Amanda-Lynne’s cry broke the silence, “My baby needs me! Let me see my baby!”
DeWayne was talking to her softly, but the silence of the night was so complete that Faye heard every word. “Honey, you can’t help him, and he wouldn’t want you to see him this way. Walk with me to Elliott’s house, and Brent will give you something that’ll help you through this.”
Amanda-Lynne’s laughter had a helpless edge, and it lasted too long. “You think something will help? Well, I’ll tell you this. Nothing helps. I tried Brent’s pills when Charles died, but you know what? The pills wore off and Charles was still dead. When I was little, I prayed to God every night, asking Him to send my parents back home to me. And every morning when I woke up, they were still dead.”
“I know,” DeWayne whispered. “I remember.”
Her eyes narrowed and she studied DeWayne as if she’d just realized who he was. “Kiki’s going to die. Did they tell you that?”
“Mandalyn, please!”
“Nothing helps. When it happens to you, you’ll know. Nothing helps.” Her eyes still narrowed, she studied DeWayne. Then, like a zoo animal who has sat in its cage for years, learning its keepers’ habits and waiting patiently for a chance to act, she twisted out of DeWayne’s grip and ran.
Brent saved Amanda-Lynne from reaching the silent crowd and getting an unobstructed view of the sight no one wanted her to see. He stepped directly into her path and allowed her to slam into him, saying, “DeWayne and I are taking you to Elliott’s house. You can walk, or DeWayne can carry you. I don’t care. But you’re not staying here.”
Amanda-Lynne faked to the right, then ran hard to the left, trying to catch Brent off guard, but DeWayne reached out and grabbed her with a hand the size of a bear paw. He threw her over one shoulder, turned around, and headed toward Elliott’s house, saying, “I wish to God I’d never heard about this tower. I’d pay back every cent of the lease money, if it would make this day go away for you, Mandalyn, baby.” Faye hoped to God that Brent would drug her so completely that she never remembered this terrible night.
Leo Smiley waded into the tangled kudzu and began to gently disengage Jimmie’s body from the broken vines that cradled it. It seemed that as Leo forced one tendril to release the boy, another one materialized to grip him more tightly.
“Shouldn’t we wait for the coroner?” Faye said.
Leo finished freeing the body. He pulled Jimmie’s limp arm around his neck and squatted slightly. Then with one arm under the dead boy’s knees and the other supporting his back, he stood. He was even taller than Ronya, but without his wife’s heavy build. The hollow cheeks beneath his beard were visible even in the moonlight, and heavy brow bones shaded his deep-set eyes. “If the coroner needs to be here,” Leo said, “Brent will call him. What I want to know is this—why are you here?”
Taken aback by Leo’s in-your-face question, she answered truthfully, “I just want to help.”
“An outsider who wants to help. That’s something I haven’t heard before.”
Leo took a step closer to her, Jimmie’s broken body still resting in his arms. Faye’s throat tightened. She had never met Jimmie, but she had heard so much about him, so many good things about such a young man.
He was so young. Her hand reached out of its own volition, to brush her fingers against Jimmie’s dark hair, to smooth his ripped jacket into place so that it could keep him warm. Leo stepped back, snatching the boy in his arms away from Faye’s caring gesture.
“Outsiders like to send our men to war. They sent my daddy to Vietnam. He never came home, and he was hardly older than Jimmie here. They like to collect taxes from us, but they don’t like to spend the money on our roads or on our children. And what have they given us in return?” He bent his head over Jimmie’s for a second. When he looked up, the glimmery moonlight reflected in every tear rolling down his cheeks, and nothing came out of his mouth but a faint choking noise.
Jorge stepped into the breach. He covered the ground between him and Faye in two steps, his face distorted by the faint light of the lantern in his hand. He stood a foot taller than Faye, but he leaned down close to her ear, so she couldn’t miss what he had to say. “Outsiders ain’t never brought us nothing but kudzu and AIDS and—” He looked up at the steel girders tracing a geometric outline against the sky. “—and goddamn cell phones. You need to go home. And you can take all the other outsiders and their so-called rural assistance with you when you go.”
