The Steep and Thorny Way (27 page)

I craned my neck and checked behind me but found no one there.

“The Kleagle—that's what they call their local recruiting officer,” he continued, and I turned back to him. “He was initiating members into the Junior Order. That part seemed to make Hank the saddest of all. Boys his own daughter's age fastened that noose around his neck.”

“But they didn't kill him?” asked Mama, lifting her face with the handkerchief pressed against her nose.

“No, they sent him on his way with a warning of a full lynching if he didn't leave the state immediately. Hank said his left arm hurt like the dickens after that. He walked down the highway toward your house, and the pain grew so blinding, he ended up tripping into the road”—Uncle Clyde folded his hands on his desk, and his knuckles quaked against the wood like a telegrapher tapping a line of Morse code—“in front of Joe's car, as you already know.”

“But the car injured him.” Mama scooted to the edge of the chair and grabbed hold of Uncle Clyde's desk. “Joe still caused his death, didn't he?”

“The Model T broke Hank's leg,” said Uncle Clyde, “that's for certain. But the arm pain and the breathing difficulty started at the Dry Dock. Hank said he hadn't been able to catch his breath since the Klan let him go.” Uncle Clyde slid his glasses back over his ears. “Joe hitting him with the car certainly didn't help matters, but Hank died because his heart was giving out after that mock lynching. I've observed other men with failing hearts who experienced that same arm pain, and I'm ninety-five percent certain his heart would have stopped beating that night even if Joe never drove down the road.”

I raised my chin. “Why did you lie in court?”

“The sheriff threatened to harm you if I spoke of what I'd learned.” He looked me in the eye. “I couldn't risk them hanging you, too.”

I bowed my head—not to pray, but to absorb the density of those words, which bore down on my spine like a slab of stone. Beside me, Mama covered her eyes, and all three of us sat in silence.

“What do we do now, Clyde?” asked Mama, still pressing her palms to her eyelids. “What do we do?”

“I don't know.” Uncle Clyde shook his head, his eyebrows puckered behind the top rims of his glasses. “I honestly don't know if it would be better to stay and fight or to take Hanalee somewhere else. Somewhere where she won't be threatened, and where she's free to marry whomever she wants and live wherever she wants.”

“I'm attending law school as soon as I'm able,” I said, pushing myself upright in my chair. “Get me out of this place so I can obtain a solid education and come back with the tools to fight these high-and-mighty
bigots. I don't want to hear about people deciding who can live and breathe—and breed—another minute longer.”

“Oh . . . sweetie . . .” Mama reached over to my wrist. “I don't even know if many law schools are accepting female students, let alone students who'd be considered ‘colored.'”

Uncle Clyde nodded in agreement. “It would be an awfully difficult path, Hanalee, but not an impossible one.”

“I'm already on a difficult path,” I said with a wheeze of exasperation, my palms raised toward the ceiling on the armrests. “What do you think this is?”

Neither of them responded, so I sank back in the chair, feeling quite old and weathered and exhausted—and sick with dread that my old friend Laurence had helped hoist my father into the air with a lynching rope when he was just sixteen.

CHAPTER 23

THE DEVIL TAKE THY SOUL

OUR NERVES FELT RAW AND SEARED
.

We rode back home in Uncle Clyde's car, for he insisted upon driving us. The anonymity of the Klan's hooded guises obliterated my trust of
everyone
in Elston. When the postman waved at Uncle Clyde in front of the central mailbox, I couldn't help but think the man's smile seemed forced and his eyes lacked warmth. Twelve-year-old boys with bicycles gawked at the glass display windows of the candy store, and the sight of their caps and short pants caused me to shrink back against my seat. They reminded me that the KKK recruited the young, to sink the organization's influence deep into the soil of our community. Poisonous
rivulets of hate and fear spread beneath the town's sidewalks and buildings and strangled the beauty that had once bloomed throughout Elston.

Or . . . maybe I had always been fooled into believing the town possessed beauty.

Uncle Clyde's Buick tore through the sunlit countryside. I stared out my backseat window at the blur of hayfields and woods, and I thought once again of the golden-haired boy who used to run ahead of his sister and me as we hurried into the forest after chores. I could still hear Laurence's childhood laughter, the low, mischievous chuckles, the teasing cry of “I bet you can't keep up with me, Hanalee.”

I blinked into the breeze and called to Mama in the front seat, “Do you remember Laurence being in church on Christmas Eve when Daddy died?”

She tamed down strands of her hair flying about in the wind, and with a heavy sigh, she said over her shoulder to me, “I can't remember a detail like that, Hanalee. That whole night turned into a fog, and it's feeling even more distorted and upsetting now.”

“I think I remember Fleur telling me he was sick that night.” I leaned my elbow against the side of the car, on the curved ridge below the window. “Yes . . .” I nodded toward the train tracks we passed, as if the church sat beside them, opened and arranged just as it had looked in December 1921. “I'm positive he wasn't there. I remember Fleur and me discussing how empty the church seemed without both her brother and my father there at the service that night.” I pulled on the back of the front seat, hard enough to make
Uncle Clyde's shoulders move. “Did Daddy say he heard Laurence's voice at the Dry Dock?”

“No,” said Uncle Clyde, “he didn't mention specific names.”

“Laurence wouldn't hurt your father.” Mama twisted toward me. “You two grew up together. His mother and I grew up together.”

“I'm certain Laurence is in the Klan, Mama.”

She frowned. “How do you know that?”

