The Tree of Forgetfulness (20 page)

So Aubrey had been talking, insinuating. “Well, he would know,” he said. “The crowd ended about here,” he said. “I had worked my way to the middle of it when the shooting started.”

It came back to him now with startling force. The boom of the shotgun, the pop of pistol shots; the way he'd been pressed against the back of the man in front of him, pushed by the man behind as they surged forward as though they'd become one thing, a thing that opened its mouth and made a sound between a shout and a groan.

After the shooting stopped and the echo sheered off through the trees, he started moving forward again, but his mind was blank, and it stayed blank until he got to the front of the crowd, where the men with torches stood, and he could see the boys lying in their blood,
hear the sounds that the woman was making. “She was all shot up, but she was still alive,” he said. “She was crawling on the ground with her dress on fire, and someone came up behind me and put a pistol in my hand. ‘Go on,' he said. “And when I didn't, he took it back and shot her dead. At my feet,” he said. “Someone shot her dead at my feet.” He wanted to tell Barrett how it had been to see a woman killed and to try and apply the words that had been spoken in the lawyer's office that day—
justice
and
the righting of wrongs
—to the mayhem and carnage of that moment. But Barrett wanted something else.

“By ‘someone,' ” he said, “you mean the sheriff?” His pencil was moving, but he watched Howard as he wrote, as if he were drawing him.

Then, just as clearly as if he were lifting the newspaper from a bundle on the platform down at the depot, he saw the headline: “Witness Hints He Knows Who Fired Fatal Shot.”
An eyewitness account by a prominent local businessman
, Barrett would call what Howard had told him, and the sheriff would fill in the rest. And then what the sheriff had begun and he had come here to finish would start again. Resentment and revenge, revenge and resentment: a big wheel turning, carrying him and the sheriff through battle after battle until both were dead; turning long after they were dead if they'd tied their children to it. He thought of Lewis, chained to that wheel until the wrong the sheriff had done his father was finally avenged. “It was dark,” he said. “There was a big crowd, and it was dark. There were guns all through that crowd. It could have been anybody.”

Barrett made a disgusted noise low in his throat. “So you hauled me out here to tell me that it was dark?” he said. “God Almighty, damn.” He shook his head, spat on the ground. “Or did you mean to tell me that it was you who shot her dead?”

“No,” he said. “I told you, someone took the gun away.”

“Which brings us back to the sheriff.”

“It could have been anybody. I did not turn around.”

“Too dark to tell one buzzard from the other?” Barrett said.

“If that's how you want to look at it.” He wouldn't be provoked.

“What a waste,” Barrett said. “What an insult to the memory of thousands of men whose killers will never be known not to name killers
who can be, and are. So tell me again, what exactly did you do that night?”

“Nothing,” Howard said. “God help me. I did nothing.”

And then, almost as if speaking to himself, Barrett said, “So that's how you got blood on your shoes.”

The breeze had stopped, and the trees stood motionless; their long, straight shadows fell across the clearing. Howard heard the rasping pulse of cicadas and, from somewhere far away, the baying of hounds. He saw himself from far away too, and he imagined he had a gun in his hand. He raised it and fired, and Barrett fell and lay as still and empty as any of the dead; an emptiness so complete that once you saw it on a human face, you could never again believe that death was anything but oblivion.

He imagined himself driving back to town, setting the gun on Aubrey Timmerman's desk, and telling him what he'd done. At his trial he would claim self-defense. “If killing Curtis N. R. Barrett was evil,” he would say, “it was a necessary evil, committed in defense of a marriage, a family, a community, a way of life.” No jury of his peers would convict him because every man among them would know what self he had been defending and why.

He would gladly have left Barrett there if the man hadn't sprinted to the car as Howard was turning around, jumped onto the running board, and pulled himself inside. As soon as they were back on the highway, Howard pushed the Ford into cruising gear. “Look here, Aimar,” Barrett said, with the false heartiness of a man trying to bluff his way out of a bad situation, “what I said about your shoes was pure speculation.” He waved his hand through the air, erasing the words. “I know from personal experience that if you're standing close when someone's shot, the blood finds you. See what I'm saying?”

