She adopted a serious expression. ‘Yes, sir, that I can do. They were going towards the rail yards.’
After what seemed to John Henry like an excessively protracted goodbye to Mrs Potter, Sheriff Bird drove Sheriff Sherman and John Henry to the yards, where a railman vouched he’d seen a pair who matched the description, and had talked to the tramp. ‘Make no mistake, he hasn’t left town, not by rail anyway. He told me he might not get on the Pensacola train after all, wanted to stay here a while instead. And when we were done talking he reached down for the boy’s hand.’ The railman lowered his voice. ‘The child shrank back in fear. Re-coiled.’
Sheriff Bird’s men carried out a door-to-door inspection of houses in the Mobile area, and sent extra men out to surrounding farms. They searched in the coloured and Italian neighbourhoods. They searched laneways and backstreets. They heard from two different men who lived by the river bend that the tramp had been in their home with the boy, doing odd jobs. But no one found the tramp.
John Henry raised the reward to four thousand dollars, a fortune. He would not, he bellowed at Sheriff Sherman, fail again: ‘This endless hunt must deliver my son.’ Never in his life had John Henry exerted so much effort without achievement, he said. The sheriff watched John Henry’s intensifying exasperation with concern.
That same afternoon, the sheriff suggested he and John Henry search the thick woods near the river bend by themselves. For two days they hiked along the narrow dirt trail, looking for any indication that others had passed through recently, stopping to eat Mrs Bird’s packed cornbread with black beans and to rest. Late at night, they sat on logs on opposite sides of an open campfire, rugged up against the cold. A soft wind blew through the trees, rustling the leaves. Frogs croaked and crickets chirped. The fire popped and wheezed.
Sheriff Sherman poked at the logs with a long stick while John Henry watched the flames.
‘It’s been nearly six months.’ The sheriff weighed his words. ‘You know I want to find your boy, John. But it might be time for us to think about how much longer we can keep doing this.’
The embers cast a tangerine glow on John Henry’s face. ‘I wasn’t aware you’d decided on the amount of time my son’s life is worth.’
‘Now, hold your horses. That’s not what I said.’
‘I was under the impression this was your job, not an activity wasting valuable –’
‘John, you must have considered that after so many false leads … It could be that Mrs Potter is mistaken, too.’
‘But the scar.’
‘Other boys have scars.’
‘On the left arm, curved, a boy the same age – it’s Sonny.’
‘None of us knows that boy’s age.’
‘I’m certain it’s him. And who’s to say any of the other leads have been false? The tramp is travelling. We simply haven’t been fast enough to catch him.’
‘I guess my question is, how long are you willing to do this?’
‘As long as it takes. What other answer is there?’ John Henry fixed his eyes on Sheriff Sherman. ‘Are you proposing that I stop searching, tell Mary we no longer care where Sonny is, who he’s with? I can’t do that.’
The sheriff nodded slowly. ‘I hear you, John. And I understand. But I want you to think seriously about how much more you’re willing to put yourself through. It’s taking a toll on you both.’
Having no easy reply, John Henry stood up and walked away from the campfire. He headed back towards the town, watched men stumble out of crowded saloons and a cat skitter from its garbage-can perch, glanced up to see a girl standing at a lit window, a thick arm slithering around her waist. Occasionally a Model T rumbled past him.
After a while, houses took the place of saloons, then fields took the place of houses. John Henry stopped on the road, surprised at how far he’d travelled and the lightness of the night. Scores of stars sparkled like diamonds, and a near-full moon shone on him, casting his shadow onto the ground. The night smelled like cold gin; the sky pulsed.
He saw a plume of white-grey smoke rising up from a field. Who else would be out here, where there was no other sign of human life? Maybe it was the tramp. He looked for a track that might lead in the direction of the fire and found it in no time, forcing himself to slow down so he wouldn’t be heard.
About twenty feet along the trail – rocks rolling under his boots, sticks crunching, a fieldmouse scampering off in fright – John Henry saw he was wrong. Hidden behind a thick cluster of trees was a scattering of shacks: small, rudimentary structures bathed in moonlight. Field workers. Still, he was so close, it could be worth watching from behind the trees to see if the tramp had sought refuge here for the night.
