Vampires Don't Sparkle! (23 page)

“I’m sorry,” he whispered as he brushed her head with his hand, “but I have known the truth about that demon in men’s flesh for far too long and kept silent. He couldn’t wait for his father, a good man, mind you, to die before he started spending his money. A few financial setbacks had put him in a state most foul. He was one of the investors in the railroad endeavor through Parsons that slowly proved itself to be a Pyrrhic race. You knew, for those who wanted to know or cared to look, from the leer in his eyes that he had killed in his time. And that kill was still on his mind. Deep-set grey eyes, like murky reflecting pools hidden by shadow. His spare silver hair combed back to vainly disguise his bald top. His face swirled of shadows and distrust, helped in no part by his overgrown mustache that gave him the appearance of a character from a dime story western.

“Parsons was a sleepy little hollow, with aspirations of being a city. The last shot from the Civil War still echoed in the air as people moved there. It was the perfect place for a man with a history he wished to forget to lose himself in. Free Negroes and escaped slaves settled the area just outside of the town. A few log cabins and meager shanties, more of an encampment than a town, but it was theirs. As Parsons boomed, so did the Scott Settlement. That was all they wanted. We should’ve seen that. And they knew their place. Most of the time they contented themselves doing the jobs that no white man wanted to do. It was not as if they did not know that the Sheriff and his boys could come in and settle any disputes any way they saw fit. Such was the relationship between Parsons and the Scott Settlement, like a town and her shadow. With the arrival of the trains, Parsons expected its growth spurt to continue.

“But there were only so many train jobs.”

She slept, undisturbed in the glow of pale moonlight. Angelic. An ideal worth protecting.

“I was not worried about myself. I kept to myself, never wanting to draw too much attention. You live a life as long as I have, you learn a few things. I was tired of wars, whether they were revolutionary or civil. It was on such a field of battle where I was changed. It was easy to hide and feed among such death. Soldiering was all I knew. No, that wasn’t true. Mine was the business of death and I was tiring of it. I tried to change and I returned home. Folks didn’t care about my peculiarities of habit and hours kept because I was the best furniture maker in these parts, ’cept’n maybe them folks in Amish country. Plenty of call for me, too, with all the newfound money people were making, not to mention the old monied families desiring to expand their interests. My neighbors, my friends, however, they worried for their jobs, their futures, and how they would take care of their families. People only grumbled, as they were wont to do, when jostled on the street, feelin’ too pressed in by the Scott Settlement. But that fear always simmered underneath. That ‘it could all be taken away’ fear; and just cause times were good and no one was goin’ hungry don’t mean that fear had gone. Fear that Holten preyed on.

“It was an election year and, of course, there had been some lively electioneering going on in these parts during Cleveland’s campaign. Folks knew that all of those Republican voting Negroes were going to turn out in hordes come election day. That didn’t sit well with many folks, especially those who already believed that with all the Negroes migrating here, they were going to vote away jobs from the local people. People thought they were going to lose their jobs. They thought … what was said about their women and children … terrible things. It was no excuse, I just wanted you to understand. You would think they had enough to fear with the things that moved in the night. The creatures they whispered about around the hearth fires. But fear blinds men to their reality. Fear snakes through them, takes hold of their heart and drives them to do dark things in its name. That was the nature of humanity.

“Night dusted down to the song of dusk. A hot, sweaty dusk. We crammed into the courthouse, made even more miserably hot because so many concerned citizens showed up. We had people at the door that only allowed Parsons locals in. Labor leaders fine-tuned the organ of resentment for Holten to soon come play. Rumors tore through the town presenting problems only politicians promised to fix. Rumors that more Negroes were due to be imported in from others states, to steal men’s jobs. The mood became more and more hostile as the night wore on.

“Then that devil Holten stood up.

“‘Parsons has changed,’ he said, ‘and is no longer safe for
good
folk. Right now, in our jail, sits an animal guilty of murder.’

“‘Murder?’ ‘Who?’ The whispers scattered like crickets in the night.

