Now the single room held ten or twelve long wooden pews, an old-fashioned upright piano and a homemade wooden pulpit, and the cross-ventilation fed the flames blazing in the far left corner. I saw that one of the pews was ablaze on its own in the middle of the room, but what with the heavy pulpit Bible and grabbing up anything else I could lay my hands on, I was too busy to think just then what that might mean.
“Get out! Get out! Get out!” cried the man with the pulpit on his shoulders, but there were hymn books scattered along the pews—how could this impoverished congregation buy new ones? And fans. No air-conditioning here—I had to save the fans. Sparks showered down, stinging my bare arms.
Gasping for air, choking on smoke, I heaped hymnals and fans on top of the huge pulpit Bible and stumbled through the door just as rafters began to crash down behind me.
I was no sooner out into the fresh air than Daddy grabbed me roughly as if I were ten years old again and he meant to shake some sense into me.
“Don’t you never do nothing like that again as long as you live,” he raged as he brushed at the singed places where burning sparks had fallen onto my hair.
Between coughs to clear my lungs and trying to assure him that I wasn’t hurt, I almost didn’t see those ugly words spray-painted in dark green across the front of the white clapboard structure.
As soon as I did see them though, I knew that this was no accidental electrical fire. Those letters were too similar to the ones sprayed across the Crocker family cemetery. And while I still didn’t think A.K. had written either set, I could only pray that he’d spent the evening repenting in his room tonight and that he hadn’t stepped foot out of the house since he got home from court—that he hadn’t been out with any racist friends.
“Back! Get back!” shouted the young man who’d rescued the pulpit. He was sweating profusely inside his heavy fire suit, but his eyes flashed with excitement as he ordered us further away. The interior was now such a fiery furnace that even Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego couldn’t have rescued anything else from its depths.
The rear of the building suddenly sagged and the rusty tin roof crashed in with sharp creaks and bangs. Geysers of sparks shot up twenty feet or more into the night sky, and the old dry wood beneath the tin burned like heart pine light-wood. Rafters pulled loose from their nails and sheets of tin buckled in the heat as more oxygen fed the flames. Clearly there was no saving any of the building and now the firemen turned their efforts to confining the fire to the structure itself as they drenched the scorched trees and bushes around the edges to keep them from catching.
There was nothing to do but stand and watch it burn to the ground.
More cars and trucks had pulled in, several of the arrivals members of this small congregation. Tears trickled down the face of a gray-haired black woman as she filmed the blaze with her video camera, but there were angry mutterings from others of the men and women standing apart from us whites.
7
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
—Park Methodist Church
The fire was still smoldering when we left and the fire truck was packing up its gear, but people continued to arrive as word spread through the black community. One of the deacons took the big pulpit Bible from me and he thanked me for rescuing it. His wife smoothed the white lace runner. “My grandmother crocheted this when I was a little girl. Thank Jesus, you saved it.”
Another member of the congregation smiled when she saw those stick-and-cardboard giveaway fans. “You don’t mean to say you walked through fire for these raggedy old things, do you?”
“You just grab up whatever you see at a time like that,” I said, feeling as foolish as old Mrs. Crocker must have felt once the emergency was past and she realized she’d risked a neighbor’s life for a fifty-cent milk pitcher.
“I hope you ain’t going to make a habit of that,” Daddy said gruffly as we walked back to the truck.
“No, sir,” I said and squeezed his work-rough hand in mine.
Neither of us had much to say as we drove home through the warm still night. The odor of smoke was on us both and every time I touched my hair where sparks had landed, a singed-feathers smell reached my nose. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing the damage in a mirror.
When we came to Old Forty-eight, Daddy turned in to a farm lane that led past Jap Stancil’s old house. It was dark and deserted, though there was a light on up at his daughter-in-law’s house where she still waited trial for shooting Mr. Jap’s son.
A half-moon was up and the air was full of the summer sounds of frogs and cicadas and crickets. We crossed Possum Creek onto Knott land over a homemade bridge of logs and boards, then took a west-branching lane that led past a twenty-acre tobacco field. It must have been topped that afternoon, for the smell of green tobacco was strong on the air and wilted pink blossoms littered the ground between the rows.
We came up to Andrew’s house from the rear and his rabbit dogs announced our coming. By the time Daddy pulled into the yard and cut off his motor, my brother had turned on the back porch light and was standing there waiting for us, barefooted and shirtless.
It wasn’t much past ten o’clock, but most farmers are up at first light during barning time. Andrew yelled at the dogs and they hushed barking before I had my door open.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“Where’s A.K.?” said Daddy.
“In bed, I reckon. Why?”
“You want to wake him up?”
Of all the boys, Andrew’s the one who favors Daddy the most, especially now that streaks of gray are appearing in his thick dark hair. He nodded curtly and stepped back into the house.
Daddy flicked one of those wooden kitchen matches with his thumbnail to light his cigarette and I smelled the familiar pungent blend of sulphur and tobacco smoke that always conjures up a hundred random memories. Into the silence came the lonesome call of a chuck-will’s-widow from the woods down by the barns. That lopsided moon was caught in the branches of the pecan trees beyond the pumphouse.
Several minutes later, a sleepy A.K. stumbled out to the porch in his underwear, all arms and gangly legs now, but a man’s height and starting to fill out. “Granddaddy?”
“Where was you this evening, boy?” His voice was stern.
“Right here.” A.K. glanced uneasily at his father, who took a seat on the edge of the porch. “I been grounded till August.”
“You didn’t sneak out somewhere?”
“No, sir.”
“Talk on the phone with them two friends of your’n?”
“I might’ve with Raymond Bagwell for a minute.”
Andrew gave him a sharp look. “Didn’t you hear me say I didn’t want y’all talking together anytime soon?”
“That’s why I called him,” A.K. said sullenly. “I needed to tell him not to call over here for a while.”
“ ’Bout what time was that?” asked Daddy.
A.K. shrugged. “Right after supper. Around seven maybe? Jeopardy was just coming on.”
“What’s happened?” asked April, pushing open the screen door and joining us on the porch. Her short sandy brown hair stood up in tufts because she was forever running her fingers through it when worried or distracted. She has a small neat body and good legs, but I knew that she wore that oversized T-shirt because middle age was thickening her waist in spite of all she could do to stop it. “Is it more trouble?”
“Somebody set fire tonight to that colored church over at Starling’s Crossroads,” Daddy said.