Melanie Thon: Meteors in August

By eleven-fifteen the crowd began to grumble, fretting about the heat. Women pushed their noses against the smoke-tinted windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the Foot brothers. Several of the men muttered about popping the damn lock and helping themselves. When Sheriff Wolfe caught wind of that idea, he brought their nonsense to a halt. He could change a man’s mind with a glance. I trusted the sheriff to do his job and hoped he’d never have reason to come after me. Other than the Indians, Caleb Wolfe was the darkest man in Willis. No one dared say anything outright, but in private people questioned the purity of his blood, the skin of his grandfather and the morals of his grandmother.

As I grew older I understood that our tolerance for the sheriff depended on the fact that he had never married. Over the years, plenty of Indians drifted through Willis, hoping to find work at the mill. They lived at the foot of the hills on the west side of town. Their houses were abandoned trailers and plywood shacks. When one family moved out, another moved in. Most disappeared within the month, and few of their children ever attended our school. Children from the reservation had to be tested. They rarely passed, of course. Many of us wouldn’t have passed either; but as far as I knew, no one ever suggested the tests might be unfair. Thirteen-year-olds were placed in fourth grade. Humiliation kept them home. Occasionally administrators slipped: One year a light-skinned woman came to the school alone to register her three sons. The last name was a French one; no questions were asked, no tests demanded. But there were plenty of complaints when teachers discovered the Champeaux brothers favored their red father rather than their fair mother.

Daddy said Indians were born lazy, that they turned tail at the first sign of trouble and headed back to the reservation, where they got a government check every month for doing nothing but sitting on their hind ends.

I watched Caleb Wolfe hold back the crowd and remembered the trouble Father had caused a certain Indian just a year before. I thought about the dogs in the woods and the mud on my father’s boots.

As we waited on the hot street no one dared to cross Sheriff Wolfe — despite the color of his skin. He was short and bowlegged. His stomach hung over his belt, but his fat was hard, not sloppy, the kind of fat a man can use like muscle: for weight and force. The people who’d been talking about busting locks were suddenly nowhere to be seen.

The white light of noon stripped us, left us without shadow or weight. A dangerous fervor swelled through the crowd and threatened to pull us off the ground, a hundred helium balloons cut free. Gwen Holler stood next to me, poking my ribs with her elbow every time light wavered in the glass. I told her to stop, but she didn’t hear me, so I jabbed her back and she got the idea. My cousin Jesse darted through the crowd, pinching girls’ butts so they jumped and squealed. The air was full of their little pig cries. He gave my bum a squeeze and I whirled, smacked him up the side of the head hard as I could. Jesse only laughed at me.

At precisely three minutes after twelve, according to Freda Graves—“Oh Lord, let us remember this hour”—we heard the dull click of the lock being released, like a trigger hitting an empty chamber. Gwen gripped my hand, squashing all my fingers together. The door creaked open slowly. Inside, the bar was dark as a cave, and I realized how quiet the street was all of a sudden.

Elliot’s two younger brothers, Vern and Ralph, appeared. They hadn’t changed since the last time I’d seen them; their beards were still long and matted, their mouths still hidden by hair. They lumbered through the doorway, carrying a long blue sign with bright red letters. The crowd took a single breath as if they’d seen a beautiful thing.

Freda Graves shook with the force of her own words. Her huge bony hands drew pictures in the air, scooped out lakes of fire, scattered the valleys with our bleached and numberless bones. “This is the eve of destruction,” she shouted, “opening a house of sin to face the House of the Lord.” From the bottom of the steps, Myron Evans shouted, “Amen, sister.”

Ralph and Vern each slipped a heavy loop of rope around the sign, preparing to hoist it, then ducked inside the dark bar again. “Mark my words well,” said Mrs. Graves, “this is the day of our downfall.” She sucked hard at the air, filled her lungs, and seemed to grow before our eyes, her shoulders square and broad as a man’s, her legs thick as old pines. “We are leading our brothers and sisters into temptation. We walk in the valley of the shadow of death, and I fear evil.”

“Amen!” Myron yelled again. His support wasn’t helping Freda’s cause. He blinked too much when he talked. It made me nervous just to watch him, as if I had to run to the bathroom. Pale, game-legged Myron Evans, a grown man who still lived with his mother and never learned to drive a car, was not generally admired by the people of Willis.

The brothers emerged with a pair of silver ladders. They propped the ladders against the building, giving them a jerk and a shove to be sure they were steady. Elliot waited inside the bar. Mrs. Graves’s audience waned now that the action had started; a few of the good Lutherans had strayed to our side of the street. Still she was undaunted. She called out to her meager band of followers. “Come stand beside me, Minnie Hathaway,” she shouted. This renewed our curiosity for a moment. We all knew Minnie. We could smell her in the heat. She doused herself with perfume, a daily reminder of her dear father’s funeral, of his coffin drowned in gardenias. She wore white gloves, every day of her life, through all the blistering days of summer and all the brutal days of winter.

Minnie minced up the steps toward Mrs. Graves. She was a bird woman with no wings, brittle-boned and light enough to fly if she’d had some way to get off the ground. “Minnie Hathaway is our beloved sister,” Freda said, gripping Minnie to her breast. “And we all know of her struggles.” We certainly did. Early in the day Minnie Hathaway was a perfect gentlewoman, so proper and elegant you almost forgot she lived at the rooming house and shared a bathroom with three men and the Fat Lady. But when Minnie got a few drinks in her, she flew into fits that twisted her cracked face and made her cuss in ways that were embarrassing even to men. “Bad as an Indian with liquor,” folks said. I was warned not to listen to nasty talk. “Don’t judge what you can’t understand,” Mother often told me. I tried not to judge. What did I know? I was only nine years old. But nothing Mother told me could have stopped me from listening to what people said. If nasty talk was bad for me, I was already poisoned.

At last Elliot appeared in the bright street. The crowd cheered and clapped when they saw him, hero of the day. He was the runt of the family: a small, jittery man with a full beard and a serious lack of hair. He nodded to his brothers. Ralph and Vern each grabbed a line of rope and started up the twin ladders.

They braced themselves on the ledge and slowly pulled the sign toward them. “Is it fair?” Mrs. Graves bellowed. “Is it fair to tempt our own sister this way? Is it just to remind her of her sorrow each time she leaves this holy place?”

“Tell her to leave by the back door,” Vern yelled. The crowd hooted.

“Forgive them,” Freda Graves moaned, raising her hands to Heaven, “for they know not what they do.”

The sign caught the lip of the ledge; the crowd gasped and stepped back, a single being with a single mind. Elliot was the only one who didn’t budge. He stood his ground, ready to accept his fate if the sign crashed on his head. Vern and Ralph each gave their end a jiggle and counted: “One, two, three … heave!” The sign was up and the mob whooped. In a matter of minutes the wires were attached and the red letters blinked on and off: LAST CHANCE, LAST CHANCE.