The Twelve-Mile Straight

She said, “Sir, you don’t scare off easy, do you?”

He said, “I won’t take much of your time.”

From Mud he bought two bottles of Coca-Cola and carried them to the checkers table on the porch. Elma might have learned her lesson about daydreaming, but for a moment she imagined that they were on a date. That they were somewhere else and she was someone else and the man across from her was her fiancé. She thought a fiancé might be better than a husband. The promise of a mate, without the burden of one. The beginning without the end.

“How are the babies?” Mr. Boothby asked.

Elma twisted the cap off her Coke and watched its breath escape from the bottle. She’d had no more sleep than a mule the night before. Winna Jean had been up crying half the night, and she’d only sleep at Elma’s breast, with Elma propped straight up in bed. And Wilson had a case of the runs so bad that Nan had to cut more diapers out of an old sack apron and double them up, and slather lard on his poor red behind. It was best that Elma should be so tired, that she should sleepwalk through those nights. Then there wasn’t enough sleep between them to worry about which baby which of them cared for, or whether Elma should feel grateful or guilty or bitter that there were two of them to care for the babies, and two babies instead of one. Elma said, “The babies are fine.”

“Appears to me you must be plumb tired of all the attention those babies bring. Sweet as they are.”

Elma took a cautious sip of her soda. Yes, it did taste just as sweet as Heaven. He was warming her up, breaking her down, but it did feel good to sit on a porch and talk to a stranger. “I only want to keep them safe. All types of people coming in, it agg’avates em.”

Mr. Boothby held up his hands, as if to show they were empty. “I understand, I understand. I’ve got children of my own.”

Here Elma’s fantasy paled a little. Now she pictured Mrs. Boothby. Did she have an electric kitchen up in Macon, with a Frigidaire and an electric stove?

“I have no interest in your babies, Miss Jesup, miraculous or not. I’m a newspaperman. We call our publication the Testament, and we do pride ourselves on seeking the truth.” Mr. Boothby lowered his voice when he said, “It’s the Negro Mr. Jackson I have an interest in.”

Elma folded her hands in her lap to hide their shaking. Bill Cousins passed by on his way into the store, tipping his hat and saying, “Morning,” his eyes taking them in. Elma felt her heart speed up. No one, of course, would believe Mr. Boothby was a friendly acquaintance, let alone a suitor, but if Bill Cousins recognized the man in the suit, he didn’t say so. If he did, he might incite a mob against Elma herself. She might be burned at the stake for talking to a big-city reporter, even if they didn’t know his politics. There were things no one wanted known by the outside, and no one knew that better than Elma. When the door had closed behind Bill, she said, “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Boothby, but the Negro Mr. Jackson died a few weeks back. Figure you would have read about it in that paper of yours.”

Mr. Boothby smiled. “You don’t say. How did he die?”

“I didn’t see it myself.”

“How did your father say he died?”

Elma paused. “He was swung up.”

“So your father was there.”

“Didn’t have to be there. There was a picture in your paper with the rope hanging from the gourd tree. It’s all accounted for.”

“And who is responsible for hanging the man? What do the accounts say?”

“Sir, don’t you have a Roosevelt to cover?”

Mr. Boothby cocked his head. “Pardon?”

“Your friend up in Warm Springs. The one you’re building the polio hospital with. Sounds awful important. It’s about alls your paper is like to talk about.”

Mr. Boothby laughed. “Well, you do keep up with the Testament, don’t you? I’m mighty pleased.”

Elma sipped her soda, then guzzled it. She could feel her defense dissolving, and she allowed herself not to care. Talking about it was better than not talking about it—it was the not talking about it, the silence her father had enforced, that was so heavy. “Freddie Wilson swung him up. He even traded shoes with him. But he ain’t my fiancé no more. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care to know. He ain’t worth a milk bucket under a bull.”

Mr. Boothby smiled. He withdrew a pipe from a pocket inside his jacket and lit it. He had no notebook, no pen. “That’s what the autopsy confirmed. I know the man who performed it. I can attest to its accuracy. It would be one thing if the man were shot dead first, then hanged without protest. What I can’t seem to understand, but which everyone else in the state of Georgia seems to understand just fine, is how one man managed to hang another live man all by himself.”

Elma was beginning to sweat. Even in the shade of the porch, the morning heat crept into her collar, under the braid pinned to the nape of her neck. Her mind stuck on the phrase from the paper, “Cervical spine.” She said, “Freddie, he had a gun. A rifle. Maybe he trained it on him.” She shrugged. “Like I say, I didn’t see it.”

