The Road to Testament

by Eva Marie Everson

  “Girl, please,” she said, scooting around the front of the parked but still-running SUV. She opened the passenger door for me. “Let someone help you.”

  “You’re driving me, aren’t you?” I said with a chuckle. I dropped my purse—one of my new ones—onto the floorboard where it joined a squished McDonald’s bag, an empty Yoo-hoo bottle (something I’d never actually seen until that moment, but had heard about in a song playing on Will’s truck radio), and a pair of scuffed black high heels.

  “So that’s a Yoo-hoo,” I said.

  She picked up the shoes. “Mmhmm. And these are my church shoes,” she said. “I come out of these things as soon as my rear end is back in my car.” She tossed them into the back.

  I nodded in understanding. Wearing even pricey shoes came with consequences, I knew. Although before moving to Testament I never would’ve admitted it. “What I find amazing, is that here it is Wednesday, and you haven’t yet taken them out of your car. Unlike me, the girl who keeps her shoes in shoeboxes when they aren’t being worn.”

  She scooped the bottle and the bag into her hands, ready to throw them in the back where the shoes had been deposited. “Sounds about like something you’d do.”

  “Should I guess how old the Yoo-hoo is?”

  “Prob’ly not. They’re my weakness. Well, that and Doritos and fast food and Snickers. Pretty much anything I shouldn’t eat.” She took the crutches while I settled in, closed the door, and laid the crutches along the backseat.

  Alma drove around the cottage. “I bet you never eat bad stuff.”

  “Rarely,” I said, thinking of the pork I’d had the Friday before. “My mother is a stickler for healthy living and I guess, to some degree, I am too. Although”—I pointed to my foot—“my recent ‘take long walks’ plan fell short.” I cut my eyes at her. “And I use the word ‘fell’ on purpose.”

  “So what did happen? Because all I’ve heard is that you and Will were walking together, you tripped on a tree root, and fell into a ditch.”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “We were not walking together. I was walking alone, he was walking behind me—unbeknownst to me—I stood too close to a ditch, Will scared me, and I fell.”

  “Lawd, Lawd. And it must have been a big ditch.”

  “The one to the old Revolutionary War road.”

  “Lawd, Lawd.” She turned the car onto the highway. “How in land’s sake did he get you out?”

  I felt heat rush to my face. “He carried me.”

  She looked at me—only momentarily, but long enough to say, “Uh-hunh.”

  “What?”

  “I know that look. Girl, you’ve got it bad for Will Decker.”

  “Nooooo . . .”

  “Then stop gushing.”

  “I’m not,” I protested around a laugh. “All right. I am. But if you say anything . . .”

  “And what happened to Rob Matthews? Y’all were pretty cute out there the other night.”

  “He’s a sweetheart but . . . he’s just a friend.” I paused. “Hey, Alma? What do you think about—say—someone Rob’s age and someone—say—Brianna’s age?”

  “Brianna Fletcher?”

  “Yes.” A last name I knew only because I wrote it on a check the day before. Another switch for me. Another “something new.”

  I realized it then . . . that something else had changed. I no longer thought of people by their last names, as I did most of the staff at Parks & Avenues, but by their first. I wasn’t even sure of Alma’s last name. Or Garrison’s.

  “Well,” Alma drawled, “my mother and father are about twelve years apart in age. I have an aunt and uncle who are twenty years apart.”

  “Does your family have some sort of May-December fetish?”

  Alma laughed. “Not one bit. Now, of course, you know that Miss Helen and her husband had a big-ole gap in age.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “You writing a story about that?” She turned the car into the nursing home parking lot.

  “No. I’m still trying to unearth—if you’ll pardon the pun—those graves out on Rob’s property.”

  “What graves?”

  “You know about the graves, right?”

  She parked the SUV. “Can’t say as I do.”

  I unbuckled my seat belt. “Come on in with me then,” I said. “Maybe you can help.”

  The nursing home was typical, I suppose, as nursing homes go. I’d never been in anything but private assisted-care facilities, which have more of a home feel. This one—Testament Nursing Home—felt more like a hospital. And it smelled like one, too. Antiseptic and . . . what was that?

