Rose reached for her hand and squeezed it again—with startling force for a woman of her age. With her free hand, she lifted the sterling hairbrush from her lap. “That news, my dear, is your gift back to me.”
“You’re a part of what made a home for me here, Rose.” She hugged the older woman’s neck and pretended not to notice Rose dabbing moisture from her eyes. Kate shifted sideways in the swing to admire Waterfront Park, teeming with people.
Rose followed her gaze. “This is so very Charleston.”
“What’s that?”
“A time for every season, you know—a time to mourn and a time to dance. Only here in the Low Country, we sometimes do both at the same time.”
Lights had been strung all through the live oaks and palmettos and crepe myrtles and from the pavilions that covered the bench swings, the harbor washed yellow and pink, and between the fountain nearest the pier and the pineapple fountain farther down the boardwalk.
It struck Kate again with almost physical force: the infernal beauty of this place steeped through with pain. When she’d first arrived back, she’d thought of Charleston as a city in amber, trapped in a two-hundred-year-old form. But it was alive, with a vibrantly beating heart—both vulnerable and resilient.
At a tent a few yards away, the staff of Penina Moise was roasting oysters for the crowd, Mordecai Greenberg himself not stirring the fire—his sideways nod to keeping kosher—but his leonine head swiveling right and then left as he greeted each person who passed.
Julian Ammons, pipe clenched in his mouth, was bending over the fire, inhaling the smell of roasting oysters, but he straightened now, a hand over his argyle vest. Seeing Kate, he walked to her. “So then. How are you?”
It had struck from behind, a spear of sorrow that took her breath.
And suddenly she was crying. For the Emanuel Nine—the nine victims—and the survivors, the families, the church, the city left maimed by the loss. For the workhouse and hangings. For the fire and fear and hate that had first brought that church to ashes. For the courage that had raised it back up. Crying, too, for her own everyday aching loss of her mother—the done and the undone: Sarah Grace, the open wound that had been her adult life, unable to forgive Heyward Drayton and, most of all, unable to forgive herself.
“I’m sorry,” Kate managed after a moment, passing an arm over her eyes roughly. “I’m not sure where that came from.”
Julian Ammons surveyed her for a moment. “We academics know more of obscure manuscripts than we do of the life in the office next door.”
Kate nodded, grateful to let him talk, to keep her head down and regather herself.
“I was a teenager in Boston, in Roxbury—anything but upper crust—and worked hard to lose the accent I’d brought with me from childhood. I was a child in the South. Me, the angry black kid with the bad attitude who despised every last thing about Birmingham—Bombingham, we called it back then. Fire hoses. Attack dogs. Maniacs who could blow up four girls at church and get away without consequence. The azaleas in front of my grandmother’s porch reached full bloom in April. She lived on the next block from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Watered those shrubs with her tears—each one big as my office desk.”
Kate looked up.
“It was the pines around her house, people said, that made them so lush. Acidity of the soil. Granny Ruth claimed, though, it was her tears and her singing to them.” He shot a wry look sideways. “She never could get lyrics to stay put in their own song, though—Cole Porter and Jesus ending up in the same verse.”
A hand slapped over his heart, Ammons crooned the next lines:
On a hill far away,
in the still of the night,
the emblem of suffering and shame . . .
Kate laughed—and surprised herself that she could.
Julian Ammons held up a finger. “Lesson number one from my grandmother’s azaleas. A life worth living is one of compassion. And a life of compassion will include many tears.”
On the bandstand nearby, Scudder Lambeth was playing along with the Satin Seagulls. He smiled over at them, but then his gaze swung to the street, and his fingers fumbled to quiet on the neck of his guitar. With a nod to his fellow musicians, he swung off the stage.
Kate twisted around on the bench swing. A buggy strung with black bunting was just pulling to the curb.
The boy up on the driver’s bench beside his daddy was climbing aboard Scudder’s shoulders, Elijah Russell alongside with a hand on one of the child’s legs—like he needed to touch part of the boy’s skin to be sure he was still there.
