The Past Is Never Read online

  “What were you doing at the quarry?” Bubba said.

  “Come on, man, you know what I mean.”

  When Bubba spoke, it sounded like the words had trouble making it past his throat. “I don’t know why I was there. I just was. I didn’t do anything bad. I never saw Pansy.” I thought he might cry, but he held it together. “I already told the police.”

  “Were you drunk?” Willet asked. “Did you smoke some of your brother’s stash?”

  “No,” Bubba said. “I don’t remember. I was sleeping and I woke up at the quarry. I know it sounds nuts. I don’t remember how I got there. I don’t remember why I went.” He rubbed his face with his hands, like he was trying to wash something away. “You think I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t expect it’s completely sane to wake up in the middle of nowhere,” Willet said.

  “I’m not crazy!”

  “No one thinks you’re crazy,” I said.

  Bubba’s brother snorted. “You don’t have to live with him.”

  Bubba ignored his brother. “Bert,” he said. “What do you remember? What was I doing when you saw me?”

  I humored him. “You were tossing rocks into the water. It had just stopped raining. I was on the other side of the quarry. I hollered at you, but you acted like you didn’t hear me. You looked up at the sky. You pointed at the sky. Then you walked into the woods. That’s what I remember. That’s what happened.”

  Bubba’s jaw clenched. “Bullshit,” he said.

  “She’s just a kid,” Willet said. “This ain’t on her.”

  “I’m not some baby,” I said. “I saw you, Bubba. I saw you.”

  “But did you see anything else? Did you see anything in the sky?”

  “I saw the sun come out after the rain. I saw you. And you wouldn’t speak to me.”

  Bubba turned to Willet. “Where were you, man?”

  Willet swallowed hard and picked at a pimple on his chin. “I was in the woods.”

  “Doing what exactly?”

  “Come on, man …”

  “You leave your little sister all alone out there, and you have the nerve to accuse me of something?”

  “I haven’t accused you of anything,” Willet said.

  “I didn’t do anything to Pansy. I never saw Pansy. Now, thanks to you, I have to spend my senior year wearing a uniform and marching around like a Nazi.” Bubba’s face turned red and his voice rose. “All you had to do was watch her! That’s it! If you hadn’t looked away, she’d still be here. It’s your fault, not mine.”

  Willet pulled my arm. “Let’s go.”

  “But …” We hadn’t learned anything, and Bubba was mad at us. I wasn’t ready to leave. “I’m sorry,” I said to Bubba. “I’m sorry they’re sending you away.”

  “Go home, Bert,” Bubba said. To Willet he said, “Try not to lose her on the way.”

  I thought Willet would punch him. Instead he pushed me too hard toward the door. I stumbled.

  We were on the bike outside, ready to drive away, when Bubba’s brother came out and stopped us. “Sorry about that, man.” He’d grown friendlier since he’d first greeted us at the door. “Can I tell you something?”

  Willet revved the engine. “Make it quick.”

  “He thinks the little green men took your sister.”

  “Do you think this is a joke?”

  “I ain’t making a joke,” the brother said. “Man, I wish it was a joke. He thinks the aliens come down and take him away. Whole days go black, he tells me. It’s fucking crazy.” The brother shoved his fists into the pockets of his dirty jeans. “I thought you should know. You can’t trust what he says, but I don’t think he would hurt anybody. I can’t believe he would.”

  “What did he tell the cops?” Willet asked.

  “Pretty much what he told you. He doesn’t remember how he got there. He woke up next to the quarry. He won’t tell them the aliens left him there, because he knows it makes him sound batshit. But that’s what he believes. Honestly, they sweated him a long time. I thought they were going to arrest him, but I guess they need some evidence to do that.”

  “When did he get home that day?” Willet asked.

  “Who knows?” The brother shrugged. “Pops was still at work, so it had to be before dark.”

  “Were you here?”

  “Yeah, man, where else am I going to be? I got a business to run.” He laughed. “I tell you, it don’t help none to have the police hanging around.”

  Willet revved the engine again. The brother pulled one of the tight-rolled joints from his pocket and slipped it in the chest pocket of Willet’s T-shirt.

