“It’s intoxicating.”
“I understand she was quite an alluring nymph.”
“Bradford, how’d you get into botany?”
“Call me Brad. Not many kids to play with at Windrow, at least not many kids my parents deemed ‘up to Hall standards.’ So I made friends with the plantation animals, became a vegetarian when I figured out some of them were ending up on my dinner plate, and I started getting interested in Windrow’s plants.”
“It seems like a good place to do it.”
“It is. Botanically, Windrow is in a marvelous part of the world. It’s in a region that’s the northernmost subtropical point in the United States. I have in mind to do a coffeetable book devoted entirely to the botany of Windrow. You have pine trees and palm trees—more plant species than you could ever imagine. The frustrating thing is when you come across something that just doesn’t seem to have a name. Tracking down the facts becomes an obsession.”
“I know the feeling.”
It was mid-afternoon when we arrived in Hirtsboro. The sun scorched with the intensity of a heat lamp, glinting off railroad tracks that bisected the town and split treeless Jefferson Davis Boulevard, a lane on each side. Two blocks of one- and two-story storefronts faced each other across the boulevard. I took out my notebook and wrote down the signs as we drove by: Farmers & Mechanics Insurance Agency; the Great Southern Auto Supply and Appliance Store; International Feed & Seed; a consignment store called Second Time Around; Classen’s Clothes (Come to Classen’s for Classy Clothes!); the First Bank of Hirtsboro (open Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and, in gold letters in old English type, The Hirtsboro Reporter.
“This town looks like the model train set my brother Luke and I had as kids,” I said.
Brad turned off Jefferson Davis and we cruised slowly through the neighborhoods behind the storefronts. Unlike with the train set, there was a right side and wrong side of the tracks. On one side, a few blocks behind the storefronts, fine old homes sprawled on large lots with sidewalks and landscaped yards adorned with huge, spreading magnolias and carefully attended azaleas. In the neighborhoods on the other side of the tracks, peeling-paint shotgun houses sat on small sun-baked yards. There were no sidewalks. The streets were sandy, narrow, and unpaved.
“Savannah County is ninety percent black and always has been,” Brad said. “The land’s good for plantation crops like cotton, rice, and indigo. If you were white, you were a planter or maybe an overseer. If you were black, you were a slave. There wasn’t much else. After Emancipation, people who were here just stayed and there’s never been reason for anybody else to come. The white people, by and large, are descendants of the planters and overseers. The blacks are descendants of the slaves. It hasn’t been that long.”
We returned to the center of town where the diagonal lines of parking spaces angled out from the railroad track like bones from a fish spine. Brad parked his pickup with its bumper sticker reading “Meat is Dead” next to a souped-up Chevelle with a bumper sticker reading “I Have a Dream”—along with a picture of the Confederate flag flying over the U.S. Capitol.
“Let’s stop in at the paper,” Brad said. “I want you to meet the editor.”
A young man with a large waist and green visor stood as we entered. Brad introduced me as a Charlotte Times reporter to Glenn Hudson and told him, “I’ve talked Matt into coming down here to look into the story.”
“Great newspaper,” Hudson said. “If I can help in any way, let me know.”
Out the plate glass window, I watched a boy about seven or eight years old struggle to push a bent and broken bicycle across Jefferson Davis Boulevard. As he got closer, I could see he was crying.
The red bike’s front wheel was folded over into a crescent. Snapped spokes splayed out in all directions. The handlebars were twisted, the seat turned sideways. The bike’s white sidewall tires were flat. Struts of the frame intruded into the misshapen rear wheel so that it would not turn. The chain dragged on the ground.
Halfway across the street the boy gently lowered the bike and used his sleeve to wipe his eyes. Hudson shoved by me, ran into the street and scooped the boy up.
“My bi-i-i-ke,” the boy sobbed.
The boy clasped his father’s neck and buried his head in his shoulder. The man stroked his son’s hair and kissed him on the cheek.
“What happened, son?”
“I rode my bike over to Michael and Chris’s to play and they broke it. They had concrete blocks and they knocked it down and they just kept throwing them.” The little boy wriggled out of his father’s arms, hugged the bike’s broken frame and broke into a new round of sobs. “They said their dad told them to because you’re a nigger-lover.”
Hudson picked up Jimmy with his right hand and slung him over his shoulder. With his left hand he picked up the bike and carried them both to the sidewalk. “C’mon, Jimmy,” he said. “We’re going shopping.”
Brad and I watched them disappear into the Great Southern Auto Supply and Appliance store. They emerged a few minutes later, Jimmy riding a new red bike in circles around his father.
When they got back to the newspaper office Hudson took several copies of that week’s edition of The Hirtsboro Reporter and tucked them into his belt so that they covered his stomach. Then he showed Jimmy how to make a fist.
“Don’t wrap your fingers around your thumb, you’ll break it that way,” he said. “Put your thumb on the outside. Now, hit me in the stomach, as hard as you can.”
Jimmy poked at the newspapers.
“You won’t hurt me. That what the papers are for.”
Jimmy hit a little harder.
“I said hard!”
“Why?”
“Because nobody’s going to do that to your bike again.”
It took a few more times and a bit more encouragement, but eventually Jimmy hit his father as hard as he could.
I wanted to cry. I know some of it was because I had been moved by what I had just seen—by Hudson’s love for his son, his instinct to do whatever it took to protect him, and by Jimmy’s need for his father. My father never would have done that for me.
But mostly it was because I was angry. I was angry at parents who encourage hate. I was angry at the cruelty kids inflict on each other. I was angry that an innocent boy named Jimmy had to be hurt for something he had nothing to do with. I was angry that he had to be taught to make a fist so that he could defend himself.
Before we left, Brad took out his wallet, peeled off some twenty-dollar bills and offered them to Hudson. “For the bike. I should never have gotten you into this.”
Hudson waved the money aside. “Cowardly bastards. One damn editorial. I’m gonna get ’em back.”
On the drive back to Windrow, I asked Brad what Hudson had written.
“Something outlandish and radical,” he said. “He wrote that Hirtsboro should try to solve the murder of Wallace Sampson.”
The next morning, a blast of humidity and the high whine of cicadas greeted Brad and me as we left the house and crunched across the gravel to the pickup for the drive back into Hirtsboro.
“If