I couldn’t be sure how much she knew and how much she was trying to wheedle out of me.
“Well, no, we all live up here year round. We’re mostly Prince George County folks. We don’t get much of a weekend crowd.”
“Oh, give me a break, Rosie, we’re a little more organized than that.”
It was like somebody was running through my house opening windows.
“You just won’t admit it for fear you might have to do something about it.”
That made it plain. See, Heath had to know all about the Order. His daddy could be part of it if he chose to because membership is inherited. She had taken Heath to her bed and satisfied him and then she had laid her head on his chest and drawn it all out of him.
She told me right then and there. She’d suspected it for a long time. She’d begun to put pieces of it together.
“Glen is the only homeowner on the lake who isn’t part of the Order. Isn’t he?”
“I don’t know for certain.”
I didn’t want to. I tried very hard not to. It was easy to look around the lake and see sweet little houses and docks and pines and let it go. The truth is I hadn’t known the full extent of it until we moved back up here. Dashnell’s daddy had been part of the Klan. I knew Dashnell had some inherited right to belong. I didn’t know this lake community was an official enclave. I thought Dashnell had brought us back up here to get away from things, to have some peace, to be close to nature. It was months before I realized he’d brought us up here so he could devote the rest of his life to the Order.
“Rosie, they all met at your house the night it happened.”
I was speechless. Heath had told her more about it than even I knew. Lily Pembroke confirmed that it was Dashnell’s hand that aimed the gun. It was Dashnell’s finger that pulled the trigger that shot the man on the lake. It was like listening to the end of the world.
I tried to gather my wits. I tried to think where I could run. I was glued to her eyes, trembling, ashamed, afraid.
“How did Heath know?” Of course there were a hundred ways he could have found out. Heath’s a Lawler and they’re highly regarded among the Order, if no place else on earth.
“We have to
do something
about it, Rosie. We have to
tell
someone.”
I wanted to turn the subject back to her and Heath, but I couldn’t figure a way to do it.
“Lily, if we say a word, we’ll lose everything we have.”
“Neither one of us has a damned thing we value, Rosie. At least I don’t—or I wouldn’t have involved myself with Heath.”
“Let me not say it so nice this time, Lily. They’ll kill us. They have ways. It looks like an accident or a suicide or a person disappears.”
She Went as sallow as her hair. She started crying. I had no earthly comfort to give her. I was in the identical steel jawed trap.
“Rosie … I’m scared too.”
I still couldn’t look at her. In a minute she got up and I heard the porch screen slam. There had been cicadas earlier, but now the air was silent. A boat motor across the lake scratched the stillness. In a few minutes I heard Dashnell’s truck grinding into second as he double-clutched up the driveway.
S
ometimes while I lie there in the dark counting the cabbage roses on the wall over my bed, I feel those horses thundering up the road. I know I smell them. You live in one world, then a phone rings or a newspaper is dropped on your porch floor or horses come thundering out of the night and nothing will ever be the same.
The worst fight Searle and I ever had was about him plowing over where those people are buried at the edge of the pasture. I had to dig post and string the fence wire myself to keep him from going back on his word. (I know my thoughts are random and it displeases me most of all. I can only follow after them and bale them together as best I can.)
“Them bones been dust fifty years,” he says. “Maybe more.”
“They’ll be back,” I says, but I didn’t get my own meaning. Just that way leads on to way, and circles turn, and all like that. I reckon it’s so heavy on my heart this morning because all through last night I listened to the rain and came back over that night Death rode past on those horses and my childhood came to an end. It must have been a clap of thunder in the distance that set those horses running through my mind. I’ve been crying all morning. I’m back then. I’m here and now. I’m suspended between. Old people spook easily. Old people cry.
Rain fell hard in the night, pitching crab apples onto the roof.
