A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  “I am sorry, friend,” whispered the woman, not turning her head, “thee will have to ride in such stench. The good Morris Brown who sent us said thee would know this secret conveyance. Thy friends cannot step onto the streets.”

  Moving slowly to avoid sound, Tom lowered himself into the box and very nearly fell back, the reek of death and decay enough to knock a man flat.

  The full moon threw enough light into the box to suggest the forms of three chickens. Headless.

  “May the death of these three creatures assist thy life, friend,” said the woman. “And may God dull thy sense of smell.”

  Wedged into the narrow coffin so that his head was hooked at nearly a right angle from his neck and his bent knees touched the top of the casket, Tom lay still, suffocating in air gone thick and putrid.

  The wagon rattled through the night with the creaks and groans of leather and wood straining across deep-rutted sand roads. They must be approaching the Lines and the King Street pass-through.

  Over the whine and groan of leather on wood and wood on earth, Tom heard a shout. Then hoofbeats approached.

  And stopped beside the buggy.

  Tom Russell lay there still as death itself in the coffin.

  “Thee must not let me despair, husband,” the woman was saying loudly. “‘Where, O death, is thy victory? Where, O grave, is thy sting?’”

  The rider alongside the buggy shifted in his saddle, his horse pawing at the crushed shell of the street. “You got to pardon me, folks. Got a duty to check all conveyances leaving the city. Had some disturbance tonight.”

  It was again the woman who spoke. “Of course. We’ve every wish of being good citizens, even at this grievous time. Thee must search as thee see fit.”

  The saddle creaked again. “You all understand now I wouldn’t ordinarily stop folks in this here kind of circumstance as you. It’s just my damn orders is all.”

  “We’ve no wish to slow thee down, sir, in thy duties.”

  A thud. The patroller leaping onto the bed of the buggy.

  “We’re bound to North Carolina,” said the woman. “To Flat Rock. Our ancestral home.” Her voice collapsed into a sob. “A slow journey with an old horse. Thee must forgive us, sir, for the dead has been such for some time now. And has begun, I fear—”

  A scrape of the coffin’s pine lid.

  A shaft of moonlight.

  “Jesus Christ!” More thuds on the bed of the buggy. A creak of the axles as the patroller leapt off.

  “—to emit a most powerful stench,” the woman finished.

  Horseshoes on the crushed shell. A scramble. “Y’all done satisfied the laws of Charleston,” the patroller said. “You folks are free to proceed.”

  Hoofbeats receded into the distance.

  “And thee,” said the woman, “have satisfied the laws of God.”

  The wagon lurched forward again. Rolled into the night.

  It may have been only an hour; it may have been more, but finally the buggy jolted to a halt.

  Footsteps over the shell. Then both the woman and man were lifting the lid. Helping Tom out.

  “Thee must forgive us,” said the man, his voice sad and strained, “for leaving thee here. We’ve gotten word they’re checking every inch of every conveyance up Ashley River Road. Thee would be found for certain.”

  Half crippled from being wedged so long in the box, Tom stumbled out and collapsed onto the road but made himself stand. “Thank you,” he managed. “Thank you.”

  The man hurled the three chickens far into the palmettos that lined the road.

  “God be with thee,” said the woman as she scrambled alongside him up onto the seat. Reins slapped on the flank of the old horse. “Courage to thee, friend. And hope.”

  The full moon rode high now, black clouds sometimes billowing over it—but moving quickly away.

  Tom ducked into a thicket of brambles so dense he had to slither under its tangle, thorns piercing a grid on his arms and back.

  Heart crashing into his ribs, he thrashed a place for himself at its center. His skin gone clammy and cold even here in this heat, he waited for dark.

  Mosquitoes swarmed his eyes, his mouth, his ears.

  Up ahead, a burying ground. Tom skirted its edge, the ground here turning soft, kinder on his bare feet.

  Drayton Hall. The brick mansion—which he could see only silhouetted against the moon—hulked up ahead. But its details he knew well—even after two decades. He’d been born here. Then sold along with his momma into the city. And his momma, alone, sold back.

