Darby (9 page)

Halfway to Ellan, I asked him, “You reckon I can talk about my birthday party yet?”

“It’s so close, I don’t see why not.”

Excited, I twisted and looked at his shadowy face. “Did I get a present?”

“I’m sure you got something.”

“I wonder what Mama’s gonna do for my party.”

“You’ll find out.” Daddy laughed and looked into his rearview mirror. A car was following close behind us, wagging back and forth so that its lights shined all around our fenders and splashed into the ditch. On the edge of Bennettsville, it sped past and got in the middle of the road, where it commenced to slow down till we had to stop.

“Why’d they do that?” I asked my daddy.

“I don’t know,” he said.

A minute or so went by, and a skinny man got from the car and walked toward us.

Daddy said, “Darby, honey, you stay here.” Careful, he got out and met the man by our bumper. The Buick’s headlights made them look like pale angels.

I rolled down my window so that I could hear, and cold air rushed against my head.

“Mr. Carmichael,” the man said, tilting his hat.

“You’re a long way from home,” my daddy said back.

“Yeah, I am. Came here on business, if you wanna know.”

“I don’t.”

“Sure you don’t, Mr. Carmichael. But rumors is rumors, and we gotta ask questions.” When the man smiled, I could see he was missing some teeth, and that gave me a shiver fit so that I had to wrap my arms across myself to stay warm.

“See, Mr. Carmichael, yer a respectable part of the Marlboro community. Why, yer a big man round here. Nobody wants nothin’ ta happen ta a fella like you. That’s why I gotta ask a simple question: Why’d you wanna get involved in somethin’ so simple as a black boy dyin’? Why did you get involved at all, huh? What I hear is that boy, he come at Turpin, and Turpin, he didn’t do nothin’ but protect hisself.”

My daddy leaned forward, and said, “That boy was twelve years old. If a twelve-year-old attacked me, I believe I could keep myself safe with one hand.”

“That boy had a knife. You see now?”

“That boy didn’t have a knife.”

“Yeah, he did.”

“Look, the only reason I got involved is because one of my tenant farmers woke me up and told me the boy had an infection. I didn’t have any idea he’d been beaten till I saw him.” I could tell Daddy was getting mad.

“You was put into a bad situation,” said the skinny man. “That’s for sure.”

“When somebody asks for my help, if I can, I give it.”

The man smiled. “Yer a good guy, Mr. Carmichael. Got a family that goes to church and you keeps yer farm runnin’ in hard times. And, I’ll tell you, helpin’ someone’s fine. Helpin’ anyone is. But we got ourselves another situation altogether. Now, if a black man was ta ask you for a lawyer, you wouldn’t help him get that, would you? You wouldn’t give one of them that sorta powerful information?”

My daddy took a small step closer to the man. Fearful they were gonna wrastle each other, I shrunk down and curled in a knot on the seat. Still, I listened as hard as I could.

Daddy said, “Now, hold on. Yesterday Mr. Hawkins asked me who he could see about legal counsel, and I told him. He asked, and I told him. That’s all. I gave him Mr. Fairchild’s name, and Mr. Fairchild came and informed me not twenty minutes ago that he can’t be any help. So except for you threatening me, I think it’s all over. Don’t you?”

The man didn’t say anything.

“Don’t you?” my daddy shouted at him.

The man raised his voice back. “Mr. Carmichael, don’t you get disrespectful with me, ’specially after what you done!”

Daddy said, “I’ll get as disrespectful as I want. That’s exactly what I’m gonna do. You stop me on the road like this again, and I’m gonna get real disrespectful. I’m gonna get downright nasty.”

Laughing, the man said, “Oh, yer a big fella, Mr. Carmichael, but you couldn’t shake no bullet, I don’t think. You take a look in that back window of my car, and you’ll see I didn’t come alone. The Ku Klux Klan don’t ever come alone. So next time you get ta feelin’ so friendly, you best consider the cost. Y’understand?”

My daddy didn’t talk.

“You hear me okay, Mr. Carmichael?”

