“Mr. Vincent, thank you for speaking straight out. I must say, most Southern lawyers prefer to speak a code which one has to have attended either Ole Miss or Alabama to penetrate. You, sir, at least speak directly.”
“I take a pleasure in that. Possibly the product of an Eastern education.”
“Excellent, sir. Now, I need a representative to travel to a certain town deeper in the South and make private inquiries. This man has to be extremely smart, not without charm, stubborn as the Lord, a man of complete probity. He must also be somewhat brave, or at least the sort not turned feeble by a show of hostility. He also has to be comfortable around people of different bloods, white and Negro. He has to be comfortable around law enforcement officers of a certain type, the type that would as soon knock a fellow’s hat off as talk civilly to him. The fee for this service, perhaps lasting a week, would be quite high, given the complex diplomatic aspects of the situation. I would suppose you have no ethical objections to a high fee, Mr. Vincent.”
“High fee. In my career those two words rarely appear in the same sentence. Yes, do go on, Mr. Trugood. You have my attention, without distraction.”
“Thank you, sir. I am charged with executing a will for a certain rather well-off late Chicagoan. He had for many years in his employ a Negro named Lincoln Tilson.”
Sam wrote: “Negro Lincoln Tilson” on his big yellow pad.
“Lincoln was a loyal custodian of my client’s properties, a handyman, a bodyguard, a gardener, a chauffeur, a man whose brightness of temperament always cheered my client, who was negotiating a business career of both great success and some notoriety.”
“I follow, sir,” said Sam.
“Five years ago, Lincoln at last slowed down. My employer settled a sum on him, a considerable sum, and bid him farewell. He even drove him to the Illinois Central terminal to catch the City of New Orleans and reverse the steps by which he arrived up North so many years ago, for Lincoln’s pleasure was to return to the simpler life from which he had sprung in the South. Lincoln returned to his birthplace, a town called Thebes, in Thebes County, Mississippi.”
Sam wrote it down, while saying, “That is the deepest part of the deepest South, I would imagine.”
“It is, sir.”
Thebes, as a word, rang ever so slightly in Sam’s imagination. He recalled that the original was a Greek town, city even, much fought over in antiquity. For some reason the number seven occurred in concert with it.
“I see puzzlement, sir,” said Trugood. “You are well educated and no doubt think of Seven Against Thebes, by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus. I assure you, no army led by seven heroes is necessary in this case. Mississippi’s Thebes is a far distance from Aeschylus’s tragic town of war. It is a backwater Negro town far up the Yaxahatchee River, which itself is a branch of the Pascagoula River. It is the site of a famous, or possibly infamous, penal farm for colored called Thebes Farm.”
“That’s it,” said Sam. “It is legendary among the Negro criminal class, with whom I had many dealings as a young prosecutor. ‘You don’t wants to go to Thebes, they say, don’t nobody never nohow come back from Thebes.’ Or words to that effect.”
“It seems they have it mixed up with Hades in their simplicity. Yes, Thebes is not a pleasant place. Nobody wants to go to Thebes.”
“Yet you want me to go to Thebes. That is why the fee would be so high?”
“There is difficulty of travel, for one thing. You must hire a boat in Pascagoula, and the trip upriver is unpleasant. The river, I understand, is dark and deep; the swamp that lines it inhospitable. There was only one road into Thebes, through that same forbidding swamp; it was washed out some years back, and Thebes County, not exactly a county of wealth, has yet to dispatch repair.”
“I see.”
“Accommodations would be primitive.”
“I slept in many a barn in the late fracas in Europe, Mr. Trugood. I can sleep in a barn again; it won’t hurt me.”
“Excellent. Now here is the gist of the task. My client’s estate—as I say, considerable—is hung up in probate because Mr. Lincoln Tilson seems no longer to exist. I have attempted to communicate with Thebes County authorities, to little avail. I can reach no one but simpletons on the telephone, when the telephone is working, which is only intermittently. No letter has yet been answered. The fate of Lincoln is unknown, and a large amount of money is therefore frozen, a great disappointment to my client’s greedy, worthless heirs.”
“I see. My task would be to locate either Lincoln or evidence of his fate. A document, that sort of thing?”
“Yes. From close-mouthed Southern types. I, of course, need someone who speaks the language, or rather, the accent. They would hear the Chicago in my voice, and their faces would ossify. Their eyes would deaden. Their hearing would disintegrate. They would evolve backward instantaneously to the neolithic.”
“That may be so, but Southerners are also fair and honest folk, and if you don’t trumpet your Northern superiority in their face and instead take the time to listen and master the slower cadences, they will usually reward you with friendship. Is there another issue here?”
“There is indeed.” He waved at his handsome suit, his handsome shoes, his English tie. His cufflinks were gold with a discreet sapphire, probably worth more than Sam had made in the last six months. “I am a different sort of man, and in some parts of the South—Thebes, say—that difference would not go unnoticed.”
“You have showy ways, but they are the ways of a man of the world.”
