The Past Is Never Page 14

  “I want to know the truth,” I told him. “That’s all.”

  He kissed me then. He smelled clean and soapy, like he’d showered that morning. He pulled his lips away, wrapped his hands around the sides of my face, and pressed his forehead to mine. Our noses touched. We breathed together. “Bert,” he said.

  I pressed my lips into his to shut him up. He tasted familiar, the way a boy you grew up with should taste. I pulled him on top of me. His body was a warm blanket. He was tentative, touching me first above my T-shirt and shorts. When he slipped his hands beneath my clothes, he paused as if he expected me to stop him. I pulled him closer and pressed into his touch. He shuddered when I breathed against his ear. He held his breath when I traced my fingers along his neck. He was desperate for me, but I could get up and walk away and he wouldn’t chase me. I knew he wouldn’t. He kept his shirt on. His legs were pasty white and he had a patch of dark hair above his buttocks.

  The couch squeaked and sighed with every move. The cheap cushions stuck to my bare skin. The girls at school said the first time always hurt. They talked about the blood on the sheets and how they ached down there for days after, but I felt no pain. My body stretched and opened as if it had been waiting for this moment. Bubba made soft whimpering noises against my neck. Then he went stiff. He pulled away and finished on my stomach.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. My body wanted something more, but Bubba made no move to continue. I considered moving his hand against me, but it seemed pushy and desperate. Whatever power I’d had moments ago was gone now. He was limp and unresponsive when I pressed against him. He apologized again and again until I told him to shut up.

  “I should go,” I said. “They might be wondering where I am by now.”

  He pushed off me to stand. The couch creaked. He turned his back to me and pulled on his jeans. I used a paper towel to wipe the flaky, sticky substance from my stomach before I slipped my T-shirt over my head and pulled my denim shorts up from where they’d settled around my ankles.

  “Do you remember the night you put on the firework show?” I asked.

  He pulled a pair of loafers onto his bare feet. “Fireworks?”

  “Yeah, you and Willet went and bought a bunch of fireworks and set ’em off in our backyard.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Maybe it was someone else.”

  “No, it was you. Pansy was still a baby.”

  “I don’t think so, but there are a lot of things I can’t remember. I told you, I lose track of time.”

  He looked pitiful, standing in the middle of his small, ugly apartment. I should have felt sorry for him, but I was angry. How could he have forgotten the fireworks? That night was important to me. It meant nothing to him.

  “Will you remember this?” I asked. “In ten years, will you remember fucking me on your cheap couch?”

  “Don’t talk like that. Don’t make it sound ugly.”

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” I said. I found my keys and slipped my feet into my tennis shoes.

  “Yeah, well, I told you that.”

  He was angry, too. It made me like him again. It was better to be angry than to be pitiful. I hugged him for a long time. I wanted to remember the way he smelled and the way his arms felt across my back. I thought I might never see him again.

  “I won’t forget,” he said, his mouth moving against my neck. “I promise.”

  I drove back to White Forest, the glare of the morning sun behind me. Would Granny Clem or Mama be able to look at me and see what I’d done? If they could, they never said so. Finally, I had a secret all my own.

  CLEMENTINE AND ORA TAUGHT Fern the secrets of their business. They taught her about the plants they grew and how to brew strong teas from roots and berries. They taught her to cool an angry wound and to bring heat to a cold infant. The mothers loved Fern. She had a way of calming squalling infants. Junior couldn’t believe how his sister had grown. No longer a scrawny child, at fifteen she was beautiful and sharp.

  Fern made dolls from the cloth scraps in Clementine’s mending basket and gave them as gifts to the newborns. She held the babies when they were first born, before they were wiped clean, and she listened to their first cries. She chose dolls based on what the infants needed. Some infants cried for warmth, others for wisdom or compassion; they all cried for love. Fern listened and gave them what they needed.

