Place Called Estherville (23 page)

“To hell with that, nigger,” Burgess told him. “No son-of-a-bitching black coon tells me what to do. You said yourself you went past my house, and I ain’t taking no chances. There’s been a lot of talk about you around town. You got in some kind of trouble at Charley Singfield’s house and had to quit working there, and Harry Daitch fired you for something you done once when you delivered groceries at a white woman’s house. Everybody says you’re a bad nigger. I heard Levi Kettles tell about coming home not long ago and finding you hiding behind the kitchen stove. He said he was out to get you, but, by God, I’m going to get you first. Maybe you didn’t jump none of those white women, but that ain’t no sign you wouldn’t if you got the chance. And now my wife comes along and swears you done it to her. That’s all I need to know. Once a nigger starts jumping white women, there ain’t but one way to break him of the habit.”

“But if you’d only ask Miss Mozelle to tell the truth—”

Burgess raised the ax. Reeves ran to him and tried to wrest it from his grip. He flung Reeves aside.

“Now hold on, Burgess,” Reeves said, running back and standing between him and Ganus. “Don’t go and do something you can’t undo after it’s too late. The nigger swore all he done was go past your house, and he could be telling the truth. You know that. You’d better go make Mozelle tell you the truth about what happened. I wouldn’t believe her so far, if I was you. You go ask her. I’ll watch this boy and keep him from running off till you get back.”

“Get out of my way,” Burgess told him, flourishing the ax threateningly. “You talk like a goddam nigger-lover. I know what I’m doing. Now, stay out of my way like I told you!”

He shoved Reeves aside.

“What—what—what you fixing to do to me, Mr. Burgess, please, sir!” Ganus pleaded, terrified. “What you fixing to do with that ax, Mr. Burgess!”

“If you don’t know now, you’ll never know.”

Ganus was crouching on his knees when he saw Burgess grasp the ax handle with both hands and swing the gleaming, sun-bright blade at him. The ax struck him on the neck just above his shoulder. The force of the blow knocked him sprawling on the ground, and while he lay there looking helplessly at the faces of the two white men standing above him, Burgess hit him again, this time with the flat head of the ax.

“You shouldn’t have done it, Burgess,” Reeves Houck said as he backed away.

“I had to protect myself,” Burgess said, breathing hard. “That nigger was getting ready to hit me.”

“You might get in bad trouble for this, anyhow. You don’t know what’s liable to happen now.”

“Hell, it’s just another dead nigger.”

“I ain’t saying so myself, but just the same if I was you, and somebody starts asking questions, I wouldn’t put too much trust in what she’ll say. If she lied to you once about it, she can lie some more, and bigger than ever. She didn’t exactly act like somebody who’d just been raped. Not by a black, anyhow. I wouldn’t want to say what it was, but she acted like she had some kind of scheme in the back of her mind. She could of made up that tale in her own head.”

“You shut your goddam mouth about my wife, if you want to stay alive. If I thought you’d tell on me, I’d chop your head off right now and be done with it. Maybe I ought to play safe and go on and do it. I don’t like the way she’s been acting around you, anyhow. If I ever catch you eyeing her, I’ll kill you just as quick as I did that nigger.”

“If you don’t like what goes on, talk to her. She’s the one who’s been doing all the monkeyshining, and you know it.”

“She won’t no more after this,” Burgess said, turning away. “Not after I get through with her for trying to get that nigger to jump her.”

Saying nothing after that, Burgess swung the ax over his shoulder and started walking over the field toward home. Reeves followed him as far as the newground clearing, and then watched him until he was out of sight. After that Reeves went back to the grove to finish stacking the cordwood and get it ready to haul to town.

D
R.
H
ORATION
L
OWDEN
had been sleeping soundly for several hours when he was awakened by loud persistent blowing of an automobile horn in the graveled driveway just outside his window. He lifted himself to a sitting position on the edge of the double-bed and turned on the light. His wife, Betty, in bed beside him, and accustomed and resigned to his being called from his rest at all hours of the night to attend births, deaths, and common stomach aches, turned over with a fitful groan and went back to sleep.

