And he was right.
The Little Emery Road was a quarter-mile, single-lane dirt road, running from Hixon’s General Store along the Southern Railroad track to Prather’s Crossing on Prather’s Road. Once Little Emery Road had gone beyond the crossing and had carried travelers on the Elberton-Royston route. Highway 17 changed that. Little Emery Road was amputated, and its only traffic was those people who lived on that quarter-mile stretch—Wade and Margret Simmons, the Holcombs, and Ben Alford.
Megan’s home was on a hill across Highway 17 and the railroad track. I could see it clearly and I wondered if Megan would see me on Little Emery Road, alone. Perhaps she would be watching from the screened front porch. Perhaps. It could happen. If she were watching, if she did see me, she would walk outside. I slowed my pace. It would be my luck to be one step too fast, one step out of view. I stopped, picked up a rock, and threw it at the railroad track. The rock pinged on the steel rail. Megan did not appear. I thought of what Alvin had said. Megan would be surprised to discover me at her front door, delivering a petition. I wondered if her mother would be at home.
I missed Megan.
A dog barked in front of Ben Alford’s yard, near Prather’s Crossing, and I saw Sonny crossing Highway 17.1 knew he had not seen me and I decided to hide behind a hedge of diseased boxwood planted along the road between the Simmons’ and the Holcombs’ houses. I did not know why I wanted to hide, but I did. I wondered why Megan had not seen me.
In a few minutes, Sonny appeared, walking a rail. He did not know I was watching and he was playing Hero by balancing on the rail and jabbing the air with an imaginary broadsword, like Sinbad the Sailor. His mouth was flapping in soundless hisses and dares, and he feigned a minor wound—a needle prick in the arm that he bravely suffered while killing a half-dozen fools with one sweep of his gleaming sword. Another half-dozen attackers rushed him from behind and Sonny raced along the rail in quick little Chinese steps, fighting for balance; if he fell into the moat below, he would be chewed to bits by a three-headed sea monster that had not been fed in a month. Sonny turned on the rail, swished once, twice, ducked a swipe, took a second wound in the left thigh, moaned, gasped for breath, swayed on the narrow bridge above the famished sea monster, almost fell, did fall (one foot quickly down, then up again; Sonny cheated at everything, even his games). He grabbed valiantly for an invisible bridge support, kicked one killer in the groin and, whipping his hunting knife out of his belt, flicked it straight through the heart of his last enemy. Bleeding from the arm and leg, breathing deeply, thanking God with slow, serious, soundless mouthing, Sonny Haynes stood victorious on the slender steel rail—two hundred feet in the air. He spat triumphantly and defiantly into the moat and the three-headed sea monster slithered away below the cinders and crossties.
I stepped into the road and yelled, “Hey, Sonny.”
Sonny fell from the rail and tripped backward, bouncing on his tail.
“Hey, Sonny, you all right?”
Sonny’s face was crimson. Sinbad the Sailor had never fallen flat on his tail in full view of another person. He tried to avoid my eyes. “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled. “You give me a scare, that’s all.”
“Well, you give me a scare, too. I was just walkin’ up through the field there and I didn’t see you.”
Sonny stood and tenderly brushed away cinders from the seat of his pants. “Whatcha doin’, anyhow?” he asked.
“Taking this petition around. You heard about this petition?”
Sonny noticed the paper in my hand and frowned. “Yeah,” he said. “I heard about it.”
“You signed one yet?”
“Naw. I’m not signing nothin’ that’ll let Freeman Boyd off from what he done,” Sonny snorted.
“Lots of folks already signed,” I said.
“Lots of folks are crazy, too.”
“You really see him take that money, Sonny?”
“See him? Yeah, I saw him. Me and Dupree was right there. We saw him, all right.”
I tried to measure Sonny as Wesley would have measured him. “Wesley said you’d have to go to court and swear on a Bible what you saw,” I replied. “He said…”
Sonny was startled. “Court? I’m not goin’ to no court.”
“What Wesley said.”
“Where’d he hear a thing like that?” Sonny asked, paling.
“I got no idea, Sonny. You know I don’t know what Wesley’s talkin’ about half the time. Just what he said, that’s all.”
