Authors: Lisa Howorth
A skinny splinter of the bogus china had stuck in a cantaloupe on the floor next to the stove. The cantaloupe was there because one of the cats, Ignatius, was weirdly obsessed with them and rolled them off the counter and into corners where he could wedge them up and get at them more privately. She only bought the expensive, out-of-season fruit (which in February tasted more like pumpkin) for Iggy. The gnawed place with the shard oozed onto the heart pine.
Still on her hands and knees, considering crying a little bit, which she knew would help nothing, and then considering a Valium, which would, Mary Byrd had just finished picking up broken pieces and wiping up the juice puddle when she raised her head and saw that Evagreen, the Thorntons’ late-middle-aged but ageless maid—housekeeper, cleaner, whatever you were supposed to call them now; all the labels for black help
seemed either degrading, euphemistic, or just silly—stood in the kitchen doorway. One skinny arm was akimbo, fist on the hip of her shrimp-colored jogging suit, the other holding a stack of tightly and perfectly folded sheets and towels to her velour chest. There was no particular expression on Evagreen’s face.
Sheepishly, kneeling before the woman, violated cantaloupe in one hand and paper towel wads and pieces of plate in the other, Mary Byrd said, “Evagreen, did you know that this Corelle stuff actually does break?”
“Don’t break on
me
,” said Evagreen, moving off. “Anything’ll break, thow it down hard enough.”
Evagreen never called her by name, never called her anything, and—Mary Byrd appreciated this—never called her “ma’am.” She sighed. She was sure Evagreen hadn’t seen her throw the plate, yet the older woman seemed to always have a sixth sense about things, especially if they involved Mary Byrd doing the wrong thing.
She
should work for the damn FBI, or somebody, solving cold cases, Mary Byrd thought. She tried to resist thinking,
What a bitch.
She knew Evagreen disapproved of her and she sort of understood why. Whiteness was only a small part of it—that would be reason enough in Mississippi—but actually it had more to do with Mary Byrd not being white
enough,
or the right kind of white person. As far as she knew, Evagreen didn’t do anybody else that way. Mary Byrd wasn’t super-lazy; she’d worked most of her adult life. After Charles had gotten his gallery business going and they could afford for her not to work, she’d tried to be an efficient housewife, making beds, loading and unloading the dishwasher, getting up at the crack and making school lunches and breakfast (cold cereal and orange juice, but still), chauffeuring children, trying to keep up with things that needed keeping up with in their vast, overgrown yard, blah blah blah, holding down the fort when Charles was often out of town, and entertaining his photographers and clients when he wasn’t. Before Evagreen came to work on Thursdays, Mary Byrd rushed around straightening, getting all the cat turds that hadn’t been scarfed up by the dogs out of the litter box, emptying the trash of earwaxed Q-tips and Tampax applicators, getting the pubes off the commode rim, scraping dried toothpaste blobs out of the sink. One of not very many white Democrats in town, she didn’t do ladies’ lunches, didn’t belong to the country club or play tennis or golf on its scrubby, eroded golf course, and her children went to the public schools. For Martin Luther King Day she and Charles went to the long, boisterous services at Second Baptist, where, as far as Mary Byrd could see, they all celebrated not how they were all the same, all in this crazy world together, but how insuperably
different
they all still were
.
Still, Evagreen would cut her no slack. In fact, Mary Byrd felt that she might gain some ground with Evagreen by doing more of those white lady things; that their impasse had more to do with breeding and outsiderness, and with Mary Byrd’s willingness to accept, if not embrace, guilt. Evagreen could sniff this coming off her and took advantage of it. To Mary Byrd, Evagreen was like one of the scary old bully nuns at St. Bernard’s back in Richmond, except that there it had been okay to hate Sister Pascal because she was white, and because, by example, she had made it clear that hating was okay, like it was okay to scorn you if you had divorced parents. There’d been no pleasing her, and there was no pleasing Evagreen, except when you screwed up. Maybe it was nothing more than what used to be called, before psychobabble, and before everything had to be about race, simply a
personality conflict
.
