“I wouldn’t drink the stuff if that’s what you’re asking,” Teddy said. “But I don’t really know. Do you suppose all that stuff and the trunk are still at Chester’s place?” he asked us.
“I don’t know,” Zora replied absently. She was no longer really talking to us. Her mind, her thoughts, were somewhere else altogether, I could tell. “I wonder,” she murmured, then quietly repeated a line from The Transformation Rosarium: “If the maker is good, then the nigredo is good.”
Teddy, dear Teddy, understood immediately what was going on. “Zora,” he said very gently, “even if you . . . managed to take a picture of your mother . . . even if that somehow worked . . . or did whatever you think it would do . . . what then?”
My realization of just how deep Zora’s desperation went didn’t come to me as quickly as it had to Teddy, but it still hit me like a brick. What Zora seemed willing to latch on to to keep from drowning in her ocean of grief took my breath away.
Zora didn’t answer Teddy, and neither I nor Teddy could come up with anything more to say. In that moment, I suspect we both told ourselves that the entire conversation had been no more than a medicinal measure for our friend.
In the entirety of the South, white people had wiped out black people’s right to vote using tests, taxes, and threats. For many reasons then, Eatonville’s mayoral election of 1905 was a rare event in the history and life of these United States. We were exercising our power to mount a free and fair election. Enfranchised colored folks decided on the date, time, and place we would choose a man to lead us. A lot of skin was in the game. Since all of it was brown, white folks didn’t seem to care very much.
The voting began at the post office on Saturday at sunrise. By three, everyone eligible had cast a ballot. Around four, Mama and I, along with the rest of the town and the candidates, returned to the post office to hear the results.
In front of his automobile’s large metal grille, John Hurston appeared to still be speechifying, a large group orbiting him like bees around sugar. In the vehicle’s back seat, Lucy Hurston languished. Seated beside her was an old woman I recognized as Lucy’s mother, Zora’s grandmother.
On the lawn, Joe Clarke chatted more casually with a small group of supporters, many of whom lived in Lake Catherine and Blue Bay and so were not eligible to vote. Bo Wilson plucked away at a tune on the banjo as I sat with Zora, fretting, on the post office steps.
“Did you see my grandmother over there?” Zora asked.
“Yes. When did she get here?”
“Last night. Just in time for this,” she spat. “I think Grandma Potts is more alarmed by my father’s success than she is my mother’s illness.”
The Alabama woman had never thought John Hurston was good enough for her daughter. As his success grew, her visits diminished, until she stopped visiting altogether. Seeing as this visit coincided with her son-in-law’s possible coronation as mayor of a town, Mrs. Potts must have thought she couldn’t delay seeing her daughter another day, another hour. The realization made my stomach drop.
Mr. Johnson emerged from the post office holding a piece of paper, and everyone instantly shushed and froze. Mr. Hurston and Joe Clarke approached the steps of the porch.
Mr. Johnson stepped down the stairs and shook John Hurston’s hand. Cheers and praise erupted. “Congratulations, John,” Mr. Johnson shouted over the noise of the crowd. “You have been duly elected the next mayor of Eatonville, Florida.”
Mr. Hurston touched his heart and gazed heavenward in gratitude. Joe Clarke extended his hand to Mr. Hurston. Mr. Hurston took it but was already gliding away toward his horseless, acting like Mr. Clarke was nothing more than another nameless, faceless fan. Mrs. Potts, looking fussed, had opened the door of the vehicle to help her daughter get out and go stand beside her victorious husband. East, seeing an opportunity, leaped out of the throng to come to their aid.
Lucy Hurston’s scalp sagged beneath thin, threadlike hair. Her eyes looked grotesquely large on her thin, gray face. John Hurston swept her up and draped an arm over her shoulders, as though she were the prize and he her maker. Sick as she was, Lucy Hurston stood strong under the weight of her husband’s pride, just as proud and pleased herself. Together, she and John had come a long way. Together, they did not have much further to go.
Three months into Mayor John Hurston’s six-year term, Lucy took to her bed. At John Hurston’s insistence, both Old Lady Bronson and Doc Brazzle came to examine her together. After the joint examination, the sage and the physician appeared before the family, huddled and waiting in the front room.