“I hear,” said Rose quietly, “the child is improving at last.”
“It’s been a long several weeks. Nobody ought to see what he saw. But he’s improving, yes. Want to come with me?”
“You run on, sugar. I’ll pay my respects in a moment.” Plucking a handkerchief from her handbag, she squared her shoulders toward the harbor before dashing at her cheeks with the silk—and Kate pretended again she didn’t see Mrs. Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney cry.
Kate waited by the oysters and fire as Scudder swung Gabe to the ground and everyone else had had a hug—Mordecai Greenberg with his whole-body wrap and a long line of church ladies with their smothering kisses on Gabe’s cheeks and forehead—even Julian Ammons with a stiff, pumping handshake.
Then, craning his neck, the boy reached out for Kate at the edge of the crowd and threw himself into her arms.
She hugged him hard around the chest—so hard she suddenly feared he’d stop breathing. He hugged her back, not letting go.
So much to say, all jammed there in her throat. “I’m so proud,” she managed at last, “to be family with you.”
Mordecai Greenberg raised both arms above his head, his head thrown back, that flat bush of beard parallel with the sky. “Mishpachah. To family!”
“To the past,” said a deep voice beside Scudder. Julian Ammons had raised his glass, his pipe curled in one finger. “And what we learn from it. But also to the future. To hope.”
Rose lifted her Chardonnay. “To a forgiveness that saved a city.”
Judge Russell nodded, lifting his Coke. “And astounded the world.”
Gabe listened, his eyes sweeping from one person to the next. “Lots,” he whispered.
Slipping out of the knot around Gabe to let others have their chance to hug him and ply him with another platter of shrimp with sausage and grits, Kate leaned into a live oak.
A wiry figure shambled up behind her, a yellow bow tie jutting out between the hunch of his shoulders.
“Botts.”
“I am not at all sure I handled it well. Sarah Grace’s request of me.”
Kate kept her eyes on the harbor. “You knew about the Wayside Inn. About the son she had.”
Botts gave a single nod—and even that appeared to cause him pain. “It was clumsily done, perhaps, my approach to keeping her secret. But my first loyalty was to her, you must understand. She trusted me.”
Kate looked him in the eye without resentment for the first time she could remember. “My mother carried her own story around like a terrible burden. I can imagine it must have been heavy for you to cart around, too. Your affection for her. And your working for her former husband. I think I do understand, Botts. For the first time in my life.”
Gratitude sprang into his eyes.
“It helps me understand my father a little better, too—all his treating me like I probably wasn’t his child, his warning me against creating more public scorn, his fear of my digging too deep into the Low Country past. It doesn’t make me like him now any more than I did. But it helps me understand why he felt lied to—betrayed, maybe, by the part of my mother’s past he hadn’t known—how he let himself become so tortured and bitter and mean. Maybe it’s progress that I’m sadder for him now—all the hate he strangled himself with—than for myself, not having a dad.”
She sized up Percival Botts—who, as it turned out, was more an awkward, lonely lit
tle man than a spider or gargoyle or cobra. “Guess I’ve learned a few things about forgiveness these past few weeks. So let me start by saying I’m sorry, Mr. Botts, for assuming you were the villain here.”
Botts’s tiny eyes closed, taking this in, then opened. Again, gratitude flickered there.
Rose was approaching, alongside Elijah Russell and Julian Ammons, the professor’s plate mounded with shrimp and grits. “I was just telling these gentlemen, Percival—if we’re not interrupting you and Katherine,” said Rose, “that I will be setting up a trust fund.”
She addressed Dr. Ammons. “The DNA tests I mentioned to you have concluded that the modern-day Russells do appear to be genetically linked to the dried blood on that grisly handkerchief that came down to me in a cedar box in my attic—which Kate and the judge and I are inclined to believe would be, according to Emily Pinckney’s journal, the blood of Tom Russell. The judge here and his son had already spurned, albeit politely, my overtures at passing down a bit of inheritance—even if our families had been biologically related.”
