I shook my head no.
“You ought to watch historical events like that, Sister, it’s educational. Anyway, I saw that colored girl, and I went out and bought one of her books, and damned if I didn’t like it. She was a country girl, grew up poor, like me. A lot like me. I didn’t know anybody had written any books on that. She understood, and conveyed, don’t you know, what it was really like. You think you could pour me a little more coffee, Baby Sister?”
I got up and poured him some coffee. I hadn’t ever heard so many words from him directed at me in my entire life. It was tempting to leave it at that, to not push him. After all, this might be the beginning of some kind of understanding between us. But I had to know.
“But Dad,” I said, “what about Forrest Miller, and the Klan here in Port Mullet? And do you know anything about Elijah Wilson’s death?”
“You really are a Yankee, aren’t you?” he said. “You can’t let a conversation make its way where it’s going by itself. You have to force things, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess I do,” I said, but not defiantly. Just telling him, yeah, that’s who I am, not because it’s what you don’t want me to be, but just because it’s who I happen to be.
“Well, then, now that we got that settled,” he said. “Forrest Miller had an upbringing about like mine. Maybe some better, but not a hell of a lot. But he moved to Port Mullet at the right time, took some pretty good business risks, and that’s all there is to it. He’s been pretending to be a gentleman farmer with a pedigree so long that he probably believes that’s what he was born. But hell, there’s a few old-timers who remember when he didn’t have a pot to piss in, nor a window to throw it out of.
“Now, I’m getting there,” he said. I thought I had been hiding my impatience better than that. “Don’t hurry me. He’s been involved with the Klan around here just about since he came to town. Like I said, I didn’t have much to do with those boys, but I never saw any reason to interfere, either. Wouldn’t do me or anybody else any good. I’d just disappear one night, and there’d be no one to take care of your momma, or you children.
“They’ve been involved in their escapades over the years, but I did my best not to hear the details. It’s not like they made a practice of killing people. Most of what it amounted to was parties where they congratulated themselves for being white. Like their skin color was a reward from God for being so good, or something.
“I know Forrest was concerned about the way his older girl was tramping around. It didn’t look right in the community. If a man can’t control his womenfolk, he loses all respect. Nothing nastier than a girl from a good family turned bad. And that colored boy should’ve known better than to mess with Forrest Miller’s girl. But that doesn’t mean they should’ve done what they did to him. A good many of the men of Port Mullet were in on it. They got together, and tied him to a tree. Then they shot him all at one time, so they could all share in the responsibility. I always figured that was Forrest’s doings. It was his daughter. If he wanted it done, he should have done it himself, was my way of thinking. But some men, to hear them talk, you would think it was a great honor bestowed on them, to get to take a shot.”
“How many is ‘a good many of the men in town’?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “maybe that’s an exaggeration. But it was a group of them who were important, who ran the place. They didn’t talk to just everyone about it, but me, being the coach, they thought I was a proper one to be bragging to. And I’m not proud to say that I didn’t set them straight about that.”
“Why didn’t the coroner notice the bullet holes at the autopsy?”
“He was most likely with them when they shot.”
“Oh.” I should have figured that out already.
“I’d rather not think much more about it,” he said. “Every which way I turned for a week or so, there was someone wanting to show me the goddamned pictures.”
I tried to pin Daddy down, to get him to be more specific. Find out exactly who said what to him, and exactly what the photographs looked like. He was evasive. It was a long time ago, he kept saying. Maybe he was telling the truth the best he knew how. It was a long time ago, and for him to keep on living with these people, maybe he had had to forget. He had to go, he said. He stood up, leaving his dirty dishes at the table, on his way to get things ready for the Big Game Cookout that always kicked off the Tashimee Fiesta.
I had just finished changing back into my more customary attire when Johnny dropped by. I opened the kitchen door, and he was standing there with a big newspaper-wrapped package tucked under his arm. There was a pungent, smokey smell I recognized but could not place.
