The Steep and Thorny Way (26 page)

“Only if this woman doesn't remove her girl within five seconds.”

“Did you summon my father, Hank Denney, here the night he died?” I asked, pulling forward, for Mama tried to tug me backward with all her might. “Did you ask him to deliver moonshine that Christmas Eve of 1921?”

“Get out of this restaurant now,” said the man, pointing toward the door with his spatula.

“We tolerate bootleggers as little as we tolerate the likes of you,” said Esther behind him, squeezing her apron into a ball between her hands.

“Just answer my question!” I shouted. “Was my father here Christmas Eve 1921, like his restless spirit told me he was?”

The man paled. His wife grabbed a little gold crucifix she wore around her neck and rubbed it with one of her thumbs. The little family from our church gathered up their belongings and scrambled out of the restaurant with a slam of the door behind them.

“Hanalee, please.” Mama snatched my hand. “Let's just get out of this place and forget about these people.”

“Listen to your mother, girl,” said the mister. “Go!”

“I'll have you know”—Mama thrust out her chest and glowered at the man—“I intend to speak to the reverend about this establishment
and let him know you don't practice the love of good Christians.”

“Don't talk to me about being a good Christian.” The man held up his spatula, as if unsheathing a sword. “You're a whore with an illegitimate child, as far as the law of this state is concerned. You ought to be ashamed of yourself and thankful you're free of your bootlegging Negro.” He raised the spatula above his head, as though he intended to lunge and strike us with it, which was both ludicrous and terrifying at the same time. “Now get out of here.”

“Are you in the Klan?” I asked, backing up with Mama's hand clamped down on my wrist.

“I am, indeed.” The man lifted his round chin. “A proud, card-carrying member, and I'm not ashamed to say so.”

“Was my father here the night he died?”

“You come inside my establishment one more time”—he nodded toward the window, toward the shadow of the oak tree stretched across the glass—“and I'll show you exactly what happened to your daddy that Christmas Eve.”

My skin went cold. The shadows of the branches bobbed across the window—the ugliest sight I'd ever encountered.

“Get out!” barked his wife. “You've ruined our breakfast shift, you no-good black and white trash.”

Mama wrenched me away, and we stumbled out the door into the glaring light of day.

I pushed her fingers off me and staggered through the tall grasses surrounding the oak, whose weighty boughs blocked the sun and made me colder still. I braced my hands against the trunk and panted through a painful stitch in my side. Just above my eyes
hovered the shapes of letters, carved in the grayish bark. I assumed they were the names of local sweethearts.

“Let's go, Hanalee.” Mama hooked her hand around my elbow.

“Wait a minute.” I lowered my head. “Let me catch my breath.”

My vision blurred. I stared at the trunk and watched the rippling stripes in the wood sharpen into focus. A carved name caught my eye, to my right:
Delia Downs
.

I leaned toward the words, my eyes narrowed, for Mrs. Downs was the black war widow who had been attacked in her home in Bentley—a woman scared into moving out of the county. Someone had scratched a line across her name.

“What is this?” I asked.

“What is what?” asked Mama.

I ran my hands over the bark, and a splinter stabbed my thumb. A slew of other names emerged in the jagged pieces, seemingly rising to the surface, the same way I spotted multiple crawdads in the creek whenever I first thought there were none.

Hank Denney
—scratched out.

Joseph Adder
.

Benjamin Fortaine
.

Greta Koning
.

Clyde Koning
.

Hanalee Denney
.

“L-l-look.” I pounded my palm against the names. “Look what they've done.”

Mama rested her hands on the trunk, and her eyes widened and darted back and forth over the letters in the bark. She rubbed her right palm across my name, as though she could erase the etchings
with her hand, and she breathed with a bleat of panic I'd never heard from her before—a wounded sound, a desperate sound.

“Who did this?” Her nails tore at the bark that contained the
H
and the
a
of my name. “What's happening here?”

“It's the Klan. They're not just anti-Catholic, Mama. They're threatening to hang Joe. I saw one of their pamphlets, and Laurence told me himself . . . they'll hang him.”

“Oh, God.” Her fingernails tore at Daddy's name, chipping away the letters—letters that someone had crossed off as though a task had been completed.

“I want to talk to Uncle Clyde,” I said.

“Uncle Clyde is not a part of them! Don't you see his name on this tree?” She slammed her palm against the name
Koning
. “They want to get rid of him, too. And the deputy. Oh, God.” Her knees buckled. “What's happened to this town?”

“Please, Mama . . .” I wrapped my arms around her waist and shouldered her weight, tasting her hair on my lips. “Let's go talk to him in his office right now. Let's tell him it's all right to speak the truth. I want to know what happened to Daddy that night. I've got to know, or I'll end up exactly like him.”

CHAPTER 22

O HEAVY BURDEN

HAND IN HAND, PETRIFIED OF LETTING
each other go and allowing the world to topple entirely off its axis, Mama and I marched up the cement front path to the forest-green Queen Anne house that served as the home of Uncle Clyde's medical practice, one block north of the main highway. The building had once housed the doctor, too, before his marriage to Mama brought him inside our own walls.

The front parlor sat empty, with only my stepfather's stiff brown furniture and potted ferns greeting us. An ugly gold clock ticked away the seconds upon the mantel of the brick fireplace, next to a framed photograph of Mama.

“Clyde!” My mother slammed the front door closed behind us. “Where are you?”

“Greta?” Uncle Clyde slunk out of his office from around the corner, carrying paperwork of some sort. He looked like a tall frightened mouse, tiptoeing into view that way. I imagined a tail tucked between his legs. “What's happened?”

“Do you have any patients in here?” asked Mama.

He straightened his posture. “No.”

