She’d heard talk, mostly at the local market, normally accompanied with her brother, Bo. But Ronna felt the news long before that. The murder of John Turner sent an icy shudder through the forest, like a shadow creeping along the fallen leaves and broken branches of places most people have never walked or played. The ancient bark moaned. The soil rumbled. And the Great Willow whispered in her dreams. The first dream she pushed aside as simply a nightmare, something conjured from all the terrible news she’s read about in the paper, about the burnings, bombings, and beatings across the south. And even then, she only saw flashes. Blurred white faces muddied together in a nightmarish soup of some bygone tale told among sharecropper children.
A few days later, another dream came to her. There were more sounds this time. Laughter. Cruel as salt in an open wound. And pleading from a young man. He didn’t sound local. None of the drawl and crooked annunciation people carried in Ole Miss. Still, Ronna ignored them. She’d always seen things. Her mother called it her sight. What California mystics would call a third eye, but in her family they simply called it voodoo, a gift, her heritage as a mambos, a priestess, guided and empowered by the spirits of past relatives, tuned into what was, what is, and what may still be. The future was never set, her mother warned her enough times. Things could always be changed, but it was like working upstream, upsetting the natural order, the natural flow of the river. You can place a rock in a brook, her mother would say, but the water will always flow downstream. If these dreams were real, what place was it of hers to change the course of the river, the course of history? There would always be bad men in the world. And bad women for that matter. What could she do?
A week had passed. Another dream came. John, that was the boy’s name, was running through the woods, not far from her own little hut. His heart pounded hard in his chest. Eyes as wide as frightened doe. Someone was chasing him, two younger white boys and two their elder. Gunfire echoed in her dream. He was shot. And they dragged him to the tree. The Great Willow at the heart of the woods…at my willow? She’d murmured, still dreaming, watching as those white men lynched him. And as his feet dangled and kicked wildly, the branch cracked and he fell like a bag of wet sand. They cursed. One of the men held an axe and went to work. Hacking and hacking and hacking the flesh and tissue and meat of John Turner until he lay in pieces, the soil drenched in his blood (Was that the rumbling I sensed before?). There was a flash and whining sound, as if from a camera, and then they buried him. They covered their sin with gore ruined red dirt. And there was a fire, a car set ablaze on the unnamed road, John Turner’s father’s Cadillac, no doubt. And they went away, swallowed by the morning sun.
What Ronna had dreamed, had already been done, of this she was certain. She could not change the boy’s fate. The boy, John Turner, rotted in a shallow grave in pieces while his parents mourned an empty casket. The murderers, still breathing, empowered by their terrifying deed…all except for one, a younger man in painters jeans. She got a good look, during this last dream. Billy is what they called him. Billy was a pale faced coward, a daddy’s boy that much she could see in his heart. In the end, he would find his own punishment. Focusing on his hazel eyes in her mind’s eye, she saw a manila noose and the slow rhythmic song of some church hymnal, ‘Up From the Grave He Arose,’ or some such, playing in the background as his own feet dangled and twitched and then lay still. The others, the fat tub of lard in dirty blue denim overalls and greasy slicked back hair, Huckabee was his name, and two supposed Greenwood peace officers, all friends, a balding old timer, O’Reilly, and his partner, some fury red ginger, Hannity, she could see, they’d live to a ripe old age without ever being brought to justice.
Justice? Could such a thing exist in the rural south?
—Unpunished though?
Guided by her ancestral spirits, laying half-awake in bed, she pushed her mind into the surrounding community. She saw fear, terror, and disdain. This was the way things had always been. They would never change. Unless.
Unless…
Ronna simply could not let their sorrow abide.
