Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. Jonathan Odell

      She saw a man stumble from his truck. She couldn’t see his face for the light, but she knew who it was. Billy Dean weaved around to the rear, and pulled out his shotgun. He staggered back again and propped himself against the hood, between the glaring headlights. “Get that little rat out here,” he slurred. “That little albino piece of shit.”

      Vida instinctively pulled Nate closer.

      “Mr. Billy Dean, sir,” her father stammered, falling back toward the door. “We don’t mean you no harm. I sure didn’t know about you and Miss Hertha.” He took another step back, his arm reaching behind him for the door. “I hope you two be real happy,” he said. “And I sure sorry for that little misunderstanding.”

      Lights began to come on throughout the quarter. Maybe, Vida prayed, someone would come to their rescue. Maybe it would be Rezel!

      With one arm Billy Dean steadied himself against the hood of the truck and with the other he raised the shotgun to his hip. It was aimed at her father’s midsection. “Not as sorry as you gonna be. I told you what I wanted. Get that boy out here. Now!”

      The door flew open and Willie came charging out past his father with a baseball bat. He took the porch in two leaps and was halfway down the steps before Billy Dean got both barrels aimed at the boy’s head.

      “Stop right there, boy. I’ll blow it off. I swear I will.”

      Willie froze.

      Billy Dean’s uncle, who had been standing there frantically rubbing the back of his neck, spoke up. “Billy Dean, this old preacher ain’t going to tell the Senator about that baby. We already torched his church. You ain’t going to tell, is you, Preacher?”

      Levi didn’t answer. His eyes turned toward the distance, at a lit-up place on the horizon where his church stood.

      Furman put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “Let’s get turned around and go on to the house. Tomorrow’s another day.”

      His uncle’s words hadn’t softened the vicious expression on Billy Dean’s face.

      That’s when Vida knew it for certain. The man wasn’t there to scare them. He was there to kill her son. No one could save Nate but her. She took her son up in her arms and ran. Trying to make it across the field and into the bayou had been the only way.

      She remembered the shotgun blasts, the spray of buckshot that sent her reeling into the dark. But what else could she have done? Hadn’t she done all a mother could do?

      The funeral had been a small, pitiful affair. Most people were too afraid to be seen in public with Levi. A preacher from Holmes County, an old friend of Levi’s, had traveled in by night to hold the service. Nobody cried except for Vida, her wounds bandaged but still raw. Everybody else, including her father, sat dry-eyed before the little pine coffin as the preacher spoke mournfully about how the innocence of children was a sure ticket to the Promised Land.

      As the preacher droned on, Vida’s body ached more from her loss of Nate than from the lead pellets that remained in her leg, embedded in muscle, so close to the bone. She tried to sooth herself by thinking of the Promised Land. She had never noticed before how often her people spoke of it. That made three the number of times that very week she had heard about the Promised Land. Once was from Lillie Dee. She had complained that Rezel was following the rest of her sons up North, to the Promised Land. Another time was from her father’s pulpit. It was where Moses was headed to.

      Now this preacher was praying for Nate’s safe journey, saying Nate was gone off to the Promised Land, as if it might be a good thing she had lost her baby. Vida couldn’t believe that Moses’s momma would agree.

      Even as a grown woman of twenty, Vida still didn’t believe it. Yet what she did believe with all her heart, what she thought about every day in the fields, what she lay awake at night promising Nate, what she swore to Jesus in every prayer she breathed, was that one day soon she would balance her books with the sheriff.

       Chapter Thirteen

       JESUS IN THE GRAVEYARD

      Today up in Delphi at the white cemetery, Jesus weighed heavily on Johnny’s mind. He had listened carefully as Brother Dear talked to Jesus about keeping Davie safe and watched as they lowered his brother down into the hole. Johnny wanted to ask his mother how long Jesus was going to keep his brother down there, but she wouldn’t look at Johnny. She sat next to him stone-faced, smelling one minute of Gardenia Paradise and the other of the medicine she had been taking from half-pint bottles.

      It seemed everybody around him was calling on Jesus except his mother, who grimaced every time somebody said his name. The biggest part of the town was there, sitting in rows and rows of straight-back funeral chairs, men sniffling and bashfully brushing their noses with the tops of their knuckles while offering their pocket handkerchiefs to their wives. Even his father wiped away tears as big as summer raindrops. Every now and then, from directly behind him, he heard the sobs of his aunt Onareen, the only one from Hazel’s family to attend.

      “How long is Davie going to have to stay with Jesus, Momma?” Johnny finally whispered.

      She acted as if she hadn’t heard him. Her dry stare was focused on Brother Dear, who shone brighter than sun on snow in his white suit. The preacher was now saying something about Jesus’s master plan and about never, never, never asking why.

      Still staring at Brother Dear, Hazel shredded her tissue until there was nothing but a mound of white bits on the lap of her black silk dress. Floyd reached over and brushed her off and then rested his hand over hers, stilling them.

      Returning from the funeral, Johnny asked his momma from the backseat how Davie was going to find his way back to the house. “Will Jesus set him loose at night? Oughten we come back in the car and get him so he don’t get lost?”

      His mother swung her head around in the seat. “What are you going on about?” she shouted. “Davie ain’t coming home. Never! Do you understand me? Jesus don’t let nobody go once he gets aholt of them!”

      Johnny sat stone still in the backseat. He was too startled to cry.

      Floyd turned to Hazel. “Why are you yelling at the boy? Why are you yelling at all? Why ain’t you crying? Everybody else is. It ain’t right, you being dry-eyed at your own son’s funeral.”

      Hazel looked accusingly at her husband. “Ain’t you the one always saying we can’t go back and change the past? That spilt milk ain’t worth crying over?”

      After taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out, Floyd shifted to his low serious voice, the one he used when he felt he was getting to the nub of the matter. “I’ll tell you why you ain’t crying, Hazel. It’s because you’re stinking drunk. It ain’t cute no more. You get mean when you drink. Just like your daddy. And I’m sure everybody at the funeral smelt it.”

      “I ain’t drunk, and don’t you talk about my daddy.” Hazel gritted her teeth. “And I’ll cry whenever somebody tells me why Davie is gone.” She shot Floyd a look that accused him of holding back the answer from her all along.

      “Well. . .” Floyd said, not appearing so sure of himself. Finally he ventured, “Now Jesus tells us we got to—”

      Hazel flew hot again. “I done heard enough about what Jesus tells us! Jesus and his many mansions. Jesus and his big ol’ everlasting arms. If His arms is so big and strong, how come they didn’t catch Davie? Tell me that!”

      Floyd didn’t offer an answer. When Davie had died, Floyd and his big ol’ arms had been there, too. Floyd