‘The first two times she did, but not the third.’
‘They sounded like this note?’
‘Almost exactly.’
I thought some more. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘I don’t either.’
‘Tell me about the string she was wearing around her head.’
‘Huh?’
‘When she died, she was wearing a black string. I’ve seen the pictures. She’d tied some leaves to her forehead.’
‘Indian shot,’ he said.
‘Right. The detective I talked to said the leaves are Gullah medicine. What’s that about?’
‘Our uncle gave them to her. Papa Crowe.’
She’d mentioned him in the note I’d read. ‘So, she’s feeling suicidal and your uncle tells her to wrap leaves on her head?’
‘He also made them into tea. It helped before.’
I saw no reason to argue. ‘She had a snake tattoo. What was that?’
‘You looked her over close.’ He insinuated something dirty.
‘A little snake, biting its own tail.’
‘Papa Crowe gave that to her too. That was between him and her.’
‘Could I meet him?’
He almost smiled. ‘I don’t think so. Most people don’t like him.’
‘Take me to see him,’ I said.
His smile spread. ‘He’s got a rifle.’
‘I don’t mind rifles.’
Alex Greene directed me through the side streets to the main road leading north to the end of the island. We drove past a refinery for the Rayonier Pulp and Cellulose Mill, through a residential neighborhood, along a park, past a bigger refinery, and on to a narrow strip of land with the old Bosquebello Cemetery on one side and the broad Fernandina marsh inlet on the other. He pointed at a half-painted wooden house that backed into the marsh inlet. ‘There,’ he said.
I pulled on to the shoulder and turned off the car, and we got out.
An old man sat on a folding lawn chair on the front porch of the house. As we walked past a ragged little flower garden and across the mix of sand, broken oyster shells, and weeds that served as the front lawn, I recognized him. When Percy and I had come through the woods on Little Marsh Island, he’d been scratching a picture of a snake on to the soil. He still wore the blue pants and sun-bleached red T-shirt.
He ignored us, staring instead at a branch of an oak tree that shaded one side of the house. A hawk, its wings tucked tight to its body as if against a cold wind, was perched at the end of the branch. Then the old man nodded as if in silent communication with the bird, and it dropped from the branch, opened its wings, circled up over the house, and disappeared over the marsh.
The man turned his eyes to Sheneel Greene’s brother. ‘Alex boy,’ he said, grinning, and then, his grin dropping, looked at me, ‘and dog man.’
Alex Greene stopped short of the porch. ‘This man wants to talk to you about Sheneel.’
‘I know he does,’ said the man. ‘We old friends since this morning.’
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said.
‘No, you ain’t.’ But then, ‘Come up and sit down, unless you like to stand in the heat.’
I took a chair that matched his, and Alex Greene sat on the porch floor, his back against the wall of the house. Flies buzzed around us but mostly left us alone.
The man asked, ‘Why you want to know about Sheneel?’
I gave him the same story I’d given Sheneel’s brother, about Lillian being Sheneel’s teacher and about my job doing skip trace.
He said, ‘That tell me who you are but not why you want to know about Sheneel.’
I considered my words. ‘She seemed to be hurting,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘World’s full of hurt.’
‘A special kind of hurt. A kind I think I understand.’
He looked at me close. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘What you want to know?’
I told him about Percy bringing Sheneel’s arm to me on Little Marsh Island, the sharp incision in the skin, the clean-cut bone, and the reluctance of the police to see the death as anything other than a suicide.
If the news unsettled him, he didn’t show it. He said, ‘Why you want it to be something else?’
‘I don’t. It just is.’
‘Then what you need me for?’
‘Tell me why you scratched the picture of the snake in the ground on Little Marsh Island.’
‘It the same as the tattoo I give to Sheneel.’
‘I know that. Why?’