Mary Byrd wondered if she needed to tell Evagreen now about this trip to Richmond she was apparently going to have to make and decided no, don’t stir that pot yet; she could get back from Virginia before next Wednesday and could get the house in order before Evagreen came again. But Charles and the children, she’d need to tell them today. She should call her mother, too. But not now. She wasn’t ready.
To escape her personal Quasimodo and to think, Mary Byrd wandered out of the house in a fog, onto the front porch where she knew a world of ugly winter yard detritus waited for her to deal with it. She should get busy doing something. Slimy yellow rags of elephant ear lay around the porch’s edge, punctuated by shriveled caladiums. Pots of impatiens looked like the wet, wilted crap at the bottom of a salad bowl and the lady ferns, so emerald and luxuriant in July, had all frozen and were crispy and brown as toast. It all should have been cut back and raked out of the beds before Christmas, weeks and weeks earlier. The red honeysuckle, morning glories, and clematis vines she encouraged to grow up the white porch posts of the old house still clung there, bare and tangled—so gorgeously frothy and fragrant all summer and at the first frost good for nothing. Thank you, Jesus, for the Lady Banks rose and Jackson vine and Carolina jessamine which kept their verdant, skinny good looks all winter. Vines were her favorite plants; she gave them carte blanche in her yard. Even wisteria and Virginia creeper she egged on, although she knew they were hell on paint and woodwork and pissed Charles off. It was so, so worth it to have the wisteria’s grape-scented purple haze in spring and the rusty red creeper that glowed like fire in the fall with the late afternoon sun. She liked to think that that’s how her curly black hair looked, backlit, when she put some henna in it. Ha. More like a clown wig. The red honeysuckle would have to be moved, she noticed. It was competing with the clematis and she couldn’t do without the sweet waft of that and its delicate white laciness in the worst part of summer. Clematis and crape myrtle and a few weedy things like false dragonhead were the only flowers with the balls to stand up to the relentless Mississippi late summers. If not for the small relief of those tough blooms she thought she might have blown her brains out one of those dusty Septembers. Not really, but the summers were so brutal, and the heat gave her bad headaches. It was no wonder all the horrible civil rights crimes had taken place in summer. It brought out the craziness, and the worst in people.
The frat boys were still thrashing in their tub, warming up for their Thursday-night throw-down. Thursday was the biggest party night of the week and when their weekend began. Classrooms were empty on Fridays; they all used to go home to Meridian or Jackson or wherever on weekends if there wasn’t a game, but now there were so many bars and bands coming through town the students stayed around. It sounded like the boys were rapping along to a recent Snoop Doggy Dogg song. She didn’t know the name of the song, only that Eliza, eleven going on sixteen, played it a lot, and it included the n-word loud and clear. She and Eliza had fought about it, but she had given up when Eliza had said, “But Mom, it’s okay because he’s a black guy. If
he
doesn’t care, why do you?” And Snoop’s mama and daddy, Eliza enjoyed telling her, were from Mississippi, too. What could you do? It had all gotten so confusing, southern white kids totally into rap and affectionately calling each other “niggaz,” black kids doing the same, like it was now okay. But it was still not okay with Charles and Mary Byrd. Maybe they couldn’t keep their children from hearing it, but they better not be singing or saying it; it marked you as white trash if nothing else.
By midnight, when the bars let out, the frat boys would be back in the tub again, the music with the n-word and worse broadcast across the neighborhood, punctuated by rebel yells—“WOOooo!”— the broke-dick war cry of the proudly defeated. Mary Byrd didn’t really mind them—Charles and their friend Mann had been Greeks at Emory and Washington and Lee, after all. They added life to the neighborhood and their parents’ dollars to the town. They were sweet and mannerly when you asked them to please get their beer cans picked up. They grew up to be all kinds of successful people —famous writers, doctors, and lawyers, a guy who invented a landmine detector, another founded that Netscape thing, a hotshot music producer, a guitarist in that new group Wilco—so somebody was learning something out there. If they just wouldn’t drive around drunk, killing themselves. Their poor parents couldn’t possibly have a clue about how close to the edge their kids were or they wouldn’t be letting them come up here with practically new driver’s licenses and giant cars that they didn’t need in the small town. A skid away from death every weekend. Their precious boys.
