But talk was all it had been. The jejune declarations of young boys trying to find their way as men. Black boys who may not have been able to truly articulate how seeing that statue every day on their way to school made them feel but knew without a shadow of a doubt what that statue meant.
As Titus turned in to Gilby’s he remembered his grandfather telling him how the Charon chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy met its untimely end. The short and sweet version was that Sarah Anne Denning, the vice president of the local chapter, distressed that her husband, Norris Denning, had been charging his picket into many of her fellow revisionists, had made a sweet potato pie for the 1935 May Day UDC picnic. She’d used all the normal ingredients. Pureed sweet potato. Milk. Nutmeg. Butter. Cinnamon. She’d also added one extra ingredient. Five heaping tablespoons of laudanum.
“My daddy told me by the time the sheriff back then found ’em they’d been dead for half the day. Laid out like rabbits after the hunt. He say you could see the buzzards circling from a mile away,” Grandpa Crown had told him and Marquis as they sat in the floor in front of his recliner. His mother had admonished his grandfather for telling her boys such a gruesome story, but she’d done so with a smile. Titus recalled there hadn’t been much sympathy in his house for dead antebellum enthusiasts.
He took his hat off as he walked into Gilby’s. The original Gilby didn’t cook anymore, but she still came to the restaurant and held court in the corner. Gillian “Gilby” Hayes was at least eighty years old, but she might be one hundred. The colloquial axiom that “Black did not crack” could have been coined in her honor. She sat at her table with a pack of Virginia Slims in one hand and a coffee cup full of whiskey in the other. Tall and lean, with a crown of snow-white hair that was layered like a dollop of whipped cream that contrasted sharply with her dark black skin. Once, while he was in New York City for a regional meeting for the Bureau, he had gone to an art museum in Brooklyn. He’d come around a corner and seen a sculpture carved from obsidian called Martinique Woman. It was like Gilby was staring at him from atop a pedestal enclosed in glass.
Gilby’s served down-home, unadulterated, nutritionally dubious Southern cuisine. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, hominy grits, black-eyed peas, turnip greens, buttermilk biscuits the size of your hand, baked and boiled ham, fried fish of every ichthyological designation, shoofly, pecan, chess, and chocolate pie, and iced tea so sweet it made your A1C rise two points just by looking at it.
Titus loved it.
He wasn’t alone in his infatuation. Gilby’s was one of the few places in Charon where everyone seemed to feel at home. A lot of that had to do with Gilby herself. She was your big mama and your auntie. Your nana and your grammy, and in later years she’d become something of an abuela for the migrant workers who found their way into town during the summer to help supplant the thinning ranks at the fish house. Her smile was a welcome invitation to anyone who came through the door to sit a spell and get yourself a good plate. As long as you treated her with respect you got respect in return.
And if you didn’t, Titus knew there was a .44-caliber hand cannon under the counter ready to teach you your manners.
“Hey, now, Titus, you not gonna come over and speak to me?” Gilby asked.
Titus smiled. The sensation felt alien after all that had happened today. Then Gilby flashed one at him in return and for a moment he felt the weight on his shoulders and the shade hovering over his heart dissipate a bit.
Gilby took Titus’s hand when he reached the table that was also her de facto throne. Her grip was stronger than he had anticipated. Years of chopping vegetables, rolling dough, and rendering chickens had given her hands deep strength, the kind that didn’t wither with age. He wondered why her hands had retained their power and his father’s had become distorted. They both had worked with their hands. But only Gilby owned her time. She could rest whenever she wanted. Albert’s hands had been tethered to another man’s whims.
“I heard about Calvin’s boy. You know, Latrell won’t never right. Then he got on that stuff and that didn’t help,” Gilby said in a low, hushed tone. Titus moved his head up and down in a quick motion of assent as he strained to hear her whispery voice. He couldn’t comment on Latrell or the shooting even if he agreed with Gilby’s assessment. Titus didn’t have to survey the dining room to see that he was being simultaneously observed and ignored. Scott had only been half right. People were watching him, but they also liked to pretend he wasn’t there. No one liked cops interrupting their dinner except the folks who liked cops too much.
