The Tree of Forgetfulness (15 page)

She put her hand into the pocket of her skirt, found Mr. Aimar's money. He'd be forever in her debt, he'd said when he gave it to her. But that wouldn't matter once Curtis N. R. Barrett wrote about what Zeke had showed him. Howard Aimar's debt to her would be forfeit then. She took the dollar out of her pocket, slid it across the table. Zeke tried to push it back, but she said, “Take it, son. Go on. Spend it like there's no tomorrow. Don't bring me any change.”

A
MONG THE MIDDAY
dinner crowd at the Hotel Aiken, he stood out like an unwelcome guest at a family gathering. In contrast to the businessmen dressed in flannel trousers and shirts with rolled-up sleeves or the farmers in khaki work clothes and boots, he wore a suit to meals, a crisp white shirt and tie, cuff links, signet ring, and polished shoes. Whenever he entered the dining room, conversation stopped, silverware slowed; ill will flowed toward him from every corner. Not that he minded the notoriety; he welcomed it,
invited
it. Today, as usual, he paused in the doorway then claimed the table at the front window where he sat at every meal, hoping that the sight of him might provoke a passerby into rushing inside and saying something reckless. He propped the
Aiken Standard
against the sugar bowl and ordered the dinner special: a pan-fried pork chop, bone-in, girdled with pearly fat and topped with a thin slice of onion. In his time in South Carolina he'd developed a taste for warm pig fat; he relished the last strands of pork, gnawed, nibbled, and sucked from the bone.

He did not know about the letter that had just arrived at the governor's office or how, after reading it, Arthur McCormick had walked around for ten minutes, belching quietly into one of the large white handkerchiefs his wife tucked into his pocket every morning. The letter was typed on stationery from the Hotel Courtland in Canton, Ohio, but its author was clearly a South Carolina man.

Dear Governor McCormick
,

If I was governor of South Carolina, I would plant my official shoe with such vehemence on the posterior of a certain Mr. Barrett, the charlatan would taste shoe leather for a week. Not that the New York World gives a tinker's dam for law and order; if so, they would look to that quagmire of filth and licentiousness, robbery, blood, and murder, where they were spawned. But in their contempt for the South, and especially South Carolina, they will send their sewer rat reporter to Aiken to attempt to convince others that our homeland is the very seat of corruption and lawlessness. At dinner the other night a prominent judge said to me, “Well, the New York World boys are going after you people of South Carolina.”

“Yes,” I replied. “And we feel like a dove that a buzzard has puked on.”

If I was to fully vent my feelings, the newspapers would have to publish a fireproof edition, but I do feel that I ought at least to sketch a faint adumbration of my conception of that blatherskite representative of a slanderous rag. If the devil were Barrett's daddy, old Jezebel his mother, he would disgrace both sire and dame
.

As God is my witness, I would rather be a one-eyed yellow cur dog and belong to a sorry negro than give succor to this blackhearted hypocrite
.

Respectfully yours
,

Haywood R. Brodie

Barrett would have found the letter rich. He loved a good fight, a story he could run with, one that might get Swope's attention by giving the editor what he called the human element—pathos and tragic irony, the stuff of life. Barrett's version might have sketched a small-bore salesman attacking his typewriter in an alcoholic rage in a grim little room in Canton then gone on to probe Haywood Brodie's motives and expose his illusions. Barrett had shed his own self-serving fantasies in
France and felt it was his right and duty to help others shed their own. “When she comes forward this week to tell the story of her friendship with Baring,” he wrote in a story about a young woman betrayed by a married man, “she will be gathering for the last time the tattered ends of a childish illusion. The man she believed to be a charming, honorable friend—apparently the only friendship with a man in all her young life—she may face with manacles on his hands charged as a wife poisoner. Whether he is acquitted of that charge or not, he is already convicted of killing a child's dreams.”

