The Past Is Never Page 3

  But the house was never right. His daughter said she was always cold inside its walls. She kept the fireplace burning even during the hottest days of summer. Every meal that was cooked in the woodstove came out ruined. She slept too often, even in the middle of the day. She produced no children. She told her husband her womb was too cold to carry a child. Nothing went right. On a warm summer night while they slept, an errant spark escaped the fireplace and settled on the woven rug covering the wood floors. The spark smoldered and gathered strength. Flames leapt through the main room, catching the curtains and a pile of quilting scraps. By the time the woman and her husband woke, the house was filled with smoke. They made it out and watched as the house burned to the ground. After the ashes were cleared, the only thing that remained was the bed of stones from the quarry. The woman came down with a persistent cough and spent the next year trying to catch her breath. Her lungs failed. She died exactly one year from the date of the fire. She was twenty years old. Her husband moved on, married another woman, but the plantation owner lived out his life in mourning. He felt responsible for his daughter’s death. He blamed the house.

  His slaves knew better. They held their children close and told them stories about how the land could turn evil. They warned the children not to play with the gray polished rocks from the quarry.

  “Those are Satan’s stones,” they said. “Don’t you steal from the Devil.”

  TWO

  WHEN I GOT HOME from the quarry, I could smell the ordinary odors of supper being cooked. In the kitchen, a pot of butterbeans simmered low and slow on the stovetop. Cornbread, golden and fresh from the oven, sat in a cast-iron skillet on the counter. A bowl filled with sliced okra tossed in flour and cornmeal waited beside the stove, ready for frying. Mama came in the back door holding a jar of pepper jelly she’d fetched from the garage.

  “I was starting to fret.” Mama pressed the glass jar into my hands.

  I twisted the jelly lid, part of a batch we’d put up last summer. Mama turned up the heat on the skillet for the okra. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth. She talked around it, smoke seeping forth with each word.

  “Y’all get washed up for supper.”

  “But, Mama …” The lid popped loose.

  “Stand back, Roberta Lynn. This oil might splatter.”

  I moved away from the stove, listened to the oil hiss and spit. I didn’t want to tell her about Pansy. I didn’t want to set all that worry in motion. I wanted to fill my plate with good food and watch something silly on television. Maybe if I stalled, Willet would come through the door with Pansy. Maybe everything would be okay.

  I pulled plates from the cabinet and stacked them on the dining table along with a pile of forks and a spoon for the jelly. I looked out the window, hoping to see Willet and Pansy walking toward the house, but the street was empty. Back in the kitchen, Mama tucked fat pats of butter into warm slices of cornbread.

  I wished Daddy were home.

  In the bathroom, I ran my hands under the faucet until Mama called out and said to hurry up because the food was getting cold. Time seemed to slow down, but everything happened too fast. I turned off the faucet and wiped the drops from the porcelain basin with a bit of tissue. I sat on the toilet without any plans to use it, elbows resting on my knees, head propped in my hands. My heartbeat seemed to echo against the dingy tile floor. My chest felt tight and hollow. I flushed the unused toilet, watched the clean water swirl in the bowl, then ran my hands under the faucet again.

  No amount of stalling would keep me from facing Mama. The bathroom door creaked when I pushed it open. The hallway seemed to expand into a long tunnel. I moved slowly, hoping Willet would come through the front door with Pansy and everything would go back to normal. Mama gave me a strange look. She seemed young and vulnerable. Her old shorts and faded blouse were dusted with flour and spotted with grease. She never did bother to put on an apron when she cooked. Her feet were bare. She wore no makeup and her hair was pushed back off her face with a cheap plastic headband. A moist line of sweat beaded across her upper lip.

  I couldn’t tell Mama Pansy was missing. I couldn’t say it. Bad news about Pansy would be the worst news of all. It would be better if I disappeared, or Willet. Mama would trade us both for Pansy, I suspected. I couldn’t say the words. She knew, though. She read my face and knew something was very wrong.

  “Where are they?” she asked, her voice soft, without a hint of tremor. “Where?” Mama sank onto the living room couch with a thud.

