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Lightning on a Quiet Night

By Donn Taylor

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The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in the day of his transgression….
—Ezekiel 33:12 (KJV)







'Tis mad idolatry
To make the service greater than the god....
—Shakespeare, Troilus 2.2.56-57

Chapter 1

The northeast Mississippi town of Beneficent, "A Town As Good As Its Name," had never known a murder until Friday, January 9, 1948. Nor, in the oldest memory of its 479 citizens, had the town known a single felony.
Until the fatal moment, that January day progressed as hundreds had before. The winter dawn came late, struggling through clouds and fog to shed a dull gray light more kin to night than day. Cold rain fell to drench the thrush-brown land, and stolid hardwoods thrust black skeletal limbs upward against the iron-gray sky. Farmers revised work plans in deference to the rain, and storekeepers pondered its effect on weekend sales. But more than rain would be required that night to keep them from the Coosa County basketball tournament, an event as integral to their lives as seedtime and harvest. From all corners of the county they came in mud-spattered pickups, the less affluent in mule-drawn wagons, to converge on Beneficent. All brought good spirits to share an experience that came but once a year.
Yet among that cheerful crowd one stranger would come unwilling….
In her bedroom in the darkening evening, Lisa Kemper stared at the rain that drummed against her window. She did not want to be there at all.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? The psalmist's words leaped unbidden into her mind, but she shut them out. She was not here in captivity, the puddles in her yard were not the waters of Babylon, and she would not sit down by them and weep.
Still, she hadn't bargained for this. After her mother's death last August, she'd postponed graduate school for a year to help her father adjust to life as a widower. Then she would get on with her studies—that is, if she could ever decide what to study. But when she made that decision, she never dreamed Stephen Kemper would leave his position with an Indiana corporation to manage the small chemical plant the company was building here.
From first sight, she detested this backward town. She abhorred the unkempt fields and unpainted barns nearby, so different from the well-tended farms of Indiana. Most of all, she abhorred the boastful motto "A Town As Good As Its Name" and the complacency of the townspeople who thought they made it that way.
But she would get through this year, somehow. She had promised.
A car's headlights flashed across her window. That would be Hollis Wilson, the newly elected state senator who would escort her and her father to the basketball tournament. People expected them to attend, he said.
"Are you ready, Lisa?" Stephen Kemper's voice carried from the living room.
"I'm coming, Father."
A critical glance in the mirror confirmed that her new gray suit brought out the blue of her eyes and emphasized her trim figure. But not too much. And if the locals thought she was overdressed, that was their problem. With a final pat at her dark brown hair, she scooped up her raincoat and headed for the living room.
Miraculously, the rain suddenly stopped, though low clouds scudded by overhead. Maybe Senator Wilson had fixed the rain, as he had so many things to help them into the community. Lisa wondered how an insignificant mud hill like Beneficent could produce someone like Wilson. He was handsome as a movie star—a war veteran, she'd heard, and people bragged that at age twenty-five he was the youngest senator in the state's history. She didn't doubt it, but she did doubt that anyone had bothered to research it.
"You'll enjoy the tournament," Wilson said. "It's one of the great events of the year."
Lisa answered with a smile and followed him out the door, her father close behind. For her father's sake, she'd make sure people thought she enjoyed the tournament.
At the wood-frame gymnasium beside the town school, mud-spattered pickups crowded the gravel parking lot and spilled out into the street. Wilson parked a block away and they walked back through laughing, faceless crowds that drifted through the darkness.
The din heightened as they entered the gym. Before Stephen Kemper could protest, Wilson paid the sixty-cents admission for the three of them. He and Lisa proceeded into the stands, while Kemper dropped off to talk about his plant's security with a hard-faced man who wore a badge. Lisa caught the words, "…no real crime here, just kid's pranks." She found that hard to believe.
"Sheriff Rainwater isn't kidding," Wilson said. "In my lifetime I can't remember a single crime being committed here. Not one. But that doesn't tell the whole story. It's a town of good Christian people trying to live good lives. That's what makes it different."
Lisa threw him a skeptical glance.
He laughed. "I know it's hard to believe. Just give it a chance and you'll see."
When they found seats, a man in overalls came to belabor the senator about a tax problem. Lisa tried to interest herself in the game. Typical girls' basketball, she thought—the Beneficent Pantherette's three forwards matched with Shady Creek's three guards on one half of the court, the opposite situation at the other end. Whoever wrote the rules didn't think girls could run full court.
One Beneficent forward, a short girl with chunky-muscled legs and a straw-colored ponytail, consistently got the best of her guards. The other players showed little skill.