He saw by his watch that the time was a few minutes past two o’clock in the morning. As usual, after more than forty years of responding promptly and uncomplainingly to sick calls from white and Negro alike in all sections of Tallulah County, he was fully awake by the time he had turned on the bedside light, and he reached for his bathrobe and slippers and went to the front door.

When he switched on the porch light, the green sedan, which had been standing in the driveway with engine running, quickly turned around and speeded out of sight down the street before he could get a good look at it. Shivering in the cold December night while he wondered if someone were playing a prank on him, he was about to go back into the house when he saw a large white envelope pinned to the screen-door. He reached for it and looked at it carefully. It was a sealed plain envelope with no identifying marks on it other than the penciled lettering:

Kathyanne Bazemore,

Gwinnett Alley.

Expecting to find some explanation inside, he tore open the flap and saw to his surprise a crisp new hundred-dollar treasury note. The envelope contained nothing else. As he studied the envelope and crinkly bill curiously, the only thought that came to mind was that these days the most likely place in town where a person would ordinarily see a new hundred-dollar bill was in the hands of the cashier of the Estherville State Bank. Chuckling to himself over the implications, and fully intending to joke about it the next time he saw George Swayne, he went back into the house and got dressed to go down to Gwinnett Alley.

He had no idea why he was being called upon, in such a mysterious manner, and at that time of night, to go to see Kathyanne Bazemore. He had arranged only a few weeks previously, it was true, for Aunt Hazel Teasley to be admitted to the ward for the aged and infirm at the county hospital, so she would be assured of receiving proper medical care as long as she lived, but he could see no connection between the two incidents. He had not seen Kathyanne since the latter part of summer, when he spoke to her on the street one day, and at that time she had appeared to be in normal health and spirits.

Dr. Plowden was a kindly, benevolent man in his middle sixties, completely gray for the past twelve years and slightly enfeebled with age, but still firm-fleshed and sure of hand, and his greatest fault was that he was more concerned with his medical practice and the health of his patients than he was with his own welfare. He had always been so engrossed in his work that he had neither taken the time to go away on a vacation, nor, as his wife often complained, had he ever had any time of his own to devote to his family. The only activity he had ever enjoyed, aside from medicine itself, was bird hunting, but he had not fired a shotgun in fifteen years. Betty had for many years tried to persuade him to retire and turn his practice over to a younger man, but he liked the profession of medicine and took pride in it, and he wanted to continue actively as long as he lived. He had often expressed the hope that when he died he would either be on his way to attend some ill person or, else, be returning from attending a patient. He had begun his career as a general practitioner, immediately after graduating from medical college, in the days when country doctors had to keep three or four sturdy horses, one of which was always kept by turn harnessed and standing to a buggy at all hours of the day and night so that there would be no delay in case of an emergency. Since the time when adequate roads were constructed in the county and he could visit his patients in a car, each year he had consistently worn out one automobile after another, and his greatest regret now was that he was not young enough to undertake to pilot a small two-place airplane in responding to emergencies and routine house calls in the country. He was privileged, because of his advanced age and respected standing in the community, to criticize in outspoken candor what he considered unethical conduct on the part of some of the other physicians in Estherville. It was his conviction that most of the younger men, selfishly thinking of their own bodily comfort or their wives’ social engagements, were abusing an honored profession by secretly agreeing among themselves to keep brief office hours during the day and declining to make outside home calls during the night, no matter how serious the emergency. For the others, particularly such men as Dr. Lamar English, who more and more were using the wealth they had accumulated as physicians to become outright money-lenders, he had the utmost contempt. On the way through town from his home on Palmetto Street to Gwinnett Alley, he stopped to drink coffee at the Round-The-Clock Cafe. It was a few days before Christmas and holly wreaths on the cash register and suspended over the windows and doors gave the restaurant a cozy festive atmosphere that was lacking during the other months of the year. In addition to the night cook and the counterman, there were three other men in the restaurant when he went in and sat down on the nearest stool. Being in a hurry, he unbuttoned his heavy gray overcoat but did not take it off. One of the men in the restaurant was Will Hanford, the night patrolman, who admittedly spent very little time walking the streets on winter nights, and the two others were orange-truck drivers from Florida who were playing the jukebox and eating ham and eggs. Will Hanford, swaggering and loudmouthed, walked up to the front of the cafe and clapped his hand familiarly on Dr. Plowden’s shoulder.

