True Fires Read online

  “A boy . . .” the Sheriff says, deliberately scanning the room, “. . . name of Dare.”

  “Why, Sammy,” Miss Burch cries, her still-clasped hands cupping his shoulder. “That’s you!”

  As the Sheriff turns his steel-eyed gaze to the front, something about the big man makes Daniel uneasy. It’s not his size. The redheaded McKennas up home are bigger, and as good as they come, on weekdays. It’s not even the reaction of the other children—mock-envy masking relief. It’s something about the way the Sheriff’s smile doesn’t rise to his eyes. And the look in those eyes. Like the look Pap and the other men get when the brush of wild wings breaks the silence outside the duck blind.

  When the Sheriff says, “This is your lucky day, boy,” Daniel feels anything but. “Ever ridden in a squad car before?”

  Lottsa times up home, Daniel thinks, but says nothing.

  “Miss Burch, it’s—what? Twenty till the bell?” Sheriff DeLuth says. “Mind if we leave early so my car doesn’t block the buses?”

  “Course not, Sheriff,” Miss Burch chirps. “Sammy, get your things.”

  4

  Betty Clayton Whitworth, proprietress of the Charmwood Guest House on Elm Street, stands on the front porch massaging her right hip. Her hurricane hip, she always calls it, gingerly rounding the inflamed joint with the heel of her right hand, scanning the horizon for storm clouds.

  Betty the Barometer, Clay’d called her that last December, should a enlisted, coulda been Ike’s secret weapon, he’d teased, marching around this very porch, mimicking Eisenhower’s Texas drawl: “Whus that y’say, Monty? June sixth? Lessee what Betty’s hip has to say ’bout it.” That Clay, always clownin’.

  The growl and sheen of the Sheriff’s car startles her. Betty’s hands fly out to grasp the white wood railing. For nine years now, the sight of the Sheriff, even the casual mention of his name, conjures up pieces of the worst night of her life: Sheriff DeLuth’s banging knock at the door, his eyes downcast while delivering the news, the horror of standing there in cold cream and curlers, boarders cracking their doors to catch a listen, hearing that Clay, her only son, the town’s most conspicuous war hero, had spent the evening at the V.F.W. drinking toast after toast to the unexpectedly dead General George S. Patton—Biggest son of a bitch ever lived! Her Clay, who’d survived North Africa, Sicily, the Battle of the Bulge, for heaven’s sake, and had a shoebox full of medals to prove it, lay dead no more than a mile from home, wrapped around the unloving arms of a Florida jack pine.

  “Why, Sheriff—Sheriff DeLuth!—what brings you to—I mean, what could you possibly—well, really?” Betty calls to the big man making his way up her sidewalk.

  “Now, Miz Betty, nothing to fret over,” the Sheriff says, stopping just short of the bottom step to greet her eye to eye.

  Keepin’ his distance, Betty thinks. Was he recalling, as she was, the fat smear of cold cream across his chest when she’d collapsed, hysterical, that awful night? She feels her cheeks flush.

  “Got a couple schoolkids, name of Dare?” DeLuth jerks a thumb toward his car. “Claim they live here.”

  “Daniel and Rebecca?” Betty cranes her neck, squinting at the two dark heads in the Sheriff’s backseat. “Yes—poor things—they do. Just a few months—I mean, till the Brysons— they’re regulars from Michigan—arrive for the winter.” Quit prattlin’ on, sound like an ol’ loon, Betty scolds herself. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Well, if you don’t mind,”—the Sheriff removes his hat and slaps it gently against his thigh—“I’d like a word with their mother. Please, ma’am.”

  “Mother? Didn’t they tell you—haven’t got one—that’s why I said poor things—earlier, I mean. Father works for Lila Hightower—you know, out at the Judge’s place? Well, of course, you do!”

  “No mother, y’say?” Sheriff DeLuth cocks his head as if he hadn’t heard right. “What happened to her?”

  “Died ’fore they came here—cancer, I think—the poor little girl, ’Becca, told me, ‘My mam’s insides et her up.’ Doesn’t that sound like cancer to you?”

  “Yes. Yes, it does. And the father works for Lila, y’say?” The Sheriff retains the look of someone who either doesn’t hear well or is having a hard time believing what she’d said.

  “Oh, yes! She’s the one vouched for ’em. House rules—I mean, I must have references—so many oddballs, really!”

  “Well,” Sheriff DeLuth fingers the rim of the big white Stetson, “I’ll be heading out to Lila’s then. Sorry to have bothered you, Miz Betty.”

