The Past Is Never Read online

  Traffic to the quarry increased. The old access road, which had grown thick with vines in the years since the quarry stopped producing, became accessible again. The vines and brambles were hacked away, the weeds trampled flat.

  Halloween came on a Sunday that year. Pansy had been missing for two months and twenty-one days. The holiday was the one time when children on our street would go door to door and adults would chat with one another. We knew our neighbors, but we weren’t overly friendly. The men in our neighborhood worked long hours, some in offices and stores, but many in nearby cotton gins and lumber mills. Some of the women worked as secretaries or pulled shifts at the tractor factory in Star River, but plenty stayed home with their children. Our neighborhood was safe and clean and people took some pride in keeping the houses painted, the yards neat. Families in our neighborhood were self-sufficient and proud. If anyone suffered, we didn’t know it.

  In years when the weather was clear, the neighborhood women would sit outside on Halloween, on front porches or in folding chairs on their front lawn, sipping sweet tea or something stronger and scooping candy into the pillowcases and paper sacks the children carried. It was easier than answering the door all night, they said. The older children watched the younger children, and no adult ever accompanied the trick-or-treaters.

  But that year, the mothers walked with their children from house to house and never let them out of their sight. Willet and I were too old for trick-or-treating, but we got a little bag of hard candies and some peanut butter marshmallows to give away. We shouldn’t have bothered. No one came to our door and when I stepped outside to see the children draped in sheets and wearing plastic masks, it was a sad and somber sight. No one ran or shouted or hid behind trees hoping to pop out and scare someone. Instead, children marched from door to door and grimly gathered handfuls of sugar-filled treats. The whole thing was over in less than an hour. The kids were tucked away behind the closed doors of their own houses, plopped in front of the flickering blue light of the television before night could fully take hold.

  The next day, we learned about Cindy Bartel. Two boys from our school, basketball players, had driven their girlfriends out to the quarry on Halloween night. They drank beer and whiskey they’d stolen from their fathers. They told ghost stories and made the girls cry when they talked about Pansy, the poor little girl last seen floating in the quarry. Cindy wept and begged to be taken home. She said she could feel the cold presence of evil in the woods and she thought the quarry wanted to swallow her whole. Her boyfriend, a lanky point guard named Timothy, tried to calm her. He told her it was all a joke. He assured her nothing evil lurked in the woods, there were no ghosts, but Cindy grew hysterical. Timothy called for the boy who’d driven them to the quarry, but he was nowhere to be found. The driver and his date were clinched together under a tree in the woods and both swore they never heard a thing. Most people believed the couple ignored the calls because they were too caught up in their teenage passion to help a friend, but I knew how those woods could swallow a plea for help.

  Cindy grew more frantic. She told Timothy she was walking home. She said she had to get away. Timothy said it was only about ten o’clock when she started walking through the dark woods. He tried to follow her, but she kept disappearing into the trees.

  “I didn’t know she could move so fast,” he told the police.

  The next morning, they found her about a half-mile from the quarry, her clothes torn and tattered as if clawed by some wild animal. Her hair was chopped short and ragged, like she’d been coiffed with pinking shears. Her foot was caught in a coil spring steel trap, the kind someone might set to catch a coyote. It was a small trap and Cindy ought to have been able to get out of it, but she’d panicked and, in pulling at it, had torn her skin and struck a blood vessel near her ankle. She passed out from the loss of blood and said she couldn’t remember a thing. The doctor tried to save her foot, but the rusty steel had poisoned her blood so he took the foot to save the leg.

  The next week, Cindy’s father beat Timothy to a pulp and spent a few nights in the county jail. He said the boy had it coming. Cindy defended Timothy, but it didn’t matter. There was no one else to blame and Cindy’s father needed to hold someone accountable. Parents forbade their children from visiting the quarry, but some boys still took dates there hoping fear would drive the girls into their arms, so the men who ran the town decided to take action.

