White Wind Blew Read Online Free Page A

Mountain, Georgia, and in the 1920s, it surged behind its new Imperial Wizard, the dentist Hiram Wesley Evans. Only WASPs could belong. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The Klan hated blacks, Jews, liberals, Catholics, and anyone foreign born. They dug their claws deep into the national debate over Prohibition, and sometimes their opposition to bootleggers and saloons turned violent, a tactic that colored much of their work. They burned churches and crosses, murdered, raped, and castrated, all in the name of keeping America safe. And to the new Klan, there was nothing more un-American than the foreign influence of the Roman Catholics, who, they claimed, held allegiance to the pope and Rome over the United States and its president.
    It was nonsense, and nothing roiled Wolfgang more than such intolerance. Nearly seventy-five years ago, it had been the “Natives,” the Know-Nothing Party, who had caused the election riots in Louisville in 1855 that targeted the Irish Catholics. Rumors of Catholics interfering with the voting process boiled over into Bloody Monday, one of the country’s worst acts of anti-immigrant violence. Homes were vandalized, businesses looted, and tenements burned, including the block-long row of houses known as Quinn’s Row. Bodies were dragged out into the streets and beaten. Entire families were killed in the fires. Wolfgang’s grandfather, his father’s father, had been a member of the Know-Nothings involved in the riots. Wolfgang had spent his lifetime distancing himself from that hatred.
    And now, with the KKK, another force of hatred was trying to force its grimy hands into politics across the south.
    Wolfgang threw the brick out the window. How dare they enter his home. He surveyed the four walls of his cottage. Next to the stone fireplace was a bat, a Louisville Slugger with Babe Ruth’s signature. He often held it while composing in his head, swinging it slowly as he paced his creaking, slanted floor. He hurried across the room—which contained a bed, a couch, a piano, a stack of books from the seminary, and little else—grabbed the baseball bat, and opened the front door.
    His breath was visible in front of him, steaming in long plumes. Like a dragon. That’s what he felt like. Come back, he dared them. Beating the barrel against his palm, Babe Ruth’s signature smeared with blood. He stepped down from his porch, touching his right hand to his forehead, chest, left shoulder, and then right, motioning the sign of the cross.
    “Come on!” he shouted. “Show yourselves.”
    Wind shook the treetops. In the distance, the sanatorium’s rooftop was visible, the bell tower highlighted by the glow of a crescent moon. Up the hill he heard leaves crunching. He gripped the bat taut now in both hands.
    A pig came running out of the shadows. Wolfgang let down his guard and watched it disappear into the trees. Lately, the pigs had been getting loose on a daily basis, and they liked to rummage through the woods. He’d seen one scurry as far as the train tracks at the bottom of the hill. Wolfgang lowered his bat and returned inside. He locked the door behind him and exhaled slowly.
    Beside his bed was an empty glass, stained red from the remnants of the evening’s wine, his stash untouched by nine years of Prohibition. The walls were utterly absent of any decoration except for a clock and the cross, very much like the room he’d had at the abbey at Saint Meinrad as a seminary student. The left side of his bed was currently in disarray. The other side was neat as always, the sheets pulled tight, the covers tucked around the outline of a pillow he was still accustomed to smelling before bed every night. He eyed the closet next to the piano. There was a portrait inside that he badly wanted to take out, but he remained strong to temptation. Instead he lifted the necklace from his shirt and kissed the cross.
    Wolfgang grabbed the bottle of red wine from the kitchen and took a heavy swig. The rest he