through the bushes. There were five white men. Two had grabbed Isaac and a big guy was hitting him and yelling about his sister. Then he punched Isaac in the chest—right on the heart, I’d guess—and Isaac just sort of folded over like a rag doll.”
“The two guys holding him let go and he fell on the ground and one of them said, ‘Jesus, Buck! You’ve killed him!’ And Buck said he was faking, but the other guys were running back to their cars so Buck ran, too.”
He paused, as if expecting Cyl to speak.
She didn’t say a word. Just looked at him so steadily that he had to turn away.
“Okay, yeah, but that was twenty-one years ago. Easy enough now to say I should have gone running to the white sheriff and told him about five white guys I’d never seen before killing a black kid. I was a NOISE activist, for God’s sake! You think they’d take my word against theirs? And if I just walked away and headed for Boston, it would have been real easy for the white authorities around here to find a dozen reasons to come after me for Isaac’s death. I wouldn’t even have known who Buck Ferguson was if he hadn’t kept yelling about niggers fucking his sister.”
“All I could think of was getting the hell away without getting involved. I carried him into the storage room, then I got the mower and clippers and stuck them there, too. The room was just sheets of plywood nailed to two- by-four studs. I took a hammer and pulled one of them off and got Isaac into the crawl space under the church. I pushed him as far in as I could, back to a part that didn’t have any electric wires that people might have to get to. There wasn’t much room to dig, but I managed to scoop out a little hollow and cover him over and that’s where I left him. Your grandmother didn’t say much when he didn’t come home that night. It wasn’t the first time.”
Even with air-conditioning, the little lounge was beginning to feel hot and humid. Beads of perspiration stood out on Adderly’s face and he took a handkerchief and wiped them away.
“Next morning, I don’t know if you remember, but you and your grandmother and your cousins went off to pick dewberries for a truck farmer down the road?”
Cyl shook her head.
“Well, you did. Which was a good thing, because lying in bed that night, I realized I hadn’t thought of something. Then I remembered seeing a dead hound out by the side of the road—a big stray that got hit by a car. After y’all left that morning, I found a burlap sack in your grandmother’s garage and I waited till the road was clear and stuck the dog in the bag and carried it through the woods to Mount Olive.”
“There were sacks of quicklime in the storage room—that stuff they used to sprinkle down the hole to keep outhouses smelling sweet? I layered a whole sack of it over Isaac’s grave, then I made a little hole in that lattice skirting at the back of the church behind the shrubs and pushed the dog through it. I figured if the quicklime didn’t do the whole job, they’d find the dog first and think it crawled up under there to die and they wouldn’t look any farther.”
“Afterwards, I went back to the house, packed up my clothes and a few things of Isaac’s so y’all would think he’d gone with me, then I hitchhiked into Raleigh, cashed in my bus ticket to Boston and bought another one home to Wilmington.”
“Where you quit NOISE, studied for the bar and started preaching about people needing to take responsibility for their actions,” Cyl said.
“Makes me sound like a hypocrite, I know,” said Adderly. “But if I preach, it’s from experience. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Isaac and feel ashamed because I didn’t take responsibility for bringing his killer to justice. Maybe after all these years, we can find the men who held him down. Maybe they’re ready to accept their part in it and testify against Buck Ferguson.”
“Very noble,” I said. “And I suppose you’re willing to tell the Sheriff your part in all this and testify, too?”
“If that’s what it takes,” Adderly said.
“Even though Buck Ferguson died in prison at least eight years ago?”
Most good lawyers are actors and Adderly’s certainly a good lawyer. Even so, his surprise looked genuine to me.
So did the expression of relief that immediately followed.
22
“So what are you going to do, Ms. DeGraffenried?” Adderly asked. “March out there and throw me to those reporters?”
“No,” Cyl said slowly. “Destroying you doesn’t bring Isaac back.”
“You’re going to keep quiet about this?” I asked indignantly.
“You said it would be my call.”
“But you’re letting him get away with—”
“—with what exactly?” Cyl interrupted sharply. “He didn’t kill Isaac.”
“So he says now.”
“He had no reason to kill. And as for hiding his body and running away, there’s probably a statute to cover it, but I don’t know what it is off the top of my head. Do you?”
“No,” I admitted, although preacher and pragmatist were both frantically flipping through all the cases filed at the back of my skull.
