Summer of the Redeemers Page 4

  Five

  THE tall boy was backing away from Picket when I crashed through the undergrowth. His hand was bleeding, and every hair on Picket’s body was standing on end. She wasn’t making a sound.

  “Get away from her.” I went to stand by Picket. Very carefully I began to run my hands over her fur, to check and see where they had hurt her. She gave a sharp whine of pain as my fingers pressed her lower spine, at her rump. Beside her were two heavy sticks.

  The boys had shed their white shirts, and their skin was alabaster in the shade of the woods. Ribs protruded on all but the plump boy, making them look helpless, somehow shamed. Blood streaked the tall boy’s hand. It ran down his middle finger and dripped to the ground very slowly.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and the others followed him as he backed away.

  “What did you do to my dog?” Picket was tense, ready to strike, but she wasn’t barking. Deep in her throat she growled, a sensation I felt more than heard. No one answered my question, and I wanted to strike them, to pick up the heavy sticks and whale away at them until they would never hurt another dog again. Not a single one of them answered me. They stared until the tall boy turned away.

  “I said let’s go,” he commanded. The boys fell in with him in a ragged line.

  “If you ever hurt my dog again, I’ll get even. You’ll burn in hell, Redeemer boys!”

  The tall boy paused as if he was considering my words. Then he turned and faced me. He was smiling. “You’d better be careful who you threaten, girl. Don’t you know you shouldn’t be out in the woods alone. No tellin’ what might happen to you. No tellin’ …”

  “Bicycles!” The cry rang out over whatever else the tall boy had intended to say. The plump boy had found them, the one who earlier had been defending his sister.

  They pulled the bikes from the foliage where Alice and I had hidden them. They were jubilant with the discovery, intent among themselves. One of them danced and hollered like an Indian around my Schwinn. Very carefully I loosened Picket’s rope from around the magnolia tree. If I let Picket loose, she’d go after them. It would be worse than one small bite. But even as much as I wanted to let her go, I was afraid of the tall boy. He might really hurt her. Or me, and he might enjoy doing it. There was also Alice and Maebelle V. to consider. I held Picket tight.

  The boys picked the bicycles up and started running across the creek with them. They meant to keep them.

  I spoke softly to Picket, pressing my fingers along her back once again. Except for that one sensitive spot she seemed to be okay.

  “Bekkah!” Alice broke through the tangle of huckleberries behind me. She took in the disappearing boys and our bicycles. “Oh, my God,” she whispered as she leaned against the magnolia. “What are we going to do now?”

  I didn’t know. I still had Picket on the rope, and I got her to walk with me. She could move, and she didn’t limp. My biggest worries began to disappear, replaced by a fire that was new. Something in the center of my chest burned. I wanted to hurt those boys. I picked up the bigger of the two sticks they’d thrown at Picket. It weighed as much as a small bag of sugar. It must have hurt when it hit her.

  “Mama’s gonna skin me when she finds out about the bicycle.” Alice’s voice wavered. Maebelle V. echoed her sentiment with a lusty cry.

  I held the rope to her. “Hold Picket and I’ll go get them.”

  “No!” Alice’s face registered shock and fear. “No, Bekkah!”

  “They stole our bikes. We can’t let them take them. Take Picket and Maebelle and head back to the road.”

  Alice pushed my hand with the rope away. “I won’t do it. No matter what you say, I won’t.” Her blue eyes didn’t flinch as she looked at me, and I knew she wouldn’t budge.

  “Those little bastards.” I wanted The Judge to be at home. But the whole summer might be gone before he came back, and I needed him now. Effie wouldn’t do, and Mama Betts wouldn’t be any help either. Tears prickled and burned. I could tell by the noises Alice was making that she was fixing to cry too. “We’ll get them back.”

  “How?” Alice pointed across the creek. “They’re gone.”

  “They can’t take them to the church. How’re they going to explain where they got them? And they can’t ride them in the woods too easily. They’ll have to get out on Kali Oka to ride. We’ll get Arly and some of his friends to help.” Arly didn’t warrant a lot of my faith, but in a crisis he could be useful. Especially a mess like this. Alice was justifiably concerned. It would be impossible to tell our folks that the church boys had stolen our bikes. We weren’t supposed to be around the church.

