The Steep and Thorny Way(27)
“They call him”—her ears turned pink, and she hunched her shoulders—“a word I’m not going to say, but I know what it implies because of the shocking things they talk about him doing. They’re planning what they’ll do to him if they find him, and I have to wonder if Laurence is hiding him just to brag that he captured him for everyone. Just to impress them.”
“Oh, Jesus.” I dug my fingernails into the folds of my quilt.
Fleur transferred the sprig of purple flowers into my lap. “Please stay away from Joe. It’s not safe to be around him. He’s got . . . He’s not . . .” She licked her lips. “The other boys say he—”
“I know Joe’s secret, Fleur. I know the types of things those other boys are probably saying about him.” I picked up the flowers by the stems and brushed the ball of my right thumb over the petals, which looked like wide-open mouths about to chomp down on my finger. “What is this for?” I asked.
“It’s alfalfa . . . for luck.” She cupped her hand around my hand and held the flowers along with me. “Please, promise me you’ll keep safe. Don’t go looking for your father’s ghost anymore or hunting around for Joe.”
I sucked in my breath. “Are you safe around those boys, Fleur?”
“Mama’s always there. And Laurence wouldn’t ever let any of them lay a finger on me.”
“You see why I worry about the two of us getting stuck here in Elston? That pack of hungry wolves you’re talking about contains all your eligible picks for a husband.”
Fleur nodded. “I know. Maybe I should just join a convent.”
“No, the Klan is anti-Catholic, remember? They’ll pass out pamphlets and host a baseball game to fund the demolition of your convent.”
Our eyes met, and we both broke into nervous snickers with our heads bent close together.
“It’s not really funny, is it?” she asked, still tittering. She leaned her head against my shoulder, and we both sighed at the same time, breathing the same air. “It’s awfully unsettling.”
I rested my head against hers and closed my eyes, absorbing the warmth of her body through the dampness of my hair. “It is unsettling. And it makes me want to get the two of us out of this place as soon as I can.”
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, WASHINGTON COUNTY, OREGON, CIRCA 1890s–1900s.
CHAPTER 10
THE MOUSETRAP
FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, THROUGHOUT all my dusting and mending and other household chores, I contemplated the loss of Laurence in my life. I wondered if Uncle Clyde was to blame for that particular heartache as well.
Looking back over the past two years, I could see all the influences that might have turned Fleur’s brother against me. The arrival of Robbie and Gil Witten in Elston. Daddy’s death. Dr. Koning’s appearance on our doorstep to check on my grieving mother, day after day after day. Somehow, all those incidents could have interconnected. Little strings that, once pulled, unraveled the world around them.
1921.
The year the KKK arrived in Oregon.
The summer Laurence wrapped his arms around me and taught me how to shoot that derringer.
The Christmas Eve Joe crashed the Model T into Daddy and witnessed Uncle Clyde take control of my father’s fate.
The last time Laurence spoke to me with compassion.
Robbie. Gil. Clyde Koning. They must have banded together and persuaded Laurence that he needed to change his views—stuffed his mind full of prejudices against me.
Conformity.
Laurence quit our fairy tales and kissing games around the time he turned ten or eleven. He said he preferred playing ball games with other boys, and his face turned scarlet whenever my arm would accidentally bump against his or we touched some other way. When I got older—twelve, thirteen—he’d tickle my sides and make me squeal sometimes, if the mood suited him. If I said something that made him laugh, I’d see the same spark in his eyes from the days when we sat side by side by side, the three of us—Laurence, Fleur, and me—fishing in the creek with our bare shins dangling in the water.
Laurence danced with me at a wedding for two of our fellow church members the same week that I turned fourteen. He held my right hand and pressed the fingers of his other hand against the small of my back, and he squished his lips together as if he wanted to snicker—the same way he’d sometimes laugh and blush when we kissed as children. A week later, he taught me to shoot that gun so I would never end up on the floor of my house beneath white men crazed with power and hate, like what happened to Mrs. Downs in Bentley—a war widow, no less, with skin as black as pitch. He was just fifteen when he showed me how to use the weapon, and his chin, so close to mine, had grown fuzzy with the first sprouts of blond whiskers. He told me, with his breath warm against my ear, “Don’t ever let them hurt you, Hanalee. Don’t ever let them make you feel small.”
Then, six months later, he left. He still lived beneath the Paulissens’ roof. He physically remained with us. Yet after Christmas Eve, after Daddy’s death, the Laurence I knew and loved abandoned us. I felt I’d lost my right arm, or something else equally vital to my existence.
I missed him.
And I now wondered if Uncle Clyde and the KKK were to blame.
BEFORE SUPPER, AFTER PINNING UP MY HAIR, WHICH finally felt dry, I snuck into the living room and pulled my grandfather’s pipe-scented old copy of the family Bible off a middle shelf of the bookcase. I’d always loved the grainy feel of the black leather cover sliding against my fingertips and the crinkle of the gilt-edged pages, as thin as onion skin. I placed Babbitt down on the rug next to the armchair and put the Bible in its place on the end table. With the quietest of movements, I peeled back the cover and flipped through the fragile pages to the Second Book of Samuel. While holding my breath, I secured a pencil from my dress pocket and underlined one of the passages involving Bathsheba, the widow of the man whom David sent to his death.