A Long Time Gone

by Karen White

  I’d always hated people telling me what I should do—mostly because my own ideas were usually epic failures. In hindsight I realized they were just trying to save me from myself, but it didn’t make it any easier. “I might not be here in October. I’d hate to leave her high and dry.”

  “She said she’ll take whatever she can get. She sounded kind of desperate.”

  The floating worms of my migraine had moved to the outer edges of my sight, obscuring my peripheral vision so all I could focus on was my brother. “I might—if I can find the time. I thought I’d restore Bootsie’s garden. I even had a pipe dream that I could get Carol Lynne and Chloe to help me.”

  A corner of his mouth lifted. “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

  I turned my head so I could view the garden better, then wished that I hadn’t. It all seemed so hopeless, like I was trying to raise a person from the dead.

  “I have some of Bootsie’s seeds in the shed. They’re all separated and labeled and should still be good. I’ll go get them if you want.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Maybe she’ll have some of her magic beans mixed in with the regular seeds so that I can actually get something to grow.”

  “You’ll manage. You always do.” He leaned on the gate, making it groan. “When I get around to chopping up that cypress, I’ll repair this and the rest of the fence. Don’t want any of the local wildlife eating my okra and pole beans.”

  He waved, and I watched him leave, almost staggering in his exhaustion.

  “Nice jorts,” Chloe said from over the fence, Carol Lynne behind her. They both wore braids, and Chloe was wearing one of my mother’s floral tops, but still had on her black jeans and heavy black combat boots. Ignoring her jibe, I said, “Are you done with your morning lessons?”

  “Yeah, but I’m supposed to read now. And then I’m supposed to study science with a group of homeschool kids—or Mrs. Smith said I could ride around in the fields with Tommy and write about it. I’ll do whichever is less boring.”

  “You might not want to mention that when you ask Tommy.”

  She plopped down in one of the green chairs, and I noticed she held my copy of Time at the Top in her lap. On her left arm she wore what appeared to be a blue enamel bracelet that was nearly buried under all of her braided leather bracelets from another jewelry craze in her recent past.

  “Is that new?” I asked.

  Holding up her arm, she twisted her wrist from side to side. “It’s a watch. I found it in the hatbox in your room that you told me to go through and sort. It doesn’t work but it’s pretty.”

  I nodded, not remembering it from my own childhood days of playing in Emmett’s hatbox.

  “What are you doing?”

  I blinked up at Carol Lynne, who was staring down at me as if she really wanted to know.

  “I’m weeding so we can get the garden ready to plant.”

  She knelt down in the dirt beside me, her hands resting on the thighs of her jeans. “How do you do that?”

  I waited to see if she would laugh to show me that she was joking, but she looked serious. “Do you want to help me?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. Here.” I took her hand and guided her to a clump of yellow Indian grass. It was the closest I’d been to her since I’d reluctantly comforted her on the day after the storm. I wanted her to be a stranger, wanted not to recognize the lemony scent of her skin, or the way her hair strands in the sun were hundreds of different colors, just like mine.

  Putting my fingers around hers, I squeezed near the bottom of the shafts and pulled, tearing the roots out of the soil.

  I let go as she started to clap, spraying clumps of dirt all around us. “That was fun!” she said.

  I smiled reluctantly. “Great,” I said. “Then do that to every single thing you see growing in this garden, then toss it in the big garbage bin behind you.”

  Turning to Chloe, I said, “Are you going to help?”

  She scrunched up her face with a look of utter disdain. “I’m supposed to be reading.”

  “Fine. Then read. But read out loud. That’s one of my favorite books.”

  Chloe gave me a sigh worthy of Hollywood, but opened the book and began to read while Carol Lynne and I dug our hands into the dark earth and began to uproot the weeds in our garden.