“He's friends with those Wittens, and the Wittens are in the Klan. Joe and I stumbled upon their family's shed the other night, and that's where I found the pamphlet with notes about an initiation involving a necktie party.” I sank down in the car seat and chewed the nail of my right pinkie.

Mama put her hand on Uncle Clyde's forearm. “Will you drive us to the Paulissens' house?”

His face whipped toward hers. “Why?”

“I don't want anything dividing our families, especially not the Ku Klux Klan. Polly and I have always been too close of friends for anything to come between us.” Mama crossed her arms and shifted in the seat.

Just up ahead, the dirt driveway leading to our own house came into view, beyond the trees with wine-colored leaves. Uncle Clyde slowed his speed and positioned the gears and his foot in such a way that the Buick chugged and jerked like a horse about to buck us into the street.

“Please, Clyde.” Mama sat up straight and built up her voice into a brick wall. “Take us to the Paulissens.”

Uncle Clyde stiffened his back and shifted the clutch and
the throttle until the car rumbled down the road, toward Fleur's house at a steady pace. I watched the trees alongside the road bend and rustle from the wind, and I thought their trunks looked darker and thicker than I remembered, their leaves less plentiful, more ragged. Everything suddenly appeared different. Unfamiliar. Inhospitable.

My stepfather steered the sedan around the bend, through the thicket of elms that led up to the front of the Paulissens' property. I saw the Ford truck, parked in front of the white house with all its blooming flower boxes, and my stomach churned at the sight of what surrounded the vehicle: local boys, a whole pack of them, gathered about like feral dogs. Laurence. Robbie and Gil. Other fellows from our school—Harry Cornelius, Al Voltman, Oscar and Chester Klein. They wore their caps pulled down over their eyebrows and were dressed in either overalls or shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Half of them smoked cigarettes. Robbie drank openly from a bottle of booze. Laurence clutched one of his father's Colt pistols in his right hand.

Uncle Clyde's shoulders inched toward his ears, and Mama breathed so rapidly, I worried she might faint.

The boys turned our way and watched us roll to a stop, the tires scraping across stones in the dirt. The engine popped and coughed with an obnoxious, hacking commotion that made us stand out even more than we already did.

Laurence looked to Robbie, who gave him a firm nod, and then my former childhood friend drew in his breath and strutted our way, the pistol by his side.

Laurence stopped in front of Uncle Clyde's window and leaned down. “What can I help you with, Dr. Koning?”

“Mrs. Koning would like to pay a visit to your mother.”

Laurence glanced at Robbie again and received a cockeyed grin.

“I'm sorry, Dr. Koning.” He rested his free hand on top of the car, right above Uncle Clyde's head. “Our house is now supporting the principles of a white homeland for Oregon. Your family isn't welcome here anymore.”

“Laurie Paulissen,” hissed Mama, leaning across Uncle Clyde. “What despicable lies are you learning from those delinquents over there?”

“They're not lies, ma'am.”

“I helped raise you, for heaven's sake, and your mother helped raise Hanalee. I changed your diapers and wiped your snotty little nose, so don't you dare stand there and tell me I'm banned from your house.”

“None of that matters anymore, Mrs. Koning.” Laurence scratched the side of his leg with his pistol. “I don't want Hanalee coming anywhere near my sister. Not only is her skin color muddying this community, but we all know that she slept with a sexual deviant who's threatening the moral integrity of Elston.”

I turned my face away from Laurence's and discovered Mrs. Paulissen observing the scene through the butterscotch curtains of the living room window. From her bedroom window up above, Fleur watched over us with her palms pressed against the glass. My heart dried up into tiny granules of sand that scattered throughout my chest and piled in a sickening lump at the bottom of my stomach.

“Back up this automobile”—Laurence slapped his hand against the roof—“and keep away from this house.”

“You're making a terrible mistake, son,” said Uncle Clyde, shifting the gears into reverse. “Your father would be appalled to hear the words coming out of your mouth right now.”

Laurence scrunched up his face, and without even hesitating, he raised the pistol in the air and cocked the hammer. At that, Uncle Clyde leaned his arm across the back of his seat and shot us backward down the driveway, swearing under his breath—something about “goddamned baby rattlesnakes not knowing when to stop biting.”

“WHERE'S JOE, HANALEE?” ASKED MY STEPFATHER AS
we rounded the bend to our house.

I fidgeted, nudging the back of the front seat with the toes of my shoes. “Why do you ask?”

“Because those boys will kill him if we don't get him out of Elston.”

I closed my eyes and forced myself not to feel a single thing—not anguish, not anger, not terror. A wicked pain bore down on my chest, squeezing a fist around my heart; if I wasn't careful, the pressure would suffocate me. My heart would fail to keep beating, like my father's.

“I don't know where he is,” I said. Something about the tone of Uncle Clyde's voice triggered an uneasy twinge in my gut. Trust had turned into a precious commodity that I'd only hand out with great care.

“If you do hear from him”—he glanced back at me for the breadth of a second—“if he comes to the house, looking for your help, hide him out in the stable, and then let me know he's there.”

The fear of forgetting how to breathe again gripped me. I hooked my fingers around the bottom of my seat and thrust my nose into the air streaming through the windows until oxygen expanded my lungs.

CHAPTER 24

THAT IT SHOULD COME TO THIS

UNCLE CLYDE INSTRUCTED MAMA
and me to remain inside the house, behind locked doors, while he honored appointments with two late-morning patients who required his attention. He drove away with the promise of returning by lunchtime.