  “On the house,” he said.

  Willet plucked the joint out and handed it back to the brother. “From here on out, I intend to keep a clear head.”

  I thought about what Bubba’s brother had said. It seemed crazy to blame aliens for Pansy’s disappearance, but no crazier than anything else. No crazier than my creature in the woods. No crazier than Daddy and Granny Clem’s curse. Unlike Willet, I couldn’t dismiss a theory because it sounded farfetched. I had a shelf full of books containing stories about men turned into toads and children outsmarting witches. The real world wasn’t any more logical than those stories.

  After we went to see Bubba, Willet confessed he and a few other guys kept a stash of illicit stuff buried in a box in the woods—bottles of liquor and a few joints, a handful of pills stolen from someone’s mother. He’d heard something in the woods the day Pansy went missing, and he’d thought it might be one of the guys raiding the stash. When he got to their spot, the box was undisturbed. He’d unearthed it and smoked one of the joints. It was the first time he’d had so much pot at once. Time slowed down and he spaced out or fell asleep. I could see by the way he held his shoulders and wouldn’t look me in the eye that he felt miserable about the whole thing. “I’m so sorry, Bert. I never should have left you.”

  “And we never should have left Pansy,” I said. “It’s not all your fault.”

  We sat in Willet’s room. We always talked there. My room was too full of Pansy’s things. Pansy’s bed was made up with pink sheets and a floral quilt. A cloth topsy-turvy doll sprawled on her pillow. Little Red Riding Hood on one end and the Big Bad Wolf disguised as grandma when you flipped the skirt and turned it over. Both faces were exposed where Pansy left it, the skirt bunched around the middle. It used to be my doll, but I never cared for it. Something about the wolf’s eyes made me uneasy. Now it stared at me every day, the leering wolf and the innocent girl, the trickster and the victim in one.

  GOOD THINGS SOMETIMES CAME from bad acts. And even something done with the best of intentions could turn sour. He figured the only way to keep from doing harm would be to die as quick as you were born, and what would be the point of that? There was no predicting anything in this world. You hoped for the best. It was all you could do.

  When Clementine went two months without bleeding, she confessed the whole mess to Ora, who said she would kill Ray. She told Ora she didn’t care about Ray. She didn’t want him dead and she had no intention of confronting him about the mess. “I want this to go away,” she said. “Isn’t there something we can do?”

  Ora pulled one of the old books from a shelf. She told Clementine what she needed. It was a long list of strange herbs and plants. Clementine said she wasn’t sure she could get them all.

  “You must,” Ora told her. “And soon. It may already be too late.”

  Clementine ordered the herbs. She had to place a call to Boston for some of the rarer plants and she had to explain the call to her boss. She told him she was ordering the herbs for a wealthy woman in town who was having female problems. He looked embarrassed when she said it and waved his hand to signal he didn’t want to hear about it. Her boss knew about Ora’s business, everyone did. He didn’t mind Clementine placing orders from the store as long as she paid for the deliveries herself.

  At home, Ora boiled the herbs twice and watched while Clementine drank
the bitter brew three times each day. The drink brought on strong cramps and a dark heaviness in her belly. “I think it’s working,” she told Ora. But days passed and her blood didn’t flow.

  She refused to cry about it, though Ora cried freely and often. Something would happen, Clementine thought. Somehow the situation would be made right. She rode her bike recklessly, never swerving to avoid ruts in the road. She lifted heavy sacks at work and climbed ladders without hesitation. She hoped to fall. At night, she pounded her fist against her belly, which was growing in spite of her dark thoughts and careless behavior. The baby in her womb would not be forced out before his time. Her clothes grew tight, and she altered them. She developed a prickly brown rash on her neck, and Ora made a salve to soothe it. Finally, six months after the encounter with Ray, her boss said he thought she’d better quit.

  “You’re obviously sick,” he said. She saw the judgment and disapproval in his face, though he wouldn’t look at her. “I can’t have someone with such an illness working for me. This is a family business.”