  Chapter 23

  Carol Lynne Walker Moise

  NEVADA

  OCTOBER 1964

  Dear Diary,

  I miss the autumn. I used to love to watch the sunsets from on top of our Indian mound with Mathilda, and she’d make me describe all the beautiful colors of cypress trees until I ran out of words for red. Now I only know it’s October because of all the Halloween candy for sale in the gas stations and grocery stores we can go to only once. Jimmy said that once we steal from a place, we can’t go back. People are peculiar that way, I guess.

  I’m in the Nevada desert now, where there aren’t any trees. Just our campsite and the smell of beans cooking on open fires and the scent of weed that floats over our group. Or merry band of waifs and adventurers, which is how Jimmy describes us. He’s always been so creative. The thing with Jimmy is that I only saw his talent and brilliance when I was high, which was most of the time. I think he figured that out, because one morning last month when I woke up, the sleeping bag next to me was empty. I guess he’s not coming back.

  I don’t miss him all that much, except that I’m sober a lot more now. I don’t like that feeling. Because then I start thinking about Mississippi and how far from home I am. Sometimes in the morning I wake up and I think I smell Mathilda frying bacon and then I realize it’s just a can of beans in a pot on the campfire. It’s all Hiram knows how to cook, and I’m grateful—I am. But what I wouldn’t give for Mathilda’s fried catfish or Bootsie’s corn bread.

  Hiram’s from Colorado. He was living with Jimmy’s brother in San Francisco and has been traveling with us ever since we got kicked out of the apartment for squatting. He had a girl, Mary, but she got sick and decided she would go home. I can’t remember where she said that was. Everything’s in such a fog. I like that. I think. At least I don’t have to remember all the hopes I once had about saving the world. I was in a Woolco stealing aspirin when the man behind the counter turned up his radio and told us all to hush. They were talking about three civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by the KKK. I wanted to fall down on my knees or raise my fist to the sky for those three men who died doing what I should have been. But instead I just put three more bottles of aspirin in my purse and got high in the back of the van in the parking lot.

  I wonder how far from Mississippi I have to get before I forget about the place I come from. My memories of home are like a river, and I spend a lot of time fighting the current that’s always trying to take me back.

  Two of the girls with us are pregnant, and there are about ten children always running about half-naked, because that’s how nature intended. I’m lucky so far, I guess. I was never one of those girls who dreamed of having babies. But sometimes when I see these girls rocking their babies to sleep I wonder what it would mean to pass on all your hopes and dreams to someone, to hold a little person who completely belongs to you. I sometimes wonder if Bootsie ever felt that way about me, or if I was just another one of her plants that needed to be plucked from her garden before the bugs that were eating it destroyed the rest.

  NOVEMBER 1964

  I’m back in Mississippi. I’ve had a real bad cough for about a month, and Hiram gave me money for a doctor, but instead I bought a bus ticket. I haven’t been sick a whole lot in my life, but when I am, all I want is my bed in my room in my house, with Mathilda and Bootsie bringing me chicken soup and laying cool hands on my forehead. A prissy woman was sitting across the aisle from me on the bus and kept giving me looks every time I coughed. Or maybe it was because I smelled. I’d be
en giving myself baths in gas station restroom sinks for a while, so maybe she had a point.

  I thumbed a ride from the station from an old guy in a pickup truck going to his brother’s funeral in Biloxi, and he didn’t seem to mind the smell. He was nice enough and told me to take care of myself when he dropped me off on the highway in front of the long drive that led to the house. I didn’t want to give Bootsie any warning. I didn’t want her locking the door on me.

  I went to my cypress tree first, to see if it recognized me, and when I sat down on its roots I knew I was home. I fell asleep, and that’s where Bootsie found me. Emmett carried me to the big black bed in Bootsie’s room, and then the doctor came and told me it was pneumonia.

