Natchez Burning Read online

  This tense emotional stalemate took a shocking turn in 1967, when Viola’s husband was drafted and sent to Vietnam. James Turner was an auto mechanic, but he’d spent a year working on helicopters in the peacetime army in 1960, and that made him valuable in Southeast Asia. In 1967 the army recalled him. Tom vividly remembered a conversation with Viola’s anxious husband before he left for New Orleans and his commercial flight to Vietnam. James Turner knew Tom had seen action in Korea, and he wanted to get the best advice he could about staying alive in combat. Tom’s cautions were simple and based on experience. “First, don’t volunteer for anything. Second, keep your head down and listen to your sergeant. Third, if you’re ever ambushed, run toward the fire, not away from it. The first shots are meant to drive you into the waiting machine guns. Your best chance is forward. Fourth, every war’s different, so listen to your sergeant. Fifth … listen to your sergeant. Are you getting the message?” James had laughed, but Tom could see he was scared to death, and no man in his right mind would have wanted to leave Viola to spend a year in a hostile jungle ten thousand miles away.

  For the first month after James’s departure, Viola had seemed a different woman. The romantic tension between her and Tom dissipated as though it had never existed, and he felt its absence like a troubling tooth that had finally been pulled, leaving an aching socket. Viola’s thoughts were clearly with her husband—yet Tom’s jaw still throbbed. She lived with a new tension, one that waxed and waned with Cronkite’s daily report on the conflict on the far side of the world. James sent regular letters, and his tone was always upbeat, so after a while Viola settled into a sort of low-grade anxiety. At work she kept up a cheerful front that could have won her an Academy Award. But five months after James Turner left Natchez, two army officers wearing dress uniforms showed up at Viola’s home. When they told Viola that her husband was dead, she gave a slight shake of the head—one small gesture of denial—then collapsed to the floor. Dr. Lucas told her to take the week off, and Tom concurred. But the next morning, Viola was back at work, perfectly coiffed and acting with her usual professionalism. The only indication of her loss was a black ribbon worn on the left side of her uniform collar.

  From that point forward, Tom had no idea how to behave. Viola’s stoicism had moved him beyond words, and from his own war experiences he knew better than to try to lessen her grief. Looking back, Viola’s heroic response to young widowhood had probably pushed him further toward love than any physical attraction. But strangely, Viola seemed even more preoccupied over the next months than she had when her husband was in Vietnam. Only after several awkward attempts did Tom finally discover the reason for Viola’s worry.

  She had a younger brother named Jimmy Revels, and Jimmy was “in trouble.” When Tom asked what kind of trouble, Viola shook her head and refused to say. But over the course of a week she finally revealed that Jimmy was involved in the civil rights movement. This worried her on several fronts. Not least was her fear that Dr. Lucas would fire her if he learned she was related to a civil rights activist. Tom assured her that he could protect her job, but Viola thought he was naïve. “Dr. Lucas might have let you desegregate the waiting room,” she said, “but that was just good business, since you pull in so many colored patients. Working in the movement is something else.”

  Viola also worried about the Ku Klux Klan, which had grown rabidly active across the state during the past four years. Jimmy was a musician, but he’d become obsessed with the Reverend Martin Luther King, adopting both his nonviolent philosophy and his habit of putting himself in harm’s way. Jimmy’s nocturnal activities were making Viola a nervous wreck. Tom tried to reassure her, but the danger could not be denied. As the company doctor for Triton Battery (a deal negotiated by Dr. Lucas), Tom had discovered that a significant fraction of the company’s white workers were racists of the first order. They didn’t even try to hide their membership in the Klan, or the fact that they were “taking a stand” in the battle for white supremacy. Because Tom was white, they simply assumed that he shared their prejudices.

