Sweeping Up Glass (29 page)

“You lied, that’s what happened!”

“Sweet Jesus,” says his mama.

Love Alice, crooning. I sit on a chair. They’re pinning my
dress. I look at the floor, scrubbed and knotholed. “Phelps told me.”

“Mr. Alton Phelps did this to you?”

“He’s dead. In my cellar.”

“Oh, Lordy. You sure?”

“No.”

Feet skid on wet porch boards, then hurry away like I’m contagious. Quarantined in my skin. Shivering. More whispers. Doors open and close and open again. Somebody cleans the blood from my chin. So many people, and they’re all talking, but not to me. Hands pull me up, wrap me in something; we go outside. Snow falls on my face while they hustle me along. Where are they taking me? I wish I could think; I’m glad I can’t.

Then, suddenly it’s warmer. I smell sweat and wool, and the breath on my face reminds me of supper. My stomach turns over.

A door closes and I hear Junk announce, “He was there, all right. We carried him out.”

I think it’s Miss Dovey who says, “Lord knows what’s next.”

“Longfeet,” Junk says, “you go down and tell Mr. Wing to keep the boy hid.”

They know where Will’m is? They know everything.

Will’m
. So Wing’s not involved. But he didn’t come out, did he, when I was in the street. …

Reverend Culpepper says, “Miss Olivia, he bring someone with him?”

“What?”

“Mr. Phelps. When he came to your house, was he alone?”

“No. The sheriff.”

Somebody chuckles. “They knowed it would take two growed men to deal wit’ you.”

“Sheriff’s gone now,” Junk says.

There’s silence while they take in what that means. All around me, faces are drawn so that I can see the shapes of their skulls.

“What Mr. Phelps tell you, ’xactly?”

I close my eyes.

“No, O-livvy. You talk to us, now.”

I say, “Love Alice. Don’t look in my eyes.”

“I won’t, baby girl,” she says. “But you go on and tell what you know.”

“He said Tate Harker’s in prison. That he shot James Arnold. And all of you knew.”

The silence is so deep I think I have drowned.

“—For your own good.”

“—That Ida Mae. We was afraid what she might do.”

“What she might
do
?”

“Junk,” says the Reverend. “Tell her the truth.”

Junk shakes his head.

“Yes, sir,” he says. “You tell her now.”

Junk turns sorrowful eyes on me. “Miss Olivia—we promised your pap.”

“You promised—”

“Ever’ one of us owed him that much.”

That’s more than I can think about. “Is Phelps dead?”

“Yes, ma’am, he is now.”

There’s just enough space for that in my head. “But, up there at my place—was he dead?”

“That not an’thang you need to know.”

“I do! I have to know if I killed him!” I am out of the chair, have Junk’s shirt in my fist.
“Don’t you lie to me anymore!”

I see where I am. In the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It’s packed full of people, and they’re all looking at me.

“I can’t say.” Junk’s eyes are on the floor. “But he sho’ is now.”

I back away. “Don’t come near me, and don’t any of you talk to me, not ever again.”

It’s a damn good thing nobody says a word.

There’s a frown on Junk’s face. He lifts his chin, sniffing, and we all turn our eyes to the tendrils of black smoke that lick the dry ceiling. The church around us bursts into flame.

I
could not collect my wits, if I tried. In minutes, doors are gone, and the front wall collapses, bringing down part of the roof. Beyond the windows, flanks of white men run with flaring torches. They jab and thrust and shout obscenities, their flames making neon streaks in the dark.

I cough. “They want me.”

“You are wrong about that,” the Reverend says. “They want
us
. They have always wanted us.”

The congregation fills the tiny back kitchen, the Sunday school rooms, the choir benches. Babies wail. Overhead, timber screams and falls. Junk’s mammy stumbles. He lifts her in his arms, carrying her tenderly the way he did Ida.

Sweet Jesus. Why does fire always bring the end? Ida ignited herself so I’d stop digging. And now the church on Rowe Street. I wonder if they’ve already set a torch to my place; if they haven’t, they will. I figure they’ll let us burn, then come in the morning and cover our bodies, or stack us in a wagon, put us all in one grave. Strike another match.

Junk shouts, “We gotta get these folks out of here!”

But there’s nowhere to go. We’re stuck in this crematory. Beyond it, there’s only bitter cold night and cowards in hoods.

The Reverend’s smashing windows with his elbow, picking at the glass, pushing folks through. Lambs of God tumble out on the snow. “Get them up!” he shouts. “They’ll catch their death!”

