The Steep and Thorny Way (34 page)

Joe knocked, and I heard my stepfather open the door for him just as Mama's feet traveled down the staircase.

“Hello, Joseph,” said Uncle Clyde from around the bend.

“Hello, sir,” said Joe, although I couldn't yet see him. His voice sounded so formal, I almost didn't recognize it—I almost even laughed. “How's Hanalee?”

“I'm in here, downstairs.” I scooted myself farther up on the sofa's cushions. “Please come in, Joe.”

“It looks like the bruising beneath your eyes has gone down,” said Mama.

“It's getting there, ma'am.”

I smiled at his use of “ma'am.”

Flanked by my parents, Joe meandered around the bend, smoothing down his hair, which shone a bit from water or pomade. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have called him a “slicker,” with a jazzy, combed-down coiffure such as that. Bandages crisscrossed his nose. He wore clean white shirtsleeves and gray trousers with a shiny black belt.

He stopped when he saw me and drew a short breath. “H-h-how are you?”

“Well”—I cocked an eyebrow—“I must be atrocious if I made you halt in your tracks and gasp.”

“No, it's just . . .” He rubbed his hands against the sides of his pants. “I think I was hoping, since I heard you so miraculously survived, that you'd look unscathed.”

“She's recovering remarkably well,” said Uncle Clyde, bracing a hand on the rocking chair. “She'll need to spend several more weeks in that cast, and the bruising and muscle strain will take time to heal. Yet considering all she endured, we're feeling quite lucky and grateful at the moment.”

Joe tucked his hands into his pockets. “I didn't ever mean for you to get hurt, Hanalee. You shouldn't be sitting there in a cast and bandages.”

“I'd much rather be sitting here like this,” I said, “than to say that the KKK strung us up from a tree.”

The world skidded to a stop after I spoke those words. Joe's eyes met mine, and for a moment we both shot back to the woods in the blackness of midnight. Klansmen and torches. Ropes and dirt and the taste of cotton pulled across my mouth. The explosion of gunpowder vibrating against my hand.

Mama appeared behind the sofa without my even realizing she had walked across the room.

“How are your parents, Joe?” she asked, which seemed a forced and meaningless question, akin to asking his thoughts about the weather.

“They're fine, I guess.” He took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed his sides again. “I actually came here because I have a gift for Hanalee. But it's something that will require her traveling in a car to see.” He inched toward me, the heels of his shoes making a squishing sound against the living room rug. “Are you . . . are you able to take a short ride?”

“I don't know.” I peeked at my stepfather. “Am I?”

“That's entirely up to you, Hanalee,” said Uncle Clyde. “Do you feel well enough to be jostled about on Elston roads?”

“I think I might.” I slid my good foot to the floor. “Especially if it involves a surprise.”

Mama placed a hand upon my shoulder. “Were you planning to drive her, Joe?”

“Yes, ma'am. My father let me borrow his car this afternoon, specifically so I could take Hanalee to the surprise.” He shifted his weight between his legs. “I know it's a car . . . I know”—he cleared his throat and shoved his hands back inside his pockets—“it holds a dark memory, but I'm leaving town for good this evening. If I could just give Hanalee this gift before I go, I think it would help set things right.”

Mama and Uncle Clyde eyed each other. I did my best to shift my gaze between the two of them, to gauge their reactions, without aggravating the stiffness in my neck.

“Well, I want to go,” I said. “If Joe's leaving tonight . . .”

“All right.” Uncle Clyde nodded. “I'll help carry you to the car.”

BOTH JOE AND MY STEPFATHER LUGGED ME OUT TO
the black Model T that had struck my father that December night. Uncle Clyde carried the bulk of me, and Joe helped with my legs, including that massive plaster cast that felt like a small child clinging to my calf. Somehow they managed to cram both me and the cast into the front seat of the automobile.

Mama paced behind the two of them, her arms crossed, her forehead wrinkled. “Are you sure about this, Clyde?”

Uncle Clyde stepped back while Joe maneuvered around him to crank the engine to a start down below the car's hood.

