Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter

transcended the seething angers of the South. He wanted the white Southern mill worker and small-patch farmer, the sharecropper, the feed-store clerks, the small-town politicos, the damn women (if they could control their goddamn crying!), the MacWhatevers and the Joneses and the Whites and the O’Whomevers; a new Confederacy, if you would, of the same ol’ boys who marched up Peahawk Ridge or across the wide-open ground at Gettysburg behind the fool Pickett or thrashed and perished in the cornfields of bloody Antietam. They could do it, for they had it within them, if they were ably led; they and they alone could bring Thebes down and make the world a better place.
    But he knew this too: he had to start with a document.
    It was all so much palaver without a piece of evidence, a piece of paper, that made it clear as a bell’s last dying dingdong: this is evil. This is wrong. This must be stopped.
    He had to have something. He knew it, and that there was no way around it.
    He thought: I have to get into that store.
    And then he thought: that is insane. It is in a prison, it is carefully guarded, it will not give up its secrets easy, it is a mile away down a dark and windy forest road that I have never traveled and, top it all, I am no man for breaking and entering. I would get caught, and if caught I would be in deep trouble.
    He thought again: I need someone to help me. I need someone to take the risk, to get me a document.
    Then he remembered the old lady whose chicken coop he’d rented. She spoke a gibberish at first, but as he listened more carefully and got used to the rhythms and strangenesses in her words, he had begun to understand her. It was she who told him about the Store. She must understand the legal underpinnings of Thebes County, the original crime that indebted its citizens to work for little or nothing for the benefit of a bossman who kept his expenses in that way to a minimum while raking off the top, whose iron system of rule by violence lined his own pockets.
    She must have a piece of paper. He remembered now, the weathered old face, the fierce eyes, the watchfulness; why, that old mama was the only one in the town whose spirit remained secretly intact, and Sam knew this to be in accordance with Negro ways, where authority frequently devolved on the sagacity of an old woman, who was smart and just and well-tempered by experience.
    Sam squinted in the dark, and saw that it was near 4:00 A.M. If he could get by that behemoth on the dock, he could get to her house by 4:30 and back again by 5:00, and then he’d have it, something upon which to build. It was how a lawyer worked: go for the paper. Get the paper. Get the evidence. If there was any evidence.
    He rose from his length of blanket on the prow of the boat, and carefully put on his shoes. Though it was warmish, he took his coat, which had been his pillow, and threw it on, to blot out the whiteness of his shirt. Rising craftily, he crept down the length of the boat, and stopped for just a second to listen to the easy sawing of old Lazear’s aged lungs as he snoozed away in the cockpit, in some impossible position that no civilized being could find rest in. But Lazear snored as if lung-shot and producing death rattles, each a mighty shudder through bubbles of phlegm, but otherwise unwakeable.
    Sam made the climb to the dock and discovered that the guardian deputy, of course, had grown bored with the passing of the nighttime hours and had departed for whatever recreation he wanted, probably a willing colored gal in a crib somewhere, for all the deputies had the look of men who’re whup-ass on colored in the daylight and cuddle with it in the night.
    Sam climbed the slope from the riverside area to what amounted to the town’s main drag, not really much of either main or drag, just shuttered storefronts behind which, on either side, lay the dogtrot cabins that made up the domiciles of the place before yielding to the all-encompassing piney woods. He