Sonny had respect for Wesley. He knew Wesley was smarter than any of us, and if Wesley said something was true, it probably was.
“Dupree didn’t say nothin’ about that,” mumbled Sonny, dropping his face. He kicked a cinder off a crosstie.
I had Sonny measured and I knew it. Wesley would have been proud.
“Well,” I said innocently, “it won’t make no difference, anyhow. You just say what the truth is, and that’s all. Can’t nobody do anything to you for telling the truth…” I paused, as Wesley would have paused, and then I said, “It’s lyin’ that gets to a judge, I hear.”
“Lyin’. What’d you mean, lyin’,” snapped Sonny.
“I don’t mean nothin’. I’m just talkin’.”
Sonny was nervous. He rubbed a red spot on his elbow.
“Yeah, well, I got to go.”
“Sure you don’t want to sign this petition?” I asked.
“My—my daddy’s already signed—one, I think. Mr. Alford come by. I reckon that’ll do for the whole family.”
“Your daddy signed?”
“Maybe he did, but that don’t mean he thinks I’m lyin’ about what I saw.”
“Yeah. Well, see you, Sonny,” I said.
“Yeah, see you.”
Sonny continued in a brisk pace toward Hixon’s General Store. I knew he would tell Dupree everything I had said.
*
Wade and Margret Simmons were not at home, and the Holcombs had already signed Ben Alford’s copy of the petition. I crossed Highway 17 and walked cautiously toward Megan’s home. It would not be easy to appear casual, and I knew it. I began to whistle quietly. I kicked at clods of dirt. I pretended I was lost in a dream, and could easily walk past Megan’s home without recognizing it. If it worked, Megan would run out of the front door and say, “Colin, what’re you doing over here?”
I approached the house, my head down, reading aloud the words of Ben Alford’s petition. Megan did not appear. I stopped and pulled a maypop from a vine growing in the gully. I smashed the maypop hard with my heel. It was rotten inside. I wiped the rot off my heel by scraping my foot across a clump of Johnson grass.
I was almost in front of the house and Megan had not appeared. Then I thought: Get it over with.
I walked quickly to the screen door of the screened-in front porch and knocked. I heard footsteps inside the house. Small footsteps.
“Yes? Who is it?” a voice called.
“Uh—Colin Wynn,” I answered weakly.
“Who?”
“Colin Wynn,” I repeated.
“Just a minute.”
I knew it was Megan’s mother.
The front door opened and Megan’s mother moved lightly across the porch and opened the screen door.
“Colin,” she said happily. “Come in.”
“Yes’m,” I replied.
“What can I do for you?” Megan’s mother asked as she motioned me to the swing hanging from a rafter. She sat opposite me in a rocker.
“Uh—I—I’m helpin’ pass around this piece of—this petition,” I stammered. “It’s something Mr. Alford wrote up for Freeman Boyd.”
“Oh, yes, Megan told me about that. May I see it?”
I handed her the petition.
“By the way, you just missed Megan. She went to play with Marie Arey. She’ll be disappointed.”
“Yes’m.”
I sat in the swing as Megan’s mother read the petition. I could not dismiss Megan’s face from my mind. This was her
house. She lived here. Her presence was everywhere, an ethereal reminder of every secret thought I had ever had. I tried to swing and the chain squealed in pain: Aghhhhhhhhhhhhh. Megan’s mother looked up from her reading and smiled. I stopped swinging and folded my hands across my lap.
Megan resembled her mother. Except for her hair. Megan had blond hair; Megan’s mother had dark hair. Hodges, my brother, had once said you had to look at a girl’s mother to know what the girl would look like when she got older. He had also said that parents of girls never liked the boys their daughters liked.
I wanted to leave.
“Uh—maybe you don’t want to sign it,” I said hastily.
“Oh, no. I think it’s a good idea,” Megan’s mother replied warmly. “Shows community spirit. Do you have a pencil?”
“Yes’m.” I gave her a pencil and she signed in the same sweeping cursive motion Megan used when she wrote.
“Thank you,” I said.
“That’s all right,” she replied. “I’m sure sorry Megan was away. She’s fond of you.”
I could feel my face tightening with redness. “Uh—yes’m.”
