by Attica Locke
She lay down and closed her eyes, thinking of the strangeness of running into Bobby Clancy again, and the things he’d said about his brother, Raymond. She lay in the stillness with it. Only then, in the dead of night, her body on the very edge of surrender, did an image finally pop free: the dead woman, her face, the black eyes drawn in charcoal. She finally remembered where she’d seen her before.
7
It was a quarter after six when Donovan called, waking her.
She didn’t remember falling asleep or how exactly she’d ended up face down at the foot of her queen-sized bed, her bare feet facing the headboard. The quilt beneath her was damp with sweat. The silk slip she hadn’t bothered to change out of was like a sheet of saran wrap against her skin. The room was suffocating. She crawled toward the radiator. Her tongue was thick as carpet and tacky against the roof of her mouth. She turned the knob on the radiator. “What is it, Donovan?” she said.
“You called me.”
Right, she thought.
She stood upright, mumbling a repeat of the earlier lie, the ruse to get him on the grounds of Belle Vie, though she mixed up a few of the details. This time, she invoked Raymond Clancy’s name, suggesting he was the one with some proposed changes to the regular schedule. She told Donovan to come by her office by nine. He didn’t ask any questions. “Yeah, all right,” was all he said. The line clicked, and he was gone.
In a dim corner, the radiator rumbled and hissed as it cooled.
Caren propped open her bedroom window.
Dew sat on the chipped paint of the windowsill. The air outside was cool and wet, the plantation wrapped in a rolling, morning fog, the sky above still a blackish blue, barely a whisper of light on the horizon. In the dark of her small bedroom, she started to dress herself, sliding into jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt.
She heard a sound coming through her open window.
In the early-morning hour, the wind was completely still, Belle Vie holding its magnolia-scented breath. Caren leaned her face into the fog, listening. The sound was faint, like a low whistle, a distant call. It was coming from the south, down by the quarters. From her second-story window, she could see only treetops, and even though it made no sense to her, she swore she heard voices . . . singing. It was the same floating sound she’d heard through her office window last night.
She stepped out into the hallway, peeking into Morgan’s room.
Her daughter was still sound asleep.
Downstairs, Caren slid into her boots. The worn leather was cold against the soles of her bare feet. Outside, Gerald was sitting in his golf cart, a black windbreaker zipped to his chin. His hands were clasped, resting on the bulge of his midsection, and his head was thrown back against the headrest; he was fast asleep. Caren had walked out of the house without a jacket. She wrapped her arms tightly across her chest, trying to seal in her body’s heat. “Gerald,” she said, walking to the cart, parked just a few feet from her front door. Gerald stirred, opening his bloodshot eyes. He was in his late thirties and built like an NFL lineman. It took some effort, but he slowly pulled himself upright, wiping ashy, dried spit from the dark-brown skin around the corners of his mouth. “I was just resting my eyes for a minute, ma’am.”
She asked him to stand, to please give her the keys to the cart.
“Everything okay, miss?”
She took his place in the driver’s seat, feeling his lingering warmth through the thin cotton of her clothes. She told him to wait by the front door, reminding him, as she started the cart’s engine, that her little girl was upstairs. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
Behind the wheel, she took off to the south, the cart’s tires bumping against wet grass.
By the time she was past the guest cottages, the light had begun to change. The rising sun had whitewashed the horizon, burning through the moisture in the air and parting the fog just as she arrived at the mouth of the slave quarters.
Near the village, she slowed as she always did.
The cart’s engine sputtered . . . then fell quiet.
Caren stared at the dark, empty cabins, their sagging porches facing one another. She felt the familiar chill in the air. And she heard the voices again, layered one on top of another, woven into a solemn chorus. It was a melody she recognized at once.
’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved . . .
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed . . .
Caren held perfectly still, listening to the old church hymn. It seemed to be coming from the far end of the village, from all the way down the dirt road, all the way down to the last cottage on the left, the one her mother called Jason’s Cabin.
She felt a soft wind at her back, cold and wet, like a spook’s breath.
It quickened her pulse.
She stepped out onto the dirt road and started the walk, wondering if, in this early morning light, she was bearing witness to an actual haunting, the quarters come alive right before her eyes. The music grew stronger, the voices more fervent, the closer she got to Jason’s Cabin, the one set nearest to the cane fields. Their sweetness was as sharp as needle points, leaving tiny pinpricks along the surface of Caren’s bare skin. She got as far as the gate when it stopped suddenly, the sound fading as mysteriously as it had started. She paused at the gate, remembering the cold dread that had come over her yesterday morning, when she had, for no good reason, cut her inspection short.
She remembered Bobby’s ghost stories, too.
Jason’s Cabin, he’d always said, was haunted.
Inside, the place was cloaked in shadow, the room even darker than it had been yesterday morning. She took a few steps, making a few tentative stabs in the air, feeling her way around the small shack, patting the raw wood of the walls. And that’s how she found it, the first real clue in the cops’ case. Caren stopped short, waiting for her eyes to adjust. When the light finally came, she was staring at an empty space on the wall. She could see the outline still, the blank shape of an antique cane knife, with its long blade, flat and wide like the head of a hoe, and a handle of curved wood. The knife itself was gone. Someone had stolen it, within days of that woman’s throat being cut.