John Henry heard the voices of Negro men before he saw them. He found a spot behind the largest tree from which he could eavesdrop, then squatted there.
There were eight men sitting on logs around a fire. An elderly man with silver hair, red braces and a collarless white shirt buttoned to the neck tapped one foot as he sang. The men either side of him nodded, spoke in time. A group of younger men sat on the other side of the fire, sharing a bottle of something into tin mugs, laughing and nudging one another as they talked. An opossum cooked on a stake over the fire.
He’d felt momentarily released from his burdens in the presence of the high stars and wide land, but watching these men, John Henry realised how lonely his life had become, how weighty, with no equivalent gatherings of easy camaraderie. The mood at the fireside with the sheriff had been morose long before they’d argued. Back at home he had a wife who was at any time either hysterical or dumbstruck, and two sons whose presence reminded him of the missing third.
One of the younger men greeted a newcomer. ‘Boots.’
Boots had a mouth harp, and the other men urged him to play. John Henry brushed aside sticks and stones so he could sit in more comfort on the ground. He listened to the harp music, heard snatches of conversation, and felt in no rush to return to his own campsite.
Boots stopped playing. ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m leaving, two days’ time.’
The wiry man sitting beside him threw a stick in the fire. ‘Don’t ask me to come with you. I won’t.’
‘What exactly are you staying for?’ Boots asked. ‘After what happened to Frankie? You going to sit around and wait your turn? I’m not, no sir.’
‘I’m not saying there’s no danger here. I’m saying the river, the men on the roads, dogs – you’ll never make it.’
The silver-haired man huffed. ‘Yes he will, Samuel Stanton. And you should be thanking him, not filling him with fear.’
‘He’s not doing this for me.’
‘Why’re you always undermining him? Boots is trying to make things better for us, while you mooch around getting drunk and pawing at girls.’
Samuel chortled, but the old man would not be stopped.
‘I mean it. Are you teaching your children to read and write? Do you tell them they have worth? The things you do now make the future.’
At this, Samuel took offence. ‘I’m making a future.’
‘That farm? Ha!’ The old man slapped his thigh. ‘They’re playing you. You’ll be working that farm to pay off a debt they’ll raise and raise. You try to walk away, you’ll get arrested as a vagrant, and the judge’ll make you work off your fines on a plantation. Like a slave. Oh, and don’t walk home in the dark. Do that and you’ll wind up tied to a fence and whipped with wire like Frankie. You’re a fool, Samuel. If I was younger I’d go north with Boots. You should, too.’
John Henry was astonished by the debate that followed, the vocabulary he’d not known Negroes possessed, the passionate way in which the older man explained why they ought to fight for equality. Equality. John Henry thought back to the Negroes who’d dredged Half Moon Lake, helped search for his son. He tried to remember individual men’s faces or a single name, and found he could not.
As the fire burned out, the men drifted to their shacks to sleep, and John Henry stoo
d. He was appalled at his ignorance in first thinking the gathering had been one of jolly fools. These men would understand his pain more deeply than any others on Earth.
As he walked away, John Henry had an idea. In his travels, he’d seen Negroes living in desperate circumstances, always in poverty. It wasn’t voting they needed, it was release from deprivation and an alternative to indolence. Once Sonny was found, John Henry, as mayor, would promote the Scout Promise – physically strong, mentally alert, morally straight – throughout Negro communities. He had no doubt the whole South would benefit from the most downtrodden being improved, starting with the youngest. That, he could do.
CHAPTER NINE
Mary had grown up in Louisiana on a sizeable sugar cane plantation with thirty-seven men. In Mary’s time, freed men worked Arlington Grove Plantation, though the family had had fifty slaves managing the house and fields before the war. Some of the workers at Arlington Grove during Mary’s childhood had once been slaves or were the children of slaves and stayed on, even kept her family’s name, which she thought had to be a sign of some affection. Her father was voluble in his disdain whenever a worker would ask to leave the plantation. ‘There’s nothing out there a hardworking Negro can’t find under my roof,’ he’d say.
