St. Silas was a small church at Third and Lincoln, made of wood, which had weathered as the Riverside Church had done, but not as happily. The paint was peeling, and two of the high, narrow windows had cracks in their panes. As the woman from Riverside had foretold, the building was locked up tight.
A faded sign gave the times for Sunday school and Christian worship. A placard in front designated the building as a National Historic Landmark and mentioned its role as a place of hiding for free blacks during the Civil War. Perhaps Emerald and August were hiding in a secret basement, but the building had a desolate, unused feel to it.
The church didn’t have a parking lot, but wheel marks in the wide grass verge along Lincoln showed where people parked. I left the car there and walked the few blocks to Sixth Street, where Nell Albritten lived, two doors down from the house where Emerald Ferring had spent part of her childhood.
I took Peppy with me: the chilly day was starting to get dark, a time when melancholy and loneliness can tighten their grip. Every time I logged on to my server, I checked for messages from Jake: e-mail, Skype, Facebook. Silence from Switzerland. I’d stopped sending my own messages—it made me feel too much like some forlorn figure in a fifties romance, waiting by the phone.
We passed the Amtrak station, a snug-looking little limestone building. A plaque on the station wall at about waist level commemorated the high-water mark from the 1951 flood. As I stopped to read the history, a dark SUV pulled up behind us and barely slowed before taking off with a great revving of its engine. I jerked Peppy’s leash to pull her close to me: I didn’t want to lose her to some would-be NASCAR racer.
Giant grain elevators blocked my view up the tracks. As we were crossing, a freight train rounded a curve, hooting mournfully. We jumped out of the way in time, but my heart was beating uncomfortably. Race-car drivers, fast trains, excitement I never experienced in Chicago.
We were about half a mile from the riverbank here. I imagined the muddy waters rushing in, taking away cars and houses, rotting the grain in the elevators. I shivered with something more than cold.
We skirted a dumping operation and a scrapyard whose sign proclaimed, lou & ed: breathing new life into old metal. It was as though I were looking at a microcosm of my South Chicago childhood. Instead of steel mills and the CID landfill, North Lawrence held grain elevators and scrapyards.
When we reached the residential stretch of Sixth Street, the houses looked old and feeble, not strong enough to survive a wild wind, let alone floodwaters that would have covered their roofs. Industry, salvage, dumping, and housing for the poor—they always go hand in hand.
As we trudged along Sixth Street, I saw what Gertrude Perec had meant about the houses being built next to the ground. They didn’t sit on foundations; doors opened level with the walkways. I would have guessed a Kansas house wouldn’t be built without a basement against tornadoes, but these little bungalows couldn’t run to anything more than a crawl space under the floor. Mud, spiders, snakes—I’d rather take my chance on the winds.
The Ferring house was still standing, or at least a house at that address was still there. With its peeling paint and sagging eaves, it looked as though it could have dated back to the Civil War.
The driveway was filled with detritus: bits of appliances, chunks of Styrofoam, old plastic bags. When I stopped to stare, trying to imagine what it might have looked like sixty-five years ago, a dog charged around from the back of the house, letting out a deep-throated bellow, hurling itself along the length of a heavy chain. Peppy growled softly, the fur on her back ruffing up. She was ready to go to war, very uncharacteristic.
A young woman came to the front door to see what the commotion was. I waved and started to move on but then thought I’d ask if she knew or had heard anything about Ferring. Perhaps old school records or a change-of-address card had survived the deluge.
I tied Peppy to a lamppost, where she and the house dog started a salvo. A dark blue Buick Enclave slowed to watch me. I frowned at it. Was this the SUV that had pulled up behind me at the train station? When the driver saw me looking, he gunned the engine and took off. Same driving technique anyway. I made Peppy quiet her threats back to throat rumbles before going up the walk.
The young woman was still in the doorway, watching me with active hostility. “You try to set one foot in this house and Peeta will eat your throat right out of your neck.”
I heard a whimper and realized that she had an infant on her hip. She barely looked into her teens herself, her dirty blond hair pulled back from a narrow face with feather-covered clips.
“I’m not from a collection agency, and I’m not going to challenge your dog,” I said. “I have a strange kind of errand. I’m guessing you’re too young to help me, but I’m trying to find someone who might be old enough to remember the family that lived here sixty years ago.”
