Grievances Read online

  A short time later Vanessa Brown emerged dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt that said Brown Family Reunion. Her hair was straight, pulled back from her face and, except for a ribbon that stuck out the back, hidden under a blue bandana. She was five foot four, maybe one hundred thirty-five pounds and wore large black glasses. We stood up as she approached the picnic table. I got out my pen and reporter’s notebook.

  “Vanessa Brown?” Brad asked.

  She stared at the ground. “Yes, sir.”

  “Miss Brown, I’m Bradford Hall. I live out at Windrow. This is my friend Matthew Harper. He’s a reporter. I wonder if we might ask you about Wallace Sampson.”

  She kicked a pebble and looked up.

  “Maybe there’s a better time to talk,” I said. “When do you get a break?”

  “Don’t get no break.”

  “We’ll wait until you get off.”

  “Why you care ’bout what happened to Wallace?”

  A complicated question. Because Bradford Hall was trying to reclaim the heritage of his family? Because Ronnie Bullock wanted to prove he wasn’t washed up? Because I needed this story to save my job? Because Walker Burns wanted a Pulitzer Prize and a ticket to a different newspaper? “We’re trying to help out Mrs. Sampson,” I said.

  Vanessa Brown looked up for the first time. “Mrs. Sampson asked you to do this?”

  “No,” Brad said. “We volunteered. But she knows what we’re doing.”

  Vanessa Brown took a seat at the picnic table and I knew we had made a breakthrough. I started with the questions that seemed the easiest: how she and Wallace had met (“I’d been knowing him all my life”); what kind of boy he was (“Real sweet”); how long they’d been dating (“Since sixth grade”); what they did on their dates (“Mess around”). When I felt I had her confidence, I moved to the night of the killing.

  “He came to my house. We sat on the swing and held hands. At midnight, Momma made him go home.” She lowered her head and picked at a splinter on the table. “I watched him walk down the road. Then he got shot.”

  “Did you hear the shot?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know where it came from?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you see Wallace fall?”

  “He spun around first.”

  I made notes.

  “How could you see him if it was late at night?”

  “Lights from De Sto. It was closed. But lights was always on inside.”

  “What did you do when Wallace spun around?”

  “Ran up to him. His eyes was open but part of his head was gone. I ran home and told Momma and she called the police.”

  “Did you see anything else just before or after the shooting?” Brad asked.

  “I didn’t see nothin’, ’cept Wallace fall.”

  “Has anyone ever asked you before about the killing?” I asked.

  “My friends.”

  “The police? Sheriff?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Wallace Sampson?” I asked.

  She shook her head and picked at the bench with bitten-down nails.

  “Is there anything else we should know?” Brad asked.

  Vanessa Brown looked at my notebook. “No,” she said. “That’s it.”

  I asked for her phone number in case we needed to follow up. She gave us the number to her party line. I gave her my card with Brad’s number written on the back. It was getting close to 5:00 p.m.—time for Patty Paysinger to evict Bullock. Brad and I headed back toward the Town Hall.

  “I think she knows more than she’s saying,” Brad said. “Seemed like she was holding back.”

  “Probably scared. She barely looked at us.”

  “In the old days they weren’t supposed to.”

  “She has a party line. Maybe it’s still the old days.”

  My eye caught three black girls—I judged them to be about ten years old—holding hands as they skipped down the street dressed in T-shirts, flip-flop sandals and shorts. As if a starting gun had been fired at a track meet, the girls broke into a sprint and raced, laughing, toward a drinking fountain planted on the sidewalk in front of the thick glass doors that marked the entrance to Classen’s.

  A girl in pink shorts surged quickly to the lead and didn’t let up until she broke through an imaginary finish line between the store and the fountain. Bent over with her hands on her knees, she was still laughing and trying to catch her breath when her companions flailed to a stop beside her.

  The girl stumbled to the fountain and began to drink.

