Echoes. Roger Arthur Smith

He was a man who truly appreciated how well she cooked. At that, she experienced a deep warmth spread through her, different from the warmth that handsome Matt Gans caused, higher up in her body and not so exciting, but still enjoyable.

      So. A start for Mildred, Dubykky thought.

      But as he knew that any compliment given or hinted from one man automatically brought to her mind some other man, whose appearance or past courtesy would divert her into making comparisons, Dubykky carefully steered the conversation to focus her strictly on Cledge. At the same time, he ensured that Cledge did not begin talking shop. Not that the law bored Gladys and Mildred so much as that they did not understand it and often expressed outrage at aspects of legal procedure that were simply a matter of course for lawyers. Dubykky did not want to fill the evening with the explanations necessary to make them see Cledge’s profession in the same light that he did. That would be dull.

      So they spoke of minerals, locations for finding them, local mines like the Lucky Boy, incidents related to local mines, the Nevada Paiute, Washoe, and Shoshone, arrowheads, antique weapons, Boudreau’s store, Hawthorne merchants in general, people who can be encountered in the shops—from gnarled prospectors to fresh-faced sailors—the atomic proving grounds, the local danger of war with the Soviet Union because the proving grounds and Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas were sure to be prime targets, not to mention Hawthorne itself because it lay smack beside the Babbitt naval ammunition depot, and, because the core material of atomic weapons—uranium—was to be found in Nevada, back to minerals.

      All participated, although primarily Cledge and Mildred. Cledge’s views on topics tended to be settled, definite, whereas Mildred’s, however vehemently expressed, were contingent on appearances. When the presidential race came up, as a tangent to atomic warfare, from the field of candidates, Republican or Democrat, Mildred immediately picked out John F. Kennedy as her choice.

      A handsome man had to be a good leader. She could not be talked out of that view, though Cledge tried. He was a Lyndon Johnson man.

      Dubykky only had to toss in an observation or fact now and then to keep the talk lively and away from unsuitable topics—unsuitable in that they might start a rupture. The closest it came to that occurred when Mildred, flush with satisfaction in herself, suggested to Cledge that he might be more comfortable with his tie removed. It was a thin, solid royal-blue tie over a stark white shirt and gave the unfortunate impression that his head was a balloon on a string. Dubykky agreed he would look more comfortable with it off but said nothing. The suggestion made Cledge blush, endearing in itself, but Mildred did not like to be balked. Cledge looked meaningfully to Dubykky, who was also wearing a tie, but he declined to take the hint and offer support. Mildred frowned. Gladys’s interest in the conversation, not very great until then, freshened.

      Sensing that he had upset Mildred, Cledge asked the table in general about the photo portrait of a man that he had noticed on the living room wall. The man, he averred, bore a striking resemblance to Mildred. Was he a brother? Gladys perked up even more.

      “That is Victor Warden, my husband and Mildred’s father,” she said to Cledge in a pedantic tone. Her husband was the dearest topic in the world to her. She never tired of speaking of him. “He died in that awful war in Korea while serving in the army with Will. That’s how we know Will.” She expanded on Victor’s background and virtues.

      While Cledge assumed a small, fixed approximation of a smile and Mildred looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and Gladys prosed on, Dubykky let his mind wander into the past: to Victor’s death, then back further to their first meeting in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and to what he knew of Victor’s early life.

      In fact, he knew a lot more than Gladys. Even the dinner reminded him of that fact, starting with the table service. The plates, silver-rimmed and gleaming white, though now smeared with food, were Japanese-made china, which Dubykky had brought home and presented to Gladys soon after he met them. He claimed it was a set that Warden had already bought for them. That was a white lie. Likewise the silver cutlery and candlesticks, all bought at a PX in Japan. A way to ingratiate himself. A way to assuage his regret. Regret not just because he was responsible for Warden’s death but also because what he knew of the man could not be shared.

      Mildred got up to get dessert, a rice pudding, while Gladys reflected on the mystery of her husband’s background. Victor, she told Cledge sadly, had never been specific about his family or childhood home. Really, it never concerned her enough to press him about until it was too late. Now it added piquancy to her nostalgia. Her eyes grew moist.

      She didn’t know because her husband had little to tell, and even then, he understood little about the context of his first days. Dubykky had turned up a few facts through his own research, as well as some probabilities. But even those small, available histories were dismal.

      Victor Warden was the product of multiple lynchings.

      Based on what Warden told Dubykky, the lynchings occurred sometime late in World War I or shortly thereafter somewhere in the Deep South. From old news stories and magazine articles, almost all from northern periodicals, Dubykky identified three clusters of lynchings, of which one seemed most probably related to Warden. But the paucity of specific information and Warden’s ignorance of the circumstances made it impossible to pin down for sure.

      Even in outline, the sequence of events was unspeakably foul. A white woman complained to her brother that a black man had molested her. The brother had the man arrested and put in a small-town jail. Then he got drunk. The drink stoked his rage. He gathered friends and went to the jail. The lawman stood aside while the mob beat the black man, who was then dragged by his feet from his cell into the street. A noose was displayed to the gathering crowd. The brother tied a rope to the prisoner’s feet, intending to hitch the opposite end to a horse’s halter so the prisoner could be dragged to a suitable tree outside the town, when a second mob arrived to stop the lynching.