“And who the fuck are you, really?” I said. “What’s your real role here?”
“Come into the kitchen,” Dabley said. “My role is simple. Your brother is a great man, and I am honored to serve his plans.”
In the kitchen was a gas stove, a double sink, a sideboard, and a long table surrounded by eight ladder-back chairs. Dabley lifted the lid on a skillet and pulled several hot biscuits from a toaster oven. He had already laid out two plates with silverware. There was a can of Coke beside one and a glass of milk with the other. “I don’t drink coffee myself,” he said, “but we bought lots of Cokes.”
“How many Cokes?” I said, thinking I might get some sense of how long they intended to keep me.
“A couple dozen.”
“I don’t plan to be here long enough to finish them.”
He slid hot scrambled eggs onto the plates and invited me to sit down.
Up close, Dabley was even more remarkable-looking. The narrow face and nose, the narrow mouth with its small, white teeth, were offset by light green eyes set wide under thick black brows. “Is your whole family skinny like you?”
“The eggs are fresh,” he said. “We have a chicken coop outside. I don’t have any family.”
“Lucky you.”
We ate in silence. The eggs and biscuits were warm, and the Coke glistened with cold as I popped off the top. “I guess I really was hungry. So, Dabley, I know you don’t want me here, but why?”
“Your brother’s texts are studied in many quarters, and he has written much more that will be published later. And there are other things that will happen. I am happy to serve him, but he is not always reasonable.”
“You mean there was too much risk with Ruby and the kids, and now with me?”
His nod was like a wince.
“But surely someone within the feds knows he’s here? Surely he’s being protected.”
“Then you must grasp why your presence here complicates that.”
“What has he been writing?”
He studied me for a second before saying, “A novel about a man who sacrifices his mixed-race children for the greater good.”
I started laughing, a strangely inappropriate response, and when I glanced down at my hand, my fingers had turned into thick brown vines wrapping around the fork. I threw the fork onto the floor, but the floor began to ripple around me. When I looked back at my hand, it flicked strobe-like between itself and the vines. “Have you drugged me?”
I tried to stand up but could barely move my legs. My feet began sinking into the floor.
“You’ve fucking drugged me.” Dabley’s face was melting into orange rivulets, and when he smiled, his teeth grew large and bulky. He made a thick rumbling noise.
“It’s LSD. Oh, no, how much did you give me?” but my words sounded like Dabley’s as I tried to say, “He wanted you to do this, but he couldn’t watch it? Fuck him.”
The fibers of the Navaho rug turned spongy when I tried to crawl. The geometric patterns rose, and red threads were untangling, striping my arms with blood. The dark diamonds tried to pull me down and bury me, but now I have been hit—no, not hit, it is only the edge of his desk, my brother’s, and The Narrow Man is behind me. He cracks the seal on the Absolut and hands it to me. I am on my feet, and I don’t know whether I am trying to save my brother or kill him. My body won’t obey me and the wheelchair won’t move, but he is on the floor, my brother, his damages uncovered, the mink throw beside him. He is not conscious while I am at the fireplace pouring alcohol into the flames. The flames flash blue and run back up to my hand. I drop the bottle, but my hand blooms fire, flames licking from each finger. The sound of Dabley’s gun is just a small pop.
15
For more than a year now, I have tried to remember what else happened that night, or even if it was the same night, because I learned later that I stayed missing for two days. A hypnotist has tried to help me, I’ve studied meditation, and I’ve taken many long walks on the Isle of Palms, but no matter how I’ve struggled, too much time is gone, eliminated like jump cuts in a movie. I remember crawling across the rug in front of the fire, I remember my chest ballooning with rage, I remember Royce on the floor and the flames streaking from my hand while Dabley dragged me through the doorway. The vestibule caught on my waist when I bumped over it. I will never know why Dabley saved me and went back into the bungalow, or why, when he tried to shoot me, he missed.