  “Hate that smell, don’t you?” Alma said from beside me. “Always smells like urine when you first walk in. They can’t help it none, and that’s okay, but it just kind of gets you at first.”

  “Is that what that is?” I swung along beside her, heading toward the front office.

  “Haven’t you ever been in a nursing home before?”

  “No.”

  “Mmmm-mmm-mmm.”

  After we signed in, the receptionist led us to the nurses’ station of the wing where Miss Helen resided. I was introduced to an aide whom Alma already knew, and who led us down a hall with polished linoleum floors, ecru walls with handrails, and scuff marks made by wayward wheelchairs.

  We stopped at an open door. “Miss Helen, you got visitors,” the aide said.

  I swung into a bright room with two beds and bedside tables, both laden with clutter. Miss Helen sat in a gold vinyl recliner beside a neatly made hospital bed. She wore a pair of polyester slacks and a classic cotton camp shirt—pink with white polka dots and large pink and white daisies. “Well, lookie-here,” she said. “Chile, you came to see an old woman.”

  Alma walked in behind me as Miss Helen added, “What in land’s sake happened to ya?”

  “Just a little fall,” I said. “I’ll be fine soon enough.”

  “Hey there, Miss Helen,” Alma said. She pulled two padded chairs to Miss Helen’s chair. “Here ya go, Ashlynne.”

  I eased into the chair and handed the crutches to Alma, who rested them against the made, but unoccupied, bed on the other side of the room, nearest the door. “Miss Helen,” Alma said, raising her voice a little, “where’s Miss Sophie today?” Then to me, “Miss Sophie is her roommate.”

  “Been roomies for two years now,” Miss Helen told me. Then to Alma, “She’s gone to the knitting and crocheting class.” She chuckled. “That woman loves to knit and crochet. All kinds of handiwork.” She pointed to an embroidered pillow at the head of her bed. “Made that for me without so much as a pattern.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said. To Alma, “How is it you know who Miss Helen’s roommate is?”

  “Alma comes out here a couple of times a month and volunteers,” Helen answered.

  “Like one of the Bingo Angels?”

  “Not like . . . I am a Bingo Angel.”

  I tried crossing my legs, but the throbbing in my ankle insisted I change positions. “Alma,” I said, “can I have another chair to prop my foot on?”

  I hardly got the full question out of my mouth and Alma was out the door and back in, carrying an armchair. After she helped me get comfortable, I said, “Miss Helen, I wanted to ask you something . . . about a piece of property with some unmarked graves. I’m hoping maybe you know something.”

  “Because I’m as old as Methuselah?” Miss Helen chuckled. “Well, who knows? I’ve managed to keep my ear to the ground over the years. What property are we talking about?”

  “The Robert Matthews property . . .”

  “Out on the highway heading toward Lake Lure and Chimney Rock,” Alma supplied. “About a quarter mile before Candy Creek Road.”

  “Unmarked, you say?”

  Excitement rushed through me. The way she said the words . . . “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How many?”

  “Close to a hundred. Maybe more.”

  Miss H
elen leaned back in her chair, turned her face toward the lone window, which overlooked a small garden of flowers and statues of children playing. I remained silent, feeling Alma’s eyes on me. I looked at her, widened my eyes, and smiled. But Alma remained stoic.

  “Now then,” Miss Helen said, leaning in, “if they’re unmarked, how do you know they’re graves?”

  We were so close, I could practically count every wrinkle on her pretty face. “Well,” I said, “they are marked by stones, but no names are on the stones. And the graves themselves are sinking. It’s obvious they’re graves. Human graves. And I’ve been thinking, maybe they’re slave graves.”

  Miss Helen and Alma exchanged knowing glances.

  “You’re right,” Alma said.

  I shifted to look at her. “I am.”

  “Right as rain,” Miss Helen said. “Them’s slave graves.”

  29

  I had a feeling,” I whispered, remembering when I’d offered the same idea to Will. He’d become sullen, nearly unresponsive. “What I don’t understand,” I said to Alma, “is why Rob or Will wouldn’t have thought this first.”

