The Truce Page 4

  “Mama, let me do this for him,” Aunt Mattie said quietly.

  All the fire went out of Mamaw as she took Aunt Mattie’s hand.

  Bone crossed her arms. Aunt Mattie had never been nice to Uncle Ash that she could remember. Why was she starting now? Why was she in such an all-fired hurry to bury him? Even if it wasn’t him. Which it wasn’t.

  “Maybe we best go,” Mr. Sherman said to his aunt. She nodded, and they headed toward the kitchen.

  The back door creaked open.

  Sheriff Taylor strode into the parlor from the front hall just as a deputy appeared from the kitchen, blocking the Shermans from leaving. The county only had two lawmen, and they had Aunt Queenie and Tiny boxed in.

  “Oscar said you’d be here, Tiny.” The sheriff nodded to the deputy. “Raymond Arthur Sherman, I’m arresting you for the murder of Ash Reed.”

  The deputy stepped forward and clapped handcuffs around Tiny’s wrists.

  Bone dropped Uncle Ash’s shirt to the floor.

  * * *

  “It’s not him,” Bone broke the silence in the wake of Tiny Sherman’s exit in handcuffs. She meant both Uncle Ash and Mr. Sherman. Mamaw shushed her.

  The sheriff ignored her anyway.

  “Queenie, you need to come with me,” he said. “Now.”

  Aunt Queenie took a deep breath and forced it out like she was calming a mighty storm raging inside herself. Mamaw reached out a hand, but Aunt Queenie brushed it away. Bone saw the sad fury in her eyes.

  Uncle Junior stepped between them and the sheriff. “Al, we’ve all known Tiny since we was kids. He’s a decent, hardworking man.”

  “Don’t mix in this, Junior.” The sheriff leaned in. “It’ll only make it harder on him.”

  Junior stiffened. He exchanged a glance with Mamaw, who shook her head a tiny bit.

  Queenie tugged her blouse straight, tucked her handbag under her arm, and stuck her chin out as she walked past Uncle Junior and the sheriff and out the front door. “You coming, Mr. Al?”

  Like most folks of a certain age around Big Vein, Bone thought, Mr. Taylor had probably been brought into the world by Queenie Sherman. Yet she still had to call him Mr.

  “Make sure nothing happens to either of them, Al,” Uncle Junior told the sheriff before he turned and followed Aunt Queenie to his car.

  A cold chill ran through Bone.

  “Certain people,” Uncle Junior explained as they watched the sheriff’s taillights fade into the darkness, “might get it into their heads to take justice into their own hands.”

  Certain white people.

  Bone pulled the butter-yellow sweater tight around her. She saw Mama mending a younger Tiny’s shattered pitching arm. Certain white people weren’t motivated by justice.

  BACK IN THE PARLOR, Uncle Junior turned off the radio and rammed a poker into the fire. Sparks flew and the embers crackled. He braced himself against the mantel and stared into the flames.

  Aunt Mattie perched herself on the settee and poured a cup of cold coffee. Mamaw paced behind her.

  The silence was quickly unbearable, and Bone had so many questions.

  Mrs. Price maneuvered Ruby toward the kitchen. “Bone, come help us clean up.”

  Bone stood her ground in the middle of the parlor. “What will happen to Mr. Sherman?” she asked.

  Aunt Mattie set her cup down with a clatter. “We’ve got more pressing matters to discuss, young lady.”

  “Amarantha,” Uncle Junior warned before dropping into his chair.

  “More pressing than an innocent black man accused of a murder?” Mamaw snapped. “That fellow over in Wytheville was dragged out of his cell and lynched by a mob!”

  Could that happen to Tiny Sherman? Bone looked to Uncle Junior for reassurance. He didn’t meet her eye.

  “Mother, that was nearly twenty years ago,” Mattie replied.

  Uncle Junior snorted.

  Aunt Mattie glared at him. “This is 1942. The citizens of this county are not going to take justice into their own hands.”

  Bone sank into the seat by the hearth. She knew some whites still hated folks like Mr. Sherman and Aunt Queenie on account of their skin color. But would they go so far as to break him out of jail and murder him?

  “Mama, I know you don’t want to hear this, but we got to make some funeral arrangements for Ash.” Aunt Mattie tried to catch Mamaw’s hand and gently guide her to the settee.

