Black, White, and RED All Over, part 11 -- Ironwood Hamilton from #freewrite in an extended story!
Once more and again -- thank you, thank you, thank you to the @freewritehouse in making me their adoptee last week ... this extra content has now sprawled into two weeks, but I promise you will NOT be disappointed with the climax of "Black and White and RED All Over," here in part 11 ... we have finally arrived where the "red" is!
If you have time to get totally caught up, here are parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. OR, get the entire tale in its new home on Amazon!
If you want to jump right on in, here is a very brief summary: one week before the fateful Friday of part 11, the Lofton County Free Voice shocks Lofton County, VA and all its police departments with its confrontational style and its demand for public release of records involving incidents and arrests of Black citizens. In parts five through nine, Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly of Tinyville, Captain H.F. Lee of Big Loft, and the principals of the Free Voice discover how certain people in law enforcement are planning to strike back, and in part 10, they prepare their counter-strike!
Now, join the final countdown to the dramatic confrontation, right after my dividing graphic...
Friday morning, 4:45am: Captain Hamilton eased out of bed, very careful to leave his wife dreaming in the sweet afterglow of the love they had made the night before. That had always been his way. He left a letter for her, and also instructions for Addison, his oldest son at home, in case of his severe injury or death (although he knew that Adella, Agnes, and Iris would have to actually hold things down with their mother until Ironwood Jr. arrived), and then did an abbreviated version of both his isometrics and his shower before departing to his office.
Upon arriving and putting the coffee on, Captain Hamilton went out to get both the Tinyville Times and the Lofton County Free Voice, both of which were already out. They only agreed on one piece of news, and it was the critical piece: on this day, all police departments beside Tinyville, which had already complied with the FOIA request, were going to comply, and the Lofton County Free Voice was going to do a public examination of the data at the Gilligan House.
6:30am: Lieutenant O'Reilly arrived at work with a grim face.
“We're really going to have to do this thing today,” he said. “We almost need security at the Gilligan House now, some people are so angry about this.”
“The fun won't start until the folks from the Free Voice arrive,” Captain Hamilton said, “but if I were a betting man, I'd bet you even money that all of the fuming and fussing will be called off by then. Lofton County is big, but there aren't that many people in it, and if we're right about what we expect to come tonight, enough word will get out to calm the likes of Mary Leigh and her ilk down.”
“Because someone else is going to take care of the problem,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said.
“Exactly. Watch for it – we're going over there at about the time Mr. Varick should be finished with his rounds. Watch the body language of the others who will be looking on. Watch the way it will get eerily quiet toward sunset, as people clear out all around. Many will know, but nobody will witness.”
“Which is why we are here,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said. “Somebody has to witness, and stand against this evil.”
“Exactly. That is the whole point of this day. Meanwhile, business as usual; we'll alternate checking on things at the Gilligan House every couple of hours.”
40 miles away, another police officer in his office was tearing all the copies he had pulled down of the Lofton County Free Voice to shreds.
“Kindling!” he shouted to no one in particular. “Kindling!”
12:00 noon: Captain Hamilton got a phone call from Captain Lee.
“Are we on schedule?”
“Affirmative. Mr. Varick called me before he went down to Littleburg, and he ought to be looping back up to Big Loft in another hour and then through to Miniopolis and back here, to get to the Gilligan House at 3.”
3:05pm: Mr. Varick returned to Tinyville, the little U-Haul he had rented full of files. He had checked them all before leaving the offices from which he had gotten them. He had stayed right in the police department offices where he had gotten the files while he checked, and had felt the hatred everywhere but in Big Loft, where Captain Lee was coolly professional, as always, and his subordinates dared not show any impatience.
Not everyone had such control of their subordinates, such as Captain Bragg in Littleburg. One of his lieutenants had made the comment, “Oh, it's all there, Varick – for all the good it's going to do you.”