“She doesn’t have long,” Doc Brazzle said, stating the shared verdict.
John Hurston left for Lucy’s bedroom first. Bob, Sarah, Everett, and Zora followed, sobbing. I rose to accompany them, but Old Lady Bronson held me back. “Come help me,” she said, and led me into the kitchen.
There, Old Lady Bronson pointed to the clock over the cupboard. I immediately understood the task at hand and the comprehension caused my chest to heave. According to superstition, the way to honor the sum of a life was to stop and mark the time before a soul departed this world for the next. If the clocks were not halted, in time, the superstition foretold, the flow of bad luck for anyone present at the death would never cease. Such were the pagan precautions that had to be taken, even in a minister’s home, to account for mysteries outside of Christ.
I dragged over a chair, stood on it, and took the metal timepiece down. It read quarter past eight. Old Lady Bronson opened the back, reached in, removed a small rusted weight from the chain, and dropped the modest pendulum into one of her large apron pockets. I returned the clock to the wall.
Another clock sat on the buffet in the dining room, where Mrs. Potts cried, hunched over the table. When she registered what we were doing, her nostrils flared.
“Stop it,” she commanded, “right now! It’s not time! She has more time!” John Hurston stepped into the room to see what the fuss was about. A thick string of snot hovered above her lip. Mrs. Potts swatted at it, the way you might swat at a fly or a gnat, which just spread the slimy smear to her cheek. John Hurston pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket. Wordlessly he wiped her nose and face, like he would have a child’s. It was the kindest thing I had ever seen him do. He folded the handkerchief and placed it in his mother-in-law’s trembling hand. “I’m going to the solarium for a few minutes,” he said. “I need to be alone. Leave Old Lady Bronson to her tasks before it’s too late.”
The agony of Mrs. Potts’s sorrow was like a punch to the gut, and she doubled over. “Too late,” she moaned at her son-in-law’s back. “Too late . . .”
Old Lady Bronson opened the clock, pulled the minute hand from the face, and slipped it into her apron pocket, where she had stowed the other time bits. Old Lady Bronson stopped time with the same expert precision she used to birth babies and reel in fish, to wring chicken necks and reset bones. I was struck by how that single pair of hands could tear things asunder as easily as they could stitch them together, keep folks alive.
Lucy Hurston’s bedroom held the last working timepiece.
When we stepped in, the first thing we saw was Sarah, Bob, and Everett standing in a cluster by their mother’s bedside, soldiers mourning a fallen general. Then we registered Zora’s presence in the room. She stood at the foot of Lucy’s bed, apart from her siblings, refusing to surrender. My heart sank and horror washed over me. Was I imagining this, or had Zora lost her mind? Old Lady Bronson provided the answer.
“Lord, child,” she scolded Zora. “Take that thing down! Carrie, help Zora get that thing out of sight, before her daddy sees. Help her, now!”
At the foot of her mother’s deathbed, Zora was in the process of setting up an old camera on a wooden chair and focusing its lens on Lucy. It put me in mind of a cannon. It was the camera from Chester Cools’s cabin, the Summoner’s camera. Zora must have gone back and retrieved it. How she managed it on her own, I didn’t know.
�
�I told Zora not to!” Bob spat, tears streaming down his face. “But she won’t listen.” He stormed out of the room, more boy than man. Sarah hugged Everett to her, hiding his face from the scene.
I stepped over to Zora and put a hand on her arm. “How?” I managed to squeak before faltering.
“After I read about nigredo,” she said to me, her eyes shining with hope, “I went back to Mr. Cools’s place for the camera. I dragged it clear across Eatonville in an old wagon. The strangest part, Carrie, is that I didn’t run into a single soul. It was as if my path had been cleared of obstacles, like I was meant to have this camera. Once I got it here to the house, I hid it under Mama’s bed, knowing that, one day soon, I would have need of it.”
“Mr. Cools had a miserable life,” I reminded her. “Maybe the Summoner did bring him back to life. Maybe Chester was a zombie. Do you think he liked it? Do you think that’s how he wanted to live? Do you think that’s what your mother would want? Is that really what you would want for her?”
