Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (57 page)

“We got the roots,” she said, “but we ain’t through yet. Now we got to go see the head man.”

“Dr. Buzzard?” I asked. I was beginning to suspect I had been duped into taking part in a long and involved expedition. Dr. Buzzard’s grave was in Beaufort, an hour’s drive each way.

“No, not him,” she said. “He done all he’s gonna do. We’re gonna see the
real
head man now, the only one who can put a stop to this thing.” She did not elaborate, and in moments we were riding east toward the beach, open fields and marsh grass spreading out into the darkness on all sides.

“Jim Williams doesn’t seem as worried as you do about Danny Hansford,” I said.

The oncoming headlights glinted off Minerva’s purple lenses. “He is worried,” she said softly, “and he should be. ’Cause
I
know … and
he
know … and
the boy
know … that justice ain’t been done yet.”

She stared ahead, unblinking, and spoke as if in a trance. “Mr. Jim haven’t told me nothin’,” she said. “He didn’t need to. I seen it in his face. I heard it in his voice. When people talks to me, I don’t hear the voice, I see a picture. And when Mr. Jim spoke,
I saw it all: The boy fussed at him that night. Mr. Jim got angry and shot him. He lied to me, and he lied to the court. But I helped him anyway, ’Cause he didn’t mean to kill the boy. I do feel sorry for the boy, but I always takes the side of the living, no matter what they done.”

We crossed a low bridge over the inland waterway onto Oatland Island. After taking several turns, we came to a boat ramp that led down to the edge of a wide creek.

“Do you want me to wait here?” I asked.

“No, you can come too,” she said, “but only if you keep real quiet.”

We left the car and walked down the ramp. The air was still, except for the sound of a small motorboat somewhere out in the middle of the creek. Minerva looked into the darkness and waited. It was the night of the new moon, she said, which was why it was so dark. She said new-moon nights were the best nights to do her kind of work. “Before I left my house tonight,” she said, “I fed the witches. That’s what you got to do when you havin’ trouble with evil spirits. You got to feed the witches before you do anything else.”

“How do you do that?” I asked. “What do witches eat?”

“Witches loves pork meat,” she said. “They loves rice and potatoes. They loves black-eyed peas and cornbread. Lima beans, too, and collard greens and cabbage, all cooked in pork fat. Witches is old folks, most of them. They don’t care none for low-cal. You pile that food on a paper plate, stick a plastic fork in it, and set it down by the side of a tree. And that feeds the witches.”

The motorboat’s engine clicked off. An oar splashed in the water.

“That you, Jasper?” Minerva called.

“Uh-hunh,” a low voice answered. A shadowy form was taking shape twenty yards offshore. It was an old black man in a slouch hat. He was paddling a small wooden boat. Minerva nudged me. “He ain’t the head man,” she whispered. “He’s just takin’ us to him.” Jasper touched his hat as we got in, then
pushed off with the paddle and started up the motor again. As we moved into the blackness, Minerva dipped her handful of roots into the water to clean off the dirt. She broke off a piece and put it in her mouth. The boat rode low in the water. I sat perfectly still, afraid that if I made the slightest movement we might capsize.

A solid wall of trees rose before us on the opposite shore. It was a forbidding black mass without a single light visible. Jasper turned off the engine and paddled until the boat scraped the sand. We all got out. Jasper pulled the boat onto the shore and sat down to wait.

Minerva and I climbed to the top of a low rise. Slowly, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I became aware of dense shrubbery around us and of the ghostly drapery of Spanish moss. We moved deeper into the trees, and I began to make out solid shapes rising from the ground—obelisks, columns, arches. We were in Bonaventure Cemetery. I had come to this place many times since Mary Harty had brought me here on my first day in Savannah, but never after dark. I recalled now what Miss Harty had told me—that late at night if you listened closely you could hear echoes of that long-ago dinner party with the burning house and the guests proposing toasts and throwing their wineglasses against a tree trunk. All I heard tonight was the wind sighing through the trees. Then it occurred to me why I had never come here this late: The cemetery shut its gates at dusk. We were trespassing.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to be here now, Minerva,” I said. “The cemetery’s closed.”

“Can’t do nothin’ about that,” she said. “Dead time don’t change for nobody.”

“But what if they have a night watchman?” I asked.

“I has worked this flower garden many times and never had no trouble,” Minerva said firmly. “The spirits is on our side. They will watch over us.” She shined her flashlight on a piece of paper with a hand-drawn map on it.

“What if they have guard dogs?” I asked.

Minerva looked up from her map. “Now listen,” she said, “if you’re afraid to come with me, you can go back and wait with Jasper. But make up your mind, ’Cause it’s already twenty till midnight.”

In truth, I was beginning to feel the protective force of Minerva and her spirits. So I followed as she set off, map and flashlight in hand, mumbling to herself. Bonaventure at night was a vast and somber place, nothing like the friendly little graveyard in Beaufort where Dr. Buzzard was buried and where boys played basketball on a floodlit court a hundred yards away. Before long, we came upon a somewhat more open terrain with a few scattered trees and modest tombstones in orderly rows. Minerva paced off several rows and turned right. Halfway down the row, she stopped and looked again at her map. Then she turned and shined the light on the ground behind her. “There it is,” she said.

At first I saw nothing. No headstone, no tomb. But when I stepped closer I noticed a small granite tile set into the ground, flush with the sandy soil. The beam of Minerva’s flashlight illuminated the inscription:
DANNY LEWIS HANSFORD MARCH
1, 1960,
MAY
2, 1981.