But he didn't know about Haywood Brodie's letter. What he
did
know was that all hell had broken loose on the front page of the latest issue of the
Aiken Standard
. “Lynching of Longs Condemned by Ku Klux. Gov. McCormick Won't ‘Pass Buck' in Lynching Probe,” one headline read. “Lynching Probe Is Pure Bunk,” declared another that ran above a letter to the editor from Col. Edward A. Wyman. “All this investigation and hullabaloo about who did the lynching and whys and wherefores is pure, unadulterated bunk,” the colonel sneered. “The
New York World
, the Governor, the so-called ‘law and order' citizens, and many others know, or could easily know, at least some of those who participated in the killing of the Longs, and know, as well as the balance of the world knows, that nobody is going to be punished and nobody wants anybody punished.”

“The
World'
s ‘Investigation' Resented in South Carolina,” read the largest headline. Barrett appreciated the mockery of the quotation marks, the way the whole article was larded with derision. He would have the public regard him as a heroic journalistic investigator, the story said, when his only apparent purpose in writing was to ridicule Aiken citizens. Actually, the article continued,
he
was the ridiculous one, for reporting that he had been warned by J. P. Gibson, the governor's investigator, that the Klan might try to usher him out of town. “About the only danger that Mr. Barrett need apprehend,” the newspaper scoffed, was on the streets of Columbia, where he was in danger of “being accidentally run down by a jitney or a truck or a wild automobile
driver if he attempts to cross the streets with any great degree of dependence upon the observance of the traffic signals.”

And who were the “Famous Seventeen,” the supposed perpetrators of the crime that Barrett referred to in every article? Did he mean to suggest that the whole mob consisted of seventeen members or that there were seventeen leaders? Was it possible, the paper suggested, “that he might have been confused by oft-repeated references to the famous ‘committee of seventeen' that was going to revise the tax laws of the State?”

“Fair enough,” he thought, and he laughed out loud, causing several men at nearby tables to frown at him. He could take a punch, and the madder people got, the greater the chance they'd slip up and say more than they meant to. He knew what happened to people under duress, what fell away or was stripped from them, what they might say or do. When he'd cut most of the meat off the chop, he picked up the bone and nibbled at the rest, working up the list of whom he'd visit today. Why not Colonel Wyman himself? Or maybe he'd drop in on Howard Aimar. Provoking them was his job; he did it well, and he wasn't afraid, or if he was, he knew how to control the fear so it didn't show.

But something on that page should have made him put down the chop bone and study the biggest headline again—“The
World'
s ‘Investigation' Resented in South Carolina.” It was the word
resented
that should have focused and cleared his mind. Southern crimes and conditions—the more lurid the better—had been one of the
World'
s favorite subjects. Educating himself on the state's history before he came down to South Carolina, he would have read his paper's 1907 series on the Klan. He would have found the stories about the 1903 murder of Narciso Gonzales, editor of the
State
, shot down on the street two blocks from the capitol by Lieutenant Governor James Tillman, nephew of Pitchfork Ben, who “resented” the newspaperman's articles, which Tillman believed had cost him the governorship. He would have read how, during Tillman's trial, his allies and kin had smuggled shotguns into the courtroom under their coats, in case the law failed them.

Granted, those were more primitive times in South Carolina, but
not by much, and if Barrett had been raised in the state, he would have known what he was up against. He would have been schooled in resentment as thoroughly as South Carolina's children were taught the real causes of the Civil War. He would have eaten and breathed and drunk those lessons until an instinctive understanding of resentment and where it inevitably led would have been mixed with his blood and rooted in the marrow of his bones. He would have grasped that nothing was more profoundly resented here than an attack on a man's honor and standing in the community. He would have known that a man's good name was sacred; to damage it was a violent act and that, once damaged, a man's standing could only be restored by retribution, a righteous, Old Testament exchange of violence. And Barrett hadn't sullied one person; he'd attacked an entire community.

He threw two dollars onto the table and walked out of the dining room and up Park Avenue toward the courthouse. He'd start with Aubrey Timmerman again, try to goad him into saying something unguarded. He liked for the sheriff to slap him on the back, say, “Come on in the house, Mr. Barrett, since you're going to anyway.” He liked to shake the sheriff's injured hand and try to make him to wince and know that he wouldn't. They understood that much about one other.

