by Lori Roy
I can’t get my eyes to latch on to him. Instead, I try to see the lawn mower that sits in the corner, but really I want to see its rubbery red button. I know it’s there because I saw it when the sun shined through the ceiling. It’s just like the mower Mama borrows from Mr. Lawson every other Sunday. Mama always says renters shouldn’t have to mow but she liked a nice lawn so she did it anyways. She first showed me how to start the mower when I turned ten and said when I was responsible enough to mow by myself, she’d pay me five dollars. More than anything, I wanted to be responsible enough. That would make me like Julie Anna, and I’d have my own money to spend when Mama and I went to the thrift store. Flip this switch, Mama had said, showing me the lever. And push this button, this red, rubbery button, three times. I bet Ellie and Fran aren’t allowed to do this, she said. I nodded and pushed the button. It was spongy like a rubber ball. She called it priming the mower and told me to use my pointer finger. Just like this, she said, and poked me three times in the belly.
“Is something wrong with you?” he says, snapping his fingers in my face, but I don’t stop looking at that button.
“Hey, come on. I ain’t been gone that long. We’re going to get you food now, something to drink. It just took me a little time to get it all set up. I got everything you need now. Got everything ready.”
But I can’t stop looking for the rubbery button. Something inside has unhitched. I’ve come apart, like the sandwich baggies Mama puts my PBJs in for lunch. My two halves won’t catch. One part of me is here in the shed. But another part is gone, or maybe it stayed behind and is clinging to my house and Mama and the red, rubbery button.
“Come on, now,” he says. “We’ll get you cleaned up, something good to eat. Wake up. Come on, this ain’t my fault. Sure as hell didn’t plan on this happening.”
Even when two hands hook me under my armpits and lift me, I stare at the mower. And as we walk out into the dark, I cry because leaving that mower all alone in the corner of the empty shed means I’ll never see Mama again.
Chapter 11
IMOGENE
Today
With a finger still on the light switch at the top of the basement stairs, Imogene thinks to flip it off, slam the door, and run. The child is gone. The spot at the bottom of the stairs is empty. Instead, she presses her hand over the switch and forces herself to breathe slow and steady and to listen. She listens for something that comes from down below, that comes from behind, from overhead. There are two bedrooms upstairs, and the floors are at least 150 years old. If someone is here in the house, she will hear footsteps. She will hear footsteps.
A child is down there. She’s certain. A small child. She thinks he was small, or maybe she was small. Slender shoulders, dark hair, bare feet. But Imogene only got a glimpse. Someone else must be here too. A child wouldn’t be left alone. Not a child so small. Someone else might be down there in the basement too.
She lets her eyes drift over her left shoulder, slowly, as if someone, probably a man, is near, maybe standing close beside her. And then she looks right, moving no part of her body, only her head and eyes. If she moves, makes any noise, he’ll know she’s here, whoever he is. She takes another deep, quick breath because she is trying too hard to be quiet and is forgetting to inhale and exhale. She swallows, and that’s the thing that startles her. The muscles in her throat tightening and loosening, the click of her tongue popping off the roof of her mouth. She closes her eyes, turns to face the basement, and opens them. And the child is there again, creeping into sight.
“Are you Imogene?”
The sound of her name bleeds the feeling from Imogene’s legs and arms, and her mouth turns dry. She should speak but can’t. Setting her flashlight on the floor, she grabs hold of the banister and slides one foot forward until it drops to the next tread, all the while keeping the child in sight. It’s a boy, she thinks. He stands beneath the yellow light, exactly at its center, like he’s been waiting for her. Making her way down three stairs, she holds on as if something might otherwise drag her down.
“Who are you?” she says.
She whispers, and something makes her look behind, at the top of the stairs. Up on the main level, the house is dark. Still clinging to the banister, she sinks to the stairs, and from there, studies the boy. He is, indeed, dark-haired. His pants are too large and he has rolled them up to his ankles. He wears a white undershirt with a neckline stretched so that it droops low on his sunken chest and hangs off one thin shoulder. He buckles his toes as if they are cold and stares up at Imogene. His skin is pale against his dark hair. She asks him again who he is, but he says nothing. He’s waiting for an answer from her.
