Baptist was horrified. He could not believe Wesley was so misinformed. He stopped in the middle of the road and began to sway from side to side, mumbling to himself. Finally, he said, “Boys, Baptist has got to teach you two white boys somethin’, and teach it right now. Sit down. Sit down, right here.”
“In the middle of the road?” I said. “Here?”
“In the road,” Baptist emphasized. “Slap-dab in the middle of it.”
And we sat. In the middle of the road. In a close circle.
“It’s like this,” Baptist counseled in a voice that had told many stories in the hush of night. “Now, you boys is smart. God knows you smart. Brains on top of brains, I reckon. But there’s one thing you not learned about, and that’s people’s meanness. Mean? People are me-e-e-e-ean, boys. Bad mean. You never seen it, not like I have. Not many folks gonna cross your daddy to show you they got meanness in ’em, and that’s why, but I’m tellin’ you, I’ve seen meanness runnin’ outa people like blood outa a stuck pig. So has Willie Lee. So has Freeman. That’s what makes him different from you boys. Freeman knows about meanness. And you know somethin’, boys? If…” Baptist paused. “I better not say that,” he added.
“Say what?” Wesley prodded. “Say what, Baptist?”
“Nothin’.” He was sullen.
“Baptist, you better say it, because it’s not fair to start somethin’ and not finish it,” Wesley insisted.
“All right,” Baptist whispered. “But you made me. You remember that.”
“We’ll remember,” I replied eagerly.
“Well, I know y’all and Freeman is big buddies. Freeman done said it a lot; he likes y’all better’n anybody. But—and this is what I didn’t want to say…”
“Say it,” urged Wesley.
“But if it come down to a choice between takin’ up for Willie Lee or y’all in sayin’ that Willie Lee had helped him out, well, Freeman would take up for Willie Lee.”
We did not answer Baptist. We couldn’t. We had never thought of a dilemma so complex, so threatening, so unsolvable.
“You made me say it,” pleaded Baptist, breaking the silence. “You made me.”
Wesley shook his head and his mind snapped into focus. “Shoot, Baptist, I can see that. Any fool can see that.”
“Yeah,” I said, and the more I thought of it, I was certain Baptist was correct.
We left Baptist at the turn-off to his house, and we walked silently in the red wheel tracks of the clay road, tracks packed and shining in the quarter moon.
As we neared our home, I said to Wesley, “I never heard a colored man say ‘nigger-lover’ before. Why’d he do that?”
“That don’t mean nothin’. It’s just somethin’ people say,” Wesley answered.
“Sounds nasty, don’t it?”
“Yeah,” Wesley replied heavily.
“Wesley?”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna tell Mama about Willie Lee and Baptist?”
“No. I promised.”
“Is that like lyin’?” I asked.
“I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.”
*
Mother asked: “Did you see any sign of Freeman?”
“No’m,” answered Wesley. He looked at me.
“No’m,” I repeated.
“Well, they’ll be a good many people lookin’ tomorrow,” she assured us. “They’ll find him, boys. They’ll find him. The sheriff’s even coming.”
14
BY EARLY MORNING, Monday, there were more than forty men and boys gathered in our yard. My father and Odell Boyd had delivered the message of Freeman’s bloody clothes and the message had spread from home to home with amazing swiftness.
“Freeman Boyd’s been hurt. Meet at the Wynns’ house.”
“Freeman Boyd’s been hurt…”
“Freeman Boyd’s been…”
“Freeman Boyd’s…”
“Freeman…”
“Meet at the Wynns’ house…”
It was one of the marvels of Emery that important events were shared, alertly and with full impact. It was as though the incident of discovering Freeman’s bloody clothes pricked some microscopic cell and the entire body responded instantaneously, along all the nerve cords and nerve endings, where farmhouses clustered like fingers at the turnarounds of dirt roads.
The message had lapped into itself, in many tellings, and it had been understood. The men and boys appeared in trucks and cars, or walking, and they waited to be told what they should do. Most of them were there because that is where they should be, because they were needed. They talked in low voices and their faces were set in the frowning mask of tragedy. They knew—knew beyond doubt—that Freeman had been critically injured, or Freeman had been kidnapped, or Freeman was dead. And as the stories were delivered from person to person—words heaped upon words, thoughts splintered into half-thoughts and quarter-thoughts—they took on the passion of anger and accusation.
