Brotherhood Page 2

  Overstepping Boundaries

  SHAD HURRIED DOWN Broad, heading west, then cut across the tree-lined streets—Grace and Franklin—weaving between brick buildings and down alleys all the way to Main. The closer he got to Granddaddy’s, the more he smelled the river. Or maybe it was rotting fish and vegetables. Or people dumping chamber pots in Shockoe’s dirt and gray-brick streets. Two blocks farther, the canal cut along Dock Street, and beyond that, the marsh, then the James River. The stink might have come from just about anything.

  At Main Street, he darted around farm carts clattering into town from New Market Road. It was only sunup, but the marketplace at Main and Seventeenth was already bustling with farmers unloading kale and onions, collards and rutabaga, turnips, parsley, and potatoes. Catty-corner to the hustle-bustle sat Granddaddy’s shop, the last in a row of redbrick shops, each three stories tall with one window and a brown door at street level and two windows overhead. Granddaddy shared a wall with Hanson’s Tack and Leather Goods. A white sign with blue letters over Granddaddy’s door said WEAVER’S FINE TAILORING.

  Shad pushed the door open and heard the familiar squeak. The little bell tinkled, and he took the wooden steps two at a time. On the second floor, his eyes caught the yellow lines of sunshine that peeked through shutter slats, drawing a slanted grid on the floor. He rounded the room to the next flight of stairs and called up. “Granddaddy?”

  He heard rustling overhead. “Shad? That you? What time is it?”

  “Uh, I ain’t sure. It’s early yet.”

  “I got britches from Mr. Dabney needing the pleats fixed. New hem. You see ’em on the chair there?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.” On an ordinary day, Shad would have run deliveries and pickups first, then taken home the simple jobs like pleats and hems. But today wasn’t an ordinary day. He wanted to kick himself for touching Rachel. No, he should have kicked her for saying what she did about his brother! He shuddered.

  He listened to Granddaddy’s water hit the chamber pot. Then he heard fabric slip against fabric. The clasp of a belt buckle.

  He shifted from one foot to the other, and his eyes fell on a few dresses and two men’s jackets hanging on a wire rack. Granddaddy’s black sewing machine with foot pedals—the one Mama hated, the one she’d said came from the devil—sat by the front window. People had been sewing clothes by hand for a thousand years, so Mama didn’t see any reason to do differently now. If Shad had his say, why, he’d give his left foot for a chance at that machine. But Mama had said, “Over my dead body,” and that was that.

  Granddaddy came down from the third floor squinting, his feet hitting the wooden steps unevenly—clip-thunk, clip-thunk. Shad watched him rub his face and run his tongue over his teeth.

  “Goodness,” he said. “Must’ve overslept.” He hadn’t yet greased his mustache, and instead of handlebars, silvery fringe covered his mouth. He wore a white shirt with an unbuttoned black vest, and looked a mess. Shad hadn’t ever seen him so rumpled.

  “Sir, the Yankees arrested Jeremiah, and Mama’s fit to be tied.”

  “Good Lord.” He reached for Shad’s shoulder to find his balance.

  Shad braced himself to support Granddaddy, and the motion sent twinges through his gut. He tried not to show the pain. Today’s emergency was all about Jeremiah, not about Shad getting roughed up by a few stupid Yankees.

  “What’d they charge him with?” Granddaddy asked.

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Your mama all right?”

  Shad nodded. “She sent me to fetch you.”

  “How’d they get him? You see ’em?”

  “Yes, sir. Crack o’ dawn. They came bustin’ in the house and took him near sound asleep.”

  “Damn Yankees. They’ll make up a charge to lock that boy away. They have it in for Jeremiah.” Granddaddy looked up as he spoke, and Shad liked that—liked the way even his grandfather looked up to him now that he’d grown six inches over the past year.

  He watched as Granddaddy paced from the brick wall on one side of the room to the white plaster on the other. He listened to the clip-thunk of his gait and recalled a story Granddaddy had told about an accident with a horse.

  He rolled Granddaddy’s words around and around in his mind. They’ll make up a charge to lock that boy away. He rubbed the tender spot on his head, knowing the Yankees hadn’t made up the charge. If Rachel had told the truth about George Nelson fingering “the Weaver boy”—and he knew Rachel wouldn’t lie—then Granddaddy was going to hear it soon enough. He might as well hear it from Shad.

