Part 43 (1/2)

”Please, no. Please. I can't tell my father.”

”I'll put your f.u.c.kin' eye out now!” the man screamed.

Slowly, Emma Lee undressed. She unb.u.t.toned her blouse with a strange, incongruent dignity. The eyes of the stranger watched as the skirt dropped to the wet ground. She could smell his hunger, feel it in her blood, in her fear. Then she removed her slip. She was crying the whole time. She was crying and undressing and looking at the butcher knife. She could smell his evil.

When she removed her bra.s.siere and panties, the black man who had no face, just a voice and an appet.i.te, hit her across the mouth, threw her to the ground and forced himself into her.

”Please. Please. Please,” she said, almost a prayer. Then she began to scream. Every time she screamed, he slapped her and then began to punch her in the face. He came inside her driving himself as deeply into her as he could. She began to vomit and he began to hit her again and again, stopping only when Emma Lee Givens lay unconscious in the blood-darkened sand. She never saw him leave down the same road Sammy had run minutes before.

At first Sammy had searched for another couple parking along the beach, but this failing, he began the long run toward town, hoping to intercept a car on the highway. He stopped twice and started back toward Emma Lee, but knew that there was nothing he could do against a grown man and a knife. It was four miles before he could flag a car down. Two had seen him and avoided him, thinking he was drunk or crazy or both. Finally, he was picked up by a black foreman who worked on one of the large tomato farms owned by Philip Turner's father and driven to the nearest house with a phone. Two police cars were dispatched immediately to pick Sammy up. Every patrol car in the county raced to the beach. A highway patrolman found Emma Lee walking down the beach road with half of her clothes on, hysterical, her face beaten past all recognition.

Chapter 31.

By morning news of the rape glowed like a wound in the consciousness of the town. Along River Street a harsh silence prevailed as white men cl.u.s.tered in doorways and nodded their heads ruefully, then looked toward the street. The id of the town was bared, gathering into something terrible, fed by the slow accretions that came with a blazing hunger for retribution. In his alley, Toomer unpacked his flowers for the day and began his song to the few shoppers who had come downtown. His voice brought a kind of normality back to the street, but it could not cut through the smell of blood that came off the town like a musk.

In Hobie's restaurant Bull heard a stunned and angry group trade disgusted accounts of the rape. Cleve Goins thought Sammy Wertzberger should be tarred and feathered for leaving Emma Lee to the mercy of a crazy n.i.g.g.e.r. Half the restaurant agreed with him. A manhunt was in progress at the beach and an army of men scoured the whole island, including the blackgum swamp at the northern end. SLED agents from Columbia were bringing carloads of bloodhounds down to Ravenel. Reporters from the Charleston News and Courier, the Columbia State, and the Savannah Morning News drove into town and were refused interviews by both Sammy's parents and Emma Lee's father. Ford's Hardware Store on the corner of River and Granville streets ran out of ammunition and shotguns an hour after the store was opened. The Ku Klux Klan planned a rally and a march down River Street. Women, black and white, cried in the street when they heard what happened. From the princ.i.p.al's office at Calhoun High, Ben tried three times to call Sammy and each time the phone was busy. The ladies' auxiliary of the Rotary Club canceled the azalea contest which was to be held in the gymnasium of the high school. Sammy Wertzberger received two death threats before eight o'clock in the morning and before his parents took the phone off the hook.

Paradise became a magnetic field for the possibility of violence. Carloads of white men rode up and down the streets of Paradise, three in the front and three in the backseat, slowing down and staring at every black man outside of his house. But there were not many black people visible on this day and Paradise had the look of a town desolated by plague or the rumor of plague.

In the Meecham kitchen, Arrabelle Smalls washed dishes and looked out the sun-filled window and said, ”It's a bad day to be colored, Miss Meecham. I seen it like this before. The white mens gone n.i.g.g.e.r-hungry today. The snake is in 'em and he ain't leavin' till they catch up with that man who runnin' around here now not knowin' he as good as dead.”

After school, Ben walked over to Sammy's house. Rachel Wertzberger answered the door. Her eyes were bloodshot, raw, and it was easy to interpret the suffering the previous night had brought to her house.

”Where's Sammy, Mrs. Wertzberger?” Ben asked.

”He's gone. We sent him away,” she answered. ”We had to, Ben. He's so upset.”

”How long will he be gone? Where did he go, Mrs. Wertzberger?” Ben asked.

”New York. Where else? Where else do we have relatives besides Charleston and that's too close. All day, Ben, we received phone calls saying that they want to kill Sammy. And for what? For running from certain death for both him and that girl. That poor girl.”

”New York! But he won't be here to graduate.”

”Just as well. To graduate in New York means that he won't graduate? We put him on the train at one o'clock in Charleston. He left you this note,” she said, handing him a sealed envelope. Then she began crying again and Ben made an awkward gesture to comfort her.

”Go now, Ben. Come back soon so we can talk and we can call Sammy on the telephone.”

Ben walked toward town forgetting for a moment that he was holding Sammy's note in his right hand. The reality of Sammy's absence came to him slowly, but there was no form or substance to the reality. He had talked to Sammy the night before, had joked with him, had heard the high-pitched laughter and watched his car pull out of sight. It was as though his father had received orders in the night and the Meecham family had broken camp, relying on their old swiftness, the old canniness of flight, and had abandoned their house and all their friends yet another time. But this was different and strange to Ben. In his whole life, no friend had ever left him. Sammy had stolen his role, his birthright.