  “It’s only a matter of time before something worse happens,” said the chair of the county aldermen. They voted four-to-one to drain the quarry and fill it with dirt to prevent any further tragedies at the site. No one said it to us, but some people talked about how they might find things when it was emptied, things the divers searching for Pansy might have missed. They said finding Pansy’s body would put to rest all the nonsense about ghosts and spirits.

  The alderman who’d led the campaign to drain the quarry also owned a construction company and he was awarded the contract for the work. Bright yellow trucks with submersible pumps rolled in and diverted the quarry water to the Tallahatchie River. The whole project took twice as long as predicted. Of course it cost twice as much as estimated. The county had to find some way to cover the cost. We learned our high school would go without a new gym or air conditioning for at least two more years. Naturally the students blamed Pansy and, by extension, Willet and me.

  Draining the quarry caused all sorts of problems. A sinkhole formed in a nearby field and swallowed up a Labrador retriever named Molly. A man working at the construction site fell to his death when the walls of the quarry collapsed as the water levels sank. The other men on the job didn’t realize he couldn’t swim until it was too late. They thought he was being funny. Turns out drowning looks an awful lot like joking around to some people. Every day, the pumps had to be cleared of some new debris: old cars and trucks and motorcycles; children’s bicycles; guns, including one military-style machine gun, three ordinary revolvers, and a half dozen hunting rifles; and more mysterious items like a lockbox sealed along its seams with wax, which, when opened, contained a child’s doll with a noose around its neck, plastic eyes removed from its sockets.

  It took nearly a month to drain the quarry. Every day I waited to hear that they’d found Pansy among the debris, but the news never came. They found the bones of a small adult and the bones of an infant trapped beneath one of the submerged cars, but they found no child in the gray muck.

  “I knew it,” Willet said. “She ain’t in there. No way Pansy would drown.”

  He was happy about it and so was Mama, because it shored up their hope of finding Pansy alive. She must be out there somewhere, living and a part of things. If she were out in the world somewhere, we would find her. I confess, I did not share their optimism. Naturally, I didn’t hope for Pansy to be dead, though finding her would have brought an end to things. It seemed to me the longer Pansy was missing, the longer we were stuck in this loop of unknowing. It’s a terrible thing to not know something so vital.

  Granny Clem invited us to eat Thanksgiving dinner at her house, but Mama said no. Granny Clem brought us a coconut cake on Christmas morning and tried to talk us into coming over for a meal later in the day. Willet and I wanted to go. We’d planned to cook a meal, but our spaghetti would be nothing compared Granny Clem’s roast turkey and cornbread dressing. But Mama refused, and we didn’t feel right leaving her alone. I suggested Granny Clem bring the feast to our house, but she said Chester wouldn’t come and she didn’t want to abandon him either. I could understand Chester’s reluctance. After the quarry was drained and there was still no answer to the mystery of Pansy’s disappearance, Willet became more determined than ever to find our father. He visited Uncle Chester again and came home with a black eye.

  I don’t know why he continued to seek answers from such an unfriendly source. “Even if he knows where Daddy is,” I said, “he isn’t about to tell you.”

  Our family was divided, and no amount of food or forced holiday celebrati
ng would change that. We ate our overcooked Christmas spaghetti smothered with jarred tomato sauce and an iceberg lettuce salad. We didn’t put up a tree or exchange gifts. We didn’t make Martha Washington candy or peppermint bark. Mama barely ate a thing. She drank sweet tea and smoked at the table. She refused a slice of Granny Clem’s cake. Willet and I made ourselves sick eating that cake. It was so beautiful, white fluffy boiled icing covered with flaked coconut and spread over four tall layers of yellow sponge; it seemed a shame to let it go to waste. We polished it off in three days, both of us floating through the week between Christmas and New Year’s in a sweaty sugar fog. We were relieved to go back to school when the holiday ended. It felt good to turn the calendar to a new year. The past year had been so awful it was hard to imagine things could get any worse. Maybe 1977 would bring good news.

