Laveau came to within a couple of feet of him, nodding his head as if he understood what he was being told. “You mean she’s worthless,” he grumbled, shaking his head with disgust. “A silly, worthless woman. Sometimes I wish… well, that don’t matter. But she’s going to be okay?”
“She’s going to be fine.”
“What about my daughter? Did you look in on her, too?”
Dr. Latling couldn’t help but notice that he couldn’t bring himself to mention Victory by name. In fact, Latling couldn’t remember if he’d ever heard the man mention his daughter by name. It was always “she”, or “her”, or “my daughter”. Never Victory, the only legitimate child he had. Maybe he just didn’t think she was worth mentioning since her troubles began.
“I did,” the doctor replied. “She seems to be recovering well.”
Laveau’s gaze lingered on the doctor for a moment and he put his hand on the man’s shoulder, escorting him to the front door and away from the men in the living room. When it was just the two of them, Laveau spoke softly.
“I been meaning to ask you,” he said. “The night that bastard was brought into the world, I never did know if it was a boy or a girl. I wasn’t in my right mind that night, Doc. You understand.”
Unfortunately, Dr. Latling understood all too well. “It was a boy,” he lied. He’d been prepared for this moment, prepared to throw Laveau off the scent of that baby just as far as he could. “It… it was born dead, Laveau. And it wasn’t well formed. You didn’t want to see it, trust me. That’s why I took it away, why I didn’t let Ms. Caroline see it. It would have only given ya’ll nightmares for the rest of your life.”
Laveau seemed to recoil at the thought. “It… it was deformed?”
Dr. Latling averted his gaze, trying to pretend he was disgusted by the child, too, when the truth was that he didn’t want to look the man in the eye because he was afraid he might let it slip what a low-lying scum he thought he really was.
“Like I said,” he muttered, “it would have given ya’ll nightmares had you seen it. I took it home and burned it in the incinerator. It’s gone.”
“No trace?”
“Nothing.”
Laveau still had his hand on the doctor’s shoulder. He squeezed, but it wasn’t a comforting or a polite one. It was an intimidating one.
“That’s good,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure there’s no trace of it. Or that no one talks about it.”
Dr. Latling knew that was a threat if he’d ever heard one. He looked Laveau in the eye. “Laveau, you and I have had an understanding for a while now,” he said. “I don’t talk about my patients and I especially don’t talk about you, so if that’s worrying you, I think you know me better than that.”
Laveau’s dark eyes glittered for a moment, as if the evil inside of him was rolling and flickering back in his brain. There was so much darkness in the man that those eyes were the first place it became apparent. But he suddenly grinned, slapping Dr. Latling on the shoulder before dropping his hand.
“You are the last person I worry about, Doc,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure we understood each other.”
“We do.”
“Good.”
Dr. Latling had to admit, he was a little shaken after that. He put his hand on the door and opened it. “Your wife has a prescription for some tonic,” he said. “You might want to send one of your boys out to get it for her.”
Laveau was still smiling. “I’ll do that.”
Dr. Latling stepped through the door, shutting it quietly behind him. Involuntarily, he shuddered almost immediately and it wasn’t because of the cold outside. It was because his encounters with Laveau always made him feel as if he’d just met the Devil face-to-face and lived to tell the tale.
And Glory was the closet he would ever come to stepping into Hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Present
“Ruby!” Lucy burst into tears, her hands covering her face. “Oh, my God, her name was Ruby! It’s really her!”
Beau put his big arm around her shoulders, giving her a squeeze of comfort. He didn’t know what else to do as the shocking news settled – Victory Hembree’s baby had not only been kept safe all these years, but she was still alive.
Lucy was rattled and had every right to be. Her sobs were so pitiful that Priscilla quickly moved to comfort her, too, feeling very badly that the news of Ruby Ransom evidently was something quite terrible or quite wonderful. She couldn’t tell which from the way Lucy was carrying on.
