The Steep and Thorny Way(2)
Joe sank down into the water and let his chin graze the surface. Long, thick lashes framed his brown eyes, and he seemed to know precisely how to tilt his head and peek up at a girl to use those lashes to his advantage. “They never gave me a chance to speak on the witness stand,” he said. “They hurried me into that trial, and then they rushed me off to prison by the first week of February. And I didn’t get to say a goddamn word.”
I pulled the hammer into a half-cocked position with a click that echoed across the pond. Joe’s eyes widened, and he sucked in his breath.
“You lied to your family about delivering food to the poor that Christmas Eve,” I said, “and you crashed into my father because you were drunk on booze from some damn party. My new stepfather witnessed him die from injuries caused by you, so don’t you dare fib to me.”
“Don’t you dare shoot me before I talk to you about that stepdaddy of yours.”
“I don’t want to hear what you have to say about Uncle Clyde. I’m not happy he married my mama, but he’s a decent man.”
“Stop pointing that gun at me and let me talk.”
“Give me one good reason why I should listen to you.” I aimed the pistol at the skin between Joe’s eyebrows. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t squeeze this trigger and sh—”
“You should listen to me, Hanalee, because you’re living with your father’s murderer.”
A shallow breath fluttered through my lips. All the doubts and fears I’d harbored about Dr. Koning since he married my grieving mama last winter squirmed around in my gut. I stared Joe down, and he stared me down, and the gun quaked in my hand until the metal blurred before my eyes.
“For Christ’s sake, Hanalee, stop pointing that gun at me and let me talk to you.”
“Clyde Koning did not kill my father.”
“Your father was alive when I helped him into my house. He even joked with me—he said he thought he’d been hit by Santa’s sleigh as punishment for misbehaving on Christmas Eve.”
I shook my head. “My father wouldn’t have said any such thing. The only thing he did wrong that night was to walk down the dark highway to try to join us at church. He wasn’t feeling well, and—”
“His leg was bleeding and maybe broken,” continued Joe, ignoring me, rattling off words as if he had them memorized from a script. “So I let him lean his weight against me while I helped him inside. My family was running the Christmas Eve service, so I laid your father on my bed and telephoned Dr. Koning.”
“I don’t—”
“The last thing your father said to me before I opened the door for the doctor was ‘The doc’s going to be the death of me. I just know it.’”
I stepped off the gnarled root, landing so hard I jarred my neck. “That’s a lie.”
“And when I asked, ‘Do you want me to send Dr. Koning away?’ he told me, ‘No, just make sure no one ever hurts my Hanalee.’”
My eyes itched and moistened. I blinked and rocked back and forth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“When Dr. Koning arrived, he shut my bedroom door behind him and left me to wait in the living room.” Joe rose back up to a standing position. Water rained off his body and splattered into the pond, and a wave lapped at his stomach, just above his hip bones. “The next time that bedroom door opened, your father was dead. He wasn’t hardly even bleeding before that point—he seemed to have only suffered a busted leg and a sore arm from the crash. But suddenly he was dead, as if someone had just shot a poisonous dose of morphine through his veins.”
I shook my head. “That’s not true.”
“People shut me up at my trial. No one, not even my own lawyer, let me speak, as if they’d all gotten paid to keep me quiet, and I suffered for it.” His voice cracked. “I can’t . . . do you know . . .” He pushed his hair out of his eyes and exposed a C-shaped scar above his right eyebrow. “Do you know how badly I fared as a sixteen-year-old kid in that godforsaken prison, Hanalee?”
My hand sweated against the gun. “I don’t feel a shred of pity for you.”
“Just one week before the accident, someone—my father wouldn’t say who—came by the church and tried to recruit him into the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which I’m certain had something—”
“No!” I marched right into the pond’s shallow edge with the pistol still aimed at Joe’s head, and I pulled the hammer into the full-cock position. “I know full well there’s a Klan church up the highway in Bentley. I know they host baseball games and print anti-Catholic pamphlets, but they never once gave a damn that my black Christian father lived in this measly spit stain of a town.”
“I’m not the one you should be shooting, Hanalee.” Joe backed away in the water. “I’m not the one who deserves to die.”
“I’ve never even heard about a single Klan-provoked killing in this state, Joe. You can try to scare me all you want, but I know you’re just switching your guilt onto other people because you—”
“No, I’m not. Look in your stepfather’s bedroom.” He stopped backing up. “I bet you’ll find a robe and a hood stashed among his clothing somewhere. I bet he married your white mother just to piss on the memory of your father. And I bet the Klan promoted him to a powerful position for killing the last full-blooded Negro in Elston, Ore—”