Faye had never in her life been lumped together with the powers-that-be who carelessly exploited anyone who was handy. Her first impulse was to say, “My great-great-grandmother was born a slave,” as if that fact would set her apart from anyone who had ever oppressed the Sujosa. She surprised herself by saying something else entirely.
“My daddy died in Vietnam, too,” she said. “I never met him.”
She met Leo’s eyes, then Jorge’s, then turned and walked away.
Excerpt from an Interview with Jimmie Lavelle, October 30, 2004
Interviewer: Carmen Martinez, Ph.D.
Jimmie Lavelle: I’m not that interested in the past. I’d rather think about the future. And I’m more interested in science than history.
CJM: What kind of science?
Jimmie Lavelle: Well, I like medicine. Dr. Harbison got out of the valley and got rich. But I also like astronomy. I’ve got a pretty decent telescope with a big honking mirror that I’ve put some mileage on, believe me.
CJM: I like astronomy, too. Have you ever heard the song Stars Fell on Alabama?
Jimmie Lavelle: Yes, I have! How did you know?
CJM: Actually, your mother mentioned it to me once; she said you liked it. There’s also an old book by that title that I read while I was preparing for this job.
Jimmie Lavelle: My Great-aunt Lolly used to sing that song all the time, and every time she sang it, she had to tell me the same story about it. You know how old people are.
CJM (ridiculously pleased that this young man who is half her age doesn’t lump her in with all the other “old people”): I interview old people all the time. I know exactly how they are. I love them, but they do tend to repeat themselves.
Jimmie Lavelle: Aunt Lolly said that her great-grandmother remembered the night the stars fell. I think she must have been talking about the meteor storm of 1833. Aunt Lolly told me her great-grandmother said it looked like someone had taken a million pins and scratched the black paint off the sky-dome. The sight marked her for life—she said she never saw anything to match it, not before nor after—but she would have missed it if it hadn’t been for the Indians.
CJM: The Indian removals were going on in full force by that time. I’ve wondered whether the Sujosa had any conflict with local tribes.
Jimmie Lavelle: Aunt Lolly seemed to think the Indians—I guess they were Creek—kept to themselves in a settlement upriver from here. I’ve never heard that we Sujosa ever had any quarrel with them. We’re probably lucky we weren’t relocated ourselves.
CJM: Why did the Creeks come to your Aunt Lolly’s great-grandmother on that particular night?
Jimmie Lavelle: They didn’t exactly say. When the knock sounded, she was afraid, because her husband had just died and she was alone with a house full of children. She came to the door with her shotgun loaded and ready, but their leader waved it aside, saying nothing but, “Come and look.” She said she was more embarrassed for them to see her with her hair unbraided than she was to go out into the night in her sleeping gown, but she got over it when she realized that all three of the Creek men standing outside her house had longer hair than hers. Then she saw the stars dropping out of the sky.
CJM: I’ve read eyewitness accounts of that meteor storm. Thousands of shooting stars fell every minute. People thought the world had come to an end.
Jimmie Lavelle: She stood there with her mouth open for a while, then the Creek leader said, “We woke our women and children. This is what men do
.” And she realized that he meant that she shouldn’t let her children miss such a sight. She went inside to fetch them, and when she came back outside the men were gone.
CJM: Maybe they went to the other Sujosa homes, making sure nobody missed the spectacle.
Jimmie Lavelle: No. She was the only Sujosa they visited. Later, she said they must have known her husband was dead, because they didn’t seem surprised when she came to the door herself. When she thought about it that way, their words made sense. They woke their women and children, then they came and woke her, because she had no husband to care for her. She reckoned they felt responsible for her.
CJM: Did she ever see them again?
Jimmie Lavelle: You don’t see a Creek who doesn’t want to be seen. But for the next couple of years, they left her little gifts at odd times. A slab of deer meat. A mess of fish. She was a damn fine gardener and her children never went hungry, before or after her husband died, but don’t you know they were glad to have meat now and then? When their gifts stopped coming, she knew that the powers-that-be in Washington had finally gotten their way. Her friends had been taken to the Indian Territory, and there was nobody left in these parts but Sujosa and white folks and black folks.