  Mamaw wasn’t having it. She rounded the couch and sat by Bone on the hearth.

  “It’s not him,” Bone repeated, on the verge of tears. Mamaw took Bone’s hand.

  “Oh, for the love of Pete, Mother!” Aunt Mattie went off. “You’ve got Laurel believing more of your nonsense. Like always.”

  Truce. Uncle Ash will be back.

  “Amarantha,” Junior said more sharply this time. “Now is not the time.”

  Bone and Mamaw turned toward him. He’d sagged back into his armchair by the fire.

  “You know it’s him, Junior!” Aunt Mattie demanded. “Who else would be wearing his dog tags?”

  Uncle Junior stirred the fire once more and then knocked the poker against the firedogs before he spoke. “I don’t know what to think. That’s his dog tag, sure enough. But I know just as sure Ash wouldn’t have gone down in that mine willingly.”

  Mamaw nodded.

  “No, he’s always running away from his responsibilities,” Aunt Mattie muttered.

  Truce.

  “Not this again,” Mamaw muttered back.

  “Mattie.” Uncle Junior held up a weary hand. “You remember when Ash got back from the war? Daddy got him a job in the mine with us. That first morning, he was trailing behind us. I should’ve known something was wrong. We didn’t have the mantrip then, just mules to haul up the cars of coal. So we had to walk down the main shaft in the pitch dark. By the time we got to the cut, Ash was white as snow and shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. ‘I can’t do this, Daddy’ was all he said before he bolted to the surface. He hadn’t told neither of us about what happened in the war.”

  Bone sat on the hearth, relieved. That scene the sweater showed her came after the war, but she hadn’t seen the whole story. Only what Mama had witnessed. That was the problem with some objects, Bone realized. They only saw pieces of a person’s story.

  Aunt Mattie harrumphed.

  “What did happen?” Ruby asked. She’d quietly snuck back in from the kitchen.

  “He used the war as an excuse for everything!”

  “Now, Mattie,” Junior warned.

  “No. He could’ve done an honest day’s work just like you and Daddy. Instead he runs around playing at being a vet—”

  An excuse? Running away from responsibility? Playing?

  The truce was off.

  “I’ll tell you what happened!” Bone leapt up. “Uncle Ash got buried in a collapsed tunnel during a big battle in Belgium. For three days!” She remembered the darkness, the guns and mortars pounding the dirt above his head. She slid the poetry book out of her back pocket and wagged it in Aunt Mattie’s face. “And he goes to the Outer Banks, and other beaches, this time a year because it’s the wide-openest, peacefulest place he can find to quiet those guns in his head.”

  Aunt Mattie’s mouth opened and closed shut without making a sound.

  Mamaw and Uncle Junior exchanged a look. They hadn’t known where Ash went.

  “So Uncle Ash would’ve never gone into that mine!” Bone concluded. She felt bad for betraying his secret—and breaking the truce—but darned if she was going to let Aunt Mattie talk thataway about Uncle Ash anymore.

  “Exactly. Not my brother.” Junior leaned back in the chair.

  “That man was not Ash.” Mamaw glared Aunt Mattie into keeping silent.

  “So he’s not dead?” Ruby said hopefully.

/>   Uncle Junior shook his head. “I said he wouldn’t go willingly.”

  Bone sank back onto the hearth, crushed under the weight of that one word. Willingly. Somebody could’ve dragged Uncle Ash down into the mine…after he was dead. That’s what Uncle Junior meant.

  No, it still wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. But…

  The book in her hand was silent.

  “It’s still not him.”

  “This is all wishful thinking.” Aunt Mattie guided Ruby gently toward the door. “We need to head home. Mother, you’re welcome to come stay with us.”

  Mamaw nodded. “I’ll be over directly.” She squeezed Junior’s arm and hugged Bone. “Thanks, Forever Girl,” she whispered.

  Bone ached. Only Uncle Ash called her that. It was on account of a Cherokee folk story they both loved, Forever Boy. He didn’t want to grow, didn’t want to face his responsibilities, so he ran away to live with the Little People in the forest. Shirking responsibilities. Running away. Did Aunt Mattie think Uncle Ash was like Forever Boy?

