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  “Was Cyl wired this tight back then?” I wondered aloud. “Is that why she grew up and turned into a Republican?”

  Luther’s big dark face crinkled with laughter. “You say Republican like some people say Satan. Democrats have no monopoly on virtue, Deborah, and this is a yellow-dog, big D Democrat saying it to you.

  “Who said anything about virtue?” I asked.

  10

  Never let a bleak past

  Cloud a bright future

  —Barbecue Church

  When I came down the hot marble steps of the courthouse that afternoon, Ed Gardner was sitting on a green slatted bench beneath the magnolia tree that shades our memorial to those Colleton County boys who died in the First World War.

  A bronze doughboy in khaki leggings and campaign cap holds a carbine at the ready and squints into the sunset. He’s as feisty as the Confederate general rising in the stirrups as his fire-breathing stallion plunges into battle on the other side of the courthouse. World War II’s monument is a tall slab of white marble with the names of our dead in brass letters. Daddy’s brother Pat’s name is on that one.

  None of my eleven brothers were old enough for Korea, but Frank was a machinist mate with the Sixth Fleet in the Far East during Vietnam. He wound up making a career out of the Navy and has now retired to San Diego. One of the lucky ones.

  “Ever notice anything odd about monument horses?” Ed asked as he ambled toward me.

  Smiling, I said, “The fact that they’re usually well-endowed stallions and almost never geldings or mares? Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

  He crushed out his cigarette and buried the butt in the border of bright yellow marigolds that lined the walk. “Must’ve played hell with battle formations every time a couple of mares went into heat.”

  I laughed. “Wonder how many lieutenants got busted to corporal because their mares led a general’s stallion astray?”

  “We’ll never know,” said Ed. “They always leave the good stuff out of the history books.”

  He glanced up at my high-heeled white sandals. “I was gonna ask you if you had time to take a walk along the river, but those shoes aren’t made for dirt, are they?”

  In times past, we’d have automatically headed straight for the lounge at the Holiday Inn where you can drink and smoke, but Ed’s quit drinking and cigarettes aren’t welcome at most alcohol-free places these days, even in North Carolina. Besides, it was a nice day. Hot, of course, but at least a breeze was blowing.

  “Dirt’s no problem” I said. “I keep a pair of sneakers in my car.”

  We crossed the street to the parking lot, catching up on gossip as we went. I asked about his wife, Linda (“She’s doing good, just working too hard”), he asked about Kidd (“Doing just fine”), and we both agreed it was too bad we didn’t see much of each other now that neither of us hung out at Miss Molly’s anymore. I changed shoes, locked my purse in the trunk of the car and stuck the keys in the pocket of my beige and white coatdress.

  From the parking lot, it was only a short walk to one of the steps that led from the adjacent street down to the town commons. There’s a scattering of benches and picnic tables and some grassy play areas where you first enter, then paths meander off along the riverbank through clumps of azaleas. The azaleas had finished blooming, but butterfly bushes made colorful splashes of purple, yellow or white, and swallowtail butterflies floated from one to another as we passed.

  Ed’s eight or ten years older, so gray hairs are popping out on his brown head and in the closely cropped brown beard that softens a jutting chinline. A couple of inches taller than I, he’s compactly built and gives off the vibes of a tightly wound spring. As usual, he wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt—today’s was brown checks with white buttons—jeans and scuffed brown boots that looked as if they’d been walking on charred wet ashes.

  “You just come from Balm of Gilead?” I asked.

  “What’s left of it. Which is damn little.”

  “Enough to draw any conclusions?”

  He paused to light a cigarette and moved around to the other side so the breeze could carry his smoke away from me. (Ed’s more of a gentleman than he likes to admit.)

  “You mean did the dog find accelerant and track the gas can back to the Amoco station where the bad guy bought five gallons with his own charge card? No.”

  “But you did find gasoline residue?”

  “Well, Sparky was wagging his tail like it was gas and it smelled like gas to me, too, but we’ll have to wait and run it through the lab first.” He took a deep drag and exhaled twin jets of smoke through his nostrils. “Tell me about your nephew and his little friends.”

  “A.K.’s not part of this,” I said. “He hasn’t been out from under his parents’ noses since last weekend.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “A.K. might lie to my daddy, but Andrew and April never would.”

  Ed grinned. He knows the legends some of his older revenuer friends have told about Daddy. “Then tell me about his friends.”

  Again I shook my head. “I really don’t know them. I heard that the Starling boy’s family used to own the land that the church stood on, but that was back probably before he was even born. As for Raymond Bagwell, all I know is that one of my old high school teachers thinks he’s a fine young man that Starling’s led astray.”

  With the edge of his boot, Ed scraped out a small hole, dropped his cigarette butt into it, then tamped the dirt back over it. “You get a good look at the words painted on the church wall?”

  “Pretty good. And before you ask, yes, it looked like the same color green paint and I suppose they could’ve been lettered by one of those boys. Can’t you compare the two?”

