The Past Is Never Read online

  “People will believe what you tell them to believe,” Granny Clem said. “That’s worth remembering, Bert.”

  The woman’s labor dragged on for hours, and Granny Clem asked me to stick around until the baby was born. I had assisted with several births by then and was no longer horrified by the mess of blood and pure shit that poured from a woman’s body during a long labor.

  This woman kept saying she needed to hurry up. “I got to get home or my father will wonder where I’ve gone off to.”

  Granny Clem said she should have left a note, because this was threatening to take a while. Out of the woman’s earshot, I asked Granny Clem what the woman was planning to tell her father when she came home toting a baby. Granny Clem said the woman wouldn’t keep the baby, she would give it to another couple. This was an aspect of Granny Clem’s business I hadn’t known about before.

  It wasn’t legal, but people wanted babies and adoptions took years. Some people adopted from other countries, but most folks wanted a child who looked like them. When women came to her with unwanted pregnancies, she helped them either end the pregnancy or place the baby. She filled out paperwork for birth certificates and listed the adopting families as birth parents. Couples paid ten thousand dollars for a newborn infant with documentation, plus an additional two thousand dollars for the birth mother. It seemed a big pile of money to me but it was cheaper and faster than legal adoption. Granny Clem said the babies were getting a better life. Of course, sometimes things went wrong. On that day, for instance, when the woman finally pushed out the baby boy, Granny Clem took one look at him and shook her head. “Marianne,” she said, “that couple is not going to take this black child.”

  Marianne burst into tears. “He’s not so dark.” She stroked his slick, newborn skin.

  “He’s dark enough,” Granny Clem said. “And he sure is beautiful, but that snooty woman from Olive Branch isn’t about to sashay home with a black child and you know it. We’re going to have figure out something else.”

  “Maybe a black family would take him?”

  “Maybe so.” Granny Clem looked at me. “Bert, clean up this baby. I’m gonna make some calls.”

  While she called, I wiped the infant clean. It made me furious. This child, this perfect, healthy boy, was less valuable than some other infant because his skin was a couple of shades darker than expected. It wasn’t fair. I never got too attached to the babies but I spent a little extra time cleaning and swaddling that little one. I felt mighty tender toward him. When I handed him back to Marianne, I could see she felt tender toward him, too.

  “Can’t you keep him?” I asked.

  Her eyes welled and tears spilled over her plump cheeks. She shook her head. “I can’t support my own self. And I’m supposed to go to junior college this year. Daddy would kill me if he knew I had a baby. And a black baby? Well, he’d kill me twice.”

  Granny Clem came in and said she had a family who might be interested. She would take him to them the next day. This particular couple had five daughters already and wanted a boy, but the woman was worn out from giving birth. She’d been asking Granny Clem for years to give her something to produce a male child. Granny Clem could do a lot of things with herbs and potions, but she couldn’t influence the sex of a child. I couldn’t believe anyone with five children would want to take on one more, though maybe they were like cats and once you had two you might as well have twenty. It irked me they only wanted the baby because he was male, but I guessed it was a good thing the child would be valued for something.

  “I can’t give you any money, Marianne,” Granny Clem said, “but I won’t charge you anything for the birth today.”

  “I was sure counting on that money.” Marianne handed the baby to me and disappeared into the bathroom for a while. I heard water running and I heard her sobbing, but by the time she emerged, she looked about the same as when she’d come to us earlier in the day. “I’ve got to get home before Daddy calls the law looking for me.”

  After she left, Granny Clem held the baby and fed him the formula she kept on hand. He sucked greedily, not like some babies who had to be coaxed to eat. He was extra good, I tell you. Granny Clem looked spent and I hated to leave. I knew she wouldn’t get any sleep. I offered to stay over.

  “Well, Bert, that sure would be a big help to me.”

  After I called to let Mama know, I took the little boy and rocked him until he slept. I kept sticking my nose into the soft folds of his neck. He smelled sweeter than anything I’d ever got a whiff of before. We sat up most of the night drinking cup after cup of tea and tending to the baby when he needed something. I told Granny Clem I was worried about Mama. Some days she talked like she expected Pansy to walk through the door any minute. Other days it seemed she’d given up all hope. She had a terrible cough and she struggled to breathe. She hardly ate, but she smoked constantly. Granny Clem said she’d send me home with some herbs to clear the lungs.

  “You can’t force a person to live, Bert. I learned that when I was about your age.”

  I nuzzled the baby and he made sweet smacking sounds against my chest. The next morning, Granny Clem would take the boy to meet the couple who would raise him. I wondered if he would miss me and if he would think I’d abandoned him. He’d only known me for one day, but one day was his whole life. I asked Granny Clem where the couple lived, the ones who would raise him as their own. She knew better than to tell me.

  “He’ll be in a better spot,” she said. “A good home with parents who will love him. It’s everything you could hope for.”

  Granny Clem talked through the night. She said talking kept her awake, but I believe she was trying to tell me something about our family. She told me about the death of her parents and how she came to work with mothers and babies. I loved listening to her stories. They seemed to settle deep within me and become my own. She said I was like my father that way. “He couldn’t get enough of my stories when he was your age. Some people are born to carry stories forward.” I liked knowing I shared something important with Daddy.