The morning after the last dream, Ronna set out early. She wore a store bought olive green dress that cut just below the knees. Bo had given her the dress as a gift for her newly minted position as priestess of the Blanche clan. Certainly, he would not appreciate her dragging the gift through the knee-deep red berried thorns and low hanging pine branches and brown dead leaves, but in her mind, it was the perfect occasion. John Turner would be born again. Tonight. Birthed from his unmarked grave at the foot of the Great Willow and overgrown kudzu and into new life…unending, possibly.
The air seemed heavier that morning. The breeze was null. A sack, strung across her back, with the handle of the shovel sticking out, weighed on her knees. Ronna trudged on, ignoring the pain and fear creeping into her. Bringing back the dead…it was nothing to balk at. In voodoo, life was as natural as death. The natural stream is regarded as holy. And there was Samedi to worry about, the Lord of the Underworld. If He is not pleased with what she was planning on doing…
But this must be done, she told herself.
The people have suffered too long.
Justice.
Justice.
They cry.
Weep.
Pray.
So, I’ll give them a protector.
The Great Willow stood like a sentinel in the deep Delta woods. An alien among the pine and furs. Large gnarled branches swept high and hung low, covering most of the base in a wide green curtain with small white blooms of flowers and a fragrance hinting nothing of death or the crimes that had been committed there.
“Hello, my friend.” Ronna patted the trunk, looking upward into the tall branches, at the sun peeping through the canopy. The warmth dispelled any doubt. She turned and searched for the grave.
A dark lump stood out from among the otherwise leaf-covered ground. Claw markers had been scratched into the red mud. Some wild animal had been here, sniffing out an easy meal.
What had made it give up? she wondered.
Ronna looked to the Great Willow. “You?”
The tree swayed in a sudden warm breeze.
“You kept him safe?”
Birds chirped from some place not far away.
Glowing, she knelt by the mound, patting the dirt.
“Okay, Mr. Turner. Let’s let you out.”
The red clay was harder than she had anticipated. Heavy rain from the past week had made everything packed. The once morning sun was now into early afternoon, burning through the forest canopy. Sweat poured off her in waves, soaking her purple bandana. She wrung the cloth and retied it across her powdered afro. Humidity was coming up off the ground, making everything slick. The shovel slipping from her now pruned fingers. She huffed and struck the ground once more, sinking the metal tip into the earth with her muddied Keds. Heaving the clay away she spotted what she’d come for.
A dark and ashen face with glossy white eyes was gazing up at her from the shallow mud. The large gash on the head was reminiscent of the murdered boy from her dream. This was John Turner. Grey flesh turned red by the Mississippi soil. Eyes frozen in the nightmare endured. Milky and faded by decay. Soulless, as her mother would say. The ritual goes, when life leaves the body to wait for the one-hundred and one days, the light goes out and fades away.
“But we’ll get your soul set back, John. Don’t you worry.”
On her hands and knees, she clawed at the crimson mud, freeing John Turner’s head. Coddling it, like an infant, Ronna couldn’t stop the hot burning tears that rushed down her sweaty and flushed cheeks. She cooed and stroked his ruined matted hair, fingers avoiding his partially exposed skull.
“Why did they do this? Why? You was just a boy. What danger were you?”
She wept.
After a while, Ronna closed her eyes, controlled her breathing. She stuffed away his head in her knapsack and went about digging up the rest of his body. His legs were too ruined, chopped and eaten by the
maggots and worms in the ground. One of his arms was ruined as well, flayed, even beyond the repair of her seamstress skill.
“That’s okay, John. I know where we can get some spares. I’ll fix you up.”
With a grunt, Ronna heaved the sack over her back and marched off into the woods, back toward the shimmering yellow light that belonged to her hut.
***
“You did what?” Bo was standing in the doorway, dressed in plaid bellbottoms and a skintight unbuttoned purple shirt, hands talking in the air, eyes wild and confused and perhaps disgusted and angry. All with good enough reason.
“I dug him up.” Ronna paid little mind as she washed and cleaned John’s remains.
“You dug him up…that boy from the paper?” Bo’s hands found his hips. His frail chest pumped as if he’d just ran a marathon.