  Mothers coveted Fern’s rag dolls. Children cherished them. It was as if she’d sewed some magic into the dolls, something to soothe an aching heart, something to cure loneliness. In fact, she tucked dried herbs in the heart of each doll: lavender for peace and comfort, spearmint to spark energy, pokeroot for courage, valerian for protection.

  In the late afternoons, Fern often wandered across the narrow creek and crossed a set of train tracks to visit Melvin and his family. Melvin was a year older than Junior and Fern, and he looked after his little brothers and sisters while his father worked at the lumber mill and his mother worked in some white woman’s kitchen. Fern said she could talk to Melvin better than she could talk to anyone else, even Junior. Junior liked Melvin just fine, but he worried about Fern getting too cozy with a black boy. Lynchings were not unheard of in the woods around White Forest.

  Fern showed Melvin’s little sisters and brothers how to make dandelion chains. She told them stories about the strangling fig that could choke a cypress tree to death with its slow embrace. With Melvin, Fern shed her hat and pushed up the sleeves of her long dresses. She lay back in the grass and let the sun beat down on her face and arms. Melvin told her she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

  Junior scolded her about the sun. She was darker that summer than she’d ever been. Clementine and Ora both commented on how quickly her skin tanned, though they didn’t seem to mind. Junior nagged her about keeping her skin light, but she ignored him. She looked more and more like their mother. For seven years they’d lived in this town, they’d attended the white school, they called Clementine their mother and Chester their brother. No one suspected they weren’t white, but how long could that last if Fern let her skin go dark? Clementine said people believed what you told them to believe. Maybe it was true. Maybe Fern could pass for white no matter the color of her skin. Junior tried to be optimistic. Everyone else was. World War II ended and men came home. Everyone seemed to have more money all of a sudden. People smiled in the streets. Even the German prisoners whistled as they chopped cotton, their days in this hot, flat land drawing to a certain close.

  Junior had begun spending time with a girl from town. Shirley was the daughter of a carpenter and the youngest child in a family full of boys. Her father drank too much, but when he was sober he made the prettiest furniture in town. Shirley let him kiss her behind the live oak tree near the quarry. When she touched him, it was like a stick of dynamite going off in his stomach. He told her he loved her and he believed what he was saying. What else could it mean, these explosions of longing? It was a time when most children grew up with no information about sex, but it was impossible to remain ignorant while living with Clementine and Ora. He knew how babies were made and how they were born. He hadn’t, until Shirley, understood the urgency behind it all. At night, he lay awake in a fever, touching himself again and again until he was raw with desire. He begged Shirley to let him touch her beneath her clothes, but she laughed and pushed him away. “My brothers will kill you.” He didn’t care. Death would be worth the pleasure.

  It didn’t occur to him that Fern might feel the same urgency. He thought girls were different. His connection with his sister stretched thin as they spent more time apart. Once they’d been joined so tightly he could hear her thoughts, but no more.

  Autumn brought a hint of coolness to the air most mornings, but the heat rolled in each afternoon. There was a movie theater twenty miles west and he and Chester often drove there on Saturday afternoons to watch westerns on the big
screen. The theater was air-conditioned. On a hot day it was heaven to sit for two hours in the cool dark and be carried away by a story. Junior loved stories. In October, they decided to see a film about the hunt for a Nazi spy. Fern decided to come along.

  He’d tried to get Shirley to join them, but she said she was going shopping with her mother and couldn’t get away. He knew Shirley didn’t care for Chester. She said he was too rough. Shirley had made some remarks about Fern, as well. She noticed Fern’s dark skin and said a lady shouldn’t spend so much time in the sun. He said his sister had always tanned easily.

  “A little too easily, if you ask me,” Shirley had said.

  At the theater, the man at the front door stared at Fern. “She’ll have to sit upstairs,” he said.

  “What are you saying?” Chester practically spit at the man.

  “Negros upstairs,” the man said.

  “She ain’t no Negro,” Chester said. “She’s my sister.”

  “And mine.” Junior was embarrassed that Chester had spoken up first.

  “Then I reckon you’re a pack of niggers and all of you should sit upstairs.”

