As an Old Memory Read online

  “Are you trying to watch TV?” she asked.

  “No, Thomas wanted to talk to me while he eats. Is that okay, or am I restricted from talking to my brother?” he asked.

  “If you keep up that smart mouth, you will be,” his dad said with a mouthful of spaghetti. “You’ve got a hefty amount of grounding already. Do you really want to tempt fate?”

  “I’m sorry. Can I go on in before he’s completely scarfed down his dinner and forgotten what he wanted to tell me?” Josh asked.

  His dad twirled more spaghetti on his fork. “Don’t worry; he won’t forget that.”

  Josh gave his dad a strange look. “What was it?”

  “I won’t steal his thunder.” Alan shoved the wad of pasta into his mouth.

  Josh hurried into the kitchen. Thomas sat at the round table, already making quick work of the pile of spaghetti and a quart of sweet tea. Tomato sauce smeared across his face almost like a Glasgow smile. His brother always ate like a man starving in the desert.

  He sat down across from Thomas, pulled one of the leftover rolls out of the basket, and picked at it. “What’s this fantastic story?”

  Thomas swallowed and took a slug of tea. “We saw a ghost.”

  It took everything Josh could do to keep from laughing in his brother’s face. A mouthful of roll helped. “What are you talking about?”

  “A ghost, a real live spook. If I hadn’t been with Dad and seen his face, I’d’ve thought I was imagining it, but his face said everything.”

  “Where at?”

  “The school. He thought I was playing a joke on him. He did that creepy ‘I want my tail’ thing he used to do. This laughing came from nowhere, and wind started blowing down the hallway. I hauled it after that, but he said on our way home that he saw a shadow walking up the hall.”

  Josh rolled his eyes. He couldn’t resist it. “You heard a ghost.”

  “Don’t be like that. I’ve never seen Dad look like that. It was the real deal. Ghostbusters or Scooby-Doo stuff.”

  “The ghosts on Scooby-Doo are fake,” Josh reminded his brother.

  “Why can’t you get into this? You like reading those dumb horror novels.”

  “Ghosts aren’t real.”

  Thomas swallowed more spaghetti. “I thought so too, but there one was.”

  “You say Dad looked like he was scared shitless?”

  “I was,” his dad said, walking in behind him, “and watch your language.”

  “You think it was a ghost?” Josh asked.

  Alan put his plate in the sink and rinsed it off. “I know it was a ghost, but I think it was the ghost of Tommy Jones, one of the kids killed at the massacre.”

  “Why?” Thomas and Josh asked at the same time, both with a mouthful of food.

  “Because when I thought it was Tommy Boy playing a joke on me, I yelled his name. The ghost responded to it. I saw those lights in the window of the gym. Of course he said, ‘Tommy Jones’ when I told him to identify himself. The thing that really scared me was, he knew we were McAdamses.”

  Thomas snapped his fingers, “You said that something made you run to the old gym the other night, and there was that explosion no one else knows anything about.”

  “Those can’t be related.” Josh stood to go back to his room and read some more of Christine. “Y’all are weird. Let me know when you call Kathryn Tucker Windham, and she can tell Jeffrey to add Tommy Jones to her next Thirteen Alabama Ghosts book.”

  He popped the last bit of roll in his mouth and walked back to his bedroom. Things seemed too quiet when he settled in to continue reading. Josh turned on the stereo with the remote. The music flowed out a little louder than he’d intended. He cranked the volume down as a song ended.

  “You’re listening to 105.9 the X. We’ll get back to the music in a minute,” the far too perky British-accented DJ said. “I was talking today with Coyote Jay about creepy things. Halloween will be coming up soon. He was telling me about this massacre that happened years ago in a small town over in West Alabama. Now apparently, some local kids want to have an anniversary dance related to it. Bad show is what I say. What do you think? Give us a call.”

  “You don’t want to know my opinion.” Josh hit the button on the remote that started the CD player.

