“Don’t talk to me about being a good Christian.” The man held up his spatula, as if unsheathing a sword. “You’re a whore with an illegitimate child, as far as the law of this state is concerned. You ought to be ashamed of yourself and thankful you’re free of your bootlegging Negro.” He raised the spatula above his head, as though he intended to lunge and strike us with it, which was both ludicrous and terrifying at the same time. “Now get out of here.”
“Are you in the Klan?” I asked, backing up with Mama’s hand clamped down on my wrist.
“I am, indeed.” The man lifted his round chin. “A proud, card-carrying member, and I’m not ashamed to say so.”
“Was my father here the night he died?”
“You come inside my establishment one more time”—he nodded toward the window, toward the shadow of the oak tree stretched across the glass—“and I’ll show you exactly what happened to your daddy that Christmas Eve.”
My skin went cold. The shadows of the branches bobbed across the window—the ugliest sight I’d ever encountered.
“Get out!” barked his wife. “You’ve ruined our breakfast shift, you no-good black and white trash.”
Mama wrenched me away, and we stumbled out the door into the glaring light of day.
I pushed her fingers off me and staggered through the tall grasses surrounding the oak, whose weighty boughs blocked the sun and made me colder still. I braced my hands against the trunk and panted through a painful stitch in my side. Just above my eyes hovered the shapes of letters, carved in the grayish bark. I assumed they were the names of local sweethearts.
“Let’s go, Hanalee.” Mama hooked her hand around my elbow.
“Wait a minute.” I lowered my head. “Let me catch my breath.”
My vision blurred. I stared at the trunk and watched the rippling stripes in the wood sharpen into focus. A carved name caught my eye, to my right: Delia Downs.
I leaned toward the words, my eyes narrowed, for Mrs. Downs was the black war widow who had been attacked in her home in Bentley—a woman scared into moving out of the county. Someone had scratched a line across her name.
“What is this?” I asked.
“What is what?” asked Mama.
I ran my hands over the bark, and a splinter stabbed my thumb. A slew of other names emerged in the jagged pieces, seemingly rising to the surface, the same way I spotted multiple crawdads in the creek whenever I first thought there were none.
Hank Denney—scratched out.
Joseph Adder.
Benjamin Fortaine.
Greta Koning.
Clyde Koning.
Hanalee Denney.
“L-l-look.” I pounded my palm against the names. “Look what they’ve done.”
Mama rested her hands on the trunk, and her eyes widened and darted back and forth over the letters in the bark. She rubbed her right palm across my name, as though she could erase the etchings with her hand, and she breathed with a bleat of panic I’d never heard from her before—a wounded sound, a desperate sound.
“Who did this?” Her nails tore at the bark that contained the H and the a of my name. “What’s happening here?”
“It’s the Klan. They’re not just anti-Catholic, Mama. They’re threatening to hang Joe. I saw one of their pamphlets, and Laurence told me himself . . . they’ll hang him.”
“Oh, God.” Her fingernails tore at Daddy’s name, chipping away the letters—letters that someone had crossed off as though a task had been completed.
“I want to talk to Uncle Clyde,” I said.
“Uncle Clyde is not a part of them! Don’t you see his name on this tree?” She slammed her palm against the name Koning. “They want to get rid of him, too. And the deputy. Oh, God.” Her knees buckled. “What’s happened to this town?”
“Please, Mama . . .” I wrapped my arms around her waist and shouldered her weight, tasting her hair on my lips. “Let’s go talk to him in his office right now. Let’s tell him it’s all right to speak the truth. I want to know what happened to Daddy that night. I’ve got to know, or I’ll end up exactly like him.”
CHAPTER 22
O HEAVY BURDEN
HAND IN HAND, PETRIFIED OF LETTING each other go and allowing the world to topple entirely off its axis, Mama and I marched up the cement front path to the forest-green Queen Anne house that served as the home of Uncle Clyde’s medical practice, one block north of the main highway. The building had once housed the doctor, too, before his marriage to Mama brought him inside our own walls.
The front parlor sat empty, with only my stepfather’s stiff brown furniture and potted ferns greeting us. An ugly gold clock ticked away the seconds upon the mantel of the brick fireplace, next to a framed photograph of Mama.
“Clyde!” My mother slammed the front door closed behind us. “Where are you?”
“Greta?” Uncle Clyde slunk out of his office from around the corner, carrying paperwork of some sort. He looked like a tall frightened mouse, tiptoeing into view that way. I imagined a tail tucked between his legs. “What’s happened?”
“Do you have any patients in here?” asked Mama.
He straightened his posture. “No.”
My mother locked the door with a loud click.
“What happened?” My stepfather’s forehead creased.
Mama turned back toward him and covered her eyes with one hand.