“I am Imogene,” she says.
“I know because your hair is red,” the boy says. He is smiling. “Red and fuzzy. Imogene has red, fuzzy hair.”
To hear the boy talk makes him somehow more real; it sharpens his edges whereas before he was cloudy, and Imogene’s chest begins to pump too fast. Her hands ache from squeezing the banister. She forces her knees to unfold, uses her hands to pull herself to her feet, and while she manages to stand, she doesn’t straighten all the way but stays crouched. She unwraps one hand from the railing and reaches out toward the boy with it. She balances there, her stretched-out hand reaching for him. The blood drains from her fingertips, and her elbow begins to burn. The boy’s smile fades and he tips to one side as if trying to see beyond Imogene to someone who might be coming up behind. She jerks around but the staircase leading upstairs is empty, the doorway still dark. She listens for those footsteps overhead, for footsteps stomping through the pile of reeds she knocked down, for the slap of the screen door off the kitchen.
She begins to wave faster; maybe she says please to him. Please, come. Hurry and come. Her thinking mind has caught up with instinct and, with it, fear. As she forces herself to breathe, she pieces together the boarded-up windows and the three locks on the outside of the door and the electricity run to the basement. Someone is keeping the boy here. They’ve locked him in. And then the boy shifts, places one bare foot on top of the other, wobbles. Imogene’s stare drops from the boy to the floor beneath his feet. It’s covered by mismatched carpet squares.
As far as the light from the single bulb reaches, the floor is lined with scrap carpet. There are carpet squares, sea-grass welcome mats, and long, narrow runners. They are all different colors and sizes and are pieced together with silver duct tape. The boy is barefooted and buckles his toes and stretches them. He hops from one foot to the other. Even through the mismatched carpeting, the floor must be cold on his bare feet. She forces her legs to move, lifts one and then the other, creeps down two more steps to where the walls on either side of her open up and give way to a greater view of the basement. A sofa sits off to the left. Only the arm is visible. Just ahead and to the right is a card table. Three chairs sit around it.
“Come,” she says, whispers. Her mouth is still dry, and her tongue doesn’t move like it ought to. The boy hasn’t heard. Or if he did hear and said something in response, she doesn’t hear him because her heart is pounding in her ears. “Come.”
This time, the boy shakes his head and is gone.
“No, don’t.” Imogene lunges for him. She slides the rest of the way down the stairs, cracking her back on the bottom step.
She sits there at the end of the long staircase, knowing her back should hurt but not feeling the pain. It’s coming to her quickly, the things to be frightened of, what might lie here in wait. It’s solid in her mind now. She closes her eyes to block out everything else and listens. It’s all she has. But the house is quiet. She pushes off the stair, rocks forward, and stands, and as quickly as she does, she falls backward again. A small bed sits directly in front of her. A twin bed like she slept on through sixth grade. A patchwork quilt lays over it, and as if a child has made the bed, one side of the quilt rides too high and exposes the wooden footboard. Someone has laid out two dolls, one a life-sized infant and one much smaller. Both rest with
their heads on the single pillow, and at the foot of the bed sits a large wooden cradle, empty. A wooden cradle for a baby. Something about the sight of that bed, the dolls, something about the sight of the cradle makes her turn her head and cough. Dry heaves, that’s what they called them in college.
Once her stomach settles on itself, Imogene lifts onto her hands and knees, pauses there, her head hanging, her eyes closed. She’s suddenly cold, and her body begins to tremble. She stands though her legs are still numb.
“You have to come with me,” she says.
Her voice echoes in her head. She turns her back on the cradle, and without looking left or right because she’s afraid of what she’ll next see, she takes a few steps in the direction the boy went when he disappeared. She doesn’t have air enough to force her words any louder, and probably the boy didn’t hear her.
“We have to go. I’m Imogene. Remember? Red and fuzzy. You can come on with me.”
