The Past Is Never Read online

  Mosquitoes buzzed across my face and neck, and I didn’t bother to swat them away. Welts rose on my exposed skin. My cheeks and neck grew inflamed and swollen. One step and another step and another and I made it to the edge of the woods. My eyes were burned out from staring too directly into the blazing white sun, but I didn’t stop to let them adjust. It seemed important to keep moving forward into the darkness, into the shadows where the creature lived.

  The woods thrummed with life, though the birds were silent. The trees beckoned me forward. Fear perched high and tight in my chest. Cool pine needles pressed against my blistered feet. A branch reached out and scraped my face. I found the berry brambles where we’d eaten the sweet fruit. They gave off a sugary fragrance that made my stomach ache, but the berries didn’t look the same. I’d remembered them as black raspberries, but these berries were dark purple and smooth. Why were my memories from that day so unreliable? I walked away from the berries, retracing my steps, but I came upon no clearing. I doubled back, found the berries again, and set off in a different direction. Maybe I’d been disoriented in the storm. But no matter which direction I walked, I couldn’t find the clearing where I’d seen the creature. I walked in circles, weak and dizzy. When had I last eaten? I couldn’t remember. A spoonful of soggy banana pudding in the morning—or was that last night? I’d drunk nothing but coffee for a week. Our milk had soured, so I’d taken to drinking it black with a little sugar. My head ached terribly. My hands shook. My legs grew weak.

  I couldn’t find the clearing. I couldn’t find the creature. I couldn’t find my sister. And I didn’t have the energy to find my way home. The welts on my face and neck began to itch. My skin burned from too much sun. My brain seemed to waver and fade, leaving me with muddy thoughts and long lapses of nothing. I needed sleep. Before Pansy disappeared, it was so easy to slip into the warm drowsiness of a dark room, but now the darkness seemed filled with danger. Nightmares tore me awake at night, and only a steady intake of caffeine kept me going each day. I stretched out beneath a water oak and closed my eyes. The dirt warmed beneath my body. My heartbeat slowed. My arms and legs grew heavy. The soft chirp of insects chased away the bad thoughts. For the first time in days, I felt calm. Willet found me hours later, dead asleep underneath the tree. He shook me awake, his voice urgent and worried. “Bert, come on! You have to wake up.”

  I smiled at him. He seemed so far away, his voice echoing as if he were speaking into a tunnel.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  I told him he was silly. “This is where I belong.”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  It was early evening. I could tell by the softness of the dappled light coming through the trees. I’d never felt more comfortable or more relaxed. My body was limp and warm and heavy. I wanted to feel that way forever.

  “Goddammit! I’ve been worried sick. I thought someone took you, too.” Willet’s face hovered above mine. “Have you lost your fool mind?”

  Everything seemed funny. Pansy was part of some cosmic game of hide-and-seek. We’d find her if we followed the rules. “Count to one hundred,” I said.

  Willet carried me out of the woods. Orange police tape stretched across a line of trees and I wondered how I’d missed it on my way in.

  Willet stumbled, but held on to me. “I don’t know if I can carry you the whole way.”

  Even though I knew I was much too old and heavy to be carried, I didn’t offer to walk. It was so nice to be held and cared for by someone. Crickets and bullfrogs chirped and croaked in the twilight. Stars appeared above us. There was still a bit of silver light in the sky, but darkness was taking over. I’d been gone for half a day, at least.

  “Was Mama worried?”

  Willet didn’t say anything, just kept moving forward. He didn’t have to tell me. I knew the truth. Mama hadn’t noticed I was gone.

  HE BELIEVED IN EVIL, not in the abstract but as a living, breathing presence in the world. Men committed loathsome violence and no one held them accountable. Sometimes he dreamed of revenge or of justice, but mostly he wondered what made a person turn bad. Were some men born with a streak of evil? Was he? No matter how many different ways he looked at the stories, he never found an answer.

  After her father died, Clementine found work at the hardware store. She was seventeen and she needed the job. The owner added a section for gardening supplies and plants. Clementine told women when to cut back their roses and how to make azalea bushes grow tall and full. As a child, she had resisted helping her mother with her constant chores, but she had absorbed the information.

  The women who shopped at the hardware store brought in pictures, glossy ads from McClure’s or Colliers, and asked Clementine to help them recreate a particular bed of flowers. She understood what they wanted and she made substitutions to accommodate for the climate or growing season. While Clementine worked with plants, Ora taught herself medicine. She ordered large books from catalogs, and Clementine lugged the heavy packages home from the post office. Sometimes Ora asked Clementine to bring her a particular plant or herb. Some were readily available, but others she ordered special. Ora made teas for soothing a cough and boiled down the tea herbs with sugar to make hard candy cough drops. She bundled together a mix of herbs and roots for a fever compress.

  Sometimes Clementine would notice a woman at the store who suffered from a lingering cold or whose eyes were dark-rimmed with lack of sleep. “Come see Ora,” she told them. “Ora can help with that.”

