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"The preacher they call up to do the burial is my first cousin. He brought a suit of clothes to the mo'tuary to dress the bones in. They was a black man workin' there, and my cousin say, 'That fella was lynched, wasn't he?' The black man say, 'Yeah, they probably drug him out of bed to do it, too. Didn't even have time to put strings in his boots or run a belt through his britches.' "
"What are you telling me, Sam?"
"I remember somet'ing, a long time ago, maybe thirty, thirty-five years back." He patted one hand on top of the other and his eyes became muddy.
"Just say it, Sam."
"A bluejay don't set on a mockin'bird's nest. I ain't got no use for that stuff in people, neither. The Lord made people a different color for a reason."
He shook his head back and forth, as though he were dispelling a troubling thought.
"You're not talking about a rape, are you?"
"White folk call it rape when it fit what they want," he said. "They see what they need to see. Black folk cain't be choicy. They see what they gots to see. They was a black man, no, that ain't right, this is a nigger I'm talkin' about, and he was carryin' on with a white woman whose husband he worked for. Black folk knowed it, too. They tole him he better stop what he doin' befo' the cars start comin' down in the quarters and some innocent black man end up on a tree. I t'ink them was the bones you drug up in that sandbar."
"What was his name?"
"Who care what his name? Maybe he got what he ax for. But them people who done that still out there. I say past is past. I say don't be messin' in it."
"Are you cautioning me?"
"When I was in the pen, yo' daddy, Mr. Aldous, brought my mother food. He care for her when she sick, he pay for her medicine up at the sto'. I ain't forgot that, me."
"Sam, if you have information about a murder, the law requires that you come forward with it."
"Whose law? The law that run that pen up there? You want to find bodies, go dig in that levee for some of them boys the gunbulls shot down just for pure meanness. I seen it." He touched the corner of his eye with one
long finger. "The hack get drunk on corn liquor, single out some boy on the wheelbarrow, holler out, 'Yow! You! Nigger! Run!' Then he'd pop him with his .45, just like bustin' a clay duck."
"What was the white woman's name?"
"I got to be startin' my supper now."
"Was the dead man in a jail?"
"Ain't nobody interested back then, ain't nobody interested now. You give it a few mo' years, we all gonna be dead. You ain't goin' change nothin' for a nigger been in the river thirty years. You want to do some good, catch the pimp tore up that young girl. 'Cause sho' as God made little green apples, he gonna do it again."
He squinted one eye in a shaft of sunlight that fell through the tree branches and lighted one half of his face like an ebony stage mask that was sewn together from mismatched parts.
It was almost dusk when I got home that evening, but the sky was still as blue as a robin's egg in the west and the glow of the late sun looked like pools of pink fire in the clouds. After I ate supper, I walked down to the bait shop to help Batist close up. I was pulling back the canvas awning on the guy wires over the spool tables when I saw the sheriff's car drive down the dirt road and park under the trees.
He walked down the dock toward me. His face looked flushed from the heat, puffy with fatigue.
"I guarantee you, it's been one scorcher of a day," he said, went inside the shop, and came back with a sweating bottle of orange pop in his hand. He sat down at a table and wiped the sweat off his neck with his handkerchief. Grains of ice slid down the neck of the pop bottle.
"What's up, sheriff?" I said.
"Have you seen Rosie this afternoon?" He took a drink out of the bottle.
I sat down across from him. Waves from a passing boat slapped against the pilings under the dock.
"We went out to the movie location, then she went to Lafayette to check out a couple of things," I said.
"Yeah, that's why I'm here."
"What do you mean?"
"I've gotten about a half-dozen phone calls this afternoon. I'm not sure what you guys are doing, Dave."
