by Rod Davis
Elle followed me out and we walked about halfway towards a prefab storage shed in the far back corner. Past that all I could see were cotton fields and surviving stands of trees.
“Sleep okay?”
“Right through the nightmares. You?”
“Same.” She walked off a few steps and turned. “Vanessa wants to go to church later. I said I would think about it.”
I gave her a look that must have been sharp.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I drank coffee and looked out at the cotton fields. “I mean we didn’t come here to socialize.”
“I didn’t say we’d go.”
“No.”
“No.”
I got over it. “So, Tula. She’s okay? You must have talked a lot after all this time.”
She studied me, one eyebrow raised. “It was like we couldn’t stop.”
Conversation lapsed. We could hear big tractor-trailer rigs out on the highway, the way sound carries early in the morning. TV coming from one of the houses down the lane. We walked to the back fence.
“There’s something you should know,” she said, running her hand across the top of the chain link. “About Byron.”
I touched her hand lightly and she smiled a trace.
“She’s still taking it hard.”
“It’s more than that.”
I let go of her hand and finished my coffee. She held her mug to her lips a moment without drinking.
“I think you should know. I mean, I want you to know. It wasn’t an accident, at the river. He jumped. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
She looked back at the house. “It was what he thought he needed to do. He had it figured out. He knew the current would drag him down, ruin any autopsy. He didn’t think they’d even find his body.”
“He killed himself.”
“Yeah.”
“All this from last night.”
“She needed to talk. You know. It’s what I do for other people. My job.”
“You didn’t go into any more of our thing—”
Her eyes flashed. “Come on, Jack.”
I looked away. “So anyway . . .”
She let it hang there. “So anyway . . . there was Tula and Byron Jr. and the baby, Vanessa, to come in eight months. They needed his insurance.”
“I thought they had a good marriage. I don’t . . .”
“. . . All that. They loved each other. He was a good provider. All that.”
She looked up toward the morning sun, not even shielding her eyes. “Except he also . . . he also had HIV.”
The light showed crinkles of pain in the corners of her eyes.
“They were going to church. He just sat down on the bed, holding his tie, one shoe off and one shoe on, and told her.”
“Jesus.”
A flight of birds swooped low over us, then settled on a power line. Just as quickly, they flew away. “It was some woman up in Memphis. Tula said he cried and hit his forehead through a wall. Then they didn’t talk for a long time.”
The humidity was coming back. I felt sweat forming on my neck.
“Tula said she told him, at first, she told him she didn’t care if he killed himself.” She looked at me, squinting now. “But you know she did. A lot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And now Tula is HIV positive.” She took a deep breath, looked back at the house again. “Vanessa, too. Tula tells people she has cancer because, you know, it doesn’t freak them out.”
“But she told you.”
“I’m the only one other than her mother and her doctor and a case worker. She said it was killing her to keep it in. She doesn’t know I’m telling you. Keep it that way until we’ve gone.”
I nodded.
She threw the rest of her coffee onto the grass. Just missing my shoes.
“One other person knows. Lenora. She’s been helping Tula with spirit work.”
I averted my eyes.
“Doesn’t need your approval.”
“I haven’t been around those ways like you have.”
“Be around this way. Tula has a number I can call.”
“Lenora’s number?”
“Kind of makes hearing that little story all worthwhile, huh?”
“What?”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m just thinking about how we live through this.”
“How Tula gets through it, too, Jack.”
“Come on.”
Artula waved from the deck, beckoning us back. “Y’all want breakfast? Ellie, you still want to come to church with me?”
11
We passed the square, the back side of town, and an abandoned, rusty hulk of a cottonseed pressing plant that looked like an apocalyptic movie set. We got to the levee and followed a trail to the top, where we’d be able to see the best way to get down the other side. To scatter Terrell’s ashes at the river’s edge.
Soon we were threading a maze of fields and thickets of trees that had survived the clear-cutting that carved out Delta agriculture over the last century and a half. Every acre was anointed in blood and grisly death, whether from heat stroke, logging accidents, or the natural dangers of snakes, alligators, and bears. I became disoriented but Elle knew exactly which fork to take and what dead end to avoid.
We had left Artula and the children at the house. At first she wanted to join us, but she felt she had to take the children to Sunday school and church. She said it was important for her to attend every Sunday. She said she had to thank God for another week; that was one of the deals she had made with Him to get through this.
So we’d come on our own. Elle wanted to find the “beach” along the riverbank where she and her cousins, and sometimes Trey, had played as kids. It was on private land, but Artula said the owners lived in Atlanta, and not all that many people knew about it. She said especially on a Sunday morning we probably wouldn’t encounter anyone.
