The Past Is Never Page 10

  “Well, it would be helpful to have your blood type,” the officer said. “Might not prove anything, but it could help us rule this child out.”

  “It isn’t necessary,” Mama said. “That isn’t Pansy. I know my daughter and that isn’t her.”

  Willet agreed with Mama. He said nothing about the body in that photo looked like our sister. Still, I wasn’t convinced. “Mama, I know you don’t want to believe it, but isn’t it better to know for sure?”

  “I do know for sure,” Mama said. “That isn’t Pansy. And anyway I don’t know my blood type.”

  “It’s a simple test,” the officer told her.

  “But you need mine and Earl’s both, don’t you?”

  “It would be best.”

  “Then there’s no sense to it.”

  Daddy’s absence loomed over the conversation in the same way it loomed over our lives. The police suspected him in Pansy’s disappearance and they’d searched for him, but found nothing. They’d asked Mama a hundred questions about where he might go and they’d been frustrated by her lack of information. We could not adequately explain our father’s prolonged absence, even to ourselves. Six months had passed since we last saw him. All my life he’d come and gone without making any announcements or expecting any fanfare. He could travel for two weeks or a month and still he’d walk through the front door and greet us as if he’d only been out for the day. This time was different. I knew it. Willet knew it. Mama couldn’t admit it.

  Despite Mama’s assurances, the police believed the body was Pansy’s. The focus shifted from a search for our sister to a search for her killer. It was full-on winter by then and often a damp chill fell across the day. Willet and I kept going to school, though we agreed it was a waste of time. Nothing we learned seemed valuable and our status as the siblings of the missing girl made us either freaks or objects of fascination.

  Most of our classmates thought Bubba had something to do with it. Everyone knew I’d seen him at the quarry that day. All he’d ever been was an odd kid, but since he’d gone off to military school, he became a monster. When they found the body in Arkansas, people said Bubba could have hitched rides through the back roads carrying Pansy’s body in a trash bag until he found a spot to bury her. It was ridiculous, and I said so. There were plenty of wide-open remote spaces to bury a body closer to home. Why would Bubba go to the trouble of crossing state lines? And when was he supposed to have made the trip? He’d been home when the police came to question him in the days and weeks after Pansy’s disappearance. But logic never trumps gossip. People wanted to believe crazy things and they wouldn’t be dissuaded by the facts.

  None of the gossip mattered. It turned out Mama was right. The body beneath the sweet gum trees was not Pansy. It was the body of a black child killed by her own mother. At first the mother claimed her daughter had run away, but she later confessed the crime to her pastor, who encouraged her to come forward with the truth. The woman said the girl had been possessed by evil; she was willful and defiant. The mother hadn’t meant to kill her child, only to chase away the Devil. “The Devil was too strong,” she told the detectives. “He took her right along.”

  I felt sorry for that little girl. There were no news reports about her going missing. There were no pleas from the blonde reporters. There were no search parties organized by the police department. There were prayers, sure, but no one gathered to light candles. There was no public outrage, no call for justice. I bet the woman from Pittsburgh never visited that mother. It made me both angry and grateful: angry one child’s life would be somehow more precious than another, grateful Pansy might still be out there alive somewhere. Mostly I felt worried. If Pansy were alive, why hadn’t we found her? And where was Daddy? I worried most of all about Mama.

  Mama did things I couldn’t reconcile with the mother she’d been before Pansy’s disappearance. She sent money we didn’t have to preachers on television, who implored her to send more: God has miracles in store for you. He asks you to sacrifice in order to receive his blessings. She sacrificed by raiding the bank accounts and sending thirty or fifty dollars to each appeal. Then she started sending hundreds.

  Willet and I intercepted the mail when we could. We pulled cash from the envelopes and used it to buy groceries, to pay bills. We tried to talk to her about the money, but she wouldn’t listen.

  “I have to do something,” she said. “What if this is the seed of the prayer that will bring Pansy home? How can I not send it?”