Soon bored with the game, Lisa surveyed the crowd, composed mostly of men in overalls and tired-looking women who held small children. Mostly disreputable, she judged, or at best...just plain ordinary. Like the sandy-haired man who stood watching the game from the corner of the end line. In his mid-twenties, she guessed. Moderate height, moderate build. He wore brogans, khaki work clothes and a dark waterproof jacket. Neat enough, but still thoroughly ordinary.
Then Miss Ponytail took her eyes off the game to wave at that man. He grimaced and pointed at the guards moving the ball toward her from the far court. Ponytail wasn't ready and dropped their pass before recovering. Lucky not to lose it, Lisa thought.
Her gaze followed the sandy-haired man to the refreshment stand. A darkly handsome, statuesque woman of perhaps thirty intercepted him there. Even at this distance she seemed to radiate an aura of sadness. The woman tried to hold the man in conversation, but he broke off and joined a male group that included Lisa's father.
Strange little mini-dramas, Lisa thought. That ordinary man no sooner walked into the gym than two women tried to attract his attention. A Redneck version of Frank Sinatra? But the woman at the refreshment stand was too old to swoon like a bobby-soxer. Or was she a case of arrested development? Such odd people! Lisa thought she would never understand them. But she had to try. Her father's success here might depend upon it. She had to try, though the placid tempo of their lives dragged against the lively beating of her heart. It felt like running in mud.
"Panther!"
The sudden word and a slap on Wilson's back shook Lisa out of her thoughts. She found the senator locked in an odd handshake, with each man grasping the forearm of the other. The newcomer was a huge man wearing an olive-drab field jacket that sported the well-known brass eagle pin that signified honorable discharge from military service.
"Lisa," Wilson said, "This is Jimmy Fletcher, the big gun from our 1942 team."
He was certainly big enough—broad-shouldered as well as standing several inches above six feet. She wanted to ask about the handshake, but the bleariness in Jimmy's eyes stopped her.
"Big gun, big goon," Jimmy said, his speech slurred. "This young senator and two, three others helped—only Beneficent team t' play in the state tournament."
Lisa nodded her response without comment. She'd already heard boasts about that team, always in the same words: We'll never forget the team of 'forty-two. She'd bet that team was as dinky as everything else in town, and who ever heard of a team called Beneficent Panthers? Nevertheless, she filed the state tournament fact as an item of local history she and her father ought to know.
But Jimmy Fletcher was speaking again. "Most folks said it was a good team." He met Lisa's eyes for a second, then dropped his gaze and shuffled away, slightly off balance.
Mississippi is a dry state, Lisa thought. So how did he manage to get tipsy? And what kind of a handshake was that?
"Sometime I'll have to tell you about our team," Wilson said. "Hey! There's Jack Davis." He pointed to corner of the end line, where the same ordinary man had returned to watch the game. "He was a member of our team."
Jack Davis, Lisa thought. The ordinary man has an ordinary name. While she'd been distracted, the girls' game had ended and the boys' game had begun. Beneficent had already gained the lead and someone had called time out. Then she noticed that Miss Ponytail had lined up as a cheerleader. For some reason she felt drawn to the girl.
"Who is that cheerleader?" she asked. "The one with the ponytail."
Wilson grinned. "That's Callie Rakestraw. Her brother—."
Lisa lost the rest of his statement, for another mini-drama occurred. As the cheerleaders leaped and cheered, Callie Rakestraw twirled her pleated white skirt, displaying her chunky legs and showing that she wore her basketball uniform beneath the skirt.
Lisa saw Jack Davis scowling at her from the end line. When he beckoned, Callie beamed and ran to him. His scowl deepened, and they gestured and seemed to quarrel. Callie stalked away, hands on hips. She twirled her skirt again and threw Jack a glance that should have turned him into stone. The town might be filled with good people trying to live good lives, Lisa thought, but that didn't mean they were immune to anger. She filed the incident in memory.
She watched in boredom until the game ended, then looked to see if more sparks would fly between Callie and Jack Davis. But he had disappeared. Callie appeared to make a point of seeking young player who wore the number four, and they walked away holding hands.
A second triangle, Lisa thought. The first was Callie, Jack, and that older woman. The other was Callie, Jack, and Number Four. Both could be catalysts for crimes of passion, and it looked like Beneficent might not be as virtuous as Senator Wilson claimed. She would have to wait and see.
On the ride home, she congratulated herself on learning things that might help her father with the locals. These people liked talking about their team of 'forty-two, so she would draw them out about that. And they were always ready to sing the virtues of Beneficent. But if the state was dry and Beneficent so virtuous, how had Jimmy Fletcher found the liquor that made him unsteady? She wouldn't ask that question. And she wouldn't ask about the two Jack Davis triangles she'd observed. She'd just watch to see what came of them. Feeling a bit smug, she decided that a stiff upper lip would get her through the rest of this year. Then back to civilization and graduate school—that is, if she could ever decide what to study.