“If there is any chance that I could keep Mama here on this earth for a day, a week, a month longer, I have to try. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try,” she said.
Before my eyes, my oldest friend had turned into an unfathomable mystery. “No matter,” I prodded, “if you kill some part of your soul and hers in the process?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t let that happen,” I said, and tugged at the chair. The heavy machine wobbled, and that’s when John Hurston detonated into the room. He was followed by Bob, Doc Brazzle, and Mrs. Potts.
John Hurston gaped at the camera in disbelief. “What’s this?” he snarled, then glared at Zora. “What in God’s name are you doing?”
Lucy Hurston stirred in her bed, fluttered ever so slightly, silently.
Zora returned all of her focus to the camera and her mother, ignoring her father, ignoring me and Old Lady Bronson.
John Hurston had had enough. He kicked the chair, which sent it sliding into the dresser. Zora lunged to keep the camera from crashing to the floor. “I just want a picture of Mama,” she cried. “Just one! Please, Daddy! Please! It might save her!”
But John Hurston took one giant step toward Zora and thwacked her on the side of her head. Zora fell to the floor, and the camera flew from her hands. Eatonville’s new mayor lifted a foot and, giving Zora a death stare, stomped on the camera until we could hear the grit of shattered glass grinding the floorboards. The only respite was that he wasn’t thrashing Zora.
“This is not how we’re going to remember my wife!” John Hurston raged.
Then, bowed by his sorrow and exhausted by his violent anguish, he collapsed amid the ruins of the machine and wept. He must have cut himself on a shard of glass, because when he put his hand to his face, he smeared his cheek with blood.
Zora got up from the floor. She stepped over her father’s spiritual remains, stepped past the defeated remains of her family, and climbed into bed beside her mother. She gently pressed her lips to Lucy’s face, stroked her hair, and listened to her mother breathe her last breath. In it, I think, Zora heard the resounding sound of a door closing, the first of many that would slam shut over the course of her life.
To prepare Lucy for the wake and funeral, Old Lady Bronson and Mrs. Potts dabbed her face for hours with cloths soaked in soda water to keep the death look at bay. A scarf tied around her head and under her chin kept her lips from parting, and nickels weighted her eyelids. A cold lodger in her wedding dress, Lucy Hurston looked more like a child bride than a corpse.
Mourners arrived with sunflowers, pennyroyal, and wild sweet william. Bloom-filled vases, glasses, and porcelain bowls lined the path from the Hurston front gate to the house, and the house itself swam with scent. Black curtains hung in the living room and the solarium. Gardenia-scented columns stood at each end of the coffin, which, at ninety dollars, was the most expensive any of us had ever heard of. John Hurston had bought it in Daytona. It was made of mahogany, lined with red velvet, and decked out with solid silver bolts. Lucy Hurston’s final resting place was a far cry from that toothpick box Chester Cools had been buried in.
Eatonville hosted the funeral at Hurston’s church, New Hope Macedonia, but Mrs. Potts insisted that Lucy be buried in the Potts family plot in Alabama, a whole state away, laid to final rest beside her sister and infant nephew. To everyone’s surprise, John Hurston easily agreed. The theft of Chester Cools’s body still cast a shadow over Eatonville, and the widower couldn’t stomach the risk of having his wife buried at Sand Grounds and suffer the same fate.
Just as they had for the mayoral election, many of John Hurston’s out-of-town followers traveled to Eatonville to pay their respects. The same chairs that had been used for the debate were now set up on the lawn outside of the church. Only there weren’t enough. Lots of men, women, and children had to stand.
The minister who had baptized Lucy, in the church where John Hurston had first spotted her as a girl, presided. His name was Roscoe Locke. “The first time I ever beheld Lucy Potts,” he recalled, “she was a shut-eyed infant rooting for her mama’s breast. ’Fore long, she was a stout-legged, milk-bellied toddler; then, a knee-scraped wiry girl; and finally, a beautiful woman. Again now and forevermore, in God’s arms she’s that little baby, unable to open her eyes because God’s glory is star-bright. His embrace is soft and steady, and the milk of His salvation is warm and sweet and good. We’ll miss dear Lucy, but our hearts are glad ’cause she lives now in God’s arms and her spirit can reach high and wide enough to do the heavens a few favors, like she done down here for all of us.
