The Year the Lights Came On (26 page)

For a moment, Wesley stood frozen, staring up at the covered mouth of the cave head-high above him. He seemed to be listening for a heartbeat, a faint warning that Freeman was there and did not want to be found. Then he called, barely in a whisper, “Freeman?”

There was no answer. Wesley stepped closer. I followed, touching him. “Freeman? You there?” I called.

No answer. Wesley pulled quickly up the slight incline and pushed away the doorway of brush leading into the cave, and crawled inside. “C’mon,” he said.

Freeman was not in the cave, but he had been there. We could feel his presence, as though the heat of his body had coated the hard clay walls. Just enough light slipped in under the lip of the opening to prove Freeman had spent his hiding there. There were dead coals of a fire, a mattress of pine needles, squashed-out rabbit
tobacco cigarettes, and wadded wax paper from the sandwiches Mother had prepared.

“Wonder how long he’s been gone?” I asked, rolling over on Freeman’s pine-needle bed.

Wesley was on his knees, studying the cave. He touched the dead embers. “Don’t know,” he decided. “Don’t think he’s been here today.”

Wesley crawled on his knees to one side of the cave, where Freeman had dug out a shelf for his Grit newspapers and rabbit tobacco. There were two paper sacks rolled into bundles and shoved back on the dirt ledge. Wesley picked up one of the paper sacks.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Don’t know.”

Wesley rolled nearer to the opening, in the light, and gently squeezed the bundle. “Feels like clothes.”

“See if it is,” I urged. “Freeman won’t care.”

Wesley did not like this invasion of privacy, but he had a commitment: he must find Freeman, or at least learn if he was safe. “Well, I guess,” he mumbled. He peeled open the sack and shook its contents onto the ground. It was a pair of pants, rolled into a tight wad.

“Just his pants,” Wesley said. “Guess he changed when he got them clothes off his mama’s clothesline.”

I picked up the pants and unrolled them. There was a long tear on the thigh of the right leg.

“Wait a minute,” ordered Wesley. “What’s that?”

He slipped nearer to the light and pushed the pants down into the cave’s opening. He mumbled something I did not hear.

“What?” I demanded.

“Blood. That’s blood on his pants,” answered Wesley, his voice
suddenly tense and worried. “Blood all over that leg. Lots of blood.”

A quick, warm breeze whipped over my face. Wesley looked at me. He was holding his breath. The pupils of his eyes widened. “Wes?” I whispered, “Did you feel that?”

Wesley moved instinctively away from the opening of the cave. “It’s nothin’,” he answered, trying to regain his courage. “Nothin’. Just your imagination.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “No, it’s not. You felt it, and you can’t say you didn’t. You saw that cat last night, too, Wesley. You saw it, and you were thinkin’ the same thing I was thinkin’. Willie Lee told us about cats.”

“Maybe we did feel somethin’, but maybe it was just the wind.”

“I know it was the wind. Wind of The Doom.”

“Shuttup.”

“Let’s go home, Wesley,” I pleaded.

“We’re not goin’ anywhere until we look this place over good. Get that other sack up there.”

“You get it. I’m not touchin’ anything.”

Wesley turned in disgust and knee-crawled to the shelf. “I should’ve left you at the house. You get scared at the drop of a hat, you know that?”

The other paper sack was far back on the ledge. Wesley pulled it out and opened it. He rolled to his left and shook out Freeman’s shirt in the light. The shirt was caked with dried blood, brown-red and sickening.

“Oh, Lord,” Wesley sighed.

“Somethin’s happened, Wes. Somethin’ bad. You think Freeman’s dead?”

“No, he’s not dead,” Wesley said, tugging at my arm. “C’mon, let’s take these things to Daddy.”

“What if somebody’s out there?” I resisted. “What if somebody’s out there waitin’ to kill us, Wesley? Waitin’ to cut our throats.” I was becoming hysterical.

“Nobody’s out there. Nobody. Now, c’mon…”

Wesley broke the sentence in half. He looked toward the opening of the cave, and then looked at me. His face was ashen.

And then I felt it: a cool, kissing breeze, stroking my face with invisible, icy fingers.

