The Tree of Forgetfulness (12 page)

“If I had a coat of arms,” he says, “the motto would be ‘Happy to Oblige.' ” In return his friends in the Rotary Club and the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club and the Chamber of Commerce, thought highly of him; they wished him well then, and they wish him well now; they will always wish him well. In a crunch they will stand shoulder to shoulder; they will vouch for one another.

That was why when Frank Henderson called at five-thirty one morning in early November of 1926 and said, “We need you to get down to the depot, Howard,” he'd gotten up and hustled down there. An hour earlier Frank's uncle in Columbia had called to say that two bundles of the
World
had just been loaded onto the southbound train. You couldn't miss Barrett's stories, he said—top of the front page of both editions, under the biggest headlines: “Sheriff Is Accused of Complicity with the Lynchers of Three” and “S.C. Whispers Names of Mob Killers.”

“Of course I went,” he says. Has she not been listening? Did he have a choice? He picked up the papers then walked over to his office and read the stories. The story about the sheriff held no surprises, though the word
complicity
troubled him, so he pulled out his
Webster's
and looked it up. Then it troubled him more. People had been accusing each other of complicity since 1656, and in all that time the meaning
had not changed.
Association or participation in or as if in a wrongful act
. Any direction you tried to run, that definition would stop you. Between the
association
and the
as if
, there was no way out.

“Up and down Horse Creek Valley,” the whispering story began, “men have talked of murder for a month. In small frame houses, squatting between cotton fields and the twisting red clay roads, in offices and in stores, the names of the lynchers have been whispered behind locked doors.”

But none of the men he knew had whispered the names of any lynchers; they didn't know any lynchers, only each other, and themselves.

No sooner had he finished the papers and opened the office at nine than the bell on the back of the front door rang and Aubrey Timmerman himself came in. “Speak of the devil,” Howard said, but the sheriff didn't find that funny. His clothes looked slept in, his face was red, and he was squinting like a man who'd just finished working a long shift under bright lights. He had the palest blue eyes, with a light in them that reminded Howard of the look of the sky in the hottest part of the summer, and when someone else talked, the sheriff seemed to watch him from a place way back inside his skull.

“I didn't like a single thing about the man,” Howard says. “Not his hands with their new pink skin nor his gun belt that creaked when he shifted in his chair.” Above all, he disliked the sheriff's voice. It was distinctive and strident, like a blue jay's call. “What can I do for you, sheriff?” Howard said, and Aubrey Timmerman leaned across the desk and lowered his voice. He was making the rounds, he said, carrying the same message to friend and foe: He intended to charge with perjury any man who said that Aubrey Timmerman was at the scene when the Longs were killed. He'd put him on the stand, make him swear on the Bible and tell
his
part. And the whole time the sheriff talked, the word
complicity
coursed through Howard's mind. “You pass the word along, I'd be obliged,” the sheriff said.

“Will do,” Howard said, and then he slapped the desk with both palms, to show that the conversation was over.

“Now I was not without sympathy for the man,” he says to the curious grandchild; she needs to hear that part of the story too. Everyone
in town knew how hard Barrett had been dogging the sheriff. No man could stand up to the pressure to remember what the sheriff was being challenged to recall. They all knew how murky things could get when what
really
happened got so tangled up with what
should
have happened, it was hard to tell them apart, especially when a man mistook what he'd
meant
to do for what he'd
actually
done. He knew how difficult it was to examine your conscience, to work your way through the commandments on the lookout for the smallest sin.
Have I broken any private vow? Have I cursed anyone or otherwise wished evil on him? Have I cooperated in the sins of others?
There are as many sins as there are days in a week, hours in a day, actions of the hand, movements of the eye, intentions of the heart. And the lack or failure or withholding of those same actions and movements and intentions are also sins. “What have I failed to do?” he says. “No one ever gets to the bottom of that question, and that is the truth.”

But she doesn't feel the least bit sorry for him. She's getting restless: looking at him mournfully, reproachfully, like every other woman he's disappointed. He must gather up the last remaining scraps of his strength and tell her something that will keep her from leaving and taking his life with her. “Put yourself in my place,” he says. She looks startled by the invitation, as though no one had ever asked that of her. “We all knew that Albert Long killed Sheriff Glover. It's hard to imagine that a boy of fourteen could heft a shotgun, much less fire one with deadly aim, but he did. Because his own people said he did, that's how I know.”

“The woman, Bessie Long, his own flesh and blood, accused him, and Dr. Hastings wrote it down on his prescription pad.” He has her attention now; she looks bright and rapacious again.
I've seen it
, she says.
One page that ends in the middle of a sentence
. Now she's greedy to hear the rest.

“I will try,” he says. “I will do my best. This is all I have ever tried to do, so help me God.” Dr. Hastings was called to the Long house on that April day, and there he found Sheriff Earl Glover and Mamie Long lying dead; he found Bessie Long shot in the arm and chest and gut. “Shot all to pieces” was the way he always put it, dying. But he
had some men load her into the backseat of his car anyway; he climbed in with her, and another man drove them to the Negro infirmary at Leesville.

As they jolted along the road, she groaned and wept and called on Jesus and spilled her blood. She was sometimes awake and sometimes so far gone that he had to hold his hand under her nose and feel her breath to know she was alive. During one period of quiet and clarity he told her that he did not think she could be saved. And if she was going to die, he said, didn't she want to meet her maker with a clear conscience? Didn't she want to tell him which one of her kin had fired the rounds of No. 6 shot that had ripped through the sheriff's lungs and heart?

“Yes,” she whispered. “Albert.”

“What's that you say? Your brother?”

“Cousin.”

