Night Bird Calling Page 20

  He was reading aloud, and I recognized the words of Oswald Chambers in his voice:

  “Jesus said, ‘In the world ye shall have tribulation,’ i.e., everything that is not spiritual makes for my undoing, but—‘be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.’ I have to learn to score off the things that come against me, and in that way produce the balance of holiness; then it becomes a delight to meet opposition.”

  Could it be God’s will for me to fight opposition—to score it off? Could meeting my challenges ever become a delight? The very thought hurt my head.

  I reached for the bandages covering the top of my skull and eyes, down to my nostrils. My shoulders ached from the effort and I dropped my hands to my sides. Helpless—I feel so helpless like this—the thing I’ve feared most. If Gerald came now, how could I—?

  “Lilliana? Can I get you anything? Anything at all?”

  The nearness of Reverend Willard, the sense of his hand on my arm undid me, but I couldn’t respond. Speaking took too much effort. I lay still, pushing away thoughts of Gerald and trying to remember, trying to separate reality from the nightmare of fire and hoods. I remembered the lights, dancing through the garden. A burning cross. Torches. A dozen or more—carried by white-robed and hooded men. Surely, men. A woman would never wear such a thing. Aunt Hyacinth, what was that robe and hood doing in your cedar chest? A sob escaped.

  “Lilliana.” It was Reverend Willard’s voice again. He sounded so grieved, so lost, so helplessly worried. But I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Are you in pain?”

  I couldn’t answer.

  “The library is saved. A few books were burned, but Olney and Marshall got here in time to put it out. We’ll repaint the room, put everything to rights before you get downstairs. I promise.”

  If only everything was so easy to mend.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  GLADYS HOVERED OVER ME FOR DAYS. Granny Chree came and went with her herbs and poultices. Dr. Vishnevsky visited, too, and finally removed the bandages from my head, checked Granny Chree’s stitches—completed mercifully when I was out cold—consulted with Granny Chree and checked my eyes twice a week with his flashlight, then pronounced me “doing well . . . lucky . . . blessed . . . well cared for . . . a miracle of grace for Lilliana Grace”—his favorite pun.

  It was almost three weeks before all my bandages were removed and I was allowed to walk down the stairs, then cautioned to rest frequently, stick close to home and others, and not worry. In all that time I couldn’t read, but I listened to the radio. Gladys, Celia, and Chester toted it up the stairs together to my room so we could all listen of an evening as I rested.

  Celia liked Dick Tracy best. I think that fussing over me and losing herself in stories and books and radio shows gave her an aura of busyness, an excuse not to think or talk about her father and their visit to the prison. Celia pretended otherwise, but I knew she was ashamed of her family’s situation—and conflicted about her father. If only she could realize that I, too, was ashamed and conflicted about my father. But that wasn’t something I could tell her. At least, I didn’t know how.

  War news dominated everything on the radio. The Atlantic had become a shooting gallery for the Germans intent on destroying Allied shipping lines. The USS Reuben James was torpedoed by a German U-boat on October 31 while escorting a British convoy across the Atlantic. My heart broke for the parents and wives and children and sweethearts of men who’d gone down on the James. I thought of Aunt Hyacinth and her beloved Henry, lost at sea.

  Despite growing threats and accusations between Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States—what Ida Mae called “a shouting match between that Hitler and Mr. Roosevelt”—we had not officially entered the war. As we listened to the radio during our evening hours, Gladys darned socks for the children and we knit scarves and socks for those bombed out in Britain. I didn’t need to strain my eyes to do that, and it seemed the least we could do.

  Fighting our own battles in No Creek, the war seemed far away. Other times we felt it so near we found ourselves listening for bombers in the night. Celia and Chester learned to identify German planes from pictures posted in the general store. I longed for spring and summer and the whip-poor-will’s call.

  I lost count of time before my mind allowed me to recapture all the events from the night of the attack. My shared memories of that night reflected terror in Celia’s and Chester’s eyes. Ironically, I didn’t feel that terror, at least not for myself. I remembered that Scripture, “Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known. What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.”

  I’d been beaten, my home and life threatened, but for the first time I wasn’t afraid. I was one of those, valued at least as much as a sparrow, that Jesus talked about. Those cloaked Klansmen and what they had done in the dark of night would one day be revealed for who and what they were. For all I’d been told throughout my life that I stood on the wrong side of God, I knew in this case I did not. They did.

  This time I had been beaten not because I was willful or sinful or bad to the core or because I’d unwittingly prompted someone to lose his temper, but because I had reached out in love to others. This wasn’t Gerald or my father, men whose authority I’d lived under. These were fiends in white sheets, breaking the laws of God and man, purporting to do it as Christians. Not all pain was the result of punishment from God. Men meted that out. It was a new thought worth pondering and it gave me a boldness, sending a kind of electric surge through every nerve. It was that boldness, a stranger inside my body, that thrilled and would not be shut down.