When the game ended, Jack Davis drove his 1938 Chevy pickup to his farm four miles west of town. Rain threatened but none fell, and the clouds had lifted to a high overcast. Far to the southeast, lightning flickered, too distant to bring the sound of thunder.
Despite the cold, Jack lingered on his front porch to savor the quiet night, so different from the turbulent nights he'd known overseas during the war. Beneficent was a good town filled with good people, and he relived with pleasure each meeting he'd had with its citizens that night. Presently, he considered the striking brunette Hollis Wilson escorted to the tournament. Hollis would need a show-case wife when he ran for governor a few years from now. That woman would meet the requirement.
Jack himself had no time for the two women who'd complicated his life lately. Callie Rakestraw would outgrow her schoolgirl crush. But Vesta Childress, the school librarian who'd intercepted him at the refreshment stand, was another story.
Even if he'd felt inclined, though, he had no time. The mortgage on his new acres of choice bottom land hung above his head like an anvil suspended by a thread. Farm work would never pay it off, so he labored extra hours at any construction job he could find. That left him scarcely time to sleep. But in three more years, if he could hold this pace, he'd have clear title.
Lightning flickered again in the southeast, followed by a faint rumble of thunder.
Somewhere out there, he thought, the evils of this world still strike like lightning. But here in this blessed place all things are quiet, the air washed cold and pure.

Later that evening in town, Sheriff Claiborne Rainwater parked beside his home. The tournament had brought no trouble except two genial visitors who'd drunk too much, and he'd found sober drivers to take them home. He thanked the Lord again for letting him be sheriff of a county where nothing ever happened. He could already taste the cup of coffee his wife would have waiting for him. It kept some people awake, but for him it acted like a sedative. He could use the sleep. He'd been on his feet since breakfast, and he wasn't getting any younger.
Across town, Stephen Kemper brooded on his problems with building the new plant. He'd spent his life working with chemicals that behaved in predictable ways, and he felt out of his element dealing with unpredictable people. Like that difficult contractor out of Memphis, often absent from the job and full of excuses why work wasn't done. If things didn't get better quickly, Kemper's company would send someone else to finish the project. He mustn't worry Lisa about it, though. Better to keep his troubles to himself....
And in Vesta Childress's home that evening, blue flames burned low in the butane heaters. Their steady hiss was punctuated now and then by a faint popping sound from impurities in the gas, and the flame flickered yellow before subsiding into blue.
Vesta shivered as she entered the house, for the night had turned cold. She'd made a fool of herself again trying to attract Jack Davis's attention. She should have remembered his love of basketball, remembered it from that magic year when the late William Bradley, the man she'd consented to marry, had coached the team of 'forty-two and she'd marveled at each tactical adjustment he made.
She moved through the few rooms she still occupied and turned the heaters to full high. They would hold back the cold darkness that seemed to press against the house from all sides.
The house itself stood isolated among trees, its rear entrance huddled against a wooded hill. A long, curved driveway formed its only connection to the main road in front. Vesta's father had valued privacy to the point of obsession. The ivy he'd planted long ago now entwined on the trellised front porch as if to make sure the house could not run away. Even now, the furniture stood where it had when Vesta was a child.
Idly, she moved to the oak secretary in one corner of the living room. A half-wall topped by dowels separated that room from the dining room. Shadows from the dowels formed a pattern of bars on the wall above her. On the secretary rested a photograph of Vesta and William Bradley, taken the day they announced their engagement in November, 1941. He smiled forth from the picture, handsome and self-assured, as he had been in life. She, too, smiled with the happiness she'd known in the radiance of newfound love. The photographer had caught her with one hand shyly fondling a wisp of her long brown hair.
For a long time she studied the photograph, then touched the tightly braided bun behind her head, tugged briefly at the collar of her blouse that lately felt a bit choking, and opened a well-marked book to Amy Lowell's poem "Patterns." Vesta knew it by heart, but she still traced its lines with her finger.
Her eyes moistened as she read about a lady in the distant past whose tragedy so resembled Vesta's own. The stiffness of the lady's clothing and the constraints of society denied fulfillment of her ripe woman's body. Yet she dreamed of bathing in a wooded bower, unconstrained, each touch of the water intimate as a lover's caress.
So like Vesta's own dreams of fulfillment in marriage to William Bradley.
The gas heaters murmured and burned with a blue flame. Air in the room remained hot and dry. Out of Vesta's mouth came an involuntary sound from beyond spoken language. Her vision now too blurred to read, she formed the remembered words with her lips. For, in the poem, the lady's dreams were shattered like her own, condemning her to a life unfulfilled, hedged in by societal constraints symbolized by the lady's stiff, corseted clothing.
The gas heaters popped and flickered yellow, and the deep-lined shadows of dowels grew darker on the wall. Vesta's fingers tugged again at her collar as her lips pronounced the poem's climactic words:

For the man who should have loosed me is dead....

As she had done so many quiet nights before, Vesta Childress sank forward upon the book, rested her head upon her arms, and wept.

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