Mystery Walk

not a person to fear . . . .

Something moved on the road ahead, just out of range of his headlights. He thought of red petals floating, floating, floating down, and then . . .

The headlights picked out two large bales of hay that had been dragged into his path. He knew with a surge of fear that he couldn't stop the car at this distance, he was going to hit; and then he'd swerved the car to the right, the tires squealing, and slammed into one of the bales with a jolt that cracked his teeth together and struck his shoulder a bruising blow into the steering wheel. The Ford, out of control, left the highway and plowed into deep weeds. The car crashed into a three-foot-deep ditch and hung at an angle, its tires digging into the thawed mud. The engine rattled, and came to a dead stop.

Dazed, Horton touched his lower lip with a trembling hand; when he looked at his fingers he saw bright red petals blooming, and he numbly realized he'd bitten into his tongue. Fireflies were bobbing in the dark around the wrecked car, circling closer.

The driver's door opened. Startled, the minister looked up into the blinding glow of flashlights; behind them were white figures with black, ragged-rimmed eyes. Someone shouted, 'Get that shit outta the road! Hurry it up!' He remembered the hay bales now, and swallowed blood. His right eye was swelling, and he was getting one whopper of a headache. A voice beside him said, 'He's all bloody!' And another, muffled by a mask, answered, 'Ain't nothin'! You ready to heave him out? Horton, you stay real quiet now, you hear? We don't want to have to get rough.'

He was pulled out of the Ford by the hooded white figures, a blindfold of coarse burlap slipped around his eyes and knotted behind his head.

The Klansmen hauled him up into the bed of a pickup truck and covered him with gunnysacks. The engine started, and the truck headed for a backwoods road. Horton was held down by several men, and he imagined what they would probably do to him, but he was too weary to try to escape. He kept spitting blood until someone shook him and hissed, 'Stop that, you damn nigger-lover!'

'You don't understand,' he said with his mangled, bloody mouth. 'Let me . . .'

Someone grabbed his hair. From the distance, perhaps at the end of the road, Horton heard a high-pitched Rebel yell. 'You think we don't know?' a voice rasped into his ear. Horton could almost make out whose voice it was: Lee Sayre's? Ralph Leighton's? 'The niggers are tryin' to take over the country, and it's sorry white trash like you that's helpin' 'em! You get 'em in your schools and your cafes and your churches, and they drag you down to where they are! And by God as long as I've got breath in my body and a pistol at my side no damned nigger is gonna take what belongs to me!'

'You don't . . .'the minister began, but he knew it was no use. The truck slowed, jarring over a last crater in the road, and stopped.

'We got him!' someone yelled. 'Easy as pie!'

'Tie his hands,' a harsh voice commanded.

6

Carol Horton knew her husband had probably stayed longer than he'd planned at Mrs. Mimms's house, and might have stopped somewhere else between here and there as well. But now, at twenty minutes before midnight, she was very worried. There might've been car trouble, a flat tire or something. Jim had been tired and disturbed when he'd left home, and Carol had been concerned for a long while that he was just trying to shoulder too much.

She looked up from the book she was reading on antebellum history and stared at the telephone. Mrs. Mimms would be asleep by now. Perhaps she should call Sheriff Bromley? No, no; if the sheriff had heard anything he would've called. . . .

There was a quick rapping at the front door. Carol leaped up from her chair and hurried to answer it, trying to get herself composed. If it was Sheriff Bromley standing out there, bringing the news of an accident on the highway, she didn't think she could take it. Just before she opened the door she heard a truck roar away, and a chorus of male laughter. She unbolted the door, her heart pounding.

In a way, she was relieved to find that no one was there. It was a joke, she thought; somebody was trying to scare her. But then her breath froze in her lungs, because she saw the mottled black-and-white bundle of rags out under the pines, at the edge of the light cast from the front-porch bulb. A few bits of white fluttered away on the chilly breeze.

Feathers, she thought suddenly, and almost laughed. Now who would dump a bundle of feathers into our front yard? She stepped off the porch, her gown windblown around her, and approached the mass; when she was five paces away she stopped, her legs gone rubbery, and stared. A crudely hand-lettered sign hung around the thing's neck: nigger-lover (this is what they get).

Carol did not scream when the eyes opened, wide and white like the eyes of a painted minstrel. She did not scream when the awful swollen face lifted toward her, shining in the light and oozing fresh tar into the grass; nor when the arm came slowly out, gripping at the empty air with a black-smeared hand.

The scream burst free, ravaging her throat, when the thing's tar-crusted mouth opened and whispered her name.

Feathers danced on the breeze. Hawthorne lay nestled in the valley like a sleeping child, only occasionally disturbed by nightmares. Wind moved like a living thing through the rooms of the dark Booker house, where brown blood stained the floors and walls, and in the profound silence there might have been a footstep and a soft, yearning sob.

TWO

The Coal Pile

7

'There she is, Billy!'

'Why don't ya go catch her, Billy?'

'Billy's got a girl friend, Billy's got a girl friend. ...'

The singing of that dreaded song was more than he could bear He took after his three tormentors—Johnny Parker, Ricky Sales, and Butch Bryant—swinging his schoolbooks at the end of a rubber strap like a makeshift knight's mace. The boys scattered in three directions, jeering and thumbing their noses at him while he stood sputtering like a live wire, atop the pitcher's mound at the center of Kyle Field, spring's dust rolling around his sneakers.

They couldn't fathom why Billy had started noticing Melissa Pettus. Maybe she did have long pretty blond hair done up with ribbons, but a bird-dog pup was pretty too and you didn't make a fuss about one of those, did you? So today, when they'd all been walking home across Kyle Field beneath a blue late-April sky and they'd seen Melissa walking up ahead through the green weeds, the only thing to do was to have some fun at Billy's expense. They hadn't expected such a violent reaction, but it gratified them, especially since they were aware Melissa had stopped and was watching.

Ricky Sales crowed, 'Loverboy, loverboy, Billy's a loverb—' He had to dodge fast, because Billy was suddenly coming at him like a steam engine, swinging his schoolbooks.

Suddenly the strap broke with a moaning sound and books were flying through the air as if fired from a slingshot. They spread open like hard kites and sailed into the dustclouds.

'Oh . . . damn!' Billy said, instantly ashamed that he'd cussed. The other boys howled with laughter, but all the anger had seeped out of him; if there was anything Mrs. Cullens hated, Billy knew, it was a dirty arithmetic book, and he was certain some of the pages had been torn too. The boys danced around him for another moment, careful not to get too close, but they saw he didn't care anymore and so they started