  The tension between Tom and Viola mounted in concert with the racial tension on the streets of Natchez, but whatever barrier remained between their professional and personal lives was shattered not long after a black man was murdered by a white deputy in a barbecue restaurant across the river. On a night when the KKK and the black Deacons for Defense were preparing for armed conflict, a midnight phone call awakened Tom from an uneasy sleep.

  “Dr. Cage,” he said with a military alertness developed in Korea and West Germany.

  “Dr. Cage?” whispered a female voice. “This is Viola. I need help. I’m in trouble.”

  Tom’s heart began hammering, and blood surged through his arteries. “Where are you?”

  “At the clinic.”

  Tom could barely hear her. He looked at his watch. One twenty-five A.M. “What’s happened?”

  “Jimmy’s hurt. Bad. I wouldn’t have called you, but he can’t go to the hospital. I tried to handle it myself, but I can’t stop the bleeding.”

  Tom heard her usually calm voice spiraling into panic. Common sense told him to ask whether the police were involved, but instead he said, “Just try to stabilize him. I’m on my way.”

  When he arrived at the clinic fifteen minutes later, Tom found Viola in the surgery with her brother and a huge young man named Luther Davis. Both men had been beaten with two-by-fours, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Jimmy Revels had been stabbed in the back, and Davis had slashing knife wounds on his arms. The pair had been ambushed by Klansmen outside the Flyway Drive-In between Vidalia and Ferriday, Louisiana. The Flyway was an all-white place, though colored patrons could walk up to the back window and buy a Coke or some french fries if they kept their heads down. Apparently, Jimmy and Luther had pulled into a regular bay and ordered milk shakes like white customers. This created confusion at first, until a pickup truck carrying two Ku Klux Klansmen arrived. The unmasked men got out carrying wooden staves, and everybody had expected a beating, but then Davis had driven his Pontiac convertible over the concrete curb and managed to escape.

  The pickup chased Luther’s Pontiac for more than a mile, until a second car cut them off near Pelham’s lumberyard. With no avenue of escape, Revels had gotten out and tried to reason with their pursuers, but this only earned him a green-stick fracture of his right humerus. Then Luther Davis joined the fray. Luther in a fight was more than most men could handle, even with odds of five against two. He’d done serious damage to their assailants, but eventually superior numbers took their toll. Realizing that he and Jimmy might die beside the road, Luther had fought his way back to the Pontiac and retrieved a .25-caliber pistol from the glove box. He told Tom he’d tried to intimidate the Klansmen into stopping the beating, but one had made him use the gun. Luther shot one man in the leg, then dragged Jimmy’s bleeding body back to the car and made their getaway. Only then had Jimmy realized he’d been stabbed in the back.

  Tom learned all this while treating the men’s injuries, Viola assisting with shaking hands. He’d always made it a point not to learn how to shoot X-rays, so he wouldn’t have to feel guilty about referring late-night trauma cases to the ER, but Viola had taught herself to do it by watching the X-ray tech. Within minutes Tom had a beautiful set of films with which to evaluate Jimmy’s fracture. Despite his pain, Jimmy thanked Tom profusely for taking the risk of treating them, while Luther bore everything in sullen silence. Viola barely spoke except to tell Jimmy to keep his voice low. Tom knew she was terrified of being fired for bringing trouble to the clinic. He wasn’t sure what to do about the situation, but one thing was certain: the actions he was taking now put him far over the line of neutrality in the conflict between the races, and well into the danger zone when it came to the Ku Klux Klan.

  He’d stitched a rubber drain into Jimmy’s stab wound and was beginning to suture Luther’s remaining lacerations when he heard a desperate pounding on the clinic’s front door. His first thought was
the police, but Jimmy assured him that they’d parked their car far way. Viola had ferried them to the clinic. Tom kept working and hoped the knocking would cease, but it didn’t. As he leaned over the sink to wash his hands, he heard a gasp, then turned and saw Viola staring at a pistol in Luther Davis’s hand. Tom started to speak, then held his silence. It would be useless to tell the man to put it away.

