Harris and Luis retreat to the hillside. Harris pulls down green metal chairs from the Back House gallery and finds a level spot among the fallen pecans on the east slope, a catbird seat where they can see the site and anyone coming up Bishop Road. Soon the crime scene unit arrives, and the county coroner, but at least everyone is careful not to tromp any of their flags, respecting their work as if they were an earlier stage of the crime scene crew. Mallory comes up and says they’re mostly concerned to make sure no fingerprints got on anything, which of course they didn’t. She says she’s going to call Professor Martin, which Harris would have done but there’s no cell phone signal here. Since Mallory got the Back House, and he and Luis share a shack, it seems like Mallory has the rank—or at least the house access. She throws him out in the middle of the night so Miss Celia won’t think he’s moved in.
Only vehicles with high clearance can get beyond where the paved drive stops at the parking area occupied by Miss Celia’s Honda, Luis’ pickup, and Mallory’s Mini Cooper. They have to swing around on a track west of the mound, past the guys’ shack where Harris’ bike is under the lean-to, to drive out into the field. He walks around front and sees they’re lined up along Bishop Road: many levels of officialdom and some that look like gawk-ers. Even the little yellow airplane that sprays the fields is swooping over like a dragonfly. The old black guy who lives in the shack right by the road a bit east of the main house drives up in his blue V-8 Dodge truck, sees his place to pull in is blocked, goes on by, turns around, comes back, parks on the other side a little past his place and gets out. He has kind of a thick body, in jeans, a brown ball cap, and a buff bomber jacket. He takes one look at the scene and goes inside his place. Home at three-thirty, Harris thinks; the guy probably works some kind of carpentry.
Harris cruises back around and sees Mallory and Miss Celia have brought out glasses of iced tea on trays. There’s a general break. His glass, tall with indents and bubbles, is like one of his mother’s. Tea’s good. Just after four, an ambulance-style vehicle shows up from the Northern office of the state crime lab. Mallory says they’ll take the bones to the main lab in Jackson, to the bioscience section.
Not too long after, the sheriff tells Miss Celia they’ll be back tomorrow with cadaver dogs; no unit is available today. Everybody should stay clear of the taped-off area.
“We won’t touch anything,” she says. “You really think there’s something more?”
“Have to look,” he says. “Maybe her hands are all that’s here. Don’t know.”
“They can tell it was a woman?” Mallory asks.
“Doc says yes, from the hand size. Says the bones are some amount of decades old, but nobody can tell more til they get to the lab.”
And in procession the officials depart, the alertness unravels. Harris could use a drink.
LUIS HAS WALKED all the way to the oxbow lake they call Old River because it used to be the Mississippi before the river changed course long ago and left this curve of water. He’s been roving in the evenings til he knows the landscape. Dead cypresses stand out in the water like pickets guarding the little bay, the boat ramp with its sign:
Public Fishing
No Firearms
Lying on the natural levee, he watches the sky grow dark, til the bugs’ whine fills his ears and the moon is rising. He starts back, though he doesn’t want to return to the shack where he’ll just spend another night waiting for Harris to stumble in from being with Mallory, the slap of the door, the complaining springs of his cot, his curse, cough, groan, snore.
In August, they were here with a dozen students for the field school, sampling and assessing the site, and the three of them laid claim to projects for their theses. After doing construction May to July with his father in Biloxi, he had money, but when he asked Mallory out for dinner at Madidi, she said no, it would be a bad idea to get involved when they were going to work together. So when they came out here last week, what does she do but hook up with Harris the second night, riding into town with him on his bike and taking him into her bed.
Fine, she just said that to put him off politely, because he asked politely. He never can speak with the careless confidence he needs. There’s always a hesitation, a gap between thought and words as his mind tries to find language, tossed between the Spanish of his parents, the English of school and books. So, often, he doesn’t speak, or speaks too formally. And usually silence is fine with him. Except there are feelings that want out, but maybe these are feelings that have no words in any language.