“Holten paused, letting the weight of his words carry, his fingers deftly dancing along the organ. He slowly revealed how earlier that day, Samuel Demory, an ax buried in his neck, was found dead. The blade did not match the savagery of the wound, the veins almost mutilated in the frenzy but that didn’t matter. The ax belonged to his long time workman, Ezekiel Walker. The same man guilty of … deeds most vile against Samuel’s daughter, Rebecca. She still rested in shock, being treated by her mother at the Demory place. Rebecca Demory. She had spark that girl did. Her aristocratic manner she used to try and put on never once hid the gentle soul that did not hesitate to reach out to people. She stirred things within any who saw her. Made it difficult for them to keep their hungers at bay, no matter how God-fearing or disciplined they were.

“‘Our women, our daughters, are not safe. How long will the good folks of Parsons suffer this?’ Holten asked. ‘Our women desire protection and this is the only way we’ll get it.’”

The man paused, stroking the curls of the sleeping girl. The rise and fall of her chest came in regular, even breaths. The way the moonlight fell on her face, swathing her like a shroud, only made her seem more winsome. More vital.

“If it hadn’t have been this, it would have been something else. I know it in my soul. When you have a room full of blasting powder, the kind of spark doesn’t matter. By early evening, the paper ran an editorial: ‘Nab Negro for Attacking Girl.’ The fact that he was already ‘nabbed’ and in jail eluded everyone. The article demanded—without actually calling for—the lynching of the Negro that very night. It ran beside a cartoon of Negroes bribed with beer, chicken, and watermelons carted in to be new voters to the area and steal jobs.

“Because the flames apparently needed a little more fuel.

“Holten deputized everyone. It didn’t seem to matter that he couldn’t deputize his big toe much less anyone else. ‘Niggers were guilty of crimes against whites,’ he shouted to any doubters, ‘that was all the authority I need.’ The women, in their Sunday dresses — all calico and sunbonnets — paraded alongside us as if on their way to a show. A town full of good people, decent people, now overwhelmed by the sudden conviction of the rightness of their actions.

“My convictions I thought were unshakeable. I lived by a simple code which kept me alive for so long. To hear people murmur, there was no doubt that come the next morning, they would be able to stand by what they did to that ‘rabid beast,’ Ezekiel. No one felt any sorrow over righting that wrong. But their shame was soon coming.

“Apparently word had escaped to the Scott Settlement about the storming of the jail and the justice to be carried out on old Ezekiel Walker. The people of Parsons didn’t care. They wanted the Scott folk to know that any one of them could be next if they stepped out of line or forget their place. Even as the good people of Parsons were dispersing after our … bonfire … word got back to us that the Negroes were arming themselves. For a war. Can’t say that I much blame ’em really, folks just defending themselves and their families. But niggers with guns? No one could have foreseen that. The very notion of that was disconcerting. A stand had to be taken. There had to be respect for the rule of law.

“The night color gave courage to many men who had been different during day hours. Men swarmed about, the hour too late for respectable women and children. It was a motley collection of overalls, thick tan shoes, and felt hats. They weren’t thinking any more, not in the way men usually think. It was as if they were seized by a feeling, almost a presence, bigger than themselves, bigger than Holten Owensby, maybe bigger than Parsons. Like worker bees rushing about serving an unseen queen bee. I don’t know what their intentions were, whether we wanted to secure our town or rush into the Scott Settlement with the common goal of beating every Negro in the area. I really think we believed it was more of the former.

“They reached the crest of the hill where their meager cabins sat like Christ seated in judgment over our town. The people of Parsons labored beneath a feast of a moon. Between bolts of pine trees, oil lamps swayed in marched unison to the flop of their feet along the dusty road. Caught up in the urge that first made Cain splinter his brother’s skull with a stone.

“The pull of blood. I recognized the quickening of the pulse. The metronome of the hunt. The taste of copper on the tongue. Blood drew them like a thirsty man to honeysuckle.

“No, not them. Us.

“The plaintive cackle of chickens first announced their presence as they neared the first farm. A shadow peered from behind the henhouse.

