Does
he want to hurt me, Hanalee?” asked Uncle Clyde. “Is Joe armed?”

My head remained lowered, and I lied through clenched teeth. “Joe is on his way to Washington. He doesn't want to be here anymore. Just let him go—
please
. Leave him alone.”

“What do you think we should do about her?” asked Mama. “I can't determine if she's telling the truth.”

“Bring her to the Fourth of July picnic this afternoon,” said the sheriff. “Let's see if Joe decides to show up.”

Mama squeezed my right leg. “I don't want her running off again.”

“She won't run off,” said Uncle Clyde. “Will you, Hanalee?”

I bit down on my bottom lip until all I could feel was the spiked pressure of teeth stabbing my flesh.

“Hanalee?” asked my stepfather again.

I lifted my face to my right and met Uncle Clyde's bespectacled eyes for the first time since he'd chased me out to the woods.

My stepfather held his jaw and his shoulders stiff. “It's sweet of you to continue to mourn your father, but it's time to put his death in the past.”

The reverend piped up: “That's wise advice, Hanalee. His death was simply a tragic accident. Nothing more. Allow your father to rest in peace.”

I released my lip from my teeth and felt my throat thicken, the muscles in my back tighten. “Well, that's precisely the problem.” I swallowed. “My father isn't resting in peace.”

CHAPTER 14

CAST THY NIGHTED COLOR OFF

WHEN A PERSON SPEAKS OF HER
father's ghost, I discovered that other people in the room tend to agree that she might, indeed, require an end to her interrogation. Sheriff Rink released me from the questioning, and Mama allowed me to disappear upstairs to my room with a glass of water and a slice of raspberry strudel, although she refused to look at me when she handed me my food and my glass, and her fingers quivered.

“We'll talk more later” was all that she said.

As I made my way upstairs, the gathering of adults in the living room ceased talking, but once I closed my bedroom door, their voices rose and fell with incoherent rumblings down below the
soles of my feet. I sat on my bed and devoured the strudel, and I downed the water so quickly, I choked. Then I felt guilty. I wondered if Joe had anything to eat inside that picnic basket that I'd lugged around the woods. I also fretted over the idea of Fleur sitting at her kitchen table with her mother and brother, picking at her breakfast with her fork, not knowing whether I'd been found.

The discussions rumbled on downstairs. I set the dish and the cup down on the floor and heard the crinkling of the Klan pamphlet tucked inside my pocket. I pulled out the crumpled piece of paper and read the penciled notes again.

Konklave, July 2, 1923. New members needed. White, Protestant boys aged twelve to eighteen
.

Initiation planned. Necktie party?

The problem of Joe Adder. Moral degenerate
.

Pancake breakfast set for Saturday at the Dry Dock. Money raised will repair potholes on Main Street
.

A headache erupted between my eyes. I massaged the bridge of my nose and chewed upon the idea of the Junior Order of Klansmen meeting only two days earlier, right after Joe showed up back in Elston. Young local Klan members, aged twelve to eighteen, had discussed the “problem” of Joe's presence the same night I had wandered down the unlit highway with Necromancer's Nectar burning through my veins. The car that had passed me after I dove onto my belly may have very well contained Klan members—young men and their adult supervisors, driving home from talks of initiations and pancake breakfasts and the reverend's wayward son.

My eyes strayed down to the last lines of the notes:

Pancake breakfast set for Saturday at the Dry Dock. Money raised will repair potholes on Main Street
.

The nape of my neck tingled. Something didn't feel right about those lines, even though the sentences appeared to be the most benevolent of them all. I reread the sentences, my heart rate doubling, and then I saw it—the word that unsettled me.

Dock
.

I shook my head. “No, that wouldn't make sense.” I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples and tried to think back to Joe's account of my father's last words to him. My mind went blank, but I knew the word
doc
—or
Dock
—was involved. I dropped to my knees on the floor, slid the basket of toys out from beneath my bed, and yanked out the newsprint containing my note.

I put full blame on the doc.

Or, perhaps I should have written . . .

I put full blame on the Dock.

The Dry Dock.

Doc.

Dock.

Dr. Koning.

The Dry Dock restaurant.

“Oh, God.” My brain spun. “Which is it?”

Down below the floor of my bedroom, the front door closed, and voices trailed outside the house. I sprang over to my window and watched the Adders and Sheriff Rink mosey over to their respective automobiles, and my eyes smarted from the glare of the sun hitting the black metal of the vehicles. Uncle Clyde wandered behind them with his hands on his hips. He imparted a few last thoughts to the sheriff and Joe's parents, but my window remained closed, and I couldn't discern the words. The cars sparked to life with swift cranks of the handles below the grilles. The sheriff and the reverend climbed into their vehicles and steered them out of our driveway.

Mama's footsteps sounded on the staircase beyond my closed door; still, I watched my stepfather shade his eyes from the sun and turn from the road toward the barrier of Douglas firs marking the entrance to the woods. My throat went dry.

“Don't go looking for him,” I whispered against the glass pane. “Please . . . leave him alone.”

Another automobile pulled into our driveway from the highway—a second patrol car, helmed by Deputy Fortaine. The deputy turned off his motor and stepped out of the car while removing his cap. The short waves of his raven-black hair rippled in the wind.

