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He lifted himself up off the bed with sleepy reluctance. He led the way to the door and opened it, feeling around with his foot and saying, “Pardon me,” to whomever he nearly stepped on.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” he said. “And I meant to say—if I didn’t already—that it was really cool of you to make it here so fast. After we talked on the phone,” he turned sideways to let me pass, “I felt sort of bad about it. I kept hearing these stories from the cops and firefighters who were filtering back here. They were talking like it’s a war zone out there. I know you were coming from the heart of downtown—not the river—and I thought maybe it’d be better that way, but I hear it’s not. I hear there’s looting. ”
“There is, in fact, a
lot of looting. ”
“Yeah. Gunshots? I heard there were gangs running the streets—”
“The most quickly organized gangs in the history of gangs, you mean? I didn’t see any gangs—just groups of loosely affiliated people breaking shit and stealing things. If you want to call that ‘gang activity’ in a press report, you can go right ahead. But it’s a reach. ”
He was quiet and I thought maybe I’d annoyed him, though I wasn’t sure why or how. “I wasn’t thinking about it that way,” he said with a touch of complaint. “I wasn’t thinking about what a great story it was. I was thinking that I was an asshole for asking you to come hiking through it all to appease my curiosity. ”
“That’s not what I meant, either. We’re too tired to talk, I think. We’re just going to piss each other off if we keep it up. You think I’m calling you a mercenary jackass, and I was just trying to anticipate . . . well . . . that you might be one at a later date. Wait, this isn’t coming out right. Let me put it this way,” I backpedaled as I stepped carefully over a sleeping pair of little girls, wrapped up together in some large man’s jacket. “It was bad out there, but it wasn’t as bad as it could be. And it sure as hell wasn’t bad enough to stop me, and I don’t hold the trip against you. ”
“Okay,” he said, and it was a tired sort of surrender, offered under duress. We backed up against a wall in order to let a pair of harried-looking paramedics carry bags of supplies through a hall and over the people who were already camped there. When they were gone, he turned to me again and asked, as if I knew how to answer it, “Then, now what?”
I closed my eyes and leaned the back of my head hard against the patterned wallpaper. “God, I don’t know. We’re out of leads here, aren’t we? What do we chase next?”
“Caroline was my only idea, and she wasn’t too helpful, was she?”
“Yes and no. She’s conflicted, and willing to lie to herself or to us—whichever makes her feel better. And she said what you said, that the church was burned and it was blamed on the flu. What church was it? I forget. ”
“First Congregationalist Church. ”
“Right. Burned down. Fire. That’s what we’re going to have to start with. We’ve got burned bodies and a burned church. What follows logically?”
“The bodies were burned in the church,” he prompted. “And don’t forget the Klan. I might be a Midwestern lad at heart, but if there’s one thing I know about the Klan, it’s that they liked to burn things—and the First Congregationalist Church would’ve been a tempting target. ”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“It was a racially diverse congregation—one of the first in the country. Black people, white people, coming together to worship. But mostly the church is just a footnote in an occasional history buff’s article. I couldn’t even find out for sure where it used to be, only that it burned down in 1919 and no one could agree on why. ”
“And it was Caroline’s church?”
“Apparently. ”
“Weird,” I said.
“Why?”
“The Reads have been a rich, prestigious family around here for generations. I have a hard time believing they’d send their kids to a church where there was any mixing. I guess they could have been enlightened before their time, but I wouldn’t bet on it. ”
He shrugged and tiptoed his way out of the corridor, into the stairwell. “Oh ye of little faith,” he said.
“I have plenty of faith. ”
“Just not in other people, huh?”
I wanted to argue with him, because I didn’t like the way it sounded when he said it—like an accusation, or an observation that he found distasteful. I could’ve argued, but he’d said it himself: he was a Midwestern lad. He wouldn’t understand. There were boundaries here, south of the Mason-Dixon; and there still are. Time moves slower here. History drags this place along, kicking and screaming, until a city like Chattanooga takes on polish enough to resemble its northern or western brethren. So when people come to it cold from somewhere else, they take a look around and they think, “This is just like some other place I’ve seen. ”
But it isn’t.
Back downstairs there was nowhere to sit and almost nowhere to stand in the Starbucks. But coffee was still brewing, and it was being passed out for free with help from the Red Cross people.
Nick and I each took a cup, and neither of us diluted it with anything sweet before we drank it.
16