But here is a vivid memory I know isn’t true: I am walking down a long yellow hallway with a little boy who says his name is Royce One, and that his brothers are named Royce Two, Royce Three, and Royce Four. He is showing me an underground greenhouse where castor beans are growing tall and darkly green. Oh, he’s making ricin, I say, and the boy says, Yes, it’s magic.
•
When I awoke, I was in a hospital and my wrists were tied down. My right hand was wrapped loosely in gauze, and Ed Blake and Wally Furman stared down at me. “You’re okay,” Blake said. “You’ve had another stroke. Your hand is scorched, but it’s not badly damaged. Last night an old woman in a pickup truck dropped you off at a regional hospital in northwest Washington and then disappeared. We had you flown here to Albuquerque for treatment. Your car was found in a parking lot in a little town named Salvado.”
I struggled to free my left wrist.
“You kept trying to pull the tube out of your mouth.”
I made a scribbling motion with my fingers, and he untied my right hand.
“You should have told me about the first stroke,” he said.
Wally Furman, visibly angry and unhappy, stood next to Blake. “What you did was foolhardy and dangerous,” he said in his stern movie-star voice. “You put us in an awkward position. Don’t you understand it wasn’t just your brother I was trying to protect you from?”
“I thought you might want this,” Blake said, holding a yellow pad near my hand and giving me a pen.
I wrote, in clumsy block letters, RICIN. EXTERMINATE THE BRUTE.
“Your brother is already dead,” Blake said. “They’ve found his remains in northern Washington in another fire. A second male body too. A terrorist action of some type was in the works, but it’s been shut down. Or we think it has. Explosives and guns and survival gear were found in a bomb shelter nearby, but they might be part of a larger enterprise. There’s a widespread search going on. Ellen, were you in that fire? Did you see your brother? What happened?”
I wrote, I DON’T KNOW.
After the tube was removed from my throat, Blake and Wally kept attempting to debrief me, but I pretended that my speech and thinking and memory were too damaged to reply. Whenever they tried to hand me notepads, I just shook my head.
After another few days, I was transferred to a rehabilitation center in Santa Fe. Unable to read or to attend AA meetings, I listened each night to tapes of the stories in the Big Book, these tales of redemption, because I was looking for hope. My mind had cleared enough to know I was responsible for my brother’s death.
When Sister Irene first appeared at my bedside, I said slowly and thickly, “Can you help me?”
Sister Irene’s gaze was untroubled. I could not grasp how she had moved past Ruby’s death and the loss of her childhood Bible so easily. “I think so.”
I did not tell her any of what I remembered. All I said was, “Your eyes aren’t enough.”
She picked up my hand, and a calm energy ran from her palm into me. “Everything is all right, Ellen. Everything is profoundly all right.”
I shook my head and pulled my arm away.
“You are forgiven. For whatever it is you did, or think you did.”
“And my brother?”
She hesitated. “Some people think repentance is necessary.”
The second time Sister Irene appeared by my bed, I had been asleep. When I opened my eyes, two people were sitting beside me. One was a tiny African American woman wearing the dark blue shirt and trousers that the trusties at the prison wore. She was
nearly bald, but wisps of crinkly gray hair clung to her scalp. Her eyes were covered with a white film. Although she looked blind, she was staring right into me.
Sister Irene was dressed in her dowdy habit, but her hair had been gelled straight up, and she held up a foot to display a red shoe decorated with rhinestones. “I keep these in the car,” she said. “This is Lila Ames, Ellen. I’ve told you some things about her. She talked with Ruby a number of times, and she knows your story as well. She’s my real confessor, my confidante. Do you remember how I told you she had moved to New York from Georgia when she was still in her teens? That she grew up on one of the Sea Islands where they still speak Gullah? She insisted on coming to see you today. I think she is too weak to be going anywhere in a car, but she is very stubborn.”
Lila Ames leaned forward and said, “Mus tek cyear a de root fa heal de tree.” This was an expression I knew: You must take care of the root to heal the tree.
“Please don’t do this,” I said.