‘Something a man like you won’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
He looked at my eyes as if he was plumbing under them. I wanted to turn away, but I stared back. If he liked the dark behind my stare, he could have it. ‘What the hell,’ he said. He leaned forward in his chair, and the sunlight caught in the perspiration on his forehead. ‘That snake is Aido-Wedo. He a god, you know. He live out on the line where the ocean meet the sky. That his line. It circle the whole world and bite itself in the tail. You understand?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, though I worried what kind of kook I was talking to.
‘Sure, I think you do,’ he said, and he kept his eyes on mine. ‘Long ago, about two hundred year, this king – he Ebo, from Benin, Africa, you know, and he is proud – he worship Aido-Wedo, and he have a tattoo like the one I give to Sheneel. Well, an English ship come to Africa and take the king and his family to be slaves, and a man up St Simons way say he want to buy them. But this king, he proud and he don’t want to be no slave.’
The old man paused. ‘I think you see what coming, don’t you?’
I didn’t.
He said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and he pushed himself out of the chair, went inside through the screen door, and returned with a black string and a glass vial of dried leaves that looked like crushed oregano. He laid the vial on a wooden table by his chair. He stepped off the porch and into the garden, selected a leaf from one of the flowering plants, and tore it from the stem. He came back and folded the fresh leaf into a little envelope. He tilted the glass vial toward the envelope, licked the top of the leaf, laid the black string across it, and pasted the envelope flap across the string and back on to the leaf. He blew on the seal to dry it and set the thing aside on the table.
He looked at me again. ‘Now, where was we?’
I said, ‘A family on St Simons Island wanted to buy the king with the snake tattoo.’
‘That right. The trader send the king and his family to St Simons and the ship go to a dock in Dunbar Creek. But this king who don’t want to be no slave, he look out the mouth of the creek to the horizon line, and he sing. “Ocean bring me here, and ocean bring me home.” His wives and children sing it too. “Ocean bring me here, and ocean bring me home.” Then the king step off the dock into the deep water, and one after other, chained together like they is, they step into the deep water after him. They drown to the last little girl.’
He looked me in the eyes. ‘You understand?’
‘No,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Milk ain’t dry off your mouth yet, no?’ Alex Greene laughed, and the old man said, ‘I give Sheneel that tattoo after the first time she try to kill herself, and I tell her, sometimes there’s worse things than you die.’
‘You said this to Sheneel?’
‘Sure.’
I shook my head.
He said, ‘You wrong if you pretend you don’t believe it. You know it the truth. Man like you, maybe you never know a time like the king know. But he a brave man that step off the dock.’
‘I understand. But I don’t see how telling that to a girl like Sheneel would help.’
‘Maybe Sheneel understand that kind of bravery too.’
‘I don’t see how.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’ He turned his eyes back to the oak tree he’d been watching when Sheneel’s brother and I arrived. ‘Well, look at that.’
The hawk had returned to the branch with a finger mullet in i
ts beak.
I said, ‘What if Sheneel didn’t kill herself? What if someone else did it?’
The man kept watching the bird. ‘We work that out too, if that what it come to.’ Sweat beaded on his forehead. His tight gray hair glistened in the heat. Flies buzzed in the air over him. He seemed at peace.
I stood and nodded to Sheneel’s brother. ‘Let’s go, if you want a ride back.’
‘Wait a minute,’ the old man said. He handed me the black string with the leaf packet. ‘You need this, dog man. Wear it around your head till it turn black with sweat and mold, and you feel better then.’
‘Indian shot?’
‘That right.’
‘What makes it work?’
‘Not so much what in it. More about what it take out of you.’
I had nothing to say to that, so I offered my hand to shake.
‘No, sir. I never shake the hand of a man like you. I learned that lesson long ago.’
‘What kind of man am I?’
He fixed his gaze back on the oak branch, where the hawk had finished its meal. ‘You got death in your eyes.’
Sheneel’s brother and I were quiet as I drove back to his house. He leaned against the passenger door as if he wanted distance between us. The sun gleamed through the windshield and the air conditioner couldn’t knock down the heat. On the roadside, wild grape vines and kudzu clung to the trunks of oaks, hollies, and sparkleberry trees as if they wanted to pull them down into the dirty sand. The houses we passed were tiny and looked shut into themselves, their owners wishing to stay far from the living world.
