By the light of the anger he’d felt toward Jimmy Jed Falconer, John had seen amazing things, both true and unsettling, about his own life and beliefs. He hadn’t been able to understand why Falconer had deliberately tried to hurt Ramona and Billy, tried to stir up the crowd against them like that; the man had spouted one lie after another about them, had even tried to make it out that Billy had been to blame for the accident! Thinking about these things had started rusted wheels turning in his head; there was pain, yes, but it seemed that for the first time in a very long while he was being powered from his own dynamo, not from the cast-off sparks of someone else’s.
Now it seemed to him that Falconer was a man of God, but yet he was still only a man, too. And that boy of his could heal, but not all the time and not everybody. It was too simple to say that a man belonged either to God or to Satan; no, even the best of men had bad days—or bad thoughts—and every once in a while might slip off the righteous path. Did that necessarily damn you to Hell for eternity? Falconer himself had slipped off, by his lies, and so had the boy, by his actions; did that make them more human, or did it mean that Satan was at work in their lives?
And what about Ramona and Billy? What was this power they had, to lay the dead to rest? Where did it come from: God? Satan? Neither one, or a combination of both? And what if he’d been wrong, all these years, about Ramona and her mother?
He started to roll over on his side, but then he realized how quiet it was; usually the crickets in the grass were fiddling fit to bust on a warm summer night like…
The house was suddenly filled with a white glare. John sat up abruptly, half blinded, and heard a loud metallic clanging and crashing outside, seemingly all around the house. He grabbed his pants off a chair and struggled into them as Ramona sat up in bed. “What is it?” she asked frantically. “What’s that sound?” He drew aside the curtains to look out the small window; bright beams of light cut into his eyes, and he couldn’t see a thing out there. He said, “Stay here!” and ran for the front door. He stepped out onto the porch, shielding his eyes from the light. White orbs ringed the house, and now he could make out human shapes, banging together pots and pans and iron pipes. The raucous rough music rang in John’s head, and dull terror throbbed within him as he realized the shapes were sheeted in Klan garb. Cars had been pulled up close to the house, their headlights all switched on at the same time. “What do you want?” John shouted, pacing from one side of the porch to the other, like a trapped animal. “Get off my land!”
The clanging went on, in rhythmic cadence. Then the screen door opened and Billy came out on the porch, his face peeling as if from sunburn; there were still thick bandages on his hands, but the doctor had said they’d be fine after the raw places scabbed over. Ramona was behind him, wrapped in her gray robe; she was carrying a long carving knife.
“Stop it! You damned dogs, what do you want?” John thought of the old pistol he had, wrapped in oily rags in a drawer, and he started to go get it when the clanging suddenly died.
One of the hooded shapes stepped forward, silhouetted in bright light, and pointed toward John. “Creekmore,” the man said, and John knew it was Lee Sayre’s voice even muffled through the mask, “this town’s suffered enough misery from that woman and her boy! Surely you know by now they’re not gonna renounce their ways! So we’ve come to set form our terms…”
“Terms?” John said. “Lee, what’re you talkin’ about?”
“No names, Creekmore! You took an oath!”
“That was when I was on the other side of that mask! What are y’all supposed to be? A vigilante squad? A hangin’ party? Did you bring your tar and feathers? What right do you have runnin’ your cars up on my land and raisin’ hell like—”
“Every right!” Sayre bellowed. “Because of the uniform we wear, and because we live in this town!”
“We’ve got the right to beat your ass too, Creekmore!” someone called out—Ralph Leighton’s voice. “You’d best watch your mouth!”
Sayre said firmly, “We want the woman and the boy out of Hawthorne. We want ’em out tonight. John, you and your parents were all born and raised here, and you’ve always been a good, God-fearin’ man. For years you were able to keep that woman in her place, but now that the boy’s got the demon in him too the both of them are too strong for you. But we’ve decided you can stay here if you want to, John. It’s not your fault you’ve been saddled with this corruption…”
“NO!” John shouted. “This is our home, damn it! This is my wife and son you’re talkin’ about!”