He thinks life’s an option. I picture Cott’ners standing outside, grinning and waiting to pick us off.

Out in the snow, Miss Dovey’s wearing her Sunday hat with the veil and pink roses, and a wool cardigan buttoned over her dress. Over the crack of flames, she shouts, “They gone for now, Reverend! Mark my words, they be back.”

More windows shatter with the heat. Junk hustles me over the sill.

“We got no place to go,” Wellette says.

“Stay together,” Junk tells them. “We be safer that way.”

Maybe, but I doubt it.

Love Alice is looking straight in my eyes. “You c’n help us, O-livvy.”

How can she look to me after the hurts I’ve dealt her? Even now I want to reach out and strike her. “Don’t you do that to me, Love Alice.”

Aunt Pinny Albert’s few teeth are chattering. “Reverend, it ain’t twenty degrees. We can’t last but a few minutes.”

“Stay close,” the Reverend says, and they cling, elbows knotted, babes to their breasts.

Above us, the sky is nothing but black. I imagine the Cott’ners are at Wing’s, drinking coffee and warming their hands. Surely Wing knows. How can he not?

How could
I
not?

Junk sent him the message:
Keep the boy hid
. I pray to God that Will’m’s at Molly’s.

Junk’s mammy asks, “What we goin’ to do, Miss Livvy?”

Phelps is a greater danger now than when he was alive. These men are vengeful in ways we can’t imagine. This one thing I know: We’re not going to be allowed to live through the night.

Meanwhile, how can these people look to me? I’m not the hero Tate Harker was. But that’s wrong, too. He was never a hero—after the accident, it was two whole months before he shot James Arnold. Then, for thirty-some years, he’s cowered behind bars, and if he’d wanted to see me, even Ida could not have stopped him. But that’s fine. In the meantime I’ve learned to think for myself—or have I? Didn’t I work through years of troubles—or did I just collect them till now they’re a mountain? Makes no difference. I cannot,
will
not, face Tate Harker. God
damn
him!

But my head won’t stay focused, and I keep going back, wondering what Pap would have said, back when I thought I knew him.

Run, Olivia?

Stand and fight?

It’s insane to take on God knows how many, who’ve committed God knows what crimes. All my miseries are rolled into one, ignited and roaring beneath my rib cage and in the timbers behind me. The one who contrived the lies, the only one who might know what’s happening here, is fifty miles away, over roads that have frozen into slabs of dark ice. And my truck won’t start.

I look around at what’s left of the church, the fire burning low, their silhouettes drawn against the rubble. “Reverend, I need to borrow your car.”

“Ain’t no gasoline in it, Olivia.”

“Then the bus. I need the church bus.”

“Only Longfeet can run it,” Junk says, his teeth clattering. “Go on and fetch it, then, Longfeet. Take us to Buelton.”

Miss Dovey’s speech is jerky and slow. “One a them Buelton churches will he’p us.”

I cannot let this happen. “No one in Buelton is going to help you! Everyone’s either involved or afraid!”

“We got us no choice. We can’t stay here.”

The bus is parked in the Reverend’s side yard, and Longfeet is already loping across the field. Miz Culpepper’s wash still hangs on the line, and an abandoned stream of smoke rises up from a barrel in somebody’s yard.

I hear the bus cough. Then it lumbers up the hill toward us. Longfeet brakes. The door wheezes open, and they climb on.

The Reverend sits directly behind Longfeet. It’s one of the few occasions when I’ve seen the Reverend without his hat. In fact, the only other time was the night he came to get me from Silty’s, and I wouldn’t go. They move about in the bus, finding seats on this trip to—where? I’m the only one standing out in the snow.

Junk reaches down for Love Alice’s arm.

“Lord Jesus will save us, O-livvy,” she says.

I shake my head.

“You’re bad hurt, Olivia,” the Reverend calls down. “You come on with us now.”

Blood still trickles into the corner of my mouth. I taste it on my tongue. My cheekbone hurts, and a dull ache has settled behind my ear.

“I can’t. I won’t leave Will’m.”

He nods.

I call up to him, “They’ll come after you-all, no matter where
you go. You know too much. Pap knew, and they set him up to find Ida and kill James Arnold.”

