Up Jumps the Devil

The large L-shaped kitchen was as much dining room and den as a place to cook and every surface gleamed with vinyl wax and lemon polish. I could have eaten off that white tile floor it was scrubbed so clean.

At the long end of the L, a plum-colored sectional set of couches and recliners wrapped around the corner and faced a color television that could be viewed from the dining table as well.

Football players grappled each other on the screen. The sound was turned off but it still held the attention of a hulking young man who sat at the table and munched on a drumstick from the biggest bucket of the Colonel’s takeout chicken. From his looks, he and the young woman had been fished up out of the same gene pool. Both had fair skin and thick heads of lustrous brown hair, both had eyes that shifted away as soon as they met mine, and both could have stood to lose a fourth of their body weight.

Their mother, on the other hand, was so thin as to be almost gaunt. She still had big hair—thicker, browner and curlier than her daughter’s—but the big breasts that had impressed my sisters-in-law were no more. Her many rings—diamonds? zircons? crystal “ice”?—slid loosely on thin workworn fingers as she poked at her hair. Beneath those towering curls, her face looked haggard despite a generous layer of pink blusher, bright red lipstick and dark blue eyeshadow.

She perched on the edge of one plum-colored couch at a right angle to a black couple who sat just as stiffly on an adjacent section of the couch. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed as if all three looked at me in relief as I approached, still bearing Aunt Zell’s frozen casserole.

Either my name hadn’t registered on the daughter or she simply lacked the social skills needed to introduce me, so I said, “Deborah Knott, Mrs. Stancil. I grew up down the road from here and used to know Dallas when I was a girl. I was so sorry to hear about him.”

“Mr. Kezzie Knott’s daughter?” she asked in a voice husky with cigarettes.

I nodded and looked at the black couple inquiringly.

The man came to his feet and put out his hand. “I’m Fred Greene, Miss—Knott, was it? And this is my wife Wilma.”

They looked to be about my age, mid-thirties, and both were as formally dressed as if they’d just come from church.

I balanced the casserole in my left hand and shook with each of them, apologizing for my cold fingers.

“You want Ashley to take that for you?” asked Mrs. Stancil as she straightened the rings on her fingers and pulled a cigarette from a gold leather case. “Ashley, honey, put that in the refrigerator, would you?”

From the pile of red-tipped butts heaped in the cut-glass ashtray on the couch beside her, she was working on her second pack since the tray was last emptied.

I handed Aunt Zell’s casserole to Ashley and explained how it could go in the freezer if they didn’t need it right away.

“That’ll be nice,” said Dallas’s widow. “We’re much obliged.” She inclined her head toward the Greenes. “They brought us some chicken and we surely do appreciate that, too. There’s no way I feel like cooking since everything happened.”

“It was nothing,” Mrs. Greene murmured. “We just hate it so bad about your husband.”

Fred Greene continued to stand and I looked at him closely. There was something awfully familiar about his face, but I couldn’t think in what context.

“You wouldn’t happen to be kin to Maidie Greene that married Cletus Holt, would you?” I asked.

“No, ma’am,” he answered politely. “My family’s from Pitt County.”

My brain made a template of his face and slid it across a wide variety of places and events. A desk? Law?

“Were you ever a guardian ad litem down in Lee County or maybe a parole officer?”

“Sorry. I install mufflers over near Garner.”

“I’m sure I’ve seen you before,” I insisted.

“A lot of white folks tell me that,” he said, and something about his stony manner made me wonder if he’d ever stood up before me in court.

I would’ve dropped it at that point, but his wife came to her feet anyhow. “Since Miss Knott is here to visit with you, Mrs. Stancil, we’ll go on now. We just wanted you to know that all your African-American neighbors in the Cotton Grove community really hate what’s happened. If we can do anything to help you identify those two cowards who shot Mr. Stancil in the back—”

The widow exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I appreciate you saying that, but you tell your people not to worry. We know it’s not anything to do with anybody ’round here. Dallas got along real good with everybody, I don’t care if they were green or purple. He always said, ‘I treat everybody decent, Cherry Lou, and long as they treat me decent back, we won’t never have any trouble.’ That’s what he always said and that’s how he always did. But if I think of anything else, I’ll let y’all know.”

After putting the casserole in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, Dallas’s stepdaughter had joined her brother and that cardboard bucket of fried chicken at the table; and since their mother remained seated as well, the Greenes nodded good-bye to me and saw themselves out.

As soon as she heard their car engine turn over, Cherry Lou Stancil stubbed out her cigarette with angry, jerky motions.

“Can you believe the nerve of them?” She turned her head closer to mine and I caught the rich burnt sugar smell of bourbon mingled with her cigarette.

“Dallas not even in his coffin yet and they come in here bold as brass, telling me that the African- American community, if you please, wants to help bring his killers to justice. What were they driving? What were they wearing? What did they look like? Like you can tell one nigger from another when they’re both black as the ace of spades like them two were that shot him.”