The Great Santini Part 43

"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, brushing 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 kinship 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.

"Just do it, Toomer. None of these boys are going to hurt you. Every one of 'em like you better than they do Red Pettus." And the crowd erupted in laughter.

So Toomer rose, limped to the other side of the wagon, mounted, shook the reins, and climbed the causeway leading to the bridge.

"I'll see you later tonight, you f.u.c.kin' gimp n.i.g.g.e.r," Red screamed at him.

"You make me sick, Pettus," Ed Mills said, walking down toward Hobie's, pausing once to watch Toomer's wagon as it crossed the bridge.

They came for him as the sun was falling behind a red-fringed line of clouds that had banked against the horizon. They came as the river had its moment of deepest gold. Two Pettus brothers and two Pettus cousins walked boldly down the dirt road that led to Toomer's bus. A bottle of Rebel Yell was pa.s.sed back and forth between the four men until Red drained the last swallow and flung the empty bottle into the bushes along the road.

"I hear ol' Toomer whipped you good, baby brother," Mac Pettus giggled.

"He fought dirty, Mac. So how 'bout shuttin' up," Red said.

"Where them f.u.c.kin' dogs?" one of the cousins said.

"I thought they'd be all over us by now," Red said.

"You just remember that Daddy said just to put a good scare into Toomer," Mac said to Red.

"I'm gonna scare the black s.h.i.t out of him," Red said.

Toomer had gathered all the dogs, the largest to the smallest, and secured them inside the bus. The barking became deafening as the four men neared the clearing. Toomer saw the big Gray standing on his hind legs at the rear of the bus wailing at the invisible strangers in a half-human bark that hung in the air, a lower octave that endured through its particular quality of menace. But all of the dogs, the great and the small, the powerful and the weak, locked in the bus with their nostrils filling with the presence of malevolence on their urine-anointed land, bayed together as Toomer sat holding the end of a long rope on the bottom step of the bus. The door of the bus was opened just enough to give the rope free play. He knew if he released the dogs the Pettus brothers would slaughter them with salvos from their repeating shotguns. But he also knew that he was seeing something instinctual and primal taking hold of his penned dogs. The twenty-six dogs were throwing themselves at the windows of the bus and their barking became like a single feral note, except for the whine of the big Gray whose voice was taking on a new dimension of wildness with each step the Pettuses took. Toomer's dogs in the deepening decline of the sun were becoming a pack.

Red was holding a .38 revolver in his hand as he emerged from the shadows of the huge oaks that masked the beginning of the clearing. The light was poor but Toomer interpreted the gaits of the other three men and could tell the gauge of each shotgun as they pa.s.sed between the hives.

The men were laughing as they caught sight of the dogs in the bus. Toomer heard their laughter, thick with the bravura of men deep into the bottle, and though he was crouched on that bottom step, his eyes dark and appraising, his eyes steady through their fear, he saw that Red was not laughing. His two hands tightened on the rope.

When the light caught the Pettus boys between the eight deep humming boxes of bees, when they walked across a pre-determined point, a zone of violation and trespa.s.s from which he knew there would be no turning back, Toomer yanked the rope. Two of the hives crashed off their bases and fell into the road, one of them striking Mac Pettus on the leg. In an instant, the bees were on them. Red sprinted toward the river slapping at the first wave of bees that stung his arms and face. Then, as he ran, there was a single moment when he felt as though his whole body was on fire and he protected his eyes with his free hand and fled toward water, dropping his revolver on the edge of the bank just before he plunged into the creek and clawed his way to its soft mud bottom where he felt the salt.w.a.ter ignite each sting like a match in his flesh. For as long as his breath allowed, he stayed submerged in the kind and beeless creek, his eyes exploding with light whose source came from the fiercely honed and polished stingers that moved and contracted deeper into his body. When he surfaced, one of his eyes was closed and the other filled with the delicate silver of a moon small as a nail clipping. He began pulling stingers out of his face, working down, and taking his time looking back up the bluff at Toomer's bus.

The other three men had run in a panic down the dirt road they had come in on. Toomer chuckled, hearing their screams grow dimmer as they headed back toward the highway.

