Fifty-Nine
AT THE END of the week, there is another meeting, a town meeting this time, open to the public.
This one isn’t held in Burt and Taylor Webb’s living room, but in the parish hall next to the First Congregational Church, where both Taylor and EJ have been known to sing in the church choir on occasion.
I’d asked Taylor one time which one of them had the better singing voice and she’d said, “That’s something for God to decide, even if it’s clearly me.”
She and EJ have done the most to circulate word around town about the meeting. So has Bess Scobee, as much a town crier as either one of them.
The crowd is different than the one I’d seen at Silas Tucker Field.
Mostly adults tonight, standing-room only for those who couldn’t find seats even upstairs in the choir area.
The small stage, the one used for the Christmas pageant every year, one in which Taylor and I had once starred as Mary and Joseph, is at the front of the big room.
Helene Mayes is seated on the stage by the time the doors have been closed.
So are Mayor Larson and Burt Webb. Claire Larson has asked me to make a few comments to close the program.
When I tell her I haven’t prepared anything, she pats my arm and says, “Nobody in this town, including me, is better at thinking on their feet than you are.”
Taylor and I stand off to the side of the stage, along with Abby Wells. Tay and Abby are being cordial enough with each other tonight, but still about ten miles away from being friendly.
“Why are we here, really?” Abby asks.
“The people on the stage are here to talk,” Tay says. “And then they’re here to listen.”
“To who?” Abby asks.
“Cross Rivers, North Carolina,” I say.
I keep looking out at the hall to see if Briar Crockett is in attendance. Or his two sons. So far they’re not.
Mayor Larson finally steps to the microphone and says there’s one order of business for her to go over, telling the audience that Burt Webb has had the interim tag taken off his title and been officially installed as chief; that she’d called off her search committee because they hadn’t interviewed anybody as qualified for the job as he is.
She also announces to anybody in the room who hasn’t heard the news about Nash Hader that Sheriff Hader has resigned.
She goes on to say that that’s another reason why people are free to speak their minds tonight, as she’s well aware how many people in her town never saw Hader as serving them and protecting them as much as surveilling them, at least when he wasn’t harassing them for the hell of it.
There is a burst of applause about that. When the room is quiet again, Mayor Larson briefly explains that we’re all here because this is the beginning of what she calls “a better day” for our town.
Before she can continue, a male voice from the back of the hall yells out, “All due respect to the mayor and to Burt Webb, but what difference does any of this make if Briar Crockett is still the one in charge?”
Mayor Larson turns to Helene Mayes.
“Would you like to take that one, Helene?” she asks.
Helene Mayes stands and shakes the mayor’s hand and raises up the microphone, looking cool as can be as she does, as if she’s right where she belongs.
Maybe, I think, it’s because she knows what it’s like to play in front of a crowd.
Or to one. But it occurs to me, all over again, that this woman isn’t afraid of anything or anybody.
She starts out by explaining who she is and why she is in this part of the state, saying, “The biggest reason is that my boss, the governor, is a politician who shares your pain.”
She waits a beat and then says, “But one thing that needs to be made clear, right here and right now, is that there is a new sheriff in town.”
Her eyes seem to take in all corners of the place.
“That sheriff is me,” she says. “And my first official act is going to be hearing from you.”
One of the waitresses from Scobee’s, a short, wide, white-haired Black woman named Ruby Mitchell, stands up in the middle of the room, not even waiting for the handheld microphone one of Mayor Larson’s deputies is prepared to pass around.
“Why should we believe things are going to change around here just because some woman from out of town says they will?” she shouts.
I feel myself smiling.
Welcome to Cross Rivers, Helene.
I see Helene is smiling, too.
“What’s your name?”
“Ruby.”
“Well, Ruby,” Helene says. “I can tell you that my first order of business will be making sure not to mess with you.”
Gets her a laugh.
“I already get the sense that you and I are a lot alike, Ruby,” Helene continues.
“That neither one of us takes any shit, pardon my French. Or suffers fools gladly. So I’m going to try not to make promises that I can’t keep, about drugs or missing girls or any of the things that brought us here tonight.
But just know that I’m not going to rest until I find those girls—or at least find out what happened to them.
And what I can promise is that the drug dealers who feel as if they’ve had a free run at their customers for far too long?
Well, I’m going to go right at them. I’m going to stop them in their cars and on the street.
If they don’t like it, they can call their congressman.
Except my backup is the governor, who I can assure everybody is somebody who doesn’t take any shit either. ”
She tells the audience then about a version of WhatsApp that will be up and running in the morning, a system where people can anonymously send in tips or post photographs or videos without any fear of their address being tracked. It will be called SpyOn.
“That app has worked wherever I’ve been,” she says. “And it will work here. And make us feel as if we really all are in this together.”
She waits another long beat and then says, “Now, before we do throw open the floor to all of Miss Ruby’s friends, there’s one other thing I want everybody in this room to know: the Southern Mafia needs to be a lot more afraid of Chief Webb and me going forward than anybody here is afraid of them.”
When the applause over that line dies down, she adds this: “Damn. Straight.”
The rest of the night is the collective voice of Cross Rivers, loud and scared and defiant and just plain fed up.
One farmer I know, Huck Gushen, takes the mic and says, “This is all well and good. But I’m still afraid to speak my mind on account of Briar Crockett might be listening, even with Hader gone.”
“You just need to know, sir, that we’re the ones listening,” Helene says. “And trust me, we hear you.”
“But can you protect us and our families?” a woman in the back says. “I’m the mother of two teenaged girls, and I’m scared to death these days every time they leave the house.”
“Gonna try our best,” Helene says.
“I know enough about this world to know there’s no medals for trying,” the woman answers her back.
“All I can tell you,” Helene says, “is that the methodology we’re going to put into play here really has worked everywhere else I’ve ever been. That app I told you about. More stops. More undercover cops. More CCTV cameras, because the governor has made sure to foot the bill for those.”
She smiles again.
“I know you’re just meeting me for the first time, but I’m asking you to trust me,” she says. “I’ve told you everything you need to know about how and why things are going to get better.” She shrugs, then grins. “Just not everything I know.”
A red-faced man in the first row stands up and is another who doesn’t wait for the microphone.
“All I’m hearing is talk, talk, talk,” he yells.
“Until my actions turn out to be even louder than you are, sir,” she says.
Helene Mayes sits back down and Mayor Larson steps back up to the microphone.
“Before we all head home,” she says, “I’d like to hear from Silas Tucker, and I’m guessing you all would, too.”
That announcement produces the biggest cheer of the night, to the point where, as we pass each other, Claire Larson says, “Please never run for office, Silas.”
I shake her hand, then Helene’s, then Burt’s.
Then I raise up the microphone even more than Helene Mayes had.
“I really think everything that needs to be said here has been said, and probably better than I can,” I say. “By the people on this stage and the people I’m looking out at now.”
I pause and find myself turning to look at Taylor, who smiles at me and nods.
“All’s I know is that what I heard here tonight is pretty great,” I say. “Because what I really heard, loud and clear, is that we are all in this together. And that’s the way it’s always had to work on any successful team on which I’ve ever played.”
The room is very quiet.
Finally, I say this: “Everybody here knows how much I’ve lost since I was growing up in this town, despite all the winning I’ve done on a football field, or any other sport, really.
And I’m just going to tell you that I am sick and tired of losing.
What I can promise you is that I will do everything in my power to make sure we don’t lose this town! ”
The cheer for that is big enough and loud enough that I find myself wondering if they can hear it at Briar Crockett’s place.
But I am about to discover that his sons have heard it.
Them and some of their friends.