  The other two girls shouted “Keisha” as the door to Classen’s flew open and a blue-haired white woman exploded from the entrance.

  “Stop that!” the woman commanded. She began to swat the girl with a balsa yardstick. “Go on! Get away!” The girl warded off the blows but stayed frozen at the fountain until one of her friends, in red shorts, pulled her away.

  “She’s sorry,” the girl in red shorts said. “She’s not from here.”

  “She needs to learn her place,” the woman said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the girl said. Her eyes never left the ground. As the woman watched, the girl in the red shorts took the hand of the girl who had been drinking and led her across the street to a spot near the railroad tracks where a rusty spigot emerged from a tangle of a weeds, gravel and broken glass. “Colored water’s here,” she said. “That other’s white.”

  “I don’t want colored water,” the girl said, bewildered. “I want plain old white water, just like we have at Atlanta.”

  The girl in the red shorts turned on the spigot. “Same water. White folks drink there. Black folk drink here.”

  The woman straightened her hair and returned to Classen’s.

  I was stunned. “Jesus. Segregated public facilities? How can this be?”

  “They took the actual ‘White’ and ‘Colored’ signs down years ago,” Brad sighed. “But no one has to be told what their place is. Unless you’re not from around here.”

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning I wanted to visit Reverend Grace while Bullock resumed his search for the police report on the Sampson shooting. Bullock had other ideas.

  “It’s a damned train wreck in there,” he said as we ate breakfast with Brad Hall at the Hungry Tummy. “Dozens of file cabinets—three doors high and green. You know the kind. The police reports are there but there’s no pattern. We’re gonna have to go through every damn one. It’s gonna take days. Maybe weeks.”

  The grill sizzled with strips of bacon and country ham. A steamy pot of grits mingled with the smell of fresh-baked biscuits. The air conditioner above the door was already running at full blast. I groaned.

  “Why don’t we all look?” Brad said. “We’ll work around the clock until we finish.”

  “One problem,” I pointed out. “The place is only open half a day.”

  “And Friday,” Bullock remembered, “we can’t work at all.”

  From time to time I’ve worked on the speech I’d give if my father ever asked me to lecture to one of his journalism classes. Reporting is a lot like academic research, I’d tell the students, and a newspaper story is a lot like a thesis. In academic research, you might poke around old books and documents in the musty corner of a library. In reporting, the documents are in a musty corner of a city hall. In a thesis, you say what you’re trying to prove at the beginning and spend the rest of the paper marshalling the argument and providing the proof. Same thing with a newspaper story—only with shorter words and no footnotes.

  Over the next few days Brad Hall, Ronnie Bullock, and I joined Patty Paysinger as regular inhabitants of the Hirtsboro town hall. She seemed to enjoy the company. After their first half day, she and Bullock were already on a first-name bas
is.

  “The easiest thing to do is look for the date,” Bullock advised. “May 4, 5, or 6. It’s in the top right of the page of the report so you don’t have to pull each one all the way out of the file.”

  But occasionally curiosity got the better of me and I could not resist pulling an entire report from the stack and reading the hand-written accounts of Hirtsboro’s high crimes, misdemeanors, and cows in the roadway.

  “Hey, look at this, Ronnie,” I said, sliding a report across the table. “Someone stole fifty pounds of barbecue from the Hungry Tummy back in ’78. Broke in through a ventilation shaft. The local pig was all over that one.”

  Bullock frowned. “Hilarious. Now how ’bout you quit wasting time.”

  There were twenty-two file cabinets—sixty-six drawers. In a half day, Bullock had been through two of the drawers. At the end of the first day together, each of us had made similar progress. Only fifty-eight more drawers to go. If Hirtsboro’s lone officer wrote four reports a day over twenty years, we were going to be examining forty thousand documents. Even if we could average one document every fifteen seconds, it would take fifty-five hours per person. We didn’t have that kind of time.