“You come again, and play.”
“Uh—yes’m.”
As I walked away, I made a vow, a cross-my-heart vow: I would never again get within a mile of Megan’s home. Nothing was worth such agony.
*
Ben Alford’s petition had impact. Sheriff Dwight Brownlee received it in the presence of Happy Colquitt, photographer and editor of The Eden County Garden.
Happy Colquitt published a front-page picture of Sheriff Brownlee holding ten copies of the petition, and beneath the picture was an editorial which became a mild endorsement of the sheriff’s re-election chances. One of the paragraphs in the editorial read:
It is this writer’s opinion that Sheriff Dwight Brownlee acted wisely in accepting the petition by Ben Alford of the Emery Community, regarding an alleged incident between a minor and A. G. Hixon’s General Store. The incident, of course, is subject to legal settlement in due process of law, but it is encouraging to note that a community has the gumption to stand up for one of its own, and that the county sheriff is sympathetic to such unity.
The editorial further noted that Sheriff Brownlee had conferred with Judge Foster Harris and that Judge Harris was pondering the “weight of the documents.” My father explained the expression had nothing to do with pounds, but was a poetic legal term suggesting “the scales of justice.”
Judge Harris pondered for a week. One of the men who worked with Dover on the REA right-of-way crew, and boarded at a house in Edenville, said he had heard a rumor from Hilda Benson, who was a librarian, that Judge Harris had pondered himself into a state of frustration. If he allowed the petition to have influence in any legal action, Judge Harris would be petitioned out of business; if he ignored the petition, he would catch grief seven ways to Sunday.
The man on the REA right-of-way crew told us that he had told Hilda to tell Judge Harris about Freeman’s bravery in Black Pool Swamp. “That ought to make some difference,” the man said solemnly. “I hear tell that anybody in that swamp is in danger of losin’ his life. I hear tell the real name of that swamp is the Great Okeenoonoo, and it means Woods of Death, or somethin’ like that.”
Later, Dover explained the man’s ignorance. “He’s not from around here, and when Freeman first found that out, he took to pulling that poor fellow’s leg, especially after he told Freeman he was scared of snakes.”
While Judge Harris reviewed his predicament, the citizens of Emery waited and wondered—wondered aloud and in marathon sessions at Allgood’s General Store, which had become the new gathering place for the men of Emery.
There was a story from Edenville that Sheriff Brownlee had decided to forget Freeman’s escape as an act motivated by fear, and something to be expected of a fourteen-year-old. Freeman said of the decision, “He’s right about that, it was fear. He was about to lock me up and melt the key.”
There was also a report that Judge Harris had inquired, on the sly, if A. G. Hixon would simply drop his charges against Freeman. A. G. Hixon refused; he had too much prestige invested in the incident, and though there was speculation that he, too, doubted Dupree’s accusation, he was trapped by his commitment.
None of us were certain what actually happened, but early one morning, after he had been released from the hospital, Freeman announced at Allgood’s that his father had accepted the services of Jackson Whitmire, attorney at law.
“Jackson Whitmire’s takin’ my case for a dollar, or something like that,” Freeman said, “and from what I hear he’s not worth much more’n that, but the people that know him say watchin’ him at work is pure pleasure. He already told Daddy that if they call in a jury, he’ll wave to them, or somethin’, and that means whoever’s on the jury will leave and put it up to Judge Harris about what’s to be done with me.”
Freeman’s confusion was understandable. According to my mother, Jackson Whitmire’s estimation of the law was, at best, muddled. He had a won-lost record considerably lower than the Atlanta Crackers’, who were in fifth place of the Southern League, but he did enjoy an unusual reputation as a courtroom performer. Most of Jackson Whitmire’s cases ended with hysterical pleading, many tears, and a summation that seldom had anything to do with the case before the court. There was one trial, my mother said, when Jackson Whitmire had been so theatrical the jury actually applauded him, and then ruled against his client.
The Freeman Boyd case would give Jackson Whitmire an opportunity to be a central figure in a celebrated event. Besides, he was confident Freeman would be carried triumphantly from the courtroom on the shoulders of Judge Harris. “I’ll get him off,” he bragged at Allgood’s one afternoon, after interviewing a number of Freeman’s friends and supporters. “There won’t be nothin’ to it. I’ll get him off free as the day he was born.”