  I dared not share those thoughts with Gladys. She was terrified for me and for her children, for the house itself. I couldn’t blame her where Celia and Chester were concerned. People who would do this to a woman alone would not hesitate to hurt children, especially if that might help them frighten grown-ups into toeing the line they wanted. Isn’t life in Germany under Adolf Hitler a picture of that?

  But how did the Klan know I’d gone to the Tates? It seemed clear that my beating was in response to those visits, to my tutoring, unless they’d just been waiting all these months to find me alone.

  I hadn’t told Gladys that I’d been helping Marshall with his reading. I knew she’d think, after what had happened, that I should stop. I had no intention of stopping my reading lessons at the Tate house unless Olney or Mercy asked me to. And that’s just where I was going the first time I felt well enough to walk out on my own.

  Gladys guessed or perhaps Mercy had told her of my visits and begged me to stay at home. She even enlisted Reverend Willard’s support when he came by to see how I was doing.

  “Are you suggesting I do their bidding and hide? Or run away with my tail between my legs?”

  He blushed. “Not at all. Leaving is the last thing I hope you’ll do. But I do think you need to be careful. The fact that this was not one deranged person acting alone but an entire group of men means that they’ve egged one another on, and they’ll be less afraid to repeat—or reinforce—their actions. When people cast aside restraint, they feel empowered. I believe you know that.”

  I turned away from his pointed stare. I did know. Once a person starts hitting or hurting another person, it becomes easier and easier to do. I had seen and lived it all my life, and Aunt Hyacinth had warned me of the same.

  Yet I still couldn’t reconcile Aunt Hyacinth’s apparent disgust and hatred of the Klan with what I’d found in her room. I needed to understand what that regalia was doing in my aunt’s
hope chest, if that had anything to do with the secret shame Aunt Hyacinth had talked about and Mama’s running away. I needed to trust someone who’d long known my family.

  Gladys had gone to make tea for the three of us when I asked, “Reverend Willard, have you always lived in No Creek?”

  “Born and raised—until I went to seminary.”

  “And your parents?” It seemed an innocent question. I’d never heard him speak of them.

  He looked away, then down at his hands, then back at me, searching my eyes. Finally he spoke. “I spent most of my life with a friend of Miz Hyacinth’s—Lucy Newcomb. My parents were killed in a house fire. Burned alive.”

  Horror crept through my veins. I couldn’t keep it from my face.

  “I was eight, spending a week camping with a group of friends—out by Trout Lake near Boone. It was the first time I’d ever gone away from home. When I came back, our house was gone, my parents’ bodies burned beyond recognition.”

  I couldn’t get my words out. I swallowed and tried again. “I’m sorry. So very sorry. I had no idea.”

  He stood and walked to the parlor window, newly replaced. “I don’t speak of it.”

  “Was it . . . ?” But how could I ask him?

  “An accident?” He snorted, a combination of disgust and sob. “The sheriff said so. Said lightning struck.”

  “Lightning?”

  “No matter that there’d been no rain, not a cloud in the sky.”

  What does that mean?

  “My parents came from rural New York, before I was born—a long line of abolitionists. Does that help?”

  I tried to make connections. “Are you saying the Civil War was alive in No Creek?”

  “The war’d been over for sixty years. Most of the folks hereabout sided with the Union, but they didn’t object to slavery—at least not for the most part, not openly. Most supported it—a way of life that had always been, in their minds, and ought to continue. Some objected to forming a Confederacy for fear of losing their business dealings and profits in the North.”

  “I never understood that—that someone would have objected to forming the Confederacy, yet still supported slavery.”

  “There were only a couple of large plantations here—not like farther east. Most families who owned slaves held only a few. But those who owned more ran the county. Slave trading, auctioning—before the war—was common. Even freed men and women weren’t safe from slave dealers—or slave stealers. From what I’ve heard, pattyrollers ran a heyday here. They were ruthless if they caught a slave out after dark without written permission from his owner, and sometimes they didn’t pay any mind to a man’s plea that he was a freedman.”

  “What happened?”

  “The war changed everything.”

  “No, I mean what happened to those caught out after dark by the—what did you call them?”

  “Pattyrollers. Patrollers—always ‘respected citizens’ and property owners. They were known to hang the man or woman up by their thumbs and beat them till the blood ran. Then rub salt in the wounds. If they didn’t know who they belonged to—or sometimes if they did—they might steal them and sell them downriver.”

  I thought I’d be sick. But it explained so much. This was where the people of No Creek had come from. This was the heritage that had birthed the Klan in their blood.

  “There’s even a story about a widow who owned slaves. She was good to them, but the local minister took her to court and had her declared ‘a fit subject for the asylum’ and incapable of caring for her property. He convinced the courts to declare him guardian of her estate, then sold her slaves. Neighbors said he wouldn’t have cared a whit about her if she hadn’t owned slaves.”

  My breath caught. Similarities in my story made me cringe. “A minister? And people tolerated that? The court tolerated it? The church?”

  Reverend Willard sighed, weariness in the shaking of his head. “Of course they should have known better, done better. They made the law of the land their plumb line, instead of the Bible they espoused from their pulpit.” And then he went quiet for a moment. “How different is it today? People want what they want and they find a way to make their sin palatable to society—or legal.” He looked at me, and I knew he saw more than our words said. “We both know that.”

