There I was, trying to explain the concept of fairness to a woman carrying two huge baskets of other people’s washing.
At the crossroads in front of Hemple’s store, I saw the usual two old men playing checkers. I stopped in front of their cracker barrel. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” I said.
One man looked up at me sadly. The other one said, “Well, suh, ain’t nobody strong enough to beat ’em. And so what they did was, they got off scot-free. Nothin’ new ’bout that.”
“Ben.” A soft voice, a hand on my arm. I turned. It was Moody.
She was wearing her white jumper again. She even had a little smile on her face.
“You planning to go door-to-door, explain to everybody in the whole Quarters what happened in the white man’s courtroom?” she asked.
“I would,” I said.
“Don’t you worry your purty head about it,” she said. “All the explaining in the world won’t change a thing.” She took me by the elbow, leading me away. The men watched us go.
“Papaw is worse sick,” she said. “I think the excitement of the trial done it. You want to see him? He wants to see you.”
Chapter 127
ABRAHAM LAY in the narrow iron bed in the front parlor, just the way he was lying there the night the White Raiders attacked. His voice was so faint I barely heard him. His lips were cracked and dry. “I imagine you been going around beating yourself up pretty good about this verdict, eh, Ben?” he asked.
“I thought I could accomplish something,” I said. “The country was watching, from the president on down. I thought we could make a little bit of progress.”
“Who’s to say we didn’t?” he asked.
Moody gently dabbed his forehead with rubbing alcohol, then blew lightly to cool his skin. Every time she touched his face, Abraham’s eyes closed in gratitude. I thought he must be seeing clouds, getting ready to dance with the angels.
“When you get to be as old as me, Ben, you can’t help but remember a lot of things. I was thinking about my mama… one time I stole a nickel from her purse. She knew it before she even looked in there, just by peering in my eyes. She said, ‘Abraham, I don’t know what you guilty of, but you sho’ nuff guilty of somethin’, so you might as well go on and confess.’ I cried for an hour, then I give back that nickel.”
Moody kept rubbing his face, rhythmically massaging the skin with her fingers. His eyes closed, then opened. He went on.
“I was just a young man during the war,” he said. “You ever heard that expression, how they say the ground ran red with blood?”
I said I had heard it.
“I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. “I saw the ground run red. I was up at Vicksburg, just after the fight. I saw… oh, Lord. Hurts to remember. I saw legs, you know, and arms, and feet, big heaps of ’em outside the hospital tent. All rottin’ in the sun.”
I could see the horror of it all in my mind’s eye.
“But bad as it was,” Abraham went on, “that’s when things begun to change. A big change at the first, then they took it back. But what happened in that courtroom… that’ll change it. You just wait. You’ll live to see it.”
He fell into such a deep silence that I thought he might have fallen asleep. Maybe he was beginning his passage into the next world.
But he had a few more words to say.
“Moody said you told the jury a saying from the book of Samuel,” he said.
I nodded.
“That’s one of my favorite passages,” he said. “I sure hated to miss you. Would you say it out to me now?”
“Of course, Abraham,” I said.
I cleared my throat.
“For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”
Then Abraham spoke the last words he would ever say to me.