  “Look, Granddaddy, this is real bad. Word’s out there’s a dead body at Doc Moore’s and—and Jeremiah did it.”

  “Whoa. Slow down, there. Just hold on a minute, son. A dead body?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who?”

  Shad bit his tongue. He couldn’t say the name because he wasn’t supposed to know the name. George Nelson had never said it. Shoot. He didn’t know what he knew anymore. He shrugged.

  “Jiminy, Shadrach. We need to know who it was.”

  “Word is the man got fished from a barrel and said ‘the Weaver boy’ ’fore he up and died.”

  Shad watched Granddaddy rub his face and tried to make out what he was thinking. Then Granddaddy stomped the floor with his good leg—stomped it so hard the windowpanes rattled. “Dern it all, Shad! That wasn’t supposed to happen. The brotherhood is taking things too far. They’re overstepping boundaries, and they’re—I don’t know how to slow ’em down.”

  Shad nodded, and in the silence that followed, he felt blood pulse through the tender spot on his head. He watched Granddaddy fiddle with his mustache. He said, “Yes, sir—I mean, I don’t know, sir.”

  The brotherhood. The Klan. They were all in it—Shad, Granddaddy, Jeremiah. Back when Shad had joined, he hadn’t known Granddaddy was in, but he’d figured it out soon enough. He might have felt more at ease during his first Klan meeting if he’d known that Granddaddy was somewhere in the room. But even so, he wouldn’t have joined because of him. No, he’d joined to get tough like Jeremiah. To prove himself. Grow up. Be a man. Make Mama proud. Make Daddy proud. All of those reasons, and a whole lot more. But at the time—Lord God Almighty—at the time, Shad didn’t have any notion what he was getting into.

  4

  The Road to Cold Harbor

  HE’D JOINED UP the third night Jeremiah had slipped out the window. Shad hadn’t said anything the first time Jeremiah climbed out. Or the second. But on the third night, the bedbugs were eating him up. Shad lay full awake, itching all over—his shoulder, his leg, his side—everything itched. He scratched, but the itch kept at him. The air was sticky hot.

  Light came from the moon, near full. Shad felt the mattress shift and heard the sounds of his brother pulling on a shirt and britches. The mattress shifted again as Jeremiah fetched the boot hook and tugged at his boots. Then the hook dropped to the dirt floor with a thud.

  Shad’s side of the bed was closest to the window, and when his brother circled around to climb out, Shad grabbed his shirt.

  “Where you going?”

  Jeremiah yanked the shirt free and knocked Shad back on the bed. “Shh. You ain’t seen me.”

  “Course I seen you. I ain’t blind.”

  Jeremiah snatched up something on the sill and shook his fist. Shad slipped off the mattress and stood beside him, squinting in the moonlight. He watched his brother uncurl his fingers one at a time. Jeremiah had nabbed a huge grasshopper.

  “Say that’s you,” said Jeremiah.

  The hopper wiggled to beat all. Next thing Shad knew, Jeremiah had pulled off a leg and put it up to the moon. Now the hopper’s innards were outers, and the leg was twitching with a mind of its own. Shad cringed. “Stop it!”

  Jeremiah imitated him in a girlie voice. “Stop it. Stop it.”

  “I ain�
��t no girl!”

  “I ain’t no girl,” Jeremiah sang. He pulled off the other leg and shoved it in Shad’s face, so close Shad’s eyes blurred. Then Jeremiah put on his big-man voice and whispered so it came out like a growl, “You ain’t old enough.”

  “Am, too. Fourteen’s enough. Lemme come.”

  Then Shad felt something cold on his foot—something gooey—and he knew Jeremiah had dropped the hopper. He shook his foot and the grasshopper slid off, flapping its wings against the dirt floor.

  Jeremiah grabbed Shad’s arm with two hands and twisted.

  “Ow,” cried Shad.

  “Stay home. You hear me?” Jeremiah shoved him away. Then he rolled over the windowsill and took off running through the corn that wasn’t corn anymore. It hadn’t been corn for two years, not since the Yankees torched it.

