She never found him in the city, nor did she ever locate a grave. Her mother grew deathly ill back in Blytheville, and she died during Sara’s second year at Newcomb. But Sara stayed in school until she graduated. Then she took the job as a library clerk in Pickleyville and soon met Tom.
In the box, there were pictures of old boyfriends and lovers. She had keepsakes, a gold necklace James Luke had given her and a bracelet with some small diamonds and rubies that Sloan bought for her in 1964. There were pictures of men, one of herself nude and taken by her boyfriend, a photographer and film developer at the Times-Picayune newspaper. The photographs made her wish for her younger days before she met Tom, a time years before James Luke beat her and left her for dead.
She had spent this formative time as a woman living a hidden sexual life in the Crescent City, and the hiddenness continued intermittently until the attack. Afterward, she never had another liaison, now almost ten years, as if she had learned her lesson.
The diaries recalled trysts, several with strangers in the library book stacks on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, where she had worked while in college. Her sex with James Luke started soon after he married Nelda, not long after the Korean War, and her fling with Sloan began in 1964 when Sloan came to the house to apologize to Tom after the fight at the feed store. Sara was at home alone. She knew him from back when she worked at the public library in Pickleyville. They used to flirt a lot when she worked, and he was just a high school kid. On the day he showed up at the front door to see Tom, she invited him inside for coffee and was soon on her knees and in his lap at the kitchen table, his blue jeans pulled down to his boots. This is how their sex got started—just as fast as a fire burning in the woods.
After she married Tom, the writing in her diary was done in code. Going out for ice cream was sex in a public place like the library, falling ill was sex in her marriage bed with another man, and buying a new robe was nearly getting caught. She wrote of these occasions to document her infidelity for her own recollection, never to be read by anyone else. A level of power was involved in these events. But times had changed now. Sara had aged over the past ten years, and the former decadence was little more than a ghost. The woman, now forty-six years old, had saved the secret history in the hope chest, “hope” being a peculiar name for what she kept in it. Everything in the box came from the past, not unlike the beleaguered and forlorn contents of a coffin. Hope seemed to mean a bright future, but this was a time of unending darkness.
She made a plan to sell the jewelry to a pawn broker in Baton Rouge on Highway 190 and to burn everything else. She believed she needed money to leave Tom, now that the marshal was snooping around, not to mention the rift between her husband and Wesley, which was about all she could take. It was time to offer these worthless mementos to the flame as if sacrificed in some religious rite, but the valuables she’d redeem for cash money.
Sara took a burlap feed sack from Tom’s shop, the old livestock barn now remodeled for carpentry work. She half-filled the sack with all she kept from her hidden life, layers upon layers of it, and packed it all into the sack, which made the cedar box as hollow as a cave echo. She took a black diary from the burlap sack and skimmed over it one last time. These words could cause a man to kill his wife or lover or give the law reason to put me in jail for obstruction of justice, she thought. The past needed to be burned now.
She put the much lighter hope chest back into its place at the top of the closet where it had reposed for over two decades. She stuffed the jewelry into her purse and walked outside with the burlap sack. She lit a cigarette when she reached the back steps and smoked. After a quick break sitting on the steps looking at the sack full of ghosts, she walked to the steel burn barrel in the backyard near Tom’s workshop and dumped the sack, lighting some letters with a match. She took the last pull from her cigarette and dropped it into the barrel. There was little wind, not enough to even make the pine needles move on the trees. The paper made good kindling. The letters were dry as dust and the fire took off quickly. She could see the contents of the sack uniting with the flames, diaries and letters, even some small sketches from college art classes. The fire made her little historical record escape from public scrutiny for all time, the diminutive library archive burning.
Sara stood and watched the pyre go upward like a rising obelisk. She was repelled by the glowing heat. She smoked a Viceroy and watched the fire die down slightly. Then she went over to the workshop and took a long mimosa tree limb that Tom used to stoke the fire in the oil drum. Jabbing it, she made the fire grow again, the paper circling and cycling into carbon. It was a consuming fire, erasing the only hard evidence of years gone by.
The woman watched it burn for a while, and then took the cigarette pack from her front pants pocket and lit a new one. She stared at the fire. She smoked. She talked quietly to herself. “That LeBlanc woman is pure evil. She always was the worst. A jealous woman. Truly the worst I’ve ever known. A sorry godforsaken woman, wide-eyed and always talking,” she said aloud. Sara took another deep drag. “The Parnells will be involved before it’s over with, just watch.”
She thought about hitting Charity with a wooden club. She spoke to the pyre. “What a fraud, a commoner just like me living in a rich man’s house. A man and woman living in a big house. And why is she doing this now? Just because my husband wouldn’t build some shitty shelves for her. Because I slept with Sloan so long ago. Did she think he was going to marry her or something? And Sloan is dead. I was the only other person who got hurt because of this, nearly killed. I swallowed it all and kept the peace, just tried to protect my son and family. For what? I should find her and kill her.”