Her small rosebud of a mouth opened in surprise. “You mean that black lady?”
I held my breath. “Yes, the black lady. Did she come here?”
“She was here with a man who was taking pictures. I came out with Peeta to drive them off—I thought they were trying some funny business with the house. Peeta chased them back to the car, and the man, he called out that she was a famous actress who grew up here. My boyfriend, when I told him, he said they were probably escaped convicts.”
The homeless man yesterday had guessed August was a runaway football player. Lawrence seemed to breed highly active imaginations in its citizens. I showed the young woman Emerald’s and August’s photos.
“She really is a famous actress,” I said. “Emerald Ferring. Look her up on Wikipedia.”
“And she really lived here?” The young woman looked around in incredulity at the junk-filled drive and the peeling paint, then ran her finger over her baby’s nose. “Hear that, Katniss? You could grow up to be someone famous, just breathing this moldy air.”
The baby turned her head, revealing the same rosebud mouth and round blue eyes of her mother. A little trail of spit dribbled from the corner of her mouth.
“When were they here?” I asked.
“I don’t really remember. Last week maybe, or the week before?”
“Did she say anything, like where she was going next?”
The young woman shook her head mournfully. “I thought they were robbers, so I didn’t want to talk to them. If she comes back, though, I can get her autograph and ask her to call you.”
I pushed one of my cards toward her through a tear in the screen door. “What about Nell Albritten? Do you know her?”
She nodded, warily.
“Did Emerald Ferring go on to see her after she left here?”
The young woman hunched a shoulder. “Can’t see that house from here. Kyle doesn’t like me talking to her anyway. He says let the neighbors mind their own business.”
The baby began to cry, and Peeta renewed his invective. It seemed like a good time to leave, but partway down the walk I turned to ask if her boyfriend had been in the Buick that drove past when I was tying up Peppy: I was wondering if he was a drug dealer, checking to see who was visiting his lair.
“In a Buick?” Her mouth curled in scorn. “Kyle can barely keep his old Dodge pickup going.”
I stepped carefully around the broken cement in the walk and knelt to unhook Peppy. I had to hold tightly to her collar while I did it—she wanted to make sure Peeta knew she might look like a chocolate-box illustration, but she could take him with three paws tied behind her.
“You realize we really are on the trail, girl? First Sonia, now the waif with the baby have both seen our fugitives. I know you’re all wound up, but try not to be too aggressive with Ms. Albritten.”
When we passed the mountain of debris in Peeta’s family’s drive and saw Albritten’s house, it came as a complete surprise. It belonged to a different universe, to the part of my childhood where my mother and the neighbors tried to keep the grime of the mills at bay. Gabriella and I had scoured the soot and su
lfur from the front step every morning, calling greetings to Louisa Djiak and other women doing the same work. We’d washed the windows and curtains once a month, and my mother had tended an olive tree in our Kleenex-size garden to lessen her homesickness for her Umbrian childhood.
Ms. Albritten’s front garden was similarly groomed, with bushes whose names I didn’t know sporting red leaves against the November gray. The little house was painted mauve, with deep purple trim around the windows. An old hitching post stood at the curb; I tied Peppy’s leash to it.
As I rang the bell, I could hear a television loudly proclaiming the virtues of a drug to help bladder control. I waited for the nanosecond pause between commercial’s end and program’s resumption before ringing again.
After another longish moment, the sound was muted and I could hear Ms. Albritten’s slow step to the door. She was perhaps ninety, stooped only slightly from age, wearing a heavy sweater over a navy-figured dress. She frowned at me but didn’t speak.
“My name is V.I. Warshawski,” I said. “I’m from Chicago, and I’m trying to find Emerald Ferring. A woman named Barbara at Riverside Church said you might know her.”
Ms. Albritten peered at me through thick lenses for a long moment, as if comparing my face to a wanted poster. “I don’t think I can help you, Ms. V.I. whoever from Chicago. I never heard of an Emerald Ferring.”
I started to remind her who Ferring was, that I was sure she’d been here with August Veriden a week or so ago, but I saw her jaw set in a stubborn line: she knew all this, and she wasn’t going to talk to me.
I stared at a broken television in the driveway next door, thinking it through. I wondered if Lisa Carmody, the Riverside associate pastor, had called her, warning her that I would probably come round, urging her not to talk to me. Did Carmody and Albritten herself know where Emerald and August were, or was this a more basic matter—a white stranger poking her nose in where it didn’t belong?