Wesley and I listened, astonished. Baptist had been right. If we had told about Willie Lee, there would have been a mob storming his house. There were men in the gathered crowd who were there because of the bloody clothes. Bloody clothes. Blood. It was the blood, not Freeman, they wanted to find.
“Wesley,” I whispered when we were alone, “what if they go by Willie Lee’s house?”
“Freeman’s not there,” Wesley answered. “Now, you shuttup. Just shuttup.”
“But…”
“Shuttup. They’re afraid of Willie Lee, anyhow. Not a man out here would face him, not even if they had a shotgun in their hands.”
The image of Willie Lee standing, leaning to fight, his hands poised to kill us, materialized in my mind. A charge from a shotgun would not make a dent in his body, not a dent.
Sheriff Dwight Brownlee and Deputy Homer Dove huddled with my father and Odell Boyd and Dover. Dover had a plan for covering Black Pool Swamp.
“Best if we go about it in two groups,” he announced. “One followin’ one way and the other followin’ another. Now, they’s two branches goin’ into Beaverjam Creek from near here. We’d be coverin’ most of the bottomland if we follow them two branches. Best thing to do is fan out on both sides of them branches and don’t leave nothin’ to question.” Dover paused, not certain if he should say what he wanted to say. He made his decision: “There’s one other thing we got to keep in mind: this is not just a boy we’re lookin’ for; this boy don’t want to be found and he knows more about bein’ in them woods than the whole lot of us put together. I guarantee you, he can hide places that gnats can’t fit in. So, we need to keep a sharp eye.”
*
The searchers separated into two groups and with eager exchanges of confidence, marched away to begin their determined mission of finding Freeman Boyd—marched away with a brisk step for their pace and a firm jaw for their commitment. They would be keen-eyed and constant, and would not waste the intimacy of an occasion that had yanked them, abruptly, from their routine and presented them with a profound duty. It was the mood of men going to war, convinced their enemy would be vanquished before the call to supper, men who would sit around in later days and tell the why and how of their service to a noble quest.
“Good luck.”
“Hope we find him first.”
“Holler if y’all see anything.”
“Don’t worry, Odell, we’ll turn them woods upside down.”
“All right, you boys. Don’t go getttn’ lost.”
We watched as Sheriff Brownlee and his group followed my father and Odell Boyd into the new ground leading toward Beaverjam Creek, then we turned in the opposite direction and followed Dover’s military stride through our pasture. Dover had wanted the boys of Our Side in his party. He knew we understood more about Black Pool Swamp than any man there, with the exception of Odell Boyd, and Dover was obsessed with the thought of his group—his Number One Team—finding Freeman.
The branch we would trail sliced through the bed of our pasture in a wide,
deep furrow. When he lived at home, before college, my brother Hodges constructed magnificent dirt-and-plank dams across the trough of the branch and we swam daily at sunset to wash away field dirt. The dam was always in the same location, just above the barbed wire fence separating our pasture from Black Pool Swamp. Below the dam, the branch narrowed and slithered into the swamp, and that was our starting point, our “jump-off place,” as Dover appointed it.
There were twenty-four people in the group and Dover divided us, twelve and twelve, to scout both sides of the branch. “Spread out,” he instructed. “We ought to cover more’n a hundred feet on both sides. When we get to the bottomlands, we’ll let the boys go through there. They know them ridges better’n the rest of us.”
We began our search in energy. Two hours later, when the sun was at noon and you could see heat rising in its wavy, liquid veil, we stopped for rest. The men were red-faced, their brown work-shirts stained chocolate by perspiration. A few had been thoughtful enough to purchase cans of sardines, or Vienna sausage, and peanut butter crackers, and they shared their meager lunches, drowning the food with branch water. My mother had given each of the boys of Our Side a sizable sweet potato she had baked earlier, and we ate gladly.