  “Well . . .” Alma shifted in her seat. “From what I know about Will, he doesn’t like to talk about that part of our history. Not a bit. Says it’s a blight on our history and he’d just as soon not remember it.”

  “But we have to. We need to remember. Not remembering makes it too easy to repeat,” I said. “Like the Holocaust. Or 9/11. If we forget it, we’ll allow it to be repeated.” I took a breath. “We have to remember. We have to know. Knowledge is power—”

  “—I remember . . .” Miss Helen interrupted my soapbox sermon.

  Alma and I stopped talking to each other and focused on the older woman. At first she said nothing more, until, “I remember my husband talking one time.” She looked at Alma. “Now don’t think I’m like he was, but he hated the coloreds.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Alma said. “We all know about your husband.”

  Helen’s eyes bored into mine. “He was not a good man. Said and did cruel things. He was twenty-eight years older’n me, did you know that?”

  A gasp escaped my lungs. “Twenty-eight?” Hearing “he was older” was one thing. This was . . .

  “I was fourteen,” she said, interrupting my thoughts. “He was forty-two.”

  “When you got married?”

  Helen leaned back. “That’s right.”

  I looked at Alma. “There should be a law . . .”

  “Well, there wasn’t. Not back then, at least.”

  Helen chuckled, but not happily. “My daddy and Eb—Ebenezer Aaron Baugh was my husband’s name—they were friends. Eb needed a woman in the house—all three of his kids were married already, even the sixteen-year-old, Nettie, had managed to escape home—and my daddy needed to get shed of one of his twelve young’uns.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand that . . .”

  “We were poor as dirt, girl. Nineteen hundred and thirty-five was a bad year for my daddy. Eb’s farm was doing fairly well as farms were doing in those days. Marrying me meant Daddy could come to the farm and pick vegetables. Eb also gave Daddy some chickens. A sow.”

  My stomach turned. And I thought Brianna’s story of young motherhood was tough.

  “You all right, Ashlynne?” Alma asked. “You’re whiter than . . . well . . . normal.”

  “I just . . . ,” I said when I’d caught my breath, “I can’t imagine being married to someone so my father could have vegetables.”

  Miss Helen chuckled again. “Not just my daddy, hon. My whole family could eat on what Eb provided. Marrying Eb meant feeding my little brothers and sisters.”

  I swallowed. “So, then . . . what does this have to do with the graves?”

  Helen nodded. “Eb was born in 1893.”

  “Not terribly long after the Civil War,” Alma said.

  Miss Helen waved a hand. “The War of Northern Aggression, Eb called it. Said his daddy’s farm—the one we lived on . . . the one you all came out to for my party—thrived when the coloreds were there. Then, he said, they had to pay them wages, and it made life more difficult.”

  Uneasiness rushed through me. “For whom?”

  “Mmhmm,” Alma added.

  Out in the hall, a disheveled older woman passed the door in her wheelchair, using her feet to shuffle along. She mumbled to no one about needing to get to the school to find her children.

  “I remember,” Miss Helen said, again bringing my thoughts back to the conversation, “Eb talking about his daddy and some men . . . they wanted to stop the coloreds from becoming too independent, from having their clandestine meetings out in the woods past Thicket’s Holler.”

  I made a mental note of the place, steeled myself, and asked, “And did they?”

  Helen looked first to Alma, then to me. “One way or ta-other.” She sighed so deeply I feared she’d run completely out of oxygen. “Tell you what you do. Go look up who owned that land back in the day. If I’m right, it’s old Levi Jefferson’s place. Married into the Iris Clinton family. That land had belonged to her family, but then Levi and Iris married and he moved in rather than her moving out. Pretty soon, it was the Levi Jefferson place. He and Iris had one son, and after he grew up and married, he and his wife—what was her name?” Miss Helen paused, thinking. “Winnie Dickson, that’s what it was. The younger Levi and Winnie’s babies all died early on, so when the older Levi and Iris got on up in age a little, they thought to sell the land. That’s when the Matthews bought it, if I remember right.”