My mother locked the door with a loud click.

“What happened?” My stepfather's forehead creased.

Mama turned back toward him and covered her eyes with one hand.

“Greta?” He stepped closer. “Talk to me.”

I slipped my right hand into my mother's left one and took a breath. “All three of our names are carved on that tree next to the Dry Dock,” I said, “along with Joe's, Deputy Fortaine's, Daddy's, and Mrs. Downs's.”

Uncle Clyde's face froze, and he gasped the word “What?”

“Someone crossed off the names of Daddy and Mrs. Downs,” I continued, “but the rest of our names are just sitting there”—my voice faltered—“waiting for us to . . . to disappear.”

“I know that the . . .” Mama moved her hand to her mouth and made a burbling noise. Tears washed down her cheeks and slid across her knuckles. “As much as it sickens me, I'm aware of the prejudices against Hanalee and me, and even Joe, and I've heard the rumors about Deputy Fortaine being a Jewish man. But why you? What's happening here? Why aren't any of us safe?”

Uncle Clyde inhaled with a force that brought a flash of pain into his eyes. He put a hand on his side and glanced over his shoulder at his office around the corner. “Come . . . sit down.” He waved us over with fingers that looked as though they weighed too much. “We have some things to discuss.”

Mama drew a short breath, and I squeezed her fingers again. We followed my stepfather into his little octagonal office that fit into the house's front tower. A second fireplace hibernated in one corner of the room, swept of all ashes, a log sitting on the grate, awaiting the first snap of cold in the fall. Upon the mantel stood a photograph of all three of us—Mama, me, and Uncle Clyde—from their January wedding. I stood in the middle of them, in front of Joe's father's church steps, the stair rails damp from a recent rain.

Uncle Clyde seated himself behind his desk, a wide worktable with a deep cherry hue, topped with a wooden pencil holder, a lamp, a set of medical books, and a tidy pile of papers. Mama and I took the two chairs with rounded backs directly across from him, below a copy of the Hippocratic oath and a framed degree from the University of Oregon Medical School.

With a whine of his chair, my stepfather leaned forward on his elbows and rubbed his right fingers across his lips, which paled to the same bone shade of white as his hand. “I committed a crime, Greta.”

All the blood left my face. The room tipped to the left, but I clutched the cold armrests and fought to keep my senses about me.

“What crime?” asked Mama in a voice that sounded as though it strained her throat.

Uncle Clyde's eyes flitted down toward the grains of wood
squiggling across his desk. A clock in the room—a plain, round wall clock with a no-nonsense frame and large Roman numerals—ticked with fidgety beats of the second hand.

“Clyde?”

“Perjury.” My stepfather cleared his throat. “I lied in court about the severity of the injuries Joe Adder caused Hank with that Model T.”

Mama stared at her husband with eyes moist and unblinking.

“Did you kill him?” I asked, squirming in my chair. “After you told Joe to wait in the front room, did you hurt my father?”

“No.” He shook his head and folded his hands on his desk. “I did not kill Hank Denney, Hanalee. Nor did I ever want to. I genuinely liked your father and mourned his death as a good friend.”

“Then who did kill him?” asked Mama, scooting forward in her chair. “Why did you lie? Why did you court me and marry me and move into our house, knowing you'd lied?”

“I tried to do the right thing—I went straight to the sheriff and told him what I learned from Hank before he died.”

“What did you learn?” asked Mama. “What have you kept from me this past year and a half?”

“Hank's neck . . .” Uncle Clyde licked his lips and placed his hands around his throat. “When I examined him, I saw bruising . . . redness . . . encircling his neck. I asked him what happened, and he seemed”—he removed his hands from his throat—“
distressed
. Terribly distressed. He wouldn't talk to me about it at first, not until I said that the marks looked like rope burns.”

“A mock lynching?” I asked before Uncle Clyde could speak the words himself. “A-a-a necktie party?”

“What?” asked Mama. “H-h-how do you know about something like that, Hanalee? How do . . . why would—?”

“Laurence taught me about that just yesterday.” I cleared my throat. “And I saw it written on a Klan pamphlet. Laurence said that a group called the Junior Order of Klansmen is planning to do the same thing to Joe.”

“‘Junior Order'?” asked Mama, looking to Uncle Clyde. “They've recruited youths into performing this violence?”

“Their violence is limited.” Uncle Clyde removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyelids so hard, I could swear I heard them squeak. “But apparently it does, indeed, happen, more often than what's reported.”

“So . . . you're saying . . .” Mama shook. “Th-th-they hanged him? My Hank? They hanged him?”

Uncle Clyde lowered his hand to his lap and nodded. “I'm sorry.”

“At the Dry Dock?” I asked.

“Yes.” Uncle Clyde's voice dropped to a tone that creaked from the depths of his chest. “According to Hank, Mr. Franklin, the owner of the Dock, telephoned him that night and asked him to deliver a case of whiskey. When Hank arrived, a party of Klansmen awaited with a burning cross and a rope slung around that oak tree.”

Mama's chin sank against her chest, and she broke into tears that made her shoulders convulse.

Uncle Clyde drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to Mama.

I rubbed my mother's arm but kept my eyes on my stepfather. “What did they say to my father?”

“Hank said they told him”—Uncle Clyde swallowed—“that they didn't tolerate bootleggers. They fastened a rope around his neck, and they raised him a few feet off the ground . . . to scare him.” His jaw stiffened. “To scare him out of town.”

“Who were the Klansmen?” I moved my hands to the armrests. “Did Daddy say? Were they boys?”

“Young men were, indeed, in attendance.” Uncle Clyde peeked at the doorway of the office, as though worried someone might be eavesdropping.