Three Rivers Page 4

  The boy removed his hat and knelt. He looked up at Obi and narrowed his eyes. “How could you? He didn’t hurt you. He was just a little messed up.”

  The blond boy grasped at the ground with his hands as if to keep from falling, though he was already splayed flat. Blood spurted from his neck like a fountain, then slowed to a steady stream. It was so much blood. The gurgling stopped. He stared up at Obi, eyes wide.

  Obi shook his head. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to.”

  Samuel backed away. “I can’t stay here. I have a family.”

  Liam called to him. “Daddy.”

  “It was an accident,” Obi said. “He came at me first.” He looked at the smaller boy, saw his face for the first time, and realized he wasn’t a boy at all.

  “I’m sorry, miss. I’m so sorry.” Obi wished he’d never shot the deer, never camped on this piece of land, never pulled the knife from his belt.

  Liam was at Obi’s side. Samuel disappeared with his family.

  “My father is going to kill me.” The girl sobbed; her nose ran. “What am I supposed to do?”

  Reese was still alive, still grappling the earth. Maybe the cut wasn’t deep enough to kill. Obi didn’t want to be a killer, didn’t want his son to think of him as a killer.

  “I’m not even supposed to be here. He’s going to kill me.”

  Obi put Liam in the truck and locked the door. “Don’t move,” he said. He yanked down their tent and tossed it into the bed of the truck, a heap of poles and canvas. The stew pot went on top. The campsite was a mess, bottles and scraps of food, cigarette butts and debris lay scattered around the fire. Normally, Obi left a campsite cleaner than he’d found it. He wished he could clean up now, leave no trace, but there wasn’t time. Better to leave a bunch of fingerprints than to risk leaving only his own.

  The boy on the ground moaned and the girl continued to cry.

  “Oh, I’m in so much trouble,” the girl said. “I’m not even supposed to be with these guys. My father is going to kill me.”

  Obi paused for just a moment as he climbed into his truck. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell him about this. Maybe you shouldn’t tell anyone.” He hadn’t meant it as a threat, but that’s how it sounded. The girl’s eyes got wide and she stumbled, falling back onto the ground.

  Obi drove as fast as he dared. He didn’t want to scare his son any more than he already had, and he couldn’t risk being pulled over. He leaned forward, both hands on the wheel, his jaw clenched; sweat poured down his back collar.

  “Everything’s okay,” he told Liam. “Everything’s gonna be fine. Don’t you worry. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” It was a promise Obi intended to keep, no matter what.

  Chapter Six

  Geneva was at that point in her pilgrimage when clarity returned. Whatever magic plants the women spiked her tea with were wearing off, and her hallucinations faded into revelation. She understood one thing good and clear: It was time to tell her daughter everything. She’d been trying to protect Melody from the awful truth, but she couldn’t protect anyone from the truth by keeping her mouth shut. The truth was there whether she gave voice to it or not.

  Greedy as a suckling pig, she squeezed ice-cold water from a soft cloth into her mouth. It dribbled down her chin and chest, and it carried the flavor of memory. Sharp and metallic and pulled up from a deep well, it carried the taste of things most people want filtered out of their water. Geneva shivered. After the hot sauna and the cave, she was so thirsty she forgot what it meant to drink. If the woman beside her hadn’t grabbed it, she’d have swallowed the cloth.

  The water brought Geneva fully to her senses. Melody had to know the truth. Without the truth, she would never understand. Melody blamed her for every damned horrible thing that ever happened. Maybe she deserved it. Maybe not. Either way, Melody needed to know what she’d been spared. She needed to know how much worse things could be, and how Geneva had saved her, saved them both. Geneva wished her own mother had bared her soul at some point in her own pathetic life. Perhaps she could have saved herself. Perhaps she could have spared Geneva.

  “Let’s get started,” the woman at her side said. “It’s time.”

  Geneva followed her out into the settling heat of the early evening. The horizon shimmered in the distance, and for all she could see, there was nothing but grass and trees and the dark rich dirt of the land stretching out to eternity. Like Lot’s wife, she turned to glance at the small gray house with the sauna and the few cool rooms where women waited to begin their journey. The haint blue windows and doors seemed to wink at her. The color, crayon bright and deceptively cheerful, was rumored to ward off ghosts and repel evil. The front door was flanked by an impressive pair of bottle trees, the largest Geneva had ever seen. Sometimes when the sun was high and bright enough, the bottles would glint and glimmer until people claimed the light could be seen shining clear to Memphis. People claimed all sorts of things.