  People in the lobby turned to stare. Junior’s face burned red. Chester’s face was red, too, though it was from anger rather than shame.

  Fern laughed. “I don’t care where we sit.”

  Chester punched the man in the face. The man’s nose bled and he howled. A security guard appeared and pulled Chester’s arms behind his back. Chester struggled and kicked. The guard pushed him out the front door.

  “Go on,” he said. “And don’t ever come back here.”

  “Let him go!” Fern grabbed onto Chester’s shirt. “He won’t do anything else.”

  “He’s banned from the theater,” the guard said. “All of you are. I don’t want to see any of you here again, you understand?”

  Junior pulled Fern away. Chester’s instinct was to fight and his was to run. What did that say about him? Did it make him smart or did it make him a coward?

  Chester broke free from the guard’s grasp and stumbled forward. He turned and spat on the guard’s shiny black boots. “You ain’t nothing,” he said. “You ain’t good enough to lick her shoe.”

  They ran to the car. Chester drove. Looking back, Junior saw a crowd of people watching, their faces full of hate and suspicion and rage. When they looked at Fern, they saw someone different. They didn’t see his beautiful, sensitive sister. They didn’t see a girl who could turn something worthless into a work of art. They saw a black girl running wild with two white boys. For years they’d leveled their hateful gazes at the Nazis across the ocean, but now they turned their sights toward home. Black people were getting uppity, they said. It was time to put them in their place.

  TEN

  WILLET NEVER LET GO of the idea that Pansy was alive, that she’d been taken by our father. If we found Daddy, we would find Pansy, he said. I didn’t expect to find Pansy and I’d long given up on Daddy. Both of them seemed bigger, somehow, in their absence than when they were with us. They were fanciful, like characters from the fairy tales, and I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to find they were living as birds or beasts under an evil spell. Maybe they were watching us. Any notion seemed as good as another, but none seemed likely.

  Willet didn’t care what was likely. He saw Pansy everywhere. He called me from Memphis and Baton Rouge and Gulf Shores to tell me about some girl he’d seen at the mall or at a diner or at a fruit stand on the side of the road.

  “It could be her,” he said.

  “Pansy would be older now.” She’d been missing for nearly four years, I reminded him. She wouldn’t be the same.

  Still, he kept looking.

  Working construction left him wrung out and dirty, and he hated the tall buildings. Some of the men never clipped into a safety harness. “They’re like goats,” he said. “Goddamned fearless goats.” Willet never got over the fear of falling. “You can’t know what it’s like up there. You think these buildings are sturdy and straight, but I’m here to tell you they sway like a playground swing in a strong wind.”

  I begged him not to tell me about it. What would we do if something happened to Willet? The money I made working with Granny Clem might buy our groceries and pay the phone bill but it wouldn’t stretch any further. Willet supported us, but it wasn’t his income I worried about losing. I’d lost one sibling. I couldn’t lose another.

  “Come home,” I said. “Quit and do something else.”

  But nothing else paid as well as working construction. A young man like Willet, with no wife and kids, could work steadily. He could move around and sleep in ugly trailers on the job site or cheap motels nearby. He worked hard and kept his fears hidden. Between jobs, he came home and did what needed doing around the house: he painted the front porch, patched shingles on the roof, yanked out a section of rot from one corner of the garage. I finished high school and worked longer hours with Granny Clem. Willet said I ought to go to college, but we couldn’t afford it. Plus, Mama needed me. Who else would keep her stocked with cigarettes and sweet tea? Who else would make sure she ate a little something every day? Who else would shame her into taking a bath once a week? It seemed like nothing would ever change for Willet and me. We’d been set on a path when Pansy disappeared and there were no detours in sight.

  Then, in July of 1980, Daddy turned up in a motel room in Everglades City, Florida. His body turned up, I mean. He’d checked into the motel three weeks earlier, paid cash for a month, and told the cleaning lady to skip his room. He wanted privacy. She’d obliged. Cleanliness was not a high priority at the Glades Motel. It was the sort of place where people paid for one night and left after two hours. The whole month might have passed without anyone finding Daddy, but someone complained about the smell.

