by Rod Davis
We headed back toward town to catch the highway that would take us northwest to Jasper and then on to Oxford but first we pulled off at one of the downtown exits. She knew a little café on Second Avenue that had good breakfasts all day. I was starving and lightheaded.
I devoured my scrambled eggs, country bacon, grits, and biscuits and she picked at her fruit and oatmeal. We made small talk about the city, the weather, the news. People who didn’t know us would have guessed we had just started dating and were floundering for things to say.
The morning was about gone, but she said it wouldn’t do much good to get to Oxford before five because Aunt Lenora wouldn’t be back yet from a doctor’s appointment in Jackson. Elle said her aunt also had a house in Jackson, near Millsaps College where she sometimes taught a course on alternative religions in the women’s studies department.
Elle said Lenora divided her time between the two towns but lately seemed to be in Jackson more and more and Oxford less and less. Also, she liked her doctor in Jackson but not the ones in Oxford. Aunt Lenora did healing work, Elle said, and sometimes clashed with the M.D. crowd. She didn’t elaborate and by then we were outside, walking around downtown. It wasn’t hot, and the air felt good.
We found ourselves at Kelly Ingram Park, outside the Civil Rights Museum. We stopped in front of the statue of Bull Connor’s police dogs lunging at black protestors.
“Where were you then?” she asked.
“A little kid in a little town in Texas. I didn’t know anything.”
“They didn’t have black people?”
“Well, yeah. They lived on one side of town and we lived on another. The Mexicans in another. But there weren’t that many black folks.”
“Let me guess who lived in the worst part of the town.”
“I was a kid. That whole town is about gone with the oil bust. So where were you?”
“I was here. Or close to here.”
“In Birmingham?”
“I was born here, but after the bombings. Then we moved to outside Oxford.”
She touched the bronze sculpture, and looked around the rest of the park. A few white tourists. Some older black men on benches. Not far away were some dive bars, an auto sales lot, secondhand clothing shops.
“One of the girls killed in that church bombing, she was a relative on my mother’s side.”
“Really?”
“Really. I didn’t know her, but Mama always told us about it. It was always like, there but for the grace of God . . .”
“Yeah.”
We were walking again.
“I have to tell you about Trey.”
“I know.”
“If I tell you, it will be hard for you to keep out of it.”
I shrugged. She smiled, then, shaking her head, peeled away toward a bench where the path curved. Before sitting down, she paused, eyeing me with her head cocked, like a hawk on a fence post.
“It’s a long story.”
I sat next to her, stretched out my legs. “You don’t have to make it short.”
She looked across the park, toward the museum. “We grew up together. My family moved to Oxford when I was little. My daddy got hired on doing maintenance for the university, but what he really knew about from college was growing cotton and peanuts, that kind of stuff. He sometimes taught a night class at a junior college near there, which was allowed because the students were mostly black.” She paused but it didn’t need expanding. “And he also did some consulting for the local farmers, because word got around he was good. That’s how we got to know the Barnetts. We lived on a few acres south of town next to what was left of the old Barnett Plantation, and the manager was calling Daddy for help all the time. Mama helped a little when she had time, to make some extra money. The Barnetts never really did any of that work themselves. I don’t think they knew much about crops or husbandry or the land at all.” She paused. “Daddy always said that and I think he was right.”
“Seems like he would know.”
She drew a deep breath. Her body barely moved otherwise. “Young Henry and Trey started playing together when they were three or four, since we were so close and out there it didn’t really seem to matter at that age. Then we all started hanging out by the time I was in the third or fourth grade, even though I was a couple of years older.”
“Than both of them?”
“I was the Old Lady.”
“The boss.”
“For a while. Anyway, we stuck together for years in that way people do around here, pretty much into high school and then of course it started being a little weird. A couple of summers, Mr. Barnett, the one they call Junior, would have us go to Rosedale, where they had an old house in town and a small farm not too far from the river, for a few weeks. We had some relatives there, too. Not on the same side of town, of course.”
She smiled oddly. “Actually it was fun. We had the run of the town and except for all the bugs and mosquitoes it was like a kid’s paradise. Almost every day we were down at the grocery grabbing Yoo-hoos and hot tamales.”
“For me it was the Dairy Queen.”
She wiped a thin film of moisture from her forehead. “I think Junior just wanted Trey to have company so he wouldn’t wind up hanging around with who knows who in Rosedale, which wasn’t much of a town at all and really still isn’t. Even Clarksdale was a big city in comparison. Cleveland was huge. For Mississippi, you know. Junior was always nice to us. His family had owned slaves but you wouldn’t know it by the way he was. Mama always said that.”
Across the park, a van pulled up in front of the museum and some people in suits got out.
“Later on we all went off to school. It was in the eighties. Trey went out to California, to Stanford, for a business degree, but then he came back and finished at Ole Miss. Terrell and I both went to Tuscaloosa.” She watched the people walk into the museum. “I took a year off and transferred to Northwestern on scholarship. I got a psych degree. I really liked Chicago and thought about staying there, but you know, when the South is in you, you come back, sooner or later.”