She stared at the oil drum. Everything burned as she smoked the cigarette. She held the soot-darkened mimosa limb in her hand and stirred the dying fire. She recalled Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Paper burns at 451 degrees. She could tell the diaries were gone now, nothing left but the book boards. Just a little flame and smoke. She didn’t want anything left, not a single readable page in the barrel or floating in the air. “Where will it all end and who will live to stop it?” Sara asked the smoke.
After a time, she peered into the drum and saw that it was gone. She believed it was good. She gave the ashes a final stir with the limb and walked back to the house. She was dry-eyed, not a tear on her face. She was doing what needed to be done, and she needed to do even more.
That afternoon, Sara drove to Baton Rouge for an evening class at the LSU Library School. Each semester and summer for more than two years she had driven to Baton Rouge for a night course at LSU, slowly working her way through a master’s degree in library service.
On the drive over, she stopped just past the East Baton Rouge Parish border. It took nearly an hour to make the drive in her little Gremlin. She stopped past the Amite River and brought the jewelry to a pawnbroker for cash and few questions.
The pawnbroker was a tall, thinly built man with hair slicked back on his head and laced with Pomade. He wore a dark leather vest and looked like a gospel preacher with his hair and attentive manner. For the jewelry, he counted two hundred and thirteen dollars into her hand. She was shocked by how much the items brought.
The woman had always kept a little money back from Tom in a maternal stash, money stowed away in a desk drawer at the junior college library, funds if she ever needed it. Now was the time when she needed it. She was sure it was time to leave him, and she believed he would know about the affairs with Sloan and James Luke before it was said and done, the marshal slipping around asking questions, Charity talking. Perhaps Tom already had his suspicions.
Sara had a vision of Charity singing like a witch in the woods, calling down curses upon her head and the heads of her family members. Lightning cracked, the devil beat his wife as the rain fell to the ground, a tale like she’d heard as a child in Arkansas. And if Tom Hardin ever finds out who raped me, it won’t be because I told him, she thought.
As the pawnbroker thanked her f
or the business, Sara glimpsed a glass case with pistols in it. She stepped over to it and bent at the waist and stared at a snub-nosed .38 Special, a Rossi. It was a small revolver, and it had a stenciled sign in front: PERFECT FOR LADIES. Her right hand passed over the top of the glass.
“Are you in the market for a handgun, ma’am?” the pawnbroker asked. “This old world sure ain’t getting no safer.”
“No,” she said as she slipped the bills into her pocketbook. But she looked again at the weapon and then at the pawnbroker, and she thought about Charity and the current troubles, how the woman was causing a train wreck that needed to be stopped.
“Ma’am, that sure would be a fine pistol for a lady such as yourself. It’s just the proper size. My lovely wife has one exactly like it. She keeps it in her purse at all times.” He reached into the case and took the pistol from the velvet shelf, and he placed it in front of her on the top of the glass, laying it directly before her.
Sara could see the paper tag on a string that read “$94.95.” She felt the wood grips, held the pistol in her palm, pointed the revolver to the floor, sighting the concrete. Then she stared at the slim man and asked, “Would you take eighty?”
“Since you’ve done business here today, I can let you have it for that amount plus tax.”
“I’ll take it. And a box of bullets.”
“God bless you, ma’am. I hope it protects you and yours from this profoundly wicked and fallen world.”
When the university class was done that evening and Sara had driven back to Baxter Parish, she went to the campus library and put the remaining jewelry money with her other cash in the manila folder in her desk drawer. The folder was marked S. HARDIN’S PERSONAL PROPERTY.
She went inside the Periodicals Room and searched the Pickleyville Star-Register for a cheap rental, maybe a garage apartment downtown. She wasn’t ready to leave yet, but she was getting close, and she worried about waiting until the fall when the junior college students took over most of the open apartments. She was far too old to rent a room in anyone’s house, and she wanted a place of her own. Wesley might need a couch to sleep on when he came home on the weekends, and the apartment needed to be a price she could afford on her little clerk’s salary, half of what Tom made as a carpenter. A man working at the college always made more money than a woman. With his side carpentry business, Tom brought home three times as much as she did after taxes. No matter what, she had to come up with a way to live on her own.
On the way home from stowing the money at Doolittle Library, she thought about Wesley and his troubles with Tom. But Tom wasn’t the ultimate problem. It was Charity LeBlanc and James Luke Cate. She wondered if using the loaded pistol in her purse to get Charity and James Luke off her back and out of her life would take care of it. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, or if she had the courage to do anything, but she decided to be ready for the worst kind of hell coming on the horizon, something even worse than being beaten, raped, and left for dead. Sara decided to be the world’s punching bag no longer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It was dusk when James Luke took a room at the Sweet Camellia Motel in Pickleyville. The place was a no-tell motel with a seedy little history as early as the 1960s when he’d last lived in the area, and the establishment had gone downhill ever since. The motel was made famous locally by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner who stayed there when they played the Louisiana Hayride, and folks said Dolly had the time of her life at the Camellia. At the front desk, James Luke said he wanted two nights, and he wrote, “Solomon Burstein, Houston, Texas,” on the room ticket, no address, and no identification offered.