Neither Captain Bragg nor Mr. Varick had visibly reacted, both of them knowing the import of the comment. It was now time for things done, not said.
A dozen willing hands were waiting at the Gilligan House for Mr. Varick and the files, including those of Mrs. Henry Varick IV, who greeted her husband with a hug and a kiss before taking up the clipboard and checking off the files before they were put back in the cases and the cases passed to another volunteer.
“Get on out of here, Ella,” Mr. Varick said when they had finished. “It's going to be too hot even for your fine self around here in a little while.”
“You better get home, Harry,” she said. “I'm too beautiful to be anybody else's wife but yours.”
“You most certainly are, Ella,” he said, “and we don't intend to let that happen.”
“The girls and I have not ceased to pray, and we'll keep praying.”
“You had better be praying in Roanoke by 7 or so.”
“I'll text you when we get there, Harry.”
“Is Mrs. Harrison still being obstinate?”
“Marva is being marvelous, Harry, talking about she has an extra shotgun and knows how to use it. I've convinced her that the rest of us may need her on rearguard, so, she's heading up to Roanoke with us.”
“You are as smart as you are beautiful, Ella. I'll see you on Sunday, Lord willing, and if not, see you after while.”
He put his hands through his wife's salt-and-pepper twists, and kissed her bronze forehead before indulging in a long, sweet kiss of her full lips. Then she left, and he watched her strong, ample figure walking away with an appreciative shake of the head.
“I'm surely ready to meet You anytime You wish, Lord,” he said, “but if You would leave me here to keep enjoying her a little while longer, I'd be happy too.”
Then, he snapped himself out of it.
“Well, if You're leaving me here, it's to get the work You've given me to do, done,” he said, and then drove the U-Haul back to the rental spot, picked up his car, and came back to the Gilligan House to start working with those files, along with 15 volunteers. Mr. Stepforth and Mr. Harrison arrived at about that time as well.
As darkness approached, Mr. Varick went upstairs to turn the lights and accessories on, then went back downstairs to finish the work of the day.
6:05pm: Captain Lee arrived from Big Loft in his pickup truck, and joined the caravan of the trucks of Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly. All-terrain vehicles were just a must, given the kind of work the night might bring.
6:30pm: A prayer and strategy meeting began at Roadside Southern Baptist Church – not the regular one, although some of its regular attendees were there. Men came from all over the county to attend. Wives came, and children. The mood was cheerful, if not exactly festive. A meal was served on the yard – a potluck. Good-looking fellowship, resembling a church meeting. It was not that.
When the wives and children kissed their husbands and fathers goodbye, the men went on up into the choir room and changed – but not into choir robes, which at Roadside were brick red trimmed with cream. Their robes were white, as were their hoods. Here and there a sign of a hasty stitch, but, after all, they would only need these robes once before returning to their regular careers. Off they piled into their trucks and jeeps and cars, to get into position and wait.
10:00pm: As good as midnight in Tinyville. Stores and restaurants had been closed for an hour, and workers either at home or nearly there. The streets were empty, as were the side roads leading to those neighborhoods in which Tinyville began to blend with the countryside. The Gilligan House was in of those neighborhoods, very near where Tinyville officially ended. Lofton County proper officially began at the wood line, about two football fields' length from the back of the house.
Half of the white-robed men in the trucks began to get moving at 10:15; the other half stayed put, their guns trained on the back door and whoever might try to escape that way. It would be a veritable turkey shoot, from that perspective. The rest fanned out, cutting the phone line and covering the nearest cell phone tower.
Upstairs, the lights in the Gilligan House showed figures still moving back and forth, still working until the circuit breakers were shorted out, and thus plunged the house into complete darkness, a darkness then broken by the attackers lighting up their firebombs. One good firebomb to light up the front entrance, making that way impassible.