“It’s been decided,” Sayre said. “We want them gone before something else happens around here.”
“We want that accursed boy out of this town!” Ralph Leighton stepped forward, jabbing a finger at Billy. “First the crops went bad after he was born, and the land ain’t been too good ever since! Then Dave Booker killed his whole family, and guess who was the Booker boy’s friend? Then Link Patterson got sliced up at the sawmill, and we all know about that! Now there are fine kids lying in the ground and in the hospital, and just guess who was there to see it happen? My son got a faceful of splinters and broke his arm, but thank God he’ll be all right, or I’d be carryin’ a gun right now! He told me he heard that boy shout that everybody was going to die, that the boy was cursin’ everybody and puttin’ some kind of spell on ’em! Even J.J. Falconer himself said the boy’s just like the mother! That boy spreads Death with him wherever he goes!”
“You lyin’ sonofabitch!” John shouted, trembling with rage.
“Who’s stirred you up?” Ramona’s voice carried over the angered yelling, and she stepped forward to the edge of the porch. She stared down at the sheeted shapes. “You’re like dumb cattle, stampeded this way and that by the sound of thunder! You don’t understand a thing about me or my son! Did that evangelist put you up to this?”
“Come on,” Leighton shouted. “Time’s wastin’!” He moved toward the house, and the ring of Klansmen closed in. “Put that knife down, you squaw-cat, ’fore I have to take it and cut off your tits…” And then he grunted with pain and surprise, because John had leaped upon him, driving him to the ground. They cursed and rolled, grappling at each other as the Klansmen cheered Leighton on.
A rock crashed through the window behind Ramona. Then another stone was flung, hitting her on the shoulder. She gasped and went down on her knees, and then a white hooded shape leaped up onto the porch and kicked the knife from her hand. The Klansman looked up as Billy came at him like a whirlwind; the boy couldn’t clench his hands yet to make fists, so he hit him with a shoulder block that lifted the man up and carried him off the porch and onto the ground on his back, sounding like a potato sack as he hit.
John had ripped the hood from Leighton’s head and was hammering blows to the man’s face. Leighton staggered and fell to his knees, his robes grimed with dirt; he yelled through purple, pulped lips, “Somebody get the bastard!”
Ramona screamed. Billy saw light glint off a length of iron pipe as one of the figures lifted it high. He shouted, “Look out!” John started to turn, but the pipe came down with terrible force upon the back of his head, staggering him forward. Leighton hit him in the stomach, and even as John fell the pipe came down again, its arc ending with an awful crunching sound.
There was a sudden silence. John lay on his stomach, his legs twitching, his fingers clawed into the dirt.
And then Billy, with a scream of rage that ripped through the night, leaped from the porch and flung himself onto the man who’d struck his father, they careened backward, slamming over the hood of a red Chevy. Billy forced his stiff fingers around the iron pipe, and he held onto it as someone gripped his hair and yanked him off. He rammed an elbow back into a set of teeth and pulled free, turning upon the Klansmen. With his first blow he broke a man’s nose; he dodged a cast-iron skillet that had been used to make the raucous noise, came up under it, and slammed his weapon into an unprotected shoulder.
An arm caught him ar
ound the throat from behind; he kicked back into a shinbone, wrenching free as an aluminum pot swung for his head. He drove the pipe deep into someone’s stomach and heard an agonized retching from inside the hood. He spun and struck again, blindly swinging the pipe with all his strength; the man in front of him backed away, but a skillet caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder and drove him to the ground.
“Kill him!” Leighton shrieked. “Go on, finish him off!”
Billy reared up and struck into a blue-jeaned kneecap. The Klansman howled with pain and hopped away like an injured toadfrog. Then someone landed on his back, pushing his face into the dirt. He struggled wildly, expecting the back of his head to be caved in.