I was glad we had come alone. We needed time to regroup. Getting to Rosedale was only supposed to be a breather, and a way to find Lenora. But we had become distracted. Denial might also be a term. If I was supposed to be the man with a plan, I had come up short. Bad people were literally hunting for Elle, and for what she might be able to get for them. And now they were also looking for the guy who’d been shooting up the hired hands.
The dirt lane veered this way and that. After three or four miles, it headed directly toward the water. The trees got taller and thicker. I went over a small rise and there it was: frothing, full-bore, hard-churning, rain-swollen. The mighty Mississippi, the Amazon of America. The sight was so sudden, so vast, so immediate, I had to catch my breath.
We drove parallel to the bank for another half-mile or so. The muddy tide surged right up against the trees, ebbing and flowing through low, marshy scrub. I didn’t see any place where you could easily walk to the edge to scatter someone’s ashes.
“That’s it,” she said, almost in a whisper.
I would never have imagined something so serene in such a wild place. A sandy beach, fifty yards wide, sheltered from the powerful currents in the main channel by a half-moon cove cutting into the bank. It wasn’t a complete secret. The rutted trail that led down to the beach was littered with beer cans and fast-food wrappers.
“Here?”
“Here. Stop. We’re getting out.”
She took the urn from the back seat and we walked to the water. The hydraulic roar, the thickness of the air, the intensity of the colors made it all seem unreal.
She held the urn against her chest. “I’m going to pray now and say a few words. You don’t have to be here but I would appreciate if you’d stay by me.”
“I’m here.”
She bent down to wedge the urn upright on the sand, then k
nelt before it. I did the same.
She extended her right arm and with her index finger drew a circle with intersecting lines and one squiggly line encircling all that, like a snake biting its own tail.
She closed her eyes and prayed, her lips barely moving. Then she crossed herself and stood.
“May God be with you, Terrell Henry Meridian.”
We stood and she handed me the urn. She slipped off her black canvas sandals and held out her arms, palms up. She nodded, indicating that I should pour the ashes into her cupped hands. I unscrewed the top and did. She stepped barefoot into the waves, up to her knees, then allowed the ashes to sprinkle from her fingers. They lingered on the surface, sank, and were borne away by the current.
She looked at me and I knew she wanted the urn.
I kicked off my shoes and waded out to her.
“Goodbye, Young Henry. This is the home of all our people and all our life and it runs from now until forever. Bless you, bless you. . . .” She watched as the remainder of the ashes floated away.
Her eyes were moist but she looked at me with a smile.
Afterwards, we sat on a grassy spot above the beach. The river’s chorus unfolded: birds in the trees, the thunder of waves, distant noise from busy farms, the blat-blast of a horn from a barge making its way downstream for Vicksburg or Natchez or New Orleans. Same as Terrell’s ashes.
“What you drew back there. It looked Haitian.”
“Lenora taught us how to do those. They’re called vévres. It’s a way to pray to African gods.”
“You believe in that?”
“I believe what can it hurt?”
I nodded. “What about your brother? Believing.”
“I think he did. Maybe more, being around her.”
“Your aunt.”
“It’s what she does. She’s very devout.”
I watched the barge.
“Do you believe me?”
“That your aunt believes in voudou? Sure. I was asking about you.”
“I said.”
“Can’t hurt?”
“Jack, I was raised Catholic. I got away from the church but I still believe in God. You don’t? You told me you studied Zen.”
“I know. But it feels different.”
“You should believe in something.”
“Something and nothing are the same, the Buddhists say.”
“Let’s just sit here.”
“Let’s just sit here.”
She stretched her legs, wiggled her bare toes. “I saved some of the ashes.”
“What?”
“I put a handful in my pocket. I’ll give them to Lenora. She’ll make a special offering.”
I picked up a small rock and threw it into the river.
We fell into another silence, listening to nature’s chorus.
I stretched, too. “Any ideas?”
She bent double, her head between her legs, like a gymnast.
“About?”
“You know.”
She leaned back on the ground.
“It’s hard to think right now.”
“Still.”
“Yeah.”
She sat up, then got to her feet. “Can we go back? I know we need to talk but I think I’m ready to leave.”
I caught her face in profile. She had just buried her brother. She was the last of her family. “Sure. You want to just drive around?”
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
We put on our shoes. Elle carefully emptied the ashes from her pocket back into the urn, then stowed it behind the seat again. I cranked the engine.
In a way, I wanted to stay. It was another world. It was the Delta. But we had to leave.
I backed around as best I could without getting stuck in the muck, then drove back toward the levee and Rosedale.
We’d barely gotten started through the cotton fields when we came to a tricked-out black Dodge Ram pickup blocking our path on the narrow lane.