  The police at the scene said it was the worst thing they’d ever come across, worse even than the six-year-old boy who mistook the family pistol for a toy and shot his little sister through the brain, worse than the old woman who lost her left leg to an alligator while gigging for frogs. By the time they found Daddy, he was oozing like soft cheese, bloated and bruised from head to toe.

  The fat police officer from Pansy’s disappearance broke the news. He asked our mother to come to the sheriff’s office and look at some photos from the scene, but Mama said she was too sick to leave the house. I called Willet at the motel where he was staying in Ocean Springs. He drove clear across the state of Mississippi after a long day of work. We went to the sheriff’s office the next morning and looked at the grainy photos from Florida. We spoke to a detective there by phone and tried to see Daddy beneath the green and blue bloated flesh. It could have been anyone.

  “How can you be sure it’s him?” I asked.

  “His wallet was on the nightstand,” the detective said. “Driver’s license was inside it. He signed the registry as Earl Watkins.”

  “But what about fingerprints? Or dental records?” I watched cop shows on television. I thought detectives were supposed to check these things.

  “His hands are too degraded to get a fingerprint,” the detective said. “And he’s missing half his teeth. Gums are rotted black.”

  According to the detective, Daddy had been a common drunk who’d likely lived on the streets for a time. His body showed evidence of exposure.

  “Did you do an autopsy?” I asked.

  “The medical examiner didn’t think it necessary. There’s no evidence of foul play. He was found on the bed in the motel. We believe he drank himself to sleep and never woke up. We’ve seen it before. It happens more often than you think.”

  I’d seen Daddy drink, of course, but I’d never seen him drunk. And he was prideful about his appearance. He kept his hair short and neat, scraped underneath his nails, shaved every morning. It was hard to reconcile the photos and the detective’s explanation with anything I’d known about Daddy.

  “He’s been gone a long time,” the detective said. “Nearly four years? People can spir
al down quick.”

  Maybe that’s why he hadn’t come home. Maybe he was ashamed.

  “He was in trouble with the law,” the detective told us. “He spread counterfeit bills all over Fort Myers. They were bound to catch him eventually.”

  The man seemed to think we wouldn’t know anything about Daddy’s counterfeiting business and we didn’t contradict him. There was an outstanding warrant for Daddy in Mobile, Alabama. Daddy and Chester had been arrested for stealing a car in 1975, less than a year before he disappeared for good. Chester had done the time, a few months in county lockup, but Daddy skipped bail. I thought back to the year before Pansy disappeared and tried to remember anything unusual, but couldn’t. It was the last ordinary year.

  “Sometimes men find a way to die rather than be locked up,” the detective said. “I’m sorry for your loss. We need to know what you want to do with the body.”

  “Did he have anything with him?” Willet asked. “Did you check the closets and drawers?”

  “Nothing remarkable. Plaid shirt, pair of boots, an empty bottle of rum. Like I said, we think he’d been living on the streets.”

  “But he paid for a whole month at the motel,” Willet said.

  “Hard to say where he came by the money. Somebody tourist could have given him a wad of cash or maybe he stole it.”

  “Were there pictures in his wallet? Pictures of a girl, maybe?”

  The detective said the only thing in his wallet was the expired Mississippi driver’s license.

  “So you don’t think he was traveling with a child?”

  The fat policeman who’d brought us to the station interrupted. “We were looking for this man in 1976. His youngest daughter disappeared. Thought he might have something to do with it.”

  The detective cleared his throat. I heard rustling through the phone lines and imagined him flipping through a stack of papers. “No sign of a child. Look, if he’d been living on the streets with a little girl, I expect social services would’ve taken notice. We don’t have a big homeless problem in Everglades City. Most of our homeless end up in Fort Lauderdale or Miami. More tourists to panhandle, more bridges to sleep under.”