As Ed Gardner described it for me later, the investigation had started in earnest that afternoon after all the coals cooled off enough and everybody’d gathered at Mount Olive.
“It was a real team effort,” Ed said, ticking the participants off on his finger.
In addition to Ed and an ATF Special Agent In Charge who’d helicoptered over from Charlotte with the resident FBI agent, there were about twenty other ATF agents (twenty-one if you counted four-legged accelerant-sniffing Special Agent Sparky), two SBI arson investigators, a handwriting expert from the SBI who would measure and photograph the new graffiti and compare the results with the Polaroids taken at the graveyard—“He was sure wishing your brother hadn’t made those boys clean it up so fast”—a couple of detectives with arson experience from Sheriff Bo Poole’s department and a couple of members of the local volunteer fire department.
“What about Buster Cavanaugh?” I asked. “Don’t tell me our county fire marshall wasn’t there?”
“Yeah, well, we sorta forgot to call him and his nose was bad out of joint when he caught up with us.”
Patrol officers kept reporters and cameras back behind the lines, but they couldn’t do much about the two news helicopters that circled overhead all day.
“Least they didn’t fly into each other and crash down on our heads,” Ed said dryly.
They began with a physical examination of the whole exterior, paying particular attention to the graffiti, then moved over to the most damaged area of the fellowship hall, trying not to disturb any evidence that might still be there.
“Ol’ Sparky hit on accelerant right away. We took samples from the floor and wall areas. This time there was no attempt to make it look like an accident. No electrical wires in that area, no appliances with heating elements, and no fancy delay devices either. They just broke in somehow—maybe busted a window. Judging by the pour patterns, once they got inside, they started sloshing gasoline or kerosene around. Soaked the rug and the curtains and some wooden chairs that were there, then put a match to the curtains.”
With all that wood, it hadn’t taken long.
Mr. Ligon had told them of his disgruntled church mouse and how drunk he’d been the afternoon before. He was worried that if Arthur Hunt hadn’t started the fire, maybe he’d perished in it? They had probed the area around his room with no success.
“We’d about decided he’d taken off, then one of my buddies hollered from inside the church.”
Sometime in the past, well before 1900, a false floor had been installed so that the choir could sit on tiered risers behind the minister. When the wall burned, so did the chairs and the risers and the false floor.
They found Arthur Hunt where he had fallen through both floors to the dirt beneath the church.
Video cameras whirred with new energy and there was a frenzied buzz from all the electronic still cameras when the sexton’s charred body was rolled out on a draped gurney to the ambulance and sent to the Medical Examiner over in Chapel Hill.
15
He that feeds the birds
Will not starve His babes
—Hico Baptist Church
July the Fourth came three days later.
Despite the fiasco of the pig-picking Daddy had thrown for me the first time I ran for judge, he saw no reason not to do it again, and invitations had been distributed by voice or mail in early June for a Fourth of July blowout.
The problem with a party this size is that it quickly assumes a juggernaut momentum of its own and you can’t stop it on a dime.
For a dime either, as far as that goes.
Deposits had been paid on rental tents and tables, the pigs had been ordered, the cabbages and the hushpuppy mix bought, cartons of soft drinks, paper plates and plastic utensils were piled high in my new garage, along with a stack of borrowed pots for boiling corn on the cob and pails for icing down the drinks. Plastic tubs already held a half-dozen watermelons and waited for the ice water that would chill them properly. Cousins were flying in from Atlanta and Washington.
Black citizens were still roiled up and angrily denounced the climate that could produce a Bagwell and Starling. Wallace Adderly had been on every local television channel and most of the radio talk shows to voice their basic concerns as he saw them.
“Churches are our key institutions,” he said. “Not the schools, not city hall, not the playing fields and gymnasiums. When you burn a church, you do more than destroy a building. You strike at the very heart of the African-American community. Every white person in this state ought to rise up in shame for what has happened in this one small area, this despicable attempt to undermine the strength of a people who will not be denied.”
Nevertheless, with both culprits in jail, and with offers of help pouring in from all over, tensions were easing and most of the media had pulled back to New York and D.C.
I had conferred with Seth’s wife, Minnie, about whether a big political celebration would seem frivolous so soon after the burnings in which a man died. (Minnie’s my campaign adviser and can usually read the community’s pulse.)
“Life keeps moving,” she said philosophically. “Some people are always going to pick fault, but let’s quick go ahead and invite all the preachers in the community. We’ll need to cook some extra hams and shoulders and that means Seth’ll have to round up another cooker.” She was already drawing up a mental list of things to do. “We’ll ditch the beer kegs, stick to soft drinks and lemonade, and if we remember that poor man in our prayers and sing the national anthem before we eat, we should be okay.”
I gave her a hug. “Hypocrite.”
“God bless America,” she said wryly.
With the new pier such a success, my family thought it’d be more fun to have the pig-picking where people could go swimming if they wanted to. Stevie and Emma had volunteered to lifeguard and we hung old sheets across a couple of doorless rooms in my new house to act as changing rooms.
Haywood and Robert set up the cookers beneath a clump of oak trees that used to shelter holsteins from the burning sun back when this pond was newly dug, back when what’s going to be my front yard was a pasture. Two long blue-and-white-striped tents—one for serving the food and drinks, one for eating—were erected and staked down by Wednesday afternoon and folding tables were hauled in and set up underneath the tents before dusk. When I finally crawled into my old bed at the homeplace sometime after midnight on the third, everything that could be done ahead of time was done.
“You mama always liked a good party,” Daddy said happily when I kissed him good night.
As I lay there listening to the familiar creaks and groans of the old house settling down for the night, I could almost hear Mother’s light voice floating up the stairwelclass="underline" “Deborah! Where did you put those tablecloths? Kezzie? You’ll have to send one of the boys to the store for more plastic cups. And better tell him to get another carton of paper napkins while he’s there.”
And Daddy’s exasperated roar. “Just how the hell many people you expecting, Sue? You promised me it was gonna be a little get-together this time.”
“Now, Kezzie,” Mother would say, then she’d flit off to take care of another dozen details that would make the weekend run smoothly.
What Daddy could never remember was that her idea of a good party was one that started on, say, a Wednesday and didn’t end till after breakfast on Monday. Cousins and friends still miss my mother’s parties. There would be picking and singing, maybe even a little dancing, marathon card sessions, lots of food and drink, people shoehorned into every cranny of the house with babies and teenagers sleeping on pallets spread across the floor. And all that was before local friends and relatives arrived for the real party on Saturday.