folks kept quiet, as most of the others did; this was a war of the loudmouths.
Suddenly a quiet began to spread. It began from the back of the chamber,
where people were clustered around the doorway. Somebody laughed, but the
laugh was choked off almost at once. A few people mumbled and muttered. And
then a man made his way into the chamber and you’d have thought the Red Sea
was parting as folks shrank back to give him room.
The man was smiling. He had a boyish face and light brown hair cresting a
high forehead.
“What’s all this yelling about?” he asked. He had a Southern accent, but
you could tell he was an educated man. “Any problem here, Mayor Swope?”
“Uh… no, Vernon. No problem. Is there, Dick?”
Mr. Moultry looked like he was about to spit and scowl. His wife’s face
was red as a Christmas beet under her platinum locks. I heard the Branlins
giggle, but somebody hushed them up.
“I hope there’s no problem,” Vernon said, still smiling. “You know how
Daddy hates problems.”
“Sit down,” Mayor Swope told the Moultrys, and they did. Their asses
almost busted the bleacher.
“I sense some… disunity here,” Vernon said. I felt a giggle about to
break from my throat, but my father grasped my wrist and squeezed so hard it
went away. Other people shifted uneasily in their seats, especially some of
the older widow women. “Mayor Swope, can I come up to the podium?”
“God save us,” my father whispered, and Mom shivered with a silent laugh
beating at her ribs.
“Uh… I… suppose so, Vernon. Sure. Come on up.” Mayor Swope stepped back,
pipe smoke swirling around his head.
Vernon Thaxter stepped up to the podium and faced the assembly. He was
very pale under the lights. All of him was pale.
He was stark naked. Not a stitch on him.
His doodad and balls hung out in full view. He was a skinny thing,
probably because he walked so much. The soles of his feet must’ve been as hard
as dried leather. Rain glistened on his white flesh and his hair was slick
with it. He looked like a picture of a dark Hindu mystic I’d seen in one of my
National Geographics, though, of course, he was neither dark nor Hindu. I’d
have to say he was no mystic, either. Vernon Thaxter was downright,
around-the-bend-and-through-the-woods crazy.
Of course, walking around town in his birthday suit was nothing new for
Vernon Thaxter. He did it all the time, once the weather started warming up.
You didn’t see him very much in late autumn or winter, though. When he first
appeared in spring, it was always a start; by July nobody gave him a second
glance; by October the falling leaves were more interesting. Then it came
spring again, and there was Vernon Thaxter with his private parts on public
display.
You might wonder why Sheriff Amory didn’t stand up right then and there
and haul Vernon off to jail for indecent exposure. The reason he did not was
because of Moorwood Thaxter, Vernon’s father. Moorwood Thaxter owned the bank.
He also owned Green Meadows Dairy and the Zephyr Real Estate Company. Just
about every house in Zephyr was mortgaged through Moorwood Thaxter’s bank. He
owned the land the Lyric theater stood on, and the land where this courthouse
had been built. He owned every crack in Merchants Street. He owned the shotgun
shacks of Bruton, and his own twenty-eight-room mansion at the height of
Temple Street. The fear of Moorwood Thaxter, who was in his seventies and
rarely seen, was what kept Sheriff Amory in his seat and had kept
forty-year-old Vernon naked on the streets of my hometown. It had been this
way as long as I remembered.
Mom told me that Vernon used to be all right, but he’d written a book and
gone to New York with it and a year later he was back home wandering around
nude and nutty.
“Gentlemen and ladies,” Vernon began. “And children, too, of course.” He
reached out his frail arms and grasped the podium’s edges. “We have here a
very serious situation.”
“Momma!” the Demon suddenly squalled. “I can see that feller’s dingdo—”
A hand with hairy knuckles clamped over her mouth. I guess the elder
Thaxter owned their house, too.
“A very serious situation,” Vernon repeated, oblivious to everything but
his own voice. “Daddy sent me here with a message. He says he expects the
people of this town to show true brotherhood and Christian values in this time
of trouble. Mr. Vandercamp Senior, sir?”
“Yes, Vernon?” the old man answered.
