put you up to this?'
'Come on,' Leighton shouted. 'Time's wastin'!' He moved toward the house, and the ring of Klansmen closed in. 'Put that knife down, you squaw-cat, 'fore I have to take it and cut off your tits. . . .' And then he grunted with pain and surprise, because John had leaped upon him, driving him to the ground. They cursed and rolled, grappling at each other as the Klansmen cheered Leighton on.
A rock crashed through the window behind Ramona. Then another stone was flung, hitting her on the shoulder. She gasped and went down on her knees, and then a white hooded shape leaped up onto the porch and kicked the knife from her hand. The Klansman looked up as Billy came at him like a whirlwind; the boy couldn't clench his hands yet to make fists, so he hit him with a shoulder block that lifted the man up and carried him off the porch and onto the ground on his back, sounding like a potato sack as he hit.
John had ripped the hood from Leighton's head and was hammering blows to the man's face. Leighton staggered and fell to his knees, his robes grimed with dirt; he yelled through purple, pulped lips, 'Somebody get the bastard!'
Ramona screamed. Billy saw light glint off a length of iron pipe as one of the figures lifted it high. He shouted, 'Look out!' John started to turn, but the pipe came down with terrible force upon the back of his head, staggering him forward. Leighton hit him in the stomach, and even as John fell the pipe came down again, its arc ending with an awful crunching sound.
There was a sudden silence. John lay on his stomach, his legs twitching, his fingers clawed into the dirt.
And then Billy, with a scream of rage that ripped through the night, leaped from the porch and flung himself onto the man who'd struck his father; they careened backward, slamming over the hood of a red Chevy. Billy forced his stiff fingers around the iron pipe, and he held onto it as someone gripped his hair and yanked him off. He rammed an elbow back into a set of teeth and pulled free, turning upon the Klansmen. With his first blow he broke a man's nose; he dodged a cast-iron skillet that had been used to make the raucous noise, came up under it, and slammed his weapon into an unprotected shoulder.
An arm caught him around the throat from behind; he kicked back into a shinbone, wrenching free as an aluminum pot swung for his head. He drove the pipe deep into someone's stomach and heard an agonized retching from inside the hood. He spun and struck again, blindly swinging the pipe with all his strength; the man in front of him backed away, but a skillet caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder and drove him to the ground.
'Kill him!' Leighton shrieked. 'Go on, finish him off!'
Billy reared up and struck into a blue-jeaned kneecap. The Klansman howled with pain and hopped away like an injured toadfrog. Then someone landed on his back, pushing his face into the dirt. He struggled wildly, expecting the back of his head to be caved in.
Then there was a
Two cars banged into each other on the narrow drive leading down to the highway. Ramona fired two more shots that went wild before the old pistol jammed up. Then the night was filled with red taillights, and tires shrieked on the highway. As Billy rose to his feet, he saw the last of the red lights disappear He was breathing hard, his head spinning, and his agonized hand let the iron pipe drop to the ground.
'COWARDS!' Billy shouted. 'YOU DAMNED DIRTY COWARDS!' And then he heard his mother sob, and he turned to see her leaning over his father's body. He saw how white his father's face was, and how red the blood was that spilled from his mouth and nostrils.
Ramona looked up at her son with terror in her eyes. 'Go get help, Billy!
Almost every afternoon in June, and now through July, the man and woman had sat together on the front porch. Crickets sang in the high grass, and a single cicada whined in the top branches of the big oak tree, mimicking the sawmill's distant noise. A soft breeze went by, cooling the sweat on Billy's face and back as he worked atop the roof, tearing up the rows of rotten shingles. His hair was a tangle of reddish black curls, commas of it sticking damply to his forehead; the summer sun had tanned him to a rich dark coppery color, and the physical work he'd been doing—the work of two men done by one, since his father had been hurt—had tightened the muscles in his shoulders and back so they were sharply defined under the flesh. The roof had leaked all through June, but this was the first chance he'd had to strip off the shingles and look for holes that he'd later plug with roofing pitch.
Billy had tried to get a job as a mechanic in every gas station for fifteen miles around, but when the owners learned his name their eyes went blank, like shutters being closed over windows. He'd been offered a job sweeping up in a broomcorn warehouse on the far side of Rossland City, but the place stank and was hot as hell and they expected him to be so grateful he'd work almost for free; he'd decided he would do better putting all his time and energy into the farm. All the houses and even the trailers in Hawthorne had electricity now, except for the Creekmore place, which sat so far off the highway no one from Alabama Power ever came to inquire.
Still, Billy felt the stirring of wanderlust in his soul. Yesterday, while tilling the ground for a sprinkling of tomato seeds, he'd looked up into the clear blue sky and seen a hawk, riding the breezes that carried to the east, and he'd wanted to see the land through the hawk's eyes. Beyond the valley's forested crown, he knew, were more towns and people, and roads and woods and cities and seas and deserts; beyond the valley were things both wondrous and fearful. They were calling to him, using such messengers as hawks and high, fast-moving clouds and a distant road seen from the top of a hill.
He ripped up another few shingles and dropped them over the roof's edge to the ground. He could hear his mother's voice, reading the Twenty-seventh Psalm to his father; it was one of his favorites, and hardly a day went by that he didn't ask to hear it. She finished, and he heard his father say, in his slurred unsteady voice, ' 'Mona? Where's Billy?'
'He's gone up on the roof to tear off the old shingles.'
'Oh. Yeah. That needs to be done. I meant to do that myself. Think he needs any help?'
'No, I believe he can do it by himself. Do you want another sip of tea?'
There was a slurping sound. Billy ripped off three shingles and tossed them over his shoulder.
'That's mighty good, 'Mona. Think you could read the Twenty-seventh Psalm to me today? Sure is a strong, hot sun up there ain't it? Cornfield'll need a dose of well-water pretty soon, I reckon. ...'
Billy concentrated on his work while his father's mind skipped tracks like a scratched-up record. Then John lapsed into silence, and Ramona began to read the psalm again.
The doctor in Fayette had said the first lead pipe blow had fractured John Creekmore's skull; the second had driven bone splinters into the brain. John had lain in a coma for two weeks, in a charity-ward bed. What was left when he came out of the hospital was more child than man; in his eyes there was a look of painful bewilderment, but he seemed to remember nothing at all of what had happened. He recognized Ramona and Billy as his wife and son, but he made no demands on them and the day was just fine if he could sit out on the porch in the shade, or down at the pond listening to the bullfrogs. He slept a lot, and often he would ask the strangest questions, as if things were at a low boil inside his head and there was no telling what might pop up from the soup of memory.
Sometimes the gnaw of guilt got too bad inside Billy, and he'd have to get away by himself into the woods for a day or so. He knew that what had happened to his father would have been averted had he not gone to the May Night dance; no, he'd wanted to show the other kids that he was just like them and he could fit in . . . but he'd been wrong. He wasn't like them; he wasn't like anybody else. And now his father had been made to pay for it. The police had never found out who'd buried those fireworks within the bonfire, just as Sheriff Bromley had never found out who'd struck those blows to the back of John Creekmore's head; everybody had airtight alibis, the sheriff had told Ramona. It was true that Ralph Leighton's face looked as if a mule had kicked it, but his wife and son and three hunting buddies said they'd all been together playing cards the night John was hurt. They'd all sworn that Ralph had tripped down some steps and fallen right on his face.
Billy sensed movement, and looked toward the highway to see dust rising into the air. A black, battered old Volkswagen van had turned off and was coming up the road to the house. The ruts must've been too much for the suspension though, because in another moment the van stopped and a man wearing a straw hat climbed out of the
