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Chapter Twelve

LATE NIGHT VISITATION

Vida Snow had heard about the boy they fished out of the river. Everybody had. It’s all anybody talked about when the white folks weren’t listening. Vida had seen the boy once, walking to the store with his Uncle Mose. Down from Chicago and only fourteen, they say. Mississippi was dangerous enough for the colored brought up to know the nasty unpredictability of white folks. That boy’s momma should have never sent her son down to Mississippi by himself.

Vida laughed darkly at the thought. Who was she to talk about mommas keeping their children safe?

She wished she could forget. Of course, she couldn’t. She remembered too well the night after her father preached on the Baby Moses, how she was unable to sleep. She had been lying awake with her own child nestled to her side, fretting over her father’s meaning, when her room exploded in light. Outside her window, a truck revved its engine.

Her father’s feet hit the floor and Vida saw him flee past her room in his nightshirt and no shoes. He was heading out onto the porch.

“Who that?” Levi called into the light. “What business you got here?” Vida lifted Nate and moved to the window.

She saw a man stumble from his truck. She couldn’t see his face for the light, but she knew who it was. Billy Dean weaved around to the rear, and pulled out his shotgun. He staggered back again and propped himself against the hood, between the glaring headlights. “Get that little rat out here,” he slurred. “That little albino piece of shit.”

Vida instinctively pulled Nate closer.

“Mr. Billy Dean, sir,” her father stammered, falling back toward the door. “We don’t mean you no harm. I sure didn’t know about you and Miss Hertha.” He took another step back, his arm reaching behind him for the door. “I hope you two be real happy,” he said. “And I sure sorry for that little misunderstanding.”

Lights began to come on throughout the quarter. Maybe, Vida prayed, someone would come to their rescue. Maybe it would be Rezel!

With one arm Billy Dean steadied himself against the hood of the truck and with the other he raised the shotgun to his hip. It was aimed at her father’s midsection. “Not as sorry as you gonna be. I told you what I wanted. Get that boy out here. Now!”

The door flew open and Willie came charging out past his father with a baseball bat. He took the porch in two leaps and was halfway down the steps before Billy Dean got both barrels aimed at the boy’s head.

“Stop right there, boy. I’ll blow it off. I swear I will.”

Willie froze.

Billy Dean’s uncle, who had been standing there frantically rubbing the back of his neck, spoke up. “Billy Dean, this old preacher ain’t going to tell the Senator about that baby. We already torched his church. You ain’t going to tell, is you, Preacher?”

Levi didn’t answer. His eyes turned toward the distance, at a lit-up place on the horizon where his church stood.

Furman put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “Let’s get turned around and go on to the house. Tomorrow’s another day.”

His uncle’s words hadn’t softened the vicious expression on Billy Dean’s face.

That’s when Vida knew it for certain. The man wasn’t there to scare them. He was there to kill her son. No one could save Nate but her. She took her son up in her arms and ran. Trying to make it across the field and into the bayou had been the only way.

She remembered the shotgun blasts, the spray of buckshot that sent her reeling into the dark. But what else could she have done? Hadn’t she done all a mother could do?

The funeral had been a small, pitiful affair. Most people were too afraid to be seen in public with Levi. A preacher from Holmes County, an old friend of Levi’s, had traveled in by night to hold the service. Nobody cried except for Vida, her wounds bandaged but still raw. Everybody else, including her father, sat dry-eyed before the little pine coffin as the preacher spoke mournfully about how the innocence of children was a sure ticket to the Promised Land.

As the preacher droned on, Vida’s body ached more from her loss of Nate than from the lead pellets that remained in her leg, embedded in muscle, so close to the bone. She tried to sooth herself by thinking of the Promised Land. She had never noticed before how often her people spoke of it. That made three the number of times that very week she had heard about the Promised Land. Once was from Lillie Dee. She had complained that Rezel was following the rest of her sons up North, to the Promised Land. Another time was from her father’s pulpit. It was where Moses was headed to.

Now this preacher was praying for Nate’s safe journey, saying Nate was gone off to the Promised Land, as if it might be a good thing she had lost her baby. Vida couldn’t believe that Moses’s momma would agree.

Even as a grown woman of twenty, Vida still didn’t believe it. Yet what she did believe with all her heart, what she thought about every day in the fields, what she lay awake at night promising Nate, what she swore to Jesus in every prayer she breathed, was that one day soon she would balance her books with the sheriff.