Kate leaned back. “So what’s this about a trust fund?”
“As it’s perfectly morbid, and no fun at all, to wait until one dies to watch others enjoy one’s riches, the judge has agreed to help me set up a fund—”
“With the assistance,” Botts interjected, “of her attorney.”
“Of course.” Rose surveyed her audience. “Scholarships for children of limited means. I’ve no delusion that several hundred years of cruelty can be made up for with one small gesture of one white woman of a certain age. But let me add this: I cannot go with a clear conscience to my heavenly reward—whose architecture I expect to look a good deal like Charleston—without the fund coming to pass.”
Elijah Russell held out his arm to escort Rose toward a bench well removed from the band, which, she announced, was a good deal too loud.
“You, Judge,” Rose was saying as she took his arm, “possess manners of the old school. Bully for you. And despite the lab’s report that your family and mine may not be biologically connected in recent history, I hope I may consider you henceforth part of my people. A personage from the judicial branch in the family again might not be a bad thing. The last was during Prohibition, and a teetotaler. I do hope you’re not the sort who makes others relinquish their bourbon.”
The judge turned his head only once to grin back at Kate before he and Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney strolled out of earshot.
From the pocket of her sundress, Kate drew a faded receipt and a pen. In a few simple lines, she blocked in the palmettos, the pier, the lights shimmering over the harbor—and a boy scampering over the boardwalk now, his head thrown back. Not laughing exactly. Not yet. But there was release in his face and his running. The horror of the summer that was still too often reflected there on his face, a tumult that churned in his eyes, had calmed for the time being. For tonight, his brown eyes reflected the lights strung through the trees. For tonight, he could let his legs fly over the pier. For tonight, he could just be a boy.
And tonight that was all Kate needed to draw. A boy in a beautiful park. Her family. Her home.
“Someday,” said Scudder, passing behind her, guitar in one hand, his eyes on the sketch, “you should really trust yourself to do something with that talent.” Without looking back, he turned to walk toward the band.
But Kate caught his arm. “Maybe . . .”
He faced her, one eye crinkling at the corner. “I’ll go with maybe if that’s all I’m getting for now.”
She laughed. “Maybe I should try trusting a really nice guy who’s worked hard to be my friend.”
“Maybe”—he bent his face to hers—“he’d be elated.”
“Scudder!” someone called from the band.
Grinning, he pulled away. “I’ll be back,” he said. “If you’ll have me.” Several paces away, he turned again. “That is, if you’re staying.”
Kate smiled down at the lines of her sketch and stuffed the paper back into her pocket. “Why wouldn’t I stay? I have family here.”
The Satin Seagulls had begun to play around dusk—a peculiar but fitting mix of early nineteenth-century music Daniel had suggested, including old spirituals, as well as jazz and Carolina beach music, old sand-in-the-shoes hits, and the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?” Just now, the band was setting down its instruments, Daniel stepping to the mike as the guest baritone, with Gabe pressed close by his side, eyes on his daddy’s face.
Deep river, my home is over Jordan.
Dan’s voice soared out over the boardwalk, over the harbor, over the long-armed live oaks and the hanging moss that seemed to tremble on the lowest, most sorrowful notes.
On the buggy behind Beecher, on top of a board placed over the benches, stood a structure covered in a black cloth. As Daniel reached the end of the song, Gabe tugged at the cloth, and it dropped away.
From a base of oyster shell cemented by tabby, a sculpture rose: a heron of cypress and iron lifting broad, powerful wings up onto the next current of the air. Over its head and neck and wings glowed ceramic shards, hundreds of them, glazed bluish white with copper edges, so that light sparked from the spread of its wings. Nine holes had been ripped through its body, but the heron’s head and neck were arched steady and strong, the heron in flight. On its tabby base was a plaque bearing the names of the Emanuel Nine, followed by a single word:
UNFETTERED
Pouring from Waterfront Park and all up the boardwalk, a crowd circled Beecher and the buggy that bore the sculpture.