“What I hear.”
“I wanted to stay near home, but not in Mississippi. The University of Alabama offered a good job working with marginal students so I signed up.”
Two young teenage boys on bicycles cut by, talking loudly to each other about girls. I heard the words “fine” and “Janeeka” and “Sharon Lee.” They looked at us and sort of smirked. One whistled. Elle waited until they were past.
“I started out counseling students on campus. But it didn’t pay much and I got on with a new program, helping unwed moms, addicts, abuse victims. Then the funding got cut to pay for their war and I went back to work at UA, but they let me do outside consulting to make some more money. There’s always lots of work. That’s how I got the contract in New Orleans.”
She rubbed her palms up and down the sides of her thighs. “It’s not just the abused moms. It’s their kids, too. It’s all passed along.”
She was trying to decide what to leave out, maybe get to later. It was very quiet around us. She lowered her voice a little.
“Trey and his dad, Junior, never got along. Trey didn’t care much for the cotton business and when Junior passed, he stopped trying. His mother had died of a stroke, they called it, years earlier and so he was the whole family all of a sudden. He changed a lot. He opened a gallery in New Orleans. I hear it does okay.”
“He’s an art dealer?”
“Sort of. Rumor is he got in deep with some gangs or maybe even the mafia out of Memphis or Texas. He was pretty much always owing big money to somebody or other. He gambled.” She was rocking to and fro. “Basically, used his gallery to fence stolen art and launder money for his mob buddies. That’s what I think got Young Henry killed, you understand? They had sort of hooked up again a few years back and I think Young Henry got in more
than he wanted. I just don’t know all of it.”
“You think your aunt does?”
“She and Young Henry were always very close. Our parents are dead, too, like Trey’s. Daddy of a stroke, only in his fifties, and Mama got bone cancer. It ate her up in a few months. We always thought it was chemicals in the fields. They died within a year of each other. Funny, isn’t it. None of us with any parents left. And now . . .”
I touched the top of her hand. She didn’t respond.
“But that was a dozen years ago, when they died. Anyway, Aunt Lenora pretty much became Young Henry’s surrogate mom. I was more independent, I guess. She really loves him. Loved him. And he thought the world of her.”
“I’m glad I’ll get to meet her.” It was just something to say.
“I guess Elfego told you about the other stuff.” She pulled her hand away. “When I think back, I guess I could see that. Trey and Young Henry being gay. It never bothered me. But it did most of the family, except Lenora and Mama. You can believe that. I think the day he went down to the Beauty Box in Tupelo to get his hair dyed was pretty much when it all started. Or that anyone knew about it.” She smiled. “He was only in the eighth grade.” Then her expression hardened. “Trey, that came on a little different.”
I gently touched her shoulder but didn’t linger.
She turned to look directly at me. Giving me the once-over. “People say Aunt Lenora has the second sight. Sometimes I think I do, too. I can see you don’t believe me.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s in your face.”
“I don’t want it to be.”
She stood up, and I did, too. A mosquito was buzzing around my ear and she reached out to flick it away.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.” How, I had no idea.
She glanced at her watch, a little Seiko on a thin leather strap. Carrying a watch was something I had given up.
We walked back to the Explorer. Traffic was thick heading out of town, but it lightened in the country. I found a decent FM station playing Buddy Guy and Muddy Waters but we lost the signal in Jasper. It seemed to be all country or Christian from then on but I eventually picked up a public station playing classical. The NPR stations are linked across Mississippi so you can move from one reception zone to another and stay with the same program. Hard to say if that’s a good or bad thing.
6
The highways through northern Alabama and Mississippi are not without beauty: rolling hills, thick rambling forests, working farms, small towns—bucolic to spare. Then there are the spots where poor people and their dwellings intrude on the fantasy, and history churns up the mirage. Not that I single out the South.
More than once, I looked in the mirror to see if we were being followed. It was pretty unlikely. I was a random addition to whatever drama existed between the Meridians and the Barnetts. I wanted to believe Elle’s story about Trey, but I wasn’t quite there yet. Maybe what I really wanted was for the story not to be true. If it was, it meant getting in deeper than I had anticipated.
Maybe what we both assumed that the police were thinking wasn’t so far-fetched. Maybe her brother really just had been mugged outside some club or at someone’s house after a stupid fight and dropped off on a back street. Cops had to play the odds on some cases, and this had to look like one where the murderer eventually would get coughed up, probably on some unrelated crime. Lovers’ quarrel all the way, they had to figure it. Even in intelligence, where a million angles converge on every op and lies are but strands of the final agreed truth, the dust usually settles on the most obvious villainy. People just aren’t that smart or that dependable.
Fact is, violent death in my adopted town was the urban equivalent of an occupational hazard. Maybe it came with being a city at the murky end of a great river. Bring what you will, roll-on-big-muddy sort of thing. I mean, it attracted me.