“Well, Doc, I see you’re up again when a man your age ought to be home in bed,” Will said for all to hear. “Why don’t you stop getting up like this in the middle of the night and let the younger doctors sew up the guts of some slashed nigger?”

“I don’t know why I do it, Will,” he said seriously. He knew Will was trying to find out where he was going, because Will liked to appear unexpectedly at a gathering of Negroes and make an arrest on some pretext, but he had no intention of telling him that he was going to see Kathyanne Bazemore. “Maybe it’s because there’s always somebody who needs medical attention, and I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t try to do what I could. That’s probably why God put men like you and me in the world—to stay up late at night and look after people who need help.”

Will came right out with the question, “Who’re you going to see at this time of night, Doc? Some nigger who ought to be dead anyway? If you’ll tell me who it is, I’ll pitch him in the jailhouse and save you the trouble of keeping him alive.”

“We’re all human beings, Will,” he said kindly. “You’re going to have to learn to treat all people alike, white and colored, or else there won’t be any place for you one of these days. I know that you and a lot more like you think you can keep this a white man’s town, but you’re wrong. The world has changed a great deal in the last generation. I may not live to see the whole change come, but I hope you do.”

He sipped the hot coffee while records changed with a clang in the jukebox. Will was momentarily subdued.

“Well, you may be right, Doc,” he agreed solemnly. He looked at the two youthful truck drivers at the other end of the restaurant. He did not say anything more until the counterman came within hearing distance. Then, in a voice loud enough for all to hear, he said, “I reckon the only difference between me and you, Doc, is that you like to help other folks, and I like to be as mean as hell to the ones I come across in my business. I’d hate to have to turn in my gun and go to bed every night at nine o’clock now. I wouldn’t think life was worth living no more if I couldn’t scare hell out of some nigger every night and throw him in the lock-up.”

“That’s probably the only difference between us, Will,” Dr. Plowden commented quietly as he hurried to finish his coffee. It was a quarter to three when he left the Round-The-Clock, and a few minutes later, lugging his heavy satchel, he was getting out of his car in Gwinnett Alley. All the wooden window blinds were tightly closed, but he could see a flickering light shining through the crack over the threshold when he went to the door of the cabin and knocked. At first there was the expected loud scuffle of feet on the bare floor, and a chair was tipped over, and then there was complete silence inside the cabin. He waited a few moments and knocked again, this time more urgently. Presently the door was unlatched and cautiously opened a few inches. When he saw somebody peering at him in the darkness, he rapped impatiently on the weathered door. It opened another inch or so.

“Who’s that?” somebody asked in a guarded voice barely above a whisper.

“Dr. Plowden,” he answered brusquely, irritated by the delay.

“It is?” the voice said in a high note of surprise.

“Of course,” he said sharply. “Let me in.”

There were excited whispers behind the door. After a while he was asked through the narrow opening, “You want something down here, Dr. Plowden?”

“I want in! Open the door, whoever you are! I can’t stand out here in this freezing weather all night. What’s the matter with you? Open the door!”

He could hear the usual agitated discord of a hurriedly whispered conversation behind the door, but he still could not understand anything that was being said. He stamped his cold feet noisily on the wooden doorstep.

“Is anybody else out there, Dr. Plowden?” he was asked. “Anybody like Mr. Will Hanford, or somebody?”

“No. I’m by myself. Open the door!”

Presently the door swung slowly open, and he immediately went inside. In the bright flickering flames of the logs in the fireplace he recognized Henry Beck as he walked past him toward the hearth. Beyond Henry were two Negro women, Nettie Dunn and her daughter, Alethea, watching him with unconcealed concern. In the far corner of the cabin’s single room, bundled in brightly colored patchwork quilts in a big poster bed, was Kathyanne. He could see only enough of her face to be able to recognize her as he walked over the creaking floor to the fireplace and stood with his back to the blazing warmth of the oak logs. Several Christmas decorations had been placed over the windows and there was a large cluster of mistletoe hanging on a nail over the mantelpiece. Aside from the large double-bed, the only other furniture in the room consisted of several straight-back chairs, two rockers, a dresser, and a table. The exposed clapboard walls had been papered with colorful illustrations and advertisements cut from magazines.