Startled, Cora jumped up from her seat and rushed to the stove, putting on the tea kettle as a sort of reflex reaction. Tea or coffee always cured all white folk’s ills, didn’t it? Once the kettle was on, and Priscilla and Beau, and even Stephen to a certain extent, were trying to calm Lucy down, Cora made her way back over to the weeping woman.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said, lowering herself back into a chair across the table. “I didn’t mean to make you cry. But that’s what happened to the baby. She came with the name Ruby. Dr. Latling told my mama that her name was Ruby.”
Lucy was trying so hard to stop her tears. She wiped at her face furiously. “I know,” she said, seeing how upset the little housekeeper was. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry to react like this. But this is just such an important thing for me to hear. You have no idea how important it is for me to hear that Ruby is alive.”
Priscilla, who was sitting down next to Lucy with her hands on the woman’s forearms, was looking at her with great concern. “Why?” she asked. “Can you tell me why it’s so important to you and why you came here asking about that particular baby?”
Lucy nodded, gratefully accepting a box of tissue from Stephen. “Yes, I can,” she said, blowing her nose. “But if you don’t mind… please don’t repeat it. This is really a private family matter but you all have provided a major piece of the puzzle so you deserve to hear the truth. You see, the baby in question – the biracial baby born in nineteen hundred and thirty-three, the one Dr. Latling brought home because Laveau Hembree was going to kill it – is Victory Hembree’s child. She fell in love with a black man and became pregnant. When Laveau found out, he beat her so badly that she lied and told him she’d been raped by a black man. Laveau ended up killing an innocent man because of it and when the baby was born, Dr. Latling must have snuck it out of the house and brought it home. I have no idea how he got it past Laveau, but what he did… it was incredibly risky and incredibly heroic. Dr. Latling, your father is a hero. He’s my hero. He saved that baby.”
By the time she finished her story, Stephen and Priscilla and even Cora were looking at her with varied degrees of horror and shock. In fact, Stephen had to sit down. He planted his butt on the nearest chair as the reality of Lucy’s words sank in.
“My God,” he finally said, rubbing his chin. “Do you mean to tell me that Victory Hembree had a mulatto baby and my daddy spirited that child away right under Laveau Hembree’s nose?”
“He did,” Lucy said, wiping away the last of her tears. “That’s exactly what he did. Think what you want of my family, Dr. Latling, but your family… I will sing your praises until the day I die. From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of Victory Hembree, I thank your father for what he did. He literally risked his life to do it.”
Stephen looked at her, a faint gleam coming to his eye. “I will admit, that was a pretty brave thing,” he said. “I still can’t believe it. And that’s why you wanted to look at his records? To see if there was any record of the baby?”
“That’s why.”
Stephen’s gaze lingered on her a moment. He was filled with disbelief but he was also filled with pride. Pride that his father had done the right thing under such harrowing circumstances against a man the entire state was afraid of. It was enough to make him misty-eyed.
“My daddy was older when I was born,” he said after a moment. “I had three sisters who were much older than I was. By the time I came around, the only boy
, my daddy was verging on becoming an old man. I spent a lot of time with him and came to know a warm man who was devoted to his family, but this bravery… you’ve told me something about my daddy that I didn’t know and for that, I thank you. Maybe we did something for you today, but you sure did something for me, too.”
Lucy smiled. “I’m glad,” she said. “Without your father’s bravery, I’m sure the story would have been much different.”
Stephen couldn’t disagree. “From what we’ve all known about Laveau, that’s the truth,” he said. “But I have to ask – how did you know about the baby? Who told you?”
“My Mamaw,” Lucy said. “Victory Hembree, I mean. She left me a letter about it. In fact… I have it with me.”
With that, she dug into her purse and carefully pulled out the journal, setting it on the breakfast table. As the others watched curiously, she opened the front cover and she pulled out the white envelope that contained the letter. Carefully unfolding it, she handed it to Stephen.