Mary’s father, Theodore Gould, ran the plantation to strict rules. He was a grave and commanding man, like his father before him. The fact that Arlington Grove Plantation House stood undamaged through the war – its garconnière, pigeonnier, overseer’s cottage, barns and slave quarters likewise unharmed – was testament to her grandfather’s resolve that it be so. Mary’s father took seriously his responsibility of maintaining the plantation and grand home, and guiding it into the future. ‘They might try to control us,’ he said. ‘But they will never erase us.’
Mr Gould often expressed his disappointment Mary hadn’t been born a boy. It wouldn’t have mattered had Mary’s mother borne other children, but God decided she ought not. Mary’s father was never cruel to his daughter, simply unimpressed. ‘It stands to reason that if you can only have one of anything, you want it to be the best.’ He said this in a matter-of-fact way, offering her what he considered the compliment that she was sensible enough to understand simple logic.
Mary recalled times when her mother – Adeline Gould, née Babineaux – was confined to her room; Mary was told not to disturb her as she was trying to hold in a baby, but they never held. During these periods of confinement, her mother’s cries were heard through the closed bedroom door for days afterwards. Without any reason Mary could ascertain, these grim times came to an abrupt stop, her mother left her room, and the house girls, maids and cooks were suddenly on the receiving end of a flurry of instructions to fling open windows, dust sills, wash bedding, make, bake and polish. The frenetic weeks were preferable to the dark and dull ones, but not knowing when either time would come and how long it would last made Mary’s stomach clench.
Though she’d never have said it aloud, Mary wasn’t sure she wanted a brother. And she worried that her reticence was somehow connected to her mother’s failure. At night, she knelt beside her bed and prayed for God to deliver their family a baby boy, and to then transform Mary’s ambivalence into delight. From both her mother and father, she knew that life could not go forward without this. Mary alone was not enough.
Mary had happy memories from her childhood, she was sure of it, but none of them was at her disposal right now. The absence of Sonny was agonising and all-consuming. Even more painful than his absence was the idea of him with another person, someone who mistreated him, starved and frightened him. It had almost been better to imagine him wandering alone – and that had been petrifying. But it seemed he was in the clutches of a stranger, kept in penury, made to beg. And not one of the many spiritual practices from which Mary sought advice – not the runes, tarot cards, ouija board or séances – brought forth anything useful from the living or the dead.
There were days when Mary couldn’t uncurl her spine for the pains in her gut. The digitalis no longer helped, though she carried it with her for lack of anything else. The doctor urged bed rest, again. But Mary was sick of her bed. She’d endured half a year of being told to lie down.
Sometimes, late at night, she padded down the cold hallway to the bedroom George and Paul shared, knelt between their cosy beds and hugged them in turn, stroked their hair, and straightened their blankets, telling them in rapid-fire whispers they must be careful, must stay safe. And when she left the room, as unpredictably as she’d arrived, the boys sat in their beds staring at the door, then at one another, then back at the door until they lay down to sleep again.
Mary knew her mother had suffered terribly from her failure to deliver a son to her husband – physical pain as well as shame and frustration. But Mary had lost a child she’d loved for years, a boy who had his own character, one of her three successes, four if she counted her marriage. She’d had everything one would want in a life and it had been shattered without warning.
Gladys Heaton’s visits weren’t helping Mary. On a blustery February afternoon, a few days after John Henry’s return from Alabama, and only moments after Esmeralda had opened the living-room door for her, Gladys began speaking in a rush: ‘I suppose you’ve heard. If Ira knows, then John Henry does. But I wanted to discuss it with you right away, in any case.’
Gladys dropped onto her favourite armchair, removed her gloves and looked about for something to drink. Why Mary’s staff could not anticipate one’s needs was beyond her.
Mary asked Esmeralda to bring them tea. ‘I have no clue what you’re talking about, Gladys.’
