Free True Fires by Susan Carol McCarthy Page A

Betty?”
    “Yes, who’s this?” she asks.
    “Outta respect for Clay, ma’am, we’re callin’ ahead. This ain’t about you, it’s about them Nigger Dares. You gotta cast ’em out. Y’hear me, Miz Betty? You gotta cast them Niggers out!”
    Somewhere, out of the bottom of Betty’s groggy brain, a name swims up to her. A friend of Clay’s from long ago.
    “Leroy? Leroy Russell, is that you? What’s this all about?”
    The caller clicks off. And, in the widening silence that follows, Betty hangs up the phone and shakes her head, trying to clear the confusing jumble of thoughts.
    What was that about?
Unable to make sense of things in the dark, Betty turns on the light to think.
Why would Leroy
Russell—I’m certain that’s who it was—call me now, in the middle
of the night? “Outta respect for Clay,” he said—and “Cast them
Niggers out!” Didn’t the story in the
Towncrier
explain they were
part Indian? And, besides, they have references—Lila Hightower,
the Judge’s own daughter, after all!!!
    Just as Betty’s about to dismiss the whole thing as a young man’s craziness—
God knows my Clay did worse things
—the ring of metal hitting metal sings outside the house. It’s another sound that swims up to her from the faraway past, when Cash was posting For Sale signs at the drained swamp lots on the other side of the lake. It is, no doubt, the song of a post-hole digger forcing its way through the dense clay hardpan just beneath the earth’s sandy surface.
    Betty pulls on her pink robe and, hand on her hip, crosses stiffly through the darkened kitchen—
No need to disturb the
first-floor tenants
—to peer out the dining room’s big front-facing windows.
    The scene on the lawn sends her hand, clutching thin cotton, to her throat. Outside, in a ghostly circle, ten, maybe twelve, men, dressed head to toe in white robes, hold fiery orange torches above their heads. The air reeks of flaming kerosene. In their center, a man wields the singing post-hole digger up, then down, then jams it in the earth, then yanks up two dark shovelfuls of dirt. At his signal, two other men hand off their torches and join him. Something like a huge hammer rises high above their heads, then straightens, then drops with a wooden thud into the hole. Betty feels fear, like cold metal, the taste of copper, on her tongue. She sees the sudden sweep of torch, the flash of vertical flame, the streak of yellow fire. She recoils in horror at the blazing, crackling fifteen-foot cross before her. One of the men turns, lifts his torch toward the house. “Cast them Niggers out!” he yells. “Or, next time, we’ll burn ’em out!” Panic balloons inside her chest, bursts in a high screeching howl as Betty faints and falls onto the diamond-patterned parquet floor.
    WHEN SHE COMES TO—thanks to smelling salts thrust beneath her nose by old Mrs. Wexall of Minneapolis, Room Four—she grasps the woman’s papery arms and attempts to haul herself up screaming, “Fire! The house! On fire!! Help me, PLEASE!!!”
    “Calm down, Miz Betty!” Bunny Collins, the young manicurist from Room Five, tells her. “It’s all right!” But, stumbling outside, she must see for herself. The men in white have vanished into the night. And the men of the house— welder Tim Wallace, winter fishermen George and Henry Howell, regional sales manager Graham Firth, frail Mr. Wexall and his brother-in-law Mr. Lindstrom—have organized a bucket brigade from the side yard’s big cistern. The flaming cross is mostly extinguished, sputtering sparks into the shadows.
    She runs to them, weeping. “Has anyone checked the roof? The house! It’s all, ALL I have left!!!”
    “It’s okay, Miz Betty. Look!” they tell her, sloshing buckets. “See for yourself !”
    By the light of the moon, she sees Charmwood—all that remains of the dream and the nightmare that has been her life— stands unharmed.
    THEY CROWD AROUND HER at the big dining-room table, oddly