CJM: Thank you for that story. It was a nice history.
Jimmie Lavelle: Hey! How did you do that?
CJM: Trick of the trade.
Jimmie Lavelle: Yeah, you don’t give up.
CJM: Is that a nice way of calling me obstinate?
Jimmie Lavelle: No, but I like that word. I can think of a few other words like it. Contrary. Obstreperous. Tenacious.
CJM: I bet those words were on the SAT—which I understand that you aced.
Jimmie Lavelle: You know, I believe some of them were. If you want to understand the Sujosa and their history, you remember those words. We wore this land out, then we were too obstinate to leave. I’ve got to leave if I hope to make a decent living, just like Brent Harbison did, but you notice that he came home. One day, I hope to do the same. The stars are brighter here than they are anywhere else in the world.
Chapter Seventeen
The coroner came and went before midnight, and Jimmie’s body went with him. The security people hired by the cell phone company arrived nearly three hours after Jimmie tripped the tower’s silent intruder alarm. The delay was hardly surprising, since the nearest security company was in Gadsden, down a hundred miles of bad road. Once there, they got busy and found the crowbar used to break the lock on the ladder.
Thursday morning, the sheriff and a couple of technicians from the medical examiner’s office arrived in the settlement to interview Irene and every person present when Jimmie’s body was found. Another team went out to the hilltop to lift prints from the metal ladder and scale the tower to see if they could determine where the boy had been standing when he took his fatal dive.
Faye, drawn back to the tower as she had been drawn back to the scene of Carmen’s death, had driven out after them. Though the sheriff wasn’t as forthcoming with information as Adam had been, he let her stand near the base of the tower and watch his team work. As far as she knew, no evidence had been gathered that could tell them whether Jimmie’s death had been accident or foul play. The word “suicide” had been mentioned by the cell phone people, but nothing she had heard about Jimmie supported that thought. Indeed, the stunned Sujosa were as affronted by the word as Faye.
But what could have happened? The general consensus was that it must have been an accident, just a drunken kid looking for excitement. Maybe Jimmie hadn’t climbed the ladder alone. Maybe two or three drunken kids had climbed the tower and the survivors were afraid to talk. If so, then surely they would have left behind fingerprints or footprints, and alcohol would show up in Jimmie’s bloodstream.
And if it had been foul play? The ladder was narrow and, though it occasionally widened into a landing as it crept up the tower, it was hard to imagine someone forcing Jimmie to climb the ladder, then pushing him off. Maybe they could have done it if they were holding a gun on him, but they would have to be very nimble on the ladder.
Faye knew that, if she’d been in that situation, she would have watched for an opportunity to stomp on the hand of the person forcing her up the ladder. She would have made her pursuer shoot her, or she would have grabbed the arm holding the gun and taken her assailant to the ground with her. Jimmie hadn’t done either of those things.
All will be revealed in time, Faye’s grandmother had always said, and she clung to that, though her more cynical side revised the old truism to say, All will be revealed in time—or it won’t. It galled her to think that the truth about Jimmie’s death might always remain a mystery. Her sense of justice demanded something, anything, that would explain what had happened to turn a gifted young man into the empty shell Leo had held in his arms the night before. Even a suicide note would have lifted the pall hanging over the community, if only a bit, by answering the question, “Why?”
She looked through the barren trees toward the hills on the other side of the Broad River. It was a beautiful view, lonely, yet serene, with one or two Alcaskaki farmsteads dotting the gray landscape beneath a blue sky. Was this the last thing Jimmie saw? She turned away.
Upon her return to the bunkhouse, Faye was surprised to find Joe, Elliott, and Ronya waiting for her. Half the morning was already gone. She’d had no intention of asking her crew to work on the day after such a horrific event.
“You can’t have gotten any sleep,” said Faye.
“Working is better than thinking,” Elliott said, and Joe nodded in agreement.
