by Lisa Wingate
Epiphany switched on the blinker. “Guess that’s it.”
“Keep going,” I told her. “The Pine View isn’t up to our standards.”
She craned her head away, surprised by the notion of standards, I guess. “Okay, but I’m ready to get out of this car.” Rubbing the back of her neck, she rolled her head to one side, then the other.
“Both hands on the wheel,” I told her.
As it turned out, our passing up the Pine View was fortuitous, since just a few blocks farther we found a charming bed-and-breakfast in a two-story historic home with a veranda running around two sides. It looked to me to be perfect for our purposes. After a short negotiation with a friendly young couple who ran the place along with the wife’s aunt, my new granddaughter and I were booked into two rooms on the second floor.
Epiphany’s eyes were wide as we brought our things into the cavernous entry hall. The proprietress gave our ragtag smattering of suitcases, grocery sacks, and computer equipment a questioning look, and Epiphany sidled a few steps away, then bent over to peek under the chandelier at a semicircular staircase worthy of Scarlett O’Hara. “Whoa, J . . . Grandpa. This place is even bigger than your house.”
The proprietress, Sharla, chuckled as she dusted crumbs from her ample bosom and winked at me. She smelled of fresh-baked apple pie and chocolate-chip cookies, which gave me great hope for breakfast the next day. “If y’all want the tour first, Chris can take your belongings upstairs.” She indicated her husband, who also looked as if he ate regularly and well, which increased my faith that breakfast tomorrow would be worth the price of the rooms.
Chris gathered our things. Epiphany came to stand beside me again, ready for the tour, and Chris lumbered toward the stairs, burdened by our baggage. The computer case swayed on his shoulder, nearly striking the chair rail as he rounded the corner. Epiphany ran after him. “I can help carry it up,” she said, sliding the bag off his shoulder, and taking charge of her backpack, as well. “I’ll be back down in a minute. Don’t start the big tour without me, Grandpa!” she called with no hint of awkwardness. Who knew she had such acting talent?
Sharla and I passed five minutes or so strolling in the front parlor, discussing photos of Ward House in its younger years, when the surrounding land comprised portions of a riverside trading post that had been scratched from the Piney Woods by Hayden Ward, Sharla’s great-great-grandfather. We passed another five minutes looking at a coffee-table book with pictures of early-day Groveland, while Sharla pointed out family members and shared stories of the Wards’ long history in the town. Her aunt Charlotte, referred to as Char, joined us and contributed yet more bits and pieces of Groveland lore.
It was clear to me, while we were talking, that both Char and Sharla were well-grounded in the history of this place and their family heritage, which could be traced back to Davy Crockett, a Texas legend. Sharla’s parents and grandparents had rooted her in the blood and soil of family history, created the ties that bind. It crossed my mind that I’d failed to do that for Deborah. I’d never shared much about my mother’s family or my father’s. Such things hadn’t seemed important. I was a man of the future, not the past. But now I wondered if that tendency in me had come about because the past was never real. My father’s history in the oil business, my mother’s connection to the Rockefeller family, felt more like a suit I had put on, a garment that didn’t quite fit. Perhaps I’d always sensed on some level that those bits of ancestry were no more connected to me than a story told at random.
After fifteen minutes had passed, Sharla cast a worried glance toward the stairs. “Where are they?” She looked at Aunt Char before seeming to answer her own question. “Oh, mercy, I bet my husband is up there filling your granddaughter’s head full of ghost stories.” Without pausing to excuse herself, she made a dash for the stairs, leaving me alone with Aunt Char, who wasted no time in inquiring about my business in town.
I considered telling her the truth about my visit to Groveland, but some inner caution compelled me to play things close to the vest. My mother had gone to great lengths to dissociate me from my past. She feared it, even after I was grown, even to her deathbed. If her part in whatever happened here could in any way bring shame to her memory or to the family name, I had to prevent it from seeing the light of day. “Oh, just a little vacation,” I replied. “And acquainting my granddaughter with a bit of family history. My father made his fortune in the oil fields not far from here, back in the day. He had relatives in Groveland, I think.”