Kate saw Dr. Sutpen file by, admiring, his pipe bobbing from one side of his mouth as he exclaimed over the sculpture’s virtues to anyone who would listen: “And if you look heah, y’all will notice the buhd’s very holes give it its remahkable strength . . .”
The crowd kept coming. Kept stopping to study the list of nine names. Kept repeating the names to each other. Reminding each other just where they were when they heard what had happened one night in Charleston. And what had happened in the days after that.
When the band shifted back into rhythm and blues, the dancing commenced.
Kate was still gazing up at the heron. “Dan. It’s perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
Julian Ammons drew his pipe from his mouth: “Superbly done.”
Smiling as Gabe raced past where Elijah Russell was spooning out roasted oysters, Kate leaned into a pier railing and marveled. At this place. At this strange turn of her life.
Rousing herself to lend a hand to the huddle of people wrestling a long board, Kate helped slide the oysters still in their shells across the long piece of plywood with a hole sawn into its middle. “Like this?”
Scudder laughed from where he sat perched, strumming his guitar softly along with the band. “You’re getting the hang of it. For a foreigner.”
She watched the sun’s rays slant golden across the water from behind their backs to the west.
All around her, couples began the slow, shuffling steps of the shag as they spun and dipped. But Kate’s eyes were fixed on the lights.
Lips pulled to a red bow of concentration, Mordecai Greenberg launched into the sliding steps with an older woman Kate recognized from the gallery staff of Cypress & Fire, but their progress was halting, with him turning every few beats to embrace another arrival at the park.
Julian Ammons, his pipe in his shirt pocket now, strolled down the line of steaming platters, his own plate mounded in shrimp and grits, baked clams, and roasted oysters. “I’ve been meaning,” he was explaining to Mulligan, the officer’s head cocked skeptically, “for some time to make more than my usual overly scheduled visit in my overly harried manner down to the Low Country. But now with my research regarding Fort Wagner, I’m able to call the remainder of the summer”—he lifted his plate—“scholarly duty.”
“It’s a very thorough approach to understanding this place you’re taking, inside and out,” Mulligan responded. “My hat’s off to you, Professor.”
&nb
sp; Judge Russell, Officer Mulligan, and Julian Ammons stood close together now, their heads bent over a cell phone.
“Play it again,” the judge said, shaking his head at the screen. “My Lord. It really did. Thought I’d see the Atlantic run dry before I’d see that flag coming down. One more time.”
Two gray heads, a red shrub of hair between them, stayed bowed, the three bumping each other and nobody caring as the clip played again and again. And again.
Kate turned to take in the whole odd panoply of them, dancing and eating and laughing.
Something brushed her side.
And there was Scudder, hands thrust into his jeans, looking bashful. “You all right out here alone?”
“I was just thinking of the first time I stood there on the seawall and looked out over the harbor. I’d just met Gabe. And saw you there. And thought how looking at Charleston was like standing in the set of a movie studio where different actors from different period films keep wandering through—time all out of joint.”
“That was just a few months and a whole world ago.”
Scudder stood quiet beside her a long while, the two of them looking out over the water, where dusk was settling now—the colors of a blacksmith’s fire at its heart, blue and yellow and red. And a ship set out to sea with its dinner-cruise load of sunburned tourists.
But as Kate squinted out at the ship, what she saw was a slender, dark-haired figure, a face with delicate features, the arms cradling an infant, her head swinging slowly to survey the city, then lifting up to the sky—eyes closing as if in relief.
“Dinah,” Kate murmured. “Who made it safely away. And lived to come back with her son.”
Gabe went cavorting by just then, a skewer of roasted shrimp and pineapple clutched in one hand.
“Tom Russell,” Kate added. “Weapon maker. Survived.”
Scudder said nothing. Just nodded. And watched the harbor with her.
But the beat of the beach music conspired with the splash of the waves on the seawall, and soon they were swaying in time.
A Tangled Mercy Page 39