OUR NERVES FELT RAW AND SEARED.
We rode back home in Uncle Clyde’s car, for he insisted upon driving us. The anonymity of the Klan’s hooded guises obliterated my trust of everyone in Elston. When the postman waved at Uncle Clyde in front of the central mailbox, I couldn’t help but think the man’s smile seemed forced and his eyes lacked warmth. Twelve-year-old boys with bicycles gawked at the glass display windows of the candy store, and the sight of their caps and short pants caused me to shrink back against my seat. They reminded me that the KKK recruited the young, to sink the organization’s influence deep into the soil of our community. Poisonous rivulets of hate and fear spread beneath the town’s sidewalks and buildings and strangled the beauty that had once bloomed throughout Elston.
Or . . . maybe I had always been fooled into believing the town possessed beauty.
Uncle Clyde’s Buick tore through the sunlit countryside. I stared out my backseat window at the blur of hayfields and woods, and I thought once again of the golden-haired boy who used to run ahead of his sister and me as we hurried into the forest after chores. I could still hear Laurence’s childhood laughter, the low, mischievous chuckles, the teasing cry of “I bet you can’t keep up with me, Hanalee.”
I blinked into the breeze and called to Mama in the front seat, “Do you remember Laurence being in church on Christmas Eve when Daddy died?”
She tamed down strands of her hair flying about in the wind, and with a heavy sigh, she said over her shoulder to me, “I can’t remember a detail like that, Hanalee. That whole night turned into a fog, and it’s feeling even more distorted and upsetting now.”
“I think I remember Fleur telling me he was sick that night.” I leaned my elbow against the side of the car, on the curved ridge below the window. “Yes . . .” I nodded toward the train tracks we passed, as if the church sat beside them, opened and arranged just as it had looked in December 1921. “I’m positive he wasn’t there. I remember Fleur and me discussing how empty the church seemed without both her brother and my father there at the service that night.” I pulled on the back of the front seat, hard enough to make Uncle Clyde’s shoulders move. “Did Daddy say he heard Laurence’s voice at the Dry Dock?”
“No,” said Uncle Clyde, “he didn’t mention specific names.”
“Laurence wouldn’t hurt your father.” Mama twisted toward me. “You two grew up together. His mother and I grew up together.”
“I’m certain Laurence is in the Klan, Mama.”
She frowned. “How do you know that?”
“He’s friends with those Wittens, and the Wittens are in the Klan. Joe and I stumbled upon their family’s shed the other night, and that’s where I found the pamphlet with notes about an initiation involving a necktie party.” I sank down in the car seat and chewed the nail of my right pinkie.
Mama put her hand on Uncle Clyde’s forearm. “Will you drive us to the Paulissens’ house?”
His face whipped toward hers. “Why?”
“I don’t want anything dividing our families, especially not the Ku Klux Klan. Polly and I have always been too close of friends for anything to come between us.” Mama crossed her arms and shifted in the seat.
Just up ahead, the dirt driveway leading to our own house came into view, beyond the trees with wine-colored leaves. Uncle Clyde slowed his speed and positioned the gears and his foot in such a way that the Buick chugged and jerked like a horse about to buck us into the street.
“Please, Clyde.” Mama sat up straight and built up her voice into a brick wall. “Take us to the Paulissens.”
Uncle Clyde stiffened his back and shifted the clutch and the throttle until the car rumbled down the road, toward Fleur’s house at a steady pace. I watched the trees alongside the road bend and rustle from the wind, and I thought their trunks looked darker and thicker than I remembered, their leaves less plentiful, more ragged. Everything suddenly appeared different. Unfamiliar. Inhospitable.
My stepfather steered the sedan around the bend, through the thicket of elms that led up to the front of the Paulissens’ property. I saw the Ford truck, parked in front of the white house with all its blooming flower boxes, and my stomach churned at the sight of what surrounded the vehicle: local boys, a whole pack of them, gathered about like feral dogs. Laurence. Robbie and Gil. Other fellows from our school—Harry Cornelius, Al Voltman, Oscar and Chester Klein. They wore their caps pulled down over their eyebrows and were dressed in either overalls or shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Half of them smoked cigarettes. Robbie drank openly from a bottle of booze. Laurence clutched one of his father’s Colt pistols in his right hand.