  She turned her eyes back to the vast landscape and walked. The woman led her in the direction of the waning sun. The soft dress swirled around her legs like a purring cat. Her bare feet sank into the cool black soil. Staring ahead made Geneva’s eyes swim with dark spots, ghosts, and ghoulies from her past. She swatted at them, shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare with a cupped hand. Her head throbbed as the sun slid slowly down the sky. Finally, the old beast melted into the far horizon. The air cooled just enough as the sky went orange, then pink, then gray. Fireflies filled the darkness. Glow and fade, glow and fade, like fairies lighting the way. Geneva smiled, remembered rare summer evenings as a girl when she was free to run outside and dance with the fireflies.

  The sharp, sour scent of fertilizer filled her nose. Memories of dancing gave way to memories of her father working the land. That land had been something of value once, not because anyone would give them a heap of cash for it, but because it produced cotton and good food and honest work. Now it was just one more burden she had to tote.

  They walked on through farmland that was still being farmed. The scrubby stalks and tender shoots that would soon turn into something worth wearing or eating or pressing into oil lay all around them like a great promise. She knew farmers and their wives all over the Delta were home now, praying for the weather. Dear God, send us rain, but not too much. Bring us heat, but not too high. Bring us breezes, but not wind. Worthless conversations, because God never listened. Or if he listened, he didn’t give a hoot. That was probably more like it. God just didn’t give a hoot about a bunch of poor farmers in the Mississippi Delta. Well, they could keep their god, Geneva thought. She had Pisa.

  * * *

  By they time they stopped walking, Geneva was so tired, she could spit. The woman spread an old wool blanket on the ground, and Geneva collapsed onto her back. The ground beneath her was unforgiving, but she didn’t care. She closed her eyes to the fisherman’s moon. Crickets chirped and a lone bullfrog croaked. Geneva slept like a corpse.

  Chapter Seven

  SUNDAY

  Melody’s train pulled into the station at just after nine in the morning. It had not been a restful night, but that was nothing new. Three years of sleeping on the cramped tour bus or in cheap hotels had left her feeling perpetually hungover. She squinted into the morning sun and raised her hands above her head, bending backward and forward to loosen out the kinks in her body. In some parts of the country, people would pay good money to be ordered into these positions, but yoga had not yet brought its sun salutations to White Forest. Melody sighed and set out walking.

  After George Walter and Bernice had dropped her off at the Memphis station, and after she’d checked the schedule and purchased a ticket for the 6:50 A.M. train, she’d wandered into the gift shop and bought a T-shirt featuring the BeDazzled face of a young, thin Elvis. The extra-large T-shirt hung on her like a dress or a nightgown, but it covered the rip in her pants.

  She’d tried to sleep on the hard wooden benches at the train station, but they reminded her of c
hurch pews and sent her dreaming about Bobby’s botched baptism. She dreamed about it plenty, no matter where she slept. In the early morning, she startled herself awake shouting, “Mama, no!” When she opened her eyes, still half in her dream, an old whore wearing a hot-pink halter top stood over her, breasts sagging dangerously. “Mama’s here,” the old whore rasped and Melody saw that the woman had no teeth. After that, she’d given up on sleep.

  Melody awakened to a truth most people discover at some point: The more you try to forget something, the larger the memory looms. Melody had been trying to forget about Bobby’s baptism since she witnessed it at the age of fourteen. As a result, she thought about it all the time. It came to her in flashes throughout the day, stalking her and pouncing when she was most vulnerable. She didn’t understand why it should haunt her so relentlessly. Bobby didn’t seem to dwell on it. Her mother did not speak of it. Her father handled it as he handled everything, with a mix of resignation and rage.

  * * *

  This was what she tried to forget.

  Bobby was eleven when he answered the call of the Lord. It was summertime and hot then, as it was now. They worshipped in a small, old church while a new sanctuary was built. The congregation looked to that new sanctuary with as much reverence as they looked toward God. When Pastor Tuttle announced they would worship in the new church the very next week, Bobby sprinted up the aisle to dedicate his soul, determined to be the first body dunked in the new baptismal pool.

