A Long Time Gone

by Karen White

  “I knows he messed up with the Klan—and I think Miss Adelaide, she know this, too, but don’ want to upset her uncle, who be busy with the farm and all that rain we had. My Robert, he was at Ellis the day they kills Mr. Berlini, workin’ one of the stills for his uncle. They don’ see him, but he saw everythin’, which would get him kilt for sure if they knew. He told me it was the Klan with they robes. But Willie, he take off his hood so he can look in the dead man’s pockets and Robert say he took something. I had a good idea I knows what that be, ’cause I remember seeing Miss Adelaide give him something right before Miss Bootsie stops wearing her ring. That why I go look in his room.”

  She paused, her eyes moving as if she were watching the play of events inside her head.

  My head swarmed with questions. “Why would the Klan have killed him? What would they have to gain?”

  “They kills him because Willie know Miss Sarah Beth’s sweet on Mr. Berlini, and she be in the family way.”

  I sat down to digest this little bombshell, remembering dates in the newspaper articles and on my family tree. “With Emmett. So Emmett was Angelo’s baby.”

  She shrugged. “Sarah Beth made sure it could be both. That girl always knows how to takes care of herself.”

  “But Berlini had the ring—why? And how did Willie know?”

  “Miss Adelaide, she give it to him—I saw her do it, and so did Willie. I don’ know why till later. But Mr. Berlini, he has a soft spot for Miss Adelaide, and Robert say Mr. John in a heap o’ trouble ’cause he ain’t workin’ with the bootleggers no more. See, Mr. Berlini asks Robert to help him, say he trust Robert, and when the time right, he gonna give the ring to Robert to show to Miss Adelaide, let her know she can listen to him. ’Cause Mr. Berlini try to help them get away somewheres until there’s no danger for them. She gives him the ring to keep her family safe.” Mathilda shook her head slowly. “She wouldn’t part from that ring for nothin’ less.”

  I stood again and picked up the water pitcher to pour more in her glass and get one for me, and I saw that my hand shook. “But when you found the ring, you didn’t tell Adelaide.”

  “No.” She looked down at her neatly manicured hands, at the pink nail beds and yellowed tips. “She would ask Willie how he got the ring. She not used to lyin’, and even though she try to protect me sayin’ she took it, he would have known she lyin’. I don’t think a day pass afore I end up in the pond, too, or worse.”

  “So you kept the ring all this time, and didn’t tell anybody.”

  Her milky eyes settled on me, and I shivered. “I never say that.”

  “Then who did you tell?”

  She took a deep breath, and a small pearl on a chain popped out from the neck of her nightgown, teasing my memories of her leaning over my bed when I was small. “You wants to tell my story or you wants to be patient and let me tell it the way I remembers it?”

  I squeezed my hands together, feeling the ring, trying to force myself to be patient. “I’m sorry, Mathilda. Please continue.”

  “Only if you stops squeezing your hands together so tight. You likes to stop the blood goin’ to your heart.”

  I stared at her in surprise. “How did you know what I was doing?”

  “Because Bootsie and Carol Lynne both do that when they’s agitated-like. You do it, too, when you’s little. Don’t take no workin’ eyes to see sometimes.”

  I slid the baby ring onto the tip of my little finger and forced my palms flat on my thighs. “All right. I’m listening.”

  She told me of the rain, and the flooded fields, and Adelaide’s garden, and how Adelaide saw it all as just an opportunity to start over. She spoke of Sarah Beth’s last visit, and how Mathilda had stayed in the room and listened to every word.

  “So that’s how you knew that Adelaide and John were planning on going away to Missouri as soon as they could.”

  Mathilda nodded. “And Sarah Beth, now she know, too. I never see her so angry, and I know it a matter of time afore she makes Miss Adelaide sorry. She in a bad way, and even Miss Adelaide don’ know how bad.”

  “What do you mean . . . ?” I stopped when her eyes settled in my direction.

  She took another sip of her water, and I would almost have accused her of enjoying herself, but I saw that her hands were no steadier than mine.

  “I had to just wait and sees what I can do to help.”