She asked my father’s name, and I told her, and of course she didn’t know him. My father had never lived in Groveland, and most likely his business would never have brought him here. Yet I had a feeling that my mother had found me here. What were the circumstances? How had that come about? What fears haunted her?
“Well, there’s a scad of books about the area, and the oil patch, and the pulpwood mills upstairs in the parlor library,” Aunt Char offered. I had the sense of watching two sevens roll up on the slot machine and waiting for the third. “I haven’t read most of ’em. Don’t need to. Mercy, I’ve heard the stories all my life, sugar. I just buy the books here and there, when there’s a book signin’ at the library, or somebody speaks at the ladies’ club or the church, and I put ’em upstairs for the customers.”
“There’s one in particular I’m looking for,” I told her, my hopes inching up and up and up. “A book about the early-day timber industry. There was a mention of some of my relatives in it, I think. An East Texas Timber Town History. The author’s name is White, I believe. M. L. White.”
Aunt Char’s eyes widened, and she slapped a hand to her chest. I suspected I’d said the wrong thing until she threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, scat! You won’t find a copy of that rag upstairs. Mrs. Mercy White wrote that book. Her daddy was the sheriff in Groveland for some years. Don’t let the name fool you, either. She was a nasty, spiteful woman. Told all sorts of tales in her book, only about half of them true, but she got her revenge on folks, I guess, before she died. That book was like the National Enquirer of the whole county, hon. I think by now the ladies’ auxiliary has gathered up every copy and burned them. Mercy White embarrassed most of those women, too.”
“I see.” Suddenly I was back to square one, my roll of the dice having come up empty. It seemed that Epiphany and I had gone on the lam and traveled all the way to east Texas in search of the rarest book in the county.
I heard the clatter of feet on the stairs, and Aunt Char and I left the front room to meet Epiphany and Sharla in the entry hall. Chris lumbered along behind them and quickly excused himself, having the look of a man whose wife had just given him a dressing-down.
Epiphany’s eyes were as wide as Easter eggs. “You’re not gonna believe this place!” she breathed, seemingly somewhere between awe and trepidation. “It’s like . . . Oh, man, and there’s all kinds of . . . You just don’t even know . . . and Ghost Finders was here, and they filmed a show. Lyndon B. Johnson slept up there, too, and there was this little girl that fell out the window, and a baby that died of pneumonia. Her picture’s in my room.” Her gaze rolled upward, her lip curling with it, as if she were considering the proposition of sharing space with a ghost.
Sharla touched her apologetically. “I knew I shouldn’t have let Chris take her up there. Sorry. He loves to tell those silly old stories. But, honestly, I grew up in this house, and I never saw any ghosts here.” She emphasized never and any in a way that had the air of protesting too much, and perhaps seeing my concern, she added, “Ghost Finders didn’t find anything, truly. And they had equipment all over the house. Chris just likes to tease. He shouldn’t have been scaring your granddaughter.”
In the periphery of my vision, Aunt Char, who had been watching Epiphany with no small curiosity, blinked in obvious surprise. Epiphany saw it, too, I could tell, and she flashed a knowing look my way, proving the point she’d made earlier in the car, I supposed. People considered us an unlikely-looking pair.
“Oh, not to worry.” I addressed the reply to both Sharla and Aunt Char, but also to Epiphany. “My granddaughter is a smart girl. She’s very practical, good with science and math and the like, not the type to get caught up in tall tales and ghost stories. Right, Epiphany?”
Epiphany nodded, then shrugged, then shook her head, a mixed bag of answers. Threading her arms over her stomach, she swiveled a glance up the stairs. I had a feeling she was wishing we’d stayed at the Pine View Motel with the truckers. “Yeah, I guess not.” Despite her halfhearted display of bravery, she followed close on my heels as we toured the house.
After the tour and a late-night snack in the kitchen, Epiphany and I went upstairs to settle in for the evening and search through the vast library of local-subject-matter books there. We were soon frustrated with the volume of information, though, and descended into a disagreement over whether to leave for home tomorrow if we hadn’t yet found what we were seeking. It was becoming clearer to me that this trip could be a proverbial wild-goose chase, and that the longer we stayed, the more likely we were to provide fuel for the flash fires that could be waiting for us at home. At this point, we had no way of knowing whether our absence had been reported, whether anyone was looking for us, or whether that hoodlum, DeRon, had actually made good on his threat of false accusations.