  And Ora did help. Doctors told the women they were weak or hysterical, that their ailments were all in their mind. Ora took their complaints seriously. So many of the problems, Ora told Clementine, had to do with things the women didn’t want to discuss with the male doctors. Their cycles were unpredictable after childbirth or too heavy each month.

  “It always comes down to blood,” Ora said.

  Ora developed remedies for women who bled too much or too often, and for women whose blood didn’t come. She treated women for the crushing pain that preceded the blood each month and she helped soothe them after they gave birth, particularly when their husbands were too quick to reenter them. Clementine learned from Ora. She enjoyed the work with the herbs and plants. She enjoyed seeing women healed. Ora abandoned her old dark superstitions for the bright science of medicine.

  Though she preferred working with Ora, Clementine continued her work at the hardware store. She liked the promise of a steady paycheck, the feeling of independence it gave her. One evening she was finishing up inventory when a heavy storm rolled in. The sky poured gray rain and thunder rumbled. It was the sort of storm that would continue for hours, possibly until morning. She dreaded the walk home. Normally she rode a bicycle into town, but she’d had a flat on the ride home the day before. The walk was long, about three miles, but not unpleasant when the weather was fine. In the downpour she’d be soaked to the skin within minutes. The creek she usually rode through or waded across would be flooded. She’d have to take the longer route, sticking to roads and bridges rather than cutting through farms and fields.

  She decided to have coffee at the diner across the street. Maybe the rain would let up. Ora would be worried, but she would worry no matter what in this weather. They didn’t have a phone in the house. There was no way for Clementine to call and let Ora know her plans.

  At the diner, she ordered coffee and sat at the counter with an old copy of Scribner’s. A man she knew from the store appeared next to her. He slid a penny across the counter.

  “For your thoughts,” he said. Ray’s wife was a regular customer.

  She laughed. “I’m waiting out the weather.”

  “Might be waiting all night. It’s a gully washer.”

  She sipped her coffee. “I suppose I should just brave it.”

  “You on foot?”

  “It’s all I have,” she said. “How far?”

  “Oh, it’s not too bad. Just a few miles north of here, past Sand Creek.”


  “That’s a hike in this mess.”

  She shrugged. What was there to say?

  “It’s dark out.”

  “All the more reason to get moving, I suppose.”

  He offered to drive her, said his truck was right outside. He was on his way to work the night shift at the cotton gin. She asked if the drive would make him late for work and he said it wouldn’t make him late enough to matter. “Plenty of men will be late in this weather.”

  She thought she shouldn’t accept the ride. It wouldn’t look right for her to be climbing into a married man’s truck after dark, but the walk home would be treacherous and miserable.

  “I’m so grateful,” she said.

  His pickup truck was a nice automobile, well cared for and clean. He took her arm and held the door for her until she was seated with her skirt tucked underneath her. She told him which roads to take. The rain made the night seem darker than usual. No starlight shone across the cotton fields, but lightning cracked and cast a purple glow on the road.

  “You walk this far every day?”

  “I have a bike,” she said. “It has a flat.”

  “You think it’s safe to travel alone like that all the time? Might be wild animals out here. Or other things.”

  She couldn’t imagine what other things might be lurking but she’d seen plenty of animals, mostly deer and wild turkey. She once rode past a pair of mating raccoons in the early morning. They’d hissed at her and barked with an eerie high-pitched chatter, stared her down with their glowing red eyes. She often heard wild dogs howling in the distance and she was careful to avoid snakes, but she’d never been felt threatened by the animals.

  “Hear that?” Ray said.

  She didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. The truck slowed to a crawl. “Is something wrong?”

  “Seems like it,” he said. “Maybe something in the engine.” He pulled the truck off the road, parked it behind a large oak tree near the old rock quarry, nothing but a deep watery hole now. No one had mined the stones since a season of flooding two years earlier. Clementine stared out the truck’s windshield into the dark rain. She couldn’t see the old quarry, but she knew it was right in front of her. She shivered.

  The rain hammered, louder without the rumble of the engine.

  “It might need oil,” Ray said.

  She waited for him to get out and check under the hood, but he stayed put.

  “No use trying to see in this mess,” he said.

  “Don’t you have a light?” Flashlights were a popular purchase at the hardware store. Most of the men who shopped there kept one of the lights in their vehicles for situations like this.

  “Gonna have to wait it out,” he said. “How can we pass the time?”

  She told him she’d walk the rest of the way. They were less than a mile from her house now.

  He reached across the seat and took her hand. “Don’t be hasty,” he said. “I have some thoughts.” He put his hand on her neck before sliding it down to grab her breasts. He could strangle her and no one would hear her scream.

  “You have a wife.”

  “Let’s leave her out of this.” He pulled her legs apart and pushed her skirt up. She wasn’t wearing trousers underneath, as she hadn’t ridden her bike that day. Instead she wore an old, ragged pair of wool knickers she’d sewed from her father’s long johns. She was embarrassed by the unfashionable gray underpants and tried to hold her skirt down around her knees. Ray pulled her arms away and yanked the ugly things down, exposing her to the cool air. What he was doing was wrong, terribly wrong. She knew she should stop him, but he had such a determined look on his face. She closed her eyes.

