Brambleman Read online

  Brambleman

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Brambleman

  A Novel

  By

  Jonathan Grant

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © Jonathan Grant 2012

  Thornbriar Press

  Atlanta

  Published by Thornbriar Press at Smashwords

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents appearing in it are the result of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Copyright 2012 by Jonathan Grant

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Thornbriar Press, Atlanta, Georgia. www.thornbriarpress.com.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

  Grant, Jonathan, 1955-

  Brambleman : a novel / by Jonathan Grant. –1st ed.

  p. cm.

  LCCN 2012931583

  ISBN 978-0-9834921-2-2

  ISBN 978-0-9834921-3-9 (ebook)

  1. Authors–Fiction. 2. African Americans–Fiction.

  3. Georgia History–Fiction. 4. Landowners–Georgia–

  Atlanta–History–20th century–Fiction.

  5. Atlanta (Ga.)–Race relations–Fiction.

  6. Forsyth County (Ga.)–Race relations–Fiction.

  7. Lynching–Fiction 8. Suspense fiction, American.

  9. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3607.R36292B73 2012

  813'.6 QBI12-600019

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover photo by Matthew King

  Cover design by Jerry Dorris at AuthorSupport

  Books are available at quantity discounts. For more information, contact Marketing Department, Thornbriar Press, 3522 Ashford Dunwoody Road Suite 187, Atlanta GA 30319.

  There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;

  He jumped into a bramble-bush, and scratched out both his eyes.

  But when he saw his eyes were out, with all his might and main,

  He jumped into another bush, and scratched them in again.

  —Mother Goose

  In memory of my parents,

  Don and Jeanne Grant

  Prologue

  Very early on the gray, drizzly morning of January 24, 1987, Thurwood Talton put on his blue suit and ambled into the bathroom of his brick bungalow in Atlanta’s Virginia-Highland neighborhood. He trimmed his silver goatee and taped a gauze bandage over the gash on his forehead, which had required six stitches to close. He was rather proud of his wound—his “badge of courage,” an admiring colleague had called it.

  The retired Georgia State University history professor was preparing for the second Forsyth County Anti-Intimidation March, a follow-up to the previous Saturday’s disaster. On that day, Talton and seventy-five others, led by fiery civil rights leader Redeemer Wilson, had been driven from the county by a pack of rock- and bottle-throwing thugs. Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and their Rebel-flag waving sympathizers had screamed at the marchers: “Get out of town, niggers!” “Praise God for AIDS!” “Forsyth County’s always been white, and it’ll always be white!”

  Talton had heard someone shout “nigger lover” just before a beer bottle smashed his head. Although dazed and bleeding, he’d stayed on his feet—barely. The photo of a sheriff’s deputy helping him back to the bus had run in hundreds of newspapers. After viewing several pictures of the mob, Talton had pointed out a hulking youth in a tan coat as his assailant. There had been no arrest. No surprise there. Forsyth County folks stuck together, he knew.

  Redeemer, a fearless man, had responded to the violence by calling for a bigger protest. Now, nervous local and state officials were bracing for a march on the Forsyth County Courthouse in Cumming by an estimated 20,000 marchers from all over the world. Talton, one of the few Southern whites who had participated in the 1960s civil rights movement, would have an honored front-row spot.

  This was, in many ways, the last hurrah for the old guard. Although the King Holiday had recently been established in Georgia, the movement was facing its twilight during the Reagan years. Talton had written in his journal of his hope that the march would begin a revival. He was sure some good would come of the fact that Forsyth’s nasty secret was finally out: Blacks were not allowed there to live, work, play—or even breathe. Needless to say, the attention was overdue. Long a sleepy rural enclave, Forsyth had first been awakened by the impoundment of Lake Lanier, the state’s favorite playground. Now, three decades later, it was a fast-growing suburb, thanks to Atlanta’s boomtown growth next door. That it was only a racist’s stone’s throw away from America’s black Mecca made Forsyth County’s outright bigotry not only ironic, but bizarre. Contrary to the catcalls, Forsyth had not always been white. And no one better understood Forsyth’s peculiar demographics than Dr. Talton.

  At first, reporters wanted to talk to him only about his head wound, but coverage shifted when they found out he’d spent several years researching and writing a hefty manuscript entitled Flight from Forsyth. After a dozen interviews, he’d boiled the story down to a sound bite: In 1912, a sensational rape-murder trial and lynching fueled the twentieth century’s worst outbreak of nightriding, and more than a thousand black residents were driven from Forsyth, never to return. Journalists misquoted him, reporting that all had fled. There was more to it than that. Talton had recently learned some horrible and fascinating new information, but he wouldn’t share it just yet.