The wind knocked my night-blooming cereus over, smashed the pot to bits. Nadine hauled me another pot out of the garage. She asked me what plans I had for Searle’s hammock. She said it would ruin in the garage. I wouldn’t say take it. I’ll offer it to Searle’s great-nephew and his fat wife if they turn up again. Though they might be getting the hint. Rain and the air’s turned to steam and the sky is still purple and the way the crickets are hollering, I’d say there’s more coming. Rain like that always undoes me. Takes me back where I don’t want to go.
Everything was fine, you know, and then the Trouble came and they passed taking Moena with them and then you’d hear the grown-ups whispering about “the Trouble,” and then they was all forgotten, sucked up by the years. But I wouldn’t forget.
You wouldn’t know that fine paved road as a river of mud, but I did. You never heard the wet clay sighing underneath that asphalt or envisioned the pavement cracking into bits, dissolving, the old wheel ruts returning, the electric light posts melting and darkness closing back in. You never saw a wolf in these woods or danced on a canvas stretched over tree stumps near the marsh that they flooded to make the lake so Birmingham would have enough water and power to mushroom into its sassy self.
It’s like his voice swam out over the dry August air and then turned back around towards the yard here and curled itself up in the crab apple tree and waited, waited ten, twenty, thirty, eighty years and then suddenly, last night, Moena came back and found it and hurled it through that window as I lay here. “Nigger gal,” Doctor McKutcheon’s voice split the night behind us, “don’t you go into town tonight.”
Now I’ll be confounded if I can stop crying. I had to hide my face from Nadine while she scooped dirt into that pot. I will be confounded because if Rose of Sharon swoops in here unannounced and catches me like this, she’ll haul me up to the doctor’s. It’s not that I mind the doctor’s. It’s stealing the time from Rose of Sharon. Especially here lately because she has a torment on her soul. I don’t mean Carmen.
She’s under a cloud. I half expected her to tell me about it yester
day when she brought me new sheets. I wouldn’t dare ask. She acted jolly. But her face was near about as gray as it was right after she’d got the news about Carmen. But, no, Rose of Sharon is over Carmen. She’s a strong woman, I’ll say that.
“Nigger gal, don’t you go into town tonight,” clear as spring water, swirling around and round in my bedroom. It comes back to me like that in disconnected pieces of back time before the Trouble. Wee Mother’s bed in the parlor. Wee Mother old and yellow, her hands knotted and rooty, and Mother in the chair beside her day and night. Hattie and Florence were allowed to go up to her and whisper in her ear or stroke her forehead because they were older. I could only peer in from the hall when no one was looking. Her eyes would come right out of her skull at you but she didn’t know you were there. Fifty years later Searle refinished that bed and the chest just before Carmen was born. Rose of Sharon was thrilled to get it for the boy. I was tickled to have it out of my house.
Pieces of it slamming up against each other in my mind like the wind slapping the garage doors back in the night. Pieces, and you shut them out because you know if you don’t they’ll find each other and make it whole and real again and it’ll draw you back there again. Most of life passes and you don’t fiddle with why. But not the night the Trouble came down like the sky collapsing. I run from these thoughts into the kitchen, reach for the radio, play with the dial, but it’s useless. It’s got me. I’m gone back there.
“Nigger gal …”
Doctor McKutcheon’s Model-T Ford had been in front of this house twice that day. Once in the last dark of night when the starlings screamed out of the sunrise behind the woods. They were all down there in the parlor with Wee Mother. I could see them hovering over her. Everybody was crying except Daddy, who kept calling Doctor McKutcheon over into the corner and holding his head close while he asked questions. Mother saw me and shooed me back up to bed. Then it was full sunup. Everybody was kind of giggly with relief at breakfast because it had just been a spell and not the end.
The doctor’s Model-T Ford was there again when we got back
from church. He had checked back by and he stayed to dinner. He fussed at Mother for not getting me piano lessons and he told funny stories and spilled gravy all down the front of his gray seersucker coat. After the cobbler and the boiled custard he drove away. The women had afternoon naps because they’d been up so early with Wee Mother and I ran across the road to Moena’s.
