James PATTERSON - Alex Cross’s Trial

Abraham pointed to an oak at the center of the clearing. “And there’s your main attraction.”

Even without his guidance, I would have recognized it as a lynching tree. There was a thick, strong branch barely a dozen feet from the ground. The low dip in the middle of the branch was rubbed free of its bark by the friction of ropes.

I walked under the tree. The hard ground was stained with dark blotches. My stomach churned at the thought of what had happened in this unholy place.

“Somebody left us a greeting,” Abraham said. “That would be the Klan.”

He was pointing behind me, to the trunk of a sycamore tree. About five feet up, someone had used an odd-looking white nail to attach a plank with crude lettering on it:

BEWARE ALL COONS!

BEWARE ALL COON LOVERS!

“I’ve never seen a nail that color,” I said.

“You never seen a nail made out of human bone?” said Abraham.

I shuddered, reaching up to haul the plank down.

“Don’t waste your strength, Mr. Corbett,” he said. “You pull that one down today, there’ll be a new sign up there next week.”

His face changed. “We got company, ” he said.

THE DOUBLE-BARRELED SHOTGUN pointed our way was almost as big as the girl holding it. It was so long and heavy I was more afraid she would drop it and discharge it accidentally than that she might shoot us on purpose.

Abraham said, “What you fixin’ to do with that gun? That ain’t no possum you aimin’ at.”

I was distracted by the fact that she was very serious and very pretty. She wore a simple cotton jumper, stark white against the smooth brown of her skin. A perfect face, with delicate features that betrayed the fierceness of her attitude. Deep brown eyes flashed a steady warning: keep away from me .

“What y’all doing messin’ around the lynching tree?” she said.

“You know this girl, Abraham?”

“I surely do. This is Moody. Say hello to Mr. Corbett.”

Moody didn’t say a word to me. She kept her barrel trained on my heart. If she was going to stare at me this way, I couldn’t help looking back at her.

“Well, if you know her,” I said, “maybe you should tell her not to go around pointing firearms at people.”

“Moody, you heard the man,” said Abraham. “Put it down. Now, granddaughter.”

“Oh, Papaw,” she said, “what you bring this white man out here for?”

Abraham reached out and pushed the gun barrel away. Moody pulled back from him as if he were trying to take away her doll.

“She’s your granddaughter?”

“That’s right.”

It struck me that the girl had seemed as willing to shoot her grandfather as to shoot me. She walked boldly up to me, around me, looking me over as if I represented some species of animal she had never observed before and already didn’t like.

“Mr. Corbett is here from Washington,” said Abraham.

“You working for him?” said Moody. “Why would you?”

“We working together,” said Abraham.

“Well, if you ain’t working for him, how come he calls you Abraham, and you call him Mr. Corbett?”

“Because he prefers it that way.” Abraham knew that wasn’t so, but he fixed me in place with a look that stifled the protest in my throat. “Mr. Corbett is here by the instructions of the president of the–”

“ Abraham, ” I said. “We’re not supposed to talk about any of this.”

He nodded, dipped his head. “You are right, Mr. Corbett,” he said.

Moody gave me a disgusted look and said, “You should have let me shoot him while I had the chance.”

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, gumbo was not something most white people would eat, unless they were Catholic and lived down on the coast. Gumbo was food for black people, or Creole people. Like chitlins and hog ears, it was the kind of thing mostly eaten out of necessity. Or so most people thought. My mother’s cook, Aurelia, used to whip up a big pot of sausage-and-crawfish gumbo and leave it to feed us through Friday, her day off.

So when Abraham suggested we stop in at a little gray shanty of a saloon with a crooked sign on the door, GUMBO JOE’S, I was a happy man. Also along for the meal was Moody and her brother Hiram, a handsome boy of nineteen with aspirations to be a lawyer.

I was surprised at the idea of a Negro restaurant in Eudora, but when I stepped inside the place, I saw it was 95 percent saloon, with a little cooker perched beside the open window in back. On the flame sat a bubbling pot.

An old black man came out from behind the rickety bar. I couldn’t help flinching at the sight of him: he had no chin, and his right arm was severed just below the elbow.

Without our asking, he brought three small glasses and a bottle of beer. “Y’all want gumbo?”

“We do,” said Abraham.

So much for a menu.

Abraham poured beer into all three glasses, and I took one. It wasn’t cold, but it tasted real good.

“What happened to that man?” I said softly.

“The war,” said Abraham. He explained that the old man had been a cook for Pemberton’s army at Vicksburg. The Yankee mortar shell that crashed through the mess tent was no respecter of color or rank.

“He lost half his face fighting for the side that was trying to keep him a slave,” I said.

“Wasn’t fighting, he was cooking,” said Abraham. “A lot of us did. The pay was good. Better than we got staying home. Those was good times, if you didn’t get killed.”

The War between the States had been officially over for forty-three years but had never actually ended in the South. The Confederate battle flag still flew higher than Old Glory, at least at our courthouse. There were Rebel flags hanging on the fronts of stores and from the flagpoles of churches. Ever since I was a boy I had recognized the old faded butternut cap as the sign of a Confederate veteran.

There had always been men with wooden legs or wooden crutches. I knew that an empty sleeve pinned up inside a suit jacket meant an arm had been left on a battlefield in Georgia or Tennessee. Maybelle’s handyman, otherwise a handsome old gent, had a left eye sewn shut with orange twine. The skin around that eye burned to a god-awful dry red that would have scared me if I’d been a child.

“That old man behind the bar?” said Abraham. “Before the war, he was trying to become a professional fiddler.”

I shook my head. “And now he has no chin to lean his fiddle on,” I said.

Abraham’s face broke open in a big smile. So did Moody’s and her brother’s. “Aw now, Mr. Corbett, I was fooling on you. Old Jeffrey wasn’t no fiddler. He was slingin’ beer back before the war, and he been slingin’ beer ever since.”

Moody saw the look on my face and busted out with a guffaw. “Papaw, Mr . Corbett ain’t too swift, is he?”

THE CHINLESS OLD MAN RETURNED, bearing in his good hand a tray with three steaming bowls of dark gumbo.

“Look like we maybe gonna have some music too,” Hiram said, and his face lit up in a smile.

Two or three men had drifted in, still shiny-sweaty from the field. They ordered beers and shot nervous looks in our direction. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how out of place I was in here. It was the Negroes’ place; who was I to come in and sit down as if I belonged?

At least they had the courtesy to let me sit there, which would certainly not be the case if one of them tried to order a beer in a white barroom.

I was delighted to see a grizzled middle-aged fellow taking out a banjo, tuning it up while his buddy drummed his hands on an overturned gutbucket. The thin, listless woman between them waited for the banjo player to plink a little chord, and then without any introduction or ritual, she set in to wailing.