  I’ll be here for a while, until I’m all better. But I know I won’t stay. It’s not in my nature. Or maybe because I heard Bootsie crying outside my door when she thought I was sleeping. There’s something in the ways of mothers and daughters, I think, that makes us see all the bad parts of ourselves. Or maybe there’s a part of me that wants to hurt her as badly as she hurt me. I’d like to think not.

  She told me the story again of my grandmother, who was lost in the flood of 1927. She told me that when her mother left she knew the levees had been breached, but she got in her car anyway and told her friend that she had to drive to New Orleans. And then she gave Bootsie to her friend to look after before she drove away. It saved Bootsie’s life, but she’d never stopped wondering why her mama didn’t take her with her.

  I thought of the river bursting out of its boundaries created by men, its strong-flowing current sweeping up everything in its path. I know what that’s like, to feel like your destiny isn’t really yours but decided upon by things that happened long before you were born.

  I tried to tell this to Bootsie, but she just smiled and told me to wait until I become a mother, and then I will understand that my real destiny will be decided by those not yet born.

  I know she’s wrong. That’s why I need to figure it all out on my own. I fell asleep trying to remember what it was I’d been looking for, and what I’d been running from. I didn’t come up with any answers, but it seems to me that it doesn’t really matter anymore. I need to leave again, if only to show Bootsie that I control my own life, and that I’m strong enough to swim against the current to find my own way.

  Chapter 24

  Adelaide Walker Bodine

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  MAY 1924

  Sarah Beth lurched back and forth over the road, our scarf-covered hair trying desperately to escape and fly in the breeze. The earth was fuzzy with new cotton plants, making all the fields resemble the heads of balding men with swirls of thin hair on top. Uncle Joe was in a good mood, saying the Farmers’ Almanac was predicting good weather for cotton growing and a bountiful harvest. Willie just stomped around the house, muttering about wasted financial opportunities that had once again been sunk into the soil of our farm.

  Willie told me in private that the best part of going to college was missing the planting, and the best part about being home was getting a job at the bank, thanks to Mr. Heathman. Sarah Beth swore up and down that she had nothing to do with it, insisting that Willie and her father had their own association. I couldn’t imagine what that would be—our families even went to separate churches, and her father and my uncle were barely acquaintances—but every morning Willie dressed in a sharp suit with a vest, tie, and pressed pocket square, then drove to the bank, where he’d work all day. “Pushing papers,” as Uncle Joe would say with a frown.

  And just about every night, he would pick up Sarah Beth and they would go dancing. John and I would go sometimes, too, but only to places John said weren’t too low-end. Everywhere we went, the juice-joint owners knew John by name, and never asked him for money for our drinks. Which, John said, meant he couldn’t be arrested, since he wasn’t buying alcohol. He’d wink when he said this, and Willie would slug back another shot like they were celebrating something.

  A few times, Willie would have to leave early—which got Sarah Beth real steamed—or he claimed a former commitment, and then after I’d gone to bed I would hear him sneak into the house in the early hours of the morning. The back stairs would creak, and I’d know it was him because I could smell the lingering scent of wood smoke as it crept under my door like an unwelcome visitor.

  I’d asked him about it once, and he’d told me that he and other like-minded citizens would have private political meetings to discuss upholding justice in a world where justice didn’t seem to have a place anymore. He’d kissed me on the forehead and told me he was making our community safer for Sarah Beth and me. And then he’d told me not to breathe a word about it to anybody, especially not to Aunt Louise or Uncle Joe. They were happy in their little world of cotton and church, and they just didn’t understand the bigger complexities of life.

  When I asked him if I could tell John, since he was going to be my husband and I didn’t feel it right that I should keep any secrets from him, Willie had laughed, and then asked me who I thought was supplying the booze for his political meetings. I smiled as if I understood, but his words had sent a cold chill through me. Obviously John didn’t feel the same as I did about secrets between husband and wife. I’d promised myself to ask John about his other business activities before our wedding, and I knew I was running out of time. I knew he loved me, and nothing I could say to him would make him love me less. But still I hesitated, afraid that by my rocking the boat, all of the unlikable things about me would lie exposed for him to see and force him to go find another girl worthy of his love.

