The Truth Hurts by Nancy Pickard Read Free Book Online Page B

obvious next in line to be the social matriarch of Sebastion when her generation’s turn came ’round. They had no children. Clayton was a deceptively mild man, practiced at foreclosing on small farmers with a personal sympathy that belied his impersonal task; she was deceptively intimidating, accustomed to getting her way without coating her “requests” with sugar as other women did. Some people found him mealymouthed; many people thought her bossy. Nobody said that to their faces.
    Just as they regularly did, Eulalie and Clayton were going to stage, on this evening, a little show of hospitality for the local bigots, people they had grown up with, played under the eyes of nannies and mammies with, gone to school with, “come out” into society with, joined the country clubs with, done business with, and all with false smiles to fool the fools who thought them friends. They felt they had to do it, just so the segregationists couldn’t suspect how far the Fishers and a few others like them—theGoodwins, the Reeses, the Wiegans, and the Folletinos—had traveled from being one of them. And just so they wouldn’t suspect that those same white families associated with some of the black people in Sebastion—people like Rachel and her fiancé, Hubert, who both worked for the Folletinos—in ways that went beyond employer/employee into something perilously close to friendship. While it was true that, if asked for either Rachel’s or Hubert’s last names, neither Eulalie nor Clayton could have provided them, at least they would have felt bad about it. There was still a gap, but it was perhaps the narrowest that Sebastion had seen since its founding.
    “If we don’t fake it, we’ll destroy Hostel,” Clayton reminded her, apparently oblivious to her earlier warning shot. “If people start lookin’ at us suspiciously, we won’t be able to hide anybody anymore, and then what good would we be to anybody, Eulalie?”
    “Well, I’d like to know why you suddenly think you need to lecture me about this, Clayton Fisher! Lord in heaven, I think I know we aren’t doing this for our own amusement! If it were up to me, I’d tell them all to their faces what I think of them, but then we’d have to shut down Hostel.”
    Her husband patted the soft June air in a conciliatory way.
    “Yes, yes, Eulalie, settle down now.”
    She hated being told to “settle down,” as any woman would have.
    “Do you think I’m a horse, Clayton? Are you going to tell me to giddyup and go, now?”
    He did privately think that his wife needed to be “reined in” now and then, but he’d sooner kick himself in his own side with spurs than to tell her so. Instead, he did what he was best at—putting a benign interpretation to almost anything. Clayton made a show of shooting his cuffsand looking at his watch. “You’re right, Eulalie, we’d both better giddyup and go! That doorbell’s going to start ringing any minute now.”
    They both, and quite realistically, feared getting shot up or burned out, if the secret of Hostel escaped into the community at large. Social standing wouldn’t help them then. Money wouldn’t save them. Their home, Clayton’s ancestral mansion built before the Civil War, could go up in flames. Even the bank might go down. But if the worst ever did happen, if their “friends” and neighbors found out they were traitors to the precious status quo, the Fishers knew it would be much worse for the black folks in town, because everything always was.

    Clayton and Eulalie descended to greet the fifty or so guests they were expecting for supper. It seemed like a coincidence at first when their backyard filled with only Hostel members and townspeople who didn’t claim an allegiance to either side but only went about their business hoping to be undisturbed by history. People had been invited for six o’clock cocktails, followed by a seven o’clock picnic, but by six-forty-five there wasn’t a known Klan member in