Uncle Clyde headed over to him, and they both spoke with their arms folded across their chests. I wondered if the deputy's last name truly was Fishstein. At the moment, he didn't strike me as being Jewish or Catholic, for a person like that—someone caught
outside the circle of normalcy in Elston—would certainly possess more sympathy for a boy in Joe's predicament. He wouldn't want to hunt him down the way he seemed to be doing, unless he was trying with all his might to overcompensate for his own differences.

From the wall behind the head of my bed emerged the sound of crying. I left my window and grabbed the box of toys and bullets from underneath the bed and crammed the Klan pamphlet down the right side.

The weeping continued.

I left my room with caution, unsure if my mother cried out of sorrow or anger, fearful of the fine line between sobbing and smacking. The floorboards of that old house of ours whined and sagged with my every step across the hallway, no matter how much I tried to make my feet move as though they were composed of feathers and air. I sidled over to the open doorway of the bedroom that my mother now shared with Uncle Clyde—a room larger than mine, wallpapered in a royal shade of blue, with a mahogany four-poster bed hogging most of the space. On the edge of the bed sat Mama, crying into a handkerchief. I eyed the wrinkled sheets and forbade myself envisioning her sleeping there with Uncle Clyde.

She lifted her face, revealing bloodshot eyes and a red-rimmed nose, all of which leaked. Her loose hair hung down to her waist like sheaves of dried wheat.

“I don't want to ever again hear you telling a ghost tale about your father,” she said in a tone that socked me in the chest.

I clenched my teeth.

“And I want honesty, Hanalee. What did Joe tell you about Uncle Clyde and your father's death?” Fear glinted in her eyes.
The wall of love and support for her new husband must have weakened—I could hear the barrier thinning in the timbre of her voice.

“He said”—I shut the bedroom door behind me and willed my stepfather to stay outside with the deputy—“that aside from a busted leg and a sore arm, Daddy seemed just fine after he hit him with the car.” I tiptoed closer to her, still fearful of getting smacked. “When Uncle Clyde arrived, he made Joe stay out in the front room, and the next time Joe saw my father, Daddy was . . .
gone
. . . as if . . .” My lips shook, and the word I wanted to utter slipped back down my throat.

“As if what?” asked Mama.

I covered my mouth with my hand and spoke from behind my fingers. “Poisoned.”

My mother's face whitened. Complex highways of green-blue veins manifested beneath her skin.

“Everyone shut Joe up at his trial,” I continued, “which led Joe to believe that people got paid to stop him from testifying. He believes that Uncle Clyde might be part of the KKK.”

A crooked little line cleaved the skin between Mama's eyebrows. “Joe doesn't know what the devil he's talking about,” she said. “Uncle Clyde has promised me over and over that he'd do anything he could—even risk his own life—to keep you safe.”

“Yes, well”—I glanced again at their bed—“I've heard a man will promise just about anything in order to bed the woman he wants.”

Without warning, Mama jumped to her feet and slapped me across the face with a force that stung with a shock of heat. I reeled back and cradled my cheek in my hand.

“For the last time, did Joe Adder take away your virtue?” she asked. “Is that why you're talking so filthy?”

“No.”

“Are you certain? You slept beside him—”

“I slept beside him in the woods, bundled in a blanket to keep from freezing, but that's all. He kept me comfortable and warm because I didn't want to sleep under the same roof as Clyde Koning.”

Mama's hand dropped to her side. “You understand what I mean about your virtue, don't you?”

“Joe Adder didn't take away my virginity, Mama. I grew up around farm animals, for heaven's sake. I know what you're talking about, and Joe doesn't want to do that sort of thing with me.”

“Then why did he try to elope with you?”

“Because no one else understands an outsider better than I.”

She closed her mouth and swallowed. “You're not . . . you're not going to run back into the woods and try to find him?”

“No! I keep telling everyone, he's heading up to Washington.” I'd told the fib so often, I began to believe the lie myself. I even stared my mother straight in the eye when I said it.

Mama blinked, and her hazel eyes moistened again.

I switched my attention to the oak wardrobe that housed Uncle Clyde's suits and dress shirts. “Will you help me look through Uncle Clyde's belongings?”

She recoiled. “For what?”

“Klan regalia. A membership card.”

“Uncle Clyde is not a part of that organization. Even if he were, the Klan isn't concerned about Negroes here in Oregon. For the most part they're improving schools and roads.”

“Are you afraid to look?”

She raised her right hand to slap me again, and I closed my eyes and hunched my shoulders, bracing for pain.

Nothing struck me.

I peeled one eye open and found Mama's outstretched palm frozen in midair. Her chin twitched.

“If I look”—she lowered her hand to her chest—“will you swear to never again speak of your stepfather this way?”

I rubbed the tender skin of my face and sorted out a suitable response.

“Hanalee?”

“All right. I'll stop wanting to raid his belongings if I see for certain he's not hiding anything that links him to that group.”

Mama trod to the closed bedroom door and put her ear to the wood.

“I last saw him outside,” I said, “speaking to Deputy Fortaine.”