“It’s hotter’n hades in here,” one of the men observed. “I’ve not seen a snake doctor flyin’ anywhere, it’s so hot. Reckon we’d better slow it down, Dover, or some of us’ll be stayin’ around for the buzzards.”
Dover dipped his handkerchief in the branch and squeezed water over his neck. He closed his brown eye and squinted toward the sun with his blue. “Yeah,” he said. “We not far from the bottomlands. Maybe we’d best let the boys go on ahead and look there, and we’ll tag on along the branch. It narrows down around here, anyhow.”
“The beavers got some dams a little piece on down,” Otis added. “That’s when you can’t do nothin’ but walk the hills.”
Dover nodded. “Right. Wesley, you think y’all can cover them bottoms?”
“Yeah,” Wesley said.
“Well, we’ll be pretty close behind. You find anything, give a yell.”
*
We left the men at rest. Wesley, Alvin, and I moved down the east side of the branch. R. J., Paul, and Otis followed the opposite bank. The beaver ponds pushed us to the hills, forcing us to trail in a widening parallel, like the raised arms of a capital Y, and then we dropped off into the watery bottomlands of Black Pool Swamp.
“I been thinkin’ about them bottoms,” Alvin said solemnly. “Even thought about it yesterday, pitchin’ against that bunch from Athens, and that was before I knew Freeman was hurt. I’m tellin’ you, Wesley, if there’s any place a man could hide a body, this is it.”
Alvin had good reason for his apprehension. The drain ditches were there, grave-deep, covered with a death mask of swamp grass and vines. If someone had killed Freeman, it would have been easy to dispose of his body in the ditches, where the mire swallowed objects like some giant glob.
“What’d you think, Wes?” asked Alvin.
“I doubt it,” answered Wesley. “But we take a look.”
“What made you think about them ditches yesterday, Alvin?” I wanted to know. “I mean, when you was pitchin’.”
Alvin laughed nervously. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I was just throwin’ away, and all of a sudden, I got this funny feelin’ about Freeman. It just happened.”
Wesley looked at me. His eyes widened. He swallowed hard. “C’mon,” he said.
It took an hour to walk the ditches, with Alvin peering cautiously into fresh depressions where beaver had crashed in playful games of hide-and-seek, or whatever games beaver played in lost hours of enjoying the murky kingdom they had created. In the middle of the bottomland, we met R. J. and Otis and Paul.
“See anything?” asked Alvin.
“Nothin’,” replied R. J. “Nothin’ but some duck feathers. I guess there must be a lot of fox around here.”
“Must be,” Alvin acknowledged. “We saw feathers on this side, too. And rabbit droppin’s. Canecutters, by the size of ’em.”
We left the bottomland and walked along the bank toward Dover and the other searchers.
“Where you think we oughta be looking, Wes?” asked Paul as we walked.
“Don’t know,” answered Wesley. Then he added, “I don’t have the slightest idea.” He sounded discouraged and puzzled.
“Me neither,” I said. No one ever asked my opinion, because I was too young and too small to have an opinion, but occasionally I volunteered a few remarks to remind myself that I belonged.
Paul laughed. “Colin, where’d you go and hide if you was in here?”
“That’s easy,” I told him. “I’d go climb up my tree.”
“Now, that’s dumb,” Paul replied. “Who’d go hidin’ in a tree?”
Wesley stopped abruptly and wheeled to Paul. “Wait a minute,” he said. “That’s not so dumb. That’s the one place we haven’t even thought about lookin’.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Otis said. And then, “What’re you talkin’ about, Wes?”
“Freeman’s tree. He’s got this tree. Must be the biggest beech in Black Pool Swamp, and it’s hollowed out up in the trunk. Got a hole running from top to halfway down. Freeman said it’d been struck by lightnin’ dead in the center, and he dug it out and drilled some drain holes in the trunk. Even fixed a kind of roof over it. You can’t tell it’s there unless you climb it.”
Alvin was skeptical. “C’mon, Wesley, Freeman’s not gonna be hidin’ in no tree.”
“Maybe not,” Wesley argued, “but it’s the one place we know about that we didn’t check. C’mon. Let’s at least look at it. It’s not all that far from here.”