Mary Byrd inhaled deeply to see if she could catch a scent in the chilly, wet air, and she could: the green vegetal smell of rotting stems and leaves. If this winter storm they were talking about was bad enough, she’d even lose the Jackson vine and Lady Banks, and the brittle azaleas. Maybe the ones that framed the house should be covered. She could scare up Teever, her yard man, and, she thought, friend, to help her, but he hadn’t come around for a week or so; she hoped he wasn’t in jail. Maybe she should go out to the trailers and see if she could find that nice Mexican guy, the one with the silver teeth, to help her. She liked that there were Hispanic guys around now; it made the town seem more in step with the rest of the country. They were work monsters, and giving them work made her feel like she was honoring her immigrant grandparents, or something like that. And maybe soon there’d be a decent taco place with those delicious Mexican Cokes. But it always miffed Teever when she had them do the jobs that he considered his.
Mary Byrd’s mind went unwillingly back to the phone calls from the detective—what
was
his odd name?—and the reporter. She hated them both. Fyce—it sounded slightly familiar, but maybe only because it was such an
unfortunate
name, as her mother-in-law said about anything unappealing. Just because she couldn’t find anything new to write about she starts dredging up people’s private stories, things best forgotten or not spoken of, even if unsolved. It had been too long! It was too over! Wasn’t there a statute of limitations or something? Mary Byrd could understand how the reporter couldn’t resist the story. A suspect to whom nothing would stick. Neighborhood secrets. No one, particularly the Richmond police, had been able to figure it out. There hadn’t been organized searches or milk cartons or Amber alerts or DNA in those days. It had been long before stories of missing and murdered children appeared practically every week in morning papers and on local TV news, and long before the whistle had finally been blown on predatory priests and the cardinals and popes who protected them. Long before the ghoulish fascination with unsolved crime and mysteries and cold case files meant they were featured every night on TV shows. Then, it was unheard of—a front-page story in the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
with a banner above the regular headline:
police hunt knife slayer of 9-year-old boy
.
Kids didn’t disappear and weren’t killed then. They weren’t sex objects. They didn’t get left to broil in parked cars and day care vans; there wasn’t such a thing as
day care
. Newborns weren’t found in Dumpsters. Dumpsters didn’t even exist. Maybe then they were still bothering to put them in shallow graves like the Lindbergh baby. Or was it that the world just hadn’t known before CNN or whatever that those things were going on? No, it was a simpler, better time, wasn’t it? So even though the sixties had been a decade of death—the horror of assassinations, freedom riders buried in levees, the masses of men in Vietnam—when had the times turned on children? It had been a very big, very terrible thing that had befallen all of Richmond. And now Mary Byrd and her family would revisit it, especially if the reporter went with it, and who knew how long it would go on and what would come of it. As if even now, when she did have to think about it, was reminded of it, her part in it wasn’t unlike the crick in her shoulder, that small but naggy pain in her left wing-bone—or whatever those bones were that would be where wings would be attached if she were an angel, which she surely wasn’t—that little spot that always seemed to ache. A pinched nerve that stayed pinched.
And this total stranger would write a book or a TV script about it? Then she and her mother and brothers would be left to patch themselves up again and Fyce would walk off with a wad. She didn’t want her mother or brothers or Eliza or William or even Charles to be touched by any of it. What if Tuttle wasn’t in custody, and he saw Fyce’s story, and came after her or her children, or her brothers? Was that just crazy, or possible? But she knew there wasn’t going to be a choice. She’d go to Richmond and do what she had to do: look at whatever awful things they had to show, and hear whatever awful things they had to tell. But it was one thing to have to talk to police and another to talk to a reporter. She was not
required
to
talk to Fyce. She thought about how good it would feel to punch her in the face, being sure not to tuck her thumb in her fist, the way Ernest had shown her. She was at least glad not to still be living in Virginia in the middle of things. Good
could
come of it, Mary Byrd’s reasonable self knew, but
would
it? The case might finally be solved and who? Ned Tuttle? finally put away. She could stop being afraid of Tuttle still being out there somewhere. But she felt sure that like so many things in life, there had been too much time and too much bumbling for this meeting to come to anything.