“She’ll brighten up that dull ol’ boulder, the moon, like she brightened up our lives here on this earth. She’ll open up a window and door on that moon so it can catch, each and every day, a little more sun, a little more warmth. In turn, that glow will stream down on us every night and in every dark moment of our lives.” Reverend Locke looked down on Lucy in her rest, touched Lucy’s folded hands, and bowed his head in silent prayer for a few moments. Then he brought the coffin lid down over Lucy, slowly, surely, finally.
Zora wailed. Her anguish rattled my teeth. Mama tucked her head into my shoulder and poured hot tears on my neck. I felt tired and small and so sad. The grief in the church hammered like a storm that was a song and a song that was a storm.
When the family returned from the burial in Alabama, my mother and I went by the Hurstons’ to see how we could help. John Hurston had gone out for a drive. Curled up like a newborn in the window seat, Everett slept while Bob packed for his return to Orlando, and Zora took refuge in Lucy’s feather bed, soaking up her mama’s scent. Sarah was puttering around the kitchen, moving platters and silverware that had been used at the repast without putting any one thing away. All of the glassware and bowls that held the funeral bouquets had been collected, but dried petals and blackened leaves littered the floor. Mama guided Sarah over to the kitchen table, sat her down, and began sorting out the special occasion items from the everyday wares. Out back, on the steps, I found two full sacks of laundry.
“Anything you want done with those things on the back porch?” I asked.
“It’s dirty laundry. Daddy’s and East’s,” Sarah said, her voice dry, empty.
East? His laundry? They weren’t even engaged, let alone married, and he had left his soiled things at a house in mourning? If that didn’t disqualify him as a suitor, I wasn’t sure what would.
“I’ll see to it,” I answered, feeling even worse for Sarah. “I see y’all got a laundry barrel out back now, not too far from the old chicken coop,” I said. “I’ll sort it out there.”
“I’ll get the fire going and boil the water,” Sarah said. “I don’t want you to get that hand wet.”
I smiled, thankful to see Sarah was still there, under her grief.
While the water was readied, I decided to sweep the flowers that had been colorful and velvety with life but were now withered to crepey gray crumbs.
T
hough my hand ached, I cleaned up the front porch, the foyer, the front room, and the solarium. When I was done with that, I grabbed the sack I assumed to be East’s because it was smaller and dragged it to the makeshift washing station to sort. The fire was blazing now, the water in the barrel boiling. Mama came out with a bar of store-bought soap and dropped it into the water. We stood together in silence for a moment, watching the fragrant steam rise.
“That was Lucy. Always making things nice.” Mama paused in homage to her friend, then said, “When you think they done soaking long enough, come get me. I’ll come out and scrub ’em while you help Sarah straighten out the kitchen. Need to keep that hand of yours dry.”
“All right.” I emptied the sack onto a tarp. Two shirts, two pairs of slacks, an undershirt, a few pairs of drawers, and some holey socks tumbled out. East’s bowler fell out last, a cross between an omen and a punctuation mark. I shook out his garments and threw them into the barrel, out of sight, one at a time. There were only socks and the hat and a single pair of trousers left on the ground. When I picked up the last pair of trousers, I could feel that there was something in the pocket. I reached into the pocket with my ungloved hand. A moment later, I was staring at a long silver nail. The initials BE were engraved on its large, flat head. Bertram Edges had smithed this nail. He had smithed this nail for one purpose: to seal Chester Cools’s coffin. I nearly lost my footing.
I gripped the thing tightly, ran around the front of the house to avoid Mama and Sarah, and bolted into Lucy’s bedroom to wake Zora. The last time I had been in this room, I watched a father crush his youngest daughter’s dream of snatching her mother from death. I faltered for a moment. Now I was about to crush the elder daughter’s hopes for a happy future.
“Zora.” I touched her arm firmly. Zora’s eyes remained closed. “Wake up!” I demanded. “It’s important!”
Zora turned onto her back and opened her eyes. “What is it?” she asked groggily.
Zora and Me: The Summoner Page 11