“My daddy?”
“Grandfather.
My daddy.
Up in Alabama when we had a place. When he worked his own fields and Mama kept a tight little house and I played free in the woods.”
“Beauty never talked about Alabama, except to say y’all was run out. Was it something Grandfather did?”
Moena smiled wistfully. “Hellfire would be a birthday candle next to Alabama. It wasn’t nothing your grandfather did.”
She told him, haltingly with tears. She spoke of a breathing, shadowed world out of which she had come. Her mask of wood, her iron facade, fell away. She told him the beauty of it. She talked about low mossy places where ferns grew waist high and the wind was like a choir in the trees overhead. As she spoke, she breathed clover and jumped in new hay and shared secrets with a girl her age from across the road. She told how she would lie on her feather bed in the loft and listen while Beauty B. and Grandfather, still young, still hopeful, still believers, rutted happily with warm rain singing outside and the dream of a son, a little brother, filling the darkness with sensation. She made him understand Grandfather when he was tall with a young heart. She made him know that Beauty B. had once been full and fleshy and happily of this earth.
Then she took him through that night when a hundred houses burned and a thousand black people gathered what they could carry and ran away. She made him understand trees quaking with fear and hope dying as she clung to her place on the back of the wagon. She put her long, cold fingers on his shoulders and bade him tremble hidden under a blanket as she had while the white men pulled Beauty B. down off the wagon and dragged her into the
woods screaming. She forced him to stand as she had the next morning where Grandfather lay unconscious with both arms broken. She took him into the woods where Beauty B. was huddled, her hands drawn over her stomach to keep her insides from falling out. She made Hez wait with her, screaming for help by the side of the road as frightened friends and cousins passed too terrified to stop. For three days and nights they hid in tall grass before Beauty B. could stand up. Somehow the two of them got Grandfather, still unconscious, onto the wagon. Then they made torturous, slow progress in the wagon on the wet and rutted road for more than a month until they reached the turpentine woods of South Carolina.
Moena had finally revealed the secret. At last he understood what had turned Grandfather to stone and driven Beauty B. deep into that madness she had mixed with the remnants of her religion.
“It means a lot to know these things,” he said.
But the truck had arrived to take her to the station. His eyes searched hers a moment. Her mask of wood was back.
T
here was one man at my house that Saturday night who didn’t go on up to Jake’s with the rest of them. Glen was twenty years younger than the others. He’s a nice looking man, tall and thin with a long face, deep green eyes and thick dark hair, probably in his early thirties. He has a four o’clock shadow and a broad, quick grin that comes and goes. He fidgets with his watchband even when the rest of him is as still as a tombstone. His voice is sonorous and deep, his manner polite; but there’s a quiet enervation. You don’t feel like you’re getting the whole story with Glen. He slipped home early, disappearing down the three backyards and porches that separate his house from ours. It isn’t that Glen doesn’t fit in. It’s more like he doesn’t want to.
Glen Pembroke and his wife Lily moved up here about eight months ago with their two kids. I had to invite them to Marjean’s birthday party. You don’t invite one up here without inviting all. Lily didn’t come. He said they couldn’t find a sitter. But she called down here to talk to him twice and it was plain from the way he flushed and whispered into the phone that they were deep in troubles of their own.
Glen plays the outsider. He holds himself apart from the rest. He isn’t a native of Prince George County. He can get away with that. At least for a while. Eventually they’ll catch up with him and force
him to declare allegiance. If he refuses, they’ll run him off. I gave him credit that night. He managed to pry himself loose from that bunch without offending a single one of them. That’s hard to do.
His wife, Lily, is an altogether different story. She’s younger than him, bleached white hair, frosted lips and a pound heavier than those two-piece bathing suits she wears to sun on their dock in the afternoons. She’s a beauty, too, but it doesn’t sit easy with her. She keeps astrology books around and she’s forever worrying Marjean to tell her fortune. Marjean claims to read tarot. I have nothing against her except that she talks too much and thinks too little beforehand.