13

“THAT’S WHAT THE BOYS SAID
and that’s what they found, Odell. Don’t know what it means, but I thought you’d better be told.”

Odell Boyd listened in silence to my father. He was sitting on a sack of fertilizer in his barn, holding a cigarette with long, dead ash hanging stubbornly to the burning stub. He looked old and lost. His face was sunken from sleepless nights, and the gray of his hair and second-day beard was a gray of burden and hopelessness that had been suppressed by false good times as a dealer in premium corn whiskey. Odell Boyd had never learned to protest his reputation as a community fool and a harmless jester. Sadly, he had accepted that reputation as his calling and he had learned to glow in the backslapping, good-timing moments of recognition when he would be called on to perform his sorry comedies. Freeman was not like his father; Freeman had learned early to fight, and his determined individualism had won respect. Freeman refused to suffer in private and pretend in public that nothing bothered
him; he refused to do stunts for a laugh. Freeman understood what it meant to be regarded as a joke. He had lived with it all his life.

“I appreciate y’all comin’ to tell me,” Odell Boyd said slowly. “You guess the boy’s hurt bad?”

“He could be,” my father said. “That’s a lot of blood on his clothes. My boys should’ve said somethin’ about him not playing his flute last night, Odell. Maybe we could’ve been out already, lookin’.”

“Yessir,” Wesley said. “We should’ve said somethin’, Mr. Boyd.”

“That’s all right, boys,” answered Odell Boyd. “Y’all been mighty good to Freeman.”

My father began to pace, thinking. He said, “Was there anything else, boys? Anything about where that cave is? Anything at all?”

I remembered Willie Lee and Baptist. “Yeah, Daddy,” I said. “We…”

Wesley interrupted. “The Pretlows live down that way. Maybe they saw somethin’.”

“Wesley,” I said. “What about…?”

“You know the Pretlows, Daddy.”

“Wesley…” I repeated. “What about…?”

“Yeah, son. I know them,” answered my father.

Wesley glared at me and I knew he meant for me to be quiet.

Odell Boyd fumbled with his tobacco tin. “They’s mean, them Pretlows. Freeman never had much to do with that bunch.”

“Me and Colin can look around this afternoon and early tonight. Maybe we can run across Freeman, or where he’s been,” Wesley said, ignoring me.

My father agreed. “Odell, I guess we can stop around at some
houses this afternoon and get some people out by in the morning.”

“Get Dover,” advised Wesley. “He’ll be glad to help out.”

*

Wesley and I left to cross the swamp from Odell Boyd’s house. We walked, not talking, until we were well into the woods, then Wesley stopped and sat on a cushion of needles.

“Look,” he said, “I knew what you was wantin’ to tell Daddy, about Willie Lee and Baptist, but that might’ve got ’em in trouble.”

“But, we heard…”

“I know what we heard. Now, think about it a minute. If Willie Lee and Baptist are mixed up in them bloody clothes, it can’t mean but two things: either they did somethin’ to Freeman or they helped him out.”

“They didn’t do nothin’ to Freeman,” I protested.

“Well, I don’t believe that either. So, that leaves helpin’ him, if they’re mixed up in it at all.”

“Wesley, I know that,” I said. “I’m not that dumb. And it seems to me Daddy ought to know it, too.”

Wesley picked up a pine needle and began to braid it. “All right, so we tell Daddy about it,” he reasoned. “What’s gonna happen? Daddy and Mr. Boyd’s gonna go straight to Willie Lee and ask him, and what’s Willie Lee gonna do?”

It was a good question. “I don’t know,” I mumbled.

“Well, he’d just stand there like he was deaf and dumb and not say the first thing, that’s what.”

“Why?”

“Willie Lee’s not about to get involved in somethin’ that may get the law on him.”

“That don’t make sense, if he didn’t do nothin’ but help.”

“It’s what Willie Lee thinks. After what happened to July last year, he won’t say a word.”

“Who?”

“July. Lives over in the Bio community. He’s Willie Lee’s cousin. They caught him last year for all that stealin’ and for tryin’ to set up a shotgun trap for some man.”