‘The boy in Mississippi. I passed by the library when Ira told –’
‘You didn’t eavesdrop on your own husband.’
‘Men are so loud. And he said Sonny’s name, which –’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that right away?’
‘Sit down, Mary, please, and I will. I couldn’t speak any faster if I tried.’ She put her fingertips to her throat and gulped to indicate the challenge of speaking when parched.
Mary made a hurrying motion with her hand.
‘Ira said there was a boy outside of Jackson, Mississippi. Now that’s more than two hundred miles away so it’s odd, but still, they were certain the boy fit Sonny’s description and –’
‘They found Sonny?’
‘Oh, do sit. I can’t think with you standing over me.’
Esmeralda entered the room carrying a tray with tea and beignets.
‘A Negro called Clarence Tine found the boy in the fields at dusk,’ Gladys said. ‘I remembered his name because it seemed odd. Don’t you think it’s odd?’
Mary frowned at her.
‘Well, the boy wouldn’t say what he was doing there or where he belonged. He just cried. The Negro’s wife was in labour – her sister had run to the fields with the news – and the baby was coming fast, though any reasonable woman would –’
‘Gladys.’
‘Because the baby was coming, Clarence Tine couldn’t afford the time to take the boy up the hill to his boss’s house. So he decided to carry him on his back to his own home, as a temporary measure, so he’d be present for his child’s birth. He intended to get the boy to its rightful parents at some point. That’s what he said, anyway. There were witnesses who told police the Negro’s version, before the lynching.’
Esmeralda clattered a fork against a plate.
‘Oh!’ Mary gasped and sank down onto a chair.
‘You see, Clarence Tine and his sister-in-law were seen running along the road with a crying white child clinging to Clarence’s back. You know how that would be perceived. Some neighbours gathered to rescue the child. Ira said these men knew where Clarence lived because he’s one of those Negroes who stir up trouble about voting.’ She glanced at the plates left out of reach by Esmeralda, who now stood next to the door, eyes cast down. She’d talk to Mary about her housekeeper on another occasion. ‘It’s sad. Clarence was strung from a tre
e. His sister-in-law met the same fate, the blessing being they died together.’
‘That’s awful, so awful for them.’
Gladys leaned forward. ‘Shall I tell you the most dreadful part? I feel I must. The sister-in-law was pregnant, too, and when she was hanging up, quite dead mind you, one of the men sliced open her belly and the baby slipped out like an eel, dropped onto the dirt. Ira said it was still alive but they left it there. Because, what would one do with it?’
Mary covered her eyes with her hands. ‘The boy, Gladys, is he Sonny?’
‘That’s the thing. I’m sure it’s him, or I’d never have told you such a story. And why would Ira have been discussing it if the boy wasn’t someone?’
Mary turned to speak to Esmeralda, not noticing that she had slumped partway down the wall. ‘Fetch Mr Davenport.’
Gladys was so shocked by the way in which John Henry spoke to her that she held her empty glass to her chest as though it might protect her.
‘Why in Heaven’s name would you speak of this to Mary?’
‘I had no idea she’d respond so madly.’ Rather than thanking Gladys for sharing valuable information, Mary had fretted about the fate of the Negroes and the horrors the child must have witnessed, and asked repeatedly if Gladys knew it to be Sonny. John Henry, Gladys felt, was being rude. Her fingers tightened around the glass.
‘Everyone says –’
‘No one says, Mrs Heaton, no one. What happened was a horrendous error. That our name passed the lips of those men is –’
‘Ira –’
John Henry moved his body to block Gladys from Mary’s view. ‘My love, I’ve spoken with the sheriff, and he’s been in touch with the authorities in Jackson. That boy is not our son.’
Gladys kissed Mary on her tear-wet cheek, and walked to the door with John Henry behind her.
Left alone, Mary sat with the whirr of her mind and watched a petal drop from the vase of flowers on the nearest table. A small bird landed on the windowsill, its chest feathers stained red from a meal of fresh strawberries. When it pecked on the glass, Mary startled as if she’d heard gunshot.
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