  Melancholy music started playing from the speakers. He took his book and started reading. His mind wouldn’t focus on the words. He read paragraphs over and over again. The only thing that occupied his mind was what had happened to him the other night. Thomas had been right: something had compelled him to run to the old gym. Even if no one else in the whole town had experienced it, he had felt a giant explosion. The idea of ghosts seemed too far-fetched, though. He looked at the words of the book again. The idea of continuing slogging through a novel about a possessed car didn’t seem all that appealing. He slipped the front jacket flap over the pages he’d read, careful not to crease it, put the book down, and flipped off the lamp. The music continued to play as he stared at the dark ceiling, waiting to fall asleep.

  Josh wandered through the cemetery while his grandfather stood graveside at the service for his friend. He yawned. That’s all he had done for most of the day. His mother had woken him up at his usual time for school. Despite the lack of entertainment and hauling his cantankerous grandfather to a funeral for another cantankerous old man, Josh hoped that he’d at least get to sleep in. No dice. As he drifted deeper into the cemetery, he wondered how rude it would be if he perched atop one of the gravestones. If he got deep enough into the old part that was high with weeds and snuggled among old cedar trees, no one would notice. Of course, that part was far from the service, he wouldn’t know when it was over, and Grandpa Sim would have to come find him. A horrible lecture with a fair amount of swearing and derogatory name-calling would ensue.

  He wandered around and looked at the names on the gravestones. It had been a while since he’d been to the cemetery. When he was younger, his folks would drag him and Thomas up there what seemed like every week, for things like funerals for his dad’s great aunts and uncles. There was always the special Decoration Day visit sometime in the spring, when everything laid heavy in that greenish-yellow pollen that made him sneeze. Ever since Grandma Sally had moved to Birmingham, those visits had dwindled to none.

  Back then, Josh and Thomas—who were both not very good readers yet but loved to try—would attempt to outdo each other reading the names. When they got a bit older and understood humor a little better, like the hilarity of fart jokes or farts themselves, they looked for funny names. Eventually, it turned into finding names that sounded dirty. During those searches, they’d found one particular tombstone that had a picture of the deceased on it. It wasn’t etched into the stone. Instead, it was a photograph that looked like an old senior portrait trapped in a plastic bubble. The thing creeped him out back then. Josh tried to find it again.

  It was somewhere near a big tree. Josh remembered stepping barefoot on a sweet gum burr near that grave. Why he’d been running around in the graveyard without his shoes, he wasn’t sure. Any time you stepped on one of those stupid things, it left an impression. A glance around the expansive old cemetery found a large sweet gum tree, with a few yellow leaves, back toward the funeral service. It was probably better to get closer to the ceremony anyway. It had to be wrapping up soon. No one could be interesting enough to have a long service in the funeral home chapel and a second one at the cemetery.

  As he made his way to the sweet gum tree, he avoided stepping on the actual graves. Grandma Sally had told him to never step on the graves because it was disrespectful. His dad always said that if you disrespect the dead, they’ll reach up and grab you. It was completely crazy, but Josh still didn’t do it, like people didn’t step on cracks in the sidewalk for fear of breaking their mother’s back. He would read the occasional headstone for fun. As he got closer to the sweet gum tree, he spied Purvis Smithfield. Thomas found that one years ago while they played find the dirtiest name. He won that
round and used it as a trump card until Josh had stumbled upon Ariella, which they pronounced “areola” out of ignorance. After that, Josh always won. Old Purvis had been in the ground a long time, buried way back in 1912. Thoughts about how far back in time that was filled Josh’s mind when he spied the tombstone he’d been looking for.

  He hurried over to it. It was close enough to the funeral service for the preacher’s loud praying to be heard. As soon as “Amen” was uttered, his grandfather would be itching to go. Josh had to get his look at that creepy grave marker before that.

  Something had happened. The picture in the plastic bubble was gone. Instead there was a black glob in its place. Josh reached down and touched it. The plastic itself had melted. The black glob on the inside was the ashes of the picture. It had burned somehow. He couldn’t figure out how that would happen without it being straight-out vandalism—maybe someone had brought a torch out there and melted it.