"I ain't gonna let no white boys hurt my chillun," he said to his dogs as he limped among his pets trying to calm them. They had shifted to the other side of the bus now, still in a frenzy, still bound in a strangely ineluctable bondage of something rooted deep in all of them, in the subliminal frontiers of the species. Toomer rubbed his hands along the shoulders of the big dogs who had commandeered positions by the windows facing the river side of the bus. He felt the stiff, arched withers of two German police dogs who ran together and often teamed to fight and get licked by the Gray. Staring out into the night, he saw nothing but he knew the bees had a.s.sured his safety that night. He lit a kerosene lamp.

Red Pettus, his face and body swollen, came dripping out of the creek, nauseated and feverish after the attack. He saw the light go on in the bus. Searching on his hands and knees along the bank, he retrieved his .38. Then, he began to walk toward Toomer.

The phone rang at the Meecham house. Ben and Mary Anne were talking at the kitchen table. Lillian was making a novena at the Catholic church and Bull had the duty at the air station. Ben answered the phone and heard the voice of Arrabelle Smalls frayed with hysteria and almost unintelligible as she wept and tried to speak at the same time. Her dialect deepened as she spoke, abandoning the smooth lyrics she had been trained to use when she worked in the houses of white men. Here on the phone, she screamed at Ben in the voice of the sea islands. The Gullah-fleshed cry of her girlhood.

"Go get Toomer, Ben, and make that boy come on over to my house tonight. Make him come on over. He got a stiffy side to him, Ben, but I be so scared about the Pettus boys. I hear just now that he grab hold to Red today and make that boy holler and it just not a good time to be colored in this town. So you got to fly and take hold to Toomer and make him come to my house tonight. I just hear the Pettus boys been runnin' their mouths about scarin' Toomer for what he done to Red. He's a stiffy boy, so you just go drag him out of that bus and tell him his mama say for you to do it. Go on, now. Get on gone, Ben. Please. Please."

"I will, Arrabelle," Ben said. "I'll have to call Dad. Then I'll go get Toomer. I promise."

"What did Arrabelle want?" Mary Anne asked.

"Where's Dad's number?"

"How do I know? He's on duty."

"He leaves it near the phone in case Mama wants to get in touch with him."

"Yeah, he also threatens her with death if she calls him for anything besides a death in the family."

Ben found the number scribbled on the cover of the small thin Ravenel telephone book. He dialed the number quickly.

"Why are you shaking, Ben?" he heard Mary Anne ask strangely.

"I'm not shaking," Ben answered.

"Yes, you are. You're shaking all over. Your hands are trembling."

"h.e.l.lo. h.e.l.lo. May I speak to Colonel Meecham, please."

"What's wrong? What did Arrabelle say?"

"h.e.l.lo, Dad," Ben said.

"What do you want, sportsfans. I can't just shoot the s.h.i.t. I've got the duty."

"Yes, sir. I know. Arrabelle just called and thinks that Toomer might be in trouble. Red and his brothers are going over there to get him. I'm going to take Mama's car and go pick him up and take him over to Arrabelle's. Is that all right?"

"Negative," Bull answered. "You stay right in that house. You hear me? Keep out of that n.i.g.g.e.r s.h.i.t. You don't want to get between the n.i.g.g.e.rs and the grits when they go for each other's throats. Consider yourself locked up in your quarters."

"But it's Toomer, Dad. He might be in trouble."

"I don't care if Toomer is being attacked by the whole Mediterranean fleet. You are not leaving that house. You got it? You read me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Toomer can take care of himself, hog. Over and out. And don't you leave that G.o.ddam house."

Hanging up the phone, Ben walked to the kitchen table and sat down. His hands were trembling out of control and adrenaline flowed through his body in giant, unseen torrents. He tried to hide his hands from his sister.

"Why did you call Dad? Why didn't you just take the station wagon and go get Toomer?"

"I don't know."

"Were you afraid to go to Toomer's?"

"No."

"Were you hoping Dad would tell you not to go?" Mary Anne said.

Ben looked up at his sister, looked into her eyes, felt the fear in his stomach, half sea, half fire and said, "Yes."