He nears the area of their excavation—the crime scene, he thinks, but then it doesn’t seem like the crime scene is where you’d bury the hands, so this is probably the un-crime scene—and cuts around. Harris’ bike is still gone. He hears a sound—crow? train whistle?—and follows it to the shack by the road. This is a solid house compared to theirs: painted dark green, with curtains at the lit-up windows. The old man sits on the porch. He’s not playing a tune, just making sounds with the harmonica, wheeze and wail, til he sees Luis watching and says, “How you doing?” The squared shape of his white beard shows by the light of a candle in a jar.
They have a nodding acquaintance, from early mornings when Luis is up drinking coffee outside and the man goes off in his truck. Luis introduces himself, and the man says he’s Bill Mc-something. “Mc-Eye?”
“Mc K-I-E. Probably supposed to be McKay or McGee, but it got changed somewhere back before my grandpa.”
Luis nods. He’s having to concentrate to catch words; the old man has a Southern accent and something more, a slur, and his voice is low.
“Had to stop working out back, right? Tomorrow, too?”
“Tomorrow they’re bringing dogs.”
“I heard that, in town. Heard they found some bones in a box.”
Luis tells what he knows: the bones of a woman’s hands. Long dead, but not so long they’re not of interest to the authorities.
“Lots of bones,” McKie says, “in Mississippi. But you know that. Some rise right out of the ground when it rains, those Indian bones, chips and bits. I worked all around here, driving a grader, leveling, turned plenty of them up: no choice when you want to plant the land.”
Luis notices McKie has on a tie, looks like a green tie with a dark blue shirt, dress pants. “Were you going out?”
“Planned to, but then I didn’t feel like it. Thinking about those bones. Have a seat,” he says.
Luis settles beside him on a rattan chair with seat cushions. “This is much nicer than where we’re camping,” he says.
“I fixed this one up after I bought it. Helped clean out yours for Miss Bishop before you got here, but it needs a lot of work. They’re old, go back to the tenant farming days. You know people pay to stay in shacks like this, over at Hopson Plantation. Italians and Japanese show up and beg to.”
“Why?”
“Because of the blues.”
The bike comes up Bishop Road with two figures on it, runs by them and turns in. Luis can hear some discussion—Harris wheedling?—and then Harris walks her up to the Back House. He’s aware of them without turning, without trying.
“You got it bad,” says McKie.
Luis can say nothing to this, but it seems he doesn’t have to.
“Told her?”
“Oh no, no,” he says. “No. It’s awkward enough. I don’t get women,” he says, and hears the ambiguity in that: so true.
McKie goes into a riff on the harmonica, some fundamental blues. “Women need to know where you stand,” he says. “That’s a lesson I learned.” He gets up, goes into the house, and comes back with something that he hands to Luis: a cold metal bar.
“What’s this?” He turns it, feels the holes.
“That’s a harp. You know, the Mississippi Saxophone. I got lots of ‘em laying around. Take a shot. Blow.”
Luis produces a chord and then inhales it.
