Summer of the Redeemers Read online

  I chewed for a long time. “I was hoping whoever took the bikes would leave them along the road. Like a prank and all. So I was down the road, sort of along the fence rows.” Even though it wasn’t a complete lie, my eyes wouldn’t lift from my plate.

  “Did it ever occur to you that I would have taken you in the car?”

  “I wanted to find it myself.”

  “Little Miss Independence.” Mama Betts put a slice of hot cornbread on my plate. Her knuckles brushed across my arm. “You were always that way, Bekkah. Headstrong and determined to have your way. It’s going to cost you one of these days. Gonna cost all of us.”

  Guilt mixed in with my fond desire to save my hide. Mama Betts had been worried sick. She never threatened unless she’d been badly scared. “I’m sorry, Grandma.”

  “You can’t help your nature, child. That’s something you’re going to have to learn. And that stubborn streak is gonna cost you plenty in the future.” She kissed the crown of my head. “Yes, ma’am, like I said, that streak is gonna cost you, and yet it may be the thing that holds you up in the worst of times. That’s what you learn when you get old. There’s a blessing and a curse in everything. Just like loving you children. It brings me my greatest pleasure and worst pain.”

  Not even Arly had anything wise to say after that. I felt about as big as a sun-baked cow pie. Even the fried chicken had lost its taste. I chewed on, determined to finish or Arly would comment.

  “When you finish, we’ll call your father.” Effie took a seat beside me at the table.

  I pushed my plate back. It was silly to pretend I wasn’t upset. I could see that Effie had been crying. Mama Betts had been worried sick, and Daddy was probably pacing the office of his strange house in Missouri. All of this misery brought on because … because I’d ridden a horse. The thought of Cammie touched me like a gentle hand.

  We dialed the university where Daddy was living in some faculty housing for visiting teachers. It didn’t even ring one good time before he snatched up the phone.

  “Daddy, it’s Bekkah.”

  “Then you’re safe. When Effie told me about the bicycle, I was afraid …”

  What could possibly have made him so afraid on Kali Oka Road? Parents had a way of worrying all out of proportion to what was going on.

  After we talked a few minutes and he finally believed I wasn’t hurt at all, his mind started working again.

  “Who took the bicycle, Bekkah?”

  Somehow, a thousand miles away, he knew that I knew more than I was telling.

  “I’m not certain.” I didn’t know their names.

  “Listen to me, girl. Whatever mischief you’re up to, don’t you ever worry your mother that way again.”

  “I was right on Kali Oka. I didn’t go anywhere—”

  “Rebekah, you’re old enough to begin to understand. You have a responsibility to me and Effie and Mama Betts and Arly. You have to use good sense and make certain that nothing bad happens to you.” He paused. “You can’t risk yourself, Bekkah.”

  “Yes, sir.” They’d all gone off the deep end. I was just an hour or so late. You’d think I’d been playing with dynamite. Effie had stepped back in the kitchen, away from the telephone in the hall. “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “If I had a chance at something I wanted more than anything else, something that wouldn’t hurt anyone, would it be wrong for me to try to get it?”

  “Hypothetical questions are impossible at this distance. Would you care to be a little more specific?”

  The detail man. He couldn’t be happy with a simple question. “There’s a woman at the old McInnis place. Her name is Nadine Andrews, and she’s offered to give me horseback riding lessons if I’ll work at her barn.”

  “What does Effie say?”

  “I haven’t told her.”

  “So, that’s the story of where you were and how you lost your bicycle.”

  “For the most part.” It would be stupid to drag the Redeemer boys into an already complicated story.

  “You couldn’t have picked up the telephone and called your mother?”

  “Nadine just moved in. I don’t think her phone is hooked up yet.”

  “Bekkah, I know how bad you want this, and I don’t personally see any harm in it, but I can’t say yes if Effie’s dead set against it.”

  My only hope faded. “Don’t tell her, Daddy. Let me work on it.”

  There was a long pause. “Promise me you won’t run off and worry your mother again. Work it out between the two of you, but don’t leave her wondering if she’s going to find your body in the ditch somewhere.”