But Lila Ames began to speak a torrent of Gullah, and she punctuated the rising and falling, the cadence of what she was saying with uh-huh, uh-huh, while tapping her leg lightly. Then she began to sing, or maybe she was praying, slapping both of her knees lightly in rhythm. “Heah I be, lawd, heah I be, heah I be, lawd,” while Sister Irene hummed harmony.
Here I be, lord.
My hand healed nicely, but the stroke left me with a permanent limp. My speech improved although I continued to speak very slowly, which was a relief. When I had recovered sufficiently to leave the rehab center for an afternoon, I took a taxi to a town named Socorro, to the Bratton Skydiving Center. Socorro did not appear to have a reason for existing. I saw no industry, only a small school, a diner, a post office, and a main street that was mostly boarded up. The only new building was a highway patrol station. All signs leading to the airport were handmade, and when I reached the center, I realized that the town’s main business might be skydiving. There were two small Cessnas and one larger plane for group jumps, but it was midday on a Monday, and the only people at the center were a pilot and an instructor. I tried not to limp or stand awkwardly, but I don’t think they would have cared since I would be strapped to the front of the instructor like a baby.
Later I tried to tell Sister Irene.
After the jumpmaster and I rolled out of the plane’s door, after I finally achieved terminal velocity, the air turned cold and hard and thundering. We fell facedown, arched belly-first toward the earth, and again I saw the reddish sandstones of my dreams. The red deserts and mesas of New Mexico had probably been the source of my visions. My unconscious was once again demonstrating its brilliant sense of humor.
“What’s so funny?” shouted the jumpmaster, to whom I was securely fastened.
I might have shouted back, “In my most transcendent moments, did I have visions of the end of time, or did I merely retrieve a picture of a desert I had seen as a child, an image that touched me deeply and later reemerged as revelations?” Instead I yelled, “I don’t know!” Because really, who cares? The connections in my brain have always been tenuous and punny. Once, when I couldn’t stop eating melons, I kept repeating, “Oh, I’m just so melancholy.”
My mother stopped recognizing me soon after I returned to Charleston. She babbled a lot but remained strangely happy. I envied her. She didn’t seem to mind the diaper that was now necessary, but maybe she didn’t even know what it was. Convincing her to eat became increasingly difficult, even bologna sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I gave her all the medicines intended to help her appetite and mind, but nothing halted her body’s ruthless clock, which caused her to shrink and wither. I began to see the bones in her face. After a while I stopped staying at her condo because she required nurses and aides twenty-four hours a day, and the spare bedroom was needed. Most nights, though, I still drove across the Cooper River Bridge to visit her, so we could watch Wheel of Fortune together.
CODA
Where any story begins is arbitrary, threads pulled and worried till a mat of events untangles (or does not), but the end of any story is fixed: and then he died, and then she died, and then they all died.
My own death will come in Greece, on the island of Naxos, where, in the waters on the west side, I have discovered a sunken ruin. This will happen in the summer of 2001, two months before the World Trade Center falls from the sky. My German shepherd rescue dog—I’ve named her Sweetie—will stay with Estelle while I rent a cottage on Naxos for the month of July. Each day on Naxos, I put on fins and a mask and stumble across a rocky beach to stare down in wonderment at an expanse of paving stones fitted tightly together more than two thousand years ago. The sea is scattered with ruins like this—shoes and ships and sealing wax—but this lost pavement, this fragment of what was once a town square, enthralls me.
I discovered Naxos near the end of my relationship with Meg. When we first arrived on the ferry, the sight of the enormous stone lintel set atop tall marble columns at the entrance to the harbor transfixed my attention. The building it would have belonged to was never completed, so all that remained was an empty frame. After Meg left me, I kept returning to Naxos because the sight of the empty frame comforted me.
I don’t know whether individual stories can still matter, but I do know that if Ruby had not appeared on television claiming that her children had been kidnapped, if I had not recognized her immediately and thrown myself headlong into her life, if I had not searched for my brother and found him, I would never have attempted to write this account. Words that matter must be fitted hard against each other like these stones, made into a surface that can hold weight and power, and the result cannot simply be an empty frame. I hope this frame is not empty. I hope the story of what happened in my family matters, because, after my death, the rise and organization of the white supremacists will continue.