  For the past year, the church had contracted with a nearby hotel to use its pool once a month for baptisms. It was awkward when guests in town for reunions or weddings came down on Sunday mornings to swim off their Saturday night hangovers. Before that, they’d done all their baptisms in the Tallahatchie River. That’s where Melody was dunked, where she felt the cool squish of mud between her toes, where she ate sour cream cake and fried chicken while the sun and a warm breeze dried her hair. It was perfect until little Johnny McPherson was bit by a water moccasin at his baptism. Plenty of folks said Johnny was an evil child and the devil had come back in that old familiar form to claim his soul. That Johnny survived and went on to brag about his brush with death just reinforced the gossip. Most people, though, knew you could enter snake-infested waters only so many times without getting bit. Those people began raising money for a new sanctuary, snake-free baptismal pool included.

  Bobby didn’t care a bit about being baptized, but he cared quite a lot about being first. He was beautiful, with eyelashes that cast shadows on his porcelain cheeks and thick black hair that he wore just a little too long. He was vain and dramatic and stubborn. Melody reminded him his mortal soul was on the line, but she didn’t mean it. She wanted to see her brother dunked in that magnificent, elevated, tile-lined pool as much as he wanted to be seen.

  * * *

  On the morning of the baptism, every seat was filled. People who showed up for church only at Christmas and Easter were there, wearing their finest clothes. The new sanctuary was spectacular with gleaming polished oak pews. The choir wore new rich purple robes with gold embroidery around the neck and arms. Melody, Bobby, and Mama sat in the third row. Melody’s father could not be lured to church for any reason. When the choir rose to sing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Bobby slipped through a side door behind the choir loft. Pastor Tuttle followed. The choir sang on and on. When they finished, Pastor Tuttle emerged clad in dark robes. He stepped down into the pool. A soft light emanated from the water and shone on his face. A microphone was attached to one side of the pool, and Pastor Tuttle took it in his hands. “Friends and family in the Lord.” His voice boomed, magnified by the microphone and tiles. When Bobby appeared behind the pastor, poised to step down into the water, Melody put a fist to her mouth. She was overcome with the beauty of her little brother, and not for the first time. Pastor Tuttle stepped to one side and offered his hand to Bobby. Bobby smiled, turned his head left and right, drawing out the moment for full effect. He looked heavenward, then reached down to take the pastor’s hand. That was when it all went wrong.

  The microphone slipped from the pastor’s hand and splashed into the water. Pastor Tuttle yelped, and disappeared. Bobby’s beautiful face contorted. His neck snapped back like someone having a seizure. Melody’s mother broke the stunned silence, screaming, “Let go. Let go! Let go!” She didn’t need a microphone to be heard. Bobby jerked, spasmed, fell back onto the hard tile steps. Time passed, though Melody would never know how much, and the sound of a bleating ambulance grew louder until it was deafening. Sunshine poured down the aisle of the church as a pair of paramedics rushed in.

  The congregation remained in the pews, some standing, some slumping forward, but Melody’s mother moved. She sprinted through the door Bobby had entered earlier and reappeared in the baptismal pool, where she sank down on the top step and pulled Bobby onto her lap. Her skirt, a beautiful linen the color of butter pecan ice cream, gaped open, revealing a glimpse of her lavender silk panties, a disturbing detail that would remain vivid in Melody’s memory for the rest of her life. Mama stroked Bobby’s hair and seemed to speak to him, though he didn’t respond. One of the paramedics appeared and reached for Bobby. Mama reared her head back and hissed. The paramedic stumbled, nearly fell into the water. He looked confused. “Mama,” Melody said, her voice too soft to be heard. She spoke up. “Mama, you have to let him go. Let them take him.” Mama’s lips kept moving; her hands stroked Bobby’s face. It was too much, too intimate a display for church, no matter how dire the situation. Melody’s face went hot. “Please.” She appealed to the paramedic. “Please help my little brother.” The paramedic locked eyes with her and she saw that he was scared and very young, but he nodded and pried Bobby from Mama’s grasp, checked for a pulse, put his mouth on Bobby’s mouth, until Bobby’s hands fluttered around the man’s face. He lifted Bobby, carried him into the main sanctuary, placed him on a stretcher, and wheeled him down the aisle. A second stretcher carried Pastor Tuttle, who was still and gray and obviously dead. Finally, they came back for Melody’s mother, who twitched and cried out some sort of gibberish. No one came for Melody, who was left to wonder what would happen next.

