My knees weren’t any too steady after I escaped the cigar shop. Not that it surprised me to see Vernon with a gun, mind you. I had one, and so did plenty of other folks. A shotgun, at least. Or a rifle. But Vernon had aimed that Colt M1911 dead at my heart and held it there, telling me what a fool the soldier he’d gotten it from had been for not marking his kills on the gun’s side.
He’d set it down on the counter after a while but talked on and on, boasting how her name was Maybelle, and how he’d carved the first of her three notches the day after he got her. “I went to visit a friend at his farm,” he’d said. “Caught this old nigger skulking around their pasture fence, swore he was only passing by on his way home from building pews at church. But I knew from his eyes that he was out to thieve. Weren’t no eyes left in his head once Maybelle finished with him.”
Which scared me good, since the weird shine in Vernon’s own eyes left no doubt as to the veracity of his claim. And then he said how the second notch came after he and his Klan pals tracked down a Negro boy accused of stealing chickens from a farmer way up in Vinita, and the third after an uppity youth on the north side of town sassed him. “That boy I shot as a mercy,” Vernon added with a wink. “Seeing’s how mightily the poor lad was suffering after we dragged him most of a mile behind Elmer Daughtry’s Tin Lizzie.”
I wanted to write Vernon’s claims off as him being a braggart and a liar. Wanted him to stop talking and let me leave. But I couldn’t and he didn’t. So I tried my best to look impressed instead of sick at my stomach, and when the chance finally came for me to excuse myself, I made such a hash of it that Vernon thought I was asking to use his john. Which worked in my favor, for, as he put it, no mongrel was going to take a piss in his establishment.
That was the point at which I stumbled out onto the street, grateful for the distracting smell of coal smoke from the brickyard ovens, and so hell-bent on getting to work that I nearly missed the person I’d played hooky to speak with in the first place.
Joseph was a little ways past the shop, arranging parcels in his bicycle basket for delivery.
“Wait!” I ran up to him, holding my homemade receipt. Joseph’s forehead wrinkled, which I’d begun to suspect was the only display of emotion he allowed himself in front of people. Ones like me, at least.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A balance sheet,” I said. “To keep track of your payments.”
He asked whether Pop had written it or me. When I answered truthfully, he handed the paper back like the useless thing it was. “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t be needing this.”
Which took me by surprise and set me to stammering how it was proof he was making his payments, and how he should take it because that was the right and proper way to do business.
“The rules aren’t the same for me as they are for you,” Joseph replied, shaking his head. “Don’t you know that, Will?” Which put my nose out of joint so bad that I told him he was being rude, and that I was only trying to do him a favor at no small risk to myself.
Joseph’s face went blank as the cloudless sky overhead. He eyed the receipt. Said, “Thank you, Mr. William. But I can’t accept.” And got back on his bicycle.
“That all you got to say?” I near shouted, frustrated at how easily he’d turned my good intentions into a fool’s errand. And the quickest flash of hate you ever did see danced across the dark of his eyes.
I stood there, feeling awkward and a fool. Joseph put one foot on a pedal and said, real quiet, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve a funeral to attend.”
Only then did I notice the band of mourning black around his upper arm.
“Who died?” I asked stupidly.
Joseph’s eyes were flat. “Nobody important, Mr. William. Only a Negro boy like me.”
The Dobbs family had been rich once. Oil rich. It was a common enough thing, men born in one-room shacks coming west to dig fortunes up from underneath the hard-packed Oklahoma dirt. But just as fast as the money came in, it could all disappear in the same kind of risky business venture that earned it in the first place.
Back when things were flush, Addie’s father, Richard, built a great mansion with a ballroom on the third floor where Addie and her friends would roller-skate. After he went bust, he sold the house to a banker with no children to speak of, and the Dobbs family moved into a modest bungalow a few blocks west.
That’s where I found myself on Sunday afternoon, two days after my encounter with Joseph. I hadn’t stopped wondering who his mourning band was for, or worrying that it might have been the boy Vernon and his pals had beat down—the same boy I knew in my heart to be Clarence Banks.
