by Cameron Judd
Inside they had discovered a cache of photographs from the early days of the organization, made long before things started spoiling. There were a few old membership rosters, some minutes from lodge meetings, and most interesting of all, every missing bound volume of the Clarion. It obviously was Caldwell who had removed them, or had them removed. Probably in relation to his research for his incomplete and unpublished novel The Lodgemen.
Eli turned to Lundy for advice on how to handle the return of the long-missing archived newspapers. Lundy’s advice, aimed at, in his terms, “not stirring the smelly substance any more than necessary,” was to slip the volumes into a corner of an old, unused library building that stood near the Clarion office, owned by the Brechts. They placed them in a shadowed spot, hid them behind assorted discarded bookshelves and the like, then engineered a situation that allowed them to be “discovered” by one of the pressmen. “There all along,” became the general concensus. David was so pleased to have the old newspapers back that he published a story about the discovery.
Coleman Caldwell read it and thanked his lucky stars his involvement in the disappearance of the volumes had not been detected. At least not by the Brechts. He owed Eli Scudder big-time.
Apart from the Harvestman Lodge history, one of the best articles in the magazine came about because David for once ignored his mother’s long-standing admonition to “keep things nice.” He engaged a black Bowington College history professor to compose the most thorough history of slavery in Kincheloe County ever to be put on paper. The subject had been almost entirely ignored in Hadley King’s official town-county history. The bicentennial magazine went a long way toward rectifying that omission. David Brecht’s own comment said it well: “I’m glad we’ve finally quit trying to pretend that our history isn’t nothing but light, but inevitably also has some shadows.”
DAVID BRECHT’S DATE AT THE PRESS association awards banquet was a woman who had proven extraordinarily helpful in key details of the joint Clarion-WVKT investigation: Kelly Brindle, known before her divorce as Kelly Brindle Parvin, making her one more in a virtual club of local women who had first accepted, then brushed off, the sullying Parvin name. Her husband, a typical Parvin lowlife named Mack Parvin, had swept Kelly off her feet while she was still in high school in the early 1970s. In those days her late father had operated a successful tire store, Brindle Tire Center, in downtown Tylerville, and also held the office of Lodge Master in Harvestman Lodge, where he proudly was ensconced behind a big desk in the lodge office suite. When David had introduced Kelly to the group, Melinda had recognized her instantly from the school portrait she and Eli had found in the abandoned desk during their exploration of the lodge building.
Kelly Brindle had had little good to say about Harvestman Lodge, a group her father had initially been proud to be part of, but had grown to despise as it began to degrade just at the time he was elected master of the lodge. He’d finally simply hit the end of his rope one day and walked out of the lodge hall, literally shouting to the walls that he was through with the place. Kelly swore that her father had known nothing of the ugly criminal tendrils that had snaked their way into his organization. He’d been a good but somewhat naive man, she said, like many others in the lodge. Child trafficking was something he would not have been able even to conceive of ... which was perhaps the reason that Lukey Parvin and his ilk had been able to get away with it right under his nose. Her secret fear, unspoken to David Brecht or any other, was that there might have been others besides the child whose abduction had chanced to be caught on film.
Broken Flower had a name now, one searched out by Rev. Feely, who had become an unofficial fact-gatherer in the Harvestman Lodge media investigation. He’d visited a nursing home wherein resided the stroke-ravaged sister of Lorene Padgett Moody, Donnie Moody’s (now Donnie New’s) late wife. It was very hard for the woman to speak, but she managed to communicate that, yes, she remembered the little daughter of her niece, Emmie Moody, born when her teenage mother still was trying to find her way in life after the dissolution of her family when she was only ten.
Broken Flower’s real name had been Danielle Moody. The child was remembered by her aunt as a pretty little girl with expressive eyes and thick hair. Feely had regretted the pain it caused the bedridden woman to talk of Emmie and her ill-fated offspring. But it had to be done.