  Ora said it didn’t matter. Her business was booming. They didn’t need the income from the hardware store. Clementine was grateful for Ora, for her practicality and her medical knowledge and her compassion, but none of that could change Clementine’s feelings for the child growing inside her. She didn’t want it. She didn’t deserve it. She wished for a miscarriage. She wished for a stillbirth. Sometimes she wished to die.

  Even as she wished for such things, she knew what would happen. She would have a baby and she would be disgraced. Women without husbands didn’t have children. Women who did were whores. She was a whore. These thoughts ran through her head every day and at night they grew stronger. She had terrible dreams and woke in a cold sweat. When she couldn’t get back to sleep, she walked outside under the stars, her bare feet slapping against the damp grass and cold, hard dirt, the baby in her stomach turning and kicking and begging for attention. She wanted to work. She wanted to be useful. She wanted to be independent. All of those wants led to wanting less. Desire was unhappiness.

  In the final month, the baby kicked so forcefully Clementine stumbled when she walked. When she sat down to eat, the baby rolled and pushed aggressively against her bulging stomach, which rippled and pulsed like a lake before a storm. Ora told her to stay in bed. She said she didn’t want Clementine to hurt herself, but Clementine knew there was more to it. She didn’t want the women who came for treatment to see Clementine moping and lurching around the house like some fat drunk cow. It frightened them.

  Finally, when she could stand no more of the pregnancy, when she was threatening to slice herself open and yank the baby out, her water broke. Ora brought in warm blankets and a damp cloth to bathe her forehead. She held Clementine’s hand and told her when to push and when to rest. The pain was incredible. Clementine ground her teeth so hard she chipped a molar.

  Ora gave her a sliver of peyote to chew and hold in her mouth. Clementine swallowed it against Ora’s instructions and soon the mist rolled over her. Wild beasts crouched in the corner of the room. She heard them snarling and whining. Their hot breath fogged the air. They smelled of raw blood, like a steak gone rancid in the hot sun. They wanted her baby; they wanted to swallow it whole. She begged Ora to make them go away. She hadn’t wanted the child, but she wasn’t giving it over to the beasts. Ora told her to push and push some more. Clementine was so tired and thirsty. Her mouth was dry and rough as sandpaper, dry and rough as Ray’s jaw against her cheek that night. She touched Ora’s cheek, her smooth perfect skin, and said I’m sorry over and over again. Ora told her to push. She felt the bed falling away or else she rose up, floating above the messy business of giving birth, above the blood and slick mucous. Her bowels let loose at some point, though she hardly felt it for the ripping pain of the baby’s head pushing its way out of her. It seemed monstrous in size. How was she supposed to push something so large through such a small opening? How did any woman do this?

  Ora became stern. She told her it was almost over. She said this was the worst it would ever be, and she must push. Ora plunged her hands inside Clementine and guided the baby into the world. Clementine felt herself ripping wide and wider still. She was filled with a burning pain that had no source. It wasn’t the baby. It wasn’t her body. It was an ancient aching pain, flaming hot and unbearable and she knew she was dying. And she knew she was going to hell. She tried to summon prayers, to ask forgiveness for her dark soul, to beg for mercy and redemption. The pain crested and her thoughts grew fuzzy. Darkness washed over her, but in the distance she saw a pinprick of light. The light expanded. Her fear melted. Her pain crept away like an embarrassed hound. The beasts in the corner turned to dust. Ora placed something warm and wet on her chest and the warm thing howled.

  “It’s a boy,” Ora said. “What are we going to do with a boy?”

  Clementine looked at Ora, and they both laughed. Ora wiped sweat from her shining face but also tears. Clementine clutched the slippery, howling creature to her chest.

  SIX

  THE WOMAN FROM PITTSBURGH was right about many things. After a month the police stopped coming by the house, and then they stopped calling. They hadn’t found any sign of Pansy and they couldn’t locate Daddy. They had asked Mama a hundred questions about where Daddy might have gone and where he might hide, but Mama didn’t have any answers. Wherever Daddy was, he was being careful. He hadn’t written any checks or pulled cash out from the joint account. Maybe he had enough of his funny money to get by for a while, but Mama couldn’t tell the police about that. With nothing new to report, the awful peroxided woman on the evening news moved on to other stories. Even the ladies from the church refocused their energies on food drives and beautification projects.