  “We’ve got to be able to work more than part-time on this,” Brad said that night. “Any chance Miss Patty’d let us work when she’s not there?”

  “None,” Bullock replied. “But I’ve got an idea.”

  In the days ahead, we developed a pattern: arrive with Patty Paysinger, work as hard as we could while Town Hall was open and, whenever Patty went to the bathroom or left the office, smuggle drawers of the unexamined police reports to the car and spend the next morning sifting through them at the Hall dining room table before returning to town with the files, smuggling them back in and repeating the process over again.

  During all this, town business went on uninterrupted—a parade of residents paying water bills and property taxes or asking that the town gravel truck fill the potholes on their road. Olen Pennegar made irregular appearances, stopping to talk quietly with Patty. He rarely acknowledged us. We never saw Magistrate J. Rutledge Buchan.

  It was late in the day Tuesday of our second week when Brad held up a single-page police report and said casually, “Here’s something interesting. The day before Wallace Sampson was shot, someone threw a firebomb at De Sto.”

  “That old store, across from where the shooting occurred?” Bullock said. “What happened?”

  Brad scanned the report. “Apparently, it scorched the side but there wasn’t any structural damage. But here’s what’s strange. The officer who investigated the incident was Olen Pennegar.”

  “Can’t be,” I said.

  “See for yourself.” Brad pointed to the signature. It was as plain as day.

  “Patty, let me ask you something,” Bullock called. “How come Olen Pennegar’s name is on a police report that’s almost as old as he is?”

  “That’s his daddy,” she laughed. “Olen Pennegar Sr.”

  A second later, Brad exclaimed, “I’ve got it! I’ve got the report on the Wallace Sampson shooting!”

  All of us, including Patty Paysinger, rushed over to Brad’s side of the table. The first thing I noticed is that the handwriting was the same as on the report about the firebombing of De Sto. The report had been written by Olen Pennegar Sr.

  Beyond that, it contained little helpful information. No reporting persons. No suspects. No motive. No detail. Just a hand-written, single paragraph that read, “Subject was laying in the street w/head wound that appears to have been caused by a gunshot. Subject transported to USCMC/Charleston. No witnesses located. No weapons found.”

  Bullock asked, “Patty, is Olen Pennegar Sr. still around?”

  “He took disability about fifteen years ago. Lives out in the country in a trailer next to his son. But he ain’t all there. Had a case of the nerves. Just wasn’t safe for him to carry a gun.”

  “So his son took over for him?”

  “Heavens, no. Olen Jr. was just a boy. We had several other officers between them. But he does wear his daddy’s nameplate and he carries his daddy’s gun.”

  We used the town copying machine to make copies of the reports about the shooting of Wallace Sampson and the firebombing of De Sto and said our good-byes to Patty Paysinger.

  “We appreciate your kindness,” said Brad.

  She smiled. “Certainly. It was nice to have someone else around. I’m going to miss the company.”

  She turned to Bullock and me. “I need two things before you leave for Charlotte. You made four copies on the town machine and Hirtsboro needs to be reimbursed. It’s fifteen cents a copy so the total is sixty cents.”

  Bullock searched his pants pocket and came up with two quarters and two nickels. He handed them to Paysinger who put them into a box in her desk and wrote out a receipt.

  “What’s the other thing?” he asked.

  “Make sure those drawers of reports you’ve been loading in the trunk of your car when you thought I wasn’t looking are all back in here. They’re town property. I will not have them disappearing.”

  Bullock flushed like a six-year-old caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he stammered.

  “And drive safely.”

  “Damn,” he said when we got back to the car. “She must have eyes in the back of her head.”

  “Before we drive back to Windrow, I want to get another look at De Sto,” Brad said. We drove over and parked in the circular gravel drive.

  “The place doesn’t look like it was firebombed,” I said.

  “The police report said it didn’t do much damage,” Brad answered.

  “Let’s see if we can find where it hit,” said Bullock.