She doesn’t see him until he finally speaks. He has crawled into a dark space under the staircase. Only his small feet poke out where she can see them. The rest of him is hidden by the darkness and behind the wooden supports.
“I can’t go,” he says.
His voice is high-pitched and soft. She reaches to pull the stocking cap from her head, but it’s gone. She lost it somewhere between knocking down the reeds along the house and falling down the stairs. It’s one more way he, whoever might be upstairs or outside, will know she is here. It’s also how the boy was able to see her red, fuzzy hair. Smoothing her hands over it, she creeps closer and tries to match her voice to his.
“You can go,” she says, nodding at a pair of white sneakers near the bottom stair. “I’ll show you how. I see you have shoes here.”
Before the boy can say anything more, a motor kicks on, and again, Imogene startles. She ducks and turns a shoulder toward the sound. It’s instinct, only instinct. Nothing is coming for her. She has to keep telling herself that. She’ll hear him, whoever he might be, first. She’ll hear him, and she doesn’t, so she has to keep on. Still she’s taking in too much oxygen, not letting off enough. It will get away from her if she lets it. It happens to Mama sometimes, though not as often now as when Imogene was younger. Panic attacks, the doctor had said. Have her breathe into a paper bag. It’ll right the oxygen. Or have her blow out hard, like she’s blowing out a candle. That’ll do in a pinch. Imogene does that now. She lifts her index finger, holds it like it’s a candle on a cake, and blows hard as if she’s blowing it out. Again.
“Then let’s put those shoes on those feet,” she says, when the darkness stops closing in from both sides. Her voice cracks. She forces herself to lean and look toward the top of the stairs. The doorway there is black. Maybe it’s still open, or maybe it’s been closed, or will be soon and she’ll be trapped like the boy. She was wrong. She won’t hear anyone who might be coming, not now, not with that motor running. The thought of it, of what she can’t hear or see, makes her chest begin to move too quickly again, and she can’t stop the trembling that has reached her shoulders. She tucks her hands up under her arms to hide the shaking from the boy.
“Is it just you here?” she asks, trying to keep the fear from her voice. Like the darkness that was trying to close in, her imagination is closing in too. She imagines the door slamming shut, the slide bolts sliding into place, the keyed lock snapping closed. “Is it just you?” She pauses, swallows, forces herself to ask. “Is there a baby, too?”
There are three chairs. A twin-sized bed. The locks had been on the outside of the door. And a cradle for a baby.
“He’ll bring Mama back,” the boy says. His feet slip out of sight, and then his hands appear, followed by the rest of him as he untangles himself from the underworkings of the staircase.
Imogene takes a step toward him, can’t stop herself because she doesn’t understand what she heard. The boy stands and hugs himself with both arms, his narrow shoulders collapsing.
“If I’m good, if I’m quiet,” the boy says, lifting his eyes to look at Imogene, “he always brings Mama back.”
The First Rising
On Thanksgiving eve in 1915, following a massive immigration from countries such as Great Britain, Italy, and Germany, a growing distrust of US allies during World War I, and the release of a film titled The Birth of a Nation that glorified the KKK, William J. Simmons led fifteen men up Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia, set a cross on fire, and reignited the Klan. Through the use of a publicity firm and the establishment of an enemies list that included, among others, blacks, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, bootleggers, those who didn’t attend church, and those who engaged in premarital or extramarital sex, Ku Klux Klan membership swelled to four to six million by the 1920s.
Chapter 12
TILLIE
Today
From the shop’s phone, Tillie calls Mrs. Tillie and tells her he’s going to do a bit of cleaning, another lie, and not to wait up for him. Then he walks around the shop turning on every light so a passerby will know he’s here and not at the house. If Tim or Robert Robithan is wanting to find Tillie, he wants them to find him at the shop, a good ways from home and Mrs. Tillie, because when they find him, they’re also going to find out that their watches are gone. They won’t care that Tillie tried to do the right thing by locking them up in the cabinet. They’ll assume he betrayed them and stole from them, and there’s nothing worse in the minds of men like Robert and Tim Robithan.