A brick and a firebomb, a brick and a firebomb, a brick and a firebomb through every window that could be reached – and if the throws through the upstairs windows fell short, they fell short in a way that set the exterior on fire too. All this was accompanied by a bloodcurdling cacophony of hoots and hollers and yells probably not attempted in Virginia since Nathan Bedford Forrest ordered the KKK disbanded in the 1870s.
All this noise just to choke on it, with the fire at last growing bright enough to illuminate two silhouettes standing just by the front entrance – the long, tall, loose-limbed Captain Hamilton, his semi-automatic rifle trained on the leader of the white-robed mob, with Lieutenant O'Reilly right with him, covering his commander with his semi-automatic rifle.
“And that will about be all, gentlemen,” Captain Hamilton shouted over the noise of the growing fire. “Give up now, and we've just got you for arson and attempted murder. Put those rifles down, back up, slowly, and get down on the ground, all the way down, hands splayed out.”
Half of the men were so deflated they began to comply until the leader said, “Wait a minute – there are 87 of us and two of them.”
“There are two of us that you can see, Captain Braxton Beauregard Bragg,” Captain Hamilton said. “28 percent of the men of the town also wish you had the sense to just stand down.”
There came such a sound of safeties coming off rifles from all around that half of Captain Bragg's mob put their rifles down and ran backward from them before getting down on their faces, their hands and arms splayed out like they were going to make snow angels.
“It's over, Captain Bragg. We already know about all the thefts you and others covered up by blaming Black folks. We already know about the kickbacks funneled down from Virginia's private prisons through the county prosecutor's office to the police departments that went along – every one of them in Lofton County. By 4:00am, it will be public news. But you and those with you don't have to be dead in that news. Stand down, gentlemen, and live.”
“There's just two of them, no matter what it sounds like!” he shrieked. “Surely three of you have enough manhood to avenge yourself on him, after he took your livelihood from you!
“Oh, those three worked with me long enough to know me,” Captain Hamilton said. “They're already laying down – ain't that right, Lieutenants?”
“Yes, sir!” came three voices from the darkness.
Captain Hamilton wrapped his finger around the trigger of his gun.
“The stories, they say are written by the victors, Captain Bragg. You're not going to win this one. You are enjoying privileges you never gave any of the men you and your department railroaded, but even my patience is not limitless. I am going to say it for the third and last time: Put down your weapons, back up, and get on the ground, while you still can do it willingly.”
Another five men complied, leaving about 40 with Captain Bragg to make up their minds, but they too began to slowly comply, as Captain Bragg burst into a fit of swearing and weeping the likes of which had probably not been heard since April of 1865.
Yet Captain Bragg did not have the sense of his great-great-grandfather, to know when a thing irrevocably over was indeed over.
“I can't do it – I can't go down like this!”
The men still standing with him likewise picked up their weapons, and likewise died, in an orderly way. Captain Hamilton shot Captain Bragg and the man next to him; Lieutenant O'Reilly got the man to the other side of Captain Bragg, and those on either side of those dead by the side of Captain Bragg died in a hail of bullets that would have just as easily cut down 800-900 men, given enough time for men to move into position with newly loaded weapons.
The defenders of the Lofton County Free Voice had applied Captain Lee's deadly geometry from the deep shadows on the left and right sides of the Gilligan House. That geometry created a kill zone that even those who tried to get up and run found themselves victims of. However, Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly were safe just beyond the crossing of the lines, and doubly safe because they had jumped down into the trench dug for them to get below return shots. Not that there were any. Captain Lee's geometry had been brilliantly executed, with no mistake, by Mr. Turner and those with him.
Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly climbed out of the trench when the shooting paused – “All clear!” the captain shouted – and swiftly ran to the men that had sense enough to stay down. The two Tinyville officers had brought plenty of extra handcuffs, and the Black men who had come to the defense of their friends and neighbors brought rope for good hogties when the handcuffs ran out.
