by Ann Hite
Bess appeared behind Nellie in the attic and nodded at me. “You got to see what she’ll do if she don’t leave.”
Nellie didn’t hear her, only me.
I saw it all in clear pictures. Nellie holding the ax over her head. Blood, Lord Jesus, the blood. Them horrible vacant eyes where Nellie had gone out of her mind.
The room grew too little, and I got myself out of there. I don’t even know what I said to Nellie. She was a curse on me and I never warned her about a thing. Later, when I calmed down, not telling her what I seen weighed heavy on me.
A week later, I slid off from the Dobbins’ house with the thought I would stand on Nellie’s doorstep and tell her everything I saw. But I never got down her drive. Merlin Hocket stood in my way. He was a mighty little man. Not much taller than me and little boned like a boy. But his face told me I shouldn’t mess with him.
“Go home, little girl. Don’t shadow Nellie’s door.”
“I got to tell her some stuff and then I’m through.”
“Leave things as they are. She’s a softhearted girl. I’ll not have you convincing her to leave. I need her. You understand? Nellie will come out alive.”
I opened my mouth but never got to say a word.
“If you tell her about Hobbs’s murdering ways, she’ll go for the sheriff. She’ll get it in her head that more can be done. The right thing. That will be her death. If you tell, I’ll bring down the worst kind of curse on your family. I’m too close to let you destroy my work.” He stared at me with pure hatred.
In my heart I knew I was lost to helping Nellie. What would happen would happen. Nellie’s future was sealed when she married Hobbs Pritchard. I had to trust Merlin. I left him standing in the road. And to this day, I’ve never stepped on Pritchard property again.
The night Nellie chopped Hobbs’s head off I woke up out of a deep sleep with a scream echoing in my head. A cold sweat covered my body and for a minute I was sure Nellie had died. I wasn’t a baby, but I wanted to go sleep with Mama in her bed. What if Hobbs showed himself to me?
Time went by, and I didn’t hear a thing about Nellie or Hobbs. Then one afternoon I seen Nellie walk out behind the church to God’s spring. That water had healed the worst snakebite on my arm and saved me.
I understood why Nellie stripped down and washed. She was baptizing herself. God’s finger was touching her soul.
* * *
The next ghost to come visit me was Merlin. I was hanging wash on the line and there he was, standing behind one of the Pastor’s nice white shirts.
“If you want to see Nellie, be on the road in morning, early. There’ll be a truck, wave it down.”
“I thought you’d be finished with the mountain since Nellie did what she did.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “I’ll never be finished with the Pritchards.” And he was gone. He was a spiteful spirit.
But I listened to him and got myself out on the road early the next morning. And sure enough the Connors’ truck came rolling up the road. It was so foggy it was there before I could think about it. I waved like a crazy person. The truck stopped.
Mrs. Connor opened the door. “Lordy Shelly, you nearly gave me a heart attack in this fog.”
“I come to ride with you. I want to see Nellie one more time.”
Mrs. Connor opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “I don’t want to know.” She reached over and pressed some paper in my hand. “That be from Nellie.” Two one-hundred-dollar bills is what I had.
Mrs. Connor shrugged. “Don’t ask.”
I saw Nellie before Mrs. Connor did. She looked like some little old boy coming down that mountain road. When she got in, I scooted in the middle. She looked at me, thought for a minute, and then said one word: “Shelly.” That was all that needed to be said. I rode all the way to the train station in Asheville. We left her standing on the platform, waiting on a train to God knows where. Before we left I gave her a hug and whispered, “I seen you in the spring. You’ll do just fine. Don’t worry. That’s healing water.”
* * *
So it was over and done. The whole mountain soon tired of buzzing over Hobbs missing. They was happy, if the truth be known. As for me, months at a time would go by before I thought of the people he murdered.
Hobbs waited three years before he appeared to me, standing on my front porch like he’d come calling. “Rose is coming up this mountain. This mess ain’t over by far. It ain’t never going to end.” And then he was gone, leaving me to think on who in the world Rose could be and what wasn’t over.
Part Four
Rose Gardner
Thirty-four
My first memory was of Mama making a deal with one of our neighbors to sell me for a thousand dollars. The poor woman had lost her husband in the Great War with Germany, and she was lonely in an awful sad way. I was three years old but smart for my age. The widow taught me to cook, read, and cuddled me on her lap. When the time came for Mama to turn me over and take the money, she backed out. So, somewhere inside her mixed-up mind, she truly loved her only child, me. But all the same, I worried that the widow had been my only decent chance in life and one day Mama would abandon me for good. I never complained about fending for myself and made good use of the time. At five I had read the Bible through twice and found a wonderful book called Tom Sawyer that I swiped from a bookstore next to the shop where Mama worked. Often people looked at me with pity in their eyes: Poor Rose, she has the worst kind of mama. But I loved her all the same with my whole heart, the kind of love that saw no wrongs. I taught Mama to read better, did her nails, and cooked her supper, hoping these things would keep me in her favor.