“It’s a rough situation for sure,” Titus said.
“I know you hurting. You and Cal was like brothers. Bobby too,” Gilby said. She let go of his hand and lit up a thin cigarette, completely ignoring the commonwealth’s health guidelines. She exhaled slowly. Twin tendrils of white smoke streamed from her nostrils like plumes of steam from a train engine.
“Yes, ma’am, we were,” Titus said.
“That Bobby Packer had the right name. He’d come in here with his people, and Lord if he wouldn’t eat a whole goddamn chicken by himself.”
“Bobby sure could eat. Speaking of eating, I better go and order my food,” Titus said.
“You look like your daddy, but you talk like your mama. Helen was as sharp as a tack. She knew how to get away from an aggravating old woman too,” Gilby said. She plopped her cigarette in the corner of her mouth and smirked.
“You ain’t aggravating me, Miss Gilby. I’m just hungry.”
“You tell Patrice I said don’t charge you for nothing. You get the special platter.”
“You ain’t gotta do that, Miss Gilby,” Titus said.
“I know. I ain’t gotta do nothing but stay Black and die, but I want you to have a good meal. Darlene’s a good woman, but she could burn water,” Gilby said.
Titus hoped he lived long enough to say whatever was the first thing that came to his mind without fear of reproach.
“Well, uh, thank you. I appreciate it,” Titus said.
“Don’t you never no mind about it. Tell your Daddy and them I said hey,” Gilby said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Titus said. He threaded his way back through the crowd on his way to the counter. Few folks acknowledged him. A couple of white teenage girls sitting by the ancient jukebox that still had CDs glanced at him over the top of their phones and snickered. He recognized them from the scene at the high school this morning. A few hours ago they had been running for their lives, and now they were hiding their faces behind their phones and giggling. He wondered if this was how they were processing their ordeal. If the impermanent nature of social media was a refuge from the finality of death.
Or was he overthinking things again?
“Sheriff, I … I just wanted to say thank you. Y’all saved some lives today. Jesus Christ in a juniper tree, that boy was crazy as hell,” a voice said.
Titus stopped and saw it was Cole Marshall. Cole drove a delivery truck for Cunningham Seafood and ran his own land-clearing and bush-hogging business on the side. Like a lot of people in Charon, he needed multiple revenue streams. He was sitting with a young woman Titus thought had to be his girlfriend. She was sitting on the same side of the booth as him. Her hands were resting on his forearm. She was idly playing with the fine blond hair that lay there. Their body language whispered of new intimacy. On the other side of the booth were Dallas and Megan Processer. Their married mannerisms moved in long-practiced concentric paths.
“No need to thank me,” Titus said.
“Glad you had the nerve to put that boy down. Mr. Spearman was a good fella, he didn’t deserve that,” a man at the table opposite Cole and his group said. Titus narrowed his eyes behind his shades. The man’s name danced on the edge of his memory. It came to him after a second. Royce Lazare. He was wearing an old-school TEXACO trucker cap over a thick head of brown hair.
“He wasn’t a dog. We didn’t put him down,” Titus said. He removed his glasses and stared at Royce.
Royce frowned, readjusting his TEXACO hat. “I was just saying…” He let the end of the sentence die on his lips.
“We didn’t mean…” Cole stammered.
Titus bore down on them, letting his eyes say the things a Black sheriff couldn’t, until the awkwardness made each man drop his eyes and their dates turn their heads.
Titus put his sunglasses back on.
He recognized the rancorous taste filling his mouth. It was abasement, pure and uncut and as bitter as vinegar. What Latrell had done was horrendous. Not what he had done to Spearman, but what he had done with Spearman and the Last Wolf. The images of their inhuman actions would live unbidden and unbound in Titus’s mind until the last day of his life.
That didn’t mean he had to stand there like an extra in Gone with the Wind and take it while this jackass in the faux-retro hipster hat got his rocks off talking to one Black man about another Black man being killed. He could despise Latrell’s actions without reveling in his death.