  More loudly, Mamaw added, “He better enjoy that peace and quiet wherever he is now, ’cause I’m going to tan his backside when he gets home.”

  Mamaw would. And when he got home, the sheriff would have to let Mr. Sherman go, too.

  Uncle Junior picked up the map and studied it for a moment. “It’s right here, Bone.” He placed his finger, his nail beds a permanent coal-ash gray, on northern Belgium.

  FLANDERS, it said.

  “Could they really hurt Mr. Sherman?” Bone asked.

  Junior sighed and nodded.

  MORNING WAS A PINPRICK OF LIGHT in the darkness. The weight of all that coal and dirt she’d dreamt of pinned her body flat to her bed. Bone felt sad when Uncle Henry died—and when Daddy left for war. She didn’t remember how she felt when Mama died seeing as she was only six at the time. That was so long ago. Now, she weighed a thousand pounds. Her body acted like Uncle Ash really was dead even though her brain told her he wasn’t.

  Someone knocked on the door. Bone couldn’t move. She half expected the door to crack open and a plump little fox terrier to skitter in.

  Where was Corolla? And Kiawah and Kitty Hawk? Where was Uncle Ash’s truck?

  It was not him.

  Mrs. Price stuck her head in instead. “Bone, dear, come down to breakfast. You don’t need to go to school, but you got to eat.”

  Bone groaned a response. Mrs. Price closed the door quietly. It took too much energy to argue or even say anything. Bone lay there listening to Mrs. P’s footsteps echo across the hall and down the back steps. The radio played in the parlor, but it was soon drowned out by the clatter of dishes in the sink. Nothing else stirred in the house.

  Had Uncle Junior gone to work? Had Miss Johnson? How could they go on like nothing had happened?

  It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him.

  Bone pulled herself out of bed. Her clothes lay on the floor, Mama’s butter-yellow sweater and Uncle Ash’s blue flannel shirt swaddled up together. Bone pulled on her dungarees—and his shirt. It was like a choir robe on her, swallowing her whole. She rolled the sleeves and tied the shirttails around her waist, comforted by the smells. She could see Ash running his hand down a horse’s leg, feeling its pain. He laughed with Tiny over a smoke while Queenie’s gelding cantered around the pasture. Was that the last time he wore the shirt? Ash was sticking his arm, sleeve rolled up, into a cow—and he pulled out a baby calf by its hooves. “Just needed a bit of encouragement, didn’t you?” He laughed as the mama cow cleaned off the newborn and it struggled awkwardly to its feet. Uncle Ash wiped his hands on his shirt.

  Ugh! That’s why he didn’t take the shirt to the beach! Bone stripped off the shirt, holding it out from her and dropping it back to the floor.

  She pulled on her same old T-shirt and slipped into Mama’s sweater. She saw Mama crying as a young Ash, a gangly teen, got on a bus headed north to Canada and the war. “I’ll be home soon, Willow,” he called out the window.

  He did come home, of course, four years later—but a different man.

  Bone buttoned the yellow sweater up to her throat before wiggling her feet into her boots. She tucked the poetry book into her back pocket.

  Downstairs, a car door slammed and knocking pounded at the front door.

  By the time Bone reached the kitchen, Mrs. Price was talking to someone in the parlor. Mamaw was furiously washing dishes. Uncle Junior sat at the linoleum-topped table, staring at the paper, his plate of eggs untouched.

  “It’s Mr. Matthews and the sheriff,” Mrs. Price whispered as she came into the kitchen. “They want to talk to you,” she said to Uncle Junior.

  “Again?” He scraped his chair back and pulled himself to his feet, grabbing one last gulp of black coffee before facing them.

  Mamaw wiped her hands. “Sit down, Bone, honey. I made you some oatmeal.”

  Mrs. Price pushed a bowl in front of Bone. She’d swirled a dollop of huckleberry jam into the creamy mixture.

  Both women inched closer to the parlor, leaning in to listen. They didn’t really need to. The mine supervisor’s voice would cut through solid rock.

  “Junior, I’m sorry for your loss,” Mr. Matthews began. “And I realize this is a difficult time for your family—”

  “As you know, we arrested Tiny Sherman for murdering your brother,” the sheriff interrupted.

  Bone pushed her oatmeal away, the bowl scraping against the linoleum tabletop.