  “What happened to the house?” I asked.

  “Your young man’s mama and daddy live in it.”

  “My young man?”

  Alma shifted in her chair. “The Matthews property is quite expansive. Rob bought about a quarter of it from his parents a few years ago. That’s where you were. Where the graves are.”

  Miss Helen waved her hand again. “Y’all go on and look that up. See if you don’t learn that several of the former slaves and their families from around here went missing after 1870.”

  “Why 1870?” I asked.

  “Because,” Alma said, “that’s the year the names of former slaves were recorded on the census.”

  “You’ll find them in 1870, but not in 1880, you mark my words,” Helen said. “My husband, Eb, had too much to drink one night—many nights, but this one in particular—and he told me.”

  “Then why . . .” I stopped, wanting to choose my words carefully. This news—this story—was beyond anything I could fathom. I didn’t want to offend Miss Helen, but I felt like we were talking about something out of another country.

  “Why what, hon?”

  “Why . . . and don’t be offended when I ask, but . . . why, if your husband gave you some indication that murders had taken place . . . why didn’t you tell somebody?”

  Without blinking, Helen Baugh answered, “I never reckoned it had anything to do with me.” Her eyes bored into mine as I tried to catch my breath. “You go back and look, now. The Jeffersons and the Clintons and my husband’s daddy.” She nodded. “They were behind it.”

  “I know I need to get to the football field,” Alma said, once I’d hobbled back to the car with her, “but what you’re doing is far more interesting than Sean Flannery.”

  I jerked at the sound of Sean’s name. But Sean’s drug usage would have to wait. At least for a while. “I’m not sure where to begin.”

  “County records. We’ve got a little place out on 221 where all the records are kept for our county plus those bordering us.” She started the car and drove out of the parking lot.

  “Alma,” I said, after a few minutes of reflection and of trying to calm my stomach, “what does all this mean?”

  “It means,” she said, “that if I were a betting woman—and I’m not—but, if I were, I’d be laying bets that Rob Matthews’ property is the final resting place for a lot of folks. And their people, their descendants, just might want to know about
it.” She shook her head. “Girl, you may end up being a hero.”

  “A hero?”

  “Yeah,” she said with enthusiasm. “Can you imagine? For those folks who get into ancestry, which is just about everybody I’ve been talking to lately. I’ll tell you one thing. As soon as I get home, I’m calling my grandmother. See what she might know. Stories like that, they tend to get buried. You know, so the storyteller doesn’t.”

  “Mmhmm . . .” I only half heard her. My mind remained on her previous comment. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a hero. Here I was, finally in a position to be liked by everyone, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know all of what I’d just learned. About the Jeffersons. The Clintons. The Baughs. I especially didn’t like the images of a fourteen-year-old Miss Helen, being bartered for food and chickens and a sow. “Helen Baugh basically lost her childhood,” I said. “Do you realize that?”

  “Helen Baugh probably didn’t have much of one to speak of anyway, girlfriend. Those days were bad. Everyone worked. Even the children. People were hungry. No jobs. No food. No hope.”

  “But to be fourteen and pretty much forced to marry a forty-two- year-old.” I quivered.

  “Someone step on your grave?” Alma asked.

  “What?” I looked out the window. We were nowhere I’d been yet.

  She laughed. “Old saying. When you get the willies like that, we always say someone has stepped on your grave.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  Several miles and a few strip malls and convenience stores later, we turned down a long stretch of road that seemed to go nowhere. Finally a small, white-brick flat-faced building came into focus on the left side of the road. Alma turned in and parked next to the sole car that reminded me more of a boat than an automobile. “We’re here,” she said.

  We entered a room in which shelves lined the side walls, tables crammed in the middle, and small white boxes ran in rows toward an area in the rear. The smell of old cigars permeated the air. A small-framed older woman sat at a desk near the back, which Alma walked and I swung toward. The desk was strewn with papers and opened books and a brown paper sack, which I suspected held the remnants of lunch and perhaps an afternoon snack. The woman looked up, removed her reading glasses, and said, “May I help you?”