Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

PART 1 Nurture

1 - Mister Juke

APRIL, 1911

Not ghosts.

Although their owners might have pretended otherwise, Dr. Andrew Waggoner knew it. The sheets that loitered and whistled and kicked at the mud on this dark hillside in northern Idaho tonight were not ghosts; nor were they devils, nor duppies, nor spectral things of any kind.

When Andrew was a good deal younger, his Uncle Elmer had told him: ghosts were what the Ku Klux Klan originally intended with those sheets they wore. They wanted to make the poor Negroes think they were beset by the implacable spirits of the dead, Devils straight up from Hell—and not merely small-souled white men with lynching on their minds.

Maybe on some other Negro, the evil light of the kerosene flame in the twilight would make a mix with all those flapping sheets, that eerie un-musical whistling noise they were making, and that would be enough. But Andrew Waggoner was not that kind of Negro and he knew.

These were not ghosts.

They’d got Andrew just outside the hospital—done the deed as the last of the sun fell toward the pine-toothed edge of the Selkirk Mountains, west of Eliada. If he’d been paying better heed, not been smoking and brooding and keeping to himself, Andrew might have seen who they were. He didn’t think anyone would be caught wearing their mama’s bedsheets that close to town.

It didn’t really matter much, of course. The truth of his predicament was awful in its simplicity: five men in sheets. One Negro, tied and on his knees. How does something like that end well?

Andrew did not think of himself as a religious man, but as one of those sheets bent down in front of him, he thought about praying.

As matters resolved, however, he didn’t have to pray or even make up his mind on the matter. If God was paying any attention at all, He spared Andrew the indignity of supplication by tossing down a bone.

“You are going to watch this, Dr. Nigger.”

The man in the sheet spoke in a voice Andrew thought he might recognize.

“It is Waggoner,” said Andrew. “Dr. Waggoner.”

He said “doctor” slowly, because he wanted to make that part of his name especially clear right now. Andrew Waggoner was a doctor, trained by some of the finest surgeons at Paris Medical School, graduated with honours, Class of 1908; he had been a resident here at Eliada’s hospital for nearly a year. He was not some hog-tied vagabond nigger that these men could feel right about killing.

“This isn’t right, Robert,” he said. “You got to know that.”

The sheet rustled like it was in the wind. The two eyes peering out through holes in it narrowed. “You don’t know names,” said the sheet. “You don’t know nothing.”

Andrew let himself smile. He was right. Robert Vernon was the man behind that sheet and that gave him something to grasp.

“Robert,” Andrew said, “you sweep floors at the hospital. You got a sister in Lewiston with a wedding coming up—it’s Harriet, am I right? Harriet Ver—”

Andrew didn’t get the last name of “Vernon” out, because at that moment the sheet drove its fist into his gut. He wished he could have stood up to it, but it was a vicious punch and it sent the air whooping out of his lungs and made him bend and fall hard on his behind.

For an instant, looking up at the sheet, he hated himself as much as the rest of them hated him. Getting on a first-name basis with white men in whiter sheets wasn’t going to get him anything. He was going to die, die twitching at the end of a rope, and there was nothing he could do about it—and he had it coming, stupid weak nigger that he was.

It was only for an instant. As soon as he heard the whimpering, wheedling sounds coming from behind that sheet, he remembered how Vernon slouched and limped behind his broom and wouldn’t meet a man’s eye in the light of day. Andrew had a fine idea who the weak idiot was in this conversation. And it sure as hell was not the one with the medical degree from Paris.

“You don’t know nothing! You don’t know my family name you dirty God-damn nigger!” Vernon hollered.

A foot came out from beneath the sheet and caught him in the side. That hurt worse than the gut punch—it might have cracked a rib—but Andrew held on. He still had a chance. A slim one, but things were not as bad—not yet—as they were for poor little Maryanne Leonard.

§

It had been an awful day for the poor thing, started bad enough and ended up as bad as it could get. She was pregnant, with a child that no man in Eliada owned up to.

There was talk that she’d been raped by one of the bachelors who worked the mill, or maybe by one of the hill folk passing through. Maybe someone nearer.