  The cold knowledge of how we’d failed Mama by leaving Pansy in the quarry became all too clear. We were older and should know better. She’d trusted us. We were supposed to watch our sister, to keep her safe. Pansy was still a baby. Pansy was Mama’s baby. Willet would find her, I thought. Willet could do anything. I remembered the time he killed a snake with a pellet gun, the time he swung himself onto the roof to fetch a stray ball and how he’d dropped from that great height with the gracefulness of a cat. When I came down with the chicken pox, Willet colored with me in the cheap paper books brought over by the church ladies, even though he’d outgrown such things. Willet had never let me down. He was brave and strong and fearless. He would bring Pansy home. He had to.

  But when Willet came through the front door, he was alone. Mama and I were still staring at one another, both of us working up the courage to speak. I don’t know if we’d been like that for an hour or for five minutes. The timeline of that day is all wonky in my mind. Willet said some things I can’t remember. What I do remember is how he looked. All of a sudden, my brother looked like a man. When Mama went to stand, he reached out and held her arm, steadying her in a gentle way. At some point, he put on a shirt, as if walking around half-naked was too casual for our current situation. He stood with Mama while she called the police and spun the dial for her when her hands shook. He put on a pot of coffee and turned off all the burners on the stove. How did he know what to do? Had he been preparing himself for tragedy? Had he rehearsed this moment in his mind?

  Meanwhile, I remained useless and clumsy. I dropped a water glass in the kitchen and gashed my thumb trying to clean up the shards. Blood crept across my palm like a lazy river. Willet thrust my injured hand under a stream of cold water and wrapped it in a kitchen towel. He could see I was feeling woozy. He held my shoulders and looked straight into my face. It was like looking in a mirror. We had the same brown eyes, the same freckles across our pale cheeks, the same dishwater hair. His face was sharper and wider than mine, but no one could ever doubt we were related.

  “We need to help Mama,” he said. “Do you understand?”

  Help her do what, I wondered. What could we possibly do to make this mess right? We could find Pansy and bring her home. Nothing else would be any help at all.

  A car pulled into our driveway. It was a police cruiser, but there were no flashing lights or sirens, just two uniformed officers with notebooks. Mama brought them right inside our house. Daddy wouldn’t like that, I thought. Even from where I stood I could smell the bleach from the laundry room where Daddy worked. He had a cardboard box full of bleached bills stashed behind the washing machine. It’s not like you could stumble over it but it wasn’t exactly locked up tight. Mama didn’t seem worried about any of that. She cared about Pansy, of course, and nothing else.

  The officers, one fat and balding, one thin with a thick afro, talked to Mama. They wrote down information about Pansy’s height and weight and age and hair color. They questioned Willet and me, together at first, then separately. We answered whatever they asked until the questions ran together like wet paint.

  What time did you leave Pansy to eat berries? What time did you leave the quarry? Neither of us wore a watch. Why didn’t Pansy stay with you? She wasn’t hungry. She’d rather swim. When did you last see your father? A few weeks ago. Was anyone else with you? No. Bubba Speck was there but just for a minute. What time was that? I don’t know. Would Pansy leave on her own? I don’t think so. Would Pansy
leave with Bubba? I don’t know. Was she angry with you for any reason? No. I don’t know. Where is your father? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

  The skinny officer asked Mama for a list of Pansy’s friends or neighbors she might visit. Mama looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “We’re her whole world.”

  Oh, God.

  I sat with the fat officer and answered more questions, one hopeless response after another. It was hot and I wanted to reach out and wipe away the stream of sweat from his bulging jaw. The scent of vegetable oil gone cold and slightly rancid settled around us. My stomach growled, though I couldn’t imagine eating anything.

  I answered the officer’s questions, but I didn’t offer any additional details. I didn’t tell him about the creature from the woods; it was too fantastic and it seemed like a bad dream. I told him I’d returned to the quarry just after the storm. That’s when I’d seen Bubba and realized Pansy was missing. The officer had a lot of questions about Bubba, but I couldn’t answer anything in a way that seemed to satisfy him. “Bubba wouldn’t hurt Pansy,” I told him.

