Authors: Anne C. Petty
Chapter 4
July 1953
“Who’s that guy in the uniform?” Ned was pointing to the oldest photo on the dresser.
Cecil picked it up. “My father. He was in the Army Supply Service corps, World War One. He got an honorable discharge when the war was over. When war broke out again after Pearl Harbor, he wanted to reenlist, but by then he was too old, so he did a lot of volunteer work for the war effort, ministering to those who came home alive. I was very proud of him. He died in nineteen forty-five … too early to see the war come to an end.”
“That’s tough,” said Ned, not wholly comprehending. War had been a distant drumbeat in the background of his childhood, but he neither knew nor cared much about it.
Ned shifted his healing leg and leaned back against the pillows. Roughly a week had passed since the bite, and he could now put weight on his left foot and hobble around a little. The preacher and his wife took good care of him, feeding him and dressing him in clean clothes. That doctor came by once more, pronounced him “one lucky sonofabitch,” and went away. He was the most comfortable he’d ever been in his life, and hoped they wouldn’t turn him out too soon. He knew he couldn’t stay indefinitely, but he didn’t want to think about what he would do once he was completely well. He had no money and no knowledge of how to get along in the world outside the forest swamps and titi thickets where he’d been born.
The cabin of his birth had not originated with his parents. His mother said she’d found the old “cracker” cabin before her marriage, during excursions into the woods. Few people knew where it was, and his mother had kept him there most of his life, except for a few trips into a nearby town for supplies.
“I heard some stuff about the war, but don’t understand much about who started it or why.” Instantly, he regretted letting that slip, because it revealed he hadn’t been in school. He would have been consumed with war news like everyone else if he’d been a student.
His mother and father had not kept him very well informed of how life went on outside their homestead among the blackgums and magnolias. They occasionally interacted with farming families in the area, but he was too antisocial to make any friends among the children. When questioned about schooling, he simply said he was needed at home, which was the same excuse all the farm kids used. No truant officer ever came looking for him. His parents—mostly his mother—taught him to read and how to add and subtract numbers, but his skills lay elsewhere. He twitched as painful memories crowded his head.
“This one here,” said Cecil, indicating a black and white photo of a very old woman seated on some porch steps with three much younger men, “was taken in nineteen-thirty-four during the Great Depression, which I guess you wouldn’t know anything about. People living on farms at least had a little bit to eat, but nobody had any money.” Cecil shook his head. “That was the last year all of us were together.”
“How come?” asked Ned, squinting at the picture.
Cecil lifted the photo off the dresser and handed it to Ned. Pointing, he said, “This is me, just twenty-one. In those days I was working day labor in the turpentine camps, chipping pine trees for the resin. I hadn’t received the call to the ministry yet, as you can see.”
Ned looked from the small, well-groomed pastor in his white shirt and black trousers to the skinny smiling youth in the photo, his dark face shiny with sweat. He slouched against the steps in rumpled work shirt and loose-fitting patched pants rolled up to the knees. His feet looked huge in lace-up men’s boots with the soles peeling off. Ned felt a momentary pang of kinship with the grubby, tattered boy in his ill-fitting clothes. He imagined that the only real difference between them was the color of their skin and the smile. Ned had rarely, if ever, felt a smile that broad cross his face.
“This, of course, is my father, pastor of St. Christopher’s A.M.E. church.” Ned could see the resemblance. The father’s expression was stern and his black suit and white shirt buttoned to the neck with no tie seemed severe, but he looked like someone you could trust.
“And this is my grandmother. I called her Granny Yoo, although her actual name was Yula. My father, Antoine, was her son. Sadly, she died the year this picture was taken.”
“Yeah?” Ned was now genuinely interested. He decided he liked the Reverend Cecil Rider, although he couldn’t say as much for the reverend’s wife, who he could tell wanted to shuffle him out the door as soon as possible. Ned knew sneakiness when he saw it; he was more than adept at it himself.
“Heart attack,” Cecil was saying, “which I guess is not too surprising. She was nearly blind, in her seventies. It took a toll on her … her older son running off with a woman she didn’t approve of. They had some terrible arguments over it, but he was under that woman’s spell and there was no turning his head. Some people said she put a hex on my grandmother, but that’s just foolishness. That’s him,” said Cecil, pointing to the other man sitting beside Yula Rider. “We never heard another word from him when those two took off. To this day, nobody knows what happened to him.”
