Afterward we were silent, breathing, on our backs together and looking up at the clean blue sky. I turned on my side and studied his tough, salt-streaked face. Blackheads on his temples, nose hairs not plucked. Probably never had been plucked. He hadn’t shaved, so my cheeks were chafed and burning. “Listen, Blake, sex can bond inappropriate people.”
He sat up and stared toward the extinct volcanoes lining the horizon. “It’s not the sex that’s bonding us, Ellen.”
I sat up too, touching the white rim of skin at his hairline. “What’s your theory?”
“It’s because I see who you are,” he said, still looking at the horizon. “And you see me. So I think it’s the usual stuff.”
“I can’t handle a connection like this, Blake. Too many trips around the block.” I stood up and began to sort out my clothes. His semen ran down my leg, and I wiped it off with my underwear. “Maybe we should bury these up here,” I said. “Leave another ghost behind.”
He was sitting, naked, hairy, vulnerable. “I know how strong you are,” he said, squinting because the sun was behind me. “It’s part of what I like.”
I handed him his white briefs. Fruit of the Loom. “I don’t think our emotions are reliable right now.”
He stood and balanced on one foot to step into his shorts. “Good luck with getting past this,” he said.
PART II
There is never only one, of anyone.
—MARGARET ATWOOD, Cat’s Eye
1
Lightman Redstone had buried his son, River, on the Nogalu reservation in a private ceremony, but afterward someone bootlegged to the newspapers a photograph revealing a small wooden coffin surrounded by figures dressed in fantastical regalia. This blurry image revealed what seemed to be the head of an enormous beaked bird, a large snake, and a foreground figure conjuring nothing either human or animal. The group stood before a raw crevice near the base of a rugged mesa much slighter than El Morro. The bird figure was carrying a cross, because maybe all gods are useful in the death of a child.
According to press reports, River’s grave would remain unmarked.
On the flight back to Charleston, I studied the most commonly available pictures of the children, newspaper copies of the photos Ruby had done in a studio before they moved to the reservation. River’s picture drew me in less, possibly because his remains were not down in the cargo hold, but Lucia’s image held me fast. She had the careless beauty of most four-year-olds, the openness of gaze and uncomplicated joy that come from waking up in the world. I sniffed the photo, which smelled of ink, not flowers. Lucia’s baby teeth, small and even, shone against her skin. Ruby had not retreated from the claim that Lucia’s darkness was inexplicable, that she had been kidnapped by a white man who called himself Jeremiah and claimed he was the hand of God.
She was drowsy with medication when she finally began speaking to me with any tenderness about her children. It was the day before she told me what had really happened in the cave, and whatever drug they had given her rendered her dreamy and haunting. She sat beside me on the cot, then unexpectedly lay down sideways and rested her head in my lap. I touched her uncertainly. Her hair was coarse and thick and black, the shaved place above her forehead bristling with new growth. The stitches were gone, but their tracks remained, crisscrossed and red and healing. I counted sixteen.
Lucia, she murmured, Lucia was a wonderment. She loved River too, of course, but Lucia came from God. Lucia’s eyes were blue at birth, her skin pale, and as she darkened, her brown eyes always looked amazed. Did I know that Lucia learned to crawl backward before she learned to crawl forward? And that as a baby she slept with three pacifiers, one in her mouth and one for each hand? But Lucia was a wiggler, not a snuggler; River was a snuggler, River was a melter, River could melt into her like a plant taking root.
I rested my hand on her hair intermittently, the weight of sorrow in my chest like a stone.
The plane was not crowded, so I had an aisle seat. By the window sat a black man reading a book. Black was the correct word, but he was light-skinned enough to have freckles. He wore a gray business suit, and on his wrist was an expensive-looking watch with lots of dials, possibly a diver’s watch. I couldn’t tell what he was reading because of the light from the window. I wondered if he noticed me, what he made of my fishing shirt, the trout bag, the cowboy boots and turquoise bracelets I bought just before leaving.