“It'll just be a short drive, right, Joe?” asked my stepfather over the roar of the awakening engine. “Just into town?”

Joe popped up his head from the front of the car. “Do you know what the gift is?”

“I remember you mentioning something you wanted to do when you were here the day after the accident.” Uncle Clyde straightened his glasses on his nose and squeezed his lips together to suppress what I believed to be a smile. “If it's what I think it might be, just be careful. Don't linger too long in front of it.”

“I won't, sir.” Joe climbed into the car beside me and shut his door. “Are you ready?” he asked me.

I scooted myself two inches closer to him, to better fit my cast into the small space in front of me. “Yes.”

“We'll be back soon.” Joe nodded at Uncle Clyde, then at Mama. “Don't you worry.”

“Be careful,” said Mama.

“We will.” Joe pushed the clutch lever forward and drove the Model T down our front drive, toward the highway. I inhaled whiffs of gasoline that reminded me of the sheriff's patrol car, but I clamped my hands around my upper legs and told myself this ride would be different.

Joe turned his face toward me. “How are you, really?”

“I don't know for sure.” I swallowed. “How are you?”

“Well, just to be clear”—he steered us onto the highway—“you weren't trying to actually shoot me in the head that night, were you?”

“You know why I fired that gun.” I pinched a wrinkle in my skirt. “You know I've had practice with a feat like that.”

“What did they do afterward?”

“What I wanted them to do: they turned all their attention to me and left you alone.”

He nodded and drove us past Mildred's family's house. “Well, thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

We approached the patch of trees where the patrol car had sailed off the highway.

“I have a story to tell you, Hanalee,” said Joe, keeping his eyes on the road ahead.

“Oh, yeah?”

“It involves a religious experience.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Oh?”

“My father asked me this morning what it would take to get me to believe in God again.” He held his breath and drove us through
the section of the road where he had encountered my living father in the dark. The shadows of trees cooled my face and filtered sunshine across the highway in a stained-glass pattern of light and darkness. A crow cawed overhead, and I saw the green sheen of its black feathers in a branch that ran as straight as the yardarm of a sailing ship.

“Now”—Joe blew a puff of air through his lips—“I never said that I don't believe in God, but Pop seems to think that doing what I do—loving whom I love—has made me godless. So I said, ‘I'll believe in God if he strikes down that oak tree at the Dry Dock.'”

I craned my neck toward him as best as I could. “And what did your father say to that?”

“He told me, ‘Let's pray for a lightning strike or a windstorm to smite down that tree, then, for I would like to see that oak destroyed, too.'”

I sputtered a laugh. “I haven't heard any windstorms over the past few days.”

“This was just yesterday, when the Dry Dock was closed on account of it being Sunday.” Joe adjusted the lever for the throttle on the steering column and sent the Model T roaring toward the brick buildings of town. “So, I went out to his toolshed and grabbed his father's old two-man crosscut saw—his father was a logger, you see. And I strolled up to Pop and said, ‘I prayed to God to get rid of that tree, and I believe he led me to find this old saw of yours. What do you think?'”

I smiled. “Don't tell me your father honestly believed that fetching that saw was an act of God.”

“He nodded when he witnessed the saw in my hands, and he
said, ‘Sometimes the Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn't He?' And the next thing I knew, Pop, the saw, and I were on this road, walking to town.”

Joe rolled the Model T to a stop across the street from the Dry Dock and Ginger's. “And without a word,” he continued, turning his head to his left, “we went to work, and the tree crashed down.”

I leaned forward and saw a mere stump of a tree, no more than four feet high. Beyond it lay the felled trunk and a forest of downed branches.

I gasped. “You and your father . . . ?”

“It's gone now, Hanalee.” Joe gazed out at the wreckage of limbs and leaves. “The lynching tree is gone.”

I covered my mouth and blinked. My throat tightened. “As much as I love seeing trees standing upright and healthy . . .” I grabbed my chin and rubbed the bottom half of my face. “Oh, Jesus, Joe. That toppled oak is the most beautiful sight I've ever witnessed.”