  Shad pulled on a burlap-sack shirt and the britches handed down to him when cousin Willy Johnson died. He climbed out the window, lickety-split. He wasn’t going to let Jeremiah stop him. Not again. He could steal into the night like Jeremiah. He could duck behind forsythia, creep through a field, lay low, fall into a moon shadow. He could do anything his brother could do.

  He saw Jeremiah get to the tree line and cut onto the road. He set a good pace, and Shad scrambled to keep up. His nose quivered with whiffs of sulfur, mole holes, and earthworm rot. Mist rose like a thin white blanket across the field, and the creeps raced up his spine. “Get off-a me, shivers. I’m-a do this.”

  He reached the tree line and stood there for a second, marveling at the long shadows set off by the moon—at the brightness of the night. It was no mystery why slaves broke for free when the moon rose full up. It was no wonder Mr. Kechler used to shackle his on nights like this. No wonder so many of them got away before Lincoln freed them all. Why, the moon was so brilliant, it nearly took his breath away.

  Shad rushed forward, feeling last month’s dogwood and cherry blossoms grip the bottoms of his feet. He heard crickets chirping up a storm, and he prayed his brother wouldn’t look back.

  Don’t look back, Jeremiah. Please don’t look back.

  Then he lost him.

  Shad ducked behind a tree and peered around, scanning the road up and back, kicking himself for not following more closely. He strained to see and was about to turn back when the moonlight caught Jeremiah again. Thank you, moon! Shad dashed ahead.

  Before he’d slid out that window, Jeremiah had tucked a bundle under his arm, and now Shad could see him marching with that bundle and a gait that said, Don’t mess with me.

  Jeremiah turned off Nine Mile Road toward town. Shad darted ahead and got to the corner. He saw Jeremiah turn on Venable Street. Not another soul in sight. Then Jeremiah took the Mechanicsville road toward Cold Harbor, and Shad ran.

  Cold Harbor. The battle there had been a bloodbath. Mama’s sister was a nurse at the Chimborazo hospital up Church Hill, and all the beds had filled up. They’d run out of beds, and out of floor space, and out of wagons to bring the men in. So they’d stopped bringing them in. They’d just left the boys where they’d fallen. Left them on the road. Right here—the one under Shad’s feet.

  Shad felt a tad queasy thinking about dead bodies, and he tried to talk himself strong. He told himself they’d had plenty of time to clean the bodies off the road. Three years since the Battle of Cold Harbor, 1864. Plenty of time for a proper burial.

  Shad’s head chanted, Three years. He kept the beat. Left foot. Three years. Right foot. Three years. He told himself to stop thinking about bodies because thinking about that sort of thing spooked a boy bad. But deciding not to think on dead bodies meant thinking on them twice as much.

  Shad got the goose bumps. The talk around town about ghosts—Shad knew it was only Jeremiah running at the mouth. But it had him tight.

  Left foot. Three years. Right foot. Three years. Lordy, he was walking through a graveyard with no grave markers. He looked for bodies. Left. Right. Three years.

  He saw Jeremiah slip over the brow of a ridge, and he scrambled to catch up. His breathing came hard. He got over the ridge and the road stretched empty before him. Straight and empty all the way to Mechanicsville.

  He’d lost him.

  5

  Ghosts

  SHAD LOOKED AROUND. The ridge was clear. Below him in front and in back, mist rose like fingers from a grave. Shad shivered. How had he gotten this far and lost Jeremiah? Shoot.

  He thought he’d figured out his brother. But Jeremiah had pulled one over on him again. He felt so . . . so stupid.

  Then Shad heard something move, and he jumped sky-high.

  A twig broke.

  He whirled around.

  A ghost appeared from behind a tree. “Who goes there?”

  Shad’s heart pounded in his mouth.

  The ghost was extra tall with a pointy head. He wore a sheet that looked gray in the moonlight. Shad told himself it was just a sheet. Just an old sheet.

  The ghost said, “I am a spirit from the other world. I was killed at Cold Harbor.”

  Shad’s knees quivered. His eyes darted left and right. Where was Jeremiah?

  “Who are you?” said the ghost. “And where are you going?” It let out a deep, evil-sounding laugh. It pointed. “You! Who are you?”