“Why, that’d make him naked as a jaybird,” observed Ferris Allgood.
“Now, that’d be a sight to behold, wouldn’t it?” Jackson Whitmire responded. “Freeman, naked as a jaybird, ridin’ the shoulders of a judge.”
And everyone laughed heartily.
We were encouraged by the boasting, but there was still the nagging uncertainty of Dupree’s contention that it was a Hixon against a Boyd. We were not fools; names mattered, and we knew it. Still, it was a new time. It was 1947. The REA was coming, and as the right-of-way crew hacked through the swamp we could hear the warning sound of change—the falling of trees, the singing of crosscut saws, the cadence of sling blades, the echo of the ax. The differences between Our Side and the Highway 17 Gang were diminishing in the evidence of the REA, and we began to realize Wesley had been accurate in his confrontation with Dupree: the only true difference was attitude—what we thought and what they thought. That was all. Yet, names mattered, and we knew it.
“You just can’t trust people,” admitted Freeman. “There’s no way they can prove I took that money, but you can’t never tell. Old Man Hixon’s got some pull in this county and that’s for sure.”
“What’s Mr. Whitmire got in mind, Freeman?” asked Wesley.
“Don’t know,” answered Freeman. “He said he had a plan worked out. Won’t say what it is, but he swears I’ll never see the light of day in a courtroom. Said he’d been haggling with the Judge. I don’t know what it is, but he’s cocky as a bantam rooster in a yardful of hen turkeys.”
*
Two days later, we were summoned to the Eden County Courthouse.
“I don’t know why they want all you boys,” fussed Mother, as she drove us to Edenville. “It just doesn’t seem right.”
“Who’s goin’ to be there, Mama?” Wesley wanted to know.
“Well, just about everybody you can think of,” replied Mother. “You and Colin, and R. J., and Otis, and Paul, and Dupree, and that little Haynes boy…”
“Sonny?” I asked.
“Sonny—yes, that’s his name. I don’t know why I can’t
remember that boy’s name,” Mother said. “I can remember his oldest brother, Whitney, but I can’t remember him. Whitney’s married to the Desmond girl, who’s Gladys Presley’s first cousin.”
“Yes’m,” Wesley said. “Who else, Mama?”
“Who else?”
“Yes’m. Who else will be at the courthouse?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Lots of people. All the parents.”
The courthouse was an aged, two-story building of granite blocks with the word JVSTICE chiseled over the main door. (I could never understand why the U in justice was a V) The building was in the center of Edenville and people referred to the area as Courthouse Square.
Sheriff Brownlee met us at the front door. He wore a starched and pressed new uniform, and his badge gleamed from hard polishing.
“Is everybody here?” Mother asked sharply.
“Yes’m,” Sheriff Brownlee answered courteously. “You’re the last ones.”
“What’s this about, Dwight?” demanded Mother.
“Now, Mrs. Wynn, there’s not much to it. Just a little interview. Judge is tryin’ to find out what’s happened so this thing can be settled.”
“Well, I don’t know why he wants these boys,” snapped Mother. “It’s plain that Freeman didn’t do anything wrong.”
“He just wants to talk, Mrs. Wynn. That’s all.”
We were led to Judge Harris’ office. It was a huge, oppressive room with a high ceiling. In the center of the ceiling, a four-blade fan whirled slowly. The odor of the room was musty, like old clothes.
No one spoke as we entered. Parents were seated along one wall, and their sons were seated together in two rows of chairs placed in front of Judge Harris’ desk.
“Boys, y’all can take a seat over there,” Sheriff Brownlee whispered. “Mrs. Wynn, if you’d sit over there…” He indicated an empty chair and Mother sat beside Angus Waller, R. J.’s father. My father was the only father not present; he had refused to attend, realizing his dissatisfaction with the county law enforcement would leave him irritated.
Dupree and Sonny sat together on the front row, with Freeman and Otis and Paul. Jack and R. J. and Alvin were on the second row, where Wesley and I sat. We exchanged nods, but no one spoke.