the breath from her body. I looked away, out into the garden. Purple hyacinths bloomed along the stone path. I wanted to look Harriet in the face but my courage failed me.
“Pauline doesn’t believe me,” she whispered. “She doesn’t want to.” She touched my hand. Hers was so cold I flinched. Then I held her fingers in mine.
I tried to think of a passage of scripture, some meditation or prayer. I turned and saw her lips pursed, like a schoolgirl puzzling over a question. Then her chin quivered and she stifled a sob. How had I never noticed her eyes were green as emeralds?
“I believe you, Harriet.” I said.
She searched my face. Then she removed her hand and stood. Erect, shoulders back.
“Thank you for the book, Charlie,” she said. She bowed from her waist. She opened the back door and disappeared inside the cottage. I realized the fragrance had been her hair, not the clematis.
When I got back to Hampton I stopped by my rooms to retrieve A Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck. By the time I reached the jail, Sheriff Curtis was putting on his hat and coat.
“The constable’ll have to give that to the Negro, Charlie,” the sheriff said. “Any item received by the prisoners, you know. Got to be inspected. I’ll make sure he takes care of it for you.”
I looked down the corridor.
“Not this evening, son. Missus said she’d have supper on the table at five o’clock. I’m late as it is.”
If Sheriff Curtis was upset about the John Wesley article, he never let on. No more crowds had gathered at the jail, even with the improving weather. Maybe seeing it wasn’t likely a riot was in the offing put the sheriff in a good mood. For that matter, maybe he hadn’t even seen the paper.
I asked the sheriff to give my regards to Mrs. Curtis and walked over to the Times-Herald offices. I typed up my article about Edgar Montague and turned it in.
Mr. Hobgood ran it the next morning on the second page. “COMMONWEALTH’S ATTORNEY CONFIDENT OF OUTCOME,” the headline read. I hoped Sheriff Curtis would see that story. It might reassure him the town would remain quiet as we headed into the weekend.
Quiet it was. Still, Sheriff Curtis kept the constable on duty all weekend, along with Chas and another deputy.
On Monday, April 1, a grand jury returned an indictment against Virginia Christian for the felony murder of Ida V. Belote. The trial was set for 10 o’clock on the morning of April 8. There were front-page headlines in every newspaper in the region. At a hearing on Wednesday, April 3, the circuit court of Elizabeth City County awarded guardianship of the orphaned female children Harriet Martha Belote and Sarah Elizabeth Belote to Lewter F. Hobbs. All that appeared in the papers was the court record.
The evening of the guardianship hearing I sat for a long time on the iron steps to my rooms. Miller moths spun about the gaslight. The blue spark of the last trolley lit the new leaves on the limbs hanging over the line. After the last shriek of metal wheels on the tracks, I heard a sound I recognized as the chain. I moved up the steps as quietly as I could. In the icebox Maebelle had left potato cakes fried in bacon. I retrieved a couple and went across the sidewalk to the street. This time I placed the cakes in the middle of the pool of light and went back up on the porch to watch. I lit a cigarette and waited.
I finished my cigarette, lit another, finished it. I nodded off, then stirred myself.
Just then a gaunt creature dragging about three feet of chain from its neck crept into the pool of light. Its big head was connected to a frail body. It was a pit bull terrier, a male. His coat was black as pitch. His ears were clipped tight to his head and his left ear was torn. His paws looked like each had been dipped in white paint. There was a big white mark on his chest the shape of a crushed cigarette packet.
“I’ll call you ‘Lucky,’” I whispered. The dog lifted his head at the sound, then snatched Maebelle’s potato cake and wolfed it down. He disappeared into the twilight.
7.
Red
I stared into the darkness where Lucky had vanished. I wanted to help Harriet but I had no idea how. I understood little about intimacy, less about the danger Harriet had described. The men I worked with seemed to be versed in such matters. But their views were coarse.
Did I know how to befriend her? Friendship had been hurtful to me. I had retreated into despair when my friend Fitz died. Loneliness had become my shepherd.
I lit another cigarette and blew out the match, watching white vapor curl from the head. I dropped the match in the cuspidor. The first friendship of my life had been hurtful, too.
Red and I met at school in 1902. He sat on the bench next to me in Miss Quesinberry’s one-room school on Flag Run. His hair was the color of copper wire and his eyes were green. He carried with him a little edition of Aesop’s Fables.
“Mind if I try them spectacles?” he asked. His canvas trousers were patched with a variety of fabrics and held up with a length of sisal.
“No,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
I loosed the wire rims from my ears and handed the glasses to Red.
“Them’s like fish hooks,” he said.
“Put the frame on your nose, then run your fingers round your ears,” I said. “It’s easy.” He hooked the temples over his ears.
“Don’t work worth a damn,” he said. “Everything’s blurry.”
“They have to be made special,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Red,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Charles,” I said.
“That your last name?”
“First name.”
“Oh, then you mean Charlie,” he said.
“No, Mother calls me Charles.”
“That ain’t no kind of name.”
“How about Red? That’s not a real name.”
“Course it is.”
“An old man I know has a dog named Red. That can’t be your real name.”
“Why, I reckon it is,” he said.
“Would you boys be so gracious as to share your conversation with the rest of the class?” Miss Quesinberry asked. She stood over us, cradling the handle of a leather strop in her hand. “Franklin! Give Charles his eyeglasses immediately! Go to the bench in the back. I don’t want to hear you two talking anymore today.”
The next day at school when Red slid in on the bench next to me, he sighed.
“Well,” he said. “You heard. Franklin my name. But everybody call me Red. Momma say the day I was born my hair so bright all the people call me that. She say even my skin was red day she showed me to people.”
“That’s