“Hi there, Laurie Marie. My father sent me by with a mess of smoked mullet to show his appreciation for your mother’s fig preserves.” He looked for all the world like a good old boy dropping by on one of those friendly errands that make up the texture of life in a town like this. A town where a large group of men may get together one night and murder a man, then brag about it and show the pictures around town.
“Cut the crap, Johnny, and put that down on the counter. You’re going to draw flies carrying whatever that is around. I know you really came here to talk to me. What the fuck about?”
“It’s nice to see you, too, Laurie,” he said evenly. “I was worried about you, you know. Why don’t you invite me in and we can sit down and chat about current events?”
I didn’t want to stay in the house. All those little connecting rooms, and twisting hallways. Someone could approach and you wouldn’t know it until the last minute, and then you were left wondering what it was they had heard. Besides, I didn’t even trust the house itself anymore. Nothing was the way I remembered it. Everything had been much worse than I had suspected. I’d been so concerned with my own freedom, my own obsession with breaking away, that I’d been willfully ignorant of what was going on around me. I’d never wanted to find out that there might be responsibilities here for me, things I should do.
I led Johnny out back, and we sat down in the old white garden swing under the oak tree. It creaked as we swung. This had to be an afternoon in somebody else’s life. Like, next maybe some lady in a flowered dress and a picture hat was going to step through the back door and offer us lemonade.
I’d forgotten to take Johnny’s package, and he had carried it out with him. He finally put it down next to him on the swing. We just sat there and swung for awhile. Johnny absentmindedly opened the package next to him. He started breaking off little pieces of mullet and eating them.
At first I thought the oily smell was going to make me sick. After a while, though, it smelled appealing, comfortably familiar. Something I’d liked once, and forgotten completely. Next time Johnny picked up a piece, I leaned over and took it right out of his fingers.
It was rich and earthy and smokey. Various people in the city had insisted that I try smoked whitefish. I did, a few times, and each time I hated it. But this reminded me of something. I knew that I’d had it before. Then I remembered. As a kid, one afternoon, Daddy had taken me—just me, and not my brothers—on a trip out into the country. We went down a shaded country road, to an old unpainted wood house with a big front porch. Skinny dogs came out from under the steps and barked at our approach. An old lady came out of the house and greeted Daddy. She gave me a glass of iced tea, and my daddy a glass of buttermilk. I sat on the porch, drinking my tea. Daddy and the old lady went out back to the smoke shed. They came back with big pieces of smoked mullet. She wrapped them up in newspaper for us, except for one piece Daddy and I ate in the car on the way home, licking our fingers clean. “Now let this be a lesson to you, Sister,” Daddy had said. “Good eating like this is worth the trouble.”
Johnny said, “I expected to hear from you, Laurie. When you didn’t call, I was worried about you.”
“You know what, Johnny? I like Emma. She seems like a hell of a woman.”
Johnny smiled. “Yeah, Emma’s good. Too good for me. She knows she’s not you, and that I’m such a damned stupid fool that I’m never going to forgive her for that.”
“Johnny, did you sell out to get your job?”
“Hell, yes. What do you think? They go around giving away Chief of Police to just anybody? Happy now that’s clear?” His voice was cold and clipped.
“Did you know that Forrest Miller and his Klan friends killed Elijah Wilson? Are you protecting them?”
He sat there a moment, chewing on the inside of his cheek.
“Shit, Laurie, are you sure? Can you prove it?”
“Yes to the first. Not yet to the second.”
He chewed a little more. “Hell no. I didn’t know that. I would have told you already if I did. Now listen. George White ran for mayor. He’s an old buddy of my daddy’s. It was pretty clear that if he got elected, I was going to be Chief. Well, what’s wrong with that? I’m a damned good chief. Then Forrest Miller, for reasons of his own, got behind George. So what? Two guys running for mayor, the other one was a real jerk. Should I have supported the guy who wouldn’t give me the job? I tell you now and I mean it, if I had any evidence of Forrest Miller committing a serious crime, I’d arrest him. I might have let his parking violations go in the past, but since the night you got in trouble, that’s all changed. Everyone knows there are skeletons in his closet, but he’s been awful good at hiding his tracks.”