“Will you kindly keep a record of the names of those able-bodied and
good-thinking men who borrow digging utensils from you for the purpose of
helping the residents of Bruton? My daddy would appreciate it.”
“Be glad to,” Mr. Vandercamp Senior said; he was rich, but not rich
enough to say no to Moorwood Thaxter.
“Thank you. That way my daddy can have a list at hand when interest rates
go up, as they are bound to do in this unsettled age. My daddy has always felt
that those men—and women—who aren’t loath to work for their neighbors are
deserving of extra considerations.” He smiled, gazing out at his audience.
“Anyone else have anything to say?”
No one did. It’s kind of difficult to talk to a naked man about anything
but why he won’t wear clothes, and nobody would dare bring up such a sensitive
subject.
“I think our mission is clear, then,” Vernon said. “Good luck to all.” He
thanked Mayor Swope for letting him speak, and then he stepped down from the
podium and walked out of the chamber the way he’d come. The Red Sea parted for
him again, and closed at his back.
For a minute or so everybody sat in silence; maybe we were waiting to
make sure Vernon Thaxter was out of earshot. Then somebody started laughing
and somebody else picked it up, and the Demon started screaming with laughter
and jumping up and down, but other people were hollering for the laughers to
shut up and the whole place was like a merry glimpse of hell. “Settle down!
Settle down, everybody!” Mayor Swope was yelling, and Chief Marchette stood up
and bellowed like a foghorn for quiet.
“It’s damn blackmail!” Mr. Moultry was on his feet again. “Nothin’ but
damn blackmail!” A few others agreed with him, but Dad was one of the men who
stood up and told Mr. Moultry to shut his mouth and pay attention to the fire
chief.
This is how it got sorted out: Chief Marchette said that everybody who
wanted to work should get on over to Bruton, where the river flowed against
the edge of town on its way to the gargoyle bridge, and he’d have some
volunteers load the shovels, pickaxes, and other stuff into a truck at Mr.
Vandercamp’s hardware store. The power of Moorwood Thaxter was never more
evident when Chief Marchette finished his instructions: everybody went to
Bruton, even Mr. Moultry.
Bruton’s narrow streets were already awash. Chickens flapped in the
water, and dogs were swimming. The rain had started falling hard again,
slamming on the tin roofs like rough music. Dark people were pulling their
belongings out of the wood-frame houses and trying to get to higher ground.
The cars and trucks coming over from Zephyr made waves that rolled across
submerged yards to crash foam against the foundations. “This,” Dad said, “is
gonna be a bad one.”
On the wooded riverbank, most of the residents of Bruton were already
laboring in knee-deep water. A wall of mud was going up, but the river was
hungry. We left the pickup near a public basketball court at the Bruton
Recreation Center, where a lot of other vehicles were parked, then we slogged
toward the river. Fog swirled over the rising water, and flashlight beams
crisscrossed in the night. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed. I heard the
urgent cries of people to work faster and harder. My mother’s hand gripped
mine, and held on tightly while Dad went on ahead to join a group of Bruton
men. Someone had backed a dump truck full of sand to the riverbank, and a
Bruton man pulled Dad up into it and they started filling little burlap bags
and tossing them down to other rain-soaked men. “Over here! Over here!”
somebody yelled. “It ain’t gonna hold!” someone else shouted. Voices
crisscrossed and merged like the flashlight beams. They were scared voices. I
was scared, too.
There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal
terror. We are used to believing that we’re the masters of our domain, and
that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a
good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees
in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We
plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and
prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not
permanent; the earth itself is a passing train. When you stand in muddy water
that is rising toward your waist and you hear people shouting against the
darkness and see their figures struggling to hold back the currents that will
not be denied, you realize the truth of it: we will not win, but we cannot
give up. No one on that disappearing riverbank, there in the pouring rain,
thought the Tecumseh was going to be turned aside. It had never been so.
Still, the work went on. The truck full of tools came from the hardware store,
and Mr. Vandercamp Junior had a clipboard where people signed their names as
they accepted a shovel. Walls of mud and sandbags were built up, and the river
surged through the barricade like brown soup through a mouthful of weak teeth.