Little Danielle Moody was no longer buried in Los Angeles, but had been reinterred beside her mother and grandmother in the cemetery in Tylerville. Her funeral service had been conducted by her grandfather, Rev. Donald New, with the aid of his rescue mission partner, Larry Cavness. Because of the fame of Broken Flower, the graveside service received national news attention. The Tennessee governor and several other political figures found it both right and politically prudent to be there.
Benton Sadler was the only politician who spoke at the reinterment, and that only because he had the odd distinction of having been present where and when the girl had been abducted. He spoke only briefly, noting he had been fully unaware of what was happening near to him that night at the lodge hall, and praised Eli’s late grandfather for having had the moral courage to place that hidden Super 8 camera inside the lodge to capture what was happening there. Will Keller, of course, had had no more inkling than anyone else that his camera would catch something much more significant than a bunch of drunken men ogling female dancers of meager skill. Keller had gone to his grave not knowing he’d documented something shocking on a scrap of film he’d never even gotten around to developing.
Throughout little Danielle’s burial ceremony had come many touching moments. The most artistic of those was provided by Buster Crosswaite, now a nationally-known dancer due to the February 1986 airing of the PBS documentary, THEM DANCING COUSINS, that had put the Crosswaites on television screens across America. There was talk of a major motion picture in development. Custer Crosswaite’s ego was swollen to new heights.
On the day of Danielle Moody’s Tennessee burial, however, Custer Crosswaite was for once content to stay out of the spotlight. He stood quietly in the crowd, doing nothing to draw attention to himself, and silently watched as his cousin Buster, whose dance sensibilities were more sensitive and delicate than his own, performed a dance he had created for the occasion. It was almost ballet-like in its flow and beauty. Buster performed to perfection, all the while meaningfully holding in his hand a rose with a broken stem. When the dance was done, he laid the rose gently beside the grave of another broken flower, and knelt with bowed head.
Even Custer was in tears.
When the service was through and the gravedigger crew were ready to begin filling the grave, Piebird Crosswaite went to Buster and hugged him close. Custer approached.
“You never done better, Buster,” he said. “Except that time you hollered through that bathroom door at this one here.” He patted Piebird’s shoulder and smiled at her.
Minor as it was, it was an important moment in the relationship between Custer and his cousin’s wife. Piebird had always found Custer hard to abide, and that simple gesture of appreciation on his part moved her. She smiled back at Custer, then hugged him too.
THE BURIAL SERVICE HAD PROVIDED OTHER personal moments of significance. As he was preparing to return to his car and leave the cemetery, Don New noticed six people who lingered after the others, gathered at the side of a grave farther across the cemetery. They were Kyle Feely and Bro. Larry Cavness, plus two sets of newlyweds: Eli and Melinda Scudder, and Curtis Stokes and his bride, Kendra. Kyle Feely had performed Curtis’s and Kendra’s simple wedding ceremony in a flower-filled meadow hardly a week before.
Don New walked over to the group. “Well, I like to think we had a good service here,” he said. “It wasn’t easy for me, laying to rest a granddaughter I never had the chance to meet, and who died in such a sad way. But God sustains.”
“That He does,” Feely said. “And you did a good job here today, Don.”
“You did indeed, my brother,” sa
id Cavness.
“Thank you,” New said.
“I thought you done good, too,” threw in Curtis Stokes.
“I appreciate that, Curtis,” New said, smiling. “Will you introduce me to your wife? Congratulations to both of you, by the way.”
“This is Kendra,” Curtis said. “Kendra, this here is my friend, Don New. He’s a preacher, like Preacher Feely who hitched us up.”
New smiled and put out his hand to Kendra. When he looked into her face, instant recognition came.
“Dear Lord,” he said, eyes widened. “Oh, dear Lord!”
She maintained her smile, showing no evidence of knowing him or why he was reacting to her as he was.
“You met Kendra before, Reverend?” Curtis asked.
New’s only answer was to ask Kendra, very quietly, “Do you remember me?”