“Yeah, well, if I can get proof, what would you say to that?”
“I’d say, let’s lock him up and throw away the key.”
“Even though he’s in tight with the mayor, your boss?”
“I’m not going to try to make you believe in me, Laurie. Either you do or you don’t.”
I didn’t answer.
“What do you know, Laurie? If I’m going to help you here, you have to tell me what you know.”
I started talking. Not because I thought he could help anymore. I could see for myself that we had no evidence. But because I needed to say it—Forrest Miller had incited a brutal murder. And the men involved hadn’t even seen it as that, and had bragged about it around town. But as the years went by and the town grew from an isolated little village to the commercial sprawl it was now, they had learned to keep their mouths shut. By now, some of them were surely dead, some had moved away, and none of the rest of them had any motive to tell the truth. Sitting there in that swing, I felt that trusting Johnny was the right thing to do. I’d have preferred to guess wrong about him than to go on doubting him.
Johnny’s tanned, lined face grew paler as I talked. I believed that he was truly shocked. After awhile he said that what really got him was there was practically no chance of finding any admissible evidence after so many years. “It’s a tragedy and a crying shame, Laurie, but it’s also what’s going to keep you safe. Forrest and them know you can’t prove anything, they’re not going to bother you. For extra insurance, I’ll go pay another little call on Forrest. Make it perfectly clear that I’m going to be keeping an eye on you from here on out, and, if anything should happen to you, I’ll be mighty interested in it. He’ll get the picture.”
No, I thought, I will. The one thing I didn’t tell Johnny was that Daddy’s mention of the photographs had reminded me of something Etta Mae had said to me. I had a secret plan. There was one more place I planned to look before I gave up on getting solid evidence.
After a while, Johnny said, “Laurie, there’s something important you should know. I never told you, and I should have. You and I know each other like no one else will ever know us. I shouldn’t go messing with that by keeping things from you.”
I said, “I don’t know what in the hell you’re trying to say.”
He ignored me and went on. “You know that something can happen when you are a child, something important, and you just completely forget about it, until all of a sudden it just comes flooding back to you?”
“Johnny, please. I’m just not ready for your repressed memories right now. I’ll give you the phone number of the therapist of one of my ex-lovers. She’s been on Oprah, so she must be good. But I don’t want to hear that your mother and the other ladies of the Eastern Star forced you to commit unnatural acts in the Masonic Lodge.”
Johnny didn’t laugh.
I sighed. “Okay, Johnny, go ahead.”
“When I was a little boy…”
“I knew you were going to start like that.”
“Don’t interrupt. When I was a little boy, I came home early from Vacation Bible School one day. I got sick, and Pastor Green brought me home. He dropped me off by the front gate, told me to give my mother his regards. I went in the kitchen, and your father and my mother were drinking coffee.”
“And...” I prompted.
“And nothing. Your father finished his coffee and left. His car had been parked around back. That’s why I didn’t see it.”
“What were they wearing?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. Probably my mother was wearing a housedress and your father was wearing grey trousers and a starched white shirt and a tie. That’s what people generally wore back then, far as I can recollect.”
“So? What’s your point?”
“Come on, Laurie Marie. Why on earth would your father talk to my mother—to any woman—if they weren’t having an affair?”
I ran my tongue over my teeth, started to argue with him. But he was right, I knew it.