She turns up on my porch around three-thirty most afternoons, a plastic glass of wine in her hand, a flimsy robe over one of her thousand two-piece bathing suits. She brags about what they paid for the house and her Neiman-Marcus furniture. She talks about Glen too. He’s a whiz bang with computers, has a very impressive job at a big company just this side of Birmingham. Their house is twice the size of any other up here at the lake and the only one with marble bathrooms. She says the house is their last chance, as if any house on this earth could fix what’s wrong between two people. Of course Dashnell and I got here under similar delusions, so I don’t have too much to say about that.
Lily sat here one afternoon sipping wine and told four of us ladies all about Glen’s carrying on with a secretary at his office like she was talking about homemade ice cream. She went into such detail that Marjean spoke up and asked how she could know so much without being there with them. Lily said it was because Glen felt so guilty about it that she could draw it all out of him in bed. The house, the beautiful lake house, was his way of making it up to her. They couldn’t really afford it. He had borrowed half the down payment from his daddy. I never quite know how to take what Lily says. I have an instinct that she makes things up. Or turns them completely around.
The worst is when Lily catches me home alone. I will go to my grave puzzling over it, but I attract people like her. They trust me. Lily spares no detail of her misery. She relives every mild flirtation
she ever experienced: a five-minute conversation with a gas station attendant in Galveston, Texas; a young Lutheran minister who kissed her at a christening when Glen left the room. When she gets near the bottom of that big long plastic glass of wine, she’ll tell me how it was last night with her and him, exactly how it was until I’m beet red and asking her to please change the subject. It’s like that poor child is absolutely starved for attention.
The peculiar thing about Lily is, if you can get her off soap operas and her hand embroidered silk sheets, that girl has a brain. She has an awareness of things that catches me off guard. For all her loose and foolish talk, Lily Pembroke is a college educated English major. She reads the newspaper front to back every morning. She has strong opinions about all kinds of things of which I’ve barely even heard. She can make me tired. But she can also make me think. I mean, she’s read books about the Central Intelligence Agency and the American racial problem in economic terms and all like that. She’s too smart for her husband, Glen, but not quite smart enough to figure out a life without him.
She was up at the house the day the sheriff came pretending to investigate that murder. He had to make some kind of an official display of a phony investigation. Dashnell and Lily and I were sitting at the picnic table on the porch. The sheriff explained he was investigating the dead black they found in a boat on the lake. Wanted to know did we know anything? That was a solid week after it happened. The sheriff hadn’t exactly rushed up here to gather evidence.
All I could have sworn on the Bible to know was the dead man’s name was George and he was from over in Yellow County. Those two things had become well known, so I saw no need in speaking. Dashnell claimed not to know anything. He give the sheriff a beer. The sheriff put his report book on the picnic table and begun asking Dashnell about his new boat. As usual Lily was about half dressed in one of her swimsuit and robe outfits. That sheriff wasted no time sliding in beside Lily and commenting on her perfume. I could see how that irritated Lily, but I didn’t see her making any moves to
cover herself either. She backed a little away from the sheriff and then spoke up real quick.
“Y’all don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to find out who killed that poor black man.”
“Accident,” the sheriff says, turning the conversation back to Dashnell’s boat.
“You really think the man was shot in the back of the head by accident?”
“It happens, sugar.” That was Dashnell.
“To a black man in Prince George County?” She rolled her eyes. That kind of provocative talk was purely for the want of sense.
“Did you see what happened?” the sheriff asked Lily, none too amused by her conversation.
“No, I didn’t.” She sounded tense and maybe a little bit afraid.
“All right, then.”