Meanwhile, around back, the men waiting in their pickup trucks realized something had gone wrong when no one came running out of the back entrance of the Gilligan House for them to shoot. Then they heard all the shooting from the sides and in the front, and knew something had gone wrong. They might have gone to the defense of their fellows, or they might have run for it, but they were not able to do any of that because not a single truck, jeep, or car would start up.
“What in the – ?”
Of course they got out, and so were snatched, one by one and two by two, knocked out, and hogtied. The last man, in a growing and paralyzing sense of terror, was actually relieved to see the face of Captain Lee attached to the arm that quite suddenly reached through the window of his truck, pulled the gun out, and then pulled him right out afterward, clear through the window.
“Thank God it is you, Captain Lee,” he said. “At least I know you won't just shoot me down!”
“Don't tempt me, Lieutenant,” said his commander as he flung his subordinate to the ground. “I've been thinking about it since yesterday, you and your white sheet purchases, and coming into my office just smiling away like you had won the lottery! Well, you just did – the lottery for fools, which comes with an all-expense paid, indeterminate stay in one of Virginia's finest prisons!”
46 dead in the front, 41 handcuffed or hogtied; 32 hogtied in the back, all caught up on arson and attempted murder – there was no hope of getting off, because Mr. Varick and the rest put down their weapons and rope and started identifying and snapping photos of the living and the dead. Random comments of the survivors and those who had defended their colleagues were put together with the two captains and Lieutenant O'Reilly's on-the-spot accounting, which in turn was backed up by the record of Mr. Turner's recorder, face up in the middle of the field of battle, poking out from under a rock that everyone coming down the field in front of the house had walked around. The information obtained was divided up amongst the victors, and so Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly had their reports to go write.
Captain Lee's night was not finished.
“Oh, I'm just good and warmed up,” he said to his cousin Captain Hamilton. “I would be honored by your company as soon as the Lofton County Free Voice is posted up.”
“Just warmed up, Colonel?” Captain Hamilton said. “We're about to do some Unit 6 things, I reckon!”
“And I need my humane adjutant to keep me from doing things the old way,” said the former commander of Unit 6. “You remember that terrible recording the Free Voice obtained showing who the accessories are to this crime?”
“I do. If I were Commissioner Thomas or either of his two deputies, I wouldn't even try to defend this one – I'd fly with the dawn's early light.”
“Which is why we are going to break their wings, in the darkest hour before the dawn they will ever see.”
Henry Fitzhugh Lee was meticulous, including when and how he got hold of a judge in the middle of the night. The Honorable Joseph Bane Lofton Sr. was a fellow insomnia sufferer to the captain. The two had met in an all-night diner and hit it off, discovering in each other a love for justice and a hatred of corruption that had made close friends of them, despite the 20-year gap in their age.
“You would call on the one night that I was almost asleep, Lee,” the judge had growled at his friend at 11:00 on Friday, “but at least if you are that hound that hunts all night, at least you have a juicy piece of game to offer me. As soon as you get me the report from the Free Voice and bring it to me, I'll write your warrants.”
The second edition of the Free Voice for the week came out at 4:00, printed on both sides because of all the news. In it, Mr. Varick had printed his transcription of the conversation the commissioner and his deputies had, and included a link to it on Facebook, accompanied by a live link of the Gilligan House still burning at 4:00. The imagery was powerful, but it was the words linking the commissioner and his deputies to the tragedy at the Gilligan House that was enough to get Captain Lee his warrants – at 4:15, since Mr. Nathan Turner drove up and handed Captain Lee a copy for the judge, right in front of the judge's house.
“Lee, you get on my nerves,” Judge Lofton said at 4:30, in his robe, at the door, “but probably not as much as you are about to get on some other people's nerves.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Captain Lee said, and bowed.
“Thank me by getting off my front step, and not calling me for more warrants until noon. Go bother Danson; he'll be at work by 9.”
“Yes, Your Honor. Thank you.”