The night clerk took notice of the extra twenty-dollar bill placed on the Formica desk. “Three nights, right?” the clerk asked James Luke. His hand touched the extra twenty.
“Like I just said, two nights, and no phone calls. I’m not here. A man needs a little peace and quiet away from the old lady sometimes, you see. Two nights if nothing changes.”
“And the extra bill?”
“Oh, it’s Hanukkah in July, my brother, a little tip to help out on life’s little journey.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Burstein. And I don’t know nothing about anything.”
“Right again.”
“Cool. Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah, whichever you’d prefer, Mr. Burstein.”
Once inside the bleakly lit motel room, James Luke took the city directory from beneath the Gideon Bible where it lay in the nightstand drawer, and he found the number listed for Howell Claiborne. Then he drove across town to Cowart’s Meat Market where he used a payphone outside. When he called the phone number, it was the current residence of the college president. Dr. Myles Polk’s wife answered. She said Dr. Claiborne was no longer living there, and that he’d retired. He now lived at his family home on Thomas Jefferson Avenue. James Luke told her he had found a purse belonging to Dr. Claiborne’s wife with some money in it, and Feliciana Polk quickly passed on the telephone number to the house, as well as the street address downtown. He wrote on a slip of paper he took from his shirt pocket.
Good God, this is easy, James Luke thought. He called the house but got no answer. He immediately drove back to the motel. He stretched out on the hard bed with his black cowboy boots still on his feet and took a long and restful nap, the sweet sleep of success.
When he awoke, he decided to go drive past the place to see what lay ahead at the Claiborne House. James Luke took a fifth of Old Crow from his suitcase, poured himself a Dixie cup full and drank it down in three strong swallows. He figured it had to be a mansion by the address on Pickleyville’s wealthiest street. After taking a shower, he got dressed in some fresh clothes. He lit a Camel. Best to go over to the house and take a look around. It being Friday night, maybe Charity and her old man are out for a night on the town. Shit, maybe she’s got somebody else, fast as she is to move from one to another.
He found the big house. He passed it twice in the Suburban. It was eleven o’clock at night, and he saw a Mercedes parked under the carport. Lights were on inside the house, first and second floors, and he wondered why they’d be up so late. He scoped out a safe place to access the house from the back, and a spot to park the vehicle two blocks away. He settled on the street beside the Federated Presbyterian Church. It was near the private alley that led behind the big houses on Thomas Jefferson Avenue. This will do, he thought,
So he drove out to Cowart’s Meat Market again and called the house. Charity answered, and James Luke immediately knew the voice. He asked for her husband, and she said he was gone to Washington, and before she could say another word, he hung up the phone and howled into the night, a holler that no one heard as he stood on the empty roadside at the payphone in front of the aging butcher shop. Then he drove back to the Sweet Camellia.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Dr. Howell Claiborne spent his summer doing research for a book on the Southern Agrarians, a group of Nashville poets from the 1920s and ’30s who argued for conservative approaches to nearly every social endeavor, all of them Anglo-Saxon bigots, reactionaries, intellectuals and writers that came from old money. The research time was funded by his severance package at the junior college, money to keep him quiet about where the bodies were buried over the years, cash to make him fade quietly and loyally into the shadows. For travel expenses, he was supplemented by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was gone so much it made Wesley wonder if the old man had another woman on the side. In fact, he had seen Dr. Claiborne only twice during the nearly two months he’d stayed at the house.
On Friday morning, Dr. Claiborne returned to the Library of Congress. He’d only spent a few days in town. While he was home, Wesley slept in the pool house. After Dr. Claiborne’s departure, however, Wesley spent the night in Charity’s queen-sized bed just like always. Sometimes he felt a little ashamed of himself, embarrassed by his role at the Claiborne place.
He eased awake on Saturday morning and saw Charity sitting in a wing-back
ed chair smoking a marijuana cigarette and reading a copy of Cosmopolitan, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. She’d just gotten out of the bathtub. He saw her legs tan and shining in the morning light that came from the second floor window, the terrycloth robe covering her upper thighs. He felt happily exhausted from the sex and the strain of the night, the two of them out late before coming home to their bedroom play. They’d attended a musical at the Saenger Theater on Canal Street in New Orleans after driving the old man to the airport for his trip to D.C.
“I bet that was the best sex you’ve ever had,” she said.
“Every time we make love it’s better than the time before,” he said, and he sat up on his elbows in bed.
She stood and walked over and pinched his right cheek. “You’ve been with the best and you’re a real pro already.” She extinguished the joint in the ashtray on the nightstand beside the bed.
He blushed, almost high from the smoke.
“You’d better go to your apartment before Cornelius comes here to do yard work this morning. You know how the coloreds talk.”
“Okay.”
“Wesley, you need my help on the project today?”
“No, I’ll be all right. I’m almost done.”
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