  Its quarters on the bluff line nearby were one-room hovels. Here lived the people who, with the thousand years of rice-growing knowledge they’d brought from West Africa, had made the fields yield gold in every sense—gold-husked rice that had made generations of the planters rich.

  Tom paused at the far edge of the burying ground—this one for Drayton Hall’s slaves, a cemetery separate from the whites. He looked back once more toward the quarters. The people there, including his momma, if she was still alive, would help him without a thought for themselves. But he knew too well what it would cost anyone who was caught.

  Tom ran now, past the burying ground and toward the rice fields, their trenches controlling the freshwater flow—and helping him drown his scent.

  Mist wrapped itself around the outbuildings of Drayton Hall and the live oaks that shaded them there. Mist nestled into dips in the contours of the fields and banded the pine and palmetto trunks.

  Tom’s feet met the sides of the full trenches, his footprints swallowed in silt.

  He left the rice fields, diving past the dark curtain of live oak and pine. Skirting the edge of the blackwater swamp, he hurled mud and now blood from the shredded soles of his feet, his pants and most of his shirt splashed as dark as his skin.

  On three sides of him now lay the swamp, vast and throbbing with sound. Cypress trees, their bases swollen wide, waded deep in the water. With their roots buckled up like bent knees, the trees looked to be bathing with the shredded remains of discarded silk stockings: Spanish moss slung over the branches and vines.

  Above the castanet rattle of cicadas and the deep-throated call of the bullfrogs, Tom could hear his own heart.

  The wind was gaining more power, black clouds wrestling each other lower and lower.

  From now on, what lay behind was the woman he loved, the woman he would do anything for—anything, even now. Anything.

  What lay behind, too, were steel balls on fire and barbed rope that furrowed the flesh.

  And gallows.

  Chapter 30

  2015

  “I’ve been reading about the swamps,” Kate said as she and Rose careened up Ashley River Road Tuesday evening. A pink scarf flapping back from her neck and all her silver Mercedes’s windows down, Rose drove more like Jay Gatsby than the little old lady she technically was. The walled gardens and stacked piazzas of Charleston had given way to cypress and dark water glimmering through tangled palmettos and silver tendrils of moss.

  “And I’ve been reading how the swamps made Charleston a kind of fortress that was easier than perhaps any other city to keep slaves from escaping.” Kate pictured her mother’s notes. “Do you think Tom Russell possibly could have made it outside the city—maybe even gotten away?”

  “Through blackwater? That would be quite the feat.”

  “Blackwater?”

  “The cypress trees stain the swamp water to what looks for all the world like ink. Although during Emily Pinckney’s time, much of the swampland had been drained for rice fields. The land alone is worth seeing at Magnolia—as is true also of its neighbors Drayton Hall and Middleton Place.” Rose banked into the next turn with screeching tires, a smile of pleasure sliding across her face as she accelerated out of it, foot all the way to the floor.

  “We’re in a hurry, I take it,” Kate ventured.

  Rose turned her head, her hands turning with her, the Mercedes swerving right. “Punctuality is a vi
rtue too lightly valued these days.”

  Clutching the passenger door’s handle, Kate kept herself mostly upright, though white-knuckled. “So, Rose. About my talking with Botts. Do you think he knows where my mother’s rings are? And why?”

  Rose pursed her lips. “Percy’s a conundrum—I’ll grant you that.”

  “But you must trust him if he’s your attorney.”

  “Technically, dear, he was my late husband’s attorney. I’ve just never gotten round to giving him the hatchet.”

  Kate stared out the window into the tangle of palmettos and vines. “Could he be capable of outright theft?”

  Rose swung into another curve, her right foot stomping on the gas to rocket the car out of the turn. “I believe the creeds, dear.”

  Kate peeled herself off the passenger door. “The creeds?”

  “Of the Episcopal Church. Which assures me we are all quite capable of most anything.”