As Tillie waits, he whittles away the time by dusting his antique scales and giving their brass pans a good scrubbing. The scales are his favorites, especially the counterbalance sort. Mrs. Tillie says he prices them too high and they’ll never sell, and she knows, rightly so, that is his intention. As he works, he thinks over all the things he could do. He could call the police, but then Robert would know Tillie lost his watches. He’ll want seventy thousand dollars, and Tillie doesn’t have it. Or he could deny Natalie ever brought them in, but that would leave her to take the brunt of whatever Robert and Tim Robithan might dole out, and Tillie knows exactly what the Robithans dole out because he once stood alongside Robert Robithan as he did it. Tillie keeps scrubbing and thinking until his fingers are wrinkled and chapped, and when still no Robithan has come looking for Tillie, he drives himself home.
It’s clear he has to tell Mrs. Tillie about the watches and that someone has stolen them because this will be the thing that makes them finally leave Simmonsville. And maybe they should even take Imogene with them because Robert Robithan has set his sights on her. They’ll have to pack up and be gone by morning. Tillie thought the memories had faded so thin they could no longer dredge up fear in him like they once did, but they’re as strong and clear to him now as they were some forty years ago when he held tight to a man’s arm while Robert Robithan drove a knife through his beating heart.
Thinking about leaving Simmonsville makes Tillie see his house differently as he sits in his driveway and looks up at it from his car. He sees it like a new family might, one with a baby on the way and maybe a youngster just out of diapers. They’ll notice that the front shutters are real wood—board-and-batten cedar that Tillie made himself. They’ll say the house has good bones and that it’ll look bigger once all Mrs. Tillie’s trinkets, knickknacks, and whatnots are gone. The old place will be young again, and whoever buys it will always wonder why two old folks left their home of so many years and almost everything in it without a word to anyone.
Mrs. Tillie has left on the light in the living room. The soft glow is the same one he came home to that night forty years ago. Mrs. Tillie had been awake to greet him when he walked through the door, and in all the years since, Tillie has wondered what roused her from bed. She’d known straightaway to hold her arms out to him because he was crying and shaking in a way he didn’t know a man could. She had already known. Somehow Mrs. Tillie always already knows.
Once inside the house, Tillie takes care setting his keys on the entryway table. As he’s pulling the door c
losed, quiet as he can, the smell of cherry blossoms chases in behind him. It’s the lightest of scents, roselike with a hint of almond. The trees, and the surprising pink show they put on come every spring, are one of the things Tillie will miss most, and he hopes in their next house, a single lamp shining in a dark living room will be nothing more than a light in the dark.
“You ready to tell me now, are you?”
It’s Mrs. Tillie, sitting right there in the glow of that table lamp, a bundle of her knitting resting in her lap. Her long gray hair has been let down, and it hangs over one shoulder.
“I’m ready,” Tillie says.
He tells about Robert Robithan’s watches first and how he had to take them from Natalie Sharon lest Robert Robithan find out he let them watches walk out the shop’s front door. Seventy thousand dollars’ worth of watches, he says. And he tells how Natalie goes with Robert’s son and that she and Robert’s boy likely stole them watches so they could sell them for good money and how Tillie couldn’t never tell Robert Robithan a thing like that about his own son. And if he did tell Robert, Tim Robithan might somehow turn the mess around on Tillie to save his own hide. And last he tells how Robert Robithan has got it in his mind Imogene is a good match for his son. But now them watches are gone and Imogene is likely more broken than ever and nothing will ever bring back their Russell and Vaughn and Tillie surely doesn’t have seventy thousand dollars.
When Tillie is done telling his troubles to Mrs. Tillie, she sets her knitting on the side table and leans forward as if to whisper. She understands the kind of being scared that Tillie is feeling, the kind that has made his fingers go stiff. And probably it’s his fault for telling her things too good. He’d let every detail of what he’d seen and done spill out to Mrs. Tillie as he was crying and shaking in her arms forty years ago, and while he didn’t know it then, he knows it now. He was crying and shaking because he’d never be able to take back knowing better but not doing better.