  “I promise. How are things in Missouri?”

  “Far removed from the things that are worrying me about Mississippi.”

  Daddy suddenly sounded tired. He was always worried about things that couldn’t be helped. He talked about perceptions and how people got tied down in one way of thinking and couldn’t see the truth. He said that the South was in for a hard time because some northern folks had time schedules in their heads and were determined to keep them. Not a lot of what he said made sense to me, but it troubled him. And Effie too. I had the idea that it had something to do with communists, but somehow Negroes were involved in it too. We didn’t have any Negroes living on Kali Oka Road, so it didn’t seem as if it could really have too much effect on us. Besides, the ones I knew in Jexville didn’t seem upset about anything.

  “Daddy, we’re all fine down here. Don’t worry about us.”

  “Put your mother on the phone, Bekkah. I love you.”

  Daddy wouldn’t tell on me about the horses. We had a deal. I called Effie to the phone and listened for a few minutes as she talked about Jexville and some argument at a juke joint up near the forks of the river at Merrill. A Negro man had been selling shine, and a white man had killed him. The Negro’s brother had then taken a shotgun and blasted the white man in half. I’d heard Effie and Mama Betts talking about it in whispers. It sounded like it was all over to me. The white man had started it, and he’d been killed. There was obviously something more to the whole story because whenever Effie started to talk about it, she whispered and tried to talk in code so that Arly and I wouldn’t catch on. Arly and I, for the most part, weren’t interested.

  “They’ve got him in jail.”

  There was a pause while Daddy talked.

  “No, none of the lawyers will represent him. I’m afraid they’re going to send someone from out of town.”

  There was another pause.

  “No, Joe says the jail is secure. He wants him moved, but there’s no place to take him.” Pause. “No, Greene County would be worse. They’d hang him in his cell. Hattiesburg, maybe.”

  There was a lot longer pause, and Effie cast me an accusatory look. “I’m not afraid to let her grow up. That’s not fair. You’re not even here.”

  Before I could be pinned by Effie’s evil look again, I went to my room. I got out my old yellow notebook that had been bought for math notes, which I hated, and started to draw pictures of Cammie. Somehow I’d get back to Nadine’s. Mama Betts said that opportunity only knocks once, and I knew that was it for me. I took my notebook into the bathroom and ran some hot water. When I took off my jeans, I could smell Cammie on them. How had they not noticed? Somehow I was going to have to leave a pair of jeans at the barn, so I could ride and then change to go home. I’d work it out. As I slipped beneath the hot water in the old claw-foot tub, I let my body float and tried to recapture the feeling of complete freedom I’d felt on Cammie’s back.

  Nine

  ALICE’S bicycle was returned—intact. She found it the next morning parked under the tree with the swing. The Redeemer boy had singled me out as a particular target. It was personal between us now.

  I was caught between a rock and a hard place with Arly. He put my Schwinn back together, as good as new. Every bolt and nut that had come out of the bicycle had been returned. But I needed Arly’s help to get even with the church
boy, especially since Alice was reluctant to go on any more adventures down at Cry Baby Creek. She counted herself lucky, she said, to have escaped without getting in hot water over the bike. Mrs. Waltman was cranky and mean in her fifth month of pregnancy, and Alice was walking a thin line with her already. If I got Arly to help me, I’d have to spend a lot of time with him, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Cammie and Nadine. Arly could not be trusted with that secret.

  Two of the longest days of my life passed while I stayed around the house and tried to make it up to Effie and Mama Betts for all the worry I’d caused them. I washed venetian blinds in the bathtub and ironed curtains and scraped dead wax out of corners until my knees were red and sore. I thought it was a suitable penance. There weren’t any Catholics on Kali Oka Road, probably not even any in the county. But I’d read somewhere that Catholic women had been known to walk to certain sacred places on their knees. It was their way of showing they were worthy of a miracle, and I needed one where horses were concerned. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder what the Redeemers considered a suitable penance. Remembering their gray clothes and faces, I shied away from that thought. It would no doubt be harsher than knee-walking.

