No one ever forgot the Great Hurricane of October 1910, not around here. Everything not torn away was salt-soaked and rotted, trees down everywhere and marly muck. It seemed like our world would never come clean again, nor our souls either. Ted removed most of our drowned chickens but that reek of death came up through the floor a month or more before we could get the store put back together and he had time to crawl back under there, rake out the last of ’em. Mama Ida called it the sulphur stench of Satan coming up from everlasting Hell where you-know-who was suffering the torments of the damned this very minute, her expression said.
Because he had stayed out of it, my Ted was one of the few men with no cause to feel ashamed. Course Daddy and the boys felt no shame either, which explains the hard feelings in our families that’s still festering today.
On October 25th, Frank Tippins finally showed up with the Monroe sheriff. The men informed ’em that the law had come too late. Where they ain’t no law, you got to make your own-I’ll bet those sheriffs heard that one a few times! But Tippins chose to see that as a confession and issued a summons to Lee County Court for the whole darned bunch, Daddy included.
I’d heard a whisper that the feller who shot first was the same man whose bullet killed Ed Watson. I was frightened it was Bill or Daddy. When I asked my brother about this, he just shook his head. “Well, Bill,” I said, “what does that darned headshake tell me, yes or no?” And he said, “Mamie, there ain’t no way to explain. It ain’t a matter of yes or no so just forget about it.”