  ALL SORTS OF WOMEN came to see Clementine and Ora: wealthy women, poor women, black women, white women, young women, old women. They all had stories to tell. Clementine and Ora never asked, but the women seemed compelled to spill their secrets. He listened to the stories and collected them. He overheard tales about cruel men and lust and betrayal. The world was not a safe place for women, he learned. It was not a kind world to anyone, but women seemed to suffer more than men.

  On a nearby plantation, German prisoners worked the cotton fields. It was 1944. The men joked about Mississippi being hotter than the belly of the crematoria, but the prisoners kept mostly to themselves. They worked when they were told to work. They slept when they were told to sleep. When someone brought them food, they ate. Few spoke fluent English, though many understood more than they let on. A Luftwaffe officer named Manfried Brun spoke perfect English. Each day, the young wife of the plantation owner came out to the field and oversaw servants bringing lunch. She carried pitchers of tea or lemonade and filled copper mugs with the cold, sweet liquid. Her hands were milk white and smooth. One day she stumbled as she brought the pitcher around, and Manfried caught her before she fell. He took the sweaty pitcher from her shaking hands and insisted she rest for a bit.

  She smiled at him. “I’m all right. Just a bit clumsy.”

  “You should not work so hard,” he said.

  She was surprised to hear him speak so easily in her own language. He told her he needed practice. The guards at the camp weren’t interested in conversation and many of them were coarse and unrefined. “I would like to speak as a gentleman speaks,” he said.

  “You sound like a perfect gentleman to me.” She offered him her hand. “My name is Mary Helen.” He took her gentle, tiny hand in his own and introduced himself.

  After that day, whenever her husband was away from the plantation, Mary Helen invited Manfried into the house after lunch. Mary Helen knew her husband would not approve of her friendship with this man, but her husband was old and gray with ugly tufts of hair sprouting from his ears. Manfried was not much older than she was and he was handsome. His hair was black and neat. Even though he worked each day in the fields, he kept his fingernails clean. He smelled like a saltwater breeze. She felt things for him she’d never felt for her husband. When her husband rolled on top of her at night, she closed her eyes and counted until it was over. She only counted to twenty most nights, but her husband smelled of boiled cabbage and every second with him was misery.

  One weekend, while her husband was away negotiating cotton prices in Tennessee, Manfried kissed her. Or maybe she kissed him. Either way, she felt something she hadn’t ever felt before. She wanted to be with Manfried, to strip off her clothing and expose her tender body to his. It would be different from what she’d experienced with her husband. She wanted him so much, she began to pull at the cotton shirt he wore. They were in the library at the time, surrounded by bookshelves filled with leather volumes her husband had chosen more for appearance than for content.

  Manfried grasped her shoulders. “Not here,” he said. “You will regret it. I never want you to regret a moment with me.”

  He asked her if she had access to one of her husband’s vehicles. They made a plan to meet that night at the old quarry. She gave him directions. He said he could get away after the evening meal. The night guard usually fell asleep as soon as the sun went down. “We will run away together,” he said. “We will be man and wife.”

  Mary Helen’s husband had taken their nice car to Nashville, but he’d left behind an old work truck. She told the kitchen help to forget about supper. She wasn’t hungry. At twilight, she backed the truck out of the storage shed and drove without headlights until she was off the plantation. At the quarry, she sat in the dark and willed herself not to think too far ahead. Her husband would be furious, but he’d find another wife. He was wealthy and powerful. The night grew darker, and she wondered if Manfried would come at all. Maybe the guard hadn’t fallen asleep. Maybe Manfried had been caught trying to escape. Maybe he’d changed his mind about running off with a silly woman.

  Finally, someone emerged from the woods. She could see nothing but shadowy movement. She opened the truck door, slid out, and called his name in a whisper. No answer. She crept forward, toward the figure. “Manfried?”