Just after we passed the Rayonier refinery, I jerked the wheel to the side and steered on to the shoulder. Sheneel’s brother looked at me, startled.
I said, ‘When did Sheneel write the note?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said, the first two times she tried to kill herself she wrote notes. Did the police take them?’
He nodded.
‘How about the third time?’
‘I told you, she didn’t write a note.’
‘That makes no sense. Why would she write a note the first two times and again this time but not the third?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sure you do. She wrote a note the third time and you took it and kept it. You didn’t call the hospital, so the police wouldn’t have it. Then, when she died, you went home and “found” the note from last time – because there was no note this time. She didn’t kill herself, so there wouldn’t be one.’
‘You’re crazy,’ he said.
‘I’ve heard that enough times to believe it, but that doesn’t change what happened here.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘I can think of only two reasons. One, you killed her or helped kill her and want to cover for yourself. Or, two, you’re scared of whoever did it.’
‘I would never hurt her.’
‘Which leaves that you’re scared.’
He seemed to fight to regain the hardness he’d shown when I first arrived at his house. ‘No one scares me.’
‘Me, personally, I’m scared most of the time,’ I said. ‘A lot of people scare me.’
He looked bewildered. ‘Take me home.’
We drove the rest of the way without talking. When he got out, he slammed the car door, walked to the house, went in, and slammed the front door too.
As I drove back toward the highway, I called Lillian. I reached her as she was walking from her campus office to her car. She said, ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m hungry,’ I said.
‘Let’s get dinner out again,’ she said. Then, ‘Did you talk with anyone at VA counseling?’
I said, ‘I just walked out of a session.’
‘They tell you anything helpful?’
I thought about keeping up the lie. Instead, I said, ‘They told me that a clean wound like the one on Sheneel Greene’s arm must have been made by a blade. A big knife. A hatchet. Maybe a cleaver.’
NINE
Lillian
Johnny fell asleep before I did for the first time since he’d been back. I put down my book and watched him – a marvel of tangled hair and deep breath. Sweat sparkled on the skin above his lips, and I wanted to touch it away with my finger or kiss him and taste his salt, but I turned off the lamp and, in the blue dark, moved close to his warmth and strength. I thought of how the body works and does not work, like falling from a tree, like chutes of gravity.
I dreamed, as I often did, of music. Nothing that I could see: only sound, a song I’d heard on the radio as I’d driven home from teaching. The words swayed, as liquid in my mind as an ocean pool. Other words supplanted them, new words that sparked as bright as sun on water, and they poured into a buoyant, comforting wash of sound.
Then Johnny screamed like a man whose skin has caught fire – the whole skin, feet to ears: a last scream, before pain grows so great that the throat no longer can make sound. Still ripping from sleep, I turned on the lamp. Johnny was sitting against the headboard, knees to chest, his hair and his T-shirt darkened with sweat, his eyes wide with fear.
‘What did you dream?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
‘Tell me. Talking will help kill it.’
‘No.’ His body shuddered.
‘Try?’
‘No.’ He stared into the air or into himself – somewhere, but not at me.
I got out of bed and brought him a towel and a dry T-shirt. I stripped the sweat-soaked shirt from his body and caressed him with the towel as if he was a child. I pulled the damp sheet from the bed and brought a blanket from the closet. He wrapped it around himself and I turned off the lamp. For an hour or more, we lay awake in the dark, saying nothing, Johnny breathing raggedly, then deep and long, and, finally, even and steady as if the nightmare that had shocked us awake never happened. I kissed his shoulder. He was asleep.
But his terror had put me on edge. After lying in bed for another half-hour, I got up, went through the kitchen to the sunroom, and turned on my laptop. Percy followed me and curled up on the cool tile near my feet. Outside the window, a quarter-moon was lowering through the branches of an oak tree. An animal moved at the edge of the yard – a neighbor’s cat, maybe a raccoon. I played a game of computer solitaire and then another, but I knew why I had come. Johnny had all but kicked me out of bed and sent me to do it.
