Home Fires

Dwight continued on upstairs and we trailed along. Smudge, too.

“Raymond came up here?” she asked. “What was he doing?”

At the end of the upper hall was a narrow, inconspicuous door that led to a steeper set of steps.

Mrs. Avery stopped short when she saw the open door. “The attic? What on earth—?”

Slowly she followed Dwight up the steps. The dog’s nails clicked on the uncarpeted wood. Mrs. Avery was almost breathless when we came out under a roof with such a high pitch that even Dwight could stand up without worrying about banging his head. Jamison and Richards were there, too, and they wore white latex gloves to keep from contaminating the evidence.

Naked lightbulbs hung down from the rafters. It was hot up here, but ventilator fans in the roof kept it from being unbearable. For such an old house, the attic was surprisingly uncluttered. Boxes and trunks lined the sides, but the middle space was completely empty except for several pieces of thin plywood lying face down along the tops of the boxes, which were piled chest-high. The largest piece of plywood was no more than eight feet long by twelve or fourteen inches wide, the smallest measured something like four feet by eight inches. There must have been half a dozen pieces.

Slowly, the deputies turned them on edge so that we could see what was lettered there in green paint—the same racist epithets repeated over and over in nearly identical letters. A spray can stood on the floor next to a pair of paint-speckled yellow rubber gloves.

Mrs. Avery put out her hand to steady herself on the stair railing. “I don’t understand. Why would Raymond —”

“No, Mrs. Avery. Not Raymond. You.” Dwight held out a sheet of ruled notebook paper covered with lines written in pencil. At the top of the sheet was the student’s name: Charles Starling, English II. The paper was covered with a fine green mist and certain words were underlined in red pencil. Bigger, for instance, had been written with the same combination of capitals and small letters as the nigger on the boards.

I had hoped they would discover samples of Starling’s school papers in a compromising hiding place. Finding her actual practice boards was gravy on the tree, as Haywood is fond of saying.

“You were in court the day the boys were tried for vandalism,” I said, “and you realized that they had just given you a perfect way to get rid of that eyesore across the branch. You would burn down some black churches, sandwiching raggedy little Burning Heart of God in the middle, and pray Starling got all the blame because it would be only his printing on the walls.”

“That’s ridiculous!” she snapped. “Really, Deborah.”

“Not half as ridiculous as you pretending you didn’t know your grandfather had placed a restriction on that church deed. As carefully as you’ve researched your family’s records for the past four hundred years? I don’t think so. If we look through your scrapbooks, I bet we’ll find copies of every deed your family’s ever held.”

“You leave my scrapbooks alone!” she said sharply. “I won’t have you touching them!”

Officer Mayleen Richards rolled her eyes as she sealed the spray can and the gloves in separate plastic bags. Dwight was doing the same with the notebook paper.

“Fingerprints,” I said succinctly and Mrs. Avery flinched as the full implications began to sink in.

“No! It was Raymond. Raymond and Charles.”

“A man died because you couldn’t stand an eyesore on land that used to belong to your grandfather.”

“No one was supposed to get hurt,” Mrs. Avery said, the beginning of a whimper in her voice. “It was his own fault. Really it was. If he hadn’t been drinking, he could have walked away in plenty of time.”

She held out her hand to Dwight beseechingly. “Surely you can understand that? It wasn’t my fault.”

26

Faith is a way of walking, not talking.

—Pisgah Church

Isaac Mitchiner was buried beside his sister, Cyl’s mother, in the cemetery at Mount Olive, a hundred feet away from where he had lain for twenty-one years. The graveside service, simple and direct, was conducted by Reverend Ligon with the assistance of Reverend Freeman.

The hot morning sun poured down on us. The choir sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” and “There Is a Rock That Is Higher.”

I went.

Wallace Adderly didn’t.

Cyl sat amongst her light-skinned family and I remembered her saying that when her cousins jeered, Isaac had comforted her—“We’re the only true Africans.”

As I passed through the line afterwards, she clasped my hand with a wry smile. “I still owe you dinner.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

Daddy called me near the end of July. He doesn’t like to talk on the telephone, so his conversations are always short and to the point.

“You gonna be out this way tomorrow evening?”

“Didn’t plan to, but I can if you want me to. Why?”