Finally, we left the argument unsettled, and our subsequent good night felt more like a mutual good riddance. Armed with a book about historic towns in the Piney Woods, I proceeded to my room, slipped into my pajamas, brushed my teeth, and climbed into bed. The old house creaked and groaned, a spring breeze rattling the veranda doors as I thumbed through the book, searching for applicable bits of history or mention of a tragic house fire during the right time frame. So far, though, what I’d found regarding the thirties and early forties largely discussed the boom days of oil and timber, and the trade in alcohol during Prohibition, when rumrunners brought their wares through ports on the Gulf of Mexico. According to the text, they were flamboyant and dangerous men who made their fortunes transporting illegal liquor northward.
A little tap-tap-tap came at the door, and I folded the book on my lap. “Yes?”
The door creaked open a crack. “J. Norm, you decent?”
“Completely in the buff. Horrible to see,” I answered, and the door opened wider.
Outside in the hall stood Epiphany in a T-shirt with the neck torn out and a pair of baggy sweatpants, hugging a lacy floral-print pillow like a giant teddy bear. “Did you hear that?” she whispered, as if someone might be listening. Her shoulders shuddered, and she stepped into the room without waiting to be invited. “There’s someone walking in the hall. They stopped right outside my bedroom.”
“I’ve been up reading.” Which was the story of my life, really. I seldom slept a solid night anymore. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“It woke me up.” Her eyes widened further, which I would have thought impossible.
“There was no noise,” I assured her.
She shifted from one foot to the other, her slim fingers kneading the pillow. Finally, she huffed, and said, “Can I just stay in here with you?” She moved a few steps toward a fainting couch on the other side of the room.
“Epiphany, I hardly—”
“You’re not even gonna know I’m here, I promise.” Another few steps. Behind her, the door creaked shut on its own. She squeaked and scampered to the sofa, then jumped onto it like a child playing Sharks in the Water, and pulled an afghan over herself.
I leaned back in my bed and opened my book again. “I don’t see what help I’ll be if there are ghosts around. They’d hardly be afraid of a crippled old man with a bad heart.”
Satisfied that she wasn’t being sent back to her own room, Epiphany snuggled down, burrowing into the feather pillow. “You can tell them rocket stories until they get bored and leave.”
I smirked at her over the top of my book.
She yawned, gazing past me toward the veranda doors. “I’m just joking, you know. I like your stories.”
“I know,” I said.
She inhaled and exhaled, her lashes falling to half-mast as she gazed through the veranda doors to the backyard, where blooming magnolias gleamed in the moonlight. “Chris said those were slave cabins out back. They made some of the slaves live in the attic, too—the people who worked in the house. They beat people and chained them to the beds up there and stuff, too.”
I laid the book against my knees, looked at her, but her eyes were falling closed. “I suspect so. History is filled with terrible events that were rationalized by the masses.” I wondered if she really understood that the world in which I’d grown up was vastly different from hers. So much change in a single lifetime. From milk trucks rumbling through the streets to a man on the moon. From a time when her aunts and grandmothers would have taken work in houses like these, oiling the banisters, cooking meals, and providing nursery care for the children, to a time when her opportunities were as big as her ability to dream them and her gumption to make them come true.
“It’s weird . . . to think about,” she whispered, then yawned again, breathed out a long, slow breath, and let herself sink away.
“Yes, it is,” I answered quietly.
While browsing the book awhile longer, I watched her sleep. Quiet now, curled into a ball with fistfuls of blanket tucked under her chin, she looked angelic, innocent. I was reminded of Deborah, not much younger than this, curled in her sleeping bag on the floor of our master bedroom. While Annalee was gone to a long-running PTA meeting, Deborah had stumbled across The Exorcist on television, after Roy was in bed. I hadn’t stopped her from watching it. My mind was on some project I’d brought home with me. I’d been forced to leave the office early due to the sudden cancellation of the babysitter Annalee had arranged.
