Every local news channel alternated between the smoldering remains of the two churches. At Burning Heart of God, the only visible signs left behind the yellow police cordon were sheets of twisted tin from the roof and the burned-out hulk of Sister Williams’s metal mobile home.
The cameras caught the fire chief shaking his head woefully.
“We’re just too short of equipment,” he said. “Way this part of the county’s growing, we need at least a substation and another truck.”
Standing behind him, Donny Turner nodded his head in strong agreement.
At Mount Olive, the damage looked awful, but much had been spared. The whole north end of the church was black and charred where only yesterday had been bright Sunday School classrooms, a robing room and the choir stall itself. Flames had destroyed the mural of Jesus with John the Baptist and had licked up against the ecclesiastical chairs before they were brought under control, but the fellowship hall next to the church looked like a total write-off. The fire had started there before jumping to the main building. The roof still stood, and so did an exterior wall with its crudely printed words in green spray paint—“Niggers back to Africa”—but the whole interior was a slurry of waterlogged charcoal.
“This is bad,” said Aunt Zell, who was too distracted to fix anything more complicated than toast for our breakfast. “This is really just too bad.”
Uncle Ash shook his head as he pulled a burned slice from the toaster and handed it to me.
I put it on the plate in front of me and tried again to call Andrew and April, but once again the operator came on the line: “We’re sorry. All our circuits are currently busy. Please hang up and try your call again later.”
It was the same when I tried Seth’s number, Daddy’s and Haywood’s. Nothing was getting through to their exchange.
I left the toast on my plate and headed for Cotton Grove. If I didn’t get caught behind any tractors, there was just enough time to make it there and back to Dobbs before court convened.
I may have pushed the speed limit a little as I drove west in the early morning sunlight. Traffic didn’t seem much heavier than usual, but then I was zipping through back roads and shortcuts. I took the homemade bridge across Possum Creek so fast that for a minute I thought I’d busted one of my shocks.
When I pulled up to the back porch of Andrew’s house, Dwight Bryant was standing by his departmental car there in the yard and Daddy was leaning against his pickup. A.K. and Andrew were on their tractors, ready to head out to the field as if nothing had happened, and April’s smile was serene and unworried.
No one seemed surprised to see me.
“I figgered you’d be out here once you seen the phones was all tied up,” Daddy said.
“We’ll go on then, Dwight,” Andrew said, giving me a wave before he cranked his tractor and trailed A.K. down past the barns. Time and tobacco wait for no man.
“Everything’s okay, then?” I asked inanely.
April’s smile widened. “If you’d gone to church last night, you’d have known.”
“Huh?”
“New Deliverance opened their revival last night.”
Enlightenment dawned. New Deliverance is the borderline charismatic church over in Black Creek with a borderline Ayatollah for a preacher. Not my favorite place to worship by a long shot. But that’s where my brother Herman and his wife go—Nadine’s one of those strait-laced Blalocks from Black Creek—and she’s always badgering different ones of us to come fellowship with them. To keep family peace, we occasionally do.
“Andrew went and promised Nadine we’d come,” April said with a wicked grin, “and we decided it wouldn’t hurt for A.K. to sit through one of their preacher’s hellfire and brimstone sermons either.”
“Ain’t that cruel and unusual punishment?” Daddy asked me with a wink.
“And guess who was sitting in the row behind A.K. till almost ten o’clock?” asked Dwight.
“Who?”
“My mother.”
I hooted with laughter and relief.
Emily Bryant is one of my favorite people. She has bright orange hair and drives a purple TR—a real catbird. But she’s also the highly effective principal of Zachary Taylor High School, and her word carries weight.
“What about the other two boys?” I asked. “Raymond Bagwell and Charles Starling?”
“We’re looking into that,” he said repressively.
Normally I would have badgered him for more details but right now it was enough to know that A.K. wasn’t involved and that I could drive back to Dobbs with a lighter heart and, with a little luck, maybe even get to court on time.
Provided Dwight or a highway patrolman didn’t follow me, of course.
✡ ✡ ✡
Cotton Grove’s a twenty-minute drive to the west of Dobbs if you follow the posted speed limits, and with most of Colleton County’s law enforcement agencies buzzing around out there, directing traffic around the two churches, Dobbs itself was relatively calm when I got back.
There was much head shaking in the courthouse halls and everyone had a theory. One of the records clerks postulated that the fire had been set by skinheads on their way back to Fort Bragg. “You know how violent they are.”
My nominal boss, Chief District Court Judge F. Roger Longmire, was sure it would turn out to be kids high on drugs.
“No, no,” said attorney Ed Whitbread. “The first fire might have been done out of white racism, but what if these last two were copycats looking to stir up more excitement?”
“Or,” said a white bailiff, and here his voice dropped almost to a whisper, “what if they was set by somebody to make it look like things are bad here for colored folks?”
“By somebody, you mean someone from the black community?” I asked.
He shrugged and hitched up his pants. “It happens. Besides, I hear they can’t find the guy they had living over at Mount Olive to take care of the place. Maybe he really did take care of the place, you hear what I’m saying?”
We heard.
“On the other hand,” said Roger as we walked down the hall to our respective courtrooms, “we both know weirder things have happened. Did you see that sexton yesterday? Pickled worse’n Peter’s peppers. Louise Parker told me that Ligon was going to recommend that the deacons fire him. Maybe he did get mad and decide to get even.”
All I could think about was that green spray paint and the fact that the fires began well after A.K. and his cohorts were released from jail at five o’clock yesterday afternoon.
And then there was Dwight’s evasive answer to my question.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised when lunch time rolled around and a bailiff told me that Bagwell and Starling were on ice downstairs in Sheriff Bo Poole’s office while Ed Gardner was hunting up a U.S. magistrate to sign an arrest warrant. The newly enacted Anti-Church Arson Act makes burning a church a federal offense now, so ATF had jurisdiction.
“They were drunk as skunks and got themselves thrown out of a shot house at eight-thirty last night, less than three miles from Mount Olive,” the bailiff said. “And nobody saw them after that. They say they went straight to Starling’s trailer and slept it off there, but it’s down at the very end of the trailer park and our people canvassed the place. So far, none of the neighbors can put Starling’s car there before ten o’clock.”
“Same green paint they used in the Crocker family graveyard?” I asked.
“Same green, same lettering. Good thing your nephew wasn’t hanging with ’em last night.”
By the time Starling and Bagwell were actually bound over in a federal courtroom so jammed with reporters that all cameras were banished, the charges had escalated. Under the new and tougher laws, death as a result of deliberate arson was now a capital offense and they were being held in our local jailhouse without bail.