“Appears to me, it’s hard to hang a man while holding a rifle to his head. If it were me, I’d put up a fight. Give him a kick with my alligator boots. What’s more likely is there were others who helped Freddie. Maybe many others.”

If Elma stepped down from the porch and looked over her right shoulder, she could see her father’s cotton coming up. No flowers yet—just green. She could stand up and walk home. If she called out, her father might even hear her voice.

“What I’m saying,” Mr. Boothby went on, “is that your fiancé may be taking the fall for his associates.”

“Associates? All Freddie associated with were drunks.”

“He worked for your father, Freddie did.”

“He was foreman at the mill. Freddie said farmwork was for coloreds. He was coming up under his grandfather.” That was all Freddie talked about, taking over the mill when his grandfather retired. This is all fixing to be ours, he’d say, parked on the hill overlooking the mill village.

“I’m not talking about farmwork,” said Mr. Boothby. “Or millwork, for that matter.”

Elma blinked out at the road. She wondered if Mr. Boothby had ever had a drink in his life, and if such a man was worthy of pity or admiration. A pickup passed, a green Chevy like Freddie’s, and for a moment she held her breath. Then she saw it had Alabama plates. “I don’t know about Macon,” she said, “but in Cotton County, that’s about the only kind of work we do.”

“Oh, I know about your industries here. What do you know about George Wilson? He owns the cotton and the cotton mill, does he? And the mill isn’t all he runs, what I hear. How’s he find time for it all, is what I wonder.”

“He’s got brothers up near Atlanta who help with the business. And Freddie helps him. Helped him.”

“With what part?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t spend much time at the mill. The village is full of riffraff.”

“Was Freddie part of the riffraff?”

Elma snorted a soda bubble. “Yes, sir.”

“How so?”

“He liked to carry on. Tear his truck around the village. Get into fistfights. Once he got shinnied up and shot the headlights out of his own grandfather’s Ford, and blamed it on some poor fool. Went and got him fired quick as you can say Wilson. He was the king of riffraff. He liked to call himself King Cotton, fancied himself royalty, fixing to take on the family business. But he couldn’t even take on a wife and child.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t ask me! Ask him! He had nine months to put his pants on, same as any daddy. His family’s got enough houses to put us in, that’s for sure. All we’d need was one.” Six months along, her father had carried her over to the Wilsons’ house, where Freddie had been raised up by his grandparents in his father’s old bedroom. Elma’s father had made her wait on the porch in front of the parlor window, her full figure framed like a picture. She saw Mr. Wilson, then his wife, heard Freddie’s voice deep within the house, and then the curtain was drawn and a colored girl brought her a lemonade, sour and full of seeds. After five minutes her father came through the door, jammed his cap on his head, and got in the truck. He didn’t say a word. By the time they turned onto the road, Elma knew that Freddie would not be marrying her. Her baby would not have a Christmas stocking on the Wilsons’ mantel.

She had given up on a reply from Freddie, but there it was in the mailbox a few days later, her name in his loopy, second-grade cursive: Dear Elma. It was both, he admitted: his grandmother didn’t want him tied down, and didn’t want him tied down to her. She don’t care for country people, was the way he put it, and she was almost grateful for his gentleness. He apologized not for dropping her but that her father had been sent away from the house. I did want to marry you, he wrote. That was all, and at least there was that.

“Least my own father took up for the babies,” she told Mr. Boothby. “Gave them a roof. I’d rather be in his house than any of those linthead shacks at the mill.” Of course her father’s house too was owned by the Wilsons, the house and the fields and the food they put in their bellies. They owned their shit and the outhouse they shit in. And a Wilson did not marry his property. He would just as soon marry a Negro in a cabin. That afternoon when her father had driven her to their house, the Wilsons didn’t yet know Winnafred, didn’t yet know that she was said to tumble around with a Negro for the nine dark months inside Elma’s belly. But even before she was born, they had disowned her.

Mr. Boothby placed his pipe on the table between them. “I’m mighty sorry for the trouble you’ve been through.”

“I’m not the one in trouble. Now it’s Freddie. What’s he the king of now?”

“Well, I’d ask him if the law could find him. And his grandfather isn’t keen to talk to the papers. Nor none of the folks at the mill.”

“Can’t blame him entirely. Both his parents died when he was a tot. His daddy was a war hero. Freddie was always toting that shotgun around like a soldier.”

“And his mother?”