  THEY HAD STAYED ON with the women and Chester for much longer than he had intended. In their home in the woods near White Forest, Mississippi, he and his sister were well fed and cared for and safe. They were loved. He knew they were, but it wasn’t the same as the love of a true mother. The women gave the children everything, including a new surname, which they shared with Chester. They were called Watkins in town and at school. Junior didn’t like school. It wasn’t difficult but it didn’t interest him. The teacher droned on about numbers and history and geography. These were nothing like the lessons he’d learned on the island. His mother had taught him to count and do sums by gathering shells. His history was the story of his ancestors, strong men and women who’d been deceived and debased, but not destroyed. The geography of the island came to him in his dreams. He could navigate the islands the way most people navigated city streets. Even after years away, he knew he’d be able to pilot a boat through the maze of bright green bird-filled mangroves and never lose his way.

  The things they taught him in school were useless. His teacher had no patience for questions and didn’t appreciate being challenged. When she talked about the Seminole wars, she called the Indians “savages.” She described them as violent creatures bent on destroying the white settlers. The white settlers were bringing progress, she said. The white settlers were bringing culture. He knew it wasn’t true and he couldn’t figure out whether she was lying or just stupid. She didn’t speak much more kindly about the slaves. To hear her talk, you would think it was a gift to be rounded up in Africa and brought to America to work on the plantations. What would she think of a half-Negro, half-Seminole woman with two mixed children? Not much, he suspected. There was nothing to be gained by arguing with the stupid woman. He’d had his knuckles rapped by her wooden ruler and he learned to keep his mouth shut, but on days when she preached about the untamed savages like his mother, rage boiled in his stomach. It poisoned his blood and mad
e him violent. One day, leaving school, he turned and punched another boy square in the stomach. The boy fell to the ground, clutching his belly, crying, “What’d you do that for?”

  Junior’s eyes had filled with hot tears that would never fall. Only Fern could calm him when the anger came. She sang songs they’d learned from their mother, and he closed his eyes and imagined he could hear wind and waves and the call of the birds.

  “When are we going home?” Fern asked him nearly every day.

  “Soon,” he promised.

  Fern fared no better than he did in school. She couldn’t sit still for so long. Her hands itched to make something. In their first year, she was punished for tearing out the pages of a textbook and creating delicate birds from the paper. She did it without thinking, he knew that, but there was no explaining it to the teacher. She learned to keep her hands at rest during the long hours of lessons. Every afternoon, though, she gathered leaves and bits of bark and insect husks and worked her magic on them until they were beautiful and worth keeping.

  Nothing could make school better, but Ora and Clementine were gentle, and cared for the children as if they belonged to them. Clementine loved Fern best. It was sad, because Chester was Clementine’s true child. Chester wasn’t smart or handsome or talented. He was prone to fits of anger and temper tantrums even as a teenager. Clementine said Chester had been born of a violent act and he carried violence around with him. Junior didn’t mind Chester’s fits. He understood them. Fern calmed both boys with her songs and with the things she made. She gave her creations as gifts to people she loved or anyone who showed her kindness. Chester and Junior filled their pockets with paper birds and wooden turtles and orchid flowers made from bits of cloth and bark. Both boys loved her and would do anything for her. Chester was rough and plenty of people thought he’d never amount to much, but Junior saw the good in him. Chester’s one great attribute was loyalty and he was especially loyal to Fern.

  When Chester was fifteen and he and Fern were thirteen, the three of them spent a long day fishing on the banks of a nearby river. It was early spring and not too hot yet. A gentle breeze kept the bugs down. They cast their lines and bragged about how they would fry up a mess of fish for Clementine and Ora that evening. They’d caught a half dozen bream by midmorning. Fern tired of fishing and wandered off to gather pecan shells, which she turned into tiny replications of stone crabs. She lined up her creations along the sandy riverbank.

  Junior wished he could take her home to the islands. She didn’t belong here, but he could think of no way for them to travel so far without hardship. Soon, he thought. He was a man now, or nearly so, and ought to be able to find work. Things were not as dire as they had been when his father left them by the train tracks. There was work to be found building bridges or dams or at the logging camps or the cotton gins. Soon he would be able to support them and they could be on their way. Clementine and Ora would be sad to see them go. He’d heard them talking about how good it was for Chester to have siblings. He wondered if Chester would want to come with them, but he knew it would be too much to take Chester away from his home. The island would be as foreign to Chester as this flat, green land was to him. The only thing these places shared was an abundance of green choking vines and mosquitoes as big as birds.

  It was no easy thing to leave a place where food was abundant and there was shelter from the rain, but they should have left that spring. They shouldn’t have stayed on for that terrible summer, no matter how comfortable and well fed they were. Back home, the white pelicans abandoned their fledglings before first flight. Only when the fledglings got hungry, got desperate, would they leave the safe warmth of the nest. It made Junior ache to think of those birds. They were brought into the world and fed for nearly three months by their mother. She left the nest each day and returned with minnow or shrimp or small fish. And then, one day, she disappeared. The birds, still small, still cozy and warm and safe in the nest, waited and waited, their bellies growing hungrier by the minute. Were they afraid? Were they sad? Were they angry? He thought they must be. Eventually, the birds left the nest. They flew for the first time out of desperation and hunger. Why couldn’t their mother stick around long enough to teach them how to fly? Why couldn’t she help them for a little while? He knew why. Birds won’t fly if they don’t have to fly. Birds, like children, must be desperate to leave a warm nest.

