Tom did not answer.
“And meanwhile, any old time your owner or somebody else’s”—he paused—“gets a mind to sell one of you off to pay a debt, there’s not a thing in the world you can do. You go on trying to save every penny you can from the handful Mistress Russell tosses your way like scraps to a dog. You go on ordering Gullah Jack out of your shop like you been doing every time he come whispering in your ear that we won’t be standing for this much longer.”
Tom turned his back. Fixed his eyes on the harbor and the tide glinting red. “Plan you’re spreading can’t end no place but one.”
“Still, you hadn’t walked away yet—not even with all my provoking, now, have you? ’Cause part of you wants to know more. Has got to know more.”
Vesey leaned closer. “What if you could play inside the buckruh’s rules and still work it your own way? What if you and me called it just a business transaction? Treat you different from all the rest. What if we paid for the weapons you’d make? Starting with three hundred bayonet heads.”
Vesey waited, then lowered his voice to add, “What if I knew you got somebody you’d be looking to protect? And that you been thinking somebody’s bound to get hurt. Soon.”
Snapping around, Tom glared at Vesey.
“Dangerous thing”—Vesey looked up at the blacksmith—“for a man like you to ignore somebody he loves, somebody who needs to get free of what’s hunting her.” He let his words fall like a hammer. “Every. Damn. Day.”
Tom stiffened. But did not speak.
“And someday, Tom, someday real soon, I’m visioning you’ll be joining us. Because you’re too smart not to know just what the future might hold for you if you don’t.”
Vesey lifted the Charleston Courier and spread it before Tom’s eyes. Just below and to the right of the masthead was an ad in bold print. “Since you like to pretend you can’t read a damn word, though I just happen to know you learned letters from the white smithy who taught you iron, I’ll read it for you, an ad that, one day, might be pitching the sale of somebody you’d maybe like to protect: AT PRIVATE SALE—A VALUABLE NEGRO. ONE PRIME, HEALTHY WENCH.”
“Enough, Vesey.”
“EXCELLENT HOUSE SERVANT, A MEAT AND PASTRY CHEF, GOOD TEETH, TO BE SOLD FOR NO FAULT BUT BREEDING.”
“Damn it. Enough! For the last time, don’t come round me asking again. Stay the hell away.”
Tom Russell broke into a run.
Chapter 4
2015
In the news clip being played and replayed on the screen of her motel room’s TV, a man was running away.
Cringing, Kate sat down on the bed with the box she’d hauled from her Jeep. In the video, graphic and unedited, the man ran across an empty lot, then collapsed, shot in the back by a police officer. Kate gripped the edges of the box as she counted the gun’s reports: One. Two. Three. Four. The shots kept coming. The man facedown in the dirt was black. The police officer, white.
She turned up the volume, the commentator’s voice blurting into the room: And in the death last week of the unarmed black man stopped for a broken taillight six miles north of Charleston, South Carolina . . .
Kate drew a sharp breath. She’d been so deep in her own grief and the upheaval of her own life she must’ve missed this.
A video captured on a bystander’s cell phone has emerged and appears to show a story counter to the police officer’s filed report . . .
Right here, north of Charleston.
Cranking the volume to its highest level, Kate lugged another half dozen boxes from her Jeep into the motel room and lined them up on the spare bed. The news anchor finished gleaning insights on the North Charleston shooting from three analysts, then shifted topics. With a sigh, Kate shut off the TV.
The nonsmoking room with a “property view,” which meant that it overlooked the parking lot, retained the scent of stale cigarettes and a cloyingly sweet floral air freshener meant to cover it. Green carpet circa the 1980s crawled leprous from door to bathroom sink, its stains forming a pattern of splotches and swirls.
But this was the only low-cost motel within walking distance of the historic district. So it would have to do.
Long enough, maybe, for the History Department to make its decision about her future. After which she might need to camp out on the street.
