The Gone Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  “Oh no, I had just started my master’s and hadn’t been introduced to your father’s work yet. Actually one of my future professors was there. And what I find fascinating about the funeral is that though Cliff wasn’t a member of the Harlem Writers Guild, and he appears to only have attended a single workshop held by Umbra, there were a not insubstantial number of black academics and writers in attendance. So you can see that he had been making connections in the literary community. I mean, the fact that his work had appeared in Negro Digest, Leaves, Othering, Nkombo, and the Black Scholar is considerable.”

  “My mother wasn’t there, right?”

  “I don’t believe she was.”

  “Do you know why not?”

  “I don’t, though I do find it curious because she would have been in Greendale to retrieve you. You find it odd as well?”

  Something to make note of. Cliff had a relatively stormy relationship with Pia, though how well Billie is familiar with the fights, occasional disappearances, and other women remains to be seen. And, of course, there was the strain of an interracial relationship at that time—the lack of places they could go together, the disapproval from Pia’s family not to mention his own, and even from some colleagues and friends for talking black but sleeping white as they say.

  “So where did my grandfather end up?”

  “St. Louis. He lived with a woman there and they had a daughter together.”

  “My father had a half sister? So, technically I have an aunt. Well anyway, you came all this way for a reason.” She drags a box across the remarkably bare room. “I found the manuscript in here. I’ve checked through all of these records at least three times, but I haven’t found anything else. Then”—she drags another box over—“this one has some of my mother’s letters and notes on her second book. She didn’t have time to finish it. It could have something relevant in it.” Billie takes a stack of papers that are sitting on a striped folding chair. “And this is it, the chapter.”

  “Let me wash my hands.” He goes into the kitchen and runs the hot water, scrubbing then drying his hands thoroughly with what he hopes is a clean dish towel. He picks up the papers, the original documents with—wait—handwriting around the typed words. Clifton James marginalia! Extraordinary. There could be, should be something like a two-day symposium featuring the documents. After the biography goes to press, of course.

  He takes a scarf from his briefcase. “It’s clean.” He rolls it out on the living room floor, then separates the papers along it. “I’ll photograph each. I’ve brought some polyester sleeves and I have an acid-free box in the car.” He looks at her. “If you don’t mind?”

  She’s frowning. “Of course. But don’t you want to read it first?”

  “I’m dying to read it. But I am also deeply aware of what a marvelous find this is and I must preserve it just in case.” Just in case it spontaneously combusts. He takes out his camera and snaps the photographs. The dog opens its eyes to check on his movements, then yawns, rolling onto its other side.

  As he’s taking the last photo, she says, “Doesn’t Rufus look two dimensional? Like a fourteenth-century hound. My mom used to have pictures of this illuminated manuscript she was obsessed with, Le Livre de la Chasse. It means slaying the boar—you probably know that already.”

  “Oh no, my French is quite rusty.” He lowers the camera. It’s true. The dog’s front and back paws are perfectly stacked.

  “We lived there for a few months, Paris. But I was only three, so I don’t really remember.”

  “Was the book a kind of medieval hunting guide?”

  “Yeah, for noblemen, of course. It had all of these elaborate rules and rituals of the hunt.”

  He puts away the camera. “Do you write?”

  She laughs. “Grant proposals. You know, now that I think of it, my mom was going to take me to the Morgan Library in New York to see the manuscript. But she got too sick. After she died, I thought about flying out to L.A. to the Getty and seeing it there. It was winter in Philly and so depressing, you know? I kept picturing myself sitting out in the sun by a pool for hours and going to the Getty. But I never did.” She reaches down to pet the dog. “He killed his son.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The guy who wrote Le Livre de la Chasse. Count Gaston. Or Jean. Pierre?”

  Better get close-ups of the marginalia. He takes the camera back out.

  She sits sideways on the armchair, her legs flopped over one arm. “So what do you think publishing his biography will do after all this time?”

  “My hope is that others discover him and that his work is placed among the other great black American writers.”

