Free The Truth Hurts by Nancy Pickard Page A

decide for themselves where they want to spend the night?”
    She started to snap at him but suddenly realized the truth of what he was implying—that she was treating a grown woman and man as if they were children or slaves—and Eulalie Fisher flushed with embarrassment. She leaned forward so that Clayton caught her in his arms and gently embraced her.
    “So much of the worst of us is purely habit,” she murmured.
    “That’s the truth, my darling,” he said. “We’re all unconscious creatures, even the best of us, and even at the best of times.”
    “I’m frightened, Clayton.”
    “Don’t be, Eulalie. We’ll be all right.”
    “Oh, Clay!” She pulled away from him in exasperation. “Even you can’t possibly find a silver lining in this!”
    He smiled tenderly at her. “But my dear, we haven’t even seen a cloud yet.”
    “No cloud! What do you call the absence of thirty-two guests at my party?”
    “Good riddance?”
    “Oh, Clay, you’re impossible!”
    Even in her indignation and anxiety, Eulalie had to laugh at his joke. That’s what he could always do for her, make her laugh when she didn’t want to. It annoyed her no end, but she needed it, and she knew that she did, especially tonight. With a grimace of exasperation, she took his hand and pulled him back into the living room to be with their guests.

    When the speech was over—and just shortly before Medgar Evers got ambushed in Philadelphia, Mississippi—the remaining six guests started nervously gathering their belongings. One by one, and fairly quickly, they moved up to Eulalie to give her a peck on the cheek and to Clayton, who kissed the ladies good night and shook their husbands’ hands. To one another they said ambiguously, though the meaning was clear to all of them, “Y’all call us if you need anything tonight, y’hear?”
    “And that’s when it happened,” Eulalie remembers, with a shudder.

    The first sign of trouble was the sound of the doorbell, which Clayton went to answer by himself. His guests were still in the living room, finishing their good nights to his wife. He returned to them with two suited FBI agents at his back. Twenty additional agents and local police officerscame around each side of the great old house, all of them carrying weapons, and some of those guns were drawn.
    “As if it wasn’t Miss Eulalie’s house!” Eulalie, herself, remarks indignantly, many years later. “As if I had submachine guns stashed in my potato salad and Bolsheviks under my bed!”
    That was bad enough, but it was going to get a lot worse.
    The eight members of Hostel—Goodwins, Wiegans, Reeves, and Fishers—were walked—not driven—down to the Sebastion jail that night.
    It was a deliberate public spectacle that drew vicious attention: hollering, name-calling, tomatoes and rocks thrown, horns honking, even a few hotheads flinging themselves at the detainees and getting in a few punches at the men before the agents or cops slowly . . . so slowly . . . pulled them off.
    “That parade they made of us, that was the point,” Eulalie recalls from the safety of her boudoir forty years later. “They had put out the word before we even set foot downtown. They wanted to show us off so everybody in town would know who their enemies were.” She takes a puff, more like a sip, from her cigarette and delicately releases the smoke into the pretty room. “Nothing was ever the same in Sebastion after that, which is maybe the way it should have been, all along.”
    They were paraded to the jail, fearing for their lives with every step.
    But nobody in the dinner party was arrested that night, and not ever.
    Frightened to death, yes, and threatened with prosecution, jail time, and worse, but not a single one arrested. They were all released after an hour of hassling, and they were even driven back to their homes.
    “We couldn’t figure it out,” Eulalie admits. “Until later that night.”
    That’s when they found out where the actual