  Unfortunately, his manuscript was too hefty. University Press had rejected it “primarily for reasons of length” although the acquisitions editor had noted other problems as well. But surely Flight’s prospects had improved in the last week, given the publicity surrounding the marches. Believing a book deal to be a sure thing, Talton planned to find an agent and cut a deal with a major publisher. He’d already promised to use part of the advance he would receive to take Kathleen on a cruise. To Alaska, maybe. Or Norway.

  Alas, none of these things would happen.

  As he looked in the bathroom mirror and adjusted the knot on his silver-and-red tie, Talton felt an overwhelming pain in his chest. He cried out in alarm and lurched into the narrow hall, bouncing off the wall, knocking down photographs, and stumbling into the front bedroom, where he died in his loving wife’s arms.
His last words were “not done.” He was 68 years old.

  The cause of death was an embolism of the left pulmonary artery: a blood clot. Kathleen Talton was certain that the man who threw the bottle had caused her husband’s death, but no one listened to her pleas for justice. She grieved with her daughter Angela and a few friends. After the Unitarian funeral, she grieved alone.

  Kathleen was certain that Talton had been talking about his book when he died, and she considered it her duty to see his work published. She tried to interest editors in Flight from Forsyth, to no avail. It needed extensive editing, she was told. Unfortunately, no one was willing to dedicate the time and effort necessary to fix it.

  Many years passed. The manuscript gathered dust on the handsome walnut desk in Talton’s study. Kathleen retired from her job as a high school English teacher in Decatur. Dementia crept into her life with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, and her world grew darker and lonelier. She feared becoming dependent on unreliable people. When unfamiliar faces showed up at her door, there was always a debate in her mind: Did she know them? Should she let them in?

  One winter night nearly two decades after her husband’s death, she wandered into the study and sat down at the desk, struggling to remember why she had come there. She was lonely—and angry at Angela for spending Christmas in Florida with her young girlfriend.

  The manuscript sat where Thurwood had left it long ago. With a trembling hand, she lifted the title page, then put it back in place atop the pile of paper. She sobbed when she realized she’d let the book die and had failed in her duty to the man she’d loved for so many years. It would take nothing less than a miracle to get Thurwood’s life’s work published now. And what about justice? What about the man who’d killed him? She looked up at the faded newspaper clipping and its picture of that young punk, captured in an enduring grimace of hatred.

  She wanted her late husband’s work to be completed and published.

  She wanted his killer to be brought to justice.

  And it would be nice to have someone to talk to on desolate winter nights.

  With the weight of loss and loneliness bearing down on her soul, she did something she hadn’t done since she was a little girl who wanted a pony. She bowed her head and prayed. This time, she asked for vengeance, justice, companionship, completion, and closure.

  It was a careless and jumbled-up prayer, but a most interesting one.

  Chapter One

  In the silence between the clatter of dishes and the waitress’s barked order, Charlie Sherman heard himself dripping. He counted tiny splashes on the laminated menu: one, two, three. Waving to get the server’s attention accelerated the patter. Interesting.

  It was late on the night after Christmas, and less than an hour before, Charlie had been a semi-respectable stay-at-home suburban father, failing novelist, and not-so-loving husband. Now he was homeless, and he looked the part, in a torn blue nylon bomber jacket, tattered beige Henley shirt, paint-spattered gray sweat pants, and holey black basketball shoes. To top off his grungy appearance, he wore basketball goggles—a necessity after he’d broken his tortoise-shell frames during a Christmas Eve wrestling match with his four-year-old son, Ben. Not only did they make him look like a devolved alien, but the prescription was ten years old, so they gave him a headache, too.

  He’d been thrown out of the house following an ugly domestic dispute that was not, at this fragile time, resolvable. Upon bitter reflection during the driving rainstorm, Charlie had concluded that Susan had wanted him out for months. Still, the eviction had come as a surprise. A shock, actually.

  He’d been in the garage minding his own business, plunking bolts into a can, straightening up his workshop in preparation for his next home improvement project—just two days after he’d finished renovating the master bath. When he heard Susan hollering, Charlie thought his wife was being assaulted. Armed with a mini-sledgehammer, he’d rushed to her side, only to learn that he was the problem—one she’d decided she could do without.

  She was standing in his office, pointing at his computer screen. Dumbfounded, Charlie stared at it. Honestly, he had no idea how that picture had become his screensaver. Due to the vagaries of Microsoft Windows, he had unwittingly turned a photo of a mournful-looking young blonde being gangbanged by a basketball team into his desktop background. An anti-virus icon covered her left nipple, but she was otherwise completely exposed. Damn you, Bill Gates.

  Meanwhile, Susan let loose. “You fucking asshole,” she said. “Get out of my house.”

  That was just her opening statement. When she unloaded, she could carry on for days on end, just like her mother. Before Charlie could properly formulate a response to her rapid-fire accusations, the cops arrived. Almost instantly, it seemed. Of course, she invited them inside.