  The “Amen” came, echoed by different men at the service. His grandfather broke away from the crowd and headed toward his car. Josh didn’t hesitate to get over there. He looked at the name on the stone to refresh his memory of who laid there so that he could tell Thomas about it.

  Tommy Jones, June 10, 1939 - October 23, 1956

  Chapter Eight

  1956

  Seven days after the massacre

  Sim stood with his family at Tommy Jones’s graveside service. A lot of the kids from the high school attended. He recognized most of them from around town. A few had visited Charlotte over the last few days, too. He had no idea who the younger ones were unless they looked like an older sibling. Before the service had started, a lot of those kids, quite a few of their parents, and a couple of random adults had asked about Charlotte. Some expressed surprise that she hadn’t attended the funerals. Sim told them all in no uncertain terms how insensitive they were.

  The overly elaborate casket was lowered into the ground, and the pallbearers, all schoolmates of the deceased, started shoveling the red dirt into the hole.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jones stood and walked away from the grave. She bent over crying into a lace handkerchief while her husband kept his arm around her. They were both dressed far too warmly. The late October sun beat down on them in their long winter coats. They passed by Sim and his folks.

  “Sorry for your loss,” his mother said, touching Mrs. Jones on the arm.

  The other woman looked up with red eyes. Sim’s burned in sympathy. A little smile came on the woman’s face. “Thank you. How is your girl? Having to find all that must have been something terrible for her.”

  “Both our kids are all right,” Sim’s daddy said. “Our boy, Sim, found Charlotte after she fainted.”

  The Joneses looked at him. Both looked so downtrodden that they might go home and blow out their brains. He hoped one day, if he got that pitiful, he’d be able to do that.

  “You helped catch that colored boy who did all this,” Mr. Jones said. “I want to shake your hand. You can’t bring back our Tommy, but you got justice for him.”

  The older man stuck his free hand out to Sim. It was awkward shaking with his left hand, but he put as much gusto into as he could. Every single parent of the victims had thanked him for catching that Tobias Abernathy and taking care of him. Of course, if any of them truly knew what happened, they’d probably be less willing to congratulate him.

  “Thank you. It had to be done for your son and my sister,” Sim said, personalizing the message for them as he had all the mourning families.

  “We’d heard rumors about that,” Mr. Jones said. “We’d hoped they were false.”

  “They were, and now we can forget about it.” Sim’s mother patted him on the back. “Thanks to Sim, Marshall, and that House boy.”

  “It had to be done,” Sim repeated.

  That phrase had become his go-to response when people started talking about how they dealt with Tobias Abernathy. It punched people in the gut so that they would recognize the need to keep the uppity niggers in their place. It had worked.

  “You ought to see the stone we have for Tommy,” Mrs. Jones said. “It’s beautiful. It will even have a copy of his senior portrait on it, sealed in a plastic bubble to keep the elements from harming it. I’ll always get to see my boy as he was.”

  “Come on dear, before you get yourself all worked up again. I don’t need you having a spell out here.” Mr. Jones started his walk back to the car.

  Mrs. Jones had been fainting from the overwhelming emotion. Sim found it all a little silly. He’d lost his fiancée, and his sister came in and out of a catatonic state, but he dealt with it fine. A couple shots of rotgut moonshine took the edge off.

  Someone pulled on his elbow. He turned to see Sheriff Johnson standing in his fancy uniform with his hat under his arm.

  “What is it, Sheriff?” he asked.

  “Step over here with me,” the sheriff said.

  Sim followed Sheriff Johnson several yards from the group. The sheriff looked very concerned. Usually, the guy seemed like nothing fazed him.

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  “Mr. Harrington’s got a guy snooping around about the Abernathy thing. This ain’t some yahoo from up in Jasper or over in Birmingham. He’s a Pinkerton or something.”