Closing the curtains, Kate dumped the contents of the next of her mother’s boxes on the slick paisley of the spare double bed. She’d already been through closets and drawers and cabinets until her head hurt, already plowed through several boxes of valentines from Kate’s kindergarten years, dog collars from three rescue mutts back, and ancient bank statements on which Sarah Grace’s handwriting had totaled up tilting columns of numbers and scratched through them and totaled still more, as if trying to make the math bend more in her favor by reworking the same numbers.
None of the half dozen boxes so far had yielded anything but memorabilia and out-of-date bills, and Kate surveyed the remaining batch of cardboard with an overpowering urge to pitch all the rest and spare herself the pain of reliving the past.
Sarah Grace must have saved every last sketch Kate had ever drawn. Each charcoal and pastel had been created with a single goal, one Kate had approached doggedly as a child: to make her mother smile. This one of the horse rearing, the proportions of his body just right—Kate had labored over the point of his hocks and the musculature of his neck all afternoon. Or this one of the sunrise over the water. Maybe this one would do it.
“You’ll be an artist someday, my Kate,” Sarah Grace used to say.
And Kate would sit up straighter, beaming.
Sarah Grace would nod and display the sketch or watercolor or oil on the refrigerator or safety pin it to the curtains above the kitchen sink or prop it up as the sole centerpiece on their Formica breakfast table. “You make sure you do something good with your life, you hear? Something that puts more beauty and more kindness into the world. And be a person of courage, my Kate. With a tender heart but a lot tougher hide.” Gently, almost fearfully—as if her daughter might disappear if Sarah Grace made the wrong move—she’d run a hand over Kate’s braid. But she often turned away at this point. “That last part’s important—the tough hide. I want you to hear me. Don’t turn out like your momma, Katie. It’s not safe.”
Kate had to squeeze shut her eyes now at the memory. And the image of a Ford Taurus slamming into a tree.
Rising to pace the room and twist up her long hair into a ponytail, Kate plunged back into the boxes: what had to be done. No avoiding the sound of her mother’s voice with every layer of paper.
Here was a stack of what must have been cards from wedding guests, their glossy white now yellowed and soiled. Kate flipped through a hum of names that sounded only vaguely familiar from her childhood, like the call of the bullfrogs late at night near their house on that leafy, lantern-lit street in Charleston: Manigaults and Middletons, Ravenels and Rhetts, Pinckneys and Petigrus and Poinsetts, but no Draytons that Kate noticed. Sarah Grace’s own parents had passed away when she was young, and Kate couldn’t recall her ever mentioning other relatives in the Low Country—or anywhere else. Or maybe she’d thrown out any Drayton cards when she and the dashing young Drayton she’d married had learned to despise the sound of each other’s names.
Here was the hairbrush with the soft bristles—too soft to do any good in Kate’s thick mane of hair—and the sterling handle. It had sat in a place of honor on Sarah Grace’s chest of drawers, though Kate had never seen her mother use it. She ran her fingers over its molded silver fleur-de-lis: so unlike anything else her mother had owned.
“All that sterling we got for our wedding,” Sarah Grace had confessed one night, her words soft and slurred, “I had to sell it, you know, Katie. Every last thing but this one. Just as well. Anything that expects a polish just for sitting there is a mite too high on itself.”
In the next box, Kate sifted through reams of crayoned art she’d made for her mom and a paper-plate tamb
ourine and a cardboard Thanksgiving turkey, its feathers traced from Kate’s first-grade hand. Here was her parents’ marriage certificate, dated June 9, 1990, just after Sarah Grace’s graduation from the College of Charleston.
And there beneath a cotton ball snowman was Kate’s birth certificate. Paper-clipped to it was an old postcard of a motel—nothing picturesque or charming about it that would suggest a reason for having saved it, just a one-story ramble of sagging doors and crooked clapboard in need of paint. Kate flipped it to its backside: the Wayside Inn in Wadesboro, North Carolina. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place Heyward Drayton would have stayed—ever. And why attach it to Kate’s birth certificate? Had she and her mother been there at some point together—possibly on their flight north from Charleston? Had it been some sort of happy memory of freedom that Sarah Grace had saved?
