The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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СКАЧАТЬ THREE

      

      GENUS JACKSON HAD BEEN DEAD TWO HOURS WHEN A POWERFUL knock came at Sheriff Cleave’s door. He lived in the quarters below the jailhouse in the Third Ward, and he thought the ruckus was his fool guardsman, reporting a problem with a prisoner. Best he could recall the only one up there was Wolfie Brunswick, the raggedy-bearded drunk of a vet who was drying out in the bullpen. Last night Sheriff and the guard had rolled their chairs into the cell to play Georgia Skins with him, Sheriff and the guard drinking Cotton Gin in the office between hands, drinking it in the teacups that had belonged to Sheriff’s grandmother, clinking the cups daintily together, growing more and more boisterous, until they were drunker than the drunk himself and the drunk was beating them soundly, a fact that threw them into greater and greater hilarity, and more and more teacups of gin. They were playing for peanuts, real peanuts, and the dust of them was still caked in Sheriff’s teeth.

      It wasn’t the fool guardsman at the door. It was George Wilson, a coat over his nightclothes, his silver head bare. Rarely had Sheriff seen him out of his pearl white suit. At the curb, his Buick idled. There was no driver waiting.

      Sheriff, still in nightclothes himself, covered his own head with the hat hanging by the door. His first thought was the mill. A quarrel between two drunk lintheads on the graveyard shift. Maybe a quarrel with Wilson himself. There had been unrest in the mill village, you could say, doffers and spinners complaining of too many hours and too little pay, as folks were given to. Folks not showing up for their shifts, or showing up drunk. If they were drunk, they were drunk on Juke Jesup’s Cotton Gin, which Wilson ran himself, if “run” was the word for it, for it didn’t run far beyond the county, and mostly ran his own help into the ground. But he did not suggest this to George Wilson. It was Sheriff’s job to look away, and besides, Sheriff too was drunk on it. Years before, Sheriff’s father and Wilson’s brothers had all followed their fortunes north, and Sheriff and Wilson had stayed behind in the little county seat that no one beyond twenty miles could find on a map, and so their loyalty to each other was a tonic for their shame—that together they might make themselves worthy.

      “It’s Jesup,” George Wilson said, standing at the door. So it wasn’t the mill—it was the gin. And then Sheriff thought of himself, of his own badge. Things had gone sour between Wilson and Jesup. Sour as they’d gone in the mill. Sheriff didn’t know why, but he could smell it. When Wilson said, “He’s gone and killed my man on the farm,” Sheriff had to hold himself up in the doorway. “He’ll say it’s Freddie, but it ain’t Freddie. Well, Freddie was there—I saw him with my own eyes when he come back to the mill—but he’s gone now.”

      “Gone where?”

      “Hell if I know. Gone.”

      “Come in, George. Sit down.”

      “No, thank you kindly. The man is still there. He’s there in the road at the mill, what’s left of him. Freddie cut him from his truck.”

      “From his truck?”

      “The men at the mill said he’d … he’d defiled Jesup’s daughter.” A thread of spit sprung from Wilson’s mouth and caught in his mustache. “That’s why he did it. I reckon Juke’s the one tied him to my grandson’s truck. But there’s a whole mess of them come out from the Straight.”

      Sheriff had to look down at his feet. That a mob had gone through the county and lynched a man without so much as a courtesy whisper, that Sheriff had been having a tea party while it happened, that he hadn’t been given a chance to at least provide the necessary performance of peacekeeping—it was an embarrassment.

      But maybe it was for the best, that his hands should be clean. The guardsman and the prisoner would vouch for him, when the papers came around.

      He said, “What is it I can do for you, George?”

      George Wilson tugged on his earlobe and sucked his square white teeth. “Quiet it down, honey, for pity’s sake.”

      So Sheriff mounted his motorcycle and followed Wilson’s car back to the mill village. Through the bars of the bullpen, Wolfie Brunswick watched him buzz down the road like a tiny king, kicking up dust. He was no taller than a mule, Sheriff was, with a slick, mule-colored mustache, and a Homburg hat that looked ready to topple him. If he’d ever had a name other than Sheriff, a name his mother had singsonged over the cradle, it was long lost.

      In the headlights of the motorbike, the men scattered over the mill village, back to their shacks. From George Wilson’s house Sheriff rang up the undertaker and waited for him to arrive and load the body into the Negro ambulance. On Monday, the local doctor would help arrange for the autopsy at the colored hospital in Americus. When no one claimed the body, it would be transported back to Florence and buried, what was left of it, in the cemetery behind the colored church, no marker but a dried gourd. By then Sheriff had gone knocking on doors throughout the village. Not one of the mill hands had seen it, they said, but all of them knew it was Freddie Wilson. “How do you know,” Sheriff asked them, “if you ain’t seen it?” And they all said that Freddie had it in him, that he was madder than a blind bull, that he was not the sort of man to be cuckold to no darky. The men didn’t say they’d had a grievance toward Freddie since he started as foreman, that he liked to knock them with his broom when they were too slow, and flick his cigarette butts in their looms, and put his hands under the dresses of their daughters and wives, and then disappear into the office and drink his grandfather’s gin and pass out on his leather couch. If Sheriff didn’t know better, he’d ask the lintheads if they had any prejudice against the Wilsons, or any allegiance to Juke Jesup, who when asked, when Wilson wasn’t looking, might sell a case or two straight to a thirsty mill hand for a song.

      There was one more errand he had to make. It was still the middle of the night—that first July night—when Sheriff drove his motorcycle from the mill out to the crossroads farm, but there was a lamp on in a window of the big house. A colored maid answered Sheriff’s knock, no more than a girl, though at first, with her short hair, Sheriff took her for a boy. It was so dark in the doorway he collided with her as he stepped through it.

      “Beg your pardon, child.” Sheriff took off his hat and placed it over his heart.

      “Sheriff,” Juke said by way of a greeting, coming in from the breezeway carrying a lamp. He was still in the overalls he’d worn that day. He looked tired or drunk or both. He may have been in deep with George Wilson, he may have brewed the gin that flowed through the county, but up close Sheriff saw he was just a rednecked farmer, his sunburnt face lined with creeks and crags, spotted as a pine snake. He set his kerosene lamp down on the kitchen table. “I told that boy to mind his ire. They weren’t no stopping him. Lord knows I tried.”

      Juke pulled out a chair. Sheriff sat while the girl made coffee. The daughter, poor child, was nowhere to be seen. Juke told him about the mill men who’d arrived in their cars, how he stayed indoors to protect his daughter from the mob, how the farmhand was swinging from the gourd tree before he knew what had happened. “Just younguns,” Juke said, shaking his head. “Younguns full of fire.”

      “You saying Freddie led the whole thing?”

      “Why else would he run? Other than he couldn’t abide being no father?”

      Sheriff shrugged. “Spect you put the idea in his head.”

      “The idea of stringing the man up, or СКАЧАТЬ