“What kind of fool do you take me for?” Howard watched the road ahead as though he were following a trail of bloody footprints that led from his wife to Minnie. No doubt, Minnie had been given the shoes to clean and the story of the dove field to contemplate. But Minnie would have had her own story. She'd come out onto the porch of her house that morning, shading her eyes against the rising sun. And then,
because there was no Zeke without Minnie, no Minnie without Zeke, the trail led straight to the boy whom he'd fed and housed and loaned money to buy his horse and wagon, the one he'd trusted to drive to the river landing and back and paid top dollar to do it and helped in every way it was possible for a white man to help a colored boy. That same boy had shown the shoes to Curtis N. R. Barrett and told the reporter what his mother had told him and given Howard a permanent place on Barrett's list of those who were up to their necks in gore, implicated to the highest degree.

H
E WAS USED
to the calls from the governor's office now; he knew how to read the signs. On the good days the governor himself was on the line. “Aubrey,” he'd say, with a big sigh, “need to see you again, son.” On those days the sheriff could relax, because when Governor McCormick claimed him as his flesh and blood, he could count on a warm welcome at the statehouse. His Honor was a small neat man with a soft moon face and mild eyes; he perspired in every season, was forever mopping his face and neck and palms with a big monogrammed handkerchief. On the good days the governor would bustle out of his office and rest one moist hand on the sheriff's shoulder, tell his pretty secretary to bring his hardworking boy a Coca-Cola. Then they'd stroll into His Honor's office, where the windows and their green velvet drapes almost touched the ceiling and oil portraits of the men who'd gone before them into glory looked down from every wall. Wade Hampton was there, Cole Blease and John C. Calhoun and Pitchfork Ben Tillman—in profile, to hide his missing eye. To the side of the governor's desk stood three flags: Stars and Stripes on the left, the palmetto and crescent moon of South Carolina on the right, and in the center, a step in front of the others, the flag of the Confederacy. The men on the walls would have disapproved of any other ranking.

On the good days, once they'd settled themselves on opposite sides of the governor's gleaming mahogany desk, the glass of cola was brought and set down on a glass coaster in front of the sheriff, and the secretary went out, closing the tall double doors behind her.
Then Aubrey Timmerman could get down to the business of bringing the governor up to date on the progress of the investigation in Aiken County.

Early this morning, however, the pretty secretary had called and spoken to him in a crisp voice without a flicker of welcome in it: “Hold for the governor, Sheriff Timmerman.” That was the sign that this would be a bad day, and he knew why.

For the last few days Gibson's blue touring car had been seen gliding up and down Laurens Street or staggering along a washboard road out in the county or nosed up to a small white house in one of the Horse Creek Valley mill villages, and this meant that a fresh batch of affidavits would soon be on their way to governor. Worst of all, two days ago Gibson's car had been parked for a solid hour in front of John Moseley's house in Graniteville, and it wasn't the first time the governor's detective had paid the old man a visit. Hearing that Gibson had visited Moseley again had made the sheriff's heart clench for a second, followed by the lighting of a deep and murderous anger at the injustice of the role the vindictive old lunatic had come to play in this business. In every corner of Moseley's haunted house of a mind, the old man kept ledgers in which he traced the strands of the web of corruption he swore was spun all over Aiken County, insinuating to Gibson, to Barrett, to anyone who would sit still long enough to hear him out, that from the lowliest jailer and chain gang guard up through the ranks of local law enforcement, the whole county was honeycombed with Klan and that the hand of the Invisible Empire had pulled the strings in the Long killings.

John Moseley knew these things because he'd once been a big shot in the Klan, back when it was the one true Klan and its stalwarts were the Red Shirt men of Hamburg and Ellenton, members of the local gentry and high-office holders whose names never appeared on any membership rolls. But then, so his account went, along came the thieves and thugs and murderers and bootleggers, the hutch dwellers and croppers, the white trash and corrupt lawmen, who drove the good men out until the Klan you had now was a rump Klan, a gang instead of an empire, lawbreakers instead of defenders of the law. The sheriff
thought he might need to remind His Honor, in case he had forgotten, that two of the governor's cousins were on Leland Dawson's list; they were all in this thing together.