  Something white fluttered across the creek. “Hold Picket.” I gave her the rope before she could decline again. In a flash I’d waded the creek and was climbing the other bank. Those stupid boys had gone off and forgotten their white shirts. I gathered the five shirts, all hanging together on a scrub oak branch. Clutching them like valuable treasure, I hurried back to our bank of the creek. Panting, I held them out. “Now we have something to barter with.”

  Alice smiled. Even Maebelle V. paused in her crying. “They can’t go home without their shirts, can they?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Then we’ll wait.”

  “Nope. We’re going home. We can get around the bicycles for a few days. They can’t. If they go back to that church without their shirts, everyone will know they’ve been in the woods with their clothes off. Maybe this is a lesson those boys need to learn.” I took Picket’s rope from Alice. We all started walking home. It would take better than an hour, probably closer to two with the baby. There would be lots of time to plot revenge.

  Before we broke out of the woods, I bundled the shirts up and hid them in a clump of dogwood trees. The boys weren’t likely to find them, but I’d know where they were. Just to be on the safe side, I broke off two huckleberry limbs at the roadside to mark the spot. When I’d finished we started walking. As we were leaving squatty footprints in the sandy part of Kali Oka, I kept thinking about the tallest boy. He was about my age, or maybe Arly’s. He was the leader. He was the one who’d thrown the sticks at Picket while she was tied.

  We were coming up on the McInnis place when Alice finally spoke. Maebelle V. had been crying for the last half hour and there wasn’t a thing we could do. We’d stopped and given her the rest of her bottle. She wanted some food, and so did we, but we still had another two miles to go at least.

  “Do you still believe that place is haunted?” Alice asked, nodding at the old yellow house and the barn that had once been home for some of the finest blooded walking horses in the South. The roof sagged in several places. Alice and I had spent a lot of the past summer exploring around the barn. It had been vacant for about two years. Mama Betts said everyone who moved in there fell on hard times and couldn’t stay.

  “Mama Betts says it is.” A ghost story would help pass the last half hour. The driveway was lined with chinaberry trees, and I squatted down in the shade of a big one for a few minutes. My feet were burning hot from the sand and clay of Kali Oka. It was June 8. Our twentieth day of summer vacation. Daddy had said the cities were even hotter, especially this summer when Negroes and whites were eyeing each other like hungry dogs.

  “Hey, do you want to take a minute and go look in the barn? Remember last summer we left some soft drinks hidden in there.”

  “They’ll be hot.” I leaned against the tree trunk and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to move, but I could hear Maebelle V. frettin’ and gurglin’. She was bound to be half starved, and a little hot Coca-Cola would tide her over until we got home.

  “I know you’re not afraid of the Redeemers, but you might be afraid of old Sheriff Sidney Miller.” Alice nudged me with the toe of her shoe. She was already standing up, and I could hear Picket breathing at her side.

  The McInnis barn did bother me. It was big, with a loft and twenty stalls, and doors that were locked but were said to lead down to underground living
quarters. Mama Betts said it was all a crock of bull. At one time the McInnis place had been the premier plantation in Jexville. Rathson McInnis, the original, had arrived in Jexville in the early 1800s, along with his slaves and family, and started the farm tradition in the county. We’d studied about Rathson McInnis in Mississippi history. He was famous for his ideas in farming, and later for getting himself killed in the Civil War.

  He carved out more than three thousand acres of the best land in the county and built a plantation house and the old barn. The plantation had been burned by the Yankees after the war. Mama Betts said that a cease-fire had been negotiated when a band of Yankee troops rode through and burned the house to cinders while Mrs. Rathson McInnis stood in the yard with a portrait of her husband, the only thing she’d been able to save before the fire was set.

  After there was nothing left of the house, the Yankees ran their swords through the portrait as Mrs. McInnis held it. The story goes that one blade cut her palm, and as the blood dripped onto the ground, she cursed anyone other than a McInnis who would ever attempt to live on their land.