But the work was forgotten, and somehow I’d ended up on the sofa beside Deborah, watching the movie with horrible fascination, something that I later said (in my own defense, because Annalee was furious with me) should never have been on television where children might find it. When it was finally over, Deborah wouldn’t go to bed in her own room. For weeks she dragged her sleeping pallet into our room, until finally her bad memories of the movie faded.
It was the last time I was ever called upon to babysit. I was deemed a complete failure at the task.
But now I remembered that on nights when I worked late or left early, I stood above that pallet and gazed at my daughter, silent and peaceful in her sleep, her dark hair curling around her. She was an angel so perfect that it was hard to believe I could have had a part in creating her. Each time before I left, I knelt down and kissed her, and whispered in her ear, Sweet dreams, Deborah.
Did Deborah remember those nights so long ago, so short, so sweet to me in their recollection?
Setting the book aside, I took a pad of Ward House stationery from the bedside table, opened to a fresh page, and began to write. If anything should happen to me in this odd quest to find my family, Deborah should know that inside the man who’d overlooked her in favor of his work and his projects was the father who’d stood over her while she slept and thought her as beautiful as an angel. I wrote:Dear Deborah,
Words do not come easily for so many men. We are taught to be strong, to provide, to put away our emotions. A father can work his way through his days and never see that his years are going by. If I could go back in time, I would say some things to that young father as he holds, somewhat uncertainly, his daughter for the very first time. These are the things I would say:
When you hear the first whimper in the night, go to the nursery and leave your wife sleeping. Rock in a chair, walk the floor, sing a lullaby so that she will know a man can be gentle.
When Mother is away for the evening, come home from work, do the babysitting. Learn to cook a hotdog or a pot of spaghetti, so that your daughter will know a man can serve another’s needs.
When she performs in school plays or dances in recitals, arrive early
, sit in the front seat, devote your full attention. Clap the loudest, so that she will know a man can have eyes only for her.
When she asks for a tree house, don’t just build it, but build it with her. Sit high among the branches and talk about clouds, and caterpillars, and leaves. Ask her about her dreams and wait for her answers, so that she will know a man can listen.
When you pass by her door as she dresses for a date, tell her she is beautiful. Take her on a date yourself. Open doors, buy flowers, look her in the eye, so that she will know a man can respect her.
When she moves away from home, send a card, write a note, call on the phone. If something reminds you of her, take a minute to tell her, so that she will know a man can think of her even when she is away.
Tell her you love her, so that she will know a man can say the words.
If you hurt her, apologize, so that she will know a man can admit that he’s wrong.
These seem like such small things, such a fraction of time in the course of two lives. But a thread does not require much space. It can be too fine for the eye to see, yet, it is the very thing that binds, that takes pieces and laces them into a whole.
Without it, there are tatters.
It is never too late for a man to learn to stitch, to begin mending.
These are the things I would tell that young father, if I could.
A daughter grows up quickly. There isn’t time to waste.
I love you,
Dad
Chapter 18
Epiphany Jones
J. Norm and me figured out on our first morning in town that the quickest way to make enemies in Groveland, Texas, was to go around looking for a copy of Mrs. Mercy White’s book. People gave us weird looks anyway, when we walked into places like the library, and the Timber and Railroad Museum, and some antique and junk stores that dealt in books. I guessed it wasn’t every day they saw an old white guy in nice clothes hanging around with a teenage girl who for sure wasn’t white, but once I called him Grandpa a time or two, they got the picture. After that, how they’d react was anybody’s guess. Sometimes people were friendly enough, sometimes they gave us hateful sneers, and sometimes they caught J. Norm’s eye with a sympathetic look, like they were trying to tell him they knew it wasn’t his fault his daughter’d got herself knocked up by some guy who wasn’t white. Some redneck dude in a junk shop was just plain unfriendly. When J. Norm asked him about Mercy White’s book, he curled his lip and said, “We don’t have anything like that in here.” Then he shrugged toward the door, like that’s where we oughta be going.