‘That’s wonderful, Papa, I –’
The businessman raised a finger, stopping his son in mid-flow. He placed the two cheques face up on the blotter and pushed the blotter across the desk so Willard could see them both clearly.
The first one was written out for twenty-five thousand dollars and Willard moved his glance aside with a flicker of irritation. The second cheque was better. Much better. ‘One million dollars precisely.’ The figures were so many that the older man had had difficulty fitting them into the space designated. Willard felt an almost overpowering urge to reach out and take the money.
But first there was a question. He lifted his eyes.
‘Father?’
‘You may take whichever cheque you choose. You may take the million dollars. You can pay off Ted. You can make pictures. You can do whatever it is you wish to do. But you will have nothing to do with the Firm. There are professional managers available these days, who will conduct business in a first-rate way. As for the future, I shall treat you as I propose to treat the girls. I shall give each of them a large gift upon marriage. That’s this, in your case.’ He tapped the million-dollar cheque in front of him. ‘Thereafter there will be nothing further during my lifetime. When your mother and I pass on, you and the girls will inherit everything in equal fifths.’
‘Or?’ asked Willard in a whisper.
‘Or you may take the smaller cheque. You got yourself into debt. You must get yourself out of debt. If you succeed in doing so, I believe you will have the wherewithal to make a creditable leader of the Firm.’
‘But two hundred thousand dollars, Pa. I…’
The businessman didn’t soften his expression at all.
‘You may come to whatever accommodation with Ted Powell you can. I would not expect him to make any special allowance for you because you are my son. But he is a good finance man. He’ll be reasonable.’
Willard stared back at the cheques. The large one and the small one. Both, in their different ways, represented a life sentence of a sort. Willard’s headache thundered in his temples. He felt like a small boy asked to do a man’s job.
‘As I say,’ said the older man, ‘the choice is yours.’
Hennessey finished speaking.
It was gone midnight. Outside, a few dogs howled, a few birds called, the breeze set up a low murmur that ran from tree-top to tree-top. Abe’s blue eyes, the brightest thing in a dingy room, had been fixed on his companion for the past hour and a half. Hennessey had smoked twelve cigarettes, Abe just one. Though the pint bottle of whiskey stood within easy reach of both men, it was still nearly full. Abe hadn’t even finished his first glass.
There was a long silence which extended beyond the two men out into the whispering night beyond.
‘That’s a hell of a story, Hennessey.’
‘You can call me Hen. Everyone does.’
The story was this.
Four or five years back, Independence was like every town the length and breadth of America. It wasn’t too good, it wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t too rich, it wasn’t too poor. The sheriff was busy now and again, but so was the preacher. Folks made money, they made love, they made merry, they made out.
Then, in the early days of 1921, things began to change. At first, it was nothing so extraordinary. A big block of land down in the river bottom was sold to out-of-towners. Up the hill in Independence, people laughed. The land down by the river was marshy and prone to flooding, pretty near useless for farming. There were jokes made about cows learning to swim, about harvesting corn from a rowboat.
But the laughter died. Construction crews were brought in. The land was drained. The river was contained behind concrete walls. Houses and villas were thrown up: big, lavish affairs with oil-fired generators, electric lights, air conditioning, indoor bathrooms, one for every bedroom. That part of it was exciting – unsettling maybe, but exciting.
Then people began to arrive. The houses became occupied, the villas filled up.
‘There’s gambling down there,’ said Hennessey. ‘Blackjack, poker, craps, roulette, the lot. And booze too, of course.’
‘Gambling? It’s hardly Palm Beach down there, Hen.’
‘Different type of customer. Palm Beach is for rich guys on vacation. They take a swim, they take the air, they take in a casino. Marion ain’t like that. It’s for serious gamblers. Folk who like the fact that there are no cops in shouting distance. The town is run by hoods, for sure, but I’d say that their clients were mostly just as rough.’
Abe thought again about the view of Marion from the air. There was a single-track rail spur linking the town to the coastal express line and a single-track dirt road heading out towards Brunswick. Neither route looked like it carried a lot of traffic.
‘Marion’s tough to get to, isn’t it?’
The storekeeper nodded. ‘They run a kind of buggy service out to the railroad and back. But hard-to-get-to is part of their pitch. They attract the kind of folks who don’t get on with cops.’
‘And they haven’t been the best of neighbours, right?’
The question had made Hennessey reach for another cigarette, which he lit before answering. ‘I guess we didn’t make a great first impression. Certain parties up here in Independence feel mighty strongly about old John Barleycorn and the whole Prohibition thing. Those parties called the cops, the county government, the County Gazette, generally made a bit of a noise.’
‘And?’
‘The cops came, took a look, said far as they were concerned Marion was full of law-abiding citizens going about their law-abiding business. They told us to shut up.’
‘And?’
‘And that night a couple of cars came up from Marion full of goons and Tommy guns. They shot us up. They weren’t really trying to kill anyone, just trying to let us know how they felt about things. We had four people hurt, plenty of damage to property. So then a bunch of people made a complaint not just to the county but to the state Capitol in Atlanta.’ The storekeeper dragged on his cigarette until a quarter-inch glowed red on the tip. He stared at it as if it held an answer to all the problems of the world. ‘The cops never came. The letters never got answered. But the folk who’d signed those letters had their houses torched, shots fired at them, livestock shot dead in the field, crops burned. Two men were beaten so badly they could hardly see.’
Abe looked intently at the storekeeper. ‘The house behind the store has a new front, Hen.’
‘Yes, I was lucky. I got to the fire before it had done too much damage. I don’t give a damn for Prohibition. I don’t see why federal government should meddle in county business. But then again, I don’t like the idea that some goons could go buy themselves the laws they wanted. I don’t like the way they take out their guns at the first sign of trouble.’
‘And now?’
‘They want us gone. That sound crazy? But it’s true. They just plain don’t want us as neighbours. Course they got jobs down there. Poor folks’ jobs. Would be coloured jobs, ’cept we never had too many coloureds round here. Cleaning floors, mending roads, that type of thing. But aside from that, they want us gone. It’s little things, but it’s all the time. Farmers wake up, find somebody’s fired their hayrick. Houghton here gets his place smashed up ’bout once a year. Me, I’ve had my own problems. If anybody even whispers about resisting, it isn’t long before they’re jumped on and beaten to a pulp.