Kate googled the motel, but it had gone out of business. An article from the local paper announced Wayside’s demise: its earlier days as a picturesque family accommodation for motoring holidays in the 1950s, followed by its steady decline and a more recent history of “suspicious activity, drug deals, abandoned children, and sordid assignations.” Cringing, Kate wedged the postcard into her own motel room’s mirror at eye level. Maybe something else would spark a connection. She’d come back to it later.
Farther down into the box were pages of something else . . . photocopies. Some from microfiche, some from books, the shadow of the binding showing at one side of the copy. Housing records, it looked like, and a government census from Charleston, circa 1820. Personal letters and lists of inventory—also from early nineteenth-century Charleston. A tattered brown copy of a small book, The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey. And a 1991 booklet entitled Places with a Past from an exhibit during Charleston’s Spoleto Festival—some of the booklet’s pages dog-eared.
Sifting these items out from the crayoned art, Kate inspected each piece. She remembered these sorts of pages splayed over their kitchen table. And this tattered brown book, Sarah Grace hunched over it with a highlighter and a pen.
But, Momma, you finished college, Kate had protested once, swinging her braids to her back with a toss of her head. You said you read all this already. For your senior thing.
Sarah Grace had hardly glanced up. Thesis. My senior thesis. I read this already all right. And they gave me a diploma. But I didn’t finish. I didn’t.
Never an explanation for why the search was important. Never any signs that she might be closer to solving whatever mystery she must have seen there.
Kate flipped through the yellowed pages. Its bibliographic note explained that the book, published in 1970, was basically a reprinting—with the addition of a scholarly introduction—of a rare copy of “An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes, Charged with an Attempt to Raise an Insurrection in the State of South Carolina,” discovered in 1862 in the garret of a Hilton Head Island home. Almost all the original copies had been destroyed, the note continued, because the court document was thought dangerous for slaves to find.
Scanning the pages, Kate paused at her mother’s underlinings and highlights. On pages 81 and 82, she’d highlighted in bright green the name Tom Russell, a blacksmith. On page 140, the book listed the court’s verdicts, and again Sarah Grace had highlighted and this time also circled Tom Russell’s name.
“Right,” Kate murmured, nodding to the book as if she were having a conversation with her mother’s notes. “The weapon maker of the revolt. But why this revolt? And why did you especially focus on him?”
She squinted at the notes her mother had scrawled in the margin next to Tom’s name in a list of men condemned to death:
But Tom Russell
SURVIVED
Kate shook her head. “Not according to the court records.”
Sighing, she stacked each of her mother’s photocopies and notes, together with the little brown book, and slipped them inside her own laptop case. She would come back to this later, too, once she’d dug through more boxes.
Toward one box’s bottom, in a sealed envelope with a stamp but no address, Kate found a raveled blue ribbon strung through a small silver key—too small for a house or a car. And taped with yellowed cellophane to the dingy blue ribbon was a scrap of paper penned in her mother’s handwriting:
Palmetto 8-
The paper was torn on its right end, so whatever had followed the eight was gone now, except a stray mark.
Kate flipped open her laptop and googled Palmetto 8 along with Charleston. The search brought up a craft brewery, a condominium development, a bank, a hotel . . . she scanned the first couple of pages. Nothing that suggested a match for Sarah Grace’s tiny key. An idea niggled at the back of her mind but then slipped away. She slipped the key and its scrap into her wallet.
At the bottom of the same box was a Polaroid similar to the second one Kate had in her jeans pocket, her mother in cutoffs, sitting on the pediment high above the ground. Only on the back of this photo was Sarah Grace’s distinctive scrawl:
I’m glad for the happiness of your life now—or I should be. The truth will need to be known someday: that I have been a coward in every way. But for now, I beg you to hold close what only the three of us know—and I wish to God it weren’t even three. For Kate’s sake, and yours, I’m leaving Charleston.
God bless and keep you,
SG
And just beneath those initials, at the very bottom edge—as if Sarah Grace had added this last bit impulsively, almost afraid to include it in the same thought:
(TR lives on.)