  But it wasn’t the Rathson McInnises, either the mister or the mistress, that made me feel ill at ease in the old barn. It was Sheriff Sidney Miller. I was eight years old when he lost his mind, shot his wife and two children and hung himself from a chinaberry tree. It was his ghost, the sheriffs badge glinting in the sun, that I’d seen in the barn. He’d been holding the end of his rope in his hand.

  “Hey, come on.” Alice nudged me with her toe.

  It was pointless to hang back any longer. My eyes were sun-blinded for a moment as I stood. Behind me a soft breeze ruffled the chinaberry leaves. An old sign, hung by rusty chains, creaked a warning.

  “Let’s just go on home,” I said.

  “Maebelle needs the sugar. We left those Cokes behind that old tire, remember? It won’t take but a minute. Last year you weren’t too scaredy cat to even walk in the barn.”

  Last summer Arly had dared me to go into the barn alone. Alice and I had been in every stall and even climbed into the loft where the old bales of hay smelled like dirt and Mama Betts’ herb plant, that curly purple-leafed one that she said smelled like an angel’s armpit. “Last year I hadn’t seen old man Miller.”

  Alice rocked back and forth on her toes. Maebelle V. was shaking her fists and crying now, a thin, tired wail that was beginning to worry me. She might starve or die of thirst or something even worse. We hadn’t thought to bring diapers, and she was sorely in need of a change.

  “Let’s go get the Cokes.” I didn’t want to. Alice was looking for a rush of goose bumps. She’d wanted to go into the barn ever since I’d told her about the ghost business last summer, but I’d never go back in there no matter how much Arly teased me. Now I was going.

  The double doors creaked, and once again I wondered who would paint a barn white with pale blue trim. It was awful-looking. Barns were red with white trim. This just made the bigness and the oldness of the place seen even more peculiar.

  The plantation had never been rebuilt, and even the stone chimney had been picked clean by fortune hunters over the past thirty years. Sometime during the 1920s someone had built a small cottage beside the barn, and that was the house Sidney Miller and his doomed family had occupied. He’d shot his wife on the back steps and his two children in their beds. Folks said he just lost his mind for no reason. Or as Mama Betts said, no one ever found the reason. He’d been right popular, for a sheriff.

  The barn was dark. Slats of light fell through the bars of the stall windows, making narrow trapezoid patterns on the red earth floor. Alice pushed the door open wider, a hiccuping Maebelle V. making her shadow seem two-headed and sinister.

  “Just behind the old tire near the last stall,” Alice said. She wasn’t coming in with me. She was going to stand at the door, holding the baby and watching me. It was fair. If she had the baby, she wouldn’t be able to run fast enough, just in case we saw something we didn’t want to hang around and talk with.

  Off to either side there was the scurry of small creatures, rats more than likely, unused to the tread of a human foot in their barn. Above, the loft creaked, as if the great weight of hay was being shifted ever so slightly. As if some sleeping entity had been roused by the smell of three small girls below. Shift. The groan of old, tired boards. Or bones. At the end of the barn a clump of moldy hay fell. It had to be rats. They could climb as good as any cat when they took a notion.

  I was halfway down the long aisle of the barn when the bird swooped in front of me. Although I didn’t scream, I ducked and threw up my arms. Alice laughed, until the bird struck the window at the end of the barn. The thud was so loud, so powerful, that we knew the bird had broken its neck. We’d panicked it and now it was dead.

  Turning back, I looked at Alice. She wasn’t laughing any longer.

  “Get the Coke, and let’s go back to the tree,” she said, her voice eerie in the barn.

  Before my nerve completely disappeared, I turned toward to the last stall. Walking real slow, I pretended each stall had a beautiful horse in it. At the very end was the black, my own horse. It tossed its head and whickered a greeting. Ever since I’d been able to walk I’d wanted a horse. I even begged Mama to get pregnant again because I knew she’d have a foal for me. Mama Betts had told Effie not to indulge me in such foolishness, but for a long time Mama let me believe that it might happen. Until Daddy said that it was cruel to build up my hopes. He said I could have a horse, but Mama said no. She was afraid I’d be hurt. Horses were unpredictable, dangerous, big, capable of bizarre behavior. Mine wouldn’t be, but Effie had no faith in that.