We were barely into Mississippi when I noticed Elle slumped back in her seat, fast asleep. Snoring a little. Maybe she had been more exhausted than she let on. Her eyeballs were rolling under the lids like she’d already hit REM. Dreams putting on stage what she was doing her best to close down while awake. I had only seen her cry that once, back in the Marigny. I hated to wake her. But I had to after Tupelo at the cutoff to Oxford. I had no idea how to find Aunt Lenora.
When she shook off the grogginess she said to take the Lamar Street exit off Highway 6. We passed stately old neighborhoods, the way the town liked to think about itself. It was only about four o’clock but there was a little traffic, most of it coming from the Ole Miss campus as students got an early start on the weekend. It’s not a big town and in no time we were past the courthouse and the boutiques that had grown up around it on the town square. I had never taken strongly to Oxford. I had a hard time thinking of Elle growing up anywhere near it.
Her aunt’s house was just northeast of downtown. Terrell’s apartment, or maybe it was a duplex, was off a loop on the northwest side. Elle didn’t want to go there and given all that had happened I didn’t, either. It would definitely be on Trey’s radar. Lenora’s might be, too, but whereas Elle didn’t think there was anything at Terrell’s that would help, talking to her aunt was a risk we had to take.
About a half mile past the square we turned right, down a hill and into a neighborhood of houses of varying levels of price and status. A couple of turns and we were on a street of small, modest bungalows.
“It’s that one,” she said, indicating a cream-colored brick with a green door, shallow screen porch on the front, surrounded by shrubs and flower beds. The yard needed mowing. The shingled roof needed work. A small gravel driveway ran along the left side to an empty carport. “She drives a Cadillac, would you believe? She says her clients want her to look prosperous.”
I slowed to a stop on the other side of the street. We looked at the house.
“The healer thing.”
“People have a lot of respect for her. She’s been Aunt Lenora to more people than me for years and years.”
“You come from an interesting family.”
“I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”
“If we live that long.”
She might have smiled. “So what do you think?” We looked at the house. It seemed quiet. Shades down. “Should we go in?”
“Or come back later.”
“That’s what you think?”
“Whatever we do, I don’t think we should stay if she’s not there. Do you have a key?”
“Under the watering can over on the side near that gate.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Jack, I have to talk to her. We’ve already driven over here.”
I did a quick recon of the street and saw nothing.
“What if she’s not home?”
“Maybe there’s a note or something.”
I eased forward and turned in, all the way into the carport, which I noticed was leaning about twenty degrees to the left.
“There was a bad storm last summer. She never got it fixed.”
I turned off the engine.
We both got out and walked to the front of the house. The door to the screened porch was open so I walked inside and waited at the door, still watching the street, while Elle went for the key. A calico cat darted across the lawn. The only furniture on the porch was a metal table and a clamshell chair. A broom in one corner.
Elle came back with a key and we were in.
The air inside was stuffy, but everything seemed normal, almost oddly so. Cozy, over-stuffed sofas, cherrywood tables, dozens of framed photos on just about every available surface, a lace-draped antique dining table, a TV and stereo in a prefab entertainment center. A big oil portrait of the Black Virgin dominated one wall, with votive candles and a clear goblet filled with sand and pebbles on a table underneath. Elle made her wa
y to the two bedrooms in the back. She returned, looked at me and shrugged.
I went into the kitchen at the back, and then saw another room off to the right, probably a converted sleeping porch. A thick strand of painted wooden beads and seashells hung from the entry door. I parted the beads. Elle came up to me. “It’s where she does her readings. You can look. It’s okay.”
The plywood walls were bare but for a poster of St. Michael, the archangel, and two framed prints: a snow leopard on a mountain and a Rousseau-like jungle scene. A table with votive candles, a bowl of water, a Bible, and a strand of beads took up the center of the room. Around it were a small couch and two matching armchairs. A shelf to one side was filled with books, photographs, a wooden sculpture of an African warrior, boxes of incense. A patchouli aroma permeated the room.
“So she does a lot of business here?”
“Some. More in Jackson. And she makes runs down to Laurel and Meridian—you know, our namesake.”
We stopped talking at the same time. Outside, the sound of gravel popped under the tires of a car pulling up in front of the house. Stopping. Big engine idling.
“Shit,” I said, more angry than I meant it to sound, as we hurried to the living room and the front window. The look she gave me was probably more frightened than she wished it to appear.
The blinds, yellowed but not dusty, were drawn. I raised my palm to her to stay to one side, and bent a slat just slightly. I saw a blue Suburban, darkened windows. I could make out a man at the steering wheel. Maybe another one in the passenger seat. I nodded to her and she came up to have a look, too.
“I would guess those are your friends from Tuscaloosa.”
“What should we do?”
“I’d say go out the back.”
“They’ll still see us.”
That was true. But I had been trained to always determine an exit.