  “But, Sheriff,” Betty flutters a trembly hand in his direction. “Is there trouble?—I mean, this is a respectable—I can’t afford—”

  “Might catch a little rain, don’t y’think?” The Sheriff eyes the bank of clouds scuttling overhead. “Then again, might not.” He shrugs and strides to the curb.

  Betty’s hand floats back down to her side, the heel of it testing her sore hip joint. Rain, for sure, she decides. And what else? she wonders as ’Becca’s small wave blurs in the back window of the Sheriff’s receding car.

  5

  Sheriff DeLuth turns left on Beech, right on Oak, then hard-pedals out Old Dixie toward the Judge’s place, south of town. In his rearview mirror, his eyes rake over the two tight-lipped children in the backseat and he shakes his head at Ed Cantrell, Betty Whitworth, and, now, Lila Hightower, hearing the words of the prophet—Jeremiah, Ezekiel, who?—The Lord give them eyes, but they do not see.

  Look at the kink in that boy’s hair, and the girl—that nose has the black curse of Canaan on it, clear as day. What’s Cantrell thinking, lettin’ them in school? And Lila vouchin’ for ’em to stay at the old hen’s boardinghouse?

  Lila.

  As DeLuth turns the wheel sharply at the bend in the blacktop created by the abrupt arrival of Lake Esther—the one locals christened SonofaBitch Curve after it claimed Clay Whitworth—his thoughts veer toward Lila Hightower.

  Lila was nobody’s fool. The Judge had seen to that. Even in grade school, when he and Louis Hightower first became friends, Lila had the jump on every kid in class. The Judge taught her to read early—tried to do the same with Louis, too, but it didn’t take—and suffered no more foolishness in his home than in his courtroom. “Don’t go relyin’ on your prettiness, Miss,” DeLuth had heard the Judge warn Lila many a time. “In the cases that count, smart beats pretty every time.” And hadn’t she outsmarted the Judge himself—damn near broke his heart, too—by joining the Women’s Army Corps after Louis went and got himself killed in Africa, for Chrissakes? And hadn’t she piled insult onto injury by staying away until just before the ol’ man died and was all set to disown her?

  DeLuth purses leathery lips as he wheels onto the private side road—paved at county expense—beside the green-and-white sign for Hightower Groves. Once, during the anxious weeks before the Judge passed, DeLuth had flirted with the possibility that all this might be his. The Judge as much as said so. “K.A., you been more of a son to me than Louis ever was.” The ol’ man was spitting up blood in wads as thick and brown as chewing tobac by then. “S’long as Lila can’t see fit to find her way home, I’ve told Paine to fix things so you’re next in line.” But, of course, Lila had come home, just in time to usher her father from this world into the next. And blood being thicker than branch water, DeLuth wound up with the Judge’s gold watch and a small note, in Lila’s broad scrawl, that said, “Sorry, Kiss Ass.”

  For DeLuth, driving down the Judge’s grove road sets memories flickering like a Movietone newsreel:

  Just there, in the big oak beside the main road, he and Louis built their flight deck out of wood pilfered from the county woodpile—The Dixie Bombers, they were—and, from their secret post on high, hurled rotten, powdery gray grapefruit at the passing traffic. “Bombs awaaay, suckers!” Over there, in the break between the navel trees and the Parson Browns, he and Louis manned the kerosene tanks, choking on fumes, changing off the smudge-pot crews during the end
less, bone-chilling night that was the freeze of ’34. By morning, everyone’s face so oily black you could hardly tell the Niggers from the whites. Here, on this very road, flanked by rows planted a perfect ten yards on center, he and Louis practiced the pinpoint-accuracy passing and receiving that took their high-school football team to the ’39 National Championships in Miami. Red Grange—three-time All-American, The Galloping Ghost himself—was there to congratulate them. The Judge, arms around him and Louis, introduced them to everyone as “my two boys.” Grange had hands like hams, pink, big, and firm; his ferocious grip and flaming face came at you like a boar out of the woods. His wave to the Miami stadium—a sort of jabbing salute—was the secret inspiration for DeLuth’s own Fourth of July “parade wave.”

  Up ahead, the big white house, white-columned like the courthouse downtown, presides over its surrounding acreage like the Judge’s bench over the hard-backed chairs of Courtroom Number Two. It was just there in the corner of the porch shaded by the live oak, the Judge and his cronies gathered to anoint him County Citrus Inspector and, later on, their uncontested candidate for High Sheriff.