Ronya, gripping her son by the hand, said, “I can work all day, if you don’t mind having Zack on the site. He’s promised me that he’ll be good while I’m working. I—” She looked Faye in the face, trying to communicate something she couldn’t say in front of a four-year-old. “I just couldn’t leave him. Not today.”
Faye made a quick decision. She knew they were all too bleary to do any work that required conscious thought, so work on the Lester site was out. Instead, she had them set up their equipment at Raleigh’s site, where they could sift soil looking for previously overlooked artifacts as long as they felt up to it. If lack of sleep caught up with them, they could go home and go to bed. Tomorrow, or Monday at the latest, they would all move over to the Lester site and start excavating for real.
Watching Ronya stoop over her work, Faye noticed that Zack hadn’t budged from his seat on the ground about five feet behind his mother. His lips were set and his eyes were big. Zack might not know what had happened to upset his mother and every grownup he’d seen since dawn, but he was smart enough to know that it was something bad.
“Let me show you where you can play,” Faye said, sticking out a hand and helping Zack to his feet. Pointing to a pile of screened soil that was waiting to be returned to one of the excavations, she said, “You can climb on that and dig in it and slide down the side of it. You can make mud pies with it, if you like. Just don’t play on any of the other dirt piles, and don’t go anywhere near any of the holes, okay?”
Zack responded by running to the top of the little pile of dirt and rolling down it, pressing dark, loose soil into every fiber of his sweatsuit. Faye looked at his mother and shrugged a wordless apology, but Ronya only smiled and kept working.
***
The morning wore away slowly. A couple of times, someone turned up a fragment of the common gray pottery that the Sujosa had been making for generations, renewing Faye’s consternation over how she could be expected to put a date on the stuff. For all Faye knew, they came from pots Ronya had thrown within the last year. When asked, Ronya said that she couldn’t tell a broken sliver of her own work from a broken bit of one of her mother’s pots, or her grandmother’s, for that matter. The piles of unscreened soil dwindled, and Faye had to admit that finding something significant there had been an idea doomed from the start. As it often is, fate was poised to reward stubbornness. When
Joe rose up from his screen, cradling something in his palm, and yelled, “Faye! Get over here,” she knew what he’d found.
“You did it. Oh, Joe, look at this. You did it.”
“You were the one that kept us looking for it when anybody with good sense would’ve quit.” Joe’s teeth showed white in his dark handsome face.
Ronya and Elliott gathered around for a glimpse of the tiny, broken thing that they had worked so hard to find.
The potsherd was tin-glazed and ornamented with luster painting, but Faye didn’t think it came from the same piece of pottery as Jorge’s sherd. It was shaped like a slice of pie, and one curved edge had been part of the rim of a plate or shallow bowl. The bottom surface was white, adorned with scattered blue flourishes, while the top had been underpainted in a deep blue pigment, probably cobalt. Luster in a reddish-gold hue had been painted on the rim and dotted in a random pattern across the blue ground like stars in a midnight sky. Even broken, it was lovely. Faye hoped that the laboratory could tease a date out of it without marring its beauty too badly.
***
Faye stood under an ice-blue sky and watched her crew work. It was nearly eleven o’clock and she felt like spoiling a little boy’s lunch. Walking over to a heavily trampled pile of soil, she noticed that it looked much smaller than it had when she left. Zack, who was practicing crawling like a snake, seemed to be wearing most of the missing dirt.
“Come with me,” she said, extending her hand. “I need some help with my grocery shopping.”
Zack grabbed her hand and looked over his shoulder at his mother. She waved them away, saying, “Go ahead. Miss Faye won’t let anything happen to you.”
Miss Faye. The nickname made her feel like she was on her way to Miss Dovey’s stature. She’d be there in, oh, sixty years or so.
Zack ran toward Hanahan’s so fast that Faye had to jog to keep up. A grimy little gentleman, he opened the screen door for her so she could enter first.
“Jenny,” Faye called, walking down the candy aisle and snagging five Hershey bars, “do you by any chance sell cold Cokes?”
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