So there I stood on the Dobbses’ front porch, hat in hand, knot in my throat, grateful Mama had loosed my reins for the afternoon. A black woman answered the door. She was hollow-eyed and ashen, and her black dress hung from her gaunt frame like funeral bunting.
“Yes, sir?” she said. “Can I help you?”
I told her my name was William, and that I was there to see Addie. She nodded and led me to the parlor, said I should have a seat, and asked would I like some iced tea while I waited. My throat was raw as fresh-hewn wood, but I perched on a settee and said no thank you, that I just needed to see Addie for a moment and didn’t mean to be a bother. And she dropped her head and shuffled out silently.
Now, even though it was only a ten-minute walk from my house and less than five from the new place Mama and Pop were in the midst of building, I’d never been inside Addie’s home. Never been alone in a room with her anywhere, in fact, which had my nerves ajangle and my temples beaded with sweat. There was plenty to look at, though, which was a distraction of the good sort.
Mansion-sized furniture filled the room to the gills. A fine rug from someplace far away covered the wood floor wall to wall. The vases on the mantel were so wide they barely fit. And instead of the tatted half-curtains that hung in the windows of most houses its size, long velvet drapes blocked out the day’s heat at the Dobbses’. It was as if all those fine furnishings didn’t know how out of place they were in such a modest room, or as if they didn’t plan on staying for long.
The ceiling creaked overhead. Water gurgled through pipes in the wall. Then soft footsteps came down the stairs behind me, and Addie walked in wearing a yellow frock that would have shamed the sun.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
She’d painted bright circles of rouge on her cheeks; an attempt, I supposed, at hiding the pallor of her skin. But it only accented the dark crescents under her eyes and did nothing to mask the exhaustion in her voice.
“Is Clarence dead?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
The mantel clock measured out seconds after that, each tick louder and more awful than the one before. Birds sang outside. The smell of roasting Sunday chicken mingled with perfume from the lilac blooms in a vase on the coffee table. They were normal things, all of them, and awful for it.
“I’m sorry,” I said, full expecting Addie to slap me like she’d done in the cafeteria. Or worse, to leave. Instead, she lowered herself onto the edge of a chair and said, “Good.”
The clock ticked on. Addie crossed her ankles. There was a calmness to her, a tired acceptance, that I wasn’t sure how to take. It might have been easier if she were angry. Easier to deal with, easier on my ragged conscience. But she just sat, watching bird shadows flit across the narrow sliver of window between the drapes. Then she did something that made no sense at all: she smiled.
“Clarence loved the color yellow,” she said quietly. “Marie told me she’d wear her yellow dress if only she could bear the lightness of it. So I’m wearing mine for her.”
Nervous as I was about upsetting Addie, I didn’t ask who Marie was. And her eyes never left the bird shadows, not even when she spoke again, saying, “Are you glad he’s dead, William?”
Which touched something curdled and tender inside me. Something I’d never known to be ashamed of before.
“No,” I said, surprised at the truth of it.
Her eyes focused hard on mine. “Then you should ask for forgiveness,” she said.
At that, my heart near broke along with my voice as I began pleading, “Can you ever forgive me, Addie? Please? Please, can you?” And her face pinched in frustration as she shook her head, saying, “Not from me, William. From God.”
Which wounded me deeper than any slap ever could, for it hadn’t occurred to me that I needed absolution from anyone other than Addie. She saw it, though. Saw the ugliness inside me, saw how small and stupid I was. And it shamed me to the bone.
But, kind soul that she was, Addie didn’t leave me to squirm.
“He’d come down from the 101 Ranch to tell Marie good-bye before the spring cattle drive,” she said. “Even though he was only a cook, he was so happy they’d decided to let him go down to Texas with them this year. He was hoping they might teach him to cowboy…”
Her voice trailed off as the maid came in and set a tray with two glasses of iced tea in front of us. There were lace cookies, too, and a silver sugar bowl and slices of lemon.
