Midnight Without a Moon(38)

Seeing that she had deflated me, she sniffed haughtily and said, “Git on outta my room and quit ack’n like a dirn fool. You see that boy all the time.”

Slapping me hard on my backside as I passed her, she added, “That’s for running down my dirn radio batt’ries.”

I felt as low as a smashed spider as I stumbled into the front room, where Hallelujah, fedora in hand, sat on the three-legged sofa near the front door. “Rosa Lee,” he said, his voice sounding relieved. “I thought something had happened to you.”

Swallowing the tears before they formed, I motioned him to follow me outside to the front porch.

“I went to the field looking for you, and Mr. Carter said you were sick in bed,” Hallelujah said, his voice rushing out. He slumped into one of the close-to-broken chairs on the porch. I leaned against a post instead.

“I’m okay,” I mumbled, staring at the floorboards.

Hallelujah placed his fedora back on his head and leaned forward in the chair. “I knocked and knocked and nobody answered. I was worried.”

When I didn’t say anything, Hallelujah began to nervously tap his foot. “Mr. Carter told me to go get Miss Sweet. I ran to the Robinsons’ and found Miss Sweet starching shirts in the backyard.” Still nervously tapping his foot, he wrapped his arms around his stomach, as if to calm himself. “I didn’t know what to think when you didn’t answer the door,” he said, his tone somber.

“I’m okay” was all I could muster. Tears threatened to gush. I felt like a fool letting Ma Pearl catch me like that. I felt even more like a fool standing outside on the porch with Hallelujah after I’d just been inside dancing undressed in front of the mirror. I didn’t think the day could get any worse until Hallelujah uttered his next words.

“They found him, Rosa Lee,” he said quietly.

I shook my head. “What?”

Hallelujah’s voice choked when he spoke. “They found the boy from Chicago.”

Found. I grabbed my chest. From the look on Hallelujah’s face, I knew it was worse than when Obadiah Malone was found, passed out, near Stillwater Lake.

“They found him yesterday,” Hallelujah said. “Preacher just got word this morning.”

My throat went dry. “Wh-wh-where?” I managed to ask. “Where did they find him?”

“The Tallahatchie River.”

The landscape swirled. I grabbed the porch post to keep from falling.

Hallelujah took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped sweat from his forehead. “A fisherman found him caught up in a bunch of tree roots. They tied a cotton-gin fan around his neck with barbed wire,” he said, his voice strained. “Tried to keep him down with the weight.”

Hallelujah stared toward the ancient oak in the front yard. His eyes seemed to be fixed on that tree for an eternity before he finally said, “He floated to the surface anyway. No matter how hard they tried,” he said, swallowing, fighting back tears, “they couldn’t hide it. They couldn’t hide their crime.”





Chapter Twenty


SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3


WHEN I WAS LITTLE, AUNT BELLE READ ME A BOOK she had found in the trash at the Robinsons’. I remember the book’s cover. It was red, yellow, black, and tattered. And I remember the title: Remarkable Story of Chicken Little. I asked Aunt Belle what “remarkable” meant. She said it meant that the story was unbelievable. After she read it, I understood why. Chicken Little thought the sky was falling—?that the world, as she knew it, was coming to an end.

She was wrong. And because of her foolish mistake, she and all her neighbors were coaxed straight into a fox’s den and eaten by the fox. And like Chicken Little, because of one foolish mistake, a boy was dead.

That Saturday morning, as I sat on the front porch with Papa and waited for Uncle Ollie to arrive, I, too, felt as if the sky were falling. The blanketlike cloud draped over us with such blackness it seemed as if God had asked his faithful angel Gabriel to paint it that way. It seemed that any minute the sky would open up and wash us all away.

Maybe Hallelujah was right. Maybe Mississippi itself was hell. No. Mississippi was worse than hell. At least in hell you know who the enemy is. And at least, if you believe the Bible, you know how to keep yourself from going there. But in Mississippi you never knew what little thing could spark a flame and get you killed. Registering to vote. Voting. Or even something as little as whistling at a white woman.

But it wasn’t just the storm clouds that darkened my morning. It was Aunt Belle; she had left without bothering to say goodbye. The minute she found out about the Chicago boy’s funeral, she sent word by Reverend Jenkins that she and her northern comrades were leaving—?heading to Chicago. I figured that’s probably where she was at that very moment—?in Chicago—?preparing to attend a funeral for someone she’d never met while the folks who loved her sat under the heavy weight of a thunderous Mississippi sky.

As Papa and I waited for Uncle Ollie, we didn’t dare sit in the house. Ma Pearl was in a huff—?slinging pots and pans around as if they had scorned her. She had planned to go fishing that morning, but both the thunder and the news that a dead body had been floating in the river for three days kept her at home.

Papa and I sat in silence as we watched the black clouds roll across the sky, looking as if there was no end to them. Thunder rumbled in the distance, yet it was still so hot that it felt as if the heat could burn a person’s skin off. No one thought the weather would turn so suddenly, as the day before had been sunny. Now it felt as if those thick clouds had trapped the heat over Stillwater the way heat got trapped inside the belly of our black woodstove.