———
HE WAS HERE in your house?” Buster said, wiping the projector lens clean with a soft rag.
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that something? He old, ain’t he?”
“Yes. Not real, real old. But older than Daddy.”
“Old as me?”
“No, sir. I don’t think so.”
“Not many people are. And I’ll tell you, I’m starting to feel it. That walk to work is catching up with me. I have to start about twenty minutes earlier these days, just so I can stop along the way and rest a little.”
“Buster?”
“Yeah, Stan.”
“What if it wasn’t the father?”
“Do what?”
“What if it’s James that did it? Not Mr. Stilwind?”
“You been thinking again, ain’t you?”
“Remember what you showed me about Margret’s letters?”
Buster put the rag in his back pocket and perched on the stool behind the projector.
“How do you mean?” he said.
“I assumed Margret was seeing James. I thought J was James and it was Jewel.”
“That was a normal thing to think, Stan. More them that like the opposite than like the same.”
“That report you read to me. The chief’s report. Did the daughter actually say it was her father?”
“I said it could be other ways, didn’t I, Stan?”
“You did.”
Buster scratched his chin, stepped on a bug running across the floor. He said, “You’re sayin’ the report didn’t say it was the father, so it could have been James . . . You know, it could. It could have been James knocked up the first sister, then the second. He was old enough. He maybe near forty now and still actin’ like some kind of teenager, trickin’ your sister like that . . . Older sister, Susan, she could have meant her brother. The old man just went down to the police station to smooth it over, way he tried to do today with your family. Sometimes a man thinks a son is more important than a daughter. It could be like that.”
“Daddy thinks Stilwind doesn’t really care for his James. Just didn’t want to be embarrassed.”
“Think your daddy’s right on that one, Stan. So now you think it’s James instead of the daddy?”
“Maybe.”
“Ever think it might have been the daddy on one, the brother on the other? Lot of times, you learn how you act from how your family acts. You can’t tell me Old Man Stilwind is all that good at how he acts. Evidence don’t show that. James may have found out his father was havin’ him a time with the older sister, and he done the same with the younger one. Now, mind you, I ain’t sayin’ it’s that way. Just tryin’ to teach you you can’t think somethin’ one way. That’s why you supposed to have trials, not lynchin’s. Most of the time things are just the way they look, but sometimes they ain’t.”
“What’s a lynchin’?”
“Most people mean a hangin’. But we colored, we’re talkin’ about burnin’, castratin’, torturin’. Way the law likes to work is they can’t find who done somethin’, they just go out and get a nigger. Sometimes the nigger done it. Sometimes not. That’s what I mean about a jury, and not just speculation. You see, you can think a thing all kinds of ways, even if you got bits of evidence. But evidence is in the way you look at it. ’Less you catch the sucker redhanded or they’re tryin’ to hurt you. Like Bubba Joe.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I seen a lynchin’ once.”
“Really?”
“Uh huh. Over in Nacogdoches. Nineteen and two it was. A nigger named Jim Buchannon. He was picked up for murderin’ a man and his wife I think. Stole a rifle from them, they said. And he had the rifle, which he claimed he traded a white man for. And he might have done it too. Or he might have killed them white folks. Can’t say.
“I was just passin’ through, on my way to see a cousin, and I come to Nacogdoches on the day of the hangin’. It was an October and a nice cool day. They say there was a kind of trial, but the sheriff, John Spradley, he didn’t think it was fair enough, and he done all he could to save the man for a trial. Hid him out on trains and such, took him from one spot or another. But they finally got him and told him he could be hung later or now, to make his choice. He chose to be hung. I was at the back of the crowd. They had a kind of tripod made of lumber and they put Buchannon on that box and kicked it out from under him, and he strangled to death. Slow-like. I told myself I wouldn’t never purposely watch no hangin’ again. It was like a picnic out there, Stan. All the men and women, mostly white, but there were colored too, way out back of it like me, and we was there to see that poor nigger hang, him swingin’ with his toes just off the ground, that rope squeezin’ the life out of him. It wasn’t even tied right, and on purpose is my guess. That way they had a little more spectacle. No neck break, just slow and horrible, him kickin’ and his tongue hangin’ out of his mouth damn near six inches. There was a fellow out there sellin’ peanuts, and people with wagons, with women and children in them, sittin’ there havin’ a picnic lunch.
“After it was all over I lost my lunch, and I left there and went on my way, avoidin’ anyone and everyone that was white. I was afraid they might not be satisfied, and want ’em another nigger. There’s a point in this story, Stan. What is it?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions?”
“That’s right. Just the other day, you was certain Old Man Stilwind had done it ’cause I laid out a little story for you. Now you done thought maybe James done it. And I thought maybe it was one of each . . . and the other thing is, outside of self-defense, the law is supposed to dish out justice, not you and me.”
“But it doesn’t always, does it?”
“Son, it ain’t like Hopalong Cassidy. Sometimes the good guys lose.”
———
I SAT OUT THERE with Buster and watched the movie, but went to my room after only one showing. I climbed into bed and thought about all that I had learned, and thought about Buster’s story. The idea of a man swinging and strangling like that made me sick.
I lay in bed with my hands behind my head, Nub stretched out over my feet, kicking his foot from time to time as he chased an imaginary rabbit.
I felt pretty miserable about what had happened to Callie. I liked to think my arrival had helped stop what was going on. I should have never let her out of my sight. Not with a guy like James Stilwind. I had an idea what kind of person he was, and I had spent my time looking out the window of the theater.
It was so wild the way the world and Dewmont really were. Probably all towns were like this and most people never found out. I wished I were most people. It was like once the lid was off the world, everything that was ugly and secret came out.
Just a short time ago my biggest concern, my greatest disappointment, was discovering there was no Santa Claus.
I sighed and looked at the ceiling.
Things had to get better.
“They have to,” I said aloud.
But fate wasn’t through with me yet.
21
NEXT MORNING, after breakfast, I let Nub out. He ran to the projection booth and started barking. I thought maybe a coon or a possum had crawled in there. It had happened a couple of times when Buster left the door open, or so Daddy told me.
Daddy said he had to run the critters out with a broom, chase them until they climbed the fence and headed back into the woods.
I had yet to make such a discovery, and was about half excited to think I might have finally done so. I was a little scared too. A coon or a possum can turn nasty when cornered.