  “Hurry up, Bekkah! Quit standing around daydreaming!”

  Of course the last stall was empty, except for two old tires, some rotting blankets, an old halter and the three Coca-Colas we’d hidden behind the tires. I got them all, hoping never to make another trip into the barn. At the door, Alice’s shadow extended almost to the middle of the barn. It was growing very late. Bikes or no bikes, we were going to be in trouble.

  We made sure to close the barn door just as we’d found it. Although we didn’t have a bottle opener, Alice was able to force the top off one bottle by using the edge of the step. We filled up Maebelle’s bottle, and she took to it with a greedy sucking sound.

  “If I had a horse, we’d be home in two minutes flat.”

  “If you had a horse, the poor thing would probably be living in your bedroom. Don’t let her have too much too fast.” She motioned for me to pull the bottle out of Maebelle’s mouth. The result, not to my surprise, was a wail of protest. I gave the nipple back to her.

  “She’ll gas up and puke on you,” Alice warned, then shrugged. She was constantly amused by my lack of know-how when it came to babies.

  “She’s starving to death.”

  “Let her digest what she’s had.”

  Alice knew her business when it came to babies, so I removed the bottle and contented myself with listening to Maebelle’s angry frustration. We picked up our gear, leaving the two unopened Cokes behind the chinaberry tree, and started on our way home. Even though we were rested, our steps were slower. Effie would be fit to be tied, worried about me. Mrs. Waltman didn’t seem to worry much, but she’d be mad at the state Maebelle V. was in. She was dirty, soiled, and now beginning to erp and drool. Upchuck was not far behind.

  “I’m hungry,” Alice finally said. We’d gone all day without anything to eat. It was close to three.

  “Mama Betts will have something good made. Since we’re in trouble, you might as well stop by and have a bite.”

  “Maybe we could clean Maebelle up a little.”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe we should tell the truth about the bikes.” Alice had no stomach for fibs, or the resulting trouble they always caused.

  “If we don’t say anything, we might get the bikes back.”

  “If we don’t say anything, that’s not really a lie.”

  “Right.
And I get a feeling I’ll hear something from that tall skinny boy real soon. Like tonight.”

  We’d just come to a big curve in the road. At the sound of a loud motor, we both automatically moved into the sandy ditch and up the bank to high ground. At the curve some of the boys drove wild. If the road was rutted real bad, like it was today, the cars would sometimes begin to jump and quiver on the washboard ruts and the driver would lose control. Then the car would slam into the ditch. Kali Oka curve was good business for the body shops around Jexville.

  “That ain’t nobody we know,” Alice said, listening to the voice of the motor. “It’s straining, like it’s big.”

  Before I could hypothesize, an old truck pulling a long horse van rounded the curve. I knew what the van was because I’d read about them in my books. The English called them vans or boxes, and Americans called them trailers. When I pretended that I had a horse, I also pretended I was English, like Velvet Brown.

  The sun was bearing down right in our eyes, and I couldn’t see in the truck very well. Most of my attention was focused on the van anyway. I couldn’t see anything through the tiny little windows, but when it passed, I might be able to see the horses’ tails, if it was loaded.

  “Look!” Alice squeezed my arm and pulled me around to look behind us.

  A skinny little arm poked out to left-hand-turn, and the truck and trailer disappeared down the chinaberry driveway of the old McInnis place.

  “Are they moving in?” I could hardly breathe.

  Before Alice could answer, there was a loud scream from a horse. Not panic or fear, but a call, as if the horse was hoping for another horse to answer.

  Picket’s interest picked up immediately. Her ears stood up and quivered, and I knew I had to get her home. The thick chinaberry trees blocked our view, but we stood for a moment longer listening.

  Several horses called in that wild, anxious manner. I knew just how their nostrils would flare and the forelock would hang wild in their eyes. Then there was the sound of a metal door banging open and a woman’s voice shouting commands.