Waiting for the governor, the sheriff tapped a pencil on the desk, looked out the window. It was a brilliant winter day, the light as clear as water in a tall clean glass, sunlight flashing like diamonds through the dark canopy of leaves on the water oak in the yard between the courthouse and the jail. He wished he could go out into that beautiful world, tip back a chair against that old oak and take his ease; every man had the right to do that once in a while. He wished he had his old job back: steering the trolley car, collecting fares, swinging the door open and shut at every stop, sending Negroes to the rear or telling them to wait for the next car if white people had taken all the seats. Brakes and gears and rolling down the track, keeping to your timetable—that was all there was to it. The trolley ran straight as an arrow out Trolley Line Road from Aiken to Augusta, Augusta to Aiken, and looking back on it now, it seemed that he'd steered that car through a simpler world, a simpler time, where colored and white had
both
been happier. Now he rued the day he'd said, “You bet,” when Bud Glover asked was he interested in becoming a lawman.

Then the governor was on the line. “Sheriff Timmerman,” he said, “I will see you in my office at three this afternoon, sir.”

And so, once again, the sheriff sped along the hard clay highway toward Columbia, glaring at the leftover cotton bolls on the brown plants in the fields beside the road as if they'd sworn affidavits against him too. He'd gotten wind of the latest batch of documents; he still had friends who wished him well and wanted him to stay out in front of what was coming at him, like Ella Rainey's latest contribution to the public good.

“Sheriff Timmerman came up and asked did I know any of the people who had taken the Negroes. Just the sheriff and Bates, I said. I did not tell him I knew Smith and Gaddis. He turned pale as a ghost and said it wasn't him I'd seen. I told him that he was the only sheriff I knew. He said it wasn't him, and he left.”

He drove on through the drab endless fields, rehearsing how he'd respectfully ask the governor to recall that he'd risked his life one time to save those three on the night Earl Glover was killed; he didn't see how he could have been expected to do it twice for three murderers who were guilty as sin.

“Later jailer Bates brought our supper. I asked him if one of the Longs came clear, and he said, ‘Yes, but probably not for long.' Before this I saw Sheriff Timmerman and State Constable Gaddis talking out in the yard. Mr. Gaddis started to walk off, and Sheriff Timmerman said, ‘We will finish this case tonight.' I heard this as I was laying in the window.”

Laying in the window
. That detail right there should tell His Honor something about the credibility of the affidavit swearers that J. P. Gibson had flushed from cover this time. He drove on toward Columbia, building his case. On the night in question, he'd say, maybe he did make some errors in judgment; he'd admitted as much on a previous visit. He'd even allowed that he was as angry as any other citizen about the possibility that those three might waltz away scot-free. This time he would put a bigger question to Governor McCormick: If Aubrey Timmerman was the cold-blooded man those affidavits made him out to be, why did he scorch his hands beating out the fire in a dead colored girl's dress? He would hold out his hands to the governor again, let the welts and the new pink skin plead his case. No sir, he'd say, he didn't mind one bit going over the story again; in fact, he welcomed the opportunity because every time he told it, he remembered more details that made the whole picture sharper.

In their affidavits all those people claimed that they'd heard him on the stairs. Fair enough, goddamnit, he'd say; they did. He was man enough to own up to a moment of irresolution. He'd started up, yes sir, then went back down. “But let me ask you something as one Christian man to another,” he'd say. “Can't a man's moment of weakness be redeemed by a later show of strength? Isn't redemption just about the whole message taught by our Lord's life, death, and resurrection?”

“Then the cage door rattled and in a few minutes the lever clicked and the door flew open. ‘What are you going to do with that cigar box?' somebody asked. And the Long boy said, ‘I'm going to carry it home.' And another man said, ‘You don't need that damn thing,' and I heard it hit the floor about that time. In a few minutes I heard the girl, Bessie Long, yell: ‘Lord have mercy,' she said. ‘What you all going to do with me?' In a few minutes I heard the automobiles go off and the Longs hollering as far as I could hear. I did not hear any scuffling in the jail. Nobody pulled the cover off my head, I was wrapped up in it too far.”