His old ties to the past were gone. Ferris Brixham, dead. Sallie Sue, dead. Mrs. Asia LaMotte, dead; a year and a half now, her insides a feast for a cancer. Now Juba; the last. He had been so crippled at the end, he couldn't crawl from his pallet. Des had fed him and bathed him and cleaned him as if he were some expensive artifact, the last artifact, from a razed house. Juba had died in his sleep, and Des had stared at the corpse by the light of a candle for nearly an hour. His servant's passing reminded him that the human body was frail enough without deliberately endangering it. The hotblood who'd confronted Cooper Main on the plank bridge seemed like a foolish and very distant relative who didn't understand life's realities and whose ideas no longer had any pertinence. Des was old; he was sick; he had fought long enough.
He got ready to stand up. It required mental preparation because he knew his knees would creak and hurt. Strange that the same arthritic trouble that had tormented Juba had now fallen on him, and at a much younger age. He could no longer do a formal dance step gracefully. That was another part of his life that was over. His face, drawn down into sad lines, reflected the attrition of the years, and so did his carroty hair; the white streak was broader, and forked into a trident.
As he started to stand, he heard a horse walking into the cemetery. A hoof snapped a fallen branch. He groaned as he rose and turned, expecting to see some black sharecropper riding his sway-backed animal to a family grave. He was startled to discover a white man. Behind the man the clouds boiled like black soup in a hot kettle.
The stranger was young, scarcely more than twenty. He wore plow shoes and an old black coat with the collar turned up. He had shaved closely, but his black beard showed. The sun had burned his nose and upper cheeks and hands; they looked raw. When the young man climbed down from his milky horse Des saw the back of his neck. Red, from field work.
While the young man walked toward Des, other details registered. Something was wrong with the stranger's left eye; it had the fixed look of blindness. The horse made Des think of Revelations: And his name that sat on him was Death.
"You are Desmond LaMotte?"
"I am, sir."
"I was told I'd find you here."
Des waited. There was a suppressed ferocity about the stranger. Somehow it fit with the rawness of his red face, red hands, red neck, ghastly staring eye; it frightened Des badly.
He saw no sign of a weapon, but his long legs shook when the stranger began reaching into various pockets of his threadbare coat, saying, "I am Benjamin Ryan Tillman of York County, sir. I have ridden here with instructions to speak to you."
"York County." That was a long way; above Columbia, at the North Carolina border. "I don't know anyone in York County."
"Oh, yes," Tillman said, presenting what he'd found in his pocket. A news clipping already yellowed. The headline startled Des.
THE KUKLUX
DISCOVERY OF THE REMAINS OF DETECTIVE BARMORE
Des's fear sharpened. The nor'easter snapped the corner of the clipping, which came from some paper in Nashville. "I don't understand this, sir —" he began.
"I'm here to explain it to you. The story says the man's body was found in some woods, along with an empty pocketbook and part of his K.K.K. rig."
"What does that have to do with me?"
"I am here to explain that, too. This white man, Barmore, he failed to carry out an order from the Grand Dragon over there in Tennessee." Tillman plucked the clipping from Des's pale hand: "The Grand Dragon of Carolina wanted to show you that the Invisible Empire won't be disobeyed."
Des felt a keen, hurting urge to make water. The stranger's good eye had a fanatic glitter. The wind, near gale force now, shot leaves past them in swirling clouds. Old tree limbs creaked. One broke off and sailed away.
"I've not disobeyed a single order," Des protested.
"And you won't disobey the one I'm here to give you, either. Your klavern hasn't controlled this district like it should. Everybody in the state knows about that woman at Mont Royal, coining money left and right with her mill and her phosphates while she runs that nigger school."
Des's gut hurt. "We tried to burn the school —"
"Tried," Tillman said, the initial T sending little sprays of spit into Des's face. "Tried is no good. You botched it. Now the damn Yankee politicians and Bible-thumpers are coming down to see it and praise it, and you do nothing. It's a stench in the nostrils of God-fearing white men. You're to get rid of it, La-Motte. You're to get rid of it or you'll go the same way Barmore went in Tennessee."
"Do you know who you're talking to?" Des shouted. "I fought the whole war in the Palmetto Rifles. An elite regiment. What did you do? Stay home with the rest of the redneck farmer boys?"
"You shit-face Charleston snob!" He was spitting again; there was something primitive and utterly dangerous about him. "I lay sick two years, trying to get well enough to join up. I lost the sight of this eye and I lost two brothers to war wounds and another to the camp fever. I'm foursquare for the South and the white race, and I've killed to prove it. I ride for the Klan in York County, and I'm to give you just one warning. The Grand Dragon of Carolina wants some blood down here. Nigger blood. That Main woman. Get your den together, get rid of her school, then get rid of her." Scornful of Des's fright, he held up the clipping. The wind tore the edges. "Understand?"
"I — I do."
"That goes for the rest of your klavern, too."
"Believe me, Tillman, I want what you want. What the Klan wants. But we had opposition last time and we'll have more now. There's nigger militia at Mont Royal —"
"Nobody gives an ounce of rat pee if all the archangels from glory are on guard with their harps and halos," Tillman said. "Either she's gone in thirty days or you're gone. I will return with pleasure to execute the sentence."
He stared at Des until Des looked away. Then, with a snicker, he tucked the clipping into the side pocket of Des's coat. He strode against the wind to his milky horse and mounted nimbly. "Good day, sir," he said, and rode out of the burying ground, his black coat the same color as the sky ahead of him.
Des leaned against a tree, weak. He read the Barmore story, then read it again. He didn't doubt the authenticity of the visitor's credentials, or the seriousness of the warning. The stranger, Benjamin Ryan Tillman of York County, was one of the most daunting human beings he'd ever met. He made Des think of Romans who slew Christians, and of the Inquisitors of Spain.
Carolina would hear from the young redneck if the darkies didn't rise up and kill him to save themselves first.
In the howling wind he rode Juba's mule back to Charleston.
At dusk he set out for the Dixie Store at Summerton. Arriving there, he instructed Gettys to buy explosives. Gettys stuttered that it was too dangerous. Des told him to ride to Savannah, or upriver to Augusta if necessary. He told him it was the Klan's order. He told him the Klan's sentence if they failed. After that Gettys didn't argue.
59
Though Whistling Snake was at least seventy winters, he walked with the vigor of a young man. His neck and forearms had a taut, sinewy look. His pure white hair was simply parted and braided without adornment. He wore a hide smock that long use had buffed to the color of dull gold. A plain rawhide belt gathered the smock at his waist. In his right hand, chest high, he held a fan of matched golden eagle feathers two feet wide from tip to tip.
Charles couldn't remember seeing another old man with such an aura of strength. Or human eyes quite so arrogant and unpleasant. The right iris was only partly visible, hidden by a lip of puckered flesh. Scar's face was smooth by comparison with that of Whistling Snake's, which looked as though his flesh had melted from temple to jaw, then been pushed and twisted into ridges as it hardened. Indentations like large healed nail wounds stippled the ridges of flesh. The man was hideous, which only made him seem stronger.