He opened his eyes, asking for Billy, and I had to kneel down and tell him that he was on his way. And Reuben nodded and closed his eyes and jerked a bit like you do nodding off while trying to stay awake. The nurse pushed me out of the room and wheeled him fast around the corner.
I followed, a door with a circular window slamming in my face.
Not five minutes later, the door swung back open, and a doctor gripped my upper arm, a man I knew from church, and he told me he wanted me in surgery.
“I’m fine right here.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I know who this man is and what he did today. If something happens, I want you to watch as a witness.”
I was hustled into a bleached smock and told to stand back from the operating table, up on a wooden apple crate. I watched them fill Reuben’s pale chest and throat with tubes, opening up the gash below his chin, more fresh blood being pumped into his body.
He lay there, out cold, with his slicked hair and closed, droopy eyes and what looked like a smile. An honest-to-God smile. I watched his face, trying to figure out the smile, the last joke on all of this, just as the sound of cracking startled me, the doctor sawing into Reuben’s chest. My head jerked back, as if hearing the report of a rifle, and I watched as the doctor held Reuben’s heart in his simple human hands and tried to massage him back to life, only to give up minutes later and check the watch on his wrist.
“HOW MANY MORE OF US HAVE TO GET KILLED BEFORE someone will make a damn decision?”
John Patterson was outside by the hospital fountain, yelling at Bernard Sykes, who just stood there taking it but shaking his head in disagreement. I joined them, listening, John telling Sykes to present the grand jury with everything, don’t hold a piece back on Fuller or Ferrell or they’d never indict. But Sykes shook his head, saying they’d have to wait for the grand jury.
“It’s a slow process,” Sykes said. “We have to build the case.”
“This case is going to be taken away from you. Don’t you know that?”
“They’re going to indict.”
“Not a word of his testimony can be used in court,” Patterson said. “The defense can’t cross-examine a dead man.”
Patterson rubbed his neck, exhausted, and looked at Sykes and then back at me. He shook his head in defeat, before walking back out into the shadows.
IT WAS TWO A.M. WHEN BILLY ARRIVED AT THE HOSPITAL, walked in by Jack Black and Quinnie. He moved slow through the lobby, the older people there watching him, seeing if he knew, how he would react, would he fall or keep upright.
I put my arm around him, not saying a word.
He’d been told.
In a back hospital room, Reuben lay on the gurney, covered up to the chin by a white sheet, the stripper sitting near him, as if guarding his body. In a chair, she shined his boots with a cloth and mug of soapy water.
“Who are you?” Billy asked.
“Just a friend,” she said.
She stopped while wiping down the cactus on the shaft, smoothing her black hair over the soft leather and crying, and watched as Billy moved to the body, standing there and looking down at his father.
“This is yours,” the woman said, handing the boy an envelope with his name scrawled on it in Reuben’s hand.
He just wavered there for a few moments, and, without a word, turned and ran out the door, leaving the room and leaving the hospital.
BILLY WOULD HIT THE ALABAMA-MISSISSIPPI LINE EARLY the next morning at seventy miles per hour, feeling the air rush from his lungs as he left the state. He felt for the first time that he could catch his breath, even though he couldn’t tell a damn bit of difference from one state to another. The moon shone on the same clapboard houses, the same tired laundry lines with flags of dresses and overalls blowing in the cold wind, and the same winding, muddy roads leading off that main highway for hardscrabble folks to follow. He lit a cigarette early that morning and turned the dial on that old blue Buick’s radio, searching for a station in range. He’d gotten only a few miles into Mississippi when he got a solid signal out of Memphis and leaned back into his seat, cracked the window, and felt the cool air slice across his face.
He could breathe better, without a doubt.
And, in the rearview mirror, he peered at the two faces, the tired boy and the girl who slept on his shoulder. Her face still scarred, nose broken, but no less beautiful to him. He could feel a warmth spread in his chest as she shifted herself toward him, making him feel that solid, firm weight anchoring them together.
The envelope lay unopened on the dash, fluttering in the wind.
A WEEK LATER, WORD SPREAD THAT THE GRAND JURY HAD made a decision. Outside the courtroom doors, the Russell County Courthouse became choked with reporters and attorneys and normal folks off the street who waited to hear the news. I saw Arch Ferrell in the middle of it all, dressed in a gray suit and shaking hands, smiling, knowing he was going to beat it all. He stayed for a while, but by three p.m. he drove off in his Pontiac. Not two minutes later, the courthouse doors opened, newspapermen running out to their typewriters and telephones, saying Ferrell and Fuller had been indicted for the murder of Albert L. Patterson.
There were gasps and yells. A few people clapped.
John was there, and we shook hands and hugged. Soon, Sykes moved out of the courtroom, trailed by dozens of newspapermen, and he led them all out to the courthouse steps where he confidently answered their questions. Afterward, he followed me back to my office, reached into his briefcase, and handed me three neatly typed and folded arrest warrants.
Si Garrett had been indicted as an accessory, and, under Alabama law, Sykes explained to me, that was the same as pulling the trigger.
We wasted no time. Jack Black drove, I sat in the passenger’s seat, and Quinnie in the rear, as we made our way to Bert Fuller’s garage apartment. His lawyer had finally finagled him a house arrest for the vote fraud because of an injured back from a “fall from a horse.” And he’d been there for weeks, with boys from the Guard taking turns watching him lie in bed in his pajamas, reading the Bible and watching television, only leaving the bed to relieve himself.
A shapely blonde met us at the door, chewing gum, hands on hips. And I reached into my pocket for the warrant, but she just let the door swing open and waved us in with the flat of her hand, saying, “We’ve been expecting you.”
Bert Fuller woke, as if being gently woken from a dream. He smiled up at me and Jack Black and said, “Blessings.”
“Get your fat ass up, Fuller,” Black said. “You’re hereby under arrest for the murder of Albert Patterson.”
He tilted his head, still not moving it from a pillow. “Boys, I am not fit to move from this bed. I’m under bed-rest orders from an Atlanta physician, and any move from my bed could paralyze me.”
Black nodded and looked to me.
“Quite a place you got here,” Black said. “I like those lassos and hats on the wall. Just how many pairs of boots do you have?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Black said. “You ready?”
“I said I can’t move.”
“Sure thing, hoss.”
Black called in four negro trusties from the jail who’d been brought over with the Guard. They took their posts on each corner of Fuller’s bed and, with the word from Black, lifted him up like a fat sultan and whisked him out the door.
“Load him in the truck,” Black said, following.
THE PARADE OF CARS CONTINUED OUT OF PHENIX CITY AND down along the curving country road to Seale and Arch Ferrell’s big ranch house. His wife, Madeline, met us in the front drive, holding her newborn daughter, and she shielded her eyes in the bright sunshine, looking out at the hordes crawling out of their automobiles. I asked her to please get Arch.