  The third day of my rehabilitation, Mama Betts and I went plum picking down Kali Oka. She suggested the trip, a sign that I was making it back to a state of grace. Walking with an easy step, pails swinging in our hands, we passed the old McInnis place, and Mama Betts gave it a thorough sizing-up.

  “Needs a good cleaning. I can’t imagine how someone could live in that house without doing some hard scrubbing. Now, how old did you say this woman is?”

  “I don’t know.” I sought Cammie in the pasture beside the barn, but there wasn’t a single horse out. The barn doors were closed, and the old truck and trailer were gone. Nadine had probably gone to get the rest of her horses. I wondered when she would be back, and who was feeding and taking care of her animals for her. There was no sign of the dogs out either, and five dogs, even if they were those little froufrou house dogs, should have made a racket. Picket, for her part, was eagerly eyeing the area for any cats to chase.

  “I thought you said the woman had horses.” Mama Betts walked on, pail swinging and an old straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She had pretty white skin and hair, and she said she’d never been in the sun without a bonnet or a hat.

  “She does.”

  “Why aren’t they out in the sun? Livestock needs sunshine. Can’t keep ‘em cooped up all day. It’s inhumane.”

  I shrugged, feigning a lot less interest than I had. “You think Mrs. Mason’s trees will have any of those big juicy plums?”

  “We’ll stop and ask. Brenda won’t mind giving us enough for one batch of jelly.”

  “Jelly my foot, I want some to eat.” We were past the old McInnis place, and my spirits sank. This would be another day when I didn’t get to see Cammie.

  “You haven’t had much to say about your bicycle.”

  Mama Betts’ statement made me misstep in the loose sand of the road. “What’s there to say? Arly fixed it.”

  “The Bekkah Rich I know would be fuming all over the place wanting to get even with whoever did such a thing … unless she knew who’d done it and was feeling guilty.”

  “When I figure it all out, I’ll get even.” I picked up a big white rock and threw it down the road.

  “Things are changing, Bekkah. You know it as well as I.”

  Beneath the floppy hat Mama Betts’ face was shadowed, but there was no denying the sadness along her mouth.

  “Not really. Every summer we pick plums and make jelly. It’s the same as it’s been every year.”

  “Child, child.” There was amusement in her voice. “I can remember days when cars hadn’t been thought of. When your grandfather and I first moved here to Kali Oka, I was seventeen. We hauled water from the little spring in the woods until we could get a well put down. I’ve seen a lot of what folks call progress, and when I was younger, I thought that some of it was good.”

  “You’d rather haul water in buckets than turn a faucet on?”

  “Not on your life. The point is, things change. There’s no helping it, and even if we could all go backward, nobody would vote to do it. But now things are moving too fast.”

  Nothing in my life had moved an inch. The past three days had been a slow, twisting eternity. “You’re just being silly, Mama Betts. What do you mean?”

  “Have you ever noticed how chickens will hear a noise and go to squawking and running all over the yard? They don’t even know what the noise is, but they go to pieces, feathers flying everywhere, and sometimes they even trample their own chicks.”

  We didn’t keep chickens, but I’d seen it happen at the Welfords’. “Chickens aren’t real smart.”

  “Neither are people. Chickens and people have a lot in common sometimes. People hear a rumor and go to running and squawking, and before they know what’s happened, they’ve hurt someone. Maybe even someone of their own.” She took a breath. “Television and radio give people too much news. Folks don’t have time to digest it slowly. They just hear it and react.”

  “But you like television.” Arly and I didn’t watch much TV, but we loved some of the shows. Even Mama Betts was hooked on The Edge of Night. Every afternoon at three-thirty, just when the bus pulled up at the house during school days, I’d hear the Edge of Night music.

  The big star was Mike Carr, a lawyer. He always did the right thing.

  “At times. Bekkah, there are two things I have to tell you. One won’t make much difference, not to you and not today. Later on you’ll understand how much this summer changed your life.”

  A knot of apprehension twisted up in my gut. Was it something about the horses or the Redeemers?