  Across a well-tended lawn, Kate maneuvered beside Rose among the well-heeled and pressed guests. Sterling platters of clam-stuffed mushrooms and bacon-wrapped shrimp floated on servers’ hands. Rose glanced down once, but only once, at Kate’s little black dress—a small thundercloud among the pastel linens and Lilly Pulitzer prints and seersucker suits.

  Kate wished she’d at least stopped to iron the dress’s duffel bag wrinkles.

  “Your scarf,” Rose pronounced, “adds a nice feminine touch, dear. To balance, you know, the I-know-more-than-you message that black always sends.”

  Magnolia Plantation consisted of a picturesque house—“Though built,” one of the other guests grieved to Kate, “well after The War”—with a wide skirt of a wraparound porch raised a full story above the ground and hundreds of acres of azaleas and magnolias.

  The sun warm on her face, the gardens rolling out to a river and, beyond it, the swamps, Kate listened to the friends of Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney—all four names aired out and in use for this sort of event, it appeared—recounting the history of the place. But Kate’s attention kept swinging across the crowd to search for Percival Botts.

  A tray of pesto shrimp on toast points was passing close by. Rose turned this away with the flat blade of an imperial hand but accepted a second flute of champagne.

  The string quartet just shifting from Brahms to Carolina beach music, Rose motioned for Kate to follow as she swept across the lawn to greet another cluster of guests.

  “So,” Kate observed, “it would appear that you know every last person here.”

  “My family, as you well know, has lived in the Low Country for as many generations as I have fingers. Perhaps toes, as well.”

  A gaggle of older women passed and reclustered close behind Kate and Rose.

  “Heyward’s daughter,” one of them said, forgetting to lower her voice. “My Law’.”

  “They say the Ravenel girl had the most inappropriate friends. Before Heyward took her away from all that.”

  “I once heard the most scurrilous gossip about her—nothing to do with the unfortunate choice of friends. And nothing I would ever dream of repeating.”

  A beat of silence.

  “Well, now you’ve gone and made our imaginations run perfectly wild, Adelaide.”

  “Not wild enough to come up with this. But I’m not one to gossip.”

  “This one certainly has her mother’s good looks, bless her heart. Let us just hope she doesn’t share the poor girl’s more . . . unfortunate characteristics.”

  Dumbstruck, Kate turned toward the women. Swinging back the weight of her hair, she opened her mouth to respond—viciously.

  But Rose lifted her champagne flute in a toast. “It is precisely our unfortunate characteristics that make any of us interesting—wouldn’t you say, ladies? Those of us, I might add, who are interesting.”

  Maneuvering Kate away from the gaggle, Rose led her through the gardens and down to the river.

  “Rose, what did they mean, those women back there? All their catty insinuations.”

  Rose flicked this away like an insect. “For some people old age means growing stiff in the joints; others grow stiff in the head—as if the brain calcified on what people were thinking six decades ago.”

  “‘The most scurrilous gossip.’ What did that mean? Do you know?”

  Rose hesitated.

  “Rose, you know more than you’re telling me.”

  “Actually, Katherine, I do not. And if I did, it’s not really my story to tell, now is it?” She waved an arm across the acres of azaleas beneath a canopy of oaks. “Do let’s admire this before returning to the party so that you can accost Mr. Percival Botts. We might allow him to arrive unaware that you’re here so you can pounce, don’t you think?”

  “Rose,” Kate tried again. “What Dr. Sutpen said about an atrocity that—”

  With a raised eyebrow, Rose made it clear they had switched topics for the time being. “I assume, Katherine, that you read a bit about the history of this place before coming. You probably know that Magnolia Plantation was owned by a John Grimké-Drayton.”

  “I . . .” Her mind back on the older women, Kate was struggling to switch subjects. “Read that today, yes.”

  “And you noted the Grimké and Drayton family connection?”

  “I had no idea my father’s family might be tied with the Grimkés. I was blown away.”

  “Again, dear, all the old names are connected somehow, a vast and complex cousinage, much like an intricate tapestry—or, depending on your perspective, like the bramble of the thorns that grew over Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom and kept out all visitors.” Rose said this cheerfully, as if she were equally willing to accept either view.