When you are the commissioner of police, or even one of his two deputies, the last thing you expect to hear is “POLICE! Open up!” between 4:00-5:00 in the morning. The last thing you expect is for the guilt of years of corruption to suddenly evaporate your courage like water suddenly under a blowtorch's flame, and for yourself to be running out of your back door in your underwear, or starting up your car and driving through your garage door in a desperate attempt to escape.
But, perhaps least and most ridiculous of all would you expect your last sight to be looking over the barrel of the gun of the man you had just hired four months before to solve all your problems. This was the ridiculously unthinkable end of Orton Thomas, commissioner of police in Big Loft, as the news of what he had conspired was spreading like wildfire across the county and burning as fiercely as the still burning Gilligan House.
Commissioner Thomas had considered himself master of every situation as it came to hand. He was quick enough to realize that something had gone wrong with Captain Bragg's plan, and that somebody had traced it back to him – Bragg, had he survived, had probably wagged his tongue too much. He was also quick enough to figure out that only one man in his department was new enough to dare carry out some overzealous judge's order before dawn. It had to be Captain Lee.
Yet although he knew Captain Lee's record, the commissioner found Captain Lee in person to be brilliant but sad, slow to pick up on the subtle insults and push back he was getting in the department on his cold cases, and exceedingly deferential to authority. So far, Captain Lee had not linked one of his cold cases to the FOIA – or so the commissioner had deluded himself. That delusion had led to others, each successively more damaging until the final, deadly one.
So, already in uniform for the day, the commissioner scrambled to the inside of his kitchen door, to wait, and was surprised to see the longer, looser figure of an officer in heather gray – backup from county? – in the foyer. That one was quick; his ears caught the commissioner's movement to fire and ducked behind a column in time to miss the commissioner's shot. However, the commissioner's shot at Captain Hamilton was followed by the commissioner's sudden awareness that someone was behind him.
That infamously handsome face, in all its cold, marble perfection, the muscle-packed and yet graceful figure, perfectly composed and posed … as near to a vision of the most deadly American of the 19th century as any Virginian of the 21st century would ever see, in his admittedly gorgeous mid-40s prime. Yet, if Commissioner Thomas in his last moments imagined General Lee had returned to Virginia, he swiftly had to come to terms with the fact that Lee had returned in his only fitting form for a warlike occasion: the Angel of Death, able to dispatch you at point-blank range no matter how well you, a mere mortal, mastered all events in the moment … except locking your back door, and thus allowing the partner of the officer you are shooting at from the kitchen to run up right behind you …
As for the two deputy commissioners, they ended up in various states of injury, having made the mistake of putting Captains Hamilton and Lee through the annoyance of having to chase them.
The first one had made it through his yard and closed his chain-link fence behind him and locked it while his pursuers were running around the house. He figured that they would be slowed down. He wasn't ready when they both grabbed on to the fence at the top, pulled themselves up, and jumped over, caught up with him, grabbed both his arms, and turned him right around, his legs still going, and slammed him right into that chain link fence.
“Very poor hospitality of you to slam that fence on us,” Captain Lee hissed.
“Beneath the standards of any Southern gentleman,” Captain Hamilton added.
He was hog-tied and thrown into the back of the cab of Captain Hamilton's truck, and seat-belted in because –
“Safety first,” Captain Hamilton said.
The second deputy surprised his pursuers just a little by coming out of his garage without lifting the door, but that just was his writing his own invitation to a tailgate party sponsored by Captain Hamilton and his truck. Captain Hamilton just kept up until they were beyond the city limits, occasionally tapping the second deputy's car gently just to let him know he could get him at any time, while Captain Lee shouted on the bullhorn, “Pull over! Pull over, Pulliam, before I have to let you get hurt!”
Deputy Commissioner Pulliam wasn't listening, and so, once clear of town, Captain Hamilton got next to him and ran him off the road at 80 miles an hour, right into a field full of hay bales.
“It's amazing how much hang time those little cars get,” Captain Lee commented as Deputy Pulliam's car landed in a huge hay bale, upside down.