  Sarah Beth honked her horn at a mule-drawn milk wagon, making the poor animal start and run off the road, the dairy farmer waving his fist at her as she sped by, stirring up waves of dirt. She’d wrecked her other car, and her father had bought her a car with a removable top—what Sarah Beth referred to as a breezer—which she adored, but which I thought just made it more difficult to keep my hair nice. And I always ended up with new freckles every time I rode with her. Her new car didn’t have a rumble seat, so Mathilda sat in the back looking petrified. She’d been given a list of things to be picked up at the grocer’s and the butcher’s, all to be put on the Heathmans’ account. To keep Mathilda honest, Mrs. Heathman wrote everything down on a note to be handed to the respective shopkeepers.

  We were on our way to town to look at wedding gowns at Hamlin’s, and Mrs. Heathman had made an appointment for me with Mrs. Hamlin herself, the epitome of good taste and fashion, according to Sarah Beth’s mother. Aunt Louise had wanted me to wear my mother’s gown, but Mrs. Heathman—who seemed almost more excited about the wedding than I did—had said it wouldn’t do. So we’d compromised, and I’d be wearing my mother’s veil. Aunt Louise had been happy, saying it would be like having my mother there with me.

  Sarah Beth screeched to a stop, and as I got out I noticed that she was crooked and too far from the curb, the rear end sticking clear out into Main Street. Mathilda exited the backseat, narrowly being missed by a chauffeur-driven Cadillac barreling down the road.

  “Sarah Beth!” I shouted. “I think you need to move your car—you’re going to get hit.”

  She laughed. “Don’t be silly. It’s bright red—they can’t help but see it. And there’s plenty of room for them to go around.” Her eyes flickered down my dress. “It’s snowing down south.”

  I looked at her in confusion, but she just closed her eyes and shook her head. She began walking down the sidewalk toward Hamlin’s. “Hurry, Adelaide, or we’ll be late.”

  “Your slip be showing, Miss Adelaide,” Mathilda said quietly.

  I thanked her and was trying to surreptitiously pull my skirt down while standing in the middle of the sidewalk when I noticed that the car that had sped past us had stopped, and was backing down Main Street regardless of whatever other traffic happened to be on the road. I heard Mathilda suck in her breath and then I did the sa
me as I recognized the man behind the rolled-down window in the backseat.

  “Miss Bodine, Miss Heathman. What a pleasure to see you both again.”

  The chauffeur jumped out of the car and opened the back door to allow the man to step out onto the curb.

  I stood without saying anything, unsure how to greet him. He took off his fedora and gave me a genuine smile that confused me. “Angelo Berlini,” he said. “We met at the jewelry store.”

  “Yes,” I said, my voice clipped, remembering how John had told me that Mr. Berlini wasn’t the kind of man I needed to know. I glanced across the street, knowing before I did so that Peacock’s was too far down the block for John to be able to look out the window and see us. “I remember you.”

  “Mr. Berlini. What a pleasure to see you back in Indian Mound.” Sarah Beth stepped forward, holding her gloved hand out to the man, who in turn kissed it, then held it in his own hand for longer than Aunt Louise would think was proper. “The pleasure is all mine. I haven’t seen you since your parents’ New Year’s Eve party, and may I say that you’re even lovelier now?”

  Color flared in her cheeks, making me want to remind her that she was practically engaged to my cousin. “You certainly know how to flatter a girl.” She turned to me. “I didn’t realize you knew each other.”

  The man’s smile returned. “Actually, it was only briefly. She had just lost something.” He clasped his hands in front of him like a choirboy. “And how fortunate that I ran into you this afternoon to let you know that I found what you lost. It’s at my hotel right now as we speak.”

  Sarah Beth narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s funny. You never mentioned losing anything to me.”