  Her hand moved up to her neck, where her stiff fingers pressed against the single pearl glowing like a star against the dark skin. I held my breath, wanting to ask about it, but afraid she’d stop talking if I did.

  “I wish Robert never gives this to me. I thinks everythin’ might be different. But maybe not. Everythin’ happens for a reason.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it made people notice me. Because Sarah Beth, she had to lie and say she gives it to me, even though we both know Robert steals the pearl he found on the ground and gives it to me.”

  I didn’t know anything about Emmett’s mother, but from what I’d heard so far, Sarah Beth didn’t seem the type to defend a servant. Or lie for her. “Why would she do that for you?”

  She turned her sightless stare on me, and I forced myself to lean back in my chair, resisting the urge to fist my hands together in a ball.

  “Because we knows a secret about the other.” She began to cough and she took another sip of water. “The day of the flood Mr. Peacock calls, and say Mr. John need Adelaide to come to the store right away, and Miss Adelaide, she thinks it’s so they can go north, so she brings that sweet baby with her.”

  I could tell it was getting hard for her to talk, that her emotions were welling in her throat, her words slower now.

  “We can stop now, if you like,” I said. “Maybe continue another time.” I held my breath, hoping she couldn’t tell.

  With her head down, she shook her head slowly. “I can’ promise I be here tomorrow to finish. And maybe my soul rests a bit easier if this all out.”

  “All right,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “Whenever you’re ready.” I unclenched my fists and forced them to lie flat again.

  “I watch Miss Adelaide leave with that sweet baby, and they’s nothin’ I can do but pray she and Mr. John and Bootsie get to Missouri likes they plans.”

  She was silent so long that I finally spoke. “But she didn’t. Somehow she was killed and her body buried in her own yard, and her baby ended up with Sarah Beth.” I took off the blue watch and stared at it, reading the inscription on the back. I love you forever. “And so did her watch. She gave it to Emmett and said to make sure Carol Lynne got it when she was older, but I don’t think she told him why. It didn’t work, and he tossed it in his spare-parts box.” I clipped it back on my wrist, my fingers rubbing the smooth enamel. “It didn’t work because she put a note inside of it that read ‘Forgive me.’ What did she do, Mathilda, that she needed to be forgiven for?”

  Mathilda was silent for a long moment, and I stood up, agitated again, wondering why it was so important that I know, wishing it had more to do with letting Adelaide rest in peace instead of my need to validate my own past.

  She continued. “I don’ know what happen at the store. Mr. Peacock, he die that day, too—found his body in Indian Bayou ten days later, and dead men, they don’ talk. But my Robert, he at Ellis with his still. The Klan done clean them out, but they’s not goin’ to let the Klan win, so they’s back and runnin’ just as soon as the Klan done tear everythin’ up. He there with his wagon, loadin’ up jugs of moonshine to save them from the flood.

  “He hear a baby cryin’ and then he sees Miss Adelaide drivin’ her car, and a man he don’ know in the backseat holdin’ that baby. Afore he knows what’s goin’ on, he see the man lean forward and then Adelaide, she cryin’ and beggin’ for the man to let her baby be, to do what he wants with her, but to let her baby be. Then he reach up to her
, and she falls over, her head restin’ on the window, and Robert sees blood all down the front of her dress.

  “Another car pull up next to the other car—Robert say they city folk, because they stop in the mud and the man gets in, but the car ain’t movin’, ’cause it stuck. So they drag Miss Adelaide and her baby out of her car and leaves them there and they gets in that car and drive away.

  “Robert pick up Miss Bootsie, and sees Miss Adelaide, she already gone, and that baby cryin’ and cryin’ likes she knows her mama is dead.” She stopped speaking, pausing as if we both could see the young mother in the sodden grass, her inconsolable baby lying nearby.

  “He see her blue watch, the one she set such store on, lyin’ in the mud, and he pick it up. He put Miss Adelaide in the back of the wagon and sits up front with the baby and goes to the Heathmans’, ’cause it closest, and ’cause it built on high ground. Miss Sarah Beth, she there all by herself, drinkin’ and smokin’, and she don’ believe Miss Adelaide is gone till Robert show her.