Deputy Commissioner Pulliam was in tears by the time he was pulled from his car, hogtied, thrown in next to his colleague Deputy Commissioner Solton, and of course buckled up because –.
“Safety first,” Captain Hamilton said.
That was the end, as dawn rose on a truly new day in Lofton County. The sunrise was so beautiful that Captain Hamilton parked the truck for a few minutes on the last turn before rolling into Tinyville.
“It's just too beautiful to miss,” he said, and Captain Lee smiled faintly.
After all, Captain Hamilton was the humane one, so much so that he could not begrudge anyone the last sunrise they would see for a few decades. The evidence seized from Commissioner Thomas's home showed that he and his deputies had colluded with Captain Bragg in the attempted murder of Mr. Varick and all staffers of the Lofton County Free Voice with him, while at the same time also destroying all the information they had given out.
For the time being, the two deputy commissioners would join their co-conspirators in the Tinyville jail until county belatedly sent to take them all to the county jail. Lieutenant O'Reilly had done a workmanlike job in getting everybody booked that was there before the two captains returned, with the muscle of 50 Black men from the town keeping the lieutenant safe from those he was booking!
The fire department had belatedly arrived at the site of the Gilligan House, and the fire would soon be out, but the house itself was gone.
“It went down in the service of our people – it died as it had lived, and that fate was better than some others about whom we could say the same thing,” said Henry Varick IV when he and Captain Hamilton next spoke.
“Indeed,” said Captain Hamilton. “A tragic night's work, but good work nonetheless. No casualties on our side, I trust.”
“Just some minor injuries,” Mr. Varick said. “A ton of work still to do.”
“Always,” Captain Hamilton said. “We both have a busy day and busy week ahead. I'm sure you'll want an official interview with me, and I'm available Monday for that.”
“That will be fine,” Mr. Varick said. “Thank you, Captain Hamilton. Give my thanks to Captain Lee and Lieutenant O'Reilly. Good morning.”
“Good morning, Mr. Varick.”
Next call: home.
“Woody?”
“Good morning, Aggie.”
And Captain Hamilton held the phone away from his ear because of the 12 Hamiltons, screaming for joy on the other end. When they calmed down a little, Captain Hamilton spoke again.
“It's a mess out here – it will be in all the news soon. I've got at least 12 hours of work to deal with before I can come home, but I'll be home, Lord willing, this evening.”
Mrs. Hamilton lowered her voice to a sultry whisper.
“You know I'm going to be waiting on you, Woody, aching for that good old made-it-home-love...”
The ache instantly tore through the phone down her husband's spine, and made his head spin, his heart pound, and his mouth water ...
“Aggie...”
“Yes, Woody?”
“I'll be home in nine hours.”
When he got home, ten hours later, Captain Lee likewise went through his homecoming rituals: his will, letters, and rent money went back into the lockbox designated for that, his gun went back into the locked closet for all such things, and then he went to his knees in thanksgiving and praise to God for his life and those who had fought beside him being preserved, and that “You restrained my wrath, so that I have by personal act and by strategic direction shed blood only in defense of myself and others who were worthy of defense, so that even those who opposed us but not fatally may live on to receive Your grace and mercy, even as You have shed it upon me, Whom You found in sin, but chose to deliver. I pray that You will grant repentance and saving faith to all who are in need who have survived this terrible night, and day.”
Upon rising from his knees, Captain Lee changed into his street clothes, took his uniform out to be cleaned for pickup Monday, came home, made a reminder note to himself to call Mama Morton, made another reminder note for what to do with his time should he be placed on administrative leave, took his regimen of medicine with his limeade, turned on his Mozart through Monk playlist, drew himself a deep, hot bath, took off everything but put the gold chain with the amber ring back on, settled into his bath, and went to dreamless, restful sleep.
Lieutenant O'Reilly went home to bed, his being the simplest before-and-after ritual of all.