  “You two stay in here,” Tom told the men. “Viola, get into Exam Three. And nobody make a peep, no matter how close anybody comes to this room.”

  Tom switched off the light. As Viola padded across the floor behind him, fresh knocking echoed through the clinic. “I’m going to say I’m alone,” he told her, “but if it’s the police, and they get pushy, I’ll tell them I met one of my nurses up here for a late-night rendezvous. Can you play that role?”

  “I’ll prance out in my Playtex if it will save Jimmy,” Viola whispered.

  “It just might.”

  Leaving her in Exam Three, Tom went to the front of the clinic, checked his shirt for blood, then opened the shuddering front door.

  What he saw on the concrete steps was not the police, but three Klansmen he knew all too well. All were employees of Triton Battery. In front stood Frank Knox with his blazing eyes and military crew cut. Behind him stood a giant of a man named Glenn Morehouse, holding up the wiry frame of Sonny Thornfield, whose face was twisted in agony. Thornfield’s T-shirt was soaked with blood, and even in the weak light spilling from the doorway, Tom could see his left pant leg plastered to his swollen thigh, a belt fastened tight just above the knee. All three men were shivering in the cold.

  “Evenin’, Doc,” said Frank Knox. “Your wife told us you was out on a house call, but she didn’t know where. We couldn’t go to the hospital with this, so we was gonna bust in and try to use your equipment. Then we saw your light.”

  “Why can’t you go to the hospital?” Tom asked in the most ingenuous voice he could muster. “Did you rob a bank or something?”

  Frank laughed. “Nah. This is nigger trouble. There’s too much FBI in town to risk the hospital. We got a doctor over in Brookhaven who helps us out sometimes—a morphine addict—but that’s too far for this. I’m worried the bullet nicked his femoral artery.”

  Tom shook his head. “That leg would be much bigger, or he’d be dead. I’m surprised you didn’t call Dr. Lucas. He’s a surgeon, which is what it looks like you need.”

  Knox snorted in contempt. “That son of a bitch don’t care about nothin’ but his bank balance. You think he’d get out of bed to help a workin’ man?”

  “Well—”

  “Frank can patch this leg,” Thornfield said through gritted teeth. “We just need the equipment.”

  “I saw a lot of gunshot wounds in the Pacific,” Knox explained. “Even patched a couple myself. But I’d feel a hell of a lot better with a trained pair of hands on this.”

  Tom bent and pretended to examine the wound by porch light, but he knew full well he was looking at Luther Davis’s handiwork. “How did this happen?”

  “You don’t want to know, Doc,” Thornfield grunted.

  “How ’bout we get off this porch?” Frank suggested. “Where you can take a better look?”

  Before Tom could protest, all three men were inside the clinic, the door closed behind them. “Where you want us?” Frank asked.

  Knox knew where the surgery was. Most of the Triton Battery men had been to the clinic for physicals, if nothing else. Tom was afraid that if they even went close to the surgery, Luther Davis would charge out and finish the work he’d started across the river.

  “There’s an examining table in the room next to my private office,” Tom said, pointing. “Down there, to your right. Room one. Go on in there.”

  While the men carried their comrade through the waiting room like exhausted soldiers, Tom walked back toward the surgery. “I’ll be right there,” he assured them. “I need some of Dr. Lucas’s instruments.”

  “Go help him, Glenn,” Frank ordered.

  “No, I’ve got it!” Tom called with a pounding heart, looking back to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

  He hurried back to the surgery, flicked on the light, and held his finger to his lips. Luther was crouched in a fighting stance with his pistol, while Jimmy sat on the examining table, motionless as an ebony Buddha.

  “It’s your Klan friends,” Tom whispered. He looked at Luther. “The one you shot’s bleeding like a hog.”

  “Good,” Luther whispered, rising and pacing in the little room. “I’m gon’ have to kill them goddamn sons of bitches yet.”

  “Stop taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Jimmy said mildly.