I still don’t know whether my brother was evil or damaged or simply a twig floating on a river of historical events. But I do know that when he was a boy he killed a man in self-defense and did not know how to inherit that violence. And neither of us knew how to inherit our white skin after the civil rights movement made that whiteness visible. In this narrative, I have tried to claim my skin in a way that disavows its supremacy, but I cannot untangle every knot or illuminate all opacities, even in my own character. I know, however, that my brother died because of my actions and that I became, like him, someone who could spend the lives of others for my beliefs.
All stories may end the same, but before this one reaches its inevitable conclusions, other important things must happen.
Claudia must publish her book, God Loves the Children of Nod, in which she attacks me fiercely for arrogance and racism. Her book will be a financial and critical success, but Claudia will end up nearly a suicide like her mother, and another treatment center and a halfway house will be necessary before she can embrace her own survival. At first, I will blame myself for the loss of her sobriety, until someone in AA gently points out that once again my ego is trying to take responsibility for someone else’s choices.
My mother will shrivel and die, and I will finally come to understand that she was neither her mind or her body, because the one she inhabited for eighty years shrank and emptied itself, yet I could still feel her presence. I will bury her husk next to Lucia’s, because Lucia surely needed another mother, just as she needed a father who wanted her and a country that understood her value.
Giang’s restaurant will become a destination prized by food critics who appreciate the irony involved in creating superbly original fare within consciously clichéd decor. I will never eat at Giang’s restaurant. I will lose touch with him and with Santane also, but not before she writes to tell me that Ed Blake now lives in his log house with a young woman named Olivia.
Lila Ames will die before me, and for her funeral I will send Sister Irene a blue silk cloth embroidered with rhinestones to drape across her body. Afterward, my connection to Sister Irene will fade quickly too. I’ve always
been a person who knows how to leave.
I will refuse to speak again with Blake or with any government representative, and, when I am forced to be deposed about the fire that killed my brother, I play dumb, a pose that becomes easier and easier.
I still attend AA meetings almost daily, and since I say so little, people begin to assume I am wise. I sponsor a number of women, but this sponsorship consists mostly of offering phrases like “Go to meetings,” “Work the Steps,” and “Pray, even if you don’t understand what it is.” People in the program seem to have trouble breaking away from my gaze. “It’s your kindness,” they say, or, “It’s your eyes.”
Sweetie will take daily walks with me on the beach, each of us favoring a damaged leg. Sweetie will never be leashed or confined like Ruby and Lila Ames, so the Isle of Palms Animal Control officers will return her and write out their tickets without much comment. Perhaps they have decided I am wise too. Or simply crazy.
Estelle and Dan Peters will marry, and they will found a clinic on Johns Island named for her family, the Manigault Center for Health and Prosperity. Estelle, past ordinary childbearing age, will, with the miracle of hormones, conceive twins who are born perfect, a boy and girl, a jackpot.
The night the millennium changes and the computerized world does not implode I will spend with Dan and Estelle and their families and friends. Estelle is not yet pregnant, but she is rambunctiously happy. There will be more than a hundred guests, many of them children, at the family’s compound on Johns Island, and we will eat fried chicken and biscuits and grits, and there will be roasted oysters and even a barbecued pig that required some twenty hours of tending and swabbing with a mop soaked in Tabasco sauce. When night falls, giant speakers will blast Chuck Berry and Tina Turner into the yard, and I will discover that all South Carolinians, black or white, like the wicked dance we call the shag. After midnight, we cheer that the millennium has ended without dreadful incidents to mark it, and we will share many hugs and awkward kisses. Estelle offers me the opportunity to spend the night in her blue room, a cabin just large enough to contain a double bed, an armchair, and a desk. She lights a kerosene lamp and leaves me there, surrounded by indigo walls and a pale blue floor and ceiling. Even the window shades are blue. “I’ve never let anyone else sleep in here but Dan,” she says. I doubt she ever tells Dan that we were once more intimate friends.
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 26