Then, remembering the note, he tore the envelope open and read, ”It was awful, Ben. I hope I never see this town again. You'll always be my best friend. If you still want to be. Remember the Bohemian Mountain Approach. Mom and Dad are sending me to New York to live with my Uncle Sidney. They say northern girls just do it and don't ask any questions. If they catch this guy I'll have to come back for the trial. Maybe I'll see you around then. Send me the graduation program. Your friend, Rock Troy.”

For the next hour, Ben sat with Toomer in the alley helping Toomer clean crabs when no customers were in sight. Cars filled with unfamiliar white men pa.s.sed them again and again, turned right at the bridge and crossed toward St. Catherine's Island and the beach beyond.

”Do you think they'll catch him, Toomer?”

”Catch 'em be the nicest thing they d-d-d-do. Ain't no p-p-place to go much unless he long g-g-gone from these islands. That's gonna be a sad colored b-b-boy when they get up with him.”

”Where'd you get the honey, Toomer? You harvested already?”

”No, white b-b-boy. I hold this out from last year. This my last f-f-four jars, I sell 'em to ol' man Fogle at the store by the bridge. He buy this bushel of Mr. Oyster I got in the back of the wagon, too.”

”I thought it was too late to gather oysters.”

”It ain't May yet. This month still got an V in it. You go shrimpin' with me next F-f-friday?”

”Sure.”

”We can c-c-catch us a freezerful of shrimp in just one night. Those creeks are fillin' up with Mr. Shrimp right n-n-now. Then maybe we can gig some f-f-flounder on the way home.”

”Great, Toomer. I'll come here Friday after school and just go on to your place with you,” Ben said, leaving for home, the ends of his fingers abraded from the crab sh.e.l.ls.

At five o'clock, Toomer drove his mule and wagon up in front of Fogies General Store at the base of the bridge. He removed the burlap sacks from the bushels of oysters and began carrying one of them into the store. He had not seen Red Pettus watching him from the interior of the store. Red was sitting on a counter drinking a beer. Both he and the men in the store had spent the entire day hunting for Emma Lee's a.s.sailant in the brush and swamplands of the beach. None of the other men paid Toomer any mind as he limped in with the oysters.

”Hey, Toomer,” Red said, ”did you hear that the n.i.g.g.e.r who raped Emma Lee Givens had a gimp foot and a bad stutter?”

Toomer did not answer but continued toward the back of the store where Mr. Fogle was putting up cans of vegetables.

”Got any singles, Toomer?” Mr. Fogle asked.

”Not too m-m-many,” Toomer answered.

”Yeah, she said the n-n-n.i.g.g.e.r had the worst stutter she ever heard,” Red said loudly. ”They said that Emma Lee could hardly understand a word that n.i.g.g.e.r said he was stutterin' so bad.”

”Ignore that b.a.s.t.a.r.d,” Mr. Fogle whispered, eyeing Red nervously.

”I got one more b-b-bushel,” Toomer said.

”What's a b-b-b-b-b-b-bushel?” Red asked. ”I ain't never heard of a b-b-b-b-bushel. Is that a new word?”

Toomer went outside, brus.h.i.+ng by Red with caution and with an understated obeisance, a dropping of the eyes and an expression of half-humility and half-fear that he hoped would defuse the violence in the boy that had not played itself out during the manhunt. As he lifted the second bushel of oysters from the wagon, Red grabbed two of the honey jars and said, ”Let me help you, Toomer. I always like to be of some help to a good neighbor.” He was playing for the edification of the men who gathered at the window to watch the drama.

”N-n-no. I don't need help f-f-from you.”

”You don't, Toomer?” Red said with mock hurt and winking at the men who watched from the store. ”In that case, then I just won't help you.”

He dropped the two jars of honey on the cement and waited for Toomer to respond. Toomer did not even look back, but continued into the store where he heard the laughter of these white men whom he had known all of his life. He looked around the store and memorized their faces in a glance, feeling something dangerous gnawing in him, boiling over, and he could sense that the trifurcated vein in his forehead was protruding now, and his bottom lip trembled uncontrollably. He waited until Mr. Fogle paid him for the oysters before he said, ”I got two more jars of h-h-honey in the w-w-wagon.” But then he heard the sound of two jars breaking against the brick walls of the deserted cotton warehouse beside the general store.

”That was mighty clumsy of me,” Red said to the other men. ”I broke four jars of honey tryin' to help my good buddy-roo, ol' Toomer over there. Toomer, no kiddin', I'm sorry about my b.u.t.ter fingers.” A few of the men were chuckling loudly, but the laughter had a closer kins.h.i.+p to obscenity than to joy.

As Toomer turned to leave the store, Red began following him, imitating his broken walk and his agonized, wavering speech. ”T-t-t-t-toomer, I h-h-hope y-y-you n-n-not m-m-m-mad a-a-at m-m-me.”

The black man had whirled snake quick and grabbed Red's throat in one hand and Red's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es in his other. He pulled Red screaming and gagging toward the wagon, then tripped him with his bad leg. Before Red could recover, Toomer was on him again, the black hand coming around the throat with such fury that Red could feel the blood flow cut off from the brain. Toomer twisted Red's neck until the boy's head was square up against the inside of the rubber truck tire of the wagon.

”You move, Red, and I'm gonna tell M-m-man-O-War to get gone and she'll take your h-h-head with her.”

The place filled up with white men who had sprinted from both the general store and from Ford's Hardware Store across the street as soon as Toomer had grabbed Red. But Red was screaming for no one to touch Toomer. Red's face was obscured by the shadow of the tire. Finally, Ed Mills came up to the wagon and told Toomer to release Red.