“Ma’am, would you talk to Ms. Ferring’s friends in Chicago, the people who asked me to come down here to find her?”
Before she could say no, I brought up Troy Hempel’s phone number, calling him on FaceTime so that Albritten could see that he was also African-American. Fortunately, he answered immediately.
“V.I. Warshawski! What is it? Have you found Ms. Emerald?”
I put him on speaker and held the phone so that Ms. Albritten could see the screen—and be seen—through the crack in the door. “I’m on the street where Emerald Ferring lived until she was seven. She was here about ten days ago with August Veriden, looking at her childhood home, and now I’m with a neighbor who needs you to vouch for me before she’ll tell me anything. This is Ms. Nell Albritten.”
Albritten took the phone but stepped back into the house to talk. “Who are you, young man, and why should I trust you?”
She shut the door as he started to explain how he knew Ferring. I could hear the faint rumble of his voice and Albritten’s own slow cadences in reply, but I couldn’t make out any of the words. They spoke for almost five minutes, and then I heard her unsteady gait going farther into her house, her voice on the phone, again with the words indistinguishable. Finally she returned to the front door.
“I hope I’m not making a mistake”—she sighed, handing me back my phone—“but I guess you can come on in.”
She peered down the sidewalk at Peppy. “Is that your dog out there? You might as well bring her in. There’s a couple of rough boys who fight with dogs over on Ninth Street. I wouldn’t leave her tied where they could pick her up.”
I’d wondered if the Buick had belonged to a drug dealer, checking out strangers in the neighborhood, but maybe it was a fighting ring eyeing how easy it would be to steal Peppy.
“She’s dirty,” I said doubtfully. “Maybe we could talk out here where I can watch her.”
“I need to sit. You bring her in and let her lay on a towel.”
18
Those Good Old Days
The room where Ms. Albritten talked to me was cared for as meticulously as her garden. The floral-upholstered couch and armchair were recently vacuumed, and she used starched white antimacassars to protect the headrests. The towel she’d laid down for Peppy was as brightly yellow as if it had just come from the store. I cringed at the thought of how it would look when we left, but Peppy obediently took her place on it, despite her obvious wish to explore the room. She held up a paw to Ms. Albritten, who gave a faint twitch of a smile.
“Hmmpf. I have biscuits I give that dog Peeta. He’s a little faker—barks for show, but that poor girl is deluding herself if she thinks he can protect her and her baby. Be best if he bit her worthless boyfriend in the ass and sent him about his business, but you can’t talk to young girls about love. They think women like me never knew what it was like.”
She gestured me to the couch before disappearing into the back of the house, her steps careful: her ankles were badly swollen under her support stockings. I heard the clink of ice against glass, the pouring of liquid, the fumbling with a canister, at which Peppy looked up alertly. Pictures were still flashing on the muted television—Judge Judy, it might have been.
Albritten had a gallery of framed photos on the walls: a solemn-faced man at different stages of life—in high school and college graduation robes, in an army uniform, and then older, with a wife and two teenage children. The children had their own array, chubby babies to Eagle Scouts. A recent picture on top of the TV showed Albritten with a group of other women in front of St. Silas. Albritten was by far the oldest; the youngest might have been in her forties. They were all smiling joyously, holding a banner that celebrated St. Silas’s 150th anniversary: 1864–2014.
Albritten presently reappeared with a silver tray holding two glasses, a plate of cookies, and a handful of dog biscuits. I decided she might find it insulting if I tried to help, so I watched while she arranged the tray on a polished coffee table. She handed a glass to me. Iced tea, which I don’t care much for in July and definitely not in November, but I’ve suffered worse in the line of duty.
“Your dog is well behaved,” Albritten said. Peppy was looking at the biscuits but not standing or making begging noises. “Here you go, good girl.”
She handed the biscuits to Peppy one at a time before sitting heavily in the armchair. “Emerald Ferring. Yes.”
She arranged her skirt over her knees. “Her mother, Lucinda, she came here after her man was killed in the war. There was a big munitions plant here, you see, the Sunflower plant, and they were looking for workers. Lucinda rented the house you were just at, where Peeta and Tiffany and the baby live