  Sweat trickled from the officer’s forehead to his neck. He wheezed a bit whenever he took a deep breath. The buttons of his uniform strained against his bulging belly. He had the look of a man about to burst. He asked me what Bubba and I talked about at the quarry.

  “We didn’t,” I said.

  He grunted and scribbled in his notebook, thanked me for my time, and said he might want to ask me more questions later.

  By the time they finished with us, I thought that day was the only day there ever was. It was impossible to imagine we would eat or brush our teeth or put on pajamas or go to sleep. It didn’t seem possible we’d ever wake up to a different day. The options narrowed to nothing. It seemed I would sit and nod or shake my head for an eternity.

  While we had answered questions, two men in scuba gear dove deep into the quarry to search for Pansy. Here is what they found: a 1969 Volkswagen bug, a Japanese motorbike turned to pure rust, two identical refrigerators, three hunting rifles and one pistol, a machete, enough dog bones to make a pack, hundreds of amber beer bottles, an old guitar, coins of every denomination, a burlap sack filled with the carcasses of a litter of kittens, five ladder-back dining chairs, three barstools, a plastic box containing syringe plungers, a backpack filled with swollen school books. Here is what they did not find: Pansy.

  After the officers left, Lorna Speaks came over from across the street. She was a religious woman, who was always trying to get us to go to the Baptist church. We went occasionally, on Easter or near Christmas, but Mama never made us go on an ordinary Sunday. Neither she nor Daddy were particularly religious. It was one more thing that set us apart from other families. Most of the folks we knew were devout; even the terrible people made it to church every week.

  I knew Lorna must have been watching from her living room window, curious to the point of shaking about the cops at our house. Mama always said she was the nosiest woman on the face of the earth, but Mama didn’t turn her away. She told her about Pansy and let Lorna pull her in for a long hug. When Lorna started praying, Mama bowed her head and clasped Lorna’s hands.

  “Dear Lord,” Lorna said, “lift up this family in their time of trouble. We pray for you to return Pansy safely to her home, to keep her from harm, to fold her up in your love and protection. In your name, we pray. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Mama said.

  I had never heard Mama pray before.

  Willet offered Lorna a cup of coffee. His manners were suddenly impeccable. He called her ma’am. It was like everyone in our family had transformed in some terrible way. I didn’t want a brother with good manners. I didn’t want a mother who prayed. All I wanted was for everything to go back to normal. I wanted Pansy to wander home and tell us some fantastic story about where she’d been and what she’d done. Most of all, I wanted my Daddy. He would know what to do, and he would not be dazzled by nosy neighbors and probing police officers. Daddy would fix things the way he always did, without bringing in a bunch of outsiders.

  Mama sat with Lorna at the dinner table, both of them letting mugs of coffee go cold between their hands. Willet and I cleaned up the uneaten supper. I took a bite of the cornbread and it swelled like wet sand in my mouth. We scraped everything into the garbage and piled the dishes into a pail of soapy water in the sink. Willet told Mama we’d wash the dishes in the morning. He asked if she needed anything.

  Mama shook her head and I realized she wasn’t making eye contact with Willet. She was mad at him, mad at both of us for leaving Pansy. This whole mess was our fault and no amount of polite helpfulness was going to fix anything.

  It was late by then, but there was no question of trying to sleep. I couldn’t stand being alone in the bedroom I shared with Pansy, so I huddled with Willet in his room. I couldn’t stop talking. How could this have happened? How could we fix it? Maybe if we’d done this or that, things would be different. I poked at the day from every angle, trying to find a path that led somewhere other than where we were. Willet let me ramble. He interjected occasionally to tell me it wasn’t my fault. He was the oldest. He should have been more responsible. He spoke in a sad, flat tone that scared me. One of the things I loved most about my brother was the way everything sounded more interesting coming from his mouth. He cussed to great effect. He used bad grammar even though he knew better, and it made everything he said sound rough and exciting. I admired his talent for getting at the truth through exaggeration. He had nothing clever to say about Pansy, though, which told me how dire things were.