“I fear that is exactly what would offend them. And, frankly, I’m not a brave man. I’m a man of desks. The actual confrontation, the quickness of argument, the thrust of will on will: not really my cup of tea, I’m afraid. A sound man understands his limits. I was the sort of boy who never got into fights and didn’t like tests of strength.”
“I see.”
“That is why I am buying your courage as well as your mind.”
“You overestimate me. I am quite a common man.”
“A decorated hero in the late war.”
“Nearly everybody in the war was a hero. I saw some true courage; mine was ordinary, if even that.”
“I think I have made a very good choice.”
“All right, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr. Vincent. This is the fee I had in mind.”
He wrote a figure on the back of his card, and pushed it over. It took Sam’s breath away.
“You are sending me to be your champion in hell, it sounds like,” said Sam. “But you are paying me well for the fight.”
“You will earn every penny, I assure you.”
2
IT took Sam but a few days to bank the retainer, rearrange his schedule, book a ticket on the City of New Orleans, and spend an afternoon in the Fort Smith municipal library reading up on Thebes and its penal farm. What he learned appalled him.
On the night before he was to leave, he finally faced the unsettled quality of his feelings. At last, he climbed into his car and drove the twelve miles east along Arkansas Route 8 toward the small town of Board Camp; turning left off the highway, he traveled a half mile of bumpy road to a surprisingly large white house on a hill that commanded the property. The house was freshly painted as was the barn behind, and someone had worked the gardens well and dutifully; it was June, and the place was ablaze with the flora chosen to flourish in the hot West Arkansas sun. A few cows grazed in the far meadows, but much of the property was still in trees, where Sam and the owner shot deer in the fall, if they didn’t wander farther afield.
Sam pulled up close to the house, aware that he was under observation. This was Earl’s young son, Bob Lee, almost five. Bob Lee was a grave boy who had the gift of stillness when he so desired. He was a watcher, that boy. He already had made some hunting trips with them, and had a talent for blood sport, the ability to understand the messages of the land, to decipher the play of light and shadow in the woods, to smell the weather on the wind, though
he was some years yet from shooting. Still, he was a steady presence on the hunt, not a wild kid. It was Sam’s sworn duty as godfather to the boy to draw him into the professional world; Earl was adamant that his son would do better than he and not be a roaming Marine, a battlefield scurrier, a man killer, as Earl had been. Earl wanted something more settled for his only son, a career in the law or medicine. It was important to Earl, and when things were important to Earl, it was Earl’s force of will that usually made them happen.
“Howdy there, Bob Lee,” called Sam.
“Mr. Sam, Mr. Sam,” the boy responded, from the porch where he had been sitting and looking out over the land in the twilight.
“Your daddy’s still on duty, I see. Is he expected back?”
“Don’t know, sir. Daddy comes and goes, you know.”
“I do know. How you got such a worker as a daddy I’ll never figure, when he has such a lazy son who just sits there like a frog on a log.”
“I was memorizing.”
“It doesn’t surprise me at all. Memorizing the land? The birds. The sky, the clouds.”
“Something like that, sir.”
“Oh, you are a smart one. You have received all the brains in the family, I can see that. You’ll end up a rich one. Is your mama here?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll fetch her.”
The boy scooted off as Sam waited. He could have walked in himself, for he was that familiar with the Swaggers. But something in his mood kept him still and worrisome.
Junie Swagger emerged. Lord, a beauty still! But Junie was, well, who knew? The childbirth had been a terrible ordeal, it was said, and Earl not around to help, at least not till the end, and so the poor girl fought her way through fifteen hours of labor on her own. She had not, it was also said, quite ever come back from that. She was somewhat dreamy, as if she didn’t hear all that was said to her. Her great pleasure was those damned flowers, and she could spend hours in the hottest weather cultivating or weeding or fertilizing. It was also said that she would have no more children.
Now, a little wan, she stood before him.
“Why, hello, Mr. Sam. Come on in.”
“Well, Junie, thank you much, but I don’t want you making no fuss. I have to have a chat with Earl is all. You needn’t even consider this a visit, and there’s no need to unlimber any hospitality.”
“Oh, you are so silly. You sit down, I’ll git you a nice glass of lemonade. You’ll stay for supper, I insist.”
“No, ma’am. Can’t. I’m in the middle of getting ready for a business trip to New Orleans. I’m driving over to Memphis tomorrow to catch the train.”
“You know, Mr. Sam, Earl sometimes gets so caught up he doesn’t get here ’til late.”
“I do know. It seems a shame after all he’s been through that he can’t have a quieter life.”
Junie said nothing for a second, but her face focused with a surprising intensity, as if some spark had been struck. Then she said, “I fear he has other things on his mind. I know this Korea business has him all het up. I’m scared he’ll get it in his head he has to go fight another war. He’s done enough. But I can read his melancholy. It’s his nature to go where there’s shooting, under the impression he can help, but maybe out of some darker purpose.”
“Earl is a man bred for war, I agree, Junie. But I do think that he’ll sit this one out on the porch. He’s still in pain from wounds, and he knows what a wonderful home you’ve made for him and the boy.”
“Oh, Mr. Sam, you can be such a charmer sometimes. I don’t believe a word you say, never have, never will.” She laughed and her face lit up.