“Bo…we need to do this.”
“We?”
“Yes, I need everyone. For it to work, I need everyone.”
“For what to work, Ronna? You—”
“Yes. We’re gonna bring John back.”
Bo stood gawking.
“It can be done, Bo. It can be done.”
“So what if it can.”
“We can’t let this crime go unpunished.”
“Then take the body to the police, Ronna.”
Ronna turned, smirking but not meaning too. “Are you serious? And what are they going to do? Ship him back to his folks, if even. Maybe not that, they might just stuff him in a pine box and bury him with a number on his tombstone. What justice is there in that, Bo? Tell me.”
Bo kicked the floor. Leaning against the hinges of the open door. The chickens were pecking away just outside, at the bugs that’d fallen from Ronna’s knapsack. He scratched his head, glaring from the ground to Ronna and back to the ground again.
“What about Samedi? He’s not going to be too happy about this?” Bo asked.
“What about the cries from His people for justice? I think Samedi will understand.”
“You hope.”
Ronna shuddered. She certainly did hope. Taking a few deep breaths, she resumed cleaning John Turner’s body. Silence crept into the hut, all but for the chickens clucking outside, delighted for the extra meal brought in from the shallow grave.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Bo leaned further in the doorway, refusing to let go of the hinges, or allowing himself to come more into the hut, closer to the corpse.
“Yes.” Ronna tried to pay him no mind.
“Okay…what do you need?”
“Rum. All you can find. And none of that backwater crap Emma makes in her tub.”
“Okay. I can do that. Rhonda has some made, just like from home.”
“Good.”
“What else?”
“Do you know where we can get a large vat?”
“Like those distillers ’em white boys use for moonshine?”
“Something like that. Something large enough to hold John.”
“Christ.” Bo looked outside, as if the answer was sitting out in the woods, crawling along the ground, waiting to be devoured by one of the clucking hens.
“I think I know of someplace that has something like that,” Bo finally said. “It’s made of copper and glass, will that be a problem?”
“No. So long as it can hold John and the rum.”
“Okay. When do you need all this?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight? Ronna are you crazy? The rum alone is gonna take some time, but the vat…Christ!”
“Tonight. And I need everyone.”
“Everyone?”
“Yes, every last Blanche.”
“Christ.”
***
Ronna patched John Turner together with body parts stolen from the Greenwood County Morgue. She’d snuck in, pretending to be one of the janitors. All the janitors for the county hospital being black, the disguise was not difficult to pull off, especially with the help of her cousin, Pauline. Walking in the freezer came with a few surprises. Namely, here, there was no segregation of the dead. White. Black. Hispanic. Asian. Rich. Poor. The dead were integrated without discord. No riots or National Guard. No Kennedy speeches. Or thrown tomatoes. Everyone here, in the waiting room of death, was equal.
One of the legs needed to make John whole came from some giant white fellow. The toe tag had the name James Porter penciled in scribble. His body had been prepared for autopsy, the abdomen readied to be exposed with the customary Y incision. But she hadn’t gone hunting for organs. The other leg came from an equally monstrous sized fellow with the name Leo Traynor dangling from his toe. He’d apparently stroked out on the basketball court at the not so luxurious Greenwood YMCA. The ink was still wet.
Ready to leave; Ronna still needed an arm. Most of the other residents of the county morgue were women: Michelle Garza and Heather Whitehead and Hannah Jones and Jo Harwood and Alison Mello and Amber Roberts, sorority sisters and cheerleaders from Ole Miss, apparently, all best friends perhaps, who once told secrets and cheated on exams and shared dreams of falling in love now laid beside each other on their own separate gurneys, casualties of a horrible accident on the highway, when their school bus blew a tire, colliding into a bridge guardrail and falling some fifty feet below. Now the sisters shared something else in common.