  “He say he bring her inside, and Miss Sarah Beth bathe her and lay her out like it be her funeral, then wrap her in sheets till they can bury her, and Sarah Beth, she can hardly breathe, she be cryin’ so bad. But she takes care of Miss Adelaide, and then take care of that baby.”

  Mathilda began speaking faster, as if to cleanse herself of the story, to unload a burden carried for decades.

  “The waters come, more than ten feet in places, and they stay at the Heathmans’. It so cold outside, they leaves the body on the back porch. Robert makes a boat with Mrs. Heathman’s dining room chairs, then goes and finds a real boat, and they goes to Miss Adelaide’s home and bury her afore anyone come back. The water didn’t stay so long up there, that part of the yard being higher than the rest. Sarah Beth say that where Adelaide belong, and where she want to be.”

  I was sobbing now, remembering my dreams where I was lying in the hole and somebody was shoveling dirt over my face. Even knowing that Adelaide was already dead, I still couldn’t stop thinking of her young life taken, and the daughter who would grow up without her. I stood and walked toward the window, staring out without really seeing anything, but unable to look at Mathilda.

  “But why bury her like that? Why didn’t Sarah Beth call the police?”

  There was a long pause before Mathilda spoke again. “Because it what Sarah Beth done that get Adelaide kilt.” She was shaking her head, as if Sarah Beth were there and she was trying to scold her.

  “She don’ mean to hurt nobody. She want to make Miss Adelaide worry some by havin’ them mens mess with Mr. John a little. Robert say Sarah Beth tell Mr. Berlini’s fiancée that she think Mr. John had somethin’ to do with Mr. Berlini being in the pond, and that he plannin’ on headin’ north. She promise to help the fiancée teach him a lesson.” Mathilda shook her head. “As smart as Sarah Beth think she is, she ain’t. She don’ know it, but she messin’ with the wrong people, people who don’ give warnin’s. People who know how to hurt a man is to hurt those he love most. Robert say it must have been them that makes Mr. Peacock call Miss Adelaide, and they kills him, too.”

  I pressed my hand across my mouth, trying to find the right words. “All because Sarah Beth was pregnant and Adelaide wouldn’t lie for her to make Willie marry her.” I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t Robert tell anybody what Sarah Beth had done? So she could be punished?” I swiped away the tears that ran down my face, hoping she couldn’t hear them in my voice.

  Very softly, she said, “He don’ ’cause of me. ’Cause Sarah Beth and me, we was kin. Blood kin.”

  I turned around slowly, recalling what Mathilda had said earlier and what I was only beginning to understand. Because we knows a secret about the other. “What?”

  “Her daddy and my daddy—they brothers. Our uncle Leon, he in charge of the stills at the Ellis plantation. Sarah Beth’s real mama, she half-white, and she die in childbed. But that baby was born beautiful and just as white as cotton, on account of her daddy, Gerald, being a light-skinned Negro. Her daddy, he ain’t got no use for a white baby and no mama, so they left her on the Heathmans’ doorstep on account of them having no babies, even though they buried five of them.”

  “And Sarah Beth knew that?”

  Mathilda shook her head. “Not at first. Her mama and daddy never knows, though I think they’s ashamed she found on they doorstep. They never put her name in the Bible ’cause of that, ’cause she ain’t worthy to be a real Heathman, and I know it hurt Sarah Beth deep. But that friend of Willie’s, Chas, he knows where she come from. He got in a fight with Leon about the price of his hooch, and somehow it came out. Chas told Sarah Beth, tryin’ to get some of what she already givin’ to Willie, but she say go ahead and say what you want, ’cause nobody believe it. And she right. But she knew. She go to Leon and ask him and he tells her the truth. That’s when I found out, too. We was first cousins—her just as white as can be and me darker ’n a raisin.”

  I pressed my forehead against the window, needing the coolness of the glass against my skin. “That’s why she wanted Willie to marry her. If she had a mixed-race baby with dark skin, Sarah Beth would at least have a husband’s name and protection.” I shook my head. “But poor Adelaide, she didn’t know. Otherwise she might have done things differently.”