  From then on, he and Judge Howard Hightower—who courtroom wags called Judge How-High, as in “When I advise you to jump, Counselor, the appropriate response is ‘How high?’ ”—remade this county into their image of Law ’n’ Order. They’d brooked no foolishness, either, not from returning Nigger war veterans, union organizers, ungenerous real-estate developers, or anyone except Big Nick, the local Bolita ringleader who lined their pockets with enough cash to build the herd of blue-ribbon Brahmas that was the envy of the state’s cattlemen.

  Lila’d managed to reel in the Judge’s house and vast grove lands. But the cash money was in the Judge’s handshake shares of the Brahmas and the Bolita that were now all his. Sorry, Miss. DeLuth smiles smugly as he passes the house on his way to the big grove buildings in the back. Like the ol’ man always said, smart beats pretty every time.

  6

  Floridy, it seems to Daniel squeezing ’Becca’s cold little hand in the Sheriff’s backseat, watching the green boulders of Miss Lila’s grove trees whiz by, Floridy’s like a giant-size bald, badly in need of trees. Up home, when lightning struck the flat top of a mountain and set fire to everything in sight, when the local wildlife was left to scratch and claw a life out of the burnt black earth under the hungry glare of the hawks and the sun, when worthless ragweed and goldenrod took the place of the berry bushes and the big cedars and the ancient elms for a hundred years or so, you had yourself a bald and ’tweren’t pretty.

  Floridy has no trees to speak of ’cept for a bunch of scrawny pines and the occasional live oak. No mountains to soften the edges between night and day and back again, settle the arguments ’twixt the hard dark dirt and the fretful, changing sky. No dirt even, fragrant with the loam of fallen leaves. Just a whole lot of sand and lakes and prickly palmetto bushes and prissy orange trees. ’Tweren’t natural atall.

  And the folks ’tweren’t natural neither. This Sheriff, Daniel thinks, is more bear than man. Got the big, square head, the shiny black hair, the li’l leery eyes, long nose, barrel-shaped body, even the limpy, flat-footed gait of a big black bear up home.

  I seed it right o f, Daniel thinks. When the Sheriff dropped a heavy paw on the back of the boy’s neck just outside the classroom, and did the same with ’Becca—not even botherin’ with the ruse of “names in his hat” and “a free ride home.” When he grunted at them to “git in the back,” lumbered up to poor Miz Whitworth at the boardinghouse, who looked like she’d spotted a ghost, and shook his head with that great, slow sway and sniffed the air in just the way that bears do, Daniel, a boy raised in bear country, knew what to do—and slipped into a still and watchful silence.

  A bear, Daniel knew, usually has one thing on his mind—he cain’t handle two—and the trick is to figure out what it is, let him have at it, and he’ll soon be on his way to the next one thing. A bear ain’t all that dangerous, unless, of course, you or your dog or the deer you just killed is the bear’s one thing. If that’s it, you best be careful that your single shot hits home.

  The Sheriff whips his car into Miss Lila’s wide, dirt grove yard and gets out in a hurry without his hat. Daniel and ’Becca watch him swivel his big head back and forth, left to right. Under the bead of his gaze, the Negroes in the yard, who are returning their empty picking sacks to the supply shed, shut their mouths, drop their chins, and study their shoelaces, backing into the shade like songbirds silenced by the shadow of a hawk.

  The Sheriff approaches an older one, the color of molasses, and demands, “You, boy! Where’s Leroy?”

  “Ain’t here no more, suh.” The molasses man shakes his head at his shoe.

  “What’s that?” The Sheriff leans over him. “I said, where’s Leroy?”

  Daniel watches the molasses man dig his chin a little deeper into his chest. “Leroy ain’t here no more, suh. Miss Lila’s got herself a new tree man. He inside the barn.”

  “Kin I help ye, Sheriff?” Beside Daniel, ’Becca gasps as the big man turns slowly on the hind of his heels to glare at their pap, who’s walked out of the barn into the sunlight.

  “Well, maybe you kin and maybe you kin’t,” the Sheriff tells Pap, mocking his accent. “Where’s Leroy Russell?”

  “Like Nate there said, Leroy don’t work here no more. Name’s Franklin Dare.” Pap steps toward the Sheriff, offers up his hand. “Yores?”