  Willet said we’d be broke soon if she kept it up. With Daddy gone for so long, there was no money coming in the door. “I don’t care about money,” Mama said. She didn’t care about us. She didn’t care about herself. She cared about finding Pansy. How could we hold that against her?

  Willet got a job working after school and on weekends at the car wash. It was minimum wage work, but some customers tipped. “Better than nothing,” he said. “But just barely.” He thought he could get work on a construction crew, but it would mean dropping out of school.

  “You only have a few months to go,” I said. “Don’t quit now.”

  “It’s not like I’m going to get a job in an office. I’ll end up working construction either way.”

  I begged him to hang on. I didn’t care if Willet got his diploma but I liked knowing he was in school with me. I rarely saw him during the day but I knew he was there. He was in a classroom somewhere in the same building, and I could find him if I needed him. I was already dreading next year, when I’d be on my own. I told him everything would be okay when Daddy got home.

  Willet laughed. “Wake up, Bert. He ain’t coming home this time.”

  I couldn’t believe he would abandon us forever, especially with Mama in such a bad state. Mama wouldn’t listen to any sort of speculation involving Daddy, but there was plenty. The fat police officer said most children who disappear are taken by an estranged parent. Mama insisted she and Daddy weren’t estranged, but it was a tough argument to make given his prolonged absence.

  Willet said they’d questioned Uncle Chester and Granny Clem. I’m not sure how he knew, but he said they hadn’t found anything and Uncle Chester swore he hadn’t talked to his brother in months.

  Nothing made any sense, and the more I thought about it, the more the answers seemed to float away from me. The nightmarish memories of the creature from the woods, of the rainstorm, of the suspicious berries, began to fade. Everything about that day seemed slippery as an oiled snake. I tried to remember the moment we decided to leave Pansy. I would concentrate on the memory of dirt clinging to my damp feet and the vision of Willet leading me into the woods, but it was like grasping at mercury. Was the sun ahead of us or behind us? Was the sky bright blue or packed with fluffy white clouds? Did Willet walk ahead of me or beside me? If I couldn’t call up specific details, how could I be sure about anything?

  Willet said we had to start taking better care of ourselves and taking better care of Mama. “We can’t be children anymore. We’ve got to go on and grow up.”

  I was fifteen by then. I wondered what part of childhood Willet imagined I was holding on to. It wasn’t like I played with dolls or threw temper tantrums. I cooked dinner most nights, even if it meant only opening a few cans.

  Willet gave me this speech while changing the oil in Mama’s car. The old Ford sedan had barely been driven since Pansy disappeared. Mama didn’t like to leave the house in case Pansy returned or called. I handed him an old rag to wipe his hands.

  Willet had gotten the car tuned up and whenever he had a spare hour, he drove out to the edge of the county and beyond. Sometimes I went along with him. He drove past broken-down shacks with cars in the yard, where dusty children played without joy among rusted farm equipment and mangy dogs. He studied their faces and sometimes spoke with them, showed them pictures of Pansy. “Have you seen this little girl?” They stared up at him, their expressions unresponsive and uncaring. The poverty that existed a short drive from our home made me sick. With Dadd
y gone and Mama sinking into sadness, we were well on our way to being poor, but this was a different level of need.

  “I don’t know why you think anyone out here would take Pansy,” I said to Willet. “The last thing these people need is another hungry mouth.”

  Willet said he didn’t believe they’d taken her, but maybe she’d ended up there somehow. “Would their parents even notice?” he said. “Where are their parents, anyhow? Do you see any adults?”

  I did not see any adults, but I knew they existed. They were out working the fields or inside working over a stove, maybe in some wealthy woman’s kitchen. I didn’t bother to point out to Willet that the parents of these children were no more or less present than our own parents.

