“I did. You deserve to know. You’re the only one who tried to help. And I did set you free. You’d’a run that still until you dropped dead in the woods because it was your precious daddy’s. Now you can move on.”
Lyda knew her better than she knew herself. The taste of freedom in the back of Jackie’s throat was bittersweet.
“Lyda, have you seen a doctor?”
“Liver’s gone. Hepatitis.” She shrugged. “Shit happens.”
“Where’s Cornelia Swanson’s body?”
Lyda grinned, the skin pulling over her skeletal features. She’d gone far downhill in the few days since Jackie had last seen her. “In the trunk of my daddy’s car. He’s been driving his dead princess around for days. Imagine that.”
Lyda forced herself off the sofa, stumbling as she went to a dresser in a corner of her room. She opened the top drawer and brought out a tape recorder. “This is all you’ll need, Jackie. The whole story. Even the part about who killed Jackson.”
“It was Fred, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. “My dear daddy wanted to make an issue out of bootlegging and warned Jackson it was coming down. Jackson threatened him about Charlotte Rush, and about his visits to me in New Orleans. Next thing I knew, Jackson was dead.”
“The law won’t be able to make charges stick about digging up that dead girl. Fred’ll get out of it.”
“Maybe. But I left another recording with the body. One he won’t get out of so easily.”
“How do you know he won’t remove that before he calls the sheriff?”
Lyda inhaled and flinched. She put a hand on her side. “That’s the real reason I burned the still. They’ll be investigating.”
“You’re framing a man for something he didn’t do.”
“Because the things he did do, he’ll never be punished for.” She sank back onto the sofa and turned away. Her chest rapidly moved up and down and Jackie thought of two cocks she’d seen fighting in a farmyard. The fierce fluttering of a desire to maim and mutilate. She knew it too well.
“Let me get you some help, Lyda. Have you even seen a doctor?”
“I don’t want help. I want revenge, and then release.”
“But—”
“Just let me go. That’s the kindest thing you can do. Let me go.”
Jackie believed her. Lyda had loosened the tethers long ago. Fred March had set her on that path. He’d stolen her will to live, her innocence, and her best friend’s father.
“I’ll call the sheriff for you. And I’ll do what I can to protect Euclid.”
Lyda nodded. “I’ll tell your daddy hello for you.” Her expression held a hint of the old Lyda. “And Jackie, I don’t want to be buried. I want to be cremated and my ashes spread in the Mississippi River. I want to wash right on out to the gulf and the Caribbean islands I always dreamed of visiting. Let me go, okay?”
“You’re going whether I let you or not.”
“We’re alike that way. If you write a story, use a picture of me dancing in my cowgirl outfit. Back from the first, when I looked good. Now get out of here.”
Jackie walked out and closed the door. Lyda would be dead within weeks. If her plan to frame Fred March failed, she still had her exit.
Johnny Z. was coming down the hall, a scowl on his face. Lyda had escaped him too.
Jackie nodded at Euclid as she crossed through the bar. She couldn’t help her friend, but she would see that Fred March was held accountable. Brother Fred was about to discover that the wages of sin were high, though nothing compared to the price of indulgence.
Come Like a Thief
by Anthony Grooms
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
South Titusville, Birmingham
Dr. Blackwood taught literature at Miles College, but I knew him from St. Paul’s Lutheran, where Daddy had started to take us after we left the Presbyterians. Dr. Blackwood was a thin man, not much taller than five feet, a dapper dresser, with bulging eyes and a thin line of mustache, like it had been drawn with a fountain pen across the ridge of his lip. I loved to hear him speak. His voice was soft and crisp and he used words that I didn’t know the meaning of. I doubt if anyone who sat on the porch watch on that fall night understood half of what he said.
“Prof,” Mr. Snodgrass (we called him “Snotty”) said, “that’s a mighty good speech! Good ’nough to deliver from the pulpit at Sixth Avenue. You could drive ole Wilson right on outta there. He puts the dead to sleep. God up in heaven be snoring through his sermons. The Lord’s head be falling down and rolling around His neck like a ball on a billiard table.” Mr. Snodgrass spat tobacco in the bean can he kept with him. “’Cept nobody in hell know what you be talking about.” Mr. Snodgrass was a bulky man, whose size should have been intimidating, except his body slouched, making itself look soft. He walked with a stoop as well. He worked in the warehouse at the Golden Flake plant. “You never knew tater chips could be so heavy,” he often said.
I could see Dr. Blackwood’s lips twitching in the silver light that shone through the front-door window onto the porch. “I am too often amused by your flights of imagination, Snodgrass, but to make a spectacle of the Divine is defamation beyond redemption.” The whites of his eyes caught the light. My father, who made up the north-facing point of their triangle, shifted toward me, a sly grin, siding with neither man. The shadow of the Remington 11–48, a shotgun he had managed to keep from his time in the service, moved along the porch railing as it lay across his lap, pointing out into Center Street. I ducked behind the curtain, lest he saw me and sent me to bed.
Like in practically every other household in South Titusville, my parents were teachers. My father worked at Lawson State, a vocational college where he taught painting. The test of a good painter was that he could carry a loaded paintbrush across a room, like a debutante balancing a book on her head, without spilling a drop. Papa had studied at Tuskegee Institute, living among the black airmen who would make up the 332 Fighter Group, and the syphilitic farmers who unwittingly became the guinea pigs of the US Public Health Service. He occasioned, too, to meet the humble, effeminate, and by then very frail inventor George Washington Carver. This touch with greatness, he said, always inspired him to do right by people. Mommy taught second grade for Birmingham Public Schools, where in addition to buying school supplies with her salary, half that of white teachers, she would buy shoes, toothbrushes, clothes, and lunch for the poorer of her students.
Early that week, Williams’s Store, a mom-and-pop sundry shop, which Sister and I frequented after our trips to the library, had been dynamited. We loved to buy the hard candy from the store, not so much for its taste, but because of its price: two for a penny. A nickel could keep us in candy for days.
Why the store was bombed was a mystery. Bombings — dynamite, Molotovs — were common in Birmingham’s black neighborhoods, especially those that were encroaching into whites-only zoned areas. But South Titusville was not one of those communities. It was self-contained, mostly content, mostly complacent, or so it seemed on the surface. It was a neighborhood where nice colored folks minded their business, went to work, to church, to school, and prettified the front yards of their quaint brick and clapboard ranches. But beneath the surface, as in every black neighborhood, bubbled the slow boil of discontent, whispered in the churches beneath the call and response, or over the fence between neighbors, or on playgrounds among children tossing a softball. The city had closed all the parks that year in resistance to integrating them. The next spring would see thousands of children, some as young as six, march in protest, bitten by police dogs and bowled over by jets of pressurized water. I would be among them. That night, though, no one knew by whom or why Williams’s Store had been shaken off its foundation and gutted by fire from two sticks of dynamite tied to a brick thrown through the window. But for the week since the bombing, on nearly every street corner in Titusville, both North and South, sat men with guns on porch watch, waiting, as Mr. Snodgrass summed up, “to blow open any Klan sonofabit’ stupid enough to drive down Center Street.”