Outside the day was humid and hazy, warm for mid-November, and as he walked along, sweating, the wrongness of the weather made him uneasy. There was something unnatural about the warm, thick air and the milky light. On days like these, he felt as though he were living in the same low-pressure system of the spirit that he'd dropped into as he'd traveled south on the train. In front of the courthouse he mopped the back of his neck with a handkerchief and watched Grady Jenkins talk to the horses and mules tied to the railing there. He was working up a story in his mind about Grady, the man with eyes blank as the sky and a perfect hoofprint in the middle of his forehead, who came to the courthouse nearly every morning and stayed until the sun went down. All day he stroked the noses of the horses and mules, whispered into their ears. He pulled grass from the lawn and laid it in front of the animals then squatted to watch them chew.

When Barrett walked up, the loiterers on the benches that lined the front walk stopped talking and shouting advice to Grady. “Come to look after your brother?” the smallest man called out.

It drove Barrett crazy to think that he and Grady Jenkins were the only two people in town who didn't know who had done what on the night the Longs were killed. “Any of you men like to make a statement, now's your chance,” he said.

That night he made one concession to the Klan's threat to usher him out of town: He moved his worktable away from the window of his hotel room. Then he sat down at his typewriter. “Even more bitter against this newspaper and its reporter was the group lounging in the courthouse today,” he wrote. “The spokesman was a small man of vehement manner in a gray hat who thundered abuse. His confidence was that ‘any twelve men in Aiken County will convict the lynchers if they are caught,' and his belief was that the World was actuated by a desire to ‘put the Negroes above white men.'

“ ‘Damn the Negroes, I say,' he offered. In 1876 we had Negroes in the Legislature. Now they know their place and they won't forget it, not here. The only reason all those lies are being published about us up North is because we're in the South.'

“The little man with the loud voice bellowed that he and all the rest of Aiken County have full confidence in the Sheriff and that the latter is doing all he can. Whereat his companions of the Court House corridor murmured their approval. But none, little man, unshaven and indignant deputy sheriff, or their companions, would give their names.

“ ‘I am,' said the little man proudly, ‘a member of the Klan.' He concluded the conversation with: ‘I won't tell you a damn thing.'

“This reporter restrained his tears.”

He wired the story to New York, and Swope wired back: “Cutting last line. No need to taunt.” But Barrett thought of the Klan's boast that they'd tapped the telegraph wires and knew every word that passed between him and his editor. “
STET
, Swope,” he wired back. “Enemy in sight.”

After that article appeared, the calls started. The first came just after
three on a Sunday morning—he noted the time on the bedside clock, in case it mattered later. Then he got up and crossed the room to the little telephone stand beside the door, holding his hands in front of him in the dark to keep from colliding with the armchair or the lamp. He picked up the heavy receiver and listened. On the other end of the line someone breathed. He held his breath, listened to the silence the way he listened to words, trying to catch the meaning.

The caller's breathing sounded ragged, and there was a hitch at the top of every inhale. Barrett stood with his eyes closed, listening. The sound could have come from the pompous man who'd told him that real leadership was what had been shown at Aiken the night the Longs were killed. He nudged back the curtain and looked out onto the empty street. One name came clearly to mind, but he didn't voice it. “Okay, pal, well, fuck you then,” he said and heard a gasp before he dropped the receiver back into the cradle. So the caller was pious, but weren't they all?

In the morning, the church bells woke him, and he dressed and knotted his tie roughly in front of the mirror on the chifforobe door, unsettled by the call and what had happened later. A line from a hymn drifted through his mind: “Ye who are weary, come home.” He was not weary, and he had no home. He'd lost faith in the idea of home in a bombed-out church back of the lines at Château Thierry, where they'd brought the mangled wounded and the men who'd been charred by the German flamethrowers. A large gilt-framed painting of Christ ascending into heaven had hung on the church's one standing wall. His white robes billowed around him, and he rose serenely through a clear blue sky; the wounds on his hands and feet looked small and bloodless.