“But when they got to Leesville, Bessie Long was still alive,” he says. “And your great-grandfather removed the bullets and stitched up her wounds. He patched her up, and she stood trial with the rest of her family. And being recommended to the mercy of the court, she was sentenced to prison for the rest of the life he'd given back to her.”

He's told the story as clearly and simply as he can manage, leaving nothing out, trying to show her how it was, and he thinks he's succeeded.

My great-grandfather
, she says, and then she sits quietly, head bowed, studying her hands. But soon she's restless again. Twice she shakes her head, stands up, pulls her coat tightly around her, takes a few steps toward the door.

“What do you want from me?” he says.

Your story
, she says.
Tell me what you did that you called unforgivable
.

“Sit down,” he says, but she will not. She opens the door, looks up and down the hall. She's going; just the idea of it makes him feel weak, weaker than he's been, as though when she walks away from him she carries off his strength. “Wait,” he says. “Stop. Don't go.”

The night the Longs were killed, he went to his office, and he meant to stay there. He had enough work to keep him there all night. Policies to be written; the height of a column of red numbers in the
ledger measured against a second column of black figures, to see which one was winning that month. There were envelopes to be opened and letters read that he'd put off reading for too long. A contract to be drawn up for the rich man to sign, summing up their recent understanding. But the longer he sat there and thought of what Bessie Long had said about Albert and remembered N. R. Latham's contempt for the lawful verdict and sentence the court had handed down, and when he thought of the men who would be expecting him to be there to see the wrong of Earl Glover's death righted, he knew he could not stay.

He joined the line of automobiles moving up the Columbia Highway. Then, just outside the city limits, he began to think of Albert Long. He remembered the scrawny neck and bony shoulders that he'd stared at throughout the three days of the trial. He remembered how Albert Long had squirmed in his seat, how he'd fidgeted and knocked his knees together the way Lewis did when he got restless. And once his thinking started to run in that direction, he couldn't stop it, and before long, all he could think about was that Albert Long was not much older than Lewis. And that's when he stumbled on the real reason he was driving out the Columbia Highway. At school, at church, at home, he'd been taught that the force of one man's character was sufficient unto any evil day, and with every mile he drove he was more convinced of what he would do when he got there.

He would push to the front of the crowd, step out in front of all those guns. He'd grab a torch, haul Albert into the light. “Stop,” he'd say, and they would stop. “He's just a boy,” he'd say, and the other men would wake up and see that he was right. He would tell them that for the sake of their neighbors and the town they loved, for the sake of their own immortal souls, they must not descend into savagery and lawlessness. They must not descend.

But when he got to where everybody was going, it was pitch-black dark. “It was so dark you could not make out the face of the man standing next to you,” he says. They were in a clearing with a black wall of pines all around, a black sky overhead, the hard ridges of old plowed ground underfoot. There was a big crowd, a lot of confusion. “Human buzzards,” Wesley Barton called the men who were there that night.
There might have been some of that breed there, he doesn't know. What he knows is that he went there to stop it. He tried. “It does not matter how I tried,” he says, “because I got there too late. They were dead,” he says. “Do you hear me? All three of them, dead.” That was what was unforgivable, he tells her: that he got there too late to stop the other men from doing what they did.

When he's done, he sees that she is sitting beside his bed again, but it doesn't matter. Telling that story has taken his strength, and what has left him will not return. “You've gotten what you came for,” he says. “Now stay or go, but let me rest.”

S
HE AND HER
mother called the letters they wrote one another their
good talks
. Before her mother forgave her for eloping with Howard, she and Libba had exchanged brief notes at the end of every week. Once her parents had accepted that Libba was a married woman living with her husband in her own house, the habit of writing to one another was so pleasurable for both of them that they kept it up. When she or her mother traveled, longer letters crossed the distance between them. Even now, some mornings when the house was quiet, she would close the bedroom door and sit at the small maple desk near the window that looked out into a magnolia tree and write her mother a letter. When she was done, she would put it in a hatbox on the top shelf of her closet where no one would have any business looking until she was gone, and what would it matter then?

“Dearest Mother,” she wrote. “Or maybe
Madame Chairman
would be more fitting, since it is to you that I still imagine submitting the minutes of my life. At this time of the year, with the flower show upon us, I feel your presence more than ever. I have a lot to live up to, Mother, and don't I know it? Your spirit shares a hymnal with me every Sunday and sits beside me at the dinner table, ever the exemplar of courtesy, tact, gentle grace, subtle mental force, unselfishness and kindness, patience and love, the full range of virtues that marked you as the great lady you were and
are
and always will be. Now, this year, if the truth be known, Mother, you have begun to dim in my memory, because the living can only follow the dead for so long, and then we
must turn back. Still, if I forget who you were and are, the pictures in my hallway remind me. There you are, in a smart hat and gloves, gavel raised, presiding over the statewide meeting of the Federation of Women's Clubs. Standing tall, you address the Daughters of the American Revolution, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. A dozen times a day, especially when I am perplexed or troubled, the proverbs you dispensed so freely come back to me.
There is a salve for every sore
, I'll think.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof
.

“If I forget you, others remember for me. Every Christmas Eve after midnight Mass, where I have once again ascended the musical heights and hit the high C in “O Holy Night,” a woman will take me aside and squeeze my hands, kiss my cheek. ‘When I closed my eyes,' she will say, ‘I could almost believe your mother was in the choir loft again.'

“Every year, so I'm told, the Civic Club Christmas baskets for the poor look more like the ones you filled and delivered all over the county. ‘Our Lady Bountiful,' the newspaper called you, and in the picture printed above that caption you looked the part: you in your furtrimmed cloak, the baskets arrayed at your feet, my brother Lewis and I standing on either side of you, abiding under the shelter of your wings.