Mama was a beautician who ran the numbers and conjured hoodoo spells on the side. By the time I was fourteen, she had taught me everything I needed to know about men. Useful stuff like how to get jewelry, trips, and good meals. How to make them smile when they wanted to beat me instead. I was born in Louisiana, right in the heart of hoodoo and voodoo country, New Orleans. But Mama pulled up our roots, and I couldn’t remember a thing about the city. We moved around the South, living in every state below the Mason-Dixon Line. Mama couldn’t abide Daddy and pretended he never existed. Sometimes she made out that my birth was no different from Mother Mary’s divine conception. That was my mama just full of herself. So I never had a steady male figure in my childhood. Mama looked just like Mary Pickford, and this got her a lot of attention, but the kind of men Mama picked was here today and gone tomorrow. She wore her welcome out with every relative we had and some who weren’t even kin.
When I was seventeen, we landed on our feet in Atlanta, but not before I had attended ten different high schools and gave up altogether. Mama said I was smarter than any of the kids I was going to school with. She was right, but still I wanted to go. She had found work in a decent beauty shop right close to Oakland Cemetery. The year was 1938 and times were hard. The Depression wouldn’t go away even with President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Women—even the well-to-do ones—weren’t having their hair done as often. Too many times I had seen the line for the mission’s soup kitchen snake around two blocks or more. Men, women, and even kids would wait and hope they would make it through the door before the cutoff. People were living in tents and lean-tos made out of cardboard near the railroad tracks. On many nights I fell asleep to the sound of the railroad men rounding up the hobos, scattering their pitiful belongings. They always attacked at night to catch these poor souls off guard. I wished I knew a spell that would make times get better, but hoodoo didn’t work on that big of a mess, or so Mama said. She and I shared one room over the beauty shop. For me that room was enough. Being with Mama was always enough. She made sure our stomachs were full and we had a roof over our heads. Sometimes it took me smiling pretty and sitting next to her latest boyfriend to get him to cough up the rent, but this was a small price to pay to keep our tiny family intact.
One day Mama sent me to buy her special perfume—Chanel No. 5—from Rich’s de
partment store. She said a woman had to keep herself up because you never knew who might come walking in the shop to whisk her away. That one small bottle of perfume cost five dollars, a fortune, a week’s worth of food, Mama’s paycheck. After I had the perfume safe in a brown sack, I took my time and watched the trolleys come and go. The air was heavy, hazy, and thick that morning as if a bad storm was going to roll in from the west. My hair had turned into a million tiny curls. I came upon a crowd of men, pushing and shoving their way into a small business. The sign above the office read TYLER’S EMPLOYMENT AGENCY. A young man with a neat haircut, dressed in a crisp white shirt and a sharp blue tie, walked out from behind a tall counter where he had been helping several men at once. Men who all looked the same, rumpled dress coats and dusty dark pants. Their shoes had seen better days, with heels run down to nothing. Some didn’t even have shoelaces. The look of irritation on the young man’s face turned to surprise and then fear when he saw how many men were outside on the sidewalk.
I was only a few feet away and could smell the men’s sweat. Lines cut across their faces with worry and something like rage. The young man pushed the door closed and turned the lock in one motion, leaving the crowd outside to roar their disapproval. Two men just on the other side of the door yelled words a girl shouldn’t hear. One of the men had a cap pushed down on his head, hiding his eyes. His fingers formed a fist. The man hit the glass with one swift motion. The glass turned into a spiderweb and took flight. A rather large piece struck the young man in the forehead. A red stream of blood splattered over the blue tie.
“The paper said you have jobs!” yelled the man who shattered the glass.
A touch on my arm made me jump, and I dropped the brown bag on the sidewalk. A sickening crack let me know what I had done as the brown paper turned wet and the air smelled of flowers. Mama would kill me.
“Young lady, you need to go home. Things are about to get ugly. No place for a girl.” The man speaking had once been handsome. His dress jacket told me he had known what it was like to have money in his wallet before the world turned upside down. I bent down to pick up the pieces of the bottle; a fist caught the man’s jaw. I was knocked to my knees. Sirens and whistles told me the police were near.
“Go on now.” The man’s eyes were the bluest blue. “Go!” He gave me a push.
I left the bag of broken glass and ran until I could see the beauty shop. Mama would be livid. There wouldn’t be any explaining how I broke her perfume. When I swung the door open, the bell tinkling, relief flooded my chest. Mama smiled her sweetest smile. “Well now, here is my beautiful daughter, Rose.”
Our luck had changed, and it came in the form of Mr. Homer J. Carson, a fancy business owner from North Carolina, who happened to drop in the shop for lemon shampoo. Lemon shampoo for a man; I just couldn’t imagine. Mr. Carson owned the only rock quarry in Asheville and his business was doing just dandy thanks to the WPA and all its projects in the South. He took one long look at my mama as if he were drinking a glass of ice tea on a hot day. Mama packed up her hoodoo, quit the numbers, and put on her entertaining hat. The change was that easy. Homer J. Carson married her before she slipped away from him and moved us to Asheville, the city of romance. Mama sure made me want to throw up with that one. Her move into a new high-society life and pretending that our old life never existed might have fooled some, but I, Rose Gardner, her daughter in every way, knew better. When she looked at me, she couldn’t help but remember exactly where she came from, the beautician who ran numbers, conjured spells, and almost sold her only child for a thousand dollars. She couldn’t hide behind her pretty smile, behind her clipped and proper words, and that’s what made her decide I needed to change too. But her lessons in determination led me up Black Mountain almost four years after Hobbs Pritchard came up missing.