  We walked around to the right and there it was—an unmistakable spot at the base of the building where scorch marks leeched through faded white paint. Bullock knelt down and ran his fingers across it. “The paint’s bubbled, but the wood never caught. The pattern is very characteristic of a fire from an accelerant,” he pronounced.

  “You mean gasoline,” I said.

  “Or kerosene. Or lighter fluid. Could be any number of things.” Bullock stood up.

  “So we know that on night one, there was civil unrest including a firebomb tossed here by someone,” I said. “And we know that shortly after midnight on night two, Wallace Sampson was shot, supposedly as he walked past the store.”

  “Correct,” said Brad.

  Bullock crashed through wet kudzu vines which had swallowed the back of the building, muting its edges but leaving an outline, like a fish in the gullet of a heron. The broken kudzu smelled of grape.

  “Pueraria lobata. Pea family,” Brad said. “Named for the famous Swiss botanist, M. W. Puerari. The government imported it from the Orient for erosion control during the Depression. The good thing is, nothing kills it. The bad thing is, nothing kills it.”

  We came to a rear entrance. The doorknob turned when Bullock twisted it. Bullock looked at me. I nodded. He looked at Brad. Brad nodded. Bullock pushed the door and kicked its base and we were greeted by an escape of musty air and mildew.

  Bullock went first. “Jesus,” he said, emerging. “I can’t see a thing.” He unclipped a penlight from his khaki shirt pocket and flicked it on. He ducked back through the door and waved us inside.

  There were no windows, no natural light except from the door. It took my eyes a while to adjust as Bullock played the tight beam around the room. A sink. A table with a couple of empty liquor bottles. A mattress on the floor. A shower curtain dividing the small room. Another mattress on the other side of the curtain. Cigarette butts ground out on the wooden floor.

  The rain began to fall, so hard it sounded like radio static as it peppered the tin roof.

  Bullock swept his light across the walls. A mirror. A dresser. A string of Ch
ristmas lights.

  “Someone musta lived back here,” Bullock said. “Maybe it was an apartment or something.” The beam probed the wall between the room and the front of the store. “It doesn’t look like there’s any door between this room and the store.”

  I was beginning to feel uneasy about the trespass when Brad said, “Let’s move on.”

  “Agreed,” I said, relieved that we were getting out of there and also that I hadn’t been the one to suggest it. “One run-in with Olen Pennegar and the Hirtsboro legal system is enough for me.”

  We crunched through the kudzu to the front of the building. “Well, speak of the devil,” Bullock said.

  There, cruising slowly in his squad car, was Olen Pennegar Jr. He gave a two-fingered wave, nodded and kept going.

  Back at Windrow that evening, a delicious odor of sizzling soy filled the kitchen as Brad made noodles and stir-fry vegetables.

  “Ooooooohhhhh, those poor little babies,” Bullock wailed when Brad sliced baby carrots. “Cut down before they even got to the prime of their life.”

  But even Bullock, who said he had been expecting fruits and nuts, conceded the meal was delicious and, as had become our habit, after dinner we ended up on the deck with three short glasses and the dwindling bottle of Rebel Yell bourbon.

  Bullock consulted a copy of the police reports. “The firebomb was reported when the guy who ran the store—a Mr. Raeford Watson—arrived for work and saw the scorch marks. The report says he told Pennegar the marks hadn’t been there when he’d closed up the night before. There’s nothing in the report about who might have thrown the firebomb or why. There are no witnesses. The next night, Wallace Sampson is shot in the head with a deer rifle as he walks by the store. Again, no witnesses.”

  “In each case, Olen Pennegar Sr. is the investigator,” I pointed out.

  “Because he’s the only cop,” Bullock said.

  “We need to talk to Pennegar,” said Brad.

  Bullock speculated that Wallace Sampson had thrown the firebomb one night, had come back the next night to try again and had been shot by Watson who’d stayed to protect his store.