I did not remember anyone named July and I had never heard of a shotgun trap.

Wesley explained. “July had it rigged to go off when the man opened his front door. Would’ve killed him for sure.”

“Did it?”

“What?”

“Kill him?”

“No, it didn’t kill him,” Wesley answered, puzzled because I had to ask such ridiculous questions. “He came in the back door just as July was goin’ out a window.”

“He was lucky.”

“Luck didn’t have all that much to do with it. The man never used his front door, but July didn’t know that. I reckon he thought all white people use front doors and all colored people use back doors.”

I was fascinated by the story, and I could understand why Willie Lee would be silent. The law believed in bad blood as readily as it believed in fact, and the law would not hesitate to point out that bad blood flowed in cousins as well as in brothers and sisters.

“What’re we gonna do?” I asked.

Wesley tossed the braided pine needle aside and began to work on another. Finally he answered, “We’re gonna stay around here, just wandering around, until sundown. Then we’ll slip up to Willie Lee’s house and see if we can see anything.”

“What if Willie Lee takes a shot at us?”

“We’ll yell out, that’s what. Willie Lee’s not about to go shootin’ at us.”

The plan seemed workable. There would be enough cover, behind trees and Willie Lee’s barn, to hide, and if we could coax Willie Lee’s dog, Big Boy, to us, we would have no fret of warning. Big Boy knew us as well as he knew Willie Lee’s own children.

*

Willie Lee lived with his wife, Little Annie, and their children in a tenant farm house owned by Hugh Shivers. The house had once been a sharecropper’s place and a white family named Pennefeather had lived there, portioning out their meager living in an unwritten agreement with Hugh Shivers. But the land had become anemic and had been planted in pine seedlings. The Pennefeathers moved to another sharecropper’s house and another unwritten agreement, and Willie Lee moved into the Shivers’ place (tenant houses were always called someone’s place). Since he did not farm, Willie Lee paid rent and did occasional odd jobs for the Shivers family.

Wesley and I loved Willie Lee’s home. It was open and warm and there was always the gaiety of small, brown babies, wallowing in play and in aggravation. Little Annie kept the red-sand yard swept clean of leaves and chicken droppings with her dogwood-brush brooms, and she had decorated the windows of the house with hand-me-down curtains that she had dyed bright red. Often, after fishing with Willie Lee and Baptist, we would return to the house and parch peanuts or eat watermelon that had been put in a bucket and cooled in the deep water of the well, and we would listen in wonder to the musical tales and arguments of those strangely funny brothers.

We wandered aimlessly, talking, deciding that Freeman was not badly hurt, or he would have stayed in his cave. We were sure Willie Lee and Baptist had aided him and we were convinced that we would find Freeman that night, at Willie Lee’s house.

By late afternoon, we were below our home, and Wesley decided to tell Mother we would be out at night. Mother fretted. If something had happened to Freeman, if someone had caught him and sliced him out of meanness, then that same someone could surprise us. “We won’t go far,” Wesley promised. “We won’t even go in the swamp.” Mother reluctantly agreed. She knew Wesley would not break his promise.

We did not need to go into the swamp. Willie Lee’s house was across Beaverjam Creek. It was near the swamp, but not in it.

The moon was at quarter, a suspended cradle rocking gracefully in a garden of stars. It was bright enough for light, dark enough for hiding. We did not use the flashlight Mother had insisted we carry. We did not need it. Wesley and I knew the road to Willie Lee’s by memory, by step-count, and by feel.

Wesley decided to circle Willie Lee’s house, to slip through his pasture and approach from behind the barn. “It’ll take a little longer,” he judged, “but if Big Boy starts barkin’, Willie Lee may think its nothin’ more’n a fox, or something.”

Big Boy did bark. Once. We stopped and froze. We were in the pasture, very near the barn.

Wesley whistled softly and we heard Big Boy thumping across the yard, wagging his tail and panting. He slipped under the barbed wire fence and trotted toward us, whining his dog’s hello. “Good boy,” Wesley whispered, patting Big Boy and hugging him close. “Good boy. C’mon, now, keep quiet.”