  The Sheriff’s eyes, sliding from Pap’s hand up to his face, glitter suspicion. The Sheriff’s a full head taller but, Daniel thinks, Pap’s five and a half feet of pure Carolina gamecock. He kin outwrestle any man on our mountain, including the oversize McKennas. Outshoot ’em, too. I seed him drop a possum out of a pine a hundred yards yonder. “Left eye or right?” Pap asked ol’ John Trotter, who bet him he couldn’t do it. “Either one,” ol’ John said. “How ’bout both?” Pap said as he pulled the trigger. That possum had turned sideways and Pap’s bullet went clean in one eye and out t’other. On account of his skills and his temper—Pap could be as prickly as a polecat—folks up home had a sayin’. “Don’t go ranklin’ Franklin Dare,” they’d warn the local hotheads. This Sheriff, Daniel decides, don’t know who he’s talking to.

  A woman’s voice behind both men calls, “His name’s DeLuth.” Miss Lila Hightower strides out of the barn to stand beside Pap, a pretty, auburn-haired woman dressed, as usual, like a man in khaki shirt, pants, and grove boots. “K.A.,” she tells Pap, “as in Kyle Ambrose. As in Kick Ass. Or Kiss Ass. Depending on who’s got the bread and who’s holdin’ the butter knife. And he has”—her green eyes flash at the Sheriff— “the manners of a pig.”

  “Now, Lila.” DeLuth’s face splits suddenly into a grin, a boy’s Sorry-I-spilled-the-sugar-bowl grin, I-wasn’t-aimin’-at-the-mockingbird grin, Teacher-it-sure-as-heck-wudn’t-me sort of grin that doesn’t appear to soften Miss Lila one bit. “What’s all this about Leroy? He’s been the Judge’s tree man ’round here for—what? Eight, nine years?”

  “Well, he ain’t mine anymore!” Her eyes are sparking fire. “Not since I found the truckload of fertilizer I paid for was pure cane sugar for his moonshine operation in the back corner grove!”

  “You fired Leroy for makin’ a little ’shine?”

  “What? I shoulda called The Law?” she blazes, then catches sight of Daniel and ’Becca in the back. “What’re you doin’ here anyway?”

  “Investigatin’ a constituent complaint,” he tells her, and opens the car door for them to scramble out. Daniel and ’Becca move mutely to stand beside Pap. “Seems to me and Clive Cunningham that your new tree man is tryin’ to bleach the tar brush at Lake Esther Elementary.”

  Pap slides a protective palm onto Daniel’s shoulder. “What ye sayin’ about my younguns?”

  The Sheriff’s eyes aren’t the least bit friendly. “I’m sayin’ that Lake Esther Elementary is an all-white school, for all-white children. Appears to me, your two don’t bel
ong.” His tone is a low growl.

  Against his shoulder, Daniel feels Pap’s clutch turn into a claw. He can see, close up, the anger rushing into his father’s face. “They’re as white as you are and of better stock!”

  “Lila,” the Sheriff says, soft, “look at that girl’s nose. I don’t like the shape of it one bit. And, the boy’s hair—ain’t as nappy as old Nate’s over there—but it’s kinked, ain’t it?”

  Pap’s claw is biting into Daniel’s shoulder now, his breath’s turned to a shallow pant, the fight muscles in his jaw have begun to twitch. Pap’s gonna kill him, I know it, Daniel thinks. Miss Lila shoots a flat hand out in front of Pap’s chest, gives him that woman’s look that says “just you wait a minute,” and turns back toward the Sheriff.

  “Kyle, what’s this all about? Hidin’ behind Clive Cunningham who, everybody knows, swells up like a tick over anyone he hasn’t known all his life. Wasn’t it just last month he accused a Fuller Brush man of being a Communist spy? Don’t you have anything better to do than bother a boy about his curly hair, embarrass a little girl over the shape of her nose?”

  “Gee, Lila,”—the Sheriff grins his I-ain’t-done-nothing-wrong grin again—“you been gone so long you forgot the difference between colored and white? This ain’t no meltin’-pot state. We got laws about such nonsense. And I’m here to enforce ’em.”

  “You sonofabitch,” she says quietly. “This is another one of your preelection stunts, isn’t it? Last time, it was the Communist labor organizers, I heard. Sheriff DeLuth had to put his big ol’ white hat on and ride their Red asses outta town. And, now, it’s desegregation, isn’t it? Find some kids with curly hair and call out the Sheriff to save our lily white souls! You’re barkin’ up the wrong tree, Kyle. This dog won’t hunt.”

  “On the contrary.” The Sheriff laughs, then says sweet as chess pie, “I think this dog’s done treed himself a couple muleottos who best stay the hell outta the white folks’ school.”