  But then, two months after Pansy’s disappearance, there came news of another child gone missing. In October, an eight-year-old girl in Miracle Valley, Arizona disappeared during a short bike ride to the mailbox. She’d been sending a birthday card to her aunt. Her older sister went to check when the girl didn’t return right away. The sister found the abandoned bike next to the mailbox, but no trace of the missing girl.

  I wondered if the sister felt responsible. I knew she did.

  “What is happening to this world?” Mama said when the little girl’s photo popped up on the evening news. Mama didn’t expect an answer. The child’s mother took our mother’s place on the newscasts begging for her daughter’s safe return. The police in White Forest renewed their focus on Pansy. Perhaps the cases were related, they said. Perhaps someone was taking young girls across America. They delved back into their missing persons files and looked for other cases that might share something with the case from Arizona and the case of our missing sister. Had other girls that same age gone missing so completely? Had they been left alone and unsupervised by parents or siblings? Were people careless with other girls the way we’d been with Pansy?

  The police found the child in Arizona. They arrested a man who’d strangled her and left her dead body in the hot, dry Tucson desert. The man confessed when the investigators found blood and a torn piece of the girl’s shirt in the back of his truck. He said she’d shot out in front of him on the street. He’d hit her by accident and panicked. On the evening news, they showed a snippet from the girl’s funeral. I spotted the woman from Pittsburgh in the second pew.

  The way Pansy disappeared—into thin air, some folks said—it was no surprise when rumors began to circulate. The people of the Mississippi Delta love a good story. Some said our father was to blame. Where was he and how could he stay away with his daughter gone missing? Others suspected Bubba had something to do with it. They heard he’d been at the quarry that day and everyone thought he was odd. But superstition and folk tales hold more power than science and logic. The unknown gets elevated with myth and legend. Cracks in the physical world get spackled over with fantasy: ghosts and devils, spirits and gods. People want explanations. People want answers. No one can stand the uncertainty of t
he unknown. The mother from Arizona didn’t get her daughter back, but she got answers. We were stuck with questions and wild legends and tall tales.

  People talked of ghosts in those woods, ghosts who survived by sucking the breath of the living. Folks who camped or hunted there reported feeling lightheaded and disoriented. People sometimes fainted. I’d felt it myself on the day Pansy disappeared and on the day the woman from Pittsburgh showed up at our door. Spirit got your breath, they’d say, when you told them how your vision narrowed and went dark, how your ears felt full of rushing water, and your feet seemed to float a hair off the ground. Pansy, being so small, might have given all her breath to the spirits, might have become one of them.

  Willet dismissed talk of ghosts. I didn’t say it, but I thought maybe a spirit had swallowed Pansy. She was such a little thing. Probably she wouldn’t even run if a spirit came to kiss her. Probably she’d lean in and kiss him right back. But that kind of thinking didn’t get us any closer to finding Pansy.

  “Don’t be a damned fool, Bert,” Willet said. “Pansy wasn’t carted away by a ghost. She was taken by some real person and I’d bet my right testicle our dear father had something to do with it. He ain’t a ghost, but he may be the Devil.”

  Sensible people didn’t believe in ghosts or evil spirits. Sensible people thought it most likely Pansy had simply drowned. It was a large, deep quarry. The divers who’d searched for our sister in the dark waters might have missed her among the debris dumped there throughout the years. After Pansy’s disappearance, people took to visiting the quarry and leaving gifts for her: teddy bears, paper hearts, flowers wrapped with ribbon. A pile of offerings rose on the lip of the quarry. A few people erected wooden crosses, which infuriated Willet.

  “Crosses are for the grave,” he said.

  Lots of people took to scattering pansy petals around the makeshift shrine. Most everyone placed a container of pansies on their front porch. I thought it was a nice gesture, but Willet said it was a signal to Pansy’s spirit that the people in the house were friendly and meant no harm. I couldn’t walk down our street without seeing planter boxes crammed with the bright flowers. They bloomed year-round, through searing heat and bone-wet damp. At least that’s how I remember it.