Till I spoke these things, I had not truly thought them through. Hadn’t Phelps said he wanted Pap to run, so he could hunt him down? I watch shadows flicker on the snow and recall the way Phelps rolled over and over down my cellar steps. The Cott’ners will want revenge for his death. When that’s done, they won’t even miss him. I thought Alton was the leader, but now I know the club is far bigger—so big, in fact, that several times a year it meets openly in the Phelps barn, and in all these years nobody has stopped them.

I see, too, how this will play out. They’ll threaten Pap to get all they want from me. Then they’ll torment Will’m. Around and around, angles and dealing while they use up our lives and work on our fear. I am dazzled by the blindness of Olivia Harker Cross, who lied to herself and said she could see.

“Reverend,” I call up. “You-all drop me in Kingston?”

He nods. “Yes, ma’am.”

I climb up. The Reverend pushes over, and I sit next to him, watch Longfeet work the clutch and the gas pedal. We ease forward on the ice. The night is like pitch, and I’m suffocating from the smells—wet wool, babies, and other things.

In the seat across from me, Junk puts his arm around Love Alice. Big, responsible Junk, who carried me home and ate my bread and jam. And now, like the rest, he’s running away.

Love Alice is leaning across her husband. “You right, O-livvy. Us runnin’ for our lives.”

I look away to the dark window and wonder if the only truths I ever knew were the ones Love Alice gave me.

The bus sluices on the ice and stalls. Longfeet swears. Tries the ignition again. The engine roars. We creep forward again.

I twist in my seat and even in the dark I wish I hadn’t. As far back as I can make out, they’re bunched together on metal seats, on the floor, in the aisle, buttoned in coats or shawls or shirtsleeves. Black faces, lined faces, tired beyond talking. Love Alice pats Junk’s hand. He’s lucky to have her.

I wonder why, years ago, Doc didn’t stitch up his ear, the way I took needle and thread to the wolf’s. Same ear, right ear. And then I recall Pap saying,
See if the sheriff don’t bring a federal marshal out to your barn on a Saturday night
.

“Junk?” I say softly. “What happened to your ear?”

All the murmuring dies away.

His voice is distant. “I had this ear befo’ you was born, Miss Livvy. You ain’t ever asked.”

“I’m asking now.”

“No mo’ lies?”

“It was Phelps, wasn’t it?”

“Him and his brother.”

“What happened?”

He sighs. “We was poor as anything—twelve of us takin’ turns at the table and sleeping in beds. I got a job pitchin’ manure for their young pappy. One day I was cleanin’ out his stable, and I seen these silver spurs hangin’ there. Shiniest things ever.”

Oh, Junk
.

“I wasn’t but ten or ’leven, an’ I take out my shirttail to polish ’em up. But Mr. Phelps run in, yellin’.
You stealing my spurs, boy?
He fired me on the spot.”

It’s a pure wonder to me why a white man’s so quick to blame coloreds. Perhaps, in their fear, they’re easier to blame. And, having placed blame
somewhere
, white men have less of a need to whip themselves or each other.

“The next Saturday night,” Junk says, “Mr. Phelps sent his men
to my mama’s place wit’ a rope. They take me to his barn and string me up, jus’ like that.”

From the back of the bus I hear weeping. Miz Hanley.

“But this old neck, it wouldn’t break. A long time they leave me swingin’ there, his boys lookin’ on. Finally old Phelps says he got to have us all off the place by sunup, on account of his wife’s fit to run off.
Good riddance
, he says. But they cut me down.”

His voice catches. “Mr. Phelps, he takes out a knife and sets to cuttin’ off my ear. But I come to. I jump up and run outa there like the devil had my shirttail. That boy, Booger, whistle to me from the bushes, and I run in there. He hide me till the sun come up and all them men drive off in wagons.

“One day,” Junk says, “I tol’ Mr. Tate.”

Only Elizabeth knew how death came to Booger. I recall the Phelps boys saying he had shot himself. How Pap offered to help bury him, all the time knowing what monsters they were.

“Did they ever come back for you?”

“They come all right. But they take Samuel, my mammy’s oldest.”

“Were they—wearing red hoods, Junk?”

“Yes, ma’am, they were.”

I turn in my seat, see Miss Pinny Albert and her sisters and Miss Dovey. Junk’s mama, rocking and holding her daughters, Mettie and Doll, whose husbands ran off—or did they? I see a half dozen children and old men with gray chin whiskers. Mr. Radney Holifield, who is near eighty and a lifetime deacon in the African Methodist Church that is no more. Two ladies with babies asleep in their arms. A dozen more.