  The figure grabbed her and shoved a dirty cloth in her mouth before she could scream. Behind her, she heard the truck’s engine turn over. The man holding her was strong, much larger than Manfried. She struggled in his grip, felt his warm, moist breath on her neck. He spun her around and she saw Manfried in the driver’s seat of the truck, another prisoner beside him. He smiled. He would save her, she thought, but the truck disappeared along the dark road and she was left alone with the large guard. He hadn’t sneaked past the man at all. Instead, he’d bribed him with the promise of a pretty young woman alone in a dark, isolated place.

  The guard had more stamina than her husband. Just when she thought he was done with her, he would pull away and gaze at some point in the distance. After a brief rest, he’d begin again with a vigor that stunned her. She’d fought him at first, but he seemed excited by her resistance. Better to let him get it over with, she figured. She was bruised and bloodied by the time he finished. Her back bore the markings of the gnarled roots of an oak tree. Rocks wedged into the moist crease of her buttocks. The man pulled the cloth from her mouth and used it to wipe his face. He grinned at her.

  “My husband will kill you,” she told him.

  “I don’t expect you’ll share this with him. What will he think about your plan to run off with a Nazi? No, you’ll tell him someone stole the truck and you don’t know anything else.”

  The man was right, of course. She’d been a fool.

  After a few weeks, she learned she was pregnant. She knew the child would not belong to her husband. It would be the offspring of the brutish guard. Every time she looked at the child, she would think of Manfried and how he’d tricked her, how he’d seduced her with his good manners and nice hands. She would think of the violent night at the quarry.

  It was too much to imagine, a lifetime of hating her own child. She’d heard stories about the two women who lived together and possessed a remedy for unwanted children. She told the women her story and begged for the bitter potion. They were her only hope, she said. She couldn’t carry the child. She would sooner strap an anvil to her waist and plunge into the deep, dark waters of the quarry. Clementine and Ora gave her the potion and told her to come back and see them if it didn’t work. The woman never returned.

  SEVEN

  JUST AFTER THE NEW year, during an unseasonable warm spell, a man from Eudora, Arkansas was out shooting mourning doves when Fetch, his redbone coonhound, disappeared into a grove of sweet gum trees on the banks of Bayou Macon. The man figured Fetch was running down a rabbit. The old dog’s eyes and hearing were failing, but his sense of smell was sharp as a pup’s. The man went after his dog and discovered what Fetch had found: the fly-infested corpse of a rotting body in a torn plastic garbage bag buried only about a foot deep. A recent rainstorm had washed away the dirt. Predators had taken care of the rest.

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sp; “Another day or so,” the man told the sheriff, “I reckon there wouldn’t be nothing left but bones.”

  The county coroner said the body belonged to a young girl, about Pansy’s age. She’d been smothered, possibly with a pillow. The coroner found a goose feather in her windpipe. The discovery of this child’s body caused a good deal of excitement for the officers working on Pansy’s case. The spot where the body was found was just more than an hour’s drive from White Forest.

  The fat police officer showed Mama a picture of the corpse as it looked before they’d sliced her open to search for clues. We stared at the image of the child on a metal table, her tiny torso covered over with a white cloth. The child was found naked and the coroner said she’d been beaten in the hours or days before she was killed. Her face seemed bloated and much of the skin had rotted away or been consumed by some forest animal. What remained was waxy and green. A portion of the child’s jaw was missing, exposing tiny teeth that shone weirdly white against the rotting gray flesh. But sprigs of curly hair sprang from her scalp, like Pansy’s.

  Mama’s hands were surprisingly steady as she studied the terrible image. “No.” She handed the photo back to the fat officer. “This is not my child. This child’s hair is too dark.”

  The fat officer tried to get Mama to look more closely. “The hair color might seem dark,” he said, “but it isn’t clean, and sometimes the film gets overdeveloped.”

  “I know what my child’s hair looks like, clean or dirty. That is not my child.”