Unwritten Laws 01(334)

Brody stares at Johnston for several seconds, then motions for Regan to cover him as he walks back to the gun room. I hear a drawer open and close. When Brody returns, he’s holding something in his hand. All the humanity has drained out of his face, leaving only stony hatred.

“Your daughter loved Pooky Wilson,” Caitlin says suddenly. “I could see it this afternoon, when I spoke to her.”

“That’s a lie,” Brody growls. “That boy defiled my flesh and blood. He broke the law.”

“What law?”

“The first law.”

“Miscegenation?” I offer.

Brody nods. “Trust a lawyer to know his history. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I meant the unwritten law. I never had any real problem with nigras. But you don’t mix blood through the white female. Albert Norris knew that rule, and he flouted it. The Wilson boy did, too. Even his friends warned him away from my daughter, but he wouldn’t listen. That nigger had to have his way, like a mutt wanting to mount a pure-blooded bitch. And the result?”

Brody holds up the item in his hand. About eight inches long, it looks like an ivory file with a leather handle. “I’ve been opening letters with that boy’s cock for forty-one years.”

Caitlin gasps.

Johnston stares in horror at the obscene artifact.

“Handsome, isn’t it?” Brody turns it in the light, which reflects dully off the osseous material. “Frank Knox carved the blade out of that boy’s arm bone, and Snake tanned the skin of his cock for the handle. They made me a razor strop, too. White man’s skin on one side, black on the other. The black side is used for coarse sharpening, the white for finishing. I’ll use that on Pithy’s razor before I go see her.” He touches the duct tape on his neck. “I think it’s gone a little dull over the years.”

“How did Pooky die?” Johnston asks through clenched teeth, eyeing the gun that Brody still wields with his other hand. “You crucify him, like I’ve heard?”

“Not exactly. When I first heard he’d spilled his seed in my little girl, I told Frank I wanted that boy skinned alive. Well, they caught him quick enough. And they took him out to that tree in Lusahatcha County. The Bone Tree. But flaying a man’s a tricky business. To do it right, you need a knife called a dermatome. Snake didn’t have one. He tried his best with a Buck knife, but it turned into such a mess they couldn’t hold that boy still no matter what they used.”

Hearing the old man describe this atrocity with such clinical detachment short-circuits some part of my being, leaving me nearly paralyzed.

“You were there,” Caitlin intones.

The light in Brody’s eyes tells me that he was. “In the end, they just nailed him up to the tree. Frank said it had been done there before, back during the War Between the States.”

With a sound like the voice of retribution, Johnston says, “I know why you done what you did. Why you tore that poor boy up so bad. Your little girl not only loved Pooky. She was carrying his child.”

Brody jerks back as though the words had struck him physically. Then he smacks Johnston across the face with his gun.

Johnston staggers but holds his feet, his eyes filled with irrefutable truth. “You didn’t just kill Pooky. I know that child was never born. You killed your own flesh and blood. You might as well have killed your daughter, too. You killed her soul right then. And you damned your own.”

Mouth agape, Brody is clearly stunned that any black man would speak to him this way. He presses the gun barrel to Sleepy Johnston’s sternum. “You got anything else to say?”

When Johnston speaks again, his voice is filled with emotion I can’t quite read. Then I recognize it—pity. “You ain’t nothing, Mister,” he says softly. “All your money and land don’t make you worth the mud on Albert Norris’s shoes. And what’s more … you know it.”

Brody fires.

Sleepy’s body jerks, then drops to the floor. His blank eyes stare sightless at the low ceiling.

Brody wipes a sheen of sweat from his face, then turns to face Caitlin and me. The man I spoke to only a minute ago seems to have fled the body before me. Caitlin appears frozen, as am I. We might have been in shock before, but the cold-blooded execution has taken our desperation to a new level.

Henry, who seemed only half-conscious before, rolls onto his side and stares at Johnston’s body on the floor.

Brody points his smoking pistol at Henry. Caitlin screams, and I shrink from the imminent shot. Instead of shooting, though, Brody crouches so that Henry can see his eyes. “You spent thirty years trying to get me, boy, and in the end you delivered the only thing that could have destroyed me. Like room service. I do believe you’re the saddest white man I ever saw.”