Ned looked, and his heart stopped. He stared hard at the young man’s face, with its liquid dark eyes and bow-shaped mouth. He looked back up at the reverend, not even bothering to disguise his expression of confusion.
“I guess I should explain,” said Cecil. “He wasn’t blood kin; he was adopted into the family as a baby when my father was about eight or nine, I think. He wasn’t colored, but he wasn’t a white boy either. But my grandmother loved him as much as she did my father, who treated him like a brother.”
Ned’s hands were shaking as he held the photograph.
“W-what was his name?”
“My grandmother named him Lazarus, but everybody called him Lacy because he was so pretty. Black hair and light coffee-colored skin, he was kind of mulatto looking. He liked to tell people that he was from New Orleans, but that was just a fib, of course. He wore his hair long, too, braided in a pigtail like a Chinaman. He was working for Mr. Clarence Bradley at the funeral home just before he took off, which was a good job to have because work was so scarce back then. But that witchy-woman stole him away.”
Ned had ceased to listen because the blood was pounding in his ears. There could be no doubt. The face was younger and less careworn, but it was him. The man in the picture was his own father.
Ned put the photograph down carefully and grasped the side of the bed to steady his trembling body. He thought he might faint dead away. Shadows thrown into the corners of the bedroom turned fluid. A voice whispered in his head.
“Ned, is something wrong?” Cecil took the photo and placed it back on the dresser. “You don’t look so good.”
“I … just felt sick for a minute. It ain’t nothin’.” His mind was reeling. He’d accidentally stumbled through a door into his father’s past, which neither of his parents had ever explained to him. His guts were churning, and the skin along his arms began to sting.
Cecil headed for the door. “I’m sorry, I’ve been talking your ear off, and what you really need is sleep. I’ll just turn the light off.”
“No! I mean, wait, please.” Ned leaned forward. “I’m not sleepy. Could you … talk a little longer?” He tried to keep his voice level. “About that picture. Did all of you live together?”
“Oh yes, in this very house. When my father left the Army and returned to preaching, the congregation built this house for him and his family, which included me, Granny Yoo, and Lacy. My mother died birthing me into this world—she was only sixteen—so our family was just the four of us.”
“I was just wondering,” Ned hesitated, not sure how to get what he wanted to know without giving anything in return. “Um, how you all got along together …”
“I think I know what you mean,” said Cecil. “An old woman, two young men, and a little boy living together in the same house. Yet it made perfect sense to us. My grandmother ruled the household, and this was her room, as I’ve told you. The biggest bedroom down the hall was the one I shared with my father, and Lacy had his own small room. Poor boy, he had brain seizures that were sometimes pretty bad. He kept to himself a lot of the time.”
Ned licked his lips and tried to swallow. He was definitely feeling toxic. “What’s a seizure?” This was sneaky, because Ned knew very well what Lacy’s fits were like and what he’d claimed to have seen when they were coming on. To five-year-old Ned, it was more frightening than milking serpents of their venom.
“Well now, I don’t think you want to hear about all that.” Cecil got up and reached for the light switch. “Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning.”
“That w-witchy woman, what was she like? I mean, I’m just curious.”
“Well sir, she wasn’t somebody you wanted to cross, that’s certain. Sure had her heart set on Lacy. She was a lot older than him, and that was partly what got off with my grandmother. She didn’t think it was right, with his condition and all. Broke her heart when he left. Well. Good night, son.” Cecil turned off the light and softly shut the door behind him.
Ned lay on his back, listening to Cecil’s footsteps retreating toward the kitchen. He was trembling and couldn’t get his thoughts lined up straight. Something scraped against the baseboards near the dresser, but when he sat up and looked, there were only shadows.
Cecil had met his mother, interacted with her, maybe knew more about her than Ned did. But Ned knew the rest of Lacy’s story and savored the thrill of knowing something others did not—it was a form of power, and it felt good.
