Chapter 38 #7
The sheriff came out of the courthouse and joined them.
Dear Jesus. The whole group was now heading my way.
Garnett was talking and he was nodding along, just like the women, as she sliced the air with her hands.
Behind me, I heard the sleigh bells clang, and Ruby and Flossy walked out of the drugstore.
I was standing directly in the path of Garnett and her people as Flossy and Ruby were coming toward me on my left.
It was a convergence of almost everybody in the world I wanted to keep apart.
“Birdie,” Pripp said coolly. She hadn’t forgotten what I’d said to her at church.
“Pripp,” I said, trying to figure out how to stop this collision.
“I gotta get stockings, Bird,” Flossy called, a few feet away now. “Rayon crap they sell in there gives me the rash.”
Pripp looked at Flossy, giving her an up-and-down. “Who’s this you’re with?” Pripp asked and then, “Is that … Frances’s dress she’s wearing?”
“Nope,” I said. The sheriff and Garnett had stopped as well.
“Miss Calhoun.” The sheriff nodded, and I felt a groundswell of heat rising up around me. Had he told Garnett about the dance club?
“Well, I’m just as sure as can be that’s Frances’s dress,” Pripp said, eyebrows up, hardly able to contain her delight at the thought of tattling. “As I recall, Frances paid four dollars ninety-five cents for it over at Neilson’s.”
I shook my head. “It’s not—we gotta go,” I said and gave Flossy and Ruby a gentle shove in the opposite direction. When I looked back, Garnett and the sheriff were watching us. Garnett nodded in agreement about something he said.
“Keep going,” I said through my teeth and, when we were definitely out of earshot, “Get your stockings but be quick, and then let’s cut this short and meet at the car. Tell the others.”
Call it prostitute’s intuition, Flossy understood that those ladies were not friends.
I let her and Ruby walk ahead of me while I kept an eye on Garnett’s group, which was now disbanding.
Hypocrites adjourned. Sheriff Porter and Garnett stayed talking.
She pointed, her finger sharp as a bird’s beak, at a copy of The Oxford Eagle in her hand.
I hoofed it to the post office. Thin late-September sun had broken through the clouds.
A lady Mrs. Tartt’s age closed an umbrella and whispered something to her husband as I walked by.
You’re being paranoid, Birdie, I told myself, then added, As you should be.
When you opened a brothel in a town with thirteen churches, surely it was natural to find peril in every move.
I walked into city hall and headed to the PO in back, which was empty of customers. Mrs. Nutt, who usually wore a mischievous smile, looked flat and glum today.
“Mrs. Nutt, something wrong?” I asked.
“Guv’ment’s letting me go. On account a some new law, two something or other.”
“Section 213,” Mavis said in the next window.
“Says a husband and wife can’t both be working at the same time. So all the poor unemployed men out there can find jobs, while the wife stays home to clean and cook supper for him.”
Mavis, looking over her silver glasses at me, said, “It don’t say that exact, but it’s a stupid law.”
“I’m awfully sorry to hear that, Mrs. Nutt,” I said.
I slid my letter to Jack across the counter, stalling to let it go.
When she took it, I felt more than just paper slip from my fingers.
It felt like the loss of joy. It was worse that there was no letter from him today and “nuttin for the Tartts either.” Then Mrs. Nutt leaned up and said, “Speaking of. How things going out at Idlewilde?”
“Quiet, real quiet.”
Mrs. Nutt smirked, despite her own bad news. “Look, we ain’t judging. Lord knows we’re poor as the dickens too. I heard you sent Mrs. Tartt outta town ’fore you opened so she wouldn’t get embarrassed by it.”
A prickle ran down my back—so they know too. Were there rumors going around? Had somebody overheard us on the party line?
Mavis leaned over and said, “Think one of them ladies could teach Walter a thing or two? He sure could use him a lesson.” She winked at me, and I told myself, Dancing. We are just talking about dancing. But I eased away from the counter.
“What’s it like out there?” Mavis asked. “Hear y’all got Mr. Binny playing.”
“It’s nothing special. Just dance lessons … for the college boys, you know, to get ready for the fall dances and the holidays. The holidays are coming, be here before you know it! But it’s only for college boys,” I said a second time. “Gotta run, sorry again, Mrs. Nutt.”
When I got out on the sidewalk, I told myself I needed to calm down. You knew this time would come. The sky was blue now and steam rose from the pavement. Any minute, people would start showing up for lunch on the square. It was time to go.
I walked in the direction of Neilson’s, down at the next corner.
In front of the department store, Flossy, Ruby, and the twins stood clustered together.
Flossy had a newspaper opened wide, and Ruby and the twins were peering over her arms to see it.
I looked around. Just the sight of the girls all together looked suspicious to me, but Garnett and the sheriff were gone.
As I got closer, Flossy looked up at me with the strangest expression, eyes unblinking, her top teeth slipped down.
Ruby was peering close to the newspaper, running her finger along the page, sounding words out with silent lips.
“We need to go,” I said. “People are talking.”
“You see the news?” Flossy asked. Her face was moist; her front teeth looked too long for her head.
“No, what happened?” I asked. I moved closer, but all I could see was the bottom half of the front page: “Mississippi Sharecroppers Plead for Help.”
“Dixie, move, let her see,” Flossy said.