I’ll say this for Lily. I don’t think she knew Dashnell was in on it. I don’t think she had any idea I could have told her exactly what happened. She was foolish and loose tongued and shameless, but she meant no harm. It was as obvious to her as it was to anyone else that a black man found shot in the back of the head in a boat in Prince George must have been done in by some locals who didn’t want him there, who wanted to send a message to all blacks everywhere to keep out. What wasn’t obvious and should have been was that it’s not a thing to discuss out loud. When the sheriff snapped, “All right, then,” at her, she hushed. Directly he and Dashnell went down to look at Dashnell’s boat.
“How can he say it was an accident?” she asked, as soon as they were out of earshot.
I still thought then, I still believed, that I had to stand with Dashnell and the other men and their women. I honestly believed whatever pale good the truth might do, it would hurt more people than it would help. Besides, I had the dull comfort of having tried to warn him away. I had the factual relief of not having actually heard anyone plan the specifics or carry out the deed. Except for that ping in the dark I heard when I was sitting on my porch after the women left that night. What facts could I give and to whom?
“Lily, you’re lucky you’re a woman. If a man talked to the sheriff that way, he’d lock him up and swallow the key.”
Lily was an Alabama girl. She knew better than to disrespect the law.
“Times have changed,” she says. “Doesn’t that sheriff know he can’t sweep a thing like this under the rug anymore?”
“Not here, they haven’t,” I said a little too adamantly.
“You go along with it,” she accused.
“Didn’t say
that,”
I snapped from someplace outside myself.
“Well, I didn’t hear
you
joining in when I asked the sheriff about it.” She was genuinely offended. “Look. Either I read you wrong, or you think it’s just as sick as I do.” I didn’t know what to say. The truth would hang us both.
“I think a lot of you,” she offered.
“I think a lot of you too, Lily.”
“No, you don’t. You think I’m another stupid blond tart whose peroxide has seeped down into her brain.”
“That’s not true!”
“Cool your
dumb act
. I’m not no stupid
man
. You act any way you have to around your husband. I know all about that myself. But brains and ideas don’t scare me. You have more of both than you’re willing to let show.”
I sat there blushing while Lily accused me of sputtering and whining and looking at the floor every time the conversation required an opinion deeper than what to fix for supper. She had me. Mother would’ve said it a whole other way. But basically it was what she had tried to get me to admit for years.
“I think it’s pure terrible what happened to that man on the lake and I know durned good and well it wasn’t an accident.” I knew my face was red as fire. I could feel it flush. It troubled me that I’d spoken like that and it nearly made me sick that I couldn’t somehow draw my words back. Because once a thing is told it keeps on telling itself. Of course Lily was thrilled to hear me admit how I felt. You never saw such a satisfied grin on man, woman or child.
“Thank you,” she purred. She pecked my cheek. She was halfway back up the yards towards her place yelling for her kids to quit fighting. I was so shocked at myself I sat there and let the chicken burn and Dashnell didn’t hush about it until bedtime.
W
ith Grandfather in the ground and Moena back in Charleston hiding behind a wall of regret, Hez sank deeper into a vague and listless existence. He abandoned the turpentine farm and he drifted through a dozen swampy South Carolina towns picking up what day labor he could and doing his best to avoid the law, which meant white people. Once again he was little more than a vagrant, a bum, a pointless drifter, an animal whose existence was used up in the endless pursuit of food and shelter.
He kept to himself. If he worked a field or a railroad bed with other men, he made only as much conversation as was necessary. He was nineteen now, a tall, sinewy man. He was black and godforsaken because God was white and God had perpetrated evil and suffering on generations of his people. He held no hope that it would not always be so. He kept a knife inside his coat. When he couldn’t find work, he robbed gardens and churches. Sometimes he would find a woman in a bar and take up with her for two or three days.
He told himself that his only friend was death. He felt it near and he felt it often. Sometimes he wanted it. Other times he merely regarded it close and inevitable. He was low and without purpose, a bad joke in a dead universe. He fell deeper into a melancholy that no combination of whiskey and woman could alleviate. He shut out
all sensation except those base sensibilities on which he depended for survival.