Almost giving up, Ronna found two men near the back of what the orderlies called the Meat Locker that looked promising. Alex Kimmell and Ken Preston, thirty-something year old clerks who worked on opposite sides of town, yet lived as roommates and professional bachelors in a small ranch style home. They looked promising, but their arms were covered with various red and bubbled yellow lesions, spread from shoulder to finger-tip.
Ronna was heading for the door, unwilling to risk any more time shopping in the freezer when she spotted a black bag on a stretcher in the corner, the kind paramedics haul victims from fires in on. Not much hope of finding anything salvageable, still she unzipped the bag. Patrick Loveland had died in an apartment fire in the lower pits of Greenwood in one of those shanty buildings in a neighborhood that’d always been particular unpleasant. Patrick was of the same age as John, nearly the same midnight complexion too. They could’ve been twins, if not for the obvious massive muscular definition. Patrick apparently was a bodybuilder in life.
Beggars can’t be choosers, Ronna told herself.
When Ronna arrived home with her parts for John Turner, she used a thick black wire to attach the pieces of conglomerated flesh, stopping several times to walk outside her hut and breath deep, to gain strength from the fresh ancient Delta woods. Her hands shook terribly, at first, but little by little the work was complete.
Bo made good on the rum. Pure as any Haitian distillery. The vat was kept outside while he and cousins Lucretia and Yvonne worked on sealing what looked to Ronna like an oversized, wide mouthed, mason jar. Most of the younger ones, including Liam, Aeden, Jesse, and Lewis filled buckets with the rum ready to start filling in the vat. Anethea and Belanna prepared the powder and plucked the chickens. Caleb Blanche, who had a small farm on the other side of the highway, brought a goat for the end ceremony feast.
Everything was placed inside. Ronna went about making her hut a temple, a hounfour. Every last soul with Blanche blood came for the ritual, despite any personal misgivings of what they were about to do. Her oldest living great-grandmother came as well. Roynyman, born in 1862, was the last Blanche to be born a slave in the cotton fields of western Mississippi, whose daddy only spoke Creole and mother passed of dysentery when Roynyman was still young enough to play with dolls. She’d seen it all, and now would see this.
“Grandmamma, thank you for coming.” Ronna stood at the entrance of the temple, already adorned in her custom headdress of feathers and white powder. Grandmamma came, she came! How can the spirits resist us now? John will walk the world once more. Nothing can stop us. Nothing.
“Child, I pray you know what you are doing.” Roynyman trembled terribly with Parkinson’
s. Everything shook, even her hand which found Ronna’s face. She shook, but there was strength and wisdom in her near blind cataractous eyes; eyes that witnessed countless seasons and countless changes in the world, presidents, from Lincoln to LBJ, from mule and horse driven buggies to Ford Mustangs, from telegraphs to house phones (not that she owned one), from Edison to Einstein to von Braun with hands as warm as they were tender, hands that’ve picked the seeds of cotton plants, birthed ten children of her own, and dozens more from her children’s children, hands that’ve embraced four husbands, now long since passed, hands that’ve kept the family traditions and rituals and ceremonies, hands that’ve written scores of books recording everything she’s ever seen and done, and even inducted her own grandchild, Ronna’s mother, as priestess, and witnessed the passing of power to Ronna herself.
“Yes, grandmamma. The people are heartbroken and deserve justice.” Ronna held her ancient mother’s hand against her face. She was glad she was here to witness yet another feat. “These…our people, must have justice. The crimes must be answered for. Samedi will be pleased, I’m sure He will.”
“Will He? How do you know?”
“Grandmamma…”
“I will not stop you, child. You’ve got your own will. Your own mind. Just know, baby bird, the river will continue to flow downstream no matter how many rocks you put in the brook.”
Ronna nodded, more out of respect and love than agreement. She wasn’t trying to change the river, just…redirect the flow.
Conceiving (Subdue Book 3) Page 8