  While Charlie never swung the mini-sledge at anyone, hit anything, or even threatened Susan with it, he was still holding it when the cops came in, and they didn’t like that very much. One of them drew his gun, and they ordered Charlie to put it on the floor—and his hands on his head. Her face pinched and flush, dark eyes throwing daggers in her husband’s direction, blonde hair flying as she wagged her head and shook her fist, Susan then accused her husband of threatening her with the hammer, or more precisely, wielding it in a menacing way. “He acts like he wants to use it on something, maybe me,” she said. Then she launched into her longstanding complaint: “It would take a miracle for him to get a real job instead of writing books no one will ever read.” She delivered this pronouncement in that hateful North Georgia twang that was the hallmark of her family.

  Charlie was left sputtering by the attack. “Hey. Just … wait a minute—”

  “Cool down,” said the white cop, laying a hand on Charlie’s shoulder.

  “Chill out,” said the black cop, pushing him toward the door.

  “Just go,” Susan said. “Porn freak.”

  So there he was, down and out. With his van blocked in by two squad cars in the driveway, Charlie stomped off into the jaws of a winter thunderstorm. After walking a mile in the rain, he came to the Hanover Drive overpass at Interstate 285. Consumed by both rage and despair, Charlie had a George Bailey moment as he stopped on the bridge and stared out through the rain into traffic. Yes, this seemed a fitting end, since his suicidal father had, on a lonely evening long ago in Missouri, embraced his own Goodnight, Irene moment and jumped in the river to drown—or at least to disappear forever.

  And then something strange happened. As he stuck his left leg over the tubular guard rail and gazed out through the rain at the oncoming traffic, he saw a transit bus nearly sideswipe a gasoline tanker. An instant later, the tanker spun out of control at sixty miles per hour on the rain-slick Interstate beneath him. In cart-before-horse fashion, the eastbound tractor-trailer became a trailer-tractor. Its headlights flashed on the median wall, then swept across the windshields of the vehicles behind it, then spotlighted the noise barrier beyond the right shoulder, and finally returned to illuminate the highway ahead as the rig regained its proper configuration, having narrowly avoided crashing into the swerving bus and several other vehicles.

  Not only had the truck spun out without wrecking and miraculously come back under control, but Charlie would swear he’d seen someone riding on the outside of the truck. For an instant, he’d glimpsed a man standing on the truck chassis between the back of the short-haul cab and the front of the tanker trailer.

  Fascinated, Charlie removed his leg from the rail and ran across the bridge to see what would happen next. He put his hands on the cold, wet rail and leaned over to watch as the vehicle pulled to the shoulder and shuddered to a stop, air brakes squealing and gasping. A few seconds later, the driver jumped from the cab. Through the hum and whiz of traffic, Charlie thought he heard the man retching. But there was no sign of the truck-surfer.

  Suddenly he realized that if he killed himself, he wouldn’t be able to see weird stuff like that anymore, which would be tragic. Also, shame crept
into his heart. After all, jumping off a highway bridge into traffic was one of the most socially irresponsible methods of suicide imaginable. At the very least, he could come up with a way to do it that didn’t snarl traffic for hours. So he decided to mull things over instead.

  Having temporarily given up on giving up, he hiked through the rain up the hill to Pancake Hut, where the waitress—Lil Bit, according to her nametag—refused to acknowledge his existence and pour him a cup of coffee. Usually he wouldn’t set foot in the place. Pancake Huts were notorious for discriminating against gays and blacks, and Charlie was a liberal, of sorts. However, at the moment, he needed shelter from the storm, not political correctness. Anyway, he was white, so what was up with Lil Bit’s cold shoulder? It was just a diner, damn it! With a “74” on its inspection certificate!

  Perhaps the restaurant sensed his disrespect, for the place had turned against him the instant he walked in the door. One of the young drunks in the booth behind him called Charlie “’tarded” when he took his seat. The other muttered, “homeless fuck.” Obviously, these were not his people: One wore a camouflage hunting outfit and the other a red baseball cap adorned with a Rebel battle flag and the words “Fergit, Hell!” And they’d been cooing insults at him ever since. Of the four other people in the place, only the cook had failed to show his contempt for the soggy newcomer. (Then again, his back had been turned the whole time, so maybe he had.) In any case, having just survived and escaped his own worst impulses, Charlie now felt trapped in this Pancake Hut of Hate.

  The rain quickened, pattering on the roof like a manic drummer. Charlie lowered his hand and raised it. The dripping had slowed, so he waved to get the water molecules in his cuff moving again. Lil Bit, standing behind the counter just a few feet away, continued to give him the alert indifference only the best truly bad servers have mastered. She’d wait on him, all right—to leave. When he recalled a news story about a homeless man who’d been fed cleaning fluid by a Pancake Hut cook, Charlie thought that maybe it was better if they didn’t serve him after all.