He wondered about those fits. His mother had said his father was a gifted seer whose brain was wired funny; it was the price he paid for being the vessel of power. She’d been sure, she’d also told him, that her husband’s seed had carried the gift into his son. But the problem was that Ned didn’t want to be a great shaman or whatever she called it. He just wanted to get away.
Ned sat up and stared at the photo again. Could he be mistaken? His father had never called himself Rider. Ned had been taught that his last name was Waterston. Had that been his mother’s name, instead? Ned felt as if his head might explode.
He lay awake a long time, watching the shadows. He could barely hear the two voices that lived in his head—they seemed very far away and he hoped they would stay that way. His forearms itched like crazy, but he forced himself not to scratch. Closing his eyes, he tried to sleep.
Just as he was dozing, a scraping noise along the baseboards brought him wide awake. He sat up and stared around the darkened room. Ned rubbed his eyes, and abruptly something bumped underneath the bed.
“Shit!” he yelped and pulled his knees up to his chest. The room seemed to tilt and slide, and the floor appeared to be rippling, the bare boards no longer wood but the scaled hide of a vast living beast. Spots danced before Ned’s eyes as he gripped the side of the bed. His hands went numb, and he fell over the side onto the undulating surface. It was icy cold and froze Ned’s heart on the moment of impact. He gasped a quick breath, and all went black.
* * *
Morning sun bathed Yula Rider’s bedroom as Ned opened his eyes. He sat up slowly, looking around at the old woman’s room, sedate and undisturbed. Head in hands, Ned decided he’d had one of the worst nightmares of his life. He slowly swung his legs over the side of the bed and waited. Nothing bumped the bed or grabbed him by the ankles, so he stood up. Whatever he thought he’d seen in the room last night, there was no sign of it now. His stomach rumbled, and he concentrated on getting dressed in his newly washed overalls, ignoring the massive headache that threatened to turn his stomach sour.
As Ned hobbled down the hallway and into the kitchen for breakfast, the phone rang. Estell went to answer it, leaving Cecil to dish out cheese grits, bacon, cornbread, and scrambled eggs onto Ned’s plate. When she returned, she seemed more relaxed than she had been since Ned arrived. He watched her with suspicion.
“It’s been decided,” she said, smiling. “Cecil, will you go take the phone, please?”
“Who is it?”
“That man from the Methodist church that you talked to.”
Ned kept silent, watching them both.
Cecil got up, and his eyes slid over Ned in a quick glance.
Estell sat down in her usual place at the end of the table nearest the stove. “Eat up, honey. We don’t want you to go hungry.”
That was the nicest she’d been to him. Ned tensed, wondering what was going on. He wolfed his eggs and bacon and kept an eye on the hallway where Cecil had disappeared. Whatever they were plotting, he wouldn’t meekly go along with it if he didn’t like it. He could hear the minister’s soft voice, but couldn’t make out any words. At last, Cecil returned and sat down at the table.
“Well, Ned, I think we’ve found a good family who can take you in. Mr. Campbell and his wife are fine church-going people, couldn’t ask for better.”
“He’s a deputy sheriff,” added Estell, “and his wife teaches Sunday school.”
Ned stopped chewing. There was no chance in Hell he was going to go live with an officer of the law.
“His brother’s a forest ranger, and he said if you can tell them how to find your cabin, they can go retrieve your mother’s remains so she can have a decent burial.”
Ned put his fork down. “When’re they coming to get me?”
“This afternoon,” said Estell, “so you need to go get a bath, and we’ll find you some pants and a shirt to wear. I don’t know what to do about shoes, though.”
“They’re planning to buy him new clothes, so don’t fret over that,” said Cecil. “Well, Ned, how does all of this sound?”
“Fine.” He could feel the panic rising. “I think I’ll go get in the tub now.” He got up, clutching the table for support.
Cecil rose and followed him down the hall. “I’ll go look through my father’s closet and see if I can find something decent for you to wear to meet the Campbells.”
Ned went into the bathroom and turned on the water. He stared at the floor, thinking, trying to calm his beating heart. Then he went to the small, high window that faced the back yard of the property. Standing on the closed toilet lid, he pushed out the screen, scrambled up onto the sill, and then eased himself out. Dropping to the ground, he landed with a painful jolt, but bit back a yelp.