“Thank you, Marie,” Addie said gently. The maid dipped her chin and left without a word.
“He was her son,” I said.
Addie nodded, picked up a glass, and stirred the ice chips round and round with a long-handled spoon.
“Marie’s been our maid since before I was born. She used to live with her husband, but after he died in a mining accident, she sold their house and moved into the quarters on our property. I was two then. Clarence was four. We grew up together, playing in the yard, stealing oranges from the kitchen. Mother never seemed to mind.”
Addie lifted the glass halfway to her lips, stopped, and lowered it again. Silence sucked all the oxygen out of the air between us, until it finally got so bad that I blurted out, “I never meant for him to die.”
“But you never meant for him not to,” Addie replied.
The gentleness in her voice was gone, and I folded in around my own shame like an accordion. She stirred her tea some more and said, “I’m sorry, William. I didn’t mean to sound curt.” I responded that she had every right to sound however she pleased. But she shook her head and her shoulders fell even lower.
“No, I haven’t,” she said.
And there was so much pain in her voice, so much sorrow, that I took her hand and squeezed it. The gesture was heartfelt, and meant to be a comfort. Addie must have sensed that, for instead of pulling away, she only sat there, chest rising and falling underneath the bodice of her dress as the clock ticked on.
An automobile puttered by outside. Addie tensed. I pulled my hand away. She looked at me, dry-eyed, and sighed and set her glass down. “I was wrong, William,” she said. “Wrong to blame you, wrong to strike you in the cafeteria, and wrong not to apologize sooner.”
Which left me more confused than relieved.
“The truth is, what happened was more my fault than yours,” Addie went on. “I asked Clarence to take me to that awful speakeasy. He said I’d no business being there, that it wouldn’t do for me to be seen with him in public. I was petulant, though, and insisted the two of us spend one last evening together before he left. My father doesn’t approve of Clarence and me spending time alone, you see. And it wasn’t as if we could meet somewhere private. Even I knew that if anyone were to spy us picnicking by the river or taking a stroll, it could very well mean a death sentence for him. But I wheedled and teased, pleading for him to take me somewhere wild, until he finally gave in.”
She paused, as if she knew she should cry but had no tears left.
“That may be,” I said. “But I’m the one who stirred up trouble in the first place. If it weren’t for me, you and Clarence could have passed the evening together and said your good-byes in peace without anyone bothering you. I was jealous and petty. I started everything. Clarence only protected himself. It was my fault.”
Addie’s face darkened and her hands bunched the fabric of her skirt up tight. “Perhaps,” she replied. “But you know as well as I do that if you hadn’t raised a ruckus someone else would have. There was no way the other white men in that place would have tolerated a girl like me spending an evening alone with Clarence. Why, just this Friday, I heard that pinch-faced friend of yours asking boys at school to join him in a letter-writing campaign. He wants the Ku Klux Klan to start a junior branch here in Tulsa. Did you know that?”
I told her no, but that it didn’t surprise me overmuch. For though Clete had a weakness for pretty girls no matter what their complexion, he harbored no love for Negro men, and had a tendency to think the world owed him more than it was willing to give.
“Well, he does,” Addie said. “That’s the way things are in this town, and I know it. Only I was selfish and spoiled and made Clarence give in to my whims one last time. I’ve always gotten exactly what I want. Even petty, silly things with prices far too dear.”
She let go of her skirt and smoothed the fabric with her palms. I picked up my glass and drank deep. Not because my stomach wanted tea, but because my mouth had gone so dry I was afraid I couldn’t speak otherwise.
The floor creaked behind us.
“Will your guest be staying for supper, Miss Addie?” Marie asked. Addie didn’t look up, only murmured quietly that I wouldn’t. Marie pressed her lips together and nodded and left the room in a rustle of black fabric.
“I should be going,” I said.
“Yes,” Addie replied. She rose from the chair and led me to the front door, opening it without a word. And just as silently, I walked out, knowing there would never be such a thing as a good good-bye for Addie and me. Not then. Not ever.