  I droned on and on, scared to let the cold silence fall around us, but I didn’t mention what I’d seen in the woods. If I told Willet about the creature he would say I was making stuff up, letting my imagination go wild. He said we needed to find our father. I couldn’t disagree with that. Mama would surely feel better with Daddy home, but Willet’s aim was not to provide comfort for our mother. Willet thought Daddy had something to do with Pansy’s disappearance. I couldn’t understand the logic. If Daddy were going to take someone on one of his adventures, it should have been me.

  “He wouldn’t do that to Mama,” I said.

  Willet sat quiet for a long time. When he spoke, he sounded serious and sad. He said our father was not a good man. He said he wouldn’t care about Mama’s feelings. He said Daddy would take anything he wanted, including our sister, and he wouldn’t care who got hurt in the process.

  I couldn’t believe it. Willet’s relationship with our father was a hard one, but it was because Willet was a boy and the oldest. Daddy had to be harder on him than he was on me and Pansy. The idea that our father would snatch our sister up and take her away with him didn’t seem right. But nothing seemed right.

  “At least,” I said, “if Daddy took her, she’s safe.”

  Willet said I shouldn’t be too sure about that.

  I knew Willet felt responsible for Pansy. We both did. We’d left her alone in the quarry while we fed our hungry bellies. We’d turned away when we should have been watching, both of us selfish and thoughtless and weak. Maybe Pansy got up out of that quarry and walked away on her own. Maybe the creature from the woods carried her away. Maybe she sank into the deep water, her flesh turned liquid. None of it seemed possible and yet she was gone.

  HE HAD SEEN MEN come home from war. He’d seen their dead eyes, but the wars fought overseas didn’t haunt him in the same way as the wars fought at home. He’d read about the battles, the ones that took place nearby and the ones farther away where whole towns burned to the ground. The war had so many names: the War of Northern Aggression, the War Between the States, the War for Southern Independence, and, of course, the Civil War, which seemed the least accurate name of all. The old people of White Forest referred to it simply as our recent unpleasantness, and it did seem recent. More than a hundred years gone by, but he could hear the crack of the muskets and smell the sulfurous gunpowder smoke. He could feel the creep of gangrene in ever
y scrape of his legs. He heard the shouts and whispers of the men as they led their horses across the rivers. Mostly he heard the voices of those who stayed home: the elderly, the women, the children, the slaves. The voices of the powerless were the loudest voices of all.

  In 1862 Confederate soldiers needed something more stable than conviction and mud to march upon. Slaves moved from the cotton fields to the quarry and from the quarry to the roads. They spread the stones with a mixture of clay and silt across roads prone to washout from nearby rivers.

  While the men worked on the roads and in the fields and at the quarry, their wives and daughters and sisters worked in the kitchens of stately plantation homes and modest houses. The women were invisible, or so it seemed, because the people in those houses talked about things as if they weren’t standing there listening. This was how the women heard news of slaves rising up and taking freedom by force. This was how they learned about a community of former slaves settled deep in the Florida Everglades where no white man would trespass, and if he dared, he would be shot on sight.

  Ungrateful, said the white women. Disgraceful, said the old men.

  The house slaves took news back to the field slaves. Over meager meals of grits or cornbread, they talked about the war and whether its end would mean anything to them. One man, neither field slave nor house servant, heard everything. Moses Fortune distinguished himself by learning to read and write as a young boy. No one knew how he’d acquired these skills. Neither of his parents was literate and the only book he ever saw was the Bible. Even the ugliest landowners would permit their slaves a Bible, though they considered them beyond redemption. It was the Christian thing to do. Moses stared at the Bible as a child of seven and eight and nine years old. His mother teased him about it, told him he’d go cross-eyed if he didn’t stop squinting at the squiggles on the page. When he was ten years old, he stood up after supper one evening and began to read aloud from the book.