  “There’s a Negro in prison in Jexville. There’s trouble brewing about him.”

  “Yeah, he shot a white man.” I wasn’t deaf as a post. I’d heard Effie and The Judge batting it back and forth on the phone. They were very troubled, but I didn’t know why. “We don’t know anybody involved in it. Why is Effie so worried?”

  “Well, baby girl, your mama and daddy believe that Negro should get a fair trial. There are those who think he should be sent to the gas chamber.”

  “What would it hurt to give him a trial? He was only killing the man who killed his brother.”

  “Sounds simple to you, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t. Just listen to me when I tell you that times are changing. Folks are on the telephone gossiping back and forth. News gets twisted and changed. Folks get to flapping and squawking like chickens, and someone’s bound to get hurt.”

  The sun was hot and I wanted to get to the shade of the plum trees, but Mama Betts was dawdling in the road talking about things I didn’t understand or even care about. “Whatever happens in Jexville won’t change my life. Not Kali Oka Road. It will never change.”

  Mama Betts’ arm slipped around my shoulders, and she pulled me to her. She smelled of vanilla and a lemony bath powder she used. No matter how hot the day, her skin was always dry and cool. She said it was because she was so old she didn’t sweat anymore. She was old. Close to seventy-five. But she didn’t act old, so it didn’t matter.

  “Baby girl, Kali Oka Road is changing now.”

  This time I laughed. Heat devils danced in the road ahead of us. The pecan trees along the ditches were in full green, and there was the distant call of a mockingbird. The road hadn’t really changed since I could remember. The Welfords had lost a big oak tree in a storm two years before. It was hit by lightning, and for several months it seemed as if part of the road had gone bald, but that was the biggest change I could remember.

  “It’s the same, Mama Betts. Look at it. Nobody’s even put up a new fence in the last five years.”

  “It’s not the physical nature of the road, though that will change too.”

  She was so sad that I took her free hand and held it. “What is it?”

  I could taste it now, the ter
rible sadness that I’d failed to notice for the past day. She’d taken me plum picking deliberately, to get me away from the house to tell me something. “What is it? Tell me.”

  “Someone killed Addy’s cat.”

  “Mr. Tom?” Addy didn’t have but one cat, but it couldn’t be Mr. Tom. “Yes.”

  “They ran over him?”

  “No, Bekkah. They killed him in a terrible way. It was deliberate and cruel.”

  Mama Betts was staring straight ahead. Her lips were white and I knew something horrible had happened to Mr. Tom. “But why?”

  “It isn’t much of an answer, but just for meanness, I suppose. Some folks are stupid and don’t know better. And some know better and are mean.”

  Since I couldn’t swallow, I couldn’t talk. We walked along in silence. I fought hard not to cry, and when I finally did, I didn’t make a sound. The road danced and curved ahead of me in the heat. I walked, trying not to think. “Why Mr. Tom? He liked everybody.”

  “There’s a new element on Kali Oka Road. It could have been someone driving by, but that doesn’t seem likely. It was probably someone on the road, somebody who lives here … now.”

  “Arly and I’ll find ‘em, and we’ll make them pay.” It was easy to say, but who on the road would do such a thing? I couldn’t imagine.

  “If I could find the person, I’d be inclined to hurt them myself,” Mama Betts said slowly, but it was clear from the way she said it that she couldn’t. “Addy is heartbroken. That cat was her company, her friend. We can’t figure it out why anyone would do something like that to hurt her. She stays home and minds her own business.”

  “How did they kill him?” I didn’t want to know, but I had to.

  “Addy found him in her front yard. There was a rock with blood all over it. His head … They had tied him up first.”

  Tied him to deliberately kill him. A helpless animal. Oh, how I wanted to make that person pay. But who?

  “There were two footprints in the dirt by the cat. Not a grown man but a boy’s shoe. And bicycle tracks. Effie and I think whoever took your bicycle might have killed the cat. There’s never been any mischief like this on Kali Oka before. Did some of those church people steal your bicycle, Rebekah?”