Kendra lowered her eyes, beginning to suspect what probably was happening inside the mind of the man facing her. “There are many people, many men, who I met in my life and don’t remember, Reverend.”
“I have to tell you, Mrs. Stokes, I’m not the man I was when I met you the first time, years ago now. My name was not “New” then. Nor, at that time, was I.”
“Sir, I think I know when you might have met me. It would have been in a was a very different, much younger time in my life ... I was a prisoner, really, in my own home.”
New looked at Curtis, wondering how freely he should speak in front of the man married to this particular woman ... and Curtis read the question in his eyes. “It’s all right, Reverend. I know about all that old stuff.”
New nodded. To Kendra he said, “I have to ask: can you forgive me? Is that possible for you?”
Kendra pointed to the grave at which they stood. Its stone was simple and square and had a cheap look. Into it was carved the name, birth date and death date of one Millard Tate.
“Preacher, in my life I’ve had to learn to forgive a man who made me stand in a gown on his porch, drugged, to be sold like a piece of meat to men I could hardly bear even to be touched by. I can’t say I remember your face among them, but I did my best to forget them all. When I found the chance to get away, I did, and found a new life for myself. And a new name, just like you. I was my old self by the choice of others, but now I’m my new self, Kendra Miller Stokes, by my own choosing. I put aside the old and tried never to look at it again. I even changed the color of my hair. And I chose to forgive the man lying in this grave, because for all the evil he did to me, there was one thing he did that gave me something very good, something I’ve made to be my work for years now.”
“What was it?” New asked.
“He read to me, sir. He’d sit down sometimes with a book of children’s stories and read to me. Sometimes Bible stories, even. It was the only time I saw a side of him that had some kindness and gentleness in it. And sometimes he wouldn’t read, but just tell me stories out of his own life. He told me about his raising, and it had been a hard one. It made him what he was, I think. Knowing that, and feeling grateful to him for teaching me the power of stories and reading and imagination ... that made it easier for me to forgive him. I have to go back sometimes and do it all over again. But I’ll bear grudges no more, not against him, not against the men he sold me to. They’re just too heavy to carry for a lifetime, grudges are. You got to lay them down and let them go.”
New said, “Are you telling me you forgive me, too, for what I did to you, Junie? Kendra, I mean?”
“I forgive you, Preacher Donnie. I forgive you all the way, forever.”
Donald New wept like a child, and the woman who once had been the girl on Millard Tate’s porch embraced him and told him that it all was all right. At that moment a burden lifted from the mind of the former Donnie Moody, and did not return.
TWO WEEKS LATER, MELINDA STOOD beside her husband and asked him if he was sure he wanted to do what he was doing. “If you’re just doing it to please me,” she told him, “than I would rather you wait until it’s something you’re doing for yourself.”
“It’s my own choosing,” Eli said. “Something I wouldn’t have foreseen doing if you’d asked me about it a year ago. I would have thought it was all kind of silly and churchy and something for people other than me. But the things I’ve seen, and the people I’ve known, especially those men standing down there in the river waiting for me, they’ve showed me some things. So don’t worry. I’m doing this for myself. Because people I’ve gotten to know, including you, Melinda, have influenced me to believe in it, and because it’s right to do.”
She smiled and kissed him. “It’s a happy day, then. Even if it is a cold one to be stepping into a river.” Sneakily, off to one side, Jake Lundy snapped a photograph of the kiss. It would become an image that would hang, framed, in the home of the Scudders for the rest of their days.
Down in the water, Rev. Donald New spoke. “My brothers and my sisters, thank you for being here today to witness this ancient ritual, which we do because our Lord has told us to. We have three people who will come into this water today: Curtis and Kendra Stokes, man and wife, and Eli Scudder, friend to many of us here. I will have the privilege of baptizing Kendra and Curtis, while my brother Kyle Feely has agreed to perform the immersion for Eli, at Eli’s request, because of friendship they share. I must thank my brother in faith, Kyle Feely, for being willing to do this with me here today, in a setting and way somewhat different than what he is used to. Brother Feely, do you have any comment you want to make?”