  “Have you heard of Mae Cowdery?”

  “Yes, of course, though I admit it’s been years since I’ve read her.”

  He waits for her to go on, but Billie gets up and floats back into the kitchen. Such a lovely girl, woman. There is an element . . . the term is arrested. He puts away the camera again and takes out his notepad. It is possible that her childhood was, in a sense, arrested. Perhaps a part of her lingers there on that porch—this porch—waiting for her father. She was in the house asleep. Though Billie’s time line on the night Cliff died is something that’s also never entirely been clear to him. But he won’t bring up such a delicate matter yet. Oh boy, he’s drinking much too much coffee. It’s giving him the jitters. He can’t drink this much if he isn’t smoking. Why is quitting so damn oppressive? Where is the joy at the new expansion in his lungs? Concentrate, man, concentrate. This is one of the greatest days of your life! He sits down cross-legged on the floor, exposing his ankles, and reads. What he wouldn’t give for a cigarette. What strikes him most as he reads is that if in “Chapter 2” Cliff is already discussing his time as a Freedom Rider, then the book must have been neither a traditional memoir nor a coming-of-age memoir, which would have started at his childhood and probably reached his civil rights awakening in the second half. The book must center around something else.

  With care, he opens the second box, lifting out a brown paper bag. Inside are three tiny teeth wrapped in cotton wool, a hint of brown at their roots.

  “Oh god, those are mine,” says Billie as she steps back in. “Is it strange to keep your child’s teeth?”

  “I don’t have children.”

  “My mother liked bones.”

  He laughs with her. This may be the— There is a way of asking gently, of course, with sensitivity. “I’m not sure yet if I will be able to stay much past the weekend, so although I hesitate to ask—”

  “What is it?” she says, her forehead tensing.

  “As I explore the limits of what this biography can be, first and foremost a reflection on a certain historical moment, a deconstruction of Cliff’s work, the way he plays with formal structures, and I hope a thorough examination of his position in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement and the tensions therein, simultaneously there’s a mystery at the heart of the book.”

  “Okay?” A hand goes to her pursed lips.

  “With regard to the circumstances of his death. I mean, in no way do I want your father’s work to be obscured by those circumstances, but nor can I ignore that they exist.”

  Billie nods slowly. “Of course not.”

  “But in order to do justice to that mystery, I do need access to certain documents. In particular, the police report.”

  She looks troubled. Their pleasant tête-à-tête disrupted. Could he have not waited until they’d known each other more than an hour?

  “Isn’t it public record?”

  “In this county, it’s at the discretion of the department. In this case, the report is only available to family members. And since it wasn’t something that went to trial, there aren’t court records.”

  She stares at the floor, moving a socked toe back and forth over a rut in the wood. “I guess so. I mean, you know what you need to really tell his story. And I’d be curious to know what it says. Maybe it mentio
ns me. I didn’t tell you but I met Jerry Hopsen the other day. Have you heard of him?”

  “Oh yes, a childhood friend of your father’s. He’s in my mental database.”

  “Right. And he said something about my picture coming on the news after my father died because I’d gone missing. Have you heard anything about that?”

  “No, never.” He picks his notepad up off the floor. “That’s incredible. It’s never come up. I can’t recall seeing it in any news reports.”

  “I think it came on the local news, maybe only for a few hours.”

  “What did Mr. Hopsen say exactly? This is quite something.”

  “That I was missing and my grandmother put my picture on the news. But then my uncle says that the police couldn’t find me and freaked my grandmother out and that I was only missing for a couple of hours. But that’s not the way Mr. Hopsen made it sound.”

  “It could be that one of them misremembers. People’s memories tend to refashion themselves around a particular narrative over time.”

  “Sure, but I’d like to know what actually happened. Maybe the police report would help me do that?”

  “It’s possible, but in any case I do think that it is absolutely invaluable to the biography.” He sips his coffee. It’s already cold. He puts the mug down and reaches into his briefcase for a gift bag. “A small token of my appreciation.”

