trees and now they munched their supper of fescue and clover, swinging their tails to swat away the horseflies that tortured them. A yearling steer, the black and white scion of an Angus-Hereford intermarriage, had backed his rump against a cedar fence post and was scratching himself in a furious war against lice, sending shimmers for hundreds of feet down the barbed-wire fence line. The air had cooled off a lot, which always made it easier for me to appreciate the beauty of Alabama farmland—the jades and olives and emeralds among the crops and grass and leaves and of the accents of gold and ginger and bronze from the soil and trees and animals. The bitter odor of herbicides recently applied to the young crops of cotton and soybeans bore through the open car windows. But I also got the sweetness of honeysuckle and the fecund stink of cow manure.
I liked all the smells, even the cow shit, because they reminded me of Eden Rise and being a boy there who watched and helped things grow that I would harvest, knowing I had participated in a cycle of nature God had ordained. That cycle, I knew from my father and mother, was what we were here to partake of. I grew up in Eden Rise believing I knew why God made us and why He placed us here, as stewards of His soil.
I turned the radio up louder, needing the sound to keep me awake. I was listening to “1-2-3,” in which Len Barry declared that finding love was as easy as taking candy from a baby. I didn’t share his confidence. Love had not come easy for me this year at Duke, or ever. Beth, my college girlfriend for a time, had enticed me into the sweet excitement of sex and then cast me off like a wool cardigan in a heat wave. I was still smarting.
“I gotta go to the bathroom.”
Alma could have said so in Montgomery, through which we had just passed and where there were plenty of gas stations and drive-ins with bathrooms. But now there was none in sight, and I stayed silent.
“I said I need to stop.”
“You wanta go on the side of the road?”
“No, damn it, find a bathroom.”
We were several miles farther down the barren county road when she pointed over the seat. “There’s a gas station up there.”
It was actually a country store, signaled by a faded sign and surrounded by three or four junk cars and two dilapidated outbuildings. I doubted that it had public bathrooms. But I stopped anyway just to shut her up. I pulled up to the gas pump, topped with a glass Esso sign. The store’s unpainted plank walls were faded to a dull gray. Red tin signs advertising Pepsi-Cola and Prince Albert smoking tobacco looked like they had been new when Granddaddy was a boy. The screen-wire door hung partly open when I went inside to pay for the gas.
Empty boxes cluttered the tongue-and-groove pine floor, which needed sweeping. Dusty cans of Del Monte corn, Van Camp’s pork-and-beans, and Possum sardines and faded boxes of saltines only partly filled the two rows of shelving. I inhaled dust and mold—there had to be a leak in the roof or a broken window somewhere. At the front of the store, adjacent to the pay counter, a glass case held a few loaves of Velveeta and some bright red tubes of baloney. A drink box was pushed against a nearby wall, and I went to it and fished out a bottle of Dr Pepper. I pulled a pack of Planters peanuts off a wire rack and approached the cash register, which rested on a counter that was serving as a landing field for a squadron of houseflies.
The heavyset white man at the cash register looked me over as if he’d never seen a customer before. He wore faded bib overalls, a stained tee shirt, and a straw hat. His potbelly made inoperable the waist buttons on the overalls, exposing dingy boxer shorts. Three days of white beard covered his face, and a large plug of tobacco distended his left cheek.
As he reached out to take my money, the old man looked out the window at the gas pump and frowned. He turned slowly back toward me. “What are you and them niggers doing here?”
I didn’t look at the man and put my hands in my pockets. “We’re just passing through.”
“Y’all some them freedom riders?” I glanced over his shoulder at the double-barrel shotgun leaned against the wall. “No, sir,” I said. “We’re just passing through.”
I eased myself out the door and stopped Jackie on his way into the store. “Not a good place to stop,” I said. I jerked my head toward the store. “The guy’s real hostile.” I looked over at Alma, who was still in the backseat tying her sneakers, the car door open. “Tell her we need to go on, okay? I’ll fill the car up as fast as I can.”
Jackie went over to the car and talked to her in a low voice. “To hell with that,” she said loudly. “I got a right to use the toilet.” She pushed past Jackie and headed for the store.
For almost thirty years now, I have cursed myself for not shoving Alma back in the car, diving into the driver’s seat, and peeling out of that particular acre of hell. It never occurred to me that I didn’t have to put the damn gas in the car. Five fucking dollars worth of twenty-five-fucking-cent-a-gallon gas. But I had paid for it, and the limits of the nineteen-year-old mind kept me from fleeing immediately, gas or no gas.
Still, I had almost finished gassing up when I heard Alma shouting inside the store.
I looked through the dirty front window and saw her gesturing at the man. I couldn’t make out everything, but I heard her say “bathroom.” A pause. “You can’t run a damn Jim Crow store no longer!” and “Who you calling . . . ” and then “What the hell…”
I was behind the gas pumps, Jackie in front of them. He looked over his shoulder at me. “I better go get her.” I let him go first, and surely I shouldn’t have.
He moved quickly toward the door and I was following when Alma appeared in the door frame. “That motherfucker’s got a gun!” Pure hatred, not fear, in her voice.
“Come on, Alma, let’s get out of here.” Jackie was half pleading, half ordering her.
She looked back in the store. “Fuck you!” Jackie got to her just then and started pulling her toward the car. Alma was shouting. “Let go of me! I’m going to the bathroom! He can’t do that shit no more.”
The old man appeared in the door with his gun in the crook of his left arm, his right hand cradling the barrel about halfway down. He was glaring at Alma as Jackie dragged her toward the car. I ran to crank the car so we could get the hell away from there. Just as the key slipped into the ignition, I heard a deafening boom. I knew that sound. I had heard it often from the time I started hunting quail and dove with Granddaddy. The boom came from about the same distance that I was taught hunters should stay apart from each other when shooting at birds—thirty feet. The storekeeper had the shotgun at his left shoulder.
I reflexively sprawled flat across the seat but then realized I had to rise and help. I was squirming from under the steering wheel when the second boom went off.
The ringing in my ear had just subsided when the man spoke. “You goddamn agitators. We orta killed every one of you sonsabitches.”
I had a gun, too. Granddaddy’s pistol.
I rolled out of the car and onto my knees outside. My hands were trembling so badly that I fumbled under the seat trying to jerk the pistol out of its holster. It was heavy and slippery, and it took three tries to get the safety catch off. Move, move, move. When I came around the back of the car, I saw Jackie lying motionless and silent on his side. Alma was on all fours. “He shot me! He shot me!” She had wet herself.
I heard a snap. The old man had reloaded the double-barrel. He looked at me and Alma.
“We