“Now you sit here, Earl will be along shortly or not, as he sees fit. I will bring you that lemonade and that will be that.”
So Sam sat and watched the twilight grow across the land. He could have sat all night, but on this night Earl had decided to come home as quickly as possible, and within a few minutes Sam saw the Arkansas Highway Patrol black-and-white scuttling down the road, pulling up a screen of dust behind it. Earl had meant to asphalt that road for four years now, or at least lay some gravel, but could never quite afford to have it done. Sam had volunteered to front him the money, but Earl of course was stubborn and wanted no debts haunting him, none left for his heirs to owe if his melancholy about the true nature of the world ever proved out and he turned up shot to death in some squalid field.
Earl got out of the car with a smile, for he had seen Sam from a long way off. He loved three things in the world: his family, the United States Marine Corps and Sam.
“Well, Mr. Sam, why didn’t you tell me you were coming? Junie, get this man a drink of something stronger than lemonade and set an extra place.”
Earl lumbered up to the porch from his car. He was a big man, over six feet, and still so darkened from the Pacific sun after all these years some thought he was an Indian. He had a rumbly, slow voice famous in the county, and his close bristly hair—he’d removed the Stetson by now—was just beginning to gray. He was near forty years old, and his body was a latticework of scar tissue and jerry-built field-expedient repairs. He’d been stitched up so many times he was almost more surgical thread than human being, testimony to the fact that a war or two will write its record in a man’s flesh. His hands were big, his muscles knotty from farmwork on weekends and plenty of it, but his face still had the same odd calmness to it that inspired men in combat or terrified men in crime. He looked as if he could handle things. He could.
“He says he won’t stay,” Junie cried from inside, “though Lord knows I tried. You tie him to a chair and we’ll be all set.”
“Bob Lee’s going to be disappointed if old Sam don’t read him a story tonight,” Earl said.
“I will stay to read the story, yes, Earl.” In his stentorian, courtroom voice, Sam could make a story come more alive than the radio. “And I wish this were a pure pleasure call. But I do have a matter to discuss.”
“Lord. Am I in some kind of trouble?”
“No, sir. Maybe I am, however.”
It was such a reversal. In some ways, unsaid, Sam had become Earl’s version of a father, his own proving to be a disappointment and his need for someone to believe in so crucial to his way of thinking. So he had informally adopted Sam in this role, worked for him for two years as an investigator before Colonel Jenks had managed at last to get Earl on the patrol. The bonds between the two men had grown strong, and Sam alone had heard Earl, who normally never discussed himself, on such topics as the war in the Pacific or the war in Hot Springs.
The two sat; Junie brought her husband a glass of lemonade, and he in turn gave her the Sam Browne belt with the Colt .357, the handcuffs, the cartridge reloaders and such, which she took into the house to secure.
Earl loosened his tie, set his Stetson down on an unused chair. His cowboy boots were dusty, but under the dust shined all the way down to the soles.
“All right,” he said. “I am all ears.”
Sam told him quickly about his commission to go to Thebes, Mississippi, and the tanned, smooth-talking colleague who had put it together for him, and the large retainer.
“Sounds straightforward to me,” said Earl.
“But you have heard of the prison at Thebes.”
“Never from a white person. White folks prefer to believe such places don’t exist. But from the Negroes, yes, occasionally.”
“It has an evil reputation.”
“It does. I once arrested a courier running too fast up 71 toward Kansas City. He had a trunkful of that juju grass them jazz boys sometimes smoke. He was terrified I’s going to send him to Thebes. I thought he’d die of a heart attack he’s so scared. Never saw nothing like it. It took an hour to get him settled down, and then of course another hour to make him understand this was Arkansas, not Mississippi, and I couldn’t send him to Thebes, even if I wanted to. I sent him to Tucker, instead, where I’m sure he had no picnic. But at the trial, he seemed almost happy. Tucker was no Thebes, at least not in the Negro wa
y of looking at things.”
“They live in a different universe, somehow,” Sam said. “It doesn’t make sense to us. It is haunted by ghosts and more attuned to the natural and more connected to the earth. Their minds work differently. You can’t understand, sometimes, why they do the things they do. They are us a million years ago.”
“Maybe that’s it,” said Earl. “Though the ones I saw on Tarawa, they died and bled the same as white folks.”
“Here’s why I’m somewhat apprehensive,” Sam confessed. “I went up to Fort Smith the other day, and found out what I could find out about this place. Something’s going on down there that’s gotten me spooked a bit.”
“What could spook Sam Vincent?”
“Well, sir, five years ago, according to the Standard and Poor’s rating guide to the United States, in Thebes, Mississippi, there was a sawmill, a dry cleaner, a grocery and general store, a picture show, two restaurants, two bar-and-grills, a doctor, a dentist, a mayor, a sheriff, a feed store and a veterinarian.”
“Yes?”
“Now there’s nothing. All those businesses and all those professional men, they’ve up and gone.”
“All over the South, the Negroes are on the move. Mississippi is cotton, and cotton isn’t king no more. They’re riding the Illinois Central up North to big jobs and happier lives.”