  It only hurt a little and only at first. The physical part wasn’t terrible, a lot of poking and jostling, but the sound of his grunting made her sick. His breath smelled hot and sour. The door handle of the truck wedged hard between her shoulders and she knew she’d be left with a bruise. When he finished, he used her ugly underpants to wipe himself clean and then tossed the sticky wad at her. She cracked open the door and dropped them on the sodden ground.

  The rain subsided a bit and he got out of the truck and made a show of checking beneath the hood. She straightened her skirt and sat upright. She knew by then there was nothing wrong with his truck. Ray drove on without looking at her. She spoke only to give him the final directions. When he pulled in front of the house, she thanked him. She hated herself for thanking him.

  FIVE

  SOMETIMES THE STRANGEST THINGS come to me, memories fully formed and sharp as cinema: the precise ingredients and technique for making a towering coconut cake, the “Jabberwocky” poem from Through the Looking Glass, dance steps from a number on television. These useless bits of information push out the important stuff, like the timeline surrounding my sister’s disappearance.

  I don’t remember which day we went to see Bubba, but we took Willet’s motorbike to the run-down neighborhood on the far side of the railroad tracks. The homes were small and crumbling, the yards overgrown with weeds. Bubba was the youngest of six boys, and he didn’t have a mother. She died a few days after giving birth to him. His brothers brought him up. His father welded steel from dawn until nightfall. I suspect his father did everything he could to keep those kids clothed. There wouldn’t have been any extra. There wouldn’t have been enough.

  Some of Bubba’s brothers were grown and had moved away, but one or two remained in the childhood home or crashed there between permanent situations. They all looked alike—tall, thin boys with long hair and flat faces. Only Bubba was short and round and different.

  The brother who answered the door greeted Willet, but he didn’t invite us in. “He don’t want to see no one,” the brother said. “He’s done talked to the police three times, and now that blonde bitch from the news is coming around. They think he did something to your sister. Do you think he did something to your sister?”

  “No,” I said. “No, we don’t.”

  The brother scratched his belly through his faded T-shirt and looked up and down the street like he was scouting for something. “He ain’t going back to school,” the brother said. “Not here. Pop’s shipping him off to that military academy in Port Gibson. They’ll straighten him out.”

  “When does he leave?” Willet asked.

  “Next week. He ain’t happy about it.”

  “No,” Willet said. “I reckon not.”

  The brother crossed his arms and studied us for a few moments. “It ain’t all about this thing with your sister. He’s always been a weird kid. Pops just don’t have the energy.”

  “But Bubba’s smart,” I said. “He’s always been smart.”

  The brother pointed at me. His fingernails needed cutting and there were gray half moons beneath each one. “Why did you tell those cops you saw my brother at the quarry?”

  My face went hot. “Because I saw him,” I said. “But I didn’t accuse him of anything. I never would.”

  The brother peered up and down the street again. He seemed nervous. I wondered if he was expecting someone.

  “If you let us in, you don’t have stand here on the stoop,” Willet said.

  The house smelled of cabbage and fried fish. It was a small place for such a large family. I’d expected a mess, but everything was tidy and clean. We sat on a small lumpy sofa. The living room was dark, its furniture old and shabby. The television set in the corner was unplugged and covered with a plastic sheet. Squares of tinfoil blocked out most of the light from the windows. I didn’t know if they were trying to keep someone from seeing in or if they didn’t want to see out. Either way, it gave me the creeps.

  The brother sat in an armchair behind a TV tray filled with rolling papers and a small bag of marijuana. He went to work rolling a joint and then another. He placed the rolled joints in a small metal box.

  “You buying?” he asked Willet.

  “Not today,” Willet said.

  It surprised me to see my brother so casual about the weed. I
knew boys at school who smoked the stuff, but they were stupid boys, lazy and dull. Willet was nothing like them.

  The brother closed his metal box and slipped a fat rubber band around it. “Lemme check on the kid,” he said. “Maybe he’ll feel like company.”

  “What are we doing here?” I asked when the brother slipped down the hallway.

  Willet said, “I want some answers.”

  The brother was gone a long time. I heard him talking to Bubba in one of the rooms off the hallway, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I didn’t blame Bubba for not wanting to see us. He didn’t owe Willet and me anything. Something the brother said must have convinced him to come out, because Bubba shuffled into the living room. He looked like he’d lost weight since I’d seen him at the quarry. He did not look well.

  “Hey, man,” Willet said.

  Bubba stared at us.

  “We just want to talk,” Willet said.

  “About what?” Bubba stood rigid but for his hands, which he kept balling into tight fists. I wondered if he planned to throw a punch.

  Willet’s voice was tight and angry. “What do you think, Bubba? You think we want to chat about the weather?”

  Bubba glared at Willet. He didn’t look at me. “They’re sending me away.”

  It was my fault Bubba was in so much trouble. There was no way I could make it right.

  “What were you doing at the quarry?” Willet asked.