Then there was a crack! like a car backfiring and the weight was off him. Around him a forest of legs scurried for the safety of their cars; Billy looked up, saw his mother on the porch holding his father’s pistol in a shaky, two-handed grip. Sparks leaped with her next shot, and Billy heard a windshield crack. Engines caught, and now the vehicles were racing away from the house, their tires throwing up tails of mud.
Two cars banged into each other on the narrow drive leading down to the highway. Ramona fired two more shots that went wild before the old pistol jammed up. Then the night was filled with red taillights, and tires shrieked on the highway. As Billy rose to his feet, he saw the last of the red lights disappear. He was breathing hard, his head spinning, and his agonized hand let the iron pipe drop to the ground.
“COWARDS!” Billy shouted. “YOU DAMNED DIRTY COWARDS!” And then he heard his mother sob, and he turned to see her leaning over his father’s body. He saw how white his father’s face was, and how red the blood was that spilled from his mouth and nostrils. “Dad?…” Billy whispered.
Ramona looked up at her son with terror in her eyes. “Go get help, Billy! Run!”
27
ALMOST EVERY AFTERNOON IN June, and now through July, the man and woman had sat together on the front porch. Crickets sang in the high grass, and a single cicada whined in the top branches of the big oak tree, mimicking the sawmill’s distant noise. A soft breeze went by, cooling the sweat on Billy’s face and back as he worked atop the roof, tearing up the rows of rotten shingles. His hair was a tangle of reddish black curls, commas of it sticking damply to his forehead; the summer sun had tanned him to a rich dark coppery color, and the physical work he’d been doing—the work of two men done by one, since his father had been hurt—had tightened the muscles in his shoulders and back so they were sharply defined under the flesh. The roof had leaked all through June, but this was the first chance he’d had to strip off the shingles and look for holes that he’d later plug with roofing pitch.
Billy had tried to get a job as a mechanic in every gas station for fifteen miles around, but when the owners learned his name their eyes went blank, like shutters being closed over windows. He’d been offered a job sweeping up in a broomcorn warehouse on the far side of Rossland City, but the place stank and was hot as hell and they expected him to be so grateful he’d work almost for free; he’d decided he would do better putting all his time and energy into the farm. All the houses and even the trailers in Hawthorne had electricity now, except for the Creekmore place, which sat so far off the highway no one from Alabama Power ever came to inquire.
Still, Billy felt the stirring of wanderlust in his soul. Yesterday, while tilling the ground for a sprinkling of tomato seeds, he’d looked up into the clear blue sky and seen a hawk, riding the breezes that carried to the east, and he’d wanted to see the land through the hawk’s eyes. Beyond the valley’s forested crown, he knew, were more towns and people, and roads and woods and cities and seas and deserts; beyond the valley were things both wondrous and fearful. They were calling to him, using such messengers as hawks and high, fast-moving clouds and a distant road seen from the top of a hill.
He ripped up another few shingles and dropped them over the roof’s edge to the ground. He could hear his mother’s voice, reading the Twenty-seventh Psalm to his father; it was one of his favorites, and hardly a day went by that he didn’t ask to hear it. She finished, and he heard his father say, in his slurred unsteady voice, “’Mona? Where’s Billy?”
“He’s gone up on the roof to tear off the old shingles.”
“Oh. Yeah. That needs to be done. I meant to do that myself. Think he needs any help?”
“No, I believe he can do it by himself. Do you want another sip of tea?”
There was a slurping sound. Billy ripped off three shingles and tossed them over his shoulder.
“That’s mighty good, ’Mona. Think you could read the Twenty-seventh Psalm to me today? Sure is a strong, hot sun up there ain’t it? Cornfield’ll need a dose of well-water pretty soon, I reckon…”
Billy concentrated on his work while his father’s mind skipped tracks like a scratched-up record. Then John lapsed into silence, and Ramona began to read the psalm again.