“This is a picture of my niece,” I said, thrusting the photo toward him. “Her name was Lucia. I’m taking her home for burial. She’s on the plane with us.”
He looked at me, startled, and took the picture from my hand. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
“I’m a white person,” I said. “Or pink. Whatever you might choose to call it.”
He studied Lucia more closely and frowned. “Is this one of the children whose mother put them in a refrigerator? Her body is actually on the plane with us?” He pushed the photo back at me as if it might burn his fingers. “You’re a relative of Ruby Redstone’s?”
“I’m her aunt. Royce Burns, the intellectual terrorist, he was my little brother.”
“I’m sorry for the children, but I have no sympathy for Ruby Redstone.” He turned back to his newspaper. “But you look like her. I didn’t notice the resemblance before.”
I picked up my trout bag and made my way toward the back of the plane. Hardly anyone glanced up at me.
In the tiny bathroom vibrating from the plane’s engines, there was nothing to look at but my aging face, the one that Ruby’s echoed so eerily. Despite the face-lift ten years ago, my skin was lined and weathered. I hadn’t worn makeup since the 1970s, but sometimes I still considered having eyeliner tattooed onto me. Bob Dylan wore eyeliner, so it seemed okay. Now my eyes were dry and red, either from pain or from the parched air of the plane.
“Maybe I really am part Cherokee,” I said out loud. My father had once taken me to a Cherokee tourist shop in the mountains of North Carolina, where he grew up. I’d been about five years old, crying because the altitude hurt my ears. He bought me a souvenir tomahawk, an oval rock strapped with rawhide into the top of a split stick. The edge of the rock was painted red. I tried hitting my arm to see if it hurt, but the rock fell out of the stick.
If I was part Cherokee, then I was Native American, because the man sitting next to me was black even though he had freckles and gray eyes. And if I wasn’t white, then Royce wasn’t white either, which would be a great joke on him. And maybe Ruby wasn’t lying about the man named Jeremiah, or maybe Lucia’s blood had been in our own family, which would be the best joke yet. But my brother and I were white, I understood that in my bones, and sooner or later I would have to figure out how to shoulder the burden of him and of our great-grandfather, photographed so proudly in his Confederate uniform.
I did not go back to my seat but sat in the empty, stiff-backed row by the toilets. Given what had happened to Ruby and her children, there were only three options open to me: guilt, avoidance, or action.
When we were little, I suspect that I did not love my brother. Our parents had wanted a boy; maybe they had always wanted a boy. “He’s all boy!” my mother once shouted, when Royce peed in her face while she was changing his diaper. And what could that remark possibly mean? I worried a great deal about this as a child. I had always been called a tomboy, so was I part boy? If so, which part?
My brother, my brother, my brother.
Once our mother left me alone with him while I was using a large pair of scissors. “Don’t let Royce touch those scissors. They’re sharp.” I cut out my drawing of South Carolina for World Geography class, handed Royce the scissors, and left the room. He stabbed his leg twice, but he didn’t need stitches. “He wanted the scissors,” I said.
Once Marie put Royce on the floor of the shower and turned on the water, but his shrieks brought our mother. “I was trying to wash him,” Marie said, and I added, “I was trying to help.”
I would have to cope with
my desire to see Lucia’s body before the undertaker rearranged her. Jimmy Beecher had been my sister’s undertaker, and he had done an amazing job with Marie, but he insisted I leave Royce’s remains sealed. So maybe I should buy the same child-size coffin for Lucia, and they could be like twins. And maybe I wanted to see Lucia’s body because sometimes it is better to let what is ghastly be ghastly.
I began to love my brother after he killed Skip Magnus. I had been living in a lesbian commune in Northern California when my mother sent me the newspaper coverage. Royce’s disputed hair had been shorn, and the pain coiled in his eyes connected us. When he got engaged to his debutante a year later, I flew home. He and Avery and I lounged around together in the yacht club’s pool. I liked Avery, who was tall and leggy and not a bimbo. “I know you hate coming down here,” Royce said, “but will you please come to our wedding?”