Had this been intended for Kate’s father and never mailed? The I’m glad for the happiness of your life now didn’t fit, though. Not the word happiness, and not Sarah Grace’s wishing it for him.
And what about the TR? Surely not Tom Russell again. Lives on wasn’t quite the same thing as SURVIVED—was it? Maybe TR here referred to something entirely different. What possible sense could a reference to Sarah Grace’s research as a history major make in a note to Heyward Drayton?
Shaking her head again as she set aside the Polaroid, Kate sifted through other loose photos. Here was an early one of her father. Senior year, Sarah Grace had scribbled in blue ink on the back. Heyward Drayton was striking as a young man, the face all contradiction: a cleft in his chin suggested sweetness, and over it rode a hard mouth. His hair waved in abundance, and that topped a broad, arrogant forehead, a span of sharp angles and pride. It was a study of what ought not to exist together in the same moment, much less in the same face.
His eyes were a color Kate had never been able to name. Maybe just the gray glint of a blade.
She did not have his eyes. Anyone could see that.
Kate fanned out three more photos, apparently taken no more than seconds apart. A young Heyward Drayton held a swaddled infant and bent his face to hers—stiffly, holding the bundle a little out from his body as if he feared the baby might break.
On the photograph’s back in her mother’s hand:
Heyward and Kate
In the second picture, he nuzzled the child. In the third, the baby was laughing. The young Heyward had lifted his eyes from the child, the camera recording an expression of startled rapture. A hard, polished man, it appeared, who’d been ambushed by joy, eyes wide with wonder, a glint of wet on one cheek catching the camera’s flash.
Kate had never seen these before. She sat down heavily on the bed.
When she could stand again, she dumped the whole of the next box onto the bedspread. Nothing in this one but strands of colored Christmas lights—Sarah Grace had never embraced the demure white lights of her New England neighbors. From the box’s absolute bottom, though, tumbled a small blue velvet case.
Until that moment, Kate had forgotten it existed. And now her heart leapt. Not for the money it had to be worth, Kate would have told Botts—and been ferocious about it—but for what this little box represented.
The money, though, for a young woman suddenly now without any family and possib
ly soon without a job or any prospects . . . the money wouldn’t be such an unwelcome thing.
She circled the room twice before touching the box.
Inside, of course, would be her mother’s engagement and wedding rings, the diamond gleaming incongruously—only the lives it united having turned ugly. Kate remembered it vaguely from her childhood, not so much on her mother’s finger as sitting on Sarah Grace’s dresser in its blue velvet box. The diamond blinked enormous and clear in Kate’s memory.
The one material thing of real value I own, Sarah Grace had said. And I can’t stand the sight of it. After which she’d stuffed it in her sock drawer.
It was so like her to toss valuables into that sock drawer—or later, apparently, into a cardboard box with strands of colored Christmas lights.
Kate took a deep breath. Reached for the blue velvet. But as she opened it, two silver earrings tumbled onto the bedspread. She checked under the box’s lining. No rings.
Probably sold at some point along with the sterling to keep a roof over their heads.
She fought back a wave of rage at her father, who’d never bothered to contribute financially to their lives.
Lifting the earrings to the motel room’s dim lamp, Kate squinted at the dangling birds—herons, she realized, with their long slender necks and beaks, heads raised against the wind and lifting their wings, just ready to soar. The earrings glittered bright even beneath the sputtering motel bulb, as shiny as if they’d hardly been worn.
Slipping their wire hooks into her ears, she rose to view herself in the mirror, cracked in one corner and spotted at its edges but still giving back the flash of silver on either side of her face. Kate gave her head a quick shake, her mother’s silver birds nearly coming to life—as sparkling and free as Sarah Grace had been broken and trapped.
Closing her eyes, Kate felt the contours of the earrings and tried to remember ever seeing her mother wear them—but couldn’t. Sarah Grace must have put them away for good when she took off her rings, all painful reminders, no doubt, of the Low Country and the giver of the gifts, the man who had walked out of their lives.
A Tangled Mercy Page 4