  * * *

  Now Melody walked toward town. Rain clouds gathered to the south, a thick gray mass that hung in the sky like a warning, but the sky above was clear blue. The town smelled just as she remembered, sharp and sweet and smoky. It was the scent of fertilizer mixed with poison exhaust from old trucks. The familiarity of the town was terrifying. She couldn’t stop thinking about George Walter and his predictions. History repeats, he’d told her. You are your mother, he’d warned. Was that what it meant to come back here? Was she following in her mother’s path as she walked these streets? God, she hoped not. She traveled west, in the direction of Main Street, passing the line of grain bins and an old water tower marked with graffiti. Shabby cinder block houses and ramshackle fix-it shops gave way to wood frame houses, tidy redbrick homes, and whitewashed storefronts. An old man wearing dirty overalls and no shirt sat on the front steps of a shotgun house that had once been painted a cheerful yellow by the look of the strips that hung off the sides and dripped onto the ground. The yard was littered with old tires, bits of scrap metal, and what looked like a brand-new toilet. Melody nodded at the man and said, “Mornin’.” The man’s head barely bobbed in response. He took a sip from the can wrapped in a brown paper bag that he held between his skinny knees.

  The town had not changed, but it seemed to Melody that it had shrunk. Stores were closed at this hour; most wouldn’t open at all on a Sunday. In the window of Murray’s Department Store, a pair of enormous overalls was on display with a sign reading: ALL SIZES IN STOCK! XXXLARGE AND BEYOND! Abel’s Hardware was so crammed with tools and lumber and buckets of paint that there was no room for a window display. Instead, the window contained a thick mangle of garden rakes and push brooms. She walked over to the Ruby Cafe, where she once ate so much fried shrimp and chocolate meringue pie that she later puked it all up
right on Mama’s good leather shoes. Melody could smell the yeast rolls baking in the back kitchen, the early prep for Sunday dinner. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten since before the performance last night. She walked on. An old black-and-gray dog slept outside the Trading Post building. When Melody passed, the mutt raised its head and watched her with suspicious eyes.

  She knew where she had to go, though it meant visiting a place she’d sworn long ago to avoid. What would George Walter have to say about that? She turned on Church Street with determination. She passed by the imposing stained glass of Immaculate Heart and the large stone entryway of Holy Mary. She passed the revival tent outside Riverside Pentecostal and then kept walking past the Church of Christ and Wesley United Methodist. She would not go so far as Old Glory Baptist, First AME, or Leflore Trinity, and she wouldn’t make it to Good Shepherd Lutheran or First Baptist or Ridgewood Baptist. She stopped outside the church she’d not entered since the day she tried to forget: Crossroads Baptist, with its white cross piercing the morning sky, and pale pink tea roses lining the walkway. The early service would begin soon; a few stragglers lingered outside the front doors. She hadn’t stepped foot inside the church since Bobby’s baptism, and she would not enter the sanctuary now. Instead, she trudged across the damp grass to the area behind the church where the Dumpsters stood, their ugly, gray, necessary bulk hidden from the worshippers. A group of teenage boys with oily skin and gelled hair stood smoking.

  The boys tossed their cigarettes when she approached, ducked their heads and swore they were headed right in to hear the sermon. She gave them twenty dollars to drive her home. They let her ride shotgun in an old, rusty Camaro. Rock music blared from a stereo with one busted speaker that cracked and popped beneath the guitars and drum solos. She directed them toward the old county road, where men posted signs advertising farm equipment for sale and where families would set up truck bed storefronts offering homemade jam, fresh boiled peanuts, and whole fruit pies for purchase. The road was deserted on a Sunday morning and the air from the open window was thick with moisture and foreboding. It was a road like every other road in the Delta, straight and seemingly infinite in length. To Melody, it felt like a road traversing time rather than distance. The wide acres of cotton and soybeans, broken up by dense stretches of loblolly pines, were the same today as they had been ten years before and ten years before that. An old rusty cotton thresher leaned precariously at the side of the road and Melody recognized it from years earlier, the only difference a steady advance of kudzu. Nothing changed here, except to be swallowed up by the earth.