“The young black girl,” said Russ. “Yes, we’ve heard of that.”
“Shirelle Parker, her name was. She was murdered. Your father was very troubled by the event. I could see him turning it over. I remember exactly what it was. He said he thought there were signs of ‘monkey business.’ What those were, he never elaborated.”
“But from what I understand, there was no monkey business,” Bob said. “A black youth was arrested the next day or two. Sam prosecuted. It was open-and-shut. The boy was executed two years later. That was all there was to it.”
“Yes,” said Miss Connie. “All there was to it.”
“So my father was wrong,” said Bob.
She turned and set her face outward, as if she were looking across the bay.
Then she turned back to face them.
“Your father was right. Reggie Gerard Fuller didn’t kill her. I found that out many years later.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know. But I do know what happened and why it happened. The night that girl disappeared there was a meeting at the church.”
Russ remembered a note inside the notebook that Earl Swagger had left behind. “Meeting—who there?”
“In those days, the South was being prepared for the civil rights movement, which no matter what you might think, did not spring out of nowhere. For a decade, very brave young black ministers and young white volunteers traveled from church to church, where they tried to prepare the people for the dangerous work ahead. The night that Shirelle disappeared, there had been such a meeting at the church. Shirelle was at the meeting. So was Reggie. After the meeting, he drove people home in his father’s hearse, people all over Polk, Scott and Montgomery counties. That’s why he never had an alibi. He didn’t drive Shirelle home because she only lived two blocks away.”
“I don’t—”
“The white man was a Jewish radical from New York. His name was Saul Fine. I believe he was a communist. He was later killed in Mississippi. He was taken out and shot by some young white men who called him a nigger lover. That night, he gave an impassioned speech to some of the younger people that the reverend believed in. Then they went home and Saul moved on. But when Shirelle was found, and Reggie was accused, he must have decided that if he told about the meeting, there’d be consequences. It would get out that a revolution was being planned, that a communist northern agitator was down South stirring up the colored. White people would get upset, there’d be violence against the church, the whole thing would come apart. The Klan would ride again. White people were very frightened in those days, I recall.”
She looked out and took off her glasses. Her eyes were still blue though now sightless and opaque. A tear ran down them.
“Your father was a brave, brave man, Bob Lee Swagger. He won the Medal of Honor and he never spoke of it to a soul. But he wasn’t the bravest man I ever heard of. The bravest man I ever heard of was a nineteen-year-old Negro boy who sat still in the electric chair while they strapped him in, and then they killed him and he never made a peep. Because he believed in something. He didn’t get any medals or glory. He never went to meet the President. He understood there were consequences to everything, and he faced them squarely and followed them where they led him. That’s what Saul Fine had told them: People will have to die. The Struggle will cost in blood. Nobody will remember those who die. It is the simple, brutal process of progress.”
She paused. “Nobody ever knew, except the people at that meeting and they couldn’t tell. His mother didn’t know, his father didn’t know and not even many of the blacks in Blue Eye knew. Sam never knew. Sam prosecuted him and believed he was doing God’s work. I believed justice was served. When I found out—this was in 1978, when I met George Tredwell, he was the black minister who traveled with Saul Fine in those days—I almost called Sam. But then I thought: What’s the point? It would kill Sam to find out he’d made such a tragic mistake. So that was the only gift I ever gave Sam, as much as I loved him.”
“It can’t hurt him now. Sam died night before last.”
“I thought I heard death in your voice.”
“He fell down some stairs. He was eighty-six. Spry and tough.”
“He was another good man. I have missed him so over the years. Was he on a case?”
“Yes, ma’am. Never really retired.”
“Arkansas: it produced some terrible men. It produced Jimmy Pye and Boss Harry Etheridge and his idiotic son, Hollis, who wanted to be President. Holly, isn’t that what they call him? I believe it’s a mistake to give a man a girl’s name, always. He certainly paid his share of girls back too, I’m told. But Arkansas also produced Earl Swagger and Sam Vincent.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Have I helped?”
“Yes, ma’am, I think you have. We’ll be moving along now.”
“Now I have a question for you.”
“Yes, Miss Connie.”
“I’m not sure I have the courage to ask it.”
“No one ever said Miss Connie didn’t have no courage. You got us through Daddy’s funeral.”
“All right, then. The child. What became of the child?”
“I’m sorry I don’t—” started Bob.
“She means Edie’s boy. Edie and Jimmy’s son.”
“Yes. Lord, I wanted to save that child. I tried to adopt him after Edie died. Sam argued the case for me. I cared for that child for three months. He was so strong, so alert, so bright. But no court in Arkansas in the fifties would let a northern widow take over a newborn child from an Arkansas mother if there was family around. I named him Stephen, after my own son. They made me give him to Jimmy’s people. It broke my heart. I never found out what happened to him.”
Her question was met with their silence.
“Oh,” she said finally. “He did not turn out well.”
“The Pyes didn’t care about him,” said Russ, “and they beat him and the more they beat him, the worse he got. Eventually, he went into the reform school system. By age twelve he was an incorrigible. They finally sent him off to live with Jimmy’s older brother in Oklahoma. He became …”
Russ paused.
“Go ahead, young man. I’ve buried enough good men so that I can take anything by now.”
“He became a violent felon. He killed many people and traumatized many, many more. He did time in the state penitentiary, where he became even more violent. A career criminal, the worst kind of bad news. Lamar Pye, that was his name. A policeman killed him in 1994.”
“Nothing good came from that day, did it?” said Miss Connie. “I hope there’s never another like it. An evil day.”
33
he houses were all the same but Duane knew the address and he remembered what it looked like and didn’t have any trouble. He pulled into the driveway. The street was a dream of America, an America he’d never, ever be a part of.
Niggers.
Niggers lived here and he lived in some trailer out beyond the interstate?
But he told himself to cool off, to dial it way down. He had to be smooth. That’s what Mr. Bama had said: You got to be smooth, Peck. You’re not going in there to kick ass and show them what a stud you are. You got to crawl and snivel. He quoted somebody called Neechee: That which does not kill you makes you strong, Peck.
So he took a deep breath, climbed out of the cruiser, tucked his hair up behind his Stetson, then walked up to the house. He took some pleasure in the fact that someone was nervously watching him from a window. They still get scared when the Man comes calling.
He knocked on the door.
He waited. Seemed to be scraping and jostling inside.
Finally, the door opened and a young black woman peered out at him.