  “You’re not killing anybody,” Tom said, blocking the big man’s path. “There’s three of them, and they’ve certainly armed themselves by now. You sit here and don’t move a muscle. If you make any noise, you’ll have klukkers all over you. And nobody wins a gunfight in a twelve-by-twelve room. I can tell you that from experience. Understood?”

  After Luther nodded, Tom grabbed some instruments and went back to the room where he’d sent the Klansmen.

  The next forty-five minutes were the tensest of his civilian life. All three Klansmen were accustomed to dealing with wounds, but their residual anger was palpable. Most alarming, they knew the identities of “both them niggers” who’d tried to “personally integrate the Flyway” that night. As Tom probed Sonny Thornfield’s leg for the .25 slug, Frank said, “What you doing up here at this hour, Doc? Your wife said you was on a house call.”

  Tom shook his head and kept working. “To tell you the truth, I was banging one of my nurses till you assholes showed up.”

  After a moment of stunned silence, all three men burst out laughing.

  “I thought you guys were my wife come to catch me,” Tom added. “That’s what took me so long to answer the door. I had to get the girl out with her clothes on.”

  “We definitely owe you one, then,” Frank said. “Any time you need a favor, you let us know.”

  “Count on it,” Tom said, finally extracting the slug to the accompaniment of Thornfield’s screams.

  “Which nurse you bangin’?” Sonny asked, breathing hard. “You ain’t bangin’ that colored girl, are you?”

  Tom’s face heated instantly. “Why?”

  “Sonny’s jealous,” Frank said, laughing. “He’s got the hots for that one.”

  “Bullshit,” Sonny growled. “It was her brother who—”

  “Quit your bitchin’,” Frank snapped. “When the time comes, I’ll let you skin the buck who done this. Till then, take it like a man.”

  “I’ll make that nigger squeal, all right,” Sonny vowed. Then he went white and vomited over the edge of the table.

  “Aw, hell,” Frank groaned, backing away. He picked the bloody and deformed slug out of the kidney-shaped metal tray. “Messing up Doc’s floor for a little pimp bullet like this. Clean that puke up, Glenn. Doc ain’t got no nurse on duty.” Frank punched Tom on the arm and laughed. “Least not no more, he don’t!”

  While Morehouse obediently cleaned up the vomitus, Tom finished working in silence. Twenty minutes was all it took to deal with the superficial injuries, but as he worked, he wondered whether Luther Davis had obeyed his order to remain in the surgery. More than anything, he worried how Viola was holding up in the darkness of Exam Three. He prayed she wouldn’t snap and try to check on her brother. Surely she wasn’t that crazy—

  “Like we said, Doc,” Frank said expansively. “Anything you ever need, you let us know.”

  “Just don’t let this happen again. You’re cutting into my sex life.”

  The three men laughed heartily as Tom led them out, Thornfield limping along with Morehouse’s support.

  “Get home and rest that leg,” Tom advised. “You can get your revenge next month. Come to the office tomorrow and let me check it. You all need rest, by the way. Head injuries are nothing to fool with.”

  Frank laughed.
“We’ll rest when we’re dead, Doc. Take it easy, okay? And sorry ’bout your pussy.”

  Tom shook his head and shut the door, sweat suffusing his skin in a sudden wave. He’d felt fear like this during the war, but something was different now. In Korea he’d mostly worried about himself. Now he had a wife and two children to protect. And tonight he’d stepped between two warring armies—small ones, perhaps, but as vicious in their hatreds as any on earth.

  He shut off the light and went back to get Viola. He found her shivering in the dark exam room, her shirt unbuttoned to the waist. A white bra showed through, cradling her breasts as though for a Playboy spread.

  “They’re gone,” he said, averting his eyes. “Let’s finish up Jimmy.”

  Before she could say anything, he went back to the surgery. While Jimmy and Luther peppered him with questions, he did some of the fastest stitching he’d done since his internship at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.