“Can I wear a tux? Can I be an usher?”
“No to being an usher, but you can wear anything you want.”
His face was full of brightness and vitality. I knew he believed this marriage would save him. His eyes were hazel like mine, but what connected us was something I couldn’t name, more like a tide sucking around my ankles. “When I’m home I always feel like I’m standing in the edge of the ocean, but I know it’s only the shallow end of the pool.”
“Jeez,” Royce said.
Avery had a tinkling laugh that I liked.
“I told you,” he said.
“I’m the only normal one in this family,” I said, which sent them deeper into laughter.
“You’re right,” Avery said, “she’s funny. Royce told me you were funny.”
“Yes, even when I’m not joking.”
Royce’s gaze seemed so open, but I wore dark glasses, even at night. “Hollywood,” I would say if anyone asked me, or, “light sensitivity, from when I saw the eclipse.”
Royce and Avery listened patiently while I explained that marriage was part of a corrupt, vicious, capitalist system that turned women into property. After their wedding, I got very drunk, and Royce slow-danced with me in the dress I consented to wear.
When he disappeared the first time, I grieved for my brother, and when I located him living peacefully in Mendocino with Santane and their baby, the intensity of my relief astonished me. And when The Burning Chest was published, I fell for my brother completely.
I fell for my brother completely.
The Burning Chest chronicles the story of a young man much like Royce, who inherits a plantation and brings his young bride home. On this land, he creates the aristocratic life he thinks his wife wants. He has the original house torn down and a mansion built with a wide veranda and tall white columns much like Tara’s.
The black caretakers on this imagined plantation are named John and Ruby Tillman, the names of the real caretakers at Blacklock, and the protagonist’s story parallels Royce’s in many ways. Royce did not write much about snakes in The Burning Chest, but he did describe his collection of rattles. In the novel, John Tillman gets committed to the state mental hospital, Ruby refuses to eat or leave their shack, and the protagonist then moves Ruby into the main house, where he tries to nurse her back to health while his moral compass churns. He begins meditating using a Zen guidebook, and the descriptions of these meditations intercut with Ruby’s anguished ravings in Gullah gave the novel a luminosity that drew much admiration.
Now I was sitting in the back of an airplane flying to South Carolina to bury my brother’s black granddaughter beside the coffin that I had begun to think of as the Tomb of the Unknown Racist, and Royce’s real daughter was in prison for murdering her real children, and Royce was almost certainly still out there.
2
Estelle picked me up outside the baggage claim area in Momma’s ancient Mercedes, which sported a faded sticker of a Confederate flag with the words HERITAGE, NOT HATE across the back bumper. Inside the airport, I had bought a baseball cap that said CHARLESTON: THE HOLY CITY and pulled it low over my eyes, hoping no one would recognize me. Charleston, despite its prominence for tourists, remained in many ways a small town. Lucia’s body had been quietly picked up by Jimmy Beecher’s funeral parlor. I didn’t know if anyone from the press besides Claudia Friedman would know or care that I had left New Mexico and brought Lucia back to Charleston with me, but I had called Claudia from a phone booth in the airport.
“Does this mean that I should come to South Carolina?”
“Can you afford it?”
“No.”
“I think you need to get here. Maybe I can’t promise you an interview with Ruby, but you’ll have a story. I’m going to bury Lucia’s body beside my brother and try to turn it into a big deal.”
“Why?”
“Why turn it into a big deal?
“No, why are you helping me?”
“People helped me too, Claudia.”
“Yes, but I hardly know what I’m doing.”
“I think you’ve got promise written all over you. I’ve been sober a long time, and I’m a pretty good judge about stuff like that. Do you have an editor at the Times you can trust? Tell him that you’re going to have an exclusive, and they’ll probably pay your way down here. Call me when you arrive. Let me give you my numbers.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, there’s no crying in journalism.”
I climbed into the passenger seat beside Estelle. “I can’t believe you’re picking me up in Momma’s car with this bumper sticker.”
