It’s news to me that Phyllis has told Mae about the nightmare that we’ve been dragging behind us. I pull my jacket closer and look over at the car, parked at the end of the street, where she’s waiting for us. My fingertips vibrate with the feel of her, a liminal tension.
“How … precisely … is Craver like a New York mobster?”
Mae looks at me as one would a particularly dense schoolchild. “Not the murdering and the money. But the taking. He couldn’t have Alvin’s gift, or yours, himself, so he put himself over you both instead. He made sure other white men like the Bells believed in your gift too, just so they would give him even more of what the world already gives him just for breathing.”
I stare at her while the cigarette burns to the filter in my mouth. I never considered it that way.
Craver’s piety has long since calcified to myth. But hadn’t he benefited from the fear my hands caused around town? Hadn’t he made sure that white folks who normally never spared any thought for the power of colored people had feared us and respected him?
I drop the butt onto the concrete and put my hands deep into my pockets.
“The receptionist just left,” I say. “Let’s go see what the man has to say.”
Craver’s room smells like a summer wake. Lilies of the valley, gladioli, hydrangeas, Ophelia and white Killarney roses at the peak of their bloom. From his Hudson flock, I assume.
The servant of God himself is as pale as the lilies I have to brush aside to give Mae a place to sit. But his cheeks are flushed. He grimaces when he glances at her. He has his finger on a page of a Bible he isn’t reading.
“They let you in?” he asks me. He seems offended. That’s a lot of energy, I think, from a man who woke up from a coma the day before.
“We didn’t ask permission, Mr. Craver,” Mae says. Smooth as silk stockings. She hasn’t taken her eyes from his since she sat down. “Dev has a way of not being seen when he doesn’t want to be.”
“I know that about him.” Each word costs him. He speaks softly. Bobby Junior’s bullet caught him in the side, ripping through his lung and skimming his liver. That he is still alive could give one cause to believe in God. But not his God.
“And we weren’t going to let this being a white hospital stop us from seeing how you fared.”
His eyes slide over the top of Mae’s head and land on his Bible. He’s scared of her. He’s lucky we left Pea sleeping in the back of the car downstairs.
“They say I’ll survive. A few more years.”
“Jesus is merciful,” says Mae, looking anything but.
“Craver,” I say, “who did this to you?”
He bites a thin, cracked lip between still-sturdy teeth. “They say”—he breathes—“that they will soon break ground on the resort. They have permission”—like fire through a straw—“to move the bodies.”
Mae is a woman all wrung out of pity. “You know my Alvin didn’t do this, old man.”
He skims her face again. Gets closer to her eyes. “Of course not.”
“Then who did?” I ask. “Bobby Junior? Tell the police the truth. You can’t let them string up an innocent kid for … what?”
“He’d already murdered Mayor Bell!” Craver pants. If Pea were here, she would have objected. I expect Alvin’s mother to do the same, but Mae is silent—and if even she isn’t sure, I don’t know how I can be. Craver catches his breath. “I could do nothing else for him. And I have others to think of.”
“You have your bones in the ground. Alvin is alive.”
He is astonished. “Davey, there will come a day when all the living will be the dead, and when all the dead will become the living in the glory of our Lord. There is no logical reason on this earth to value one over the other. I am the only hope for salvation of two hundred and forty-eight souls. What is one little Negro boy to that?”
A brief silence. Then Mae slaps him. The Bible falls to the floor, a thud and spray of tissue-thin paper. He groans like an animal left for hours in a trap.
“Dev,” says Mae behind gritted teeth. “Be kind enough to leave us?”
“Davey—”
I put a hand on his shoulder. I feel as much of a threat to him as I would to a corpse. “She won’t hurt you,” I say.
“Don’t wait,” she says, over her shoulder. Her hands rest on the bed, right beside Craver’s weeping jowls. “This might take a while. Better to get Phyllis home.”
I look back sharply. “Is she—”
“Go, Dev.”
Craver looks like a man about to drop from a hanging tree. I don’t even think of saving him.
Pea is leaning against the driver’s-side door when I get back to the car. She trembles, hands rigid against her sides, eyes darting. She looks sick, or haunted. She seems unaware of my presence. My heart squeezes out a few explosive beats. We have been happy, we have been true, we have been, at last, right, these last few weeks. And I had thought we might have just a little longer.
But here, she’s hurting. Nothing else I can do. I take her in my arms, hold her rigid against me until she seems to recognize my skin or my smell and lets me hold her up. She murmurs something.
“What? Pea, Sweet Pea, what—”
“Don’t hit him,” she says, just loud enough for me to hear. “He’s … in front of the car? I think? Be careful. Don’t hit him.”
I’d ask her what she means but she starts to tremble again. For an awful moment I think she’s fainted. But then she opens her eyes wide and takes two steps back. She’s hot to the touch.
“Are you sick?”
She looks afraid, and then angry with herself.