  Sim snorted as he took a cigarette out of his pocket. “This isn’t the Old West, Sheriff. I’m not sure there are Pinkertons anymore.”

  “I know he ain’t a Pinkerton, but he ain’t from around here either. He’s from Chicago or New York.”

  “And what was done had to be done,” Sim quoted himself.

  “Unfortunately, the law sees it a little different, due process and all that Constitutional stuff.” The sheriff took a stub of a cigar from his shirt pocket and started chewing on the end. “This guy’s straight up law and order. I know that boy killed those folks, and I know what he supposedly did to your sister, but this guy ain’t going to take hearsay as an answer.”

  “What was done had to be done.”

  Sheriff Johnson spat his cigar on the ground and grabbed Sim by the shoulders, giving him a good shake. “This guy’s a colored lover. He’s got some kind of civil rights connection up north, maybe even in Washington.”

  “Run him off.” Sim took the final drag off his smoke. “It’s not like you’ve never done that before.”

  “It ain’t the same. He’s staying with the Harringtons, and what we did isn’t exactly legal. This guy has legal legs to stand on.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “We all go to jail. Some of us may even get the chair. You and your buddies are probably the most likely to get that.”

  Sim smiled. Riding in Yellow Mama wouldn’t be that bad. He’d hate to fry for killing a monkey, but if it happened, it happened. “What are you worried about? Sounds like you got it easy.”

  “Do you know what those cons who I put in prison would do to me in there? I might as well get the chair for mercy’s sake.”

  “I’ll figure out something,” Sim said. “Get out of here. An old man like you asking advice of a young buck like me is embarrassing.”

  Sheriff Johnson left. Sim told his folks to head home in the car. He said that he needed to think and would walk home to clear his head.

  As soon as everyone left the cemetery, he walked to the old part under the cedars and perched on top of a headstone to think about what had happened. In all truth, what he and the boys had done needed to be done. Any jury in Alabama would agree with them. All the worry that Sheriff Johnson expressed was for nothing, but times were changing. Pinehurst had allowed a colored family to move in, even if they were domestics for the Harrington family. Ten years ago, when he’d graduated high school, that wouldn’t have been tolerated, Harringtons or not. In those days, the sun did not set on living niggers in Pinehurst.

  He took out another cigarette. As it burned down with every puff, he started formulating a plan.

  Chapter Nine

  Alan sat at his desk. He’d reporte
d the malfunctioning light to the janitor, even though nothing was wrong with the light when he arrived at work. His day flew by. At the time when Josh was supposed to haul his old man to that funeral, he worried about leaving his son cooped up with his father. The punishment might have been a little too harsh. After all, the boy had been defending the honor of his aunt. As Josh had complained about, his father did call him derogatory names to his face. He’d done the same to Alan and his brother Mike. Now old Sim paid for it, because his brother never came back from Denver. He and Mike rarely even spoke.

  The bell rang, and Alan’s students wasted no time running out of the classroom. Seventh period was about to start, and he didn’t want to walk to the field house to assist in the athletic PE class. The last thing he wanted was to go anywhere near the weight room or that football field. He wanted to go home and sleep. The last few days frayed on his nerves, but he tidied his desk and shoved things that didn’t need to be left on his desktop into the drawers. Jessica walked in as he got up to leave.

  “I’m not bothering you, am I?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Oh no, I was on my way to the field house. It’s a welcomed delay. I don’t want to go out there today.”

  “I know that Josh has been suspended, and I figure he’s in big time trouble, but he fought those guys because they were making fun of his Aunt Charlotte.”

  “I know and we were lenient on him,” he said, though he doubted his own words as he thought of the cruel and unusual punishment of being trapped with his father.

  “That’s good.” She looked down as the late bell rang. “Would it be okay if I stopped by after school today to talk to him?”

  “He’d probably enjoy it.”

  “I want to tell him that I’m not upset that he knocked me down yesterday during the fight. I know that he didn’t do it on purpose, even though Corey has been trying to convince me otherwise.”