  “Oh, you didn’t need to get me anything.” She takes the bag and pulls out a pint of bourbon. “Wow.”

  “I haven’t had this particular brand, but it comes highly recommended.”

  “Thanks.” She slips the bottle back in.

  “Can I ask who else knows about the chapter?”

  “Just you and my cousin Lola. I mean, other people might know it exists, but you guys are the only ones I’ve told.”

  “I know you are waiting on divulging this to your uncle, but would you consider not telling anyone else for the time being? Only because there are a couple of scholars who would whip out a few trivial essays on it and undermine the publication of the book.”

  “Are there other Cliff James scholars? You’re the only one I’ve heard of.”

  “There are other scholars interested in him, though I’m not certain they would say that they specialize in his work.”

  She runs her thumb back and forth along the side of the gift bag. “Do you think my father had an accident? Or maybe that it was something else?”

  There is a very intense look on her face. The space between them has edges. Best to proceed very carefully here. “If you mean foul play, while it’s not improbable that the local police during that time could have been involved in the death of a black man, my question would be why Clifton James? And why in 1972 and not years before when he was an activist? I’ve never uncovered that he was in any sort of dispute. If he was a victim of circumstance it seems odd that it would occur at his house, on his property with nothing stolen, et cetera. Well actually, his girlfriend at the time did make the suggestion of— She did suspect foul play, but she didn’t seem to have any sense of who or why, and it seems possible that it was just grief talking. My experience studying racially motivated killings has been that though one person may have pulled the trigger so to speak, there’s a way in which it is almost always a communal effort, and there’s no evidence of that here.”

  “I was actually thinking suicide. But you’re saying like a mob?”

  “Let’s think about Emmett Till. In the most popular narrative, he was murdered by two white men, Milam and Bryant. But there were many more people present, moving the body, cleaning up the evidence, participating—you see, a communal effort. I’ve actually been hearing rumors that the FBI might reopen that case. But I don’t think we should jump to any conclusions about your father without evidence.”

  There’s a loose piece of paper from the box with two lines scrawled in pen. You have here no lasting home. You are a stranger and a pilgrim wherever you may be, and you shall have no rest . . . “What is this?” He hands it to Billie.

  Her eyes run along the lines. “Oh, it’s Thomas à Kempis. A German monk. He wrote a book that was important to my mom. I don’t remember what it was called.” She becomes quite still then looks up. “Good, isn’t it?”

  She lets the dog out and goes onto the porch. Melvin follows, holding the chapter. They watch the dog chase birds fruitlessly across the yard.

  “You can read it in peace inside. I’ll stay out here with the dog. Shit.” Billie hops off the porch as the dog bounds into the road. “Rufus, come!”

  The dog scampers over the road and into the field on the other side. Melvin goes down the steps.

  “Rufus! Come!” She turns back to Melvin. “God, he’s never gone so far. He’s a speck already.”

  “I’m sure he’ll come back. For food if nothing else.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to lose my dog to the Delta. Wait here. It’s muddy.” Billie sprints across the road and into the turnrows, hunting her noble hound.

  Billie

  THE GREENDALE POLICE STATION IS A SQUAT BRICK BUILDING LOW ceilinged and fluorescent lit. Billie parks next to a battered red pickup truck with a BUSH/CHENEY bumper sticker and a rifle locked on a rack. Cracking the windows, she leaves Rufus on the backseat with a rawhide treat, which he does not appreciate, yipping and scratching. If only she could bring him.

  Before the doors, she spits out her gum. To appear professional. Like someone who has done this before and could do it again. Someone who will not burst into hysterics when the file touches her hands. Or run screaming down the road after she reads it.

  After passing through heavy glass doors and the arch of a metal detector, there is a resigned black woman with bobbed hair behind the counter who without looking at her while she talks says that it’ll be a minute. Billie goes to let Rufus out. He jumps from the car and itches his neck with his hind leg. Together, they tour the sad yellow parking lot grass overlaying the medians.