Daddy opened his car door, and he got in. He got the Buick rolling forward and around the man and the car that was sitting in the middle of the road. After a few minutes of driving, he said, “Darby? Darby, sweetheart, it’s okay. Those boys just needed directions. They’re from Columbia, and they lost their way, was all.”

I started to cry. I couldn’t stop. Bawling, I said, “I . . . I heard what he said, Daddy! I heard him say he was from the Ku Klux Klan and how you might get shot by a bullet.”

Upstairs, hidden from Aunt Greer, Mama squeezed me hard and told me that nothing bad was going to come of what happened. But I couldn’t stop crying. It was terrible. I didn’t want my daddy to die, and I didn’t want to, either. “I . . . I hate Mr. Dunn,” I sobbed.

My mama rocked me good. She said, “Mr. Dunn probably didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”

Placing a hand on my head, Daddy told me, “Darby, they’re all bluster and nothing more. The Klan is all bluster.”

“What’s
bluster
mean?”

“Means hot air,” Mama explained.

“That’s what they’re full of,” Daddy declared, “just like a balloon. Besides, I promise you, we’re gonna be fine. I wouldn’t ever let something happen to you, your brother, or Mama.”

“You forgot about Aunt Greer,” Mama joked.

He laughed. “That’s right, Aunt Greer, too.”

Smiling a little, I said, “How about your camellia bushes?”

A grin came on his face. “Now you’re playing dirty. I wouldn’t allow anyone or anything to lay a hand on those.”

Smiling wider, I snuffled. “Daddy, I swiped a bud for my hair on Monday.”

“Oh, I know you did,” he said. “You always take them from the bush over by the smokehouse.”

Surprised that he knew about that, I couldn’t help feeling better.

When I woke up on the morning of my birthday, what happened the night before seemed like a scary dream that wouldn’t melt away. Still, I tried not to think too hard on the skinny man with missing teeth. Whenever I started to, I focused on turning nine and how I was going to have cake and get some presents after lunch. That made me feel better.

Shaking from the cold, I slipped from my bed and rushed over to the fire that was snapping and sizzling on the andirons in my hearth. Freezing, I snuck so close I nearly climbed in. When I was warm, I rushed to the wardrobe and got my best dress from a hanger and slid it on as quick as I could. Then I found some socks and buckled on my Sunday shoes. Pulling a sweater around me, I charged downstairs to the warm kitchen.

“Hey, Annie Jane,” I said, and went straight to the stove, which I commenced to leaning against.

“Happy birthday, youngin.” Annie Jane was poking at strips of sizzling bacon with a fork. She wore a kerchief on her head, and her dress was one of Mama’s old ones with real small flowers all over it and a tearing hemline.

“You know what Mama’s got planned for today?” I asked her.

“I ain’t saying.”

I leaned flat against the oven’s warm sides. “Annie Jane, what kinda cake are you making me?”

“Your favorite.”

“Chocolate?”

“Yas, ma’am.”

Inside the stove, logs roared. “Do you think I gotta eat breakfast, or can I save up for my party?”

Annie Jane bobbed her head from side to side. “Oh, I’m sure you gots ta eat somethin’.”

“Maybe just a little bacon?”

“Full meal is what I ’spect your tummy be calling for.”

Warmed up, I wandered away from the stove and over to the window. I looked down on our outbuildings and the Darby and Beth School. “I wish eleven-thirty would hurry up,” I told her.

“Let’s see,” she replied real easy-like, making a show of turning all the way around and staring at the wind-up clock, “you gots yourself a three-hour wait. You best figure out what to do so it don’t take forever.”

Gazing at our sunny backyard, I was thinking,
Three whole hours!
when my daddy sauntered in for breakfast. Sitting down, he didn’t talk right away. Then, after gulping down a warm glass of milk, he dabbed his mouth with his napkin and gave me a good looking-over, like a teacher. “You okay, Darby?” he finally asked.

“It’s my birthday,” I answered, and, directly, my head swam with pictures of the skinny Klan man and Daddy, looking like they were gonna grab each other. I trembled and smiled. “Right now, I’m real happy ’cause I’m already nine,” I told him.

He nodded. “Yes, you are. The only reason I ask is I don’t want you worrying about last night.”

“I ain’t,” I blurted.

