The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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СКАЧАТЬ help. He got ideas of his own.”

      Sheriff knew how these things happened. It might not have happened in Cotton County, but it happened in every county it touched. A hill of men, too many to count, too many to haul in, too many most times for a sheriff to do anything about except throw up his arms. But in all his years he’d never seen a mob finger one of its own.

      “You sure you ain’t out there, helping em, after what the nigger done to your child? It was me, I might a done the same.”

      Juke stood, walked to the pantry, and returned with a jar of gin, which he poured into Sheriff’s black coffee, then his own.

      “I might a done it.” Up close, Sheriff could see that burns braided the man’s right arm from his knuckles to his elbow, his skin a mess of scar tissue, hairless and pink as a pecker. “All us sinners is capable, I reckon.”

      Sheriff lifted his hands to the ceiling. “Spect we’ll have to wait till he come back and tell us.”

      “If he come back.”

      “If?” He thought Jesup was betting, figuring it out as he went. He was counting on those men covering for him, fingering Freddie, and he was probably right. “Where’s he gone go?”

      “Where he ain’t a wanted man, I reckon.”

      Sheriff laughed. “If you say so. Ain’t the law that wants him back much as his pawpaw.”

      Then the house girl put a plate of corn pone on the table, each one cold and hard as a brick. Something was wrong with her. Her eyes were bloodshot, and they stared through the room as though they didn’t see anything in it. Sheriff thought she might be touched, or empty in the head, but then he remembered. “She the one can’t form words?” he asked Juke. All those years he’d allowed him and George Wilson to run their liquor and he’d never set foot in the big house. It was his job to look away.

      “Show him,” said Juke, and the girl, still dead in the eyes, rolled her head back and opened her mouth to reveal the pink stub veined with scars, a blind slug in the cave of her mouth. “She’s the one delivered the twins. Her momma learned her good.” And from there he told the story he’d tell the neighbors that visited in the days after, the reporters, the other lawmen bearing the badges of curious county seats. Wilson came first, Juke said, and Winnafred minutes later, their cords braided like streamers on a maypole, sister nearly taking hold of brother’s heel, like Isaac’s children. They were so surprised to know there were two babies in there that they hadn’t noticed, at first, that one was darker than the other. Even Juke hadn’t been sure. Babies looked all kinds of ways when they were born. But there was no denying it. Freddie saw that the baby boy wasn’t his blood, and after that, well, it was a damn shame, all of it.

      Before he left, Sheriff asked to look in on the babies. Something was tugging at him. He’d been caught up in George Wilson’s grand aspirations and perhaps too in the deluded ones of his bootlegging tenant. He shared with the two men an affinity for gin and his belief that a workingman should have it if he wanted it. But unlike them he was a veteran and a servant of the law, with a soldier’s eye and a detective’s nose. He’d sniffed out a German spy in the pisser at a whorehouse in Paris, France. He’d identified the Wiregrass Killer in a barbershop, when the man was inside with half his face covered in cream and Sheriff was in the road, twenty yards away, on his horse. Now he smelled a skunk and he wanted to see it with his own eyes.

      It was something about that maid. Her empty eyes. The way she froze up when they talked about the dead man, and again when they talked about the babies. And where was the daughter? If Sheriff had more than peanuts to bet, he’d put his money on that colored girl being mother to the dead man’s child. Two Negroes doing as Negroes did, carrying on in the woods. Who knew how the Jesups got tangled up in it, but what other explanation was there? Sheriff was a humble man but he’d been through as much school as church and he wasn’t one to believe in miraculous wombs.

      The white one was asleep. The colored one was awake. The boy. His eyes skated toward the light of the doorway. Then the daughter emerged from the darkness of the room, crossing from her chair to the cradle, shielding the light with her wrist. Before she did, he got a good look at her pretty, outraged face. “I beg your pardon,” said Sheriff, holding his hat to his heart. He stood between the door and the cradle for close to a minute, the light falling over the boy. What he saw was a colored baby with his white mother’s face. She lifted him and held him to her shoulder, and Sheriff put his hat back on. He shook his head and gave a little laugh. Ain’t a Fritz behind every pisser door, he reminded himself.

      Back in the kitchen, to Jesup, he said again, “I beg your pardon.”

      “Damn shame, ain’t it,” said Jesup. “Neither one of em’s gone know its daddy.”

      That was how it came to be that Juke Jesup went free. Sheriff left him with a handshake and a warning. “I don’t care how friendly Wilson been to you. He ain’t gone let his boy take the fall so easy. You best walk with the sun at your back and keep your shadow in front of you.”

      It was the day that belonged to the Lord. If you hung your wash on a Sunday, everyone in church would know it, and you might have your sins prayed for. When the first reporter showed up that afternoon, before Genus’s body was even cold, Juke sent him away, saying, “Let the dead have a day’s rest.”

      But Monday morning, the knocks came quick—a reporter from the Florence Messenger, the Albany Herald, the Valdosta Daily Times. They all ran a photograph of the gourd tree, a short length of rope hanging from a beam. They seemed disappointed that there was no picture of Genus hanging. There was no picture of Genus at all. In the front-page article in the Messenger, they spelled his name “Genius.”

      FLORENCE, Ga., Jul. 7—At approximately 12:30 A.M., Genius Jackson, a Negro youth of unknown origins, was allegedly killed by George Frederick “Freddie” Wilson III, 19, on the property of his grandfather George Frederick Wilson, known as the crossroads farm, near the intersection of String Wilson and Twelve-Mile Roads. Although the deceased’s body suffered multiple gunshot wounds, an autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a fracture of the cervical spine.

      According to witness John “Juke” Jesup, the sharecropper who hired Jackson as a wage hand, Jackson was hanged from a gourd tree in retaliation for the rape of his daughter, Elma Jesup, 18, Wilson’s fiancée. Wilson, who worked as foreman under his grandfather’s supervision at the Florence Cotton Mill, was last seen in his green Chevrolet truck traveling southbound on Valentine Road. He is said to be wearing a pair of shoes made of alligator leather, which belonged to the deceased.

      Elma looked for the word “lynch” but didn’t find it. A lynching, she knew, would imply that the man had died at the hands of persons unknown. Somehow all those persons unknown had managed to pin it on Freddie Wilson, and though Elma felt no more love for him and now felt not even pity—he’d had it coming forty ways from Sunday—what she did feel was bewilderment, fury, and finally relief, that her father had managed to get off without a scratch, clean as a newborn. The reporters sat with Juke in the rockers on the porch, on the scattered pine stumps, drinking coffee and eating corn pone with chitlins and talking till the sun went down. He told stories about growing up on the farm as a boy with String Wilson, the story about the skunk they’d caught in a rabbit trap, the story about String carrying a potato in his trouser pocket for a week because Juke told him it would turn into a rock. There were stories of Juke’s heroics—the one about saving String when he’d fallen down that well, and saving the drunk who’d wrecked his tractor in the creek (it had crushed the man’s СКАЧАТЬ