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s the head man in this thing. He’s the one that’s causin’ all the trouble.”

Deep double tire tracks bracketed Danny Hansford’s marker. Utility trucks had apparently driven back and forth over his grave. There was even a spot of crankcase oil on the gravestone. It made a silent mockery of Danny’s boast that he would get a big tombstone if he died in Mercer House. Minerva knelt in front of the marker and gently wiped away the loose sand.

“Pitiful, ain’t it?” she said. “Now I know why he haven’t let go. He ain’t happy here. He got a nice oak tree and a dogwood overhead, but he ain’t happy.” She dug a small hole next to the grave and slipped a piece of root into it. Then she reached into her shopping bag and took out a half-pint bottle of Wild Turkey. She poured a few drops into the hole, then put the bottle to her lips and drank the rest.

“You can drink all you want to when you’re at the grave of a person who loved to drink,” she said. “You’ll never get drunk, ’Cause the dead will take the fumes away from you. By the time you pull the top off the bottle, they done beat you to it. You can drink for hours. Mr. Jim told me the boy loved Wild Turkey, so I give him a little drink to get him in a better mood. Me, I like to dip snuff. When I die, you can carry me my favorite snuff. Peach or Honeybee. Put it under your lower lip when you sit by my grave.”

Minerva seemed in a better mood herself. She dumped the contents of her shopping bag on the ground and motioned for me to step back and give her room. Then she began to speak in that faraway voice.

“Where they got you now, boy? Has they got you in heaven? If you ain’t in heaven yet, you wanna git there, don’t you? ’Cause, face it, boy, you gonna be dead a
lonnnng
time. So, now listen. The only way you gonna move up is if you
quit playin’ with Mr. Jim!”

Minerva leaned to within a few inches of the gravestone, as if whispering into Danny’s ear. “I can help you, boy. I got connections!
I has influence!
I knows the dead. I will call on them and tell them to lift you up. Who else gonna do that for you? Nobody! Do you hear me, boy?”

She cocked an ear to the grave. “I think I’m hearin’ somethin’,” she said, “but I ain’t sure what it is.” Minerva’s hopeful expression slowly turned into a scowl. “Sounds like laughin’. Dammit, it
is
laughin’. He’s just laughin’ up a storm at me, that’s what he’s doin’.”

Minerva gathered her paraphernalia and stuffed it angrily back into her bag. “Dammit, boy, you ain’t no better than my old man. I swear you won’t git no help from me.”

She rose to her feet and headed down the row of tombstones, lurching and muttering. “You think you had a hard life, boy. Hell, you ain’t got no idea. You never had no bills to pay, no kids to feed, no house to clean. You done had it easy. Well, you can just lay there now. That’ll teach you.”

Minerva charged through the darkness, the beam of her flashlight bouncing ahead of her. We passed the graves of Bonaventure’s two most famous residents, Johnny Mercer and Conrad Aiken—Mercer’s epitaph affirming a hereafter in which angels sing, Aiken’s raising the specter of doubt and of destinations unknown. Danny Hansford would have to chart his own course now. Minerva had washed her hands of him. At least for the time being.

Once we were back in the boat, she lightened up. “I’ll leave him lay there for a while,” she said. “Let him worry he missed his chance to git raised up into heaven. Next time I come he’ll be glad to see me. I’ll carry him some Wild Turkey and some devil’s shoestring, and I’ll give him another chance. Oh, he’ll back off Mr. Jim by and by. Uh-huh. Then I’ll raise him up, and he won’t laugh at me no more. You wait and see. Him and me is gonna be such good friends, he’ll be givin’ me numbers before long so I can play ’em and git me some money!”

Less than a month later, on the morning of January 14, 1990, Jim Williams came downstairs to feed the cat and make himself a cup of tea. After doing that, but before picking up the newspaper from the front stoop, he collapsed and died.

News of Williams’s sudden death at the age of fifty-nine immediately gave rise to speculation that he had been murdered or that he had taken an overdose of drugs. But the coroner announced that there had been no indication of foul play or drug abuse and that Williams appeared to have died of natural causes, most likely a heart attack. After an autopsy, the coroner was more specific: Williams had died of pneumonia. This started another rumor—that he might have died of AIDS. But Williams had shown no signs of being ill; in fact, only a few hours before dying he had attended a party where he had been in good spirits and in apparent good health.

Minerva, of course, had her own idea about what had happened. “It was the boy that done it,” she said. A little-noticed
detail of Williams’s death lent an eerie ring of truth to her pronouncement. Williams had died in his study, in the same room where he had shot Danny Hansford. He had been found lying on the carpet behind the desk in the very spot where he would have fallen eight years earlier, if Danny Hansford had actually fired a gun and the shots had found their mark.

Two days after Williams’s funeral, I paid my respects to his mother and sister at Mercer House. As I was leaving, a horse and carriage came clopping around the square and slowed to a stop in front of the house. From the sidewalk, I could hear the tour guide telling her three passengers that General Hugh Mercer had built the house during the Civil War, that the songwriter Johnny Mercer had grown up in it, and that Jacqueline Onassis had once offered to buy it for $2 million. To this by-now familiar routine, the tour guide added that filmmakers had used the house the previous spring to shoot scenes for the movie
Glory.
But she said nothing about Jim Williams or Danny Hansford or the sensational murder case that had captivated the city for so long. The tourists would leave Savannah in a few hours, enchanted by the elegance of this romantic garden city but none the wiser about the secrets that lay within the innermost glades of its secluded bower.