“
I’m not,”
he said, correcting my talk.

“I’m not,” I repeated.

Daddy scrunched his napkin into his lap. “That sort of thing can be scary, Darby, but you should know it doesn’t bother me a bit. Those boys aren’t so interested in us.”

From the side of my eye, I could see Annie Jane watching and wondering what Daddy was meaning. “I know,” I told him, wanting to take an eraser and rub the Ku Klux Klan man out of my head like lines of chalk on a blackboard.

I spent the morning out back, kicking the basketball against a fence and pole-vaulting. Every so often, a black family stopped by the Grab, which is this little building inside our backyard where tenant farmers can shop without going all the way to town. They come by and knock on our back door, and Mama or Aunt Greer runs out and helps them get supplies like flour or eggs or things of that sort. Then we mark it in a book, and my daddy takes it from their wages.

Tenant farmers came and went from the Grab, and I watched the families until McCall shuffled out and we played basketball. Like usual, though, McCall got upset that I kept beating him, so he didn’t play too long before he went back inside. Bored, I walked into the front yard and skipped beneath our flagpole trees, kicking up pine needles in the grass. Traipsing all the way out to the highway, I ran across the cold, blowy road and dragged my feet along for fun, sending dust puffing into the air. Then, for no reason, I wandered into our big red barn that sometimes seems like a church with a steeple. I climbed up into the hayloft, where I stared out the loft door with its pulley and hoist above. Leaning, I peered across the fields. I saw past way-off tenant homes that looked more like crumpled woodpiles. I saw turkey vultures circling in the cold sky the way they do. I saw a line of trees that ends one of our smallest fields and starts Mr. Dunn’s property. And there was Mr. Dunn’s house, so little, as if ants lived in it. It wasn’t dark or mean or even real seeming. It didn’t look like a little kid would die there or like the owner would belong to the Ku Klux Klan, either. Nervous, I backed up and fell over a hay bale. Then I thought that it had to be near about eleven-thirty, so I ran back to Ellan as fast as I could. When I got there, I saw that I still had an hour and a half to wait.

For my birthday party, Mama had made a fright show downstairs. She’d set up little booths and blankets all over. You reached your hand into a hole to feel a wolf’s brain or a witch’s tooth or monkey eyeballs, and that got all of us screaming so that for a while my party was crazy. It was gross fun, and it wasn’t till afterward that we found out the stuff we touched wasn’t real. The wolf’s brain was an oyster, and the witch’s tooth was an arrowhead and the monkey eyeballs, they were two pickled quail eggs.

Later, out in front of Ellan, as we took sticks and tried to burst open a bag full of candy and tiny presents, Sissy surprised me by telling Evette to fetch her a drink, which Evette did. Boy, that got me mad at the both of them. “You aren’t here to help,” I told Evette. To Sissy, I said, “She’s our friend and isn’t gonna get stuff for anyone but herself.” But that didn’t stop anybody from treating her different.

Even though it was a little cold out, Mama and Aunt Greer had set four small tables in the backyard. They were real pretty, too, with white cloths draped over the tops and nice cups and glasses arranged right. Also, because I was the birthday girl, I got to choose who I wanted to sit alongside me, and I decided on Evette and Beth even though it wasn’t exactly proper for a white girl to eat alongside a black girl. I didn’t care, though. During lunch I even told them, “I wish for my birthday that we were friends and that the three of us would do anything for each other. I wish we were pretend sisters.”

Evette answered, “Beth don’t wanna be my sister.”

Beth gave a shrug, causing the shoulders of her coat to rise up beside her pretty ears, which are the other things about her I want.

“She’s saying she doesn’t mind being pretend sisters,” I informed Evette.

Beth said, “I’m not saying that.”

I gave her a stern stare. “You should, ’cause Evette’s so nice and you are, and it doesn’t make any sense that we wouldn’t be pretend sisters.”

“Sure it does,” Evette told me. “It’s ’cause I’m black.”

“No it isn’t,” I told her, but right off I knew she was right.

Quiet for a little bit, Beth pushed a piece of cake around with a spoon. Then she finally spoke. “If it’s what you want, Darby, just for this afternoon I’ll play sisters.”