McKie rumbles something like a laugh. And he starts to play and talk, and Luis, who is feeling
unmoored anyway, looks at the moon and lets it roll over him. He doesn’t get all the words but he catches the story, like a half-remembered song:
Once McKie loved a woman—met her round here when she was just a girl. He came from Mound Bayou, found work here, everything was getting mechanized and he was always good with driving. Used to make up music out in the middle of the fields, had the turn of the wheels in it. She was a noticeable girl: tall and sassy. A memorable girl. Then he met her again in Memphis when McKie was trying to break into music up there. She remembered him, too. She was involved in the movement. They were organizing sit-ins in Tennessee and she got trained to stand it, being insulted, arrested. Then she came down here Mississippi, which was harder. Sometimes he played Clarksdale juke joints, saw her. But it got nasty, scary here—this would be in 1964, Freedom Summer, you heard of that? Registering people to vote. There was White Knights of the KKK around and just terror. They talked about getting away. He wanted to go to Chicago, where there were opportunities in music, and he asked her to go along, but he played it cool when he did it, you know, take it or leave it. And she said she couldn’t leave the movement, but then one time she said, yes, she wanted to go. So it was set up he’d pick her up—he had a car, she didn’t—one evening, was to get her outside the bus station and because he was sometimes unreliable she said if he didn’t show up she’d catch a bus. Was a Saturday, there was a fish fry, he’d been talking and joking with people, and he arrived just a few minutes late and she wasn’t there. Bus station guy couldn’t say much. Maybe there’d been a woman waiting. Maybe not. Maybe she got on a bus. Maybe just left. Only a few minutes late, nothing really. He called her mother who lived up outside of Memphis. She’d told her mother she was going to Vicksburg, so he went there, but nobody’d seen her and maybe Vicksburg was just what she told her mother when she was going off with him. Then somebody said she’d been seen in Chicago and he thought okay, maybe she went looking for me, and he went there, picked up playing, but there was no sign of her. Any place he went, to New Orleans, to New York, to Paris—can you believe he made it all the way to Paris and to Germany too?—anywhere he saw somebody from the floating world of Mississippi, he asked them, where’s Veneece? Rumors here and there, but nothing real. But there were a whole lot of other women and they’re kind when you’re lonely, when you can play. Then styles changed, changed real bad by the 70s unless you were a star, unless you were a legend. He was back in Chicago, drove buses there, Illinois and Wisconsin—was married there for a while, drank too much, but later sobered up. Then things started up here with the blues, and he came on home. He can teach driving lessons, pick up work sometimes on equipment, and do some playing too. He gets the Social Security now, but he likes to work. Mr. Bishop—that’s Scott Bishop—gave him some work, and helped him buy this place. “This isn’t the one Veneece grew up in—that was out in the fields, one of the old shacks Mr. Bishop knocked down once the agribusiness came in. You’d hardly believe how it used to be round here, all the work done with mules, needed two for a wagon, four for a plow. I can make the harmonica sound like mule: See? You try it.”
Luis laughs and lifts the harmonica in his hands and blows: still the same flat chord but it sounds the way he feels.
“Carry it around,” McKie says. “Get to know it.”
“I couldn’t take it.”
“That one I don’t use. It’s fine.”
There’s the bang of a door up on the mound, and Harris stomps down to their shack, slams that door too.
“See that?” McKie says. “It’s working already.”
Luis stands up and thanks him, wanting to go now he’ll have Harris under his eye.
McKie says, “I remember her cleaning her white gloves—gals wore white gloves then, to go to church in—cleaned them off with bread crumbs: rolled the soft bread along so it picked up any little dirt that got on the fingertips.”
Luis is filled with a question he can’t think of any way to express.
As he walks along the road, he looks up and sees Celia Bishop standing in an ivory robe on the porch above the elaborate portico. The house’s square whiteness floats above the brick foundation, like the phantom of a temple that was here six hundred years ago. Over the treetops hangs the huge moon, nearly full, marked with the pale blue features of a woman looking to her left. The scene swims through his dreams.
AFTER SHE SHOWERS AND DRESSES, Mallory strips the bed. The sheets are half off anyway, and they smell too much like sex and Harris. She grabs her towels, while she’s at it, and carries everything to the washer in the other room, and crams it in.
She fills the kettle, puts it on the little stove. Through the window above the sink she can see, out past the screened porch, the area where men in uniforms stand drinking coffee. Better to get to work, if they can’t excavate today. Those bones have told her: time to get serious. She arranges her notes beside her laptop on the kitchen table. She will concentrate away her irritation at herself. It was a mistake to sleep with Harris. Maybe not the first time, but the second—that’s when he started to think he had rights. And all this after she’d turned down Luis, who was cute and seemed smart, because she knew it was better to be all business. She could kick herself.
There’s a knock on the door and a “Mallory?” It’s Celia—as she has told Mallory to call her, although Harris says “Miss Celia” is proper. Celia says, “Phone in there’s driving me nuts. And I’d like to look for something in the pantry here, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m just making tea. Can I give you some?”
“Thank you.” Celia throws open the louvered doors to the right of the laundry area. The shelves in there are full of boxes; Mallory has peeked. “This is stuff of my mother’s. She lived out here after Daddy died and Scott got married, right through her last illness five years ago.”