  He shook his head. “There’s not enough on that videotape to go to court with. All we’ve got’s part of a KKK and a swastika. Your brother alibis your nephew, Bagwell and Starling alibi each other—any fifty-dollar lawyer could argue that the angle distorts the letters or that the paint is black, not green. If there’d been even a smear left, we could’ve tried matching it to what I hear was used in the cemetery.”

  I told him about the one pew burning in the middle of the church, well away from the primary fire and he rolled his eyes scornfully. “Amateurs.”

  We’d reached the end of the main path. From here, it dwindled into a true hiking trail, one person wide, through a tangle of briars, trumpet vines, birches and wax myrtles.

  As we turned to go back, Ed said, “Any of your kinfolks on the volunteer fire department?”

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  “I was thinking that if they were, they might have noticed something and mentioned it to you.”

  “You kidding? All those guys were noticing last night was how quick they could get water on the fire and how much they could save. They were running on adrenaline,” I said and told him about the way the Turner boy had hoisted that big wooden pulpit as if it were no heavier than a toothpick. “I doubt they were looking for clues first thing.”

  “Turner?” asked Ed. “Donny Turner?”

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” he answered slowly. “Big guy? Never misses a call-out?”

  “Big, yes,” I said. “But you’d have to ask somebody else about his dedication. He certainly seemed to have his heart in it last night. Not to mention his back.”

  Abruptly changing the subject, Ed said, “You sit in a courtroom every day. See much racially motivated stuff?”

  “An occasional barroom brawl.” I answered promptly. “And sometimes a high school scuffle will get out of hand. Or someone will file a civil suit claiming they were either fired or not hired because of race.”

  I thought about the people I’d gone to high school with, both white and black. Most of them married now, most of them with children of their own and settled into some sort of nine-to-five job. Most of them decent human beings.

  Most of them. Not all.

  There are very few of us who
don’t have bits and pieces of covert racism embedded in our psyches. Things that pop out when we aren’t expecting it, the “what else can you expect from a [insert ethnic or racist epithet of choice]?” Things we’re usually too ashamed to express, the very things we act superior about when our nearest and dearest do express them.

  “We’re probably always going to have rednecks who don’t have anything but their white skins to feel superior about and shiftless blacks who think they’re totally entitled because their ancestors were once slaves. For the most part though, whatever their bedrock feelings may be, I think most people around here try to keep a civil tongue and get on with their own business.”

  Ed lit another cigarette as I searched for the right words.

  “I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve never felt we were so polarized here in Colleton County that we’d have hate burnings like last night. You’re going to find it was a kid acting out, doing it more for kicks than for hatred. You just wait and see. I’m sure you are.”

  I didn’t realize I was getting so vehement till Ed held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, you don’t have to convince me. One thing though: this volunteer fire department. Any blacks on it?”

  “You saying you don’t think they came out as fast as they would’ve for a white church?” I snapped.

  “Don’t be so touchy. I’m just trying to see the big picture here.”

  We came up the steps beside the fenced-in play yard of a church-sponsored daycare center. Under the watchful eye of two white women, little children were swinging, playing in the sandbox, hanging from monkey bars—black kids, white kids, even a couple of kids of Asian descent.

  Surely it was going to be different for them?

  11

  Burden Drop-Off Center (Matthew 11:28)

  —New Testament Baptist Church

  Next day, Friday, things were a little quieter. Ed and his people had nothing to say on record, the television cameras and reporters drifted back to Raleigh, the county commissioners were talking about appointing an interracial task force, and Wallace Adderly had been invited (invited himself?) to speak at the interchurch fellowship meeting that was still scheduled for Sunday at Mount Olive.

  My calendar was so light that I was finished by two, which suited me just fine. I didn’t want to be anywhere around when A.K. checked into jail at six. Andrew, who actually spent a night or three in the old jail back when he was doggedly climbing Fool’s Hill himself, had sounded stoical when I called last night, but April’s seen too many prison movies. She was terrified that A.K. was going to be raped or beaten up and nothing I said could convince her that things like that didn’t happen in our new jailhouse.

  For all I knew, she was probably planning to come along and camp out in Gwen Utley’s office for the whole forty-eight hours. Gwen’s one of our magistrates and her door’s on the same basement hallway as the jail. Gwen’s pretty no-nonsense though, so maybe she could reassure April.

  On the way out of town, I stopped past Aunt Zell’s where I’ve lived for the last few years and changed into sneakers, a faded red cotton T-shirt and my favorite pair of cutoffs. A baseball cap and work gloves and I was ready to head out to the farm to see what the builders had done since I last had a chance to look.

  My brother Adam out in California had sent me a book with several passive solar house plans and the modest one I’d picked had a concrete slab floor, steel framing, a tiny sunroom and a couple of strategically placed masonry walls to store heat in cold weather. South-facing windows would catch the low winter sun, while the eaves were angled to block most of the higher summer sun. A trellis of wisteria would help shade the south side until the trees got taller, and extra thick insulation would cut down on both heating and cooling costs without adding too much to the overall building cost.

  The two solar collectors on the roof and the hot water tank were a bigger investment, but I liked the idea of letting the sun heat my water from March till November.