“Mine’s in the shop, and I was afraid to take the cover off yours.”
“This isn’t just to amuse yourself?”
She glanced at me, but I couldn’t read her gaze.
“What,” I said.
Estelle had straightened her hair and dyed it a reddish brown. Usually she wore her white uniform and tags because of the respect that came with them, but today she had on a sleeveless top and baggy shorts that let her thighs spread out on the worn leather seat.
She snorted with laughter.
“That good, huh?”
“Yo’ mamma done lose her teeth. I took her out onto the balcony for some fresh air, and she whipped them out of her mouth and threw them right over the railing. Eleven floors. They could have killed a tourist!”
Estelle pulled onto the edge of the road—luckily we weren’t on the interstate yet—while we had a good one. Tears on the face, that kind of laughter.
“It’s been hard,” she finally managed to say. “Listen to this. A local reporter learned my identity and located my family on Johns Island. I have six aunts, and the one who helped lead the hospital workers’ strike in the sixties was featured again in the Sunday paper.”
“I hope you saved the clipping. Nobody has tried to corner you personally?”
“No, because when I went out with your mother, she was the story. And when I’m by myself, I just act ignorant. It’s all died down for the moment, thank God.”
“I think that’s about to change.”
Once we had passed through the industrial areas of North Charleston and entered the city itself, even the asphalt sliding beneath us felt more familiar, more intimate. I opened the window, letting in the hot, heavy air while I stared down at the pavement. Palmetto trees lining the narrow street seemed so close I wanted to reach out and touch them. Palmettos are squat versions of the palms ubiquitous in Florida. The first time I went to Florida—I was fourteen and had not yet been anywhere farther than North Carolina—I’d been shocked by the tall, spindly trees. How could anybody get the coconuts down from palms like that? Of course, I had never seen anyone remove a coconut from a palmetto either, so I began looking for coconuts on the palmettos as we passed.
“Hey,” Estelle said. “Get over it. Roll up that window.”
“Do you know if palmettos grow coconuts?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Estelle, can we go get some green peanuts? I think a big bowl of boiled peanuts and a couple of Co-Colas will do
a lot for my mental health. But I don’t want to walk into the store.”
“I’ll go in for you. But listen, seriously, what are we going to do about your mother’s teeth?”
“One thing at a time. Peanuts, then Momma, then the body in the trunk.”
“There’s no body in the trunk. Are you needing an AA meeting?”
“Indeed, I am. But I’ll go tonight or in the morning. Do you think Jimmy Beecher will give me any trouble about burying a famously murdered black child in the family plot?”
“He has to legally, I think. I’ll bet he was more than willing to bury your crazy brother out there.”
“Yeah, but Royce was white, and anyway, now I’m wondering if that’s really Royce.”
Estelle rarely went to AA meetings anymore, a fact that worried me. I still went to three or four a week, although I rarely considered drinking. But meetings quieted me inside and provided a framework for calm self-examination. At first, I had assumed AA was a cult, but at that period of my life I was hallucinating from drugs and too paranoid to enter a treatment center, so I just crawled around my apartment eating chocolate and experiencing what is called “the gift of desperation,” because no one joins Alcoholics Anonymous and changes her whole fucking life without experiencing a bottomless desperation. In my early sobriety, I was so frightened that I spent several nights on the bathroom floor crouched under a blanket on the bright tiles, door locked, butcher knife in my hand. At dawn, I’d call my sleeping sponsor, who would murmur, “Did you have a drink or take a drug?”
“No,” I’d sob.
“And did you go to a meeting last night?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are a winner.” She kept saying that word to me: winner, winner, winner. My terrors and rages would pass, she said, or at least lessen considerably, but I would have to walk through them without the relief of alcohol or drugs. “Try praying.”
“But I don’t believe in God.”
“Pray anyway, because your body and brain have been damaged. Do these three things: don’t drink or take drugs no matter what, go to meetings, and pray whether you mean it or not.”
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 10