The doctor in Fayette had said the first lead pipe blow had fractured John Creekmore’s skull; the second had driven bone splinters into the brain. John had lain in a coma for two weeks, in a charity-ward bed. What was left when he came out of the hospital was more child than man; in his eyes there was a look of painful bewilderment, but he seemed to remember nothing at all of what had happened. He recognized Ramona and Billy as his wife and son, but he made no demands on them and the day was just fine if he could sit out on the porch in the shade, or down at the pond listening to the bullfrogs. He slept a lot, and often he would ask the strangest questions, as if things were at a low boil inside his head and there was no telling what might pop up from the soup of memory.
Sometimes the gnaw of guilt got too bad inside Billy, and he’d have to get away by himself into the woods for a day or so. He knew that what had happened to his father would have been averted had he not gone to the May Night dance; no, he’d wanted to show the other kids that he was just like them and he could fit in…but he’d been wrong. He wasn’t like them; he wasn’t like anybody else. And now his father had been made to pay for it. The police had never found out who’d buried those fireworks within the bonfire, just as Sheriff Bromley had never found out who’d struck those blows to the back of John Creekmore’s head; everybody had airtight alibis, the sheriff had told Ramona. It was true that Ralph Leighton’s face looked as if a mule had kicked it, but his wife and son and three hunting buddies said they’d all been together playing cards the night John was hurt. They’d all sworn that Ralph had tripped down some steps and fallen right on his face.
Billy sensed movement, and looked toward the highway to see dust rising into the air. A black, battered old Volkswagen van had turned off and was coming up the road to the house. The ruts must’ve been too much for the suspension though, because in another moment the van stopped and a man wearing a straw hat climbed out of the driver’s seat. Billy called down, “Mom! Somebody’s coming!”
Ramona glanced up from the Bible and saw the figure walking slowly up the road. “Hon? We’re gonna have some company.”
“Company,” John repeated. One half of his face was drawn tight, the other was loose and immobile. He could only speak from one side of his mouth, and on the dead half of his face the eye was a cold blue stone.
Ramona stood up. There was something written across the black van’s side, but she couldn’t quite make out what it said. The man was short and rounded, and now he paused to shrug off the jacket of his seersucker suit; he pegged the jacket on a finger, let it rest across his shoulder, and then continued up the slight incline, visibly huffing and puffing.
He stopped underneath the spreading oak to catch his breath. “Ma’am, I certainly hope this is the Creekmore property. If it isn’t, I’m afraid I’m going to have to sit in this shade and rest.”
“It is. Who might you be?”
“Ah!” The man’s round, cherubic face brightened. There were spots of color on his cheeks, and he had a gray, neatly clipped mustache above a wildly sprouting goatee. “I stopped at a re
sidence just down the way, but when I asked directions, they were quite rude. These roads around here do twist and turn, don’t they? So: are you Ramona Creekmore?”
“I might be, or I might not be. I haven’t heard your name yet.”
The little man, who reminded Ramona of a short, fat goat, smiled and took out his wallet. The smile faltered a fraction when Billy walked out from around the house to see what was going on. “And you must be Billy,” the man said.
“Yes sir.”
There was a stony silence from Ramona. She stepped down off the porch as the man produced a dog-eared white business card; she took it, looked at it briefly, and then handed the card to Billy. Written across the card in an ornate script was Dr. Reginald Mirakle, Performer Extraordinaire.
“We don’t need any doctors; we’ve seen enough to last us for a long time.”
The man’s canny gray eyes darted toward John Creekmore, sitting motionless in his chair with the Bible on his lap. “Oh. No, ma’am, you misunderstand. I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a…a performer.”
“You mean a charlatan?”
He raised gray eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. “Some have said so in the past, I’m afraid. But that’s neither here nor there. If I may?…” He took the card back from Billy and replaced it in his wallet. “Mrs. Creekmore, might I trouble you for a glass of water? I’ve driven from Haleyville this morning, and it sure is warm on the road.”
Ramona paused for a few seconds, mistrustful of the man. But then she said, “All right. Billy, keep the man company, will you?” And then she went back onto the porch and inside the house. John called out to the man, “Howdy!” and then he was silent again.