We played “Scratch the Hen” in the yard and Mother came over to sit on the porch with Beauty B. after a while. Mother was halfway peeved because she said it was taking Beauty B. three forevers to finish my school dresses and here Moena looked like she walked off a bandbox, Beauty B. had made her so many new clothes that summer. Beauty B. explained that Moena had to have them because the white Methodist Church was starting a new school for colored girls and school was to start in July. That was so the colored girls could be let out for six weeks in October to pick cotton.
I was already mad about me setting in school on yellow October afternoons and Moena getting to be out in the fields with the butterflies. Rosa Lynn Brown passed in the road on foot sometime in there. Mother spoke, but Rosa Lynn wouldn’t deign to send her dignified hello up onto Beauty B.’s porch. Moena said that was on account of Beauty B. had made Rosa Lynn a fur-lined cape at Christmastime. When Beauty B. went to deliver it Rosa Lynn tried to pretend she had paid Beauty B. in advance. Beauty B. had to send the colored bishop from Yellow County to see Mr. Brown about it.
The bishop, who looked whiter than me, had grown up on the Browns’ place. Years later I would hear rumors that Mr. Brown was the bishop’s father. In any event, he gave the bishop Beauty B.’s two dollars at once. Then he gave his daughter Rosa Lynn what for because he had given her the money to pay Beauty B. and she’d squandered it.
All the same, I eyed Rosa Lynn with silent fascination as she passed that afternoon because I had heard at Sunday school that Rosa Lynn was engaged and I’d never seen an engaged woman before.
Moena and I held secrets and the woods held us as we crept over the moss to the stream. We had saved a gourd full of watermelon
seeds and scattered them in a sunny place on the bank where the roots would have plenty of water except maybe for a couple weeks in August when the creek was almost completely sand. Her granny had taught her about growing truck that way. It was early August that Sunday and the melons were small and green inside, but we found one the size of a coconut and we took it to the swamp oak that grew sideways out over the creek bed and we sat there, the green melon halves in our laps, fingering the least bitter bites out of the centers.
We had no aspirations or designs that afternoon. All we had was the sunlight filtering through the leaves and the silent, slow moving green water below. Could a child of eight lean her sweaty back hard into the bark of a swamp oak to scratch it and smell the sun and the summer grass off her best friend’s arm and say, “This is perfection”? Or is that remembering? If that’s remembrance then why does my heart hear Moena say, “I know”?
There’s a fellow over in Yellow County, an old man who paints pictures of flowers and gardens and whatnot. They have one in the doctor’s office, misty looking, magic pictures. Nadine says he must not see very well because everything looks hazy. Maybe. But I’ll say he’s not looking at the thing he paints. I’ll say he’s looking back at it through time, and he’s trying to find God in it. That’s how it feels to remember that afternoon by the stream.
I have to quit crying.
Rose of Sharon called to say she’d be by. I can wash my own hair, barely, but I like the feel of her fingers on my scalp. She doesn’t normally come two days running. Maybe it’s on account of how I looked to her yesterday. Or whatever it is that’s troubling her. Her washing my hair is how we talk, me and her. It’s how we touch each other.
H
e had been in the Army six weeks when he went to see the doctor about the swelling and the ache in his joints. The doctor gave him aspirin and sent him on a fifteen mile hike with his platoon. It was blistering hot, highly unusual for late November in North Carolina. The aspirin brought his fever down and he figured the sweat was good for him. When he woke that night in the barracks his legs were screaming with pain and he was trembling with the cold.
Blaylock, his sergeant, was a tight assed, light skinned black man who used his high yellow complexion to curry favor from the white officers. Blaylock pasted on a hollow sneer and ordered Hez back to his bunk. Hez pleaded with him. There were pointed daggers drilling and scraping his elbows and knees. Blaylock wasn’t about to bother his white superiors at such an inconvenient hour.
By morning Hez was seeing demons with triangular shaped heads and giant ears and tails. His legs wouldn’t move. He shook with chills. The pain in his chest was so sharp he thought someone had broken it while he slept. They put him on a stretcher and two enlisted men placed it in the open bed of a half-ton truck and drove him seventy miles to the army hospital near Durham.