Joe swallowed and nodded, and before anyone from the Dry Dock could come out and yell about the tree, or him, or me, he adjusted the clutch lever and cruised the car to the farthest end of town, slowing down to a stop at a shady spot along the curb in front of the Lincoln Hotel.

He set the brake and leaned back against the seat. We both sighed and stared ahead out the front windshield. A boy with a nose wrapped in bandages. A girl stuck in a cast. Both of us bruised and sore and uncomfortable. The statue of Honest Abe watched us from the rhododendrons to our right.

“Just look at us, Hanalee,” said Joe with another sigh. “We look like war casualties.”

“We look like survivors.”

“Hmm.” He slipped his hands off the steering wheel. “I suppose that's true.”

I scratched at my leg through my skirt, just above the opening of the cast. “Is it true? You're really leaving town tonight?”

“Yep.” He lowered his face. “I'm catching a train to Seattle this evening.”

“Are you heading to work in that doctor's office?”

He played with the lower buttons of his starched white shirt. “I'm going to give that job a try. See what it's like.”

“What does your father think about that?”

Joe shrugged. “If I stay here, I'll have to change my ways.”

“Even after helping you chop down that tree yesterday . . . ?” I asked. “Even after saying the Lord works in mysterious ways . . . ?”

“The tree was for you and your father. Not for me.”

I stopped scratching at my leg. “Uncle Clyde and Mama think Washington might be a fine destination for us, too.” I tipped my head to the left and squinted at him through a glare of sunlight winking through the leaves of the cherry trees across the street. “Would you be upset if we followed you up there?”

He snorted and leaned back. “Not at all. I don't know a soul up in Washington.”

“You sure you'd be all right seeing me again?”

“Of course I'm sure. I'll take you to jazz clubs on Jackson Street.”

I grinned. “Is that the place to be?”

“That's what your stepfather claimed, anyway. He said the area's interracial. Tolerant.”

“Really?”

He nodded and swiveled toward me in his half of the seat. He picked at a scratch at the top of the upholstery, below his right thumb. “Are you taking Fleur up there, too?”

“I don't know. She's worried about upsetting her mother and Laurence if she comes with us.”

“Tell her to just head up there for the rest of the summer. Get her out of Elston while everything's still settling down here. If she likes Washington and her mother's happy to have her safe with you, maybe it could become a permanent arrangement.”

“That's a good idea.” I gave a small nod. “I hadn't thought of that.”

“Give it a try.”

“I will.”

Across the street, on top of the barbershop, a man crouched on the roof and hammered loose boards into place. A car drove past us, another black Model T, but I didn't recognize its occupants—a couple, young and white and handsome.

I cocked my head at Joe, and he lifted his chin and looked me in the eye. For a moment, neither of us said a word, and I nearly found myself asking,
What are we, Joe? What do we mean to each other? Why did our paths end up crossing?

“I forgive you,” I said instead. “I know in the woods, when I was hurrying you to get dressed, I said I didn't. But I do.”

He stiffened his jaw and gulped with a swallow I was able to hear. With a voice that came out as a sigh of relief, he breathed the words “Thank you.”

I laid the palm of my left hand on the leatherette seat between
us. The man across the street hammered away, and another car whooshed by, whizzing a hot gust of air past my face.

“You swear you'll take me to jazz clubs?” I asked.

“I swear.” He spread his hand over mine. “We'll have a rollicking good time.”

“That would . . .” My voice caught in my throat. “That would be the bee's knees.”

We both snickered at my use of goofy modern slang, and then Joe slid across the seat and wrapped both his arms around me. I pressed my cheek against his shoulder and closed my eyes, and we sat like that in his Model T for a good long while, out in the open where anyone who hated us could have seen us, but we just didn't care.

I breathed in the clean scent of his shirt, and he cupped a hand around the back of my head, and I relived it all—our plotting in the woods, our escape through the darkening trees, the encounter with the Wittens, the Klan, the cross, the torches, the noose. He squeezed me close against him, nestling his face in the crook of my neck, and I passed through all that darkness and came out to a place warm and safe and bright with sunlight. A place in which I sat in a car with a friend, with the sun shining down on my head and loving arms clasped around me.