  NINE

  I WORKED FOR GRANNY Clem all through high school. Her house became my second home and if it weren’t for Mama, I’d have spent every minute at Granny Clem’s. I was more comfortable there than anywhere else. We marked the passing days and months and years with the only measure that made any sense to us. Most days we didn’t speak of it, but on special days—Christmas, the Fourth of July, Pansy’s birthday—Granny Clem might shake her head and say, That poor child. And I knew she was referring to Pansy. Or Willet, on the anniversary of Pansy’s disappearance, would make a point of being extra careful with Mama, bringing her sweet tea before she had a chance to ask for it and curbing his tendency to cuss about everything. The first year was the hardest. By the third year it was routine.

  I grew up. I would have grown up whether Pansy disappeared or not, I suppose, but by the time I turned seventeen, I’d attended dozens of births and learned the difference between poison leaves and edible ones. I don’t know who I’d have been if things had turned out different—if we’d found Pansy or never lost her in the first place. Maybe I’d have gone to prom or homecoming games. Maybe I’d have taken up with one of the local boys, a farmer’s kid with a permanent tan or the pale, preppy son of an alderman. Maybe I’d have joined the science club or been a reporter for the school newspaper. All sorts of things were possible before Pansy went missing, but her disappearance whittled my world to a sharp point.

  As it was, I couldn’t afford an ordinary adolescence. At Granny Clem’s, I dealt with life and death. I spent hours in her garden or her kitchen. I carried the work around with me. My skin smelled of purple and green, lavender and mint, hyacinth and lemon balm, birth and death. Black dirt caked beneath my fingernails. By the time I was a senior in high school, her patients trusted me. I knew so many of them. They were the mothers of my classmates. They were the grocery store clerk and the secretaries on Cotton Row. One of them sat three rows ahead of me in American history class. She’d been particularly shocked to find me when she showed up at Granny Clem’s seeking an end to an unplanned pregnancy. I learned how to put the women at ease. I figured out how to make my eyes float past them when I saw them on the streets or in the stores. No flicker of recognition, no narrowing my eyes in judgment, no smirk or pity or warmth. The women who came to Granny Clem didn’t want my sympathy; they wanted my silence. I gave them what they wanted and they trusted me.

  “That one keeps her mouth shut tight,” one woman said.

  Granny Clem nodded. “She’s a secret-keeper. Runs in the family.”

  I stayed up many nights with Granny Clem and the newborn babies. I liked being awake when other folks were sleeping. The babies smelled like rising yeast dough and lemon. Our house smelled of mildew and of Mama’s stale cigarettes and loneliness. Willet was gone a lot. He worked construction on the coast and in cities across the southeast. He’d bought a used truck and left me with Mama’s old Ford. I felt bad when I left Mama alone, but we rarely talked when I was home. As long as I shopped for her, as long as I kept her stocked with cigarettes and diet soda and tea, she didn’t miss me. I was not the daughter she wanted or needed.

  Some nights when there was no reason for me to stay with Granny Clem, I drove the back roads of the Delta and tried to get lost. Many of the roads had no markers and one dirt-packed stretch looked like the next, especially when the cotton grew high. Sometimes I drove out to the site of the old quarry and watched the stars shine on the spot where we lost Pansy. It gave me the willies, being there alone. It was like Daddy said; the place was evil. We never should have swum there or played in those woods. We were courting
trouble.

  Mostly I drove in silence but when the sound of my own thoughts got to be too much, I turned on the radio for distraction. I rolled the dial past rock music and gospel preaching. I didn’t know what I was listening for until I heard a familiar voice:

  “Our phone lines are open, so call now. We’re talking to Horace Lawrence, abduction survivor, and author of the book Into That Dark Sky. This is simply one of the best, most compelling stories I’ve ever read about the abduction experience. As most of you know, I was abducted repeatedly as a child. Horace’s recollections in this book corroborate everything I remember. And I know there are skeptics among you; there are those of you listening to my voice right now who cannot believe extraterrestrials exist, who will not accept the proof right in front of you that these beings not only exist but they visit, and they take children as subjects to be studied. We are part of their great experiment. The evidence is all around us. All you have to do is look up and believe. I’m Bubba Speck, and I’m here to take your calls.”

  People called in with stories about being abducted, stories about being probed by aliens. One woman claimed she’d been impregnated and had an abortion to rid herself of an alien fetus. A man talked about his missing son and his certainty the boy had been snatched from his bed and carted away in an alien spacecraft. Bubba listened to these people. He sympathized with them. “No one else believes me,” they said. “I can’t talk about it, or people think I’m crazy.” All of these folks who, by the light of day, could find no one to trust their story, found Bubba’s warm voice in the dark night.