Dixie stepped aside and I saw that The Oxford Eagle had printed an actual photograph, not just a drawing.
They didn’t spend the money on photos very often.
It was of a heavyset woman being dragged by her hands—handcuffs, I realized, but she’d stumbled to one knee.
The man was still pulling her, though, and I could see a bald spot on the side of her head.
Like her hair had been pulled out. Her left eye was swollen shut.
The caption above it said “Citizens Against Filth Triumphant.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“It’s the Sicko—it’s Priscilla,” Flossy said.
The man dragging her was Sheriff Porter. He was smiling wide at the camera, showing sharklike teeth. The picture was grainy, but behind Priscilla three other women were being led by ropes tied around their waists, like animals, while men stood by, leering and pointing at them.
“There’s Rosie,” Flossy choked, “and Hildi and, God, look at poor Priscilla.”
“I thought you hated Priscilla,” Dixie said, leaning up against my back to see.
“Nobody likes the death of their own!” Flossy snapped.
I was reading the print under it: “Notable citizen and newly elected president of the Anti-Vice League of Mississippi Mrs. Welty Pittman pressed authorities to shut down what she called ‘a scourge’ in Sweetwater, Miss. On Thursday, Sheriff J. W. Porter and three deputized men crossed county lines with warrants and raided the home of Priscilla Stuggs.”
I’d gone to see the sheriff on Wednesday.
“Sheriff Porter told this reporter: ‘I have never seen a place like it in all my life. A snake pit of filthy, diseased women, coloreds and whites coupling together. The Christians of this fine state will not tolerate such filth or tainting of our good, clean population.’”
“I wanna go home,” Flossy said, her voice wavering.
“Es’s bringing the car around,” Ruby said. I kept reading.
“Miss Stuggs and her gang were charged with prostitution, sodomy, bootlegging, and a felony count of miscegenation. Mrs. Pittman went on to say of Miss Stuggs: ‘Our orphanages are already full of children that cost this state money, children who suffer from imbecility and even worse. I am not the law, I am just a Christian citizen, and as president of this fine state’s Anti-Vice League, I recommend Miss Stuggs and her scamps be sent to the criminal ward of the state hospital where we can stop their kind from propagating and see that they serve lengthy sentences in prison, where they belong.’”
When we drove toward home, Esmeralda took a hard left to avoid driving past the jailhouse. She gripped both sides of the wheel with her white-gloved hands.
“It’s the misceg charge that’s getting them the knife,” Flossy said, beside me in the back seat.
“What’s that word mean?” Trixie asked from the front.
“Means Priscilla let Negro customers in, which is horseshit because Priscilla hates Negroes,” Flossy said.
“Please, Negroes wouldn’t go there anyway,” Esmeralda said. “And the colored crib’s just down the road.” I hadn’t even known there was a colored brothel in town. “Sugar’s is ten times nicer and cheaper. Least that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Just like in Dakota,” Flossy said. “Same story, different color. You can run tail, booze, tar, cadillacs of cocaine, but they catch you laying with a redskin and you’re hanging from a tree.” Flossy let out a deep, throaty sob. “They’re gonna cut those poor girls to pieces.”
Lunch that afternoon was unusually somber.
Esmeralda wasn’t eating; she was mostly staring out the window.
Flossy looked thin and sick, barely touching her sweet potatoes or fried okra.
When Charlie’d read Garnett’s statements, she’d cursed, “That bloodless witch.” Yet at the table she sat upright, almost offensively self-confident.
She said it again to everybody, “I guarantee you, if the sheriff knew anything, he’d have come out already,” this time adding, “This makes us the only game for sixty miles now, so get ready to be busy.”
When they’d gone upstairs to get dressed for the night, I stayed at the table with Charlie. It had occurred to me that she might be acting reckless because the worst had already happened to her. But no, that wasn’t it. It always came down to one thing, and that was Meg.
“I know,” Charlie said. “I know what you’re thinking. We only have one more week to go.”
I spoke so Charlie would listen. “If you get arrested, like Priscilla in the paper, you’ll have lost any chance of getting her back.
Same as if you go to Byhalia and do something stupid.
The Heidelbergs have money. They will track you down and arrest you.
” This wasn’t the first time I’d suggested what I was about to, but this time, with the newspaper, I seemed to have her full attention.
“Maybe you don’t need as much money as you think you do, Charlie.
Or maybe you don’t have to go as far as California.
If we close now, you can still afford to hire a lawyer and try and get Meg back the legal way. There’s bound to be some kind of law—”
“Law?” Charlie’s eyes flew open. “Garnett Pittman is the law. The only way I’m going to get Meg out of her bony reach is to make every damn penny I can and take Meg until there is no train track left.
If I wait for the courts, then I guarantee you, Garnett Pittman will find a way to take Meg for herself. ”
I wanted to argue, but I was afraid she was right.
Charlie set her hand on my shoulder, and I could feel her shaking.
“If I get arrested and Garnett gets her hands on Meg, will you promise me something? Promise that you or”—she choked out the words—“your sister will try to adopt her before she gets sent off?”
Good God, that one took me by surprise. It was such a desperate thing to ask, I was out of words for a few seconds. She’d rather even Frances have Meg than Garnett. Even Frances. But I nodded and said, “Of course I will. I will try my damnedest.”