The voices started again, like a whisper at her back.
Caren swung around but saw no one.
Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease . . .
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace . . .
The singing, she realized, hadn’t been coming from the cabin at all. She walked back outside and the sound grew louder. It appeared to be coming from the cane fields.
Caren drove the cart around to the back side of the quarters, down the drab hill where no grass would grow. When she got within thirty yards of where the body had been found, she saw them out there. They were on the cane side of the fence, a small crowd standing in the dirt by the fields. One of the women was holding a candle, burned down to within an inch of her fingertips. The others were likewise facing in Caren’s direction, their heads bowed solemnly toward the open grave on the other side of the fence. They were women mostly, six that she counted at a distance, all white and middle-aged and thick through the hips. Their voices were high-pitched and sweet, anchored by one lone tenor. At the center of their group stood a black man with round, almost cherubic, features. He was wearing black slacks, a black shirt, and a clerical collar, the cuff of white stark against his dark, coffee-colored skin.
Behind them, the field-workers were gathered. The men were small and compact, their skin tanned to a reddish brown, their dress nearly identical: sleeves of their work shirts secured with rubber bands at the wrists, the legs of their pants tied at the ankles with strips of cloth. They and a few women pressed straw hats against their chests, listening in silence, holding tight
to the bittersweet melody, if not the words themselves. There was one man with his head down. He was leaning against the fence. With the back of one hand, he wiped at tears in his eyes. The black priest glanced in Caren’s direction. He nodded kindly, but didn’t smile. He held up his hand, signaling the group, and together they started the hymn all over again.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound . . .
That saved a wretch like me . . .
Deputy Harris, who was coming up on his twenty-fourth hour on duty, had his backside leaned against the fence railing. He was smoking a cigarette, chewing on the fingernails of his left hand between frequent puffs, his nerves seemingly shot to hell. He looked over his shoulder at the singing Christians and the black priest and rolled his eyes, flicking cigarette ash within a foot of the mouth of the ragged, open grave. There were four short stakes in the ground around it, strung together with flimsy yellow tape.
Over the gospel melody, Caren heard the kick of a truck’s engine.
Behind the workers, a Chevy pickup, the name GROVELAND stenciled in sunny yellow across its side, pulled to a stop on a strip of raised land between the fence and the rows of cane. Hunt Abrams was behind the wheel. From the cab of his truck, he stared at the scene: his workers standing idle and more than a half dozen strangers singing church music at dawn. His left arm was hanging out of the driver’s-side window. He stabbed a finger in the air, trying to get the young cop’s attention. “Hey,” he said. “You want to tell them to get the hell off my farm?”
Deputy Harris barely stirred. “My deal is on this side of the fence.” He took another puff of his cig. “Long as they not disturbing the scene, it ain’t my problem.”
“Is that right?” Abrams said tersely.
Deputy Harris shrugged.
In the cab of his truck, Abrams paused for a moment. His eyes skimmed past the deputy, taking in once more the priest and the churchwomen. Then he rapped his knuckles against the side of the truck, nodding his head to get his workers’ attention. “Vamonos, people,” he said, his Spanish as dull as dry clay. “Let’s go. Trabajamos.” Caren could see the nose of his shotgun resting beside him on the truck’s front seat. The workers, all ten or so, returned their hats to their head. Moving wordlessly under a newly rising sun, they disappeared into the fields. The last man, his cheeks still damp, wouldn’t move until one of the other men called his name. “Gustavo, no puedes quedarte aquí,” he said. The one named Gustavo wiped his tears. He made the sign of the cross before turning to follow the others. “Y’all need to get on away from here,” Abrams said to the women. “We’re running a business, not a prayer group.” And when they didn’t immediately move, he spoke louder. “I know you hear me. You’re just making trouble for yourselves every minute you’re still standing here.”
The shotgun was still within arm’s reach.
One of the church ladies, her face plump and heart-shaped under a mass of sagging curls, pleaded with the boy cop. “Did you see that? You hear the way he’s talking to us?” But Deputy Harris was as unmoved by their complaint as he had been by Hunt’s. Like he said, it ain’t his deal. Though he did watch with some curiosity one of the churchwomen pulling a spiral notebook from her purse and making what seemed like copious notes about every detail of the scene on Groveland’s sugar farm, even taking the time to jot down the truck’s license plate number. Abrams glared at the lot of them. The priest, through all this, hadn’t said a word, not to the cop and not to Hunt Abrams. He motioned to the women, signaling an end to their vigil. As the group began to form a line to take them out of the fields and toward the farm road, the priest, his English sharpened by an accent Caren couldn’t immediately place, looked lastly at her. “Good day, ma’am,” he said, as polite as she’d ever heard the words.
Hunt Abrams was still sitting in his truck when they’d gone.
He stared across the fence at Caren. “You got something you want to say about it?”