I made a Google search for Gullah and snake. The search tallied 588,000 hits, the first sites dealing with Gullah cooking, a Gullah tradition of telling animal fables, and Gullah root doctors who use natural and African medicines to treat snakebites. A Yale University site devoted to the Sierra Leonean background of Gullah retold trickster stories involving a Brer Snake. ‘You knew I was a snake before you put me in there,’ said Brer Snake to a possum who had been dumb enough to put him in its marsupial pocket. The website never mentioned the Ouroboros symbol that Sheneel Greene had tattooed on to her arm, but it said, ‘The Gullah believe in dangerous spirits capable of enslaving a person by controlling his will. They sometimes paper the walls of their houses with newsprint or put a folded bit of newspaper inside a shoe, believing that the spirit must first read every word before taking action.’ While eating dinner, Johnny had told me about the little yellow house where Sheneel lived and its newspapered front window.
A site on Gullah cuisine recommended stirring snake livers and fish eyeballs into dirty rice.
Another link led to an electronic edition of a book called Gullah Culture in America. It told the Aido-Wedo snake story. It also described root medicine – mashed okra flowers for snakebites, rags soaked in hot cotton-root tea for a sore back, sweetgrass bindings for broken bones. The Gullah seemed to trust their own ways more than western medicine. According to one story, a Gullah boy told his family he had snakes in his head, and a white doctor said he suffered from ringworm. The antifungal cream he prescribed did nothing but make the boy’s hair greasy, and every night the boy would scream about the
snakes, until one morning his mother saw a snake outside the window. She killed it with a stove shovel, and that same day the boy said the snakes were gone and they never came back. According to another story, if you saw a black snake coiling around a root, that was a fever root. If you crushed it and applied it to the chest in a poultice, it would draw out even the worst fever.
A noise came from the kitchen – footsteps, the refrigerator opening – and I knew Johnny had gotten up. Percy lifted his head from the floor, set it down again, and slept. ‘Hey,’ I called into the kitchen.
But Johnny said nothing. I typed the words Fernandina and Greene into Google and got almost 600 hits. A lot of Greenes lived in the town – a lawyer, two realtors, the owner of a corrugated paper products company, a man involved in lighthouse preservation, others. When I scrolled down, I found a site that promised Greene Family History. It consisted of short autobiographical stories written by family members as a gift to celebrate someone’s eighty-fifth birthday, but it included nothing by Sheneel or her brother Alex. Someone who identified herself as Deborah Greene-Phelps wrote about her grandmother Viola and her grandmother’s younger sister, Louise.
Viola and Louise Greene moved to Fernandina in 1935 when their father, Nathaniel, the owner of a New England insurance company, decided that his daughters, aged seventeen and fifteen, were too much temptation for the young men they knew in New Jersey. Other members of the extended Greene family had lived on Amelia Island for several generations. Nathaniel’s Fernandina house, a rambling Victorian where the family had vacationed in the winter months, became the permanent residence for his wife and daughters, and he rode the Atlantic Coast Line train from Morristown once a month for a long weekend before returning to work.
According to Deborah Greene-Phelps, Viola and Louise found as many chances to tempt and be tempted in their new house as they had found at the home they’d left.
On one of the long weekends, their father invited a dark-skinned man named Abraham Lincoln Lewis into the house and, after talking with him alone in his study, invited him to join the family for dinner. This was the old South, and such invitations were rarely made, but Nathaniel Greene remained a recalcitrant Northerner, and he delighted in scandalizing the neighbors. A.L. Lewis owned the Afro-American Life Insurance Company and, even richer than Viola and Louise’s father, had started developing a piece of shoreline, which he’d named American Beach, to the south of Fernandina. Negroes whose families had moved north and climbed into the middle class could travel by rail, boat, or automobile to a place they could call their own.
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