  On these back road trips, Willet taught me to drive. I pointed the nose of Mama’s gray Ford down the straight dirt roads of the Delta and pressed the gas. It was one of the few good feelings I recall from those days. You can’t beat the Delta for driving. You can speed up and brake hard without any concern you’ll hit something or someone on the straight, flat, empty roads. The first time you really pick up speed and see the cotton fields go from studded white to a blurred blanket, well, it’s like driving through clouds. Occasionally Willet sent me out on my own to pick up groceries or run to the post office. I was careful and I never got pulled over. I think Willet wanted to make sure I could take care of Mama and myself. He knew he’d have to find real work soon and there were not a lot of opportunities in White Forest.

  No matter what we did, Mama sank further into sadness. She had a lot of bad days. Even her good days weren’t great. On a good day, she might put on clothes she hadn’t slept in and wander into the kitchen for a tumbler full of sweet tea and a handful of crackers. She might even take a shower. Most days, though, she never made it any further than the couch, where she sat slumped and bloated in her stained T-shirts and ratty shorts. She slept poorly. She smoked constantly. I tried to get her out of the house to shop for groceries or clothes at the discount store. She refused. Pansy could come home any day, she said, and she couldn’t bear the thought of her baby coming back to an empty house. Mama talked like Pansy might return and things would go back to the way they were before. It was wishful thinking. If Pansy managed to make it home, I knew nothing would be the same.

  OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES WERE simpler. His memories were tangled like a knot and unraveling them left him with more questions than answers. If he’d never come to Mississippi, would he be a different sort of man? Maybe, but he figured prying a rock from the earth didn’t change the nature of the rock.

  He and Fern were eight years old when their father left them by the side of the road. He was called Junior then, the first of many names he would carry through his life. “Take care of your sister,” his father told him, before boarding a train heading north. They weren’t sorry to see him go. They were still adjusting to the loss of their mother.

  Ama Story had stood barely five feet tall and weighed no more than one good net of mullet. As a black Seminole, her marriage to a white man caused a scandal on Chokoloskee Island. The family didn’t fit in with either the white men running the trading post and attempting to set up schools and medical care, nor with the Native American families who’d lived there for hundreds of years on the shell mounds and in the chickee huts of their ancestors.

  But Chokoloskee was the sort of place where people tried to get along. It was a place where outlaws could hide, where a white man and an Indian chief might taste ice cream together for the first time. It was a place where you could cast a net in the evening and pull up a mess of fish come morning. On Chokoloskee, people lived by the tides and the moon; they pulled together to rebuild after a bad storm and they killed a violent sugar baron without arguing about it because, frankly, the man needed killing.

  Junior hadn’t wanted to leave the island, but times were hard and his mother’s death left his father in a bad way. As a younger man he’d made a decent living smuggling rum into the country through the network of mangrove islands stretching out to the Gulf of Mexico, but the end of Prohibition left him floundering for a way to make money. He’d never intended to have one child, much less two, a fact he was fond of sharing with Junior and Fern. He’d loved their mother, but she was the only person he seemed capable of caring about, and when she was gone, he gave up pretending to be a father. He talked about finding a woman to raise them, but no woman would put up with him, and even though both children were fair-skinned, everyone knew their mother had been black. No woman wanted to take the chance her grandchildren might be Negroes.

  So the family headed north by boat and by foot and by train, when they could hop one. Their father believed he might find work in the cotton fields, so they traveled toward the Delta. Jobs were scarce. No one wanted to pay a strange man to pick cotton, particularly when the man came with the very real baggage of twin children. Finally, it was Junior who suggested his father leave them behind. Junior knew how to hunt and fish and trap small game. He could tie more knots than a sailor. He had a knack for knowing which berries were edible and which were poison. He and Fern would be okay, he told their father. He met with no resistance and, in 1939, his father left them in a Mississippi Delta town called White Forest. Other than telling Junior to care for his sister, he offered only one piece of instruction: “Don’t ever tell no one around here your mother weren’t white. They’ll run you out of town if you’re lucky. Most likely they’ll just kill you.”