  Mrs. Price shushed her as Mamaw steamed into the parlor. Bone zigzagged past Mrs. Price to follow.

  “You haven’t yet proved that was Ash,” Mamaw insisted.

  Both the sheriff and Mr. Matthews gave Mamaw a pitying look—and turned to Uncle Junior.

  “Have you figured out where he was killed?” he asked the sheriff.

  “Um.” Mr. Matthews blinked slowly. “What makes you think—”

  “My brother never’d have gone down in the mine on his own, Mr. Matthews,” Junior said. He turned to the sheriff. “Al, you remember what happened when Ash came back in ’19.”

  “I know. That’s what got me thinking foul play, too,” the sheriff said. “The county medical examiner said the man died from getting hit from behind with something hard and flat, like a beam or a coal shovel.”

  The sheriff was being careful not to answer Uncle Junior’s question, Bone couldn’t help noticing. And Mr. Matthews kept fidgeting with the coins in his pocket.

  Mr. Matthews coughed. “We don’t need to go into those details in front of the women and children.” He looked at Bone, and then away. “Trust me,” he told Junior. “We’re doing everything to make sure someone pays for your brother’s death.”

  This time the sheriff coughed, and Mr. Matthews shut up.

  “I had another look around shaft twenty-seven yesterday.” The sheriff pulled something out of his coat pocket. It was a Memphis Red Sox cap. Tiny Sherman was the only person who wore one of those anywhere near Big Vein.

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence in the parlor.

  Bone couldn’t figure it. These men—including Uncle Junior—thought Tiny Sherman killed his friend, her Uncle Ash, somewhere and then dragged him down the mine on the mantrip to where he and a bunch of other men were working—and then left his prize ball cap there. It was like a bad Charlie Chan or Bulldog Drummond movie.

  “He could’ve left that there anytime,” Junior finally said. “It’s his job.”

  “Not anymore,” Mr. Matthews said, shaking his head. “Never should’ve put my faith in that boy. I just promoted him to outside man and he goes and does something like this.”

  Mamaw glared a hole in the man.

  “Why would Tiny do this?” Bone asked.

  Mr. Matthews turned to her. “You never know with his kind, young lady.”

  “That’s not what—,” Bone
stuttered in anger. Uncle Junior put a hand on her shoulder. That was not what she meant at all. She’d meant Tiny had no reason to hurt Uncle Ash. It didn’t make sense. They were friends.

  Uncle Junior stood and stretched, poked at the fire for a moment. “One thing has been bothering me about this, Al.” He turned to the sheriff, poker still in his hand. The tip of the iron was covered in ash.

  “Just one?”

  “We need to get the mine open and running today, Mr. Reed.” Mr. Matthews tapped his watch. “You got more than enough evidence…”

  The sheriff held up his hand. “Go on, Junior.”

  “The rock dust.” Junior stirred the fireplace ashes once again before setting the poker back.

  “The what?” Mr. Matthews asked.

  Everyone looked at him. Even Bone knew what that was: the crushed limestone that the miners used to cut down the coal in the air so it wouldn’t explode. Some folks called it lime, some rock dust.

  “The body was covered with it when we found it.” Junior studied first the sheriff, then Mr. Matthews as he said it. “Like someone had dusted the body down with a whole bag of lime.”

  The mine supervisor’s face was a blank slate—until the last word.

  “Oh, the lime!” Mr. Matthews said.

  The sheriff nodded. “That is peculiar.”

  “Obviously, Tiny was just covering his tracks. The lime would eat away—I mean—destroy the evidence,” Mr. Matthews said, pleased he’d thought of that. “They do that all the time in detective novels and films. He probably thought no one would find the body for a while.”

  “Uh-huh,” Junior said, exchanging a glance with the sheriff, who just shook his head.

  Mr. Matthews was right, though, at least about this. In one of Uncle Henry’s detective novels she’d read, the killer covered the body in lime. The lime decomposed the body faster. What were Uncle Junior and the sheriff not saying?

  “Now that we’ve got that mystery solved,” Mr. Matthews charged on, “we got to open the mine again. The army needs coal!” He waggled his finger in Uncle Junior’s face. “And if the army doesn’t get it, we don’t get paid.”