“So that’s why it’s a whole little apartment.” The kettle whistles. Mallory pours water over teabags in the old brown pot. She sets out blue flowered mugs: all this was here when she arrived, fixed up by Celia.
“This structure’s old—see those cypress beams? It was a summer kitchen for my grandparents when they first moved here, before World War I. After they knocked down the farmhouse to build the main house, they used this for laundry; has its own well.” She pulls a box out and kneels in front of it, riffling through while she talks. “They did this over as an apartment for my father after he got shot up at Guadalcanal and brought home his bride. Then Scott was born, and I came along, and we all lived in the main house. My grandparents moved to town. This was a laundry and storage. I’d play out here, read.” She turns and pulls out another carton, pushes back her hair as she leans over it.
“What are you looking for?”
“The sheriff’s people asked me if there’s any record of who all lived around here, on Bishop land, at different times. I don’t know if there is. When I got here in June the house was a mess. I cleaned, cleaned, cleaned, but I didn’t see old business records. So I thought maybe there’s something out here.”
Mallory pours the tea. “I’m out of milk. I should go into town and pick up some groceries later.”
“I’m fine with sugar,” Celia says, and stands up, adds some. Mallory can see a hint of silver along her temple where her hair has grown in since the last coloring. The zinnia print of her blouse is over-bright, and Mallory realizes she’s never seen Celia without lipstick.
Mallory wraps her hands around her mug and looks at her screen, which has gone to sleep. It seems rude to wake it up now. “Who’s been calling?”
“Everybody.” Celia sips, shakes her head. “It’s going to be in the Clarksdale paper this afternoon, what they found, with a picture of the box, but everyone seems to have heard already. A reporter who called shared the nasty speculation that somebody chopped off a woman’s hands but let her go. Said that’s what they still do to thieves in some countries.”
“Oh, horrible,” says Mallory. Though of course she has heard of this. And the Ind
ians slashed hamstrings to keep captives from running off; remains showed it. Human history was cruel, but that was easier to think about at a distance.
“Yes, well,” says Celia, “most seem to think it was murder and the body was cut up. The reporter said the North Mississippi authorities have no record of a corpse without hands. They’re looking at lists of missing women from the 50s and 60s, where they could try a DNA match to relatives, so I presume the bones look to be that old. Which puts it in what was an ugly time around here, one reason everybody’s so damn interested.”
“They can tell the age more precisely with Carbon-14 dating.”
Celia says, “I know. I was a biology teacher, thirty-five years. I taught over in North Carolina, Asheville. Took my retirement last spring. Never thought I’d be back here.” She sits on the floor with a new box. “Cookbooks,” she says. “I should look through these. Lots of old ones from churches and here’s mother’s Women’s Club. Hmm.”
Mallory sneaks a finger out and brushes her touch pad and the screen comes back. She opens the database where she tracks each day’s work and starts entering figures from yesterday.
HARRIS HOSES DOWN HIS BIKE. The hose has a leak in it at the handle—he found it among the old crap under the lean-to. Their so-called shack is really a cabin, you can see daylight through the boards, and the roof, as he said to Luis last night, is mainly rust. No surprise, really, Mississippi is the apotheosis of rust—anything left outside oxidates and stays forever, like something in mythology: girl running from a lusty god becomes an old Ford with no tires.
The dog officers are expected, and he has his eye out for Professor Martin. This research is Martin’s baby. In midsummer he came out to set up for the field school, and made them his research assistants when Miss Celia said she’d be willing to house them for a stint in the fall. They’re on their honor to behave well and not blow the project.
Martin had them work on methodology and record keeping at the start of the semester, and then sent them off. Wanted them making progress before the cold set in. Then they’d write their thesis proposals, do presentations to his undergrads, and grade his papers and finals. It was a feudal structure, the university, just like this place in its day: big house, little house, shacks. Harris last night argued this to Mallory, that they were the tenant farmers of academia, but she told him he was full of it—they’re in it for hope of getting somewhere, not trapped.
Delta Blues Page 17