“My daddy and your momma? Good Lord, Johnny!” Even as I said it, I wondered what had got into me. I couldn’t remember ever using that expression before in my life. Horrified, I wondered if this was the corollary to another discovery I had made. I saw my mother everyday in the bathroom mirror. In the softening under my chin. In the lines around my eyes. Shit. And now I had started talking like her. I added, “And hell, they might as well fuck as drink coffee alone together in the house, because no one would ever believe that was what they were doing,”
“That’s right,” Johnny agreed.
We were silent for a moment. To break free from my father, it had been absolutely imperative that I sleep around like crazy, every time I got a chance. But when I did that, who was I imitating? Shit. I hate all this self-knowledge stuff. Being a self-absorbed teenage ninny had been much less painful.
Then something occurred to me, and I jumped right out of the swing, startling Johnny. My leap set the swing in furious motion, and it banged into my leg. “Ouch! Oh no! Maybe you and me... Maybe we’re...”
Johnny grabbed my arm, pulled me back down on the seat. “No, no, don’t worry about that. I thought about that, too. Back when we were married, and we were having one of our major battle scenes, and all of a sudden, I remembered. I remembered them sitting there at the kitchen table, how shocked they looked when I walked in the door. I worried about it for a long time. I still wanted you, damn it, even though I was afraid you might be my half-sister. And I hated you for turning me into that. A depraved person, a pervert. I hated you then for everything you did to me, all the crazy things we did together. All the guys, my friends, they were still going to watch high school football games every Friday night, just like they hadn’t ever graduated. And spending their weekends fishing, and talking about girls. Jesus Christ! You had me doing mushrooms and hallucinating, and sleeping with you and another girl at the same time!”
“That’s not fair,” I interrupted. “We didn’t do mushrooms and sleep with Marla the same night!”
“That’s not what I meant!” he spat at me. Then he calmed down, and took my hand. “I didn’t mean to get into all this. What I meant to say is, your brother Seth, when he started dating Jody Howard, your daddy took him aside and told him she was his half-sister, and that was that. Seth lost interest in Jody right then and there. Your father wouldn’t have let us get married if there was any chance that we’re, you know, related.”
“I can’t picture my daddy telling me that,” I said, doubtful.
“No. But he would have taken me on a fishing trip or something, and he would have told me.”
“How do you know about Seth and Jody?”
“Seth told me.”
Seth didn’t tell me, I added to myself silently. I sat back down in the swing. The breeze moved the small oval leaves of the live oak tree, shifting the lacy patterns of light and shadow on the grass. We pushed our feet against the ground in unison every time the swing went forward. I knew that he was right. That was the worst of it. If Johnny had been my half-brother, my father would have told Johnny, but not me. The next worst thing was that Jody Howard was my half-sister. That simpering, empty-headed, homecoming queen. Bitter jealousy rose up in me. Did my—our—father prefer her? Did he wish I was more like Jody?
“Let’s go swimming,” I said. I pulled off my shirt and jeans. I had on a red satiny bra and panties that were less revealing than my actual bathing suit, so I didn’t see why not.
“I’ve got to get back to work right now, Laurie Marie. Ever since you’ve been in town, it’s been hell on my reputation as a steady worker.”
“Okay, then. See you later. I’m going for a swim,” I said. I turned my back on him, walked the few steps to the pool, and stood near the deep end, dipping the toes of one foot in the water. I knew he couldn’t resist.
I was looking down, watching his shadow approach me on the white concrete. He thought he was sneaking up on me. I edged right up, balancing on the edge, the lip of the pool cutting into the soft skin in my arches. One push from Johnny and I’d be in deep water.
I waited until I could hear his breathing, and right as his arms reached out to push me, I turned from the waist, wrapped my arms around him, locked them together tightly. We fell with a satisfying splash into the clear blue water. Johnny’s nice starched uniform and all.
He was startled, and he let loose of me right away. I pushed with my feet against his chest, and shot away from him across the length of the pool. I’m not in great shape anymore, and my lungs were aching for air when I reached the shallow end and broke the surface. My wet hair dripped on my shoulders, and my skin felt cool in the air.