  Shad opened his mouth, but he had no voice. He saw another ghost come out from behind a tree. This one had a face painted on a gray sheet—a crooked, sloppy face. Shad knew these ghosts weren’t real, but his heart thumped. He told himself, Not scared. Holy moly, not scared at all.

  He heard the pointy-headed ghost laugh another deep laugh. “What brings you here?”

  “I—uh—”

  “The brotherhood?” asked Pointy Head.

  “No!” said the other ghost. Shad sensed something in the way he said it—a jerk in his voice, or the step of his boot—something that meant Crooked Face wanted Pointy Head to shut up.

  But Pointy Head didn’t shut up. “Let him join the brotherhood!”

  Shad looked from Crooked Face to Pointy Head. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “He’s a pip-squeak,” said Crooked Face. “A snot-nosed pip-squeak.”

  Shad squinted. Jeremiah?

  “He can learn,” said Pointy Head.

  “He’s a crybaby,” said Crooked Face.

  Shad dropped his mouth open. Sure enough, that was Jeremiah under the sheet. Jeremiah calling him a crybaby. Shad wanted to punch his brother smack-dab in the nose. But where exactly was his nose?

  00.........2.Shad snapped his mouth shut.

  “Are you here to join the brotherhood?”

  Pointy Head’s dying-man voice reminded him of Jeremiah’s buddy Clifton. Now Shad felt indignant. What nerve his brother and Clifton had, treating people this way—scaring the dickens out of them. “Yes, I am!” he shouted.

  “Jiminy,” mumbled Crooked Face.

  “State your name!” croaked Pointy Head.

  “Shad.”

  “Your full name.”

  “Shadrach Alfriend Weaver.” He saw Crooked Face turn and kick a tree. Then he heard Pointy Head laugh.

  “What do you know about the brotherhood?” demanded Pointy Head.

  “Uh, well . . .”

  “Speak up!”

  Shad straightened, racking his brains to find the words. The truth was that he knew very little. He’d heard talk around town and had watched Jeremiah sneak out the window. He’d put two and two together, but he wasn’t sure. “I know it protects people. I know brothers ride the streets at night, keeping evil away.”

  Pointy Head slapped him on the shoulder. “Attaboy.”

  Shad heard Crooked Face mumble again. “He ain’t ready.”

  “Give him a chance.”

  “He don’t know what he’s doing.”

  “Sure he does. You hear him? He’
s got guts.” Pointy Head wrapped his ghost arm around Shad. “Don’t you, boy? You got guts?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Shad, hoping the ghost couldn’t feel him tremble. When Pointy Head let go of him, Shad exhaled long and slow. He hadn’t meant to hold his breath—hadn’t realized he’d been holding it.

  He watched Pointy Head march to a tree and pick up something. “Come over here,” said Pointy Head.

  A lump came up in Shad’s throat like a cat’s hairball. He got an urge to run. Stop, he told himself. Stop shaking. You’re here. You’re in. He held his head high.

  “Come here,” repeated Pointy Head.

  Shad knew Jeremiah didn’t want him, but he wasn’t going to let his brother stop him anymore. He walked toward Pointy Head.

  “Turn around.”

  Shad turned around.

  “New recruits get blindfolds. Nobody knows where the brotherhood meets till he swears allegiance.” Pointy Head looped a scratchy rag over Shad’s eyes and tied it behind his head. It smelled of tar. “Brother, are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Speak up, boy! Are you ready?”

  “Yes!” Shad shouted. And for a split second the crickets stopped chirping and the woods stopped rustling and everything got silent.

  Then he heard Pointy Head say, “Come this way.” He took Shad’s arm and led him along the Mechanicsville road. The crickets started up again. Shad tried to push the lump down his throat, but it rose right back.

  They walked for a piece. Shad didn’t think there could be anything creepier than walking blindfolded up a road at night—blindfolded beside a brother he didn’t trust. He made his hands into fists.

  Shad was almost as tall as Jeremiah now. Nowhere near as strong, but almost as tall. Granddaddy had said the day might come when Shad would outgrow Jeremiah, and Shad liked that idea—that his day might come.

  They turned off the road into a field. Shad heard bullfrogs and smelled wet ground. His bare feet felt the dirt get softer and colder and squishier. He felt Pointy Head’s grip tighten on his upper arm, leading Shad around water, brushing up against cattails. Then they cleared the water and walked uphill.