  “It’s huge to me, Rose—that connection.”

  “Related—cousins of some level, I suppose—to both Judge Grimké and the daughters, Sarah and Angelina, of hell-raising fame, as well as the Drayton line. John Grimké-Drayton never wished to own slaves himself, but when his older brother died in a hunting accident, he inherited this plantation and all ‘property’ attached to it. Nearly broke the man’s heart to inherit the slaves. And why didn’t he just release them, most people ask.”

  Kate accepted a piece of warm goat cheese with walnuts on toast points from a passing tray. “By that time in the Deep South, or soon after, at least, emancipating them would’ve been next to impossible, as in an act of the state legislature. Still, if he really believed it was the right thing to do, you’d like to think he’d have found a way.”

  Rose nodded absently and gazed over the marshland. “That’s right, yes. If it’s the right thing to do, one finds a way.”

  “What are you thinking about, Rose?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Something specific’s on your mind.”

  “Yes. But that’s for another day.” Musing a moment, Rose suddenly plucked a small oval frame from her handbag. “I thought you might like to see this.” The frame held a miniature sketch of a man in a silk vest, its gray the same color as his hair. Kate leaned in to inspect it.

  Above the vest was a face whose skin sagged sallow and loose from its cheekbones, sinking into dry, colorless pleats, the whites of the eyes gone yellow around the dulled hazel, like too many gin slings had stained them forever. The top of the man’s spine had bent to a shepherd’s crook.

  “You and I, Kate, know him well. For a man just shy of fifty, he’d aged powerfully fast.”

  “Jackson Pinckney!”

  “None other, my dear. When I found this yesterday packed away with a bundle of sterling cutlery I suspect no one has used for years, I knew you’d want to see it.”

  Kate studied his hands. “Like hooks. Made of old wood left out on the shore.”

  “You know, family legend had it that, when sober, old Jack Pinckney could hold forth on how slavery was economic suicide in the long term. He wrote treatises on it—remind me to show you those. Not on slavery as a moral outrage—clearly, he lost no sleep on that—but how the average planter would do better to hire Ir
ishmen cheaply and rid himself of ‘this millstone on the neck of the South.’ Deep in his bourbon, however, he was convinced that he was the real slave to that way of life. Pitiful, really.”

  “I think I’d manage to hold up dry-eyed.”

  Slipping the frame back into her purse, Rose lifted her flute of champagne.

  Kate motioned toward the river. “I’ve read about the intricacies of their rice growing—the trunks and gates and trenches, and how they had to protect the rice from salt water that might seep in during a freshet. But I’m still searching for clues as to whether somehow Tom Russell might have made it out of here.”

  They aimed their steps back toward the main lawn.

  “Meanwhile,” Kate said, “let’s see if anyone else has made it out here.” Increasing her speed to a racing walk, Rose right beside her, Kate rounded the edge of the main house.

  And there he stood: neck jutting forward, his tiny head encircled by seersucker and pastels like a gargoyle surrounded by flowers.

  Kate made herself speak as she approached. “Well. Mr. Botts. I was planning on contacting you. Again today. Honestly, I keep trying to imagine why you won’t respond to my calls and e-mails. Unless you have something to hide.”

  Champagne flutes stilled.

  Botts paled.

  “The manager at Palmetto Bank found a record that last winter someone—perhaps my mother, perhaps someone else—removed a ring she’d stored in her safe-deposit box. I thought maybe you and I could schedule a chat about that—at long last.”

  “Do you mind”—Botts kept his voice low but barely restrained, like a dog snarling at the end of a leash—“if we do this elsewhere?”

  “You mean instead of in front of a crowd?” Kate’s eyes swung over the faces. “Actually, I think these are the perfect people to join us in discussing Low Country family issues.”

  The gray of his eyes narrowed. “You are making a fool of yourself in public, Katherine. And making these people unspeakably uncomfortable.”