  I looked away. He went on.

  “Most people, especially those farther up the mountain, were poor and too busy scrabbling out a living from the land to even think much about slavery. For them the war was about breaking up the Union, and the Union was sacred. Their ancestors, mostly Scots and Irish, had fought and died to help establish it. Few here cottoned to the idea of a Confederacy—until President Lincoln called for troops. They refused to fire on their own neighbors and kin, so they enlisted in the Confederacy in droves. Others were forced into it and resented it. Some even hid out in the mountains, refusing conscription, refusing to fight.”

  “But you said the war changed everything. Why, then, is it . . . how it is now?”

  “Now they’re the end products of forced Reconstruction and lauded Jim Crow laws. They deeply believe every created being has its distinct and God-given place, separated by color, class, clan, ethnic origin, religion—whatever they were born into was God’s choosing, and those lines are not to be traversed. No middle ground. Just because the South lost the war and slavery, it didn’t change people’s thinking. Wars don’t do that. Once the myth of the ‘lost cause’ became popular, folks even romanticized the war—if you can imagine.”

  “And your parents?”

  “My parents’ grandparents were active in the Underground Railroad into Canada and proud of it. Mama and Daddy taught me that color doesn’t matter, that class is only a fallen man-made notion and that every man has the responsibility to better himself as he’s able. I think they pretended not to see, not to hear what folks said behind their backs, as if that would make the snides go away. They never let it keep them from friendships they valued.”

  “And you think that’s why—why they—”

  “It took me a long time to understand what might have happened. Even then, I couldn’t comprehend it—who would do such a thing. My parents were good people, kind people. They didn’t try to force their views down anyone’s throat, but they did live their lives openly.”

  I heard the intensity in his voice.

  “Trouble is, it was just their kind that the Klan was formed against—unwanted Yankee notions of progress and the fear of colored folks rising—becoming equals, owning land, being educated, voting, running for and holding political office.”

  He kneaded the back of his neck. “I’ve never told anyone this,” he confided, still turned away. “But it was when I started asking questions about what had happened, how it could possibly have happened like the sheriff said, that a pastor who’d come to No Creek for revival befriended me, took me aside. He offered me the opportunity to go to school and seminary far from here. He changed my life. He was a good man, a great pastor. But I’ve often wondered if someone here sponsored my education. I don’t see how he could have afforded all that on a pastor’s salary.”

  “Aunt Hyacinth?”

  Now he looked straight at me. “I’ve wondered. He was a good friend of hers. I even asked her once in a roundabout way, but she refused to talk about it.” Minutes stretched between us. Finally Reverend Willard left the window and sat across from me. “She’d been my teacher. She knew everything that had happened to me and to my family—and to every other child in the community. She was the one who’d set things in motion for me to live with Miss Lucy, an older maiden lady, when my parents died. She’s the one who deeded Olney Tate that portion of the prime tobacco land his father had hoped to buy before he was killed—the land he farms beyond his cabin. Wishons own most of the acreage out that way, the part that went to auction, but thanks to Miz Hyacinth, Olney owns his small plot, adjacent to the Wishons.

  “By the time I started asking questions, Miss Lucy was too infirm to keep
track of a growing adolescent boy. I believe Miz Hyacinth knew that. I think, if she was the one responsible, that she wanted to protect me from myself—from my questions and the repercussions they might bring. She knew a thing or two about the Klan.”

  What did she know? How did she know?

  He sighed. “I believe I may owe her a greater debt than I know for certain. Greater than I was ever able to thank her for.”

  “I had no idea she’d deeded land to the Tates. Is that why Olney came whenever she called?”

  “I’m sure he was grateful, but in my opinion, and I believe in your aunt’s, he far more than earned that land. Regardless, we both owe her a lot. A number of folks hereabouts do.”

  Aunt Hyacinth’s hidden Klan regalia grew more mysterious in my mind than ever. “You were a wonderful friend to her, Reverend Wil—Jesse. That was the greatest possible gift. You were eyes and ears in her blindness and the community she craved.”

  “Until you came and enriched her life immeasurably. I hope you know how you gladdened her heart.”

  That made my own uncertain heart ache all the more.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  THEY WERE NEARLY TO NO CREEK when Celia overheard Janice Richards, three school bus seats back, bragging to Norma Jackson and the cluster of girls beside her.

  “So all I did was tell Ida Mae what I’d seen plain as day—Mrs. Swope goin’ down to the Tates’ one day with a satchel and another day with books—back and forth once, maybe two times in a week. Anybody’d know she was over there teachin’ that colored boy to read. I never had to spell it out.”

  “But you heard what happened to her, didn’t you? You reckon Ida Mae told? You reckon she knows who’s who—in the Klan?” Peggy Sue Brown hoarse whispered.

  “Doesn’t everybody? Anyway, Ida Mae probably didn’t tell a soul. There was a checker game goin’ strong in the back of the store the day I was in. How could I help it if half the men in the county was there?”