  I sat down on her bed, not wanting to be close to her, feeling even more drained than I had when I’d arrived. “Have you known all this time?”

  “I figure some out on my own, and what I don’ know Robert tol’ me on his deathbed. Until then I happy thinkin’ she die by accident in the water. When Robert pass, Sarah Beth, she gone, too, so I told myself it be better to let people believe what they already do. I see Miss Adelaide’s haint, though. That’s why I put up my bottle tree. I just don’ know for a long spell who it was.”

  She turned her head toward the window. “We all do what we thinks is best at the time. I couldn’t bring Adelaide back, so they no sense in taking more lives. Things don’ always work out the way we think, and there ain’t no way to pay for mistakes except to learn from them.”

  My hands were clenched again, and I didn’t have the willpower to pull them apart. “So three generations of us Walker women grew up believing that the only way to find ourselves was to leave this place, regardless of who we left behind.” I felt a glimmer of anger, something I welcomed over the gaping emptiness. “So what happened . . . after the flood?”

  “Miss Louise and me raise Miss Bootsie, and Sarah Beth some, too. She and Willie get married—I think they’s guilty ’cause of what happen’ to Miss Adelaide and feels it’s they right thing, and Emmett born six months later. Willie, he stay drunk most of the time, and dies when he stumbling drunk and slips on the marble floor in the Heathmans’ house and hits his head. Miss Sarah Beth, she get real involved in her church, and when the crash came, she help feed the poor until her daddy lose his house, and she come live with Willie’s mama and daddy.

  “She take real good care of Miss Bootsie, like she was her own, and then Miss Louise and Mr. Joe when they gets too old to carry on. Guilt can sure change a person.”

  “And John?”

  Her face softened. “That man always a gentleman. He run his own watch store, and he treat Emmett like a son, teachin’ him things about them watches and clocks, and how to judge the weather by the clouds. He love Bootsie, too, but he leave her raisin’ to us womenfolk. I think she look so much like Miss Adelaide it hurt him too much to look at her. He only live ’bout twenty more years. His car crash into a tree one night and he gets kilt. No other car, and he don’ drink, so nobody know for sure what happened, but I thinks he just gets tired of livin’ without his Adelaide. I figure it a blessin’ he never know the truth.”

  “And the mob left him alone?”

  “I figure they thought he be punished enough, and then Prohibition was over and they’s no need for him. He was finally free.�
�

  I held the ring tightly, the little letters on top warming my skin like a mother’s touch, too exhausted to decide whether to stay or leave.

  “They crows still come back to that cypress tree?”

  I looked up at her, surprised that she knew that. “Yes. They do. Even after the tree fell over, they still came back.”

  “You knows the story of the crows?”

  “You mean that nursery rhyme you used to sing to me? It’s kind of hard to forget.”

  She shook her head. “No. I means the real story. How they mates for life, and generations of they same family come back to they same nest every year, with everybody takin’ turns to feed they babies. Sometimes one of they chil’ren leave the nest and don’ come back for years. But then they do, and the family welcomes they back like they always been there.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, remembering the crows and my apprehension of them—no doubt fostered by Mathilda’s nursery rhyme.

  “You needs to plant another tree for they crows, so they have a home.”

  “Funny,” I said. “Chloe told me the same thing—but because she thought I’d need a place to sit under with my grandchildren.”

  “Um-hmm,” she said, nodding as if I’d just explained the miracles of the universe. “So, you done chasin’ ghosts?”

  “I have no idea. I thought knowing the truth would somehow set me free. Would validate my life in some way. It’s like for generations our whole lives have been based on a lie.”

  She reached out her hands and I sat beside her again, her fragile bones settling within mine. “No, Vivi. All you Walker women has more love in your hearts than I see in most people—and I seen lots in my days. It take a lot of love for a mother to let go of her own chil’ren. Mos’ don’ have the strength for that.” She squeezed my hand with surprising strength, the ring digging into my palm. “That what your life be. That what be in your blood.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’ve got to go. Thank you for telling me the truth. It was hard to hear, and I know it was hard to tell it, but I’m glad to know what happened to my great-grandmother. I think we can bury her now—properly.”