Feely smiled at the people on the bank. “I admit that I’m far more accustomed to administering the sacrament with a few sprinkles of water inside a church sanctuary, and usually to much younger folk than these ... but I am glad indeed to, as they say, ‘go with the program’ and do this in the way these seekers have chosen. And I confess I find something especially meaningful and even classic in a river baptism. Thank you, Brother Don, for letting me join you in this.”
Feely addressed the people on the bank. “We’ll begin with a song to be presented by Eli’s beautiful and talented wife, Melinda Buckingham Scudder, a hymn she sings well and regularly as one of the leading actresses in our community’s new outdoor historical drama, Firm Foundation. Appropriately enough, the hymn is ‘How Firm A Foundation.’ Melinda will sing a capela. Begin when you are ready, Melinda.”
Her voice rang clear in the morning air, and never had the old hymn been better presented. When she was done, she nodded at the two clergymen shivering in the waist-deep water.
“Candidates for baptism, please join us in these waters,” Feely said, and motioned them down.
When Eli’s foot entered the river, he was surprised at how cold it was, but resisted the reflexive urge to pull his foot out again.
Curtis and Kendra didn’t do as well. Kendra drew in her breath and declared, “Oh!” and danced back onto the bank for a few seconds, during which time Curtis stepped into the river, gave a reactive whoop, and yelled, “Gall-dang, that’s cold!”
“Curtis!” Kendra said, frowning. “You can’t say ‘gall-dang’ at a baptism!”
“Sorry, sweety.” He flicked his eyes upward. “Sorry, Lord.”
Bracing against the chill, the three walked through the deepening water to where the shivering preachers stood waiting. The only sound for a few moments was the chattering of teeth, the distant song of a bird, and the clicking of Jake Lundy’s camera while he snapped away on the riverbank.
At the end of it all came hymns by the river and towels for the sodden. Don New went over to Melinda to thank her for her earlier solo. When she extended her hand to him, his eye was caught by the glitter of sunlight on her rings. He broke off in mid-sentence, staring at them.
“These came from ...”
“They were a gift to Eli, given to him to give to me,” Melinda said. “A gift from a friend who died. They were found inside a wall in the building where Eli and I work. It used to be a motel.”
“Yes,” said New, lifting Melinda’s hand to look at
the rings even more closely, confirming his suspicion. “I know the place. The old Winona Court. I stayed there once. In my old days.” His expression became wistful and he patted her hand, touching the rings. “Yes. In my old days.” He smiled at Melinda and drifted away toward his car. Kendra Stokes moved toward Melinda, damp and shivering a little, but happy.
Some yards away, Curtis was talking to Eli. “That was some mighty chilly water,” he said.
“Amen, brother.”
Curtis looked over at Melinda and Kendra, who were talking now. “There’s something I just noticed today,” he said. “Your wife and mine look alike quite a bit, in the face. Kendra’s older, of course. You see it?”
Eli looked. Curtis was right.
“Why do you reckon that is?” Curtis asked. “Melinda looks more Kendra than she does Mrs. Buckingham. Seems like she’d look like her own mother ’stead of somebody else, don’t it?”
“Yeah, Curtis,” Eli replied. “It sure does. Just a mystery, I guess.”
“I guess.” Curtis shivered. “I’m going to my car now. This wind is nipping me pretty bad. Hey, didja hear the news? From Mr. Sadler?”
“Benton Sadler, you mean?”
“Yeah, yeah. Didja hear?”
“No.”
“He owns that old Harvestman Lodge building, and you know what? He’s giving it over to the rescue mission. It’s bigger than the place they got now, and they can do a lot with that extra space.”
“You know this for a fact?” Eli was making a fast transition from freshly-baptized professor of faith to local newsman again.
“He told me himself,” Curtis said. “I take a walk sometimes at work during my lunch break, and Mr. Sadler came riding up the road near me on that big motorcycle he rides. He stopped to talk to me. That’s when he told me.”