With that, Harriet Jacobs picked up her Montgomery Fair shopping bags and moved to the back of the bus. She sat down next to the old black woman. The woman seemed confused.
Patty Sprinkle had lots to talk to her husband about that night. He had lots to say as well. There was a faction of men who shared Mr. Sprinkle’s views who were exploring ways to punish the black leaders of the boycott for that they had done. There would be arrests and convictions for violation of state statutes that banned boycotts “without just cause.” Local automobile insurers would be coerced into canceling coverage for those who enlisted their vehicles in the carpooling efforts. Taxi drivers who lowered their fares to match the bus fare would be subjected to a re-animation of an ancient city ordinance that set a minimum on taxi fares — a minimum that most black folk in Montgomery couldn’t afford to pay. Later would come the retaliatory house and church bombings. These, though publicly disavowed by the ostensibly upstanding members of the white community, were always effective in drumming up the requisite amount of fear among the black citizenry.
1955 was ending but 1956 promised to be an even more difficult year for Montgomery, Alabama, in the area of race relations. Harriet Jacobs spent that year driving maids to and from their places of employment, and avoiding contact with almost all of the women she had once considered friends, including the woman who was a friend only by the broadest definition of the word. Patty Sprinkle, without a car, and without the ability to drive one even if she had one, spent the year largely at home berating her maid and yardman, and agreeing with everything her husband said, no matter how racist, no matter how venomous.
Three hundred and eighty-one days after the boycott began, the federal judiciary of the United States agreed with Rosa Parks and the boycotters, and put an end to segregation on all modes of public transportation nationwide.
In April of that year, the singer Nat King Cole, native of Montgomery, was brutally assaulted in the middle of a concert ninety miles up the road in Birmingham by members of the Northern Alabama White Citizens’ Council.
During the boycott, Patty Sprinkle would on occasion go downtown to shop. The bus was almost always either empty or nearly so. She told people that she liked it that way. She told people that it suited her just fine.
1956 DISCREETLY SILENT IN MONTANA
The deputy sheriff and the emergency room physician had been friends since childhood. Their familiarity with one another often placed them into situations of like-minded understanding, obviating the need for long explanations or even drawn-out disagreement. There were occasions, in fact, in which each man knew exactly what his friend was thinking. This was such a time.
The bodies of two dead teenage boys lay on examining tables at one end of a long corridor, its white walls alternately strobed and obumbrated by two flickering, dying overhead fluorescents. At the other end of the corridor were the boys’ families and friends: two fathers and two mothers, one grandmother, five siblings, four friends, and one solicitous neighbor. It was two-fifteen in the morning and several of those who waited anxiously for word on the boys drank from cardboard cups of coffee. The men smoked. The grandmother prayed. The two youngest children slept curled upon the waiting room divans, their heads resting in mirror symmetry upon their mothers’ laps.
Over the fluorescent tube’s importunate hum, the deputy sheriff said, “When are we—?” He finished his question by jerking his head in the direction of the waiting room.
“I thought we should talk first,” replied the doctor. “You’ll tell me what you and your men saw when they reached the scene?”
The deputy nodded. “We should be on the same page, though, about what the families need to know.”
“Yeah, right.” The doctor pulled a package of Salems from the pocket of his scrubs. The mentholated cigarette was new. “I don’t get all the hoopla,” he said, offering one of the smokes to the lawman. “Tastes exactly like Kool.”
The two men started walking together down the corridor. They passed an empty gurney, then an abandoned candy striper’s hospitality cart. The doctor exchanged nods with a bustling night shift intern.
The doctor led the deputy into a small hospital conference room. Sometimes families were brought into this room to discuss options for the care or, in some cases, the termination of care for their sick or dying loved one. The room was spare, more formally arrayed than the waiting room. It was a place where the families, many of them ranchers from isolated parts of Lewis and Clark County, could think more clearly and less emotionally about what needed to be done. Of course, there was no need to bring the families of the two dead teenagers into this room tonight. There was no decision to be made — only information to be conveyed: that the lives of two young Helena men had ended too soon, had ended in a terrible automobile accident on a darkened highway a few miles east of town.
And yet.
And yet, there was also that other matter.
The lanky deputy sheriff settled himself into a chair. The rock-faced doctor half-sat, half-leaned against the edge of the table a few feet away. The deputy ran his hand through his thick, dark brown hair. He was in his late thirties and the gray had only just begun to sprout at the temples. The doctor, who was only a few months older than the deputy, was still blond, but his hair was thinning. Crow’s feet had begun to form in the outer corners of his eyes, squinting now in the room’s bright unnatural light.
“As you know, both boys arrived DOA,” said the doctor. “Though the Findley kid—”
“Died in the ambulance,” said the deputy, his voice solemn. “We’d hoped that…” His voice trailed off. He shook his head.
“So both were in the car when you got there? Neither of them had been thrown?”
The lawman nodded. “The Findley boy was still behind the wheel. Chest staved in. From the steering column?”
The doctor nodded. “Where was the Robinson boy?”
“On the floor.”
“At the time of impact?”
“My guess: half on, half off the seat. When we found him his head was down by the other boy’s feet.”
“What do you think, Gavin?”
“You want me to say it?”
“I need you to confirm it.”
“I didn’t wipe it all off?”
The doctor shook his head. “Not completely. There was still some residue of semen on the right cheek.”
“But that wasn’t the only thing that would have given it away.”
The doctor scooted off the table. He pulled up a chair, turned it backward and sat down next to the deputy.
“The kid’s pants,” the deputy went on, “the Findley kid’s — they were pulled down to his ankles.”
“The BVDs too?”
The deputy nodded. “Merton and I figure that the wreck could have been attributed to any number of things. All related. The booze, obviously. Diminished attention to the road on the part of the teenager getting fellated. Merton thinks it could also be partly due to the Findley boy’s pants getting tangled up with the accelerator pedal. They were both barefoot, you know. They were coming back from their senior class’s big bonfire at the lake. Neither of the boys had apparently bothered to put his shoes back on.”