The water rose. My belt buckle submerged.
Lightning zigzagged down from the heavens, followed by a crash of thunder
so loud you couldn’t hear the women scream. “That hit somethin’ close!” said
Reverend Lovoy, who held a shovel and resembled a mud man. “Lights are goin’
out!” a black woman shouted a few seconds later, and indeed the power was
failing all over Bruton and Zephyr. I watched the lights flicker and disappear
from the windows. Then my hometown lay in darkness, and you couldn’t tell sky
from water. In the distance I saw what looked like a candle glowing in the
window of a house about as far from Bruton as you could get and still be
within Zephyr’s boundaries. As I watched, the light moved from window to
window. I realized I was looking at Mr. Moorwood Thaxter’s mansion up at the
high point of Temple Street.
I sensed it before I saw it.
A figure stood to my left, watching me. Whoever it was wore a long
raincoat, his hands in his pockets. The wind shrilled in off the thunderstorm
and moved the wet folds of the coat, and I almost choked on my heart because I
remembered the figure in the woods opposite Saxon’s Lake.
Then whoever it was started wading past my mother and me toward the
laborers. It was a tall figure—a man, I presumed—and he moved with purposeful
strength. Two flashlight beams seemed to fence in the air for a few seconds,
and the man in the raincoat walked into their conflict. The battling lights
did not reveal the man’s face, but did reveal something else.
The man wore a drenched and dripping fedora. The band of that hat was
secured by a silver disc the size of a half-dollar, and a small decorative
feather stuck up from it.
A feather, dark with wet, but a feather with a definite glint of green.
Like the green feather I’d found on the bottom of my sneaker that
morning.
My mind raced. Might there have been two green feathers in that hatband,
before the wind had plucked one out?
One of the beams, defeated, drew back. The other pranced away. The man
walked in darkness.
“Mom?” I said. “Mom?”
The figure was wading away from us, and had passed no more than eight
feet from me. He reached up with a white hand to hold the hat on his head.
“Mom?” I said again, and she finally heard me over the noise and answered,
“What is it?”
“I think… I think…” But I didn’t know what I thought. I couldn’t tell if
that was the person I’d seen across the road, or not.
The figure was moving off through the brown water, step after step.
I pulled my hand free from my mother’s, and I went after him.
“Cory!” she said. “Cory, take my hand!”
I heard, but I didn’t listen. The water swirled around me. I kept going.
“Cory!” Mom shouted.
I had to see his face.
“Mister!” I called. It was too noisy, what with the rain and the river
and the working; he couldn’t hear. Even if he did, he wouldn’t turn around. I
felt the Tecumseh’s currents pulling at my shoes. I was sunken waist-deep in
cold murk. The man was heading toward the riverbank, where my dad was.
Flashlights bobbed and weaved, and a shimmering reflection danced up and
struck the man’s right hand as he pulled it from his pocket.
Something metallic glinted in it.
Something with a sharp edge.
My heart stuttered.
The man in the green-feathered hat was on his way to the riverbank for an
appointment with my father. It was an appointment, perhaps, that he’d been
planning ever since Dad dove in after the sinking car. With all this
commotion, all this noise, and in all this watery dark, might not the man in
the green-feathered hat find a chance to drive that blade into my father’s
back? I couldn’t see my dad; I couldn’t make out anyone for sure, just
glistening figures straining against the inevitable.
He was stronger against the current than I. He was pulling away from me.
I lunged forward, fighting the river, and that was when my feet slipped out
from under me and I went down, the muddy water closing over my head. I reached
up, trying to grab something to hold on to. There was nothing solid, and I
couldn’t get my feet planted. My mind screamed that I’d never be able to draw
a breath again. I splashed and wallowed, and then somebody had gripped me and
was lifting me up as the muddy water oozed from my face and hair.
“I’ve got you,” a man said. “You’re all right.”
“Cory! What’s wrong with you, boy?” That was my mother’s voice, rising to
new heights of terror. “Are you crazy?”
“I believe he stepped in a hole, Rebecca.” The man set me down. I was