  Back in the station lobby, an officer comes out and asks her to step into the hallway from which he’s just emerged. The hall door shuts behind her with a sucking sound.

  “Ms. James, I’m Sheriff Oakes.” He smiles, resting in his bulk like an armchair.

  She shakes his offered hand. “Hello.” She was expecting someone to hand her a file and that would be it. But it’s a small town, so maybe this is how it goes.

  “I wanted to come on out here, Ms. James, and introduce myself. My father was one of the officers who worked the case back in ’72 as the responding. He passed a couple years ago, otherwise I know he would have spoken to you himself.”

  The sheriff has thickly chapped lips that she finds distracting. “I’m sorry to hear that.” She looks away from his mouth. “Thanks for meeting with me.”

  “Let’s head on over to my office.”

  As they turn the cinder block corner, they enter a carpeted space, a few officers hunched in cubicles glancing at her from under anemic lighting.

  The sheriff stops at a desk where a middle-aged secretary with stiff blond hair sits on the phone. Her watery blue eyes meet his. “Janice can get you a coffee or water. When she’s done with whatever she’s doing, that is.”

  “That’s okay, thanks. I don’t have long,” Billie says, wishing she were back in the car with Rufus.

  He walks into his office and she follows, leaving the door cracked. One can only hope to count on Janice if things get weird.

  The walls of his office are lined with awards, newspaper clippings, photographs of him with state representatives, of him fishing with small children, and a large crucifix. The only window looks out onto a back parking lot. He sits down behind his desk, moving his coffee cup from a folder.

  He points at the water stains on the low ceiling. “They haven’t remodeled this place in thirty years. There’s faulty vents up there. Likely asbestos too.”

  She sits in the hard chair in front of his desk. “Mind if I ask why I’m back here? I was under the impression I was ju
st picking something up.”

  “I wanted to be up front with you about the case. I swear it’s always bothered me.”

  “Could you elaborate?”

  “It seems to me like they ain’t had a whole lot to go on back then. Part of that is they didn’t have the technology we do now, if you know what I mean.” He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his hairline. “Always so dang hot in here this time of day.”

  Her teeth are almost chattering with cold.

  “Now, I don’t know what you’ve been told, but it’s my job to make sure you have all the facts.” He continues in a slightly more formal tone. “In the report, and again not sure what your family may have told you, but they ruled your father’s death an accident.” The AC clicks on, stale cold air rushing down the vents overhead, making the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling flutter. “Finally.” He puts the handkerchief down. “I know that my daddy explored all the angles. I remember that.”

  “But how would you remember?”

  “When I was about eighteen, I worked here in a part-time capacity for my daddy. He was the deputy sheriff then.” He pauses to sip his coffee. “I remember them looking at a couple of potential suspects. But it was all conjecture.”

  “Who did they look at?”

  “First, at your mother. But now that’s standard procedure, most homicides being done by the spouse. She had a solid alibi in Philadelphia.”

  Nausea pushes through her stomach. “Did they think it looked suspicious?”

  “Just being thorough.” He sets down his coffee. “Then they looked at your uncle.”

  “My uncle?”

  “Thing was, he owed your father some money. This being a small town, people knew how he’d been gambling, going beyond his means.”

  “But he was young. I mean, my father barely had any money, so it can’t have been much.”

  “I guess not enough to support his being a suspect. Personally, I knew Dee wasn’t involved in that way. What they did find for certain is that your father had a high blood alcohol content at the time of his death. And I’ve seen this kind of thing happen on the job countless times with hard drinkers. And this is just my honest-to-god personal opinion, but I believe that rather than it being accidental, he was trying to take his own life.” He lays his hands on the folder on the desk. “See I say this because it’s real common that when the notion of suicide enters the picture, a family can’t imagine their loved one taking their own life and so they often want it to be something else, anything else, even foul play.”