By the time she returned home, it was well past seven, and Letty was already at the kitchen stove, making eggs. Morgan was sitting at the round, two-seat table opposite the stairs, dressed for school. She was wearing another of her white oxford shirts, under the straps of a plaid smock dress, her head down in a math textbook. She appeared to be doing fractions. Caren kissed the top of her head and went to finish a single braid Morgan had started at the back of her head. “Don’t,” Morgan said, pulling away and brushing pencil-eraser shavings from her lined notebook paper.
“I thought you said you did your homework.”
“I did. This is for tomorrow.”
At the stove, Letty smiled. “Smart girl.”
Morgan closed her math book, shoving it into her navy schoolbag, then stood up from the table and announced to Letty that she would wait for her by the car.
“She’s in some hurry today.”
“Sit down, Morgan,” Caren said.
It was the first they’d seen each other since last night, since the heated talk in Morgan’s bedroom. Caren wanted her to know they weren’t finished. But she also didn’t want to get into it with Letty in the room, the business of the blood and the police. “It’s terrible what happened to that lady, isn’t it?” Letty said, correctly reading the topic on everyone’s minds. “Pobrecita, eh? Makes you wonder if half of them wouldn’t do better just staying right where they are. It can be hard over here, you know. I know girls like that. I got people like that in my family. They come from these little towns in Mexico, and they don’t know what they’re going to find, what it’s really like here.” She had her head bent over the stove and seemed almost to be talking to herself. “I lit a candle for her last night. Me and Gabby, we prayed for her.”
Caren had been up with her, too, the woman, her face.
And the memory of where she’d seen her.
It was in town, not even a week or so earlier. Caren had been standing in the middle of a long line at Brandy’s Grocery on St. Patrick, picking up a few things Lorraine had sworn she needed first thing in the morning. There was an eighteen-year-old girl working a single register, a black girl identified as FAYE by her name tag. She had rhinestones on her fingers and glitter polish on her nails, and her station at the cash register sat just high enough off the ground that it allowed her to look down on the rest of them. The line had come to a halt, and Caren craned her neck, trying to see what the holdup was at the front of the line. Some argument was brewing, between the cashier and a customer . . . and it was her, Caren now realized, the woman from the grave. She could see those same sharp black eyes, even now. The cashier, Faye, was on the verge of calling over the store’s manager. The problem, as Caren overheard it in bits and pieces, was over the purchase of a money order. Faye was demanding to see some form of identification to run the transaction, and the woman was saying No, no, no, the only word of hers that Caren could make out. The accent was unmistakable, though. It was an easy enough guess that she wasn’t born and raised around these parts. She had a basket full of items, and all she wanted was to pay for them and for the money order.
“Huh-uh,” Faye said, shaking her head. “I can’t let you do that. We not doing no money orders anymore, ma’am, not without some form of picture ID.”
There were groans in line.
To the cashier, the woman made her case, pulling out words, one by one. She took great care with the foreign language, telling the cashier in English that no one had asked for any identification when she bought a money order in the store last week. To which, Faye merely shrugged, saying, “I’m just doing what they tell me. You don’t have a driver’s license? A state ID?” Her tone was terse and impatient. She had grown tired of the whole thing, the back-and-forth. And in response to whatever the woman in line said, Faye pressed a call button at her station. The manager was now officially on the way.
Caren stepped forward.
She was just about to make an offer to help, to take the woman’s cru
mpled bills and purchase the money order for her, using her own valid driver’s license . . . when she heard a familiar voice behind her.
“I thought that was you,” she heard a man say.
When Caren turned, she was standing face-to-face with Bobby Clancy. He had a six-pack of beer in one hand and a couple of oranges in the other.
“Well, this is a surprise,” she said.
He blushed at the sight of her, the lines around his eyes crinkling softly when he smiled. At the time, they hadn’t seen each other in nearly twenty years, and Caren smiled, too, warmed by this unexpected reunion. She couldn’t look at him without thinking of her mother, the whole of her childhood. He mentioned Helen’s funeral, reporting that he had come back to the parish for the service, to pay his respects, but especially to see her, to see Caren. “I guess I must have missed you, though.”
“I guess so.”
She left off the fact that she’d actually missed her mother’s funeral. Helen Gray was dead and buried before anyone tracked Caren down or found a current phone number. It was Lorraine who ultimately made the call, catching Caren as she was walking out the door to work. Caren had had to ask her to repeat it twice. Lorraine got her street address, and three days later a box of her mother’s things showed up on her doorstep. She wanted you to have these, baby, Lorraine had written in pencil. Caren had opened the box only once. She caught a lingering whiff of her mother’s scent, rosemary and lavender and cigarette smoke, and she’d closed it at once and put it away.
Standing in line at the grocer’s, Bobby said it was good to see her.
He said it more than once, in fact.
And there were promises to get together sometime, to catch up on old times, though no contact information was exchanged. She supposed he knew where to find her. He slipped out of the still unmoving line, passing her with a pat on the shoulder, abandoning the beer and the oranges, as others in line were fleeing in frustration, too.