  “And if you’d ante up another ten or fifteen thou, you could go totally off-grid,” Adam says, e-mailing me diagrams and figures about storage batteries, photovoltaics, and Swedish refrigerators. This from a man who enjoys the Silicon Valley lifestyle in a seven-thousand-square-foot house.

  “Hey, I use solar energy to heat the pool,” he says indignantly.

  It was another hot and sticky day here in eastern North Carolina, but I kept my car windows down and the air conditioner off. If I hoped to do any work on the house, it would seem even hotter to step out of a cool car into ninety-two degrees.

  A church sign on the way out of town read

  God’s fire in your heart

  Will keep you from burning.

  Okay.

  Churches have always had signs, of course. Usually they’re dignified brick boxes neatly lettered on either side with the name of the pastor and the hours of service. In the last few years though, the brick boxes started having a little glass door on either side and a signboard inside that spells out exhortational messages with changeable letters.

  Or else the pastors use one of those portable signs on wheels, the kind that usually have a big red arrow pointing to a used car sale: “All prices slashed!!”

  Not all the church messages make good sense—especially when some of the letters fall off and you have to guess at the original wording.

  Portland Brewer and I recently saw one where the letters were so scrambled that it looked as if the sign was speaking in tongues.

  In front of a Pentecostal church.

  True story.

  When I got to the King homeplace, I turned in at the long sweeping driveway that led up to the house past newly planted baby azalea bushes that would someday grow into head-high masses of pink and white.

  Aunt Zell’s irises had been spectacular at Easter—like stalks of white orchids, six or seven blossoms to the stalk—but they needed dividing again and she’d already given some to every gardener she could think of. Then she remembered that Mrs. Avery’s mother used to have white irises growing in her dooryard, “so I called Grace King Avery and she was thrilled because her brother didn’t care anything about the gardens. Just let them go. I said I’d send her some divisions at first passing and as long as you’re going right by her door…”

  As I drove around to the back (no matter how splendid the front door on a country dwelling, few people use it), I was glad that I’d opted for a new house instead of going Grace King Avery’s route. There’s nothing more beautiful than a gracious old farmhouse lovingly restored, but they’re black holes when it comes to time and money. I hate to think how many gallons of paint it took to cover all the turned railings and gingerbread on the front and side porches alone.

  Raymond Bagwell was hard at it with a shovel when I rolled to a stop. Stripped to his skinny waist, he was digging up a four-by-twenty length of sunbaked dirt that was probably going to be Mrs. Avery’s restored perennial border.

  “Raymond, right?” I asked as I got out of the car.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said warily.

  “I’m A.K.’s aunt.”

  “The judge?” He paused in his digging and gave my ball cap a skeptical look.

  “That’s me. Mrs. Avery here?”

  He nodded toward the screen door and got on with his shovel.

  A medium-sized white dog came over to greet me. Halfway between a spitz and a sheepdog, with a thumbprint of black hairs on the top of his head, he sniffed at my legs as I unlocked the trunk and lifted out the cardboard carton of iris tubers. Before I could slam the trunk lid, Grace King Avery was there, welcoming me, scolding Raymond for not helping me with the bulky box—“Just set it over there in the shade. And if you could just give them a sprinkle with the hose so they don’t get too dried out? Zell did just dig them today, didn’t she, Deborah? Not too much there, Raymond! I said sprinkle, not soak. Come in, Deborah, I was just thinking about you.”

  Useless to say that I was in a hurry. She and the dog were already leading me through th
e kitchen—“You wouldn’t believe the way my brother let this place go. I had to buy all new appliances”—and into a large and airy room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases between the tall casement windows. All the woodwork sported a fresh coat of white enamel.

  “This is where my father and my grandfather, too, did their accounts,” she said. “That desk has sat in that very spot for over a hundred years.”

  The desk was solid and pleasingly crafted but probably built right here in the neighborhood by some nineteenth-century cabinetmaker who was good with his hands. It was not a piece to drive an antique dealer wild with envy unless he could see it with Mrs. Avery’s ancestor-addled eyes, but it did look at home here. The dog curled up in the kneewell and went to sleep.

  “My grandmother had her sewing machine over there in the corner,” she said, nodding toward the spot where a large television now sat, “but I’m going to use this room as my den cum library.”

  (Mrs. Avery’s probably the only person in Colleton County who could use the word cum and not sound pretentious.)

  I’d never been inside this house before and I was surprised by its charm. There was an ease to the proportions that made you feel as if you could take a deep breath in comfort here, so I praised the desk and the room even though it was still cluttered with boxes of books and papers waiting to be arranged on the newly painted shelves as soon as they were completely dry.

  Looking more than ever like a little gray-feathered guinea hen, Mrs. Avery picked her way through the maze of cardboard boxes and plucked a paper from one of them. “I came across this last night while I was looking for something else. Do you remember it?”

  It was a creased sheet of lined paper that had been torn from a spiral-bound notebook and folded into a tight little packet. On one side, Pass to Portland. On the other side, Ask Howard if he wants to take me to K.’s party, okay? D.