  Junior knew better than to brag about being the son of a failed rum runner and a black Indian and he said so.

  “I’ll come back for you when I can,” his father said, before leaping onto a moving freight train.

  “Well,” Junior said to his sister, “at least that’s the last lie we’ll have to hear from him.”

  Fern giggled and took his hand. Junior needed to find them a safe place to stay. He’d be happy living outdoors most of the year, but it would be better for them both if they had shelter. He made his sister wear a hat and a long dress even in the hottest weather, because her skin would turn brown if she spent too much time in the sun, and people would suspect she might not be pure white.

  They walked through town, staying underneath the awnings where they could. Like most of the places they’d traveled through, White Forest was struggling. Empty shelves lined the back wall of the dry goods store and a hand-scrawled sign across the diner said CLOSED FOR GOOD. Junior and Fern stood around the corner from the post office, where a trio of dusty old men sat on a bench. The men complained about the price they were getting for cotton and they complained about Roosevelt. It was the same in every town; only the crops were different. In Florida, men complained about the price for sugar and grapefruit. In Georgia, they said it wasn’t hardly worth growing peanuts. Junior kept his ear peeled for some piece of useful gossip, something he could parlay into a beneficial situation, but the men only griped for the pleasure of hearing themselves speak.

  They walked from one end of town to the other in the span of time it took most folks to eat lunch. “Well, this ain’t no place,” Junior said, though the town wasn’t any smaller than the towns of the Everglades. Fern bent and plucked something from the dusty ground. She tucked a tiny white feather in her pocket. She was always gathering such things. Later she might weave the feather into a dandelion crown or use it to scratch a picture in the dirt.

  Fern had been named for the green plants that grew thick on the cypress trees along the rivers and swamps of the Everglades. During the dry season, when the rain ceased to fall and water evaporated, the bright green fern would wither and turn brown. Anyone seeing the dry clumps would assume the plant was dead. But when the rain fell and the basin filled, the leaves drank in the water and rose up to live again. Resurrection Fern.

  She had a way of making ordinary things beautiful. His sister turned weeds into long chains, which she wore around her neck and on her head. She could whittle like nobody’s business. She used Junior’s knife to turn cabbage palm and cyp
ress wood into works of art. She carved the anhinga with its outspread wings and snakelike neck. She carved a yellow bellied turtle and a swamp chicken. She turned sugarcane bark into replications of the delicate pineapple air plants that clung to the cypress in the big swamp. She was born with the knack of making something out of nothing. Junior loved her fiercely.

  He hated his own name and the designation of being second. His mother had called him her “little anhinga.” When he and Fern were toddlers, he would stand atop the highest shell mound and hold his arms out to soak in the sun. His father said he looked like Jesus on the cross, but his mother thought he looked like the snakebird perched on the branches of the cypress strands. Their father hadn’t approved of the way his wife doted on his son. He said it would make the boy soft. He’d whipped Junior often and for any reason. He didn’t like Fern’s fanciful creations, nor her tendency to drift and get lost in her own head. He’d whipped her once, just after they crossed into Mississippi. Junior had pulled his father’s pistol from the sack he carried and pointed it at his father’s head. His father laughed at him, said he wouldn’t dare shoot. Something in Junior’s eyes must have convinced him otherwise, because he let up on Fern after that. He told Junior he would have to be responsible for his sister and for anything that happened to her. Junior was fine with the arrangement.

  They walked on, choosing roads by instinct and whim. The place was so flat he thought it would be damn near impossible to get lost. They came to a point at the edge of town where the road forked and they could choose to continue walking alongside the wide fields of cotton or enter into the woods. Junior chose the woods for shade. He hoped to find food and water and was pleased when they came upon a patch of wild berries. Eventually, the woods thinned and gave way to a large clearing, where there was a deep depression in the earth. He took Fern’s hand and they stood on the edge and peered down. It made him dizzy. Was it a hundred feet deep? Two hundred? The hole was filled with water, and he knew there must be a spring nearby.