I was the daughter Mr. Carson always wanted but never had. His late wife, Jessica, who was everywhere in Mama’s new home—on the walls, in the closets, and even in the kitchen, where her apron still hung on a hook by the stove—wasn’t crazy about children. Mama didn’t marry Mr. Carson to make him forget his wife. She didn’t marry him for love or romance. No, as long as he gave her lace dresses, new hats, and a hefty allowance, Mama was in heaven.
She warned me to stop using the hoodoo she taught me, told me to put those backward ideas behind me. And I listened, and even gave it a try, until Hobbs Pritchard came into my life. I’m the reason Hobbs came up missing, a misguided spell.
Because of Mama I met Hobbs. If she hadn’t been having one of her fancy parties, where ladies whispered behind her back, where she could never measure up to dear Jessica, my life would have turned out completely different. She had ordered a hundred of those dainty finger cakes that a girl could pop in her mouth and let the icing dissolve on her tongue, even though Mama told her it only added weight to her hips.
Hobbs showed up with the bakery’s deliveryman, who was his poker buddy. He tried to sell Mama homemade liquor to serve at her party. Mama could see straight into his soul and see herself. I’m sure that’s why she detested him on sight.
“I don’t want moonshine. I’ve moved on to better things.” She laughed and turned her back, motioning the deliveryman to follow her in the house with the boxes. “You do understand my husband owns the stone quarry?” She flung this over her shoulder like a dart at a dartboard, smack dead into the bull’s-eye.
I watched the whole scene play out while sitting on the back porch swing. Hobbs probably wouldn’t have noticed me if I hadn’t laughed. Any girl on this earth could see how handsome he was, but his looks weren’t what made me tingle. Excitement vibrated off him with a fiery energy.
“What are you sitting out here for in those fancy clothes? Shouldn’t you be helping your mama with her high-and-mighty party?” He sneered.
I stood and met his stare. “I don’t give a damn about my mama or her so-called friends. I’m bored to death. This city is dead.”
He threw his head back and laughed at the sky. And it wasn’t a nice laugh. “Come on with me into your mama’s garden. It seems right pretty. Maybe we can find something alive in there.” Again he laughed.
Mama prided herself on Jessica’s flower garden, famous for its hedges that formed a maze guests loved walking through. I held out my hand and he helped me off the side of the porch.
Hobbs lit a cigarette, and we kept a lazy pace, not touching, even though I wouldn’t have minded. As soon as we were in the middle of the maze, he pulled me to him and kissed me.
My body melted into him. I had to be a lady and not let things go too far. “Excuse me, but maybe I didn’t want to kiss you.” I’d been kissed plenty of times. Shoot, I even let some boys go to second base before I halted their fun. That was my intention with Hobbs.
He kissed me again, long and sweet.
In the kiss I tasted danger. “Your friend should be ready to leave.” Even I could hear the lack of conviction in my voice.
“Let him go. I’m a big boy.” He kissed me again and pushed me against a tree, tugging at my dress and underwear. I tingled all over.
“This is enough.” I was more determined.
“No teasing, little girl. I know there’s not one thing ladylike about you.”
His hard part freely bobbed around. God, I couldn’t help but be amazed since I’d never seen one before.
I pushed his chest with all my strength. “I’m going back to the house.”
“Nope. Don’t fight me. You know you want this.” He held me without much effort.
I wiggled but it didn’t make any difference. The first push hurt but things moved so fast I couldn’t even cry. He finished before I could summon the air to yell. I never imagined my first time would be pushed up against a tree in the middle of a hedge maze. I always thought I’d be in love, but Mama always said love doesn’t have a thing to do with anything.
He zipped his pants and looked at me. “What’s your name?”
Mama said not to give my gifts away. No good
man wanted to buy the cow if he could get milk free. I looked at the ground. This wasn’t going like I wanted.
“Hobbs Pritchard is my name.” He touched my hand and turned to walk away but came close again. “I’m coming back to see you. Meet me here at midnight.”
“Rose, Rose Gardner.” His scent of whiskey and sweat was on me.
“I’ll meet you right here, Rose Gardner.”
“I know hoodoo.” Was this a threat or an offering?
He kissed me one more time. “I just bet you do.”
A rush of energy ran through me. Did I hate him or love him? There was no in-between place.
“I like you, Rose. I like you a lot. Do you like me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Good. You can find out.” He was gone before I could say another word.
I was left straightening my dress and hungering after a man who most would say was the worst kind of creature. But he liked me. I needed someone to like me.
When I met him that night under the moon, he held a rose—a rose, mind you—in his fingers. Now, that took some thought. His hair was combed back straight. “This is for you.”