“‘Evenin’ gen’lmen,’ Jim Archer said, his old shotgun, reminiscent of a Confederate provosts’ musket, cradled in his arms like a bouquet he’d come a-courtin’ with. He tanned hides down at the Pruitt Shoe Company. A good man. Never tried to cheat you. He should’ve been running a middle buster, plowing his field, not challenging them.

“‘Where you going with that gun, nigger?’ Holten asked. I heard the voice as clear as day, yet it sounded as alien as anything I had heard. Angry, distorted, little more than a growl, not in control of his own faculties. Like a puddle of quicksilver, each of them was a drop that pooled together in one unseemly mass. One voice speaking for the whole.

“‘Thought I might stick around. Use it iffen I have to,’ Jim said in that steady, unintimidated voice of his. By light of day, this might simply have been a man protecting his family’s farms, but that night, right then, he was only a nigger threatening white men with a gun. Part of me wanted to cry ‘Put the gun down and run, Jim. Don’t be so damned proud.’ But my silence, the conspiracy of silence which kept secrets long buried like cancer eating away from the inside continued to hold reign.

“‘We takin’ you down, boy.’

“The thing about quicksilver is that once you drop it, it scatters in little drops that you have to sweep up.

“But you could never track all the drops.

“Men pounced on Jim from the surrounding shadows. They jerked his gun high, with only a single shot fired off. Two men held him while others beat him. Others set his henhouse, and then his own house, ablaze. He must’ve sent his family to a neighbor’s house. I could almost hear his wife pleading with his stubborn mule self to join them. Now the only voice heard was an unsteady, terrified one that cried out to Jesus.

“‘Southern niggers deserve a genuine lynchin’!’ Holten coaxed in mincing school mistress fashion, as if to school boys with their primers, all dirty grins and horrid chuckles. He danced about overturned chairs, climbing atop Jim’s hay-filled wagon for a better view. Holten against the flames, the very picture of the devil incarnate, his features, dark and twisted a wrathful shade of red.

“Frenzied whoops of carousing, between their cheers, their howls, and their imprecations arose at his suggestion. Even as the smoke seared my nostrils, through the tumbling smoke, buried in the flames, Jim was no longer Jim. No longer human, but some vague threat wrapped in flesh. Clubs smashed his head open with brutal efficiency, the poor cuss. loody, unconscious, near death. Lofted into the air, they passed from man to man, a battered ragdoll no one wanted yet everyone wanted a piece of. ‘I got some rope,’ someone yelled. A noose slid around Jim’s blood-slickened neck. As he was hoisted into the air, the rope broke.

“‘Get stronger rope,’ another voice bellowed. It sounded like one of my neighbors, but again, the voice was distorted. Ugly. Barely human. Jim, however, was none the wiser and long past caring. In order to put the rope about Jim’s neck, someone (I?) stuck his (my?) fingers inside the gaping scalp and lift his head by it. What monsters we had become, to think nothing of the fact that my hands were awash in the man’s blood. To drink deep of the violence to quench the thirst for blood.

“‘Grab hold and pull! Pull for Parsons!’ Holten yelled. We pulled Jim about seven feet off the ground and left him hanging in a grove of mulberries and locusts, a blood-smeared, sambo scarecrow. I drew water from his well. Tepid water, tasting like beech trees and old bucket, but it was wet in my parched throat. Though my thirst remained unabated. The evening had barely begun.

“We set afire the shacks of poorer Negroes who lived in the surrounding area. The flaming wood skeletons painted the night in amber hues. We stoned and clubbed Negro men, women, and children, whoever we came across. We were a mess of people tramping about in the mud; muddy despite the fact that it hadn’t rained in quite a spell, but you stomp enough people, your boots’ll get wet just the same.

“I don’t know if you knew or not, but I was a gunner in the war. Worked as swift as we could. Focused, we were. The labor was meticulous or so it seemed to the other calvary men. We was always asked ‘how do you remember what all you have to do in that confusion?’ I became numb to it, if I were ever truly conscious to it to begin with.

“The key was to concentrate on the work. Experience which came in handy that night. We destroyed any saloon or business that catered to Negroes. We overturned the tables, drank the liquor, broke the windows, then torched the place in view of hundreds of spectators.