*
Freeman’s tree was not a tree as other trees are trees; it was a monument. He had taken Wesley and me to its location a few times, but he warned us against ever going there without him. A man’s tree, according to Freeman, should never be trespassed. A tree was put on Earth by God for one man and one man only, and it was simply a matter of man and tree meeting at the proper time. “It’s a feelin’,” Freeman had described. “You just walk up to a tree someday and there it’ll be and there you’ll be and you’ll know it’s all yours. Then you just take out your knife and carve your initials in the bark, and that does it. From then on out, that tree belongs to you, and it don’t make no difference whose land it’s on.”
We had obeyed Freeman’s warning to stay clear of his tree. There had been times, in fact, when Wesley and I walked in circles, skirting the area, just to avoid casting eyes on the F.B. proudly sliced into the bark—the F.B. that had healed into a scar and had turned dark in age and weather. It was Freeman’s tree. It even had Freeman’s pride.
But we had been impressed by Freeman’s advice and had spent days, innocent and receptive, in search of our own tree. Eventually Wesley decided such a discovery had to be a private quest, and that it had to be totally unexpected. He was right. One day, while serving my sentence of isolation because of my association with Megan, I was wandering in the edge of the swamp and something made me stop and look up. There, waiting patiently, was my tree.
It was a sycamore. It was not as majestic as Freeman’s beech. It did not have limbs elbowing anemic pines and water oaks out of its stretch; there was nothing intimidating about it, nothing bold and absolute. My tree was straight and thin. It had bark that was young and smooth, a gray-white bark with flecks the color of ink. My tree had a childish look, a woefulness that seemed almost apologetic, and it appeared clownish wearing a squirrel’s nest at an awkward tilt in a limb flopping too far from its trunk. But I loved that tree, loved it from the first accident of looking up and seeing it and wondering why I never before knew it was there. I took my pocket knife and carved C.W. in the bark, high up, boring in the periods with the small blade. My tree. I knew that someday it would be as complete as other trees I had read, where legends of childhood were carved in a code language of initials. Who loved
who. Which year when. Hearts and arrows. Puckered lips. Poems. Yes, poems. Two days after discovering my tree, I gouged out a three-word poem: Eyes of Green.
*
We followed Wesley in a single file over the spine of a hill that Freeman had named Hog Mountain. As a mountain, it was an insult. As a hill, it was peculiarly out of place in Black Pool Swamp. At the bottom of the slope, there was a small branch—a half-branch—fed from an underground spring. We found the animal path of the half-branch and trailed upstream until we reached a clearing. Freeman’s tree was a hundred yards across the clearing, at the base of a separate gathering of hills.
“That’s it,” announced Wesley, pausing to scan the clearing. “Where?” asked Alvin.
“Over yonder, Alvin,” I said, turning him in the direction of the tree. “That big beech tree across the clearin’.”
From a hundred yards Freeman’s tree looked like a fighter, wild and daring. It seemed to recognize our presence. A wind we could not feel swam through a pond of leaves in the top limbs of the beech, and the limbs waved a greeting to us.
“It’s big,” Paul muttered.
The limbs waved again, but not in greeting. Now it was a warning, a mute’s signal to leave. Something, some nerve at the base of my skull, began to tighten. I whispered, “Wesley, Freeman’s not there. Let’s go.”
“What’s the matter?” Wesley asked, annoyed.
“He’s right,” Paul replied anxiously. “Let’s go.”
Paul had sensed it, the gesture, the silent caution that pushed against us. I looked at R. J. and Otis. Bravery seeped from their faces as they stared at the tree, hypnotized.
“Maybe it’s best we go get Dover,” suggested Alvin.
“Why?” asked Wesley. “You act like you’re scared. You lettin’ your imagination run wild. What’s there to be scared about?”
Alvin was not convinced. “Wouldn’t be fair to Dover,” he protested. “I’m not scared, Wes. It’s just that Dover might think we didn’t tell him everything.”
“Well, I’m goin’ over there,” Wesley announced in a loud voice. “You can come with me, or you can stay right here. I don’t care.”