At first, I thought it was a worker or maybe a foreman from the big farm on which we were trespassing. I had a story worked out about getting a little lost, trying to find our way back to the Great River Road State Park, which was just to the north. But it wasn’t that kind of thing.
The pickup stood idling in the middle of a curve around a cotton field so that we couldn’t get around. The driver turned off the engine and climbed out of the cab. He was a youngish guy, burly, wearing a dark blue ball cap. Staring at us.
Now that I had a better look, I pegged him even younger. Frat boy type but more rural. He was holding a beer can. Unless he’d had one for breakfast, likely he’d been out all Saturday night and just coming home.
“Can you get around him?”
I looked at the drainage ditches on either side of the lane. “I don’t think so. I don’t suppose you know him.”
Her look didn’t need words.
“I guess not.”
He stopped alongside the front fender of his truck and pointed to me with his beer-can hand. “Say, what y’all doing down here on private prop’ty? An’ blockin’ my way?”
I got out of the Explorer.
“Just tell him we’re lost,” she said as I closed the door.
“Y’all not from around here, are you?” He started walking toward me.
I waited. “Look, if you could just move over a little we could both get by. We just need to get back to Rosedale.” I reworked my fake story. “We need to get to church. We’re visiting some friends.”
He closed about half the distance to me. “You don’t have no friends here.”
“Hey, man, can we just get by? Both of us go on our way?”
He pulled his cap lower.
“That’s a nigger with you, ain’t it, son?”
I rolled my eyes, took a breath.
“Ain’t it?”
“Look, we need to get by.” I heard the growl in my own voice. He was now only a few yards away from me.
“I said, what are you doin’ on this road? Fucker.”
“Move your fucking truck.”
“Yankee asshole.”
Putting it all in slow motion, my mind was trying to take in the whole incredible cliché of the thing even as I was working out violent possibilities.
Then I heard Elle’s door open and slam shut.
“You got a problem?” she walked up to us.
“Goddam, girl. Ain’t you something! You want to party?”
Elle gave him a classic sizing-up, and shook her head. “He’s just a drunken fool.” Then, directly to him: “We need you to move your truck. This is an access road. You don’t own it.”
“It ain’t access for you.”
“We just want to get around you. Okay?”
I had begun easing toward the back of the Explorer. Elle saw me.
“Jack, no. He’s just an idiot.”
“What was that?” he said, his words full of drunken saliva.
“I was talking to him. I said you’re acting like a fool. Now move that truck a little and let us get on to church.”
I kept moving.
Her tone shifted. “Where you going this time of morning all drunk, anyway?”
“What . . . bidness is that of yours?” He seemed startled at being scolded.
“I’m just saying this is Sunday church time and you don’t need to be like this. What’s your name?” Her voice sharpened.
“I ain’t givin’ you no name.”
“It’s just as well, then, so you don’t embarrass your family.”
He took a step forward, but tripped and fell down, first on his knees, then his ass. “Shit.”
“You’re way too drunk to drive anyway.”
“I was just goin’ to fish.” It came out in more of a slurred muddle
than ever, so he had to repeat it.
“Well, then, go.” She looked at me, maybe winked but I wasn’t sure. By now I had opened the hatch. The Remington was loaded and ready.
He got up slowly, wobbly. Whatever was in Elle’s voice had taken command of the morning. The boy stumbled back to the pickup and opened the door. “You jus’ get on, then,” he called out.
Elle turned to me. “Let’s go.”
I closed the hatch.
No sooner had we gotten back in the Explorer than we heard gears grinding. The Ram lurched backward, almost into the ditch.
I backed up, too, to get more room. Then the pickup started forward, fishtailing slightly, and hung onto the other side of the trail.
I drove forward, right wheels half into the ditch. When I saw the young bubba was at least moving in a straight direction I gunned it and we were past him, maybe a forearm’s distance from a sideswipe.
He kept going. I saw his brake lights as he got to the next curve.
“Probably drive right into the river,” I said. I could feel my fingers dig into the steering wheel.
“I expect he’ll be passed out before much longer.”
I looked across at her. “That was pretty good back there.”
“Well, you know, in theory I’m supposed to be able to read people and get in control.”
“You didn’t mind what he said?”
“What, calling me a nigger?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Of course I did. But that wasn’t the point, was it?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning not much point grabbing for a gun to make our lives even more complicated just because a redneck calls me a name.”
I drove a half-mile before I knew what to say. Then I stopped, put it in park, and shifted in my seat to face her.
“It set me off.”
“I could see that.”
She studied my face closely. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying something is weird in my head now.”
She looked at me “Look, we haven’t even had time to think about the fact that we’re in Mississippi, a black woman and a white man going around like it was the most normal thing in the world.” She paused. “That little moron back there—there’s going to be more of that. You know that.”