With Priscilla hanging over his shoulder, reading the letter right along with him, Stephen did what Beau had done – he read it slowly once and then went over it a second time. By the time he was finished, he was misty-eyed again and his wife was quietly weeping. She took a tissue from the box Lucy had on her lap, silently absorbing the tragic story as Stephen looked rather stricken by it all.
“My God,” he finally breathed, clearing his throat because his voice was husky. “What the woman went through. What her daddy did to that man… that’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard of.”
Lucy looked at the letter in his hands. “Now you know why I had to come and ask you about it.”
Stephen nodded fervently. “Had I know about that letter, I never would have yelled at ya’ll when you first came around,” he said, grinning because Lucy and Beau were laughing softly. He sobered, his focus on Lucy. “I’m so sorry I called you a bitch earlier. I was mad. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Lucy laughed softly. “I’ve been called worse. No offense taken.”
Stephen still had that sheepish look, now because his wife was looking at him as if she were ready to wash his mouth out with soap. He was feeling so much regret at his behavior that he didn’t blame Priscilla in the least.
“Ms. Victory mentioned giving the baby a locket,” he said. “Do you have it?”
Lucy nodded. “I found it in her chifforobe,” she said. “It had the words ‘In The Dreaming Hour’ inscribed on the back, just like she said.”
“That poem,” Priscilla said, wiping at her nose. “Did you find it? The one Ms. Victory talks about?”
Lucy went back to the envelope that had contained the letter, pulling out a very small scrap of old paper. Just holding it brought the tears back, as she looked at it, and she knew she couldn’t read it aloud. She handed it to Beau.
“Will you read this to them?” she asked, her throat tight.
Beau pulled his readers out of his pocket, putting them on as he focused on the faded ink. In his gentle baritone, sounding probably much the same way Lewis Ragsdale had once sounded, he read the words quietly. It was only appropriate that a man read the words aloud, considering a man had once written the poem to the woman he loved.
In the Dreaming Hour,
Where my heart is free
The song of nighttime comforts me
And brings me thoughts of thee.
On beams of silver moonlight,
Against the dark of night,
The world beholds no color,
No blackness and no white.
In this world, void of color,
The heart and soul combines,
For in the Dreaming Hour,
My love unites with thine.
When he was finished, he took off his glasses and looked up at the Latlings. Priscilla’s eyes were closed and she held the tissue against her nose, while Stephen seemed to be frozen, staring at the scrap in Beau’s hand. It was as if the poem had put him in a trance, those remarkable words filling his senses with the powerful story they represented.
“I have never heard anything quite so beautiful,” he finally said, his gaze now moving between Lucy and Beau. “Thank you for sharing that. The man who wrote that… well, that’s no ordinary man.”
Lucy took the fragile piece of paper back from Beau, folding it up in the letter once more. “I can’t even imagine what he went through, being born during that era and living in the kind of oppression that was taking place down here in the south during that time. And the fact that my mamaw fell in love with him just makes it all the more tragic.”
Stephen nodded as Priscilla finally opened her eyes and went over to the stove where the kettle was starting to hiss. “Yes, it does,” he said. “It really does.”
Seeing that Priscilla was tending to the kettle, Cora stood up from her chair. She’d been completely silent through the reading of the letter and the poem, not uttering a sound. When she moved, Lucy looked over to the old woman as if completely forgetting she had been sitting there.
“Do you want to read it, too?” she asked. “I didn’t mean to be rude and not offer.”
But Cora shook her head, almost recoiling from the paper that Lucy was extending to her. “No, ma’am,” she said. “Somethin’ like that… it wasn’t meant for nobody else to read it. It’s only meant for one person.”
Lucy smiled faintly as the housekeeper hustled over to help her employer. She looked at Beau. “There’s something in what she says,” she said. “It’s so incredibly personal.”
Beau nodded, pushing himself onto his feet, grunting because he’d gotten stiff kneeling down for so long. “I didn’t realize you had the poem with you,” he said. “That’s the first time I’ve seen it. Something like that should have been buried with Ms. Victory.”
Lucy carefully put the folded note and poem back into the envelope. “Had I know about it, I would have made sure it was,” she said. “I only found out about it after she’d been put in the ground.”
“But you can still have those words inscribed on her head stone,” Stephen said. “That’s what she said she wanted.”
Lucy looked up at him as she put the journal back into her purse. “I intend to,” she said. “But knowing Ruby is alive… I think I’m going to give this poem and this journal to her, if she wants it. It’s her father and mother, after all. She might want to have something from them.”
Stephen looked over at Cora as the old woman brought tea cups to the table. “Where’s Ruby living now?” he asked her. “Do you know?”
Cora nodded. “She lives over in Cleveland,” she said. “She’s a retired professor from Delta State.”
Lucy looked at the woman in surprise. “She was a college professor?” she said. “My God… a woman of color born in that era getting a college education?”
Cora set the cups down. “My Aunt Florence insisted that all of her children be educated,” she said. “She’d saved up the money, so Ruby and her sisters went to Spelman College in Georgia.”
Stephen looked at Lucy. “Spelman is an all-Black woman’s college,” he said. “It’s been around a long time.”
Lucy already knew that about Spelman. She was hugely impressed that Ruby had grown up to become a teacher and there was a massive part of her that wanted to jump in the car and drive right over to Cleveland at that very moment. But at this juncture in the search for Mamaw’s baby, she knew she couldn’t do that.
Right now, she needed to let her family in on what she’d discovered. That was going to be a daunting task because she still wasn’t entirely sure if her dad was ready for such an emotional burden. Still, she couldn’t keep him out of it any longer. It was his right to know.
“Cora,” she said. “Do you think you could give me Ruby’s phone number? I’d like to call her and introduce myself. Do you know if she’s ever expressed any interest in knowing about her roots? I’m assuming she knew she was adopted.”
Cora gazed back at her, rather fearfully. “
I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if anyone ever told her where she really come from.”
That threw a monkey wrench into things. If Ruby didn’t know she wasn’t a biological child of Florence, then that could complicate things a great deal. That thought had never occurred to Lucy, frankly, and her joy in the discovery of Ruby was dampened by that thought.
“Oh,” she said, looking at Beau with something of a puzzled expression. “If she doesn’t know she’s adopted, do I tell an eighty-year-old woman what her roots really were? I’m not sure that’s even right.”
Beau was contemplating that very thought. “That’s true, but you wanted to give her that locket.”
“So I just give it to her and not tell her why?” Lucy asked, increasingly disappointed. “That doesn’t make any sense. She’s going to think the whole thing is crazy if some stranger gives her an antique locket.”
“Then tell her,” Stephen said. He’d been standing off to the side, listening to the chatter. When Lucy and Beau looked at him, he continued. “The woman is a teacher, after all. That means she’s somewhat pragmatic, hopefully. So she’s eighty years old? It’s never too late to learn the truth, even about yourself. I know this isn’t my family or my situation, but if it was me, I’d just tell her the truth.”
Lucy thought he made some sense. “But how?” she asked. “Just show up on her doorstep?”
Stephen shook his head. “No,” he shoved his hands in his pockets, his manner pensive. “Something like that needs to be handled delicately. Look, I’m a clinical psychiatrist by trade. I’m also Dr. Latling but I don’t practice medicine like my daddy did. If you want my advice and my help, I’m willing to offer it. I feel as if I have an investment in this situation given that my daddy rescued Ruby from Laveau. I can have Cora bring her over to our house and you can be here, too. We’ll call it a party or something. Then you can get to know her and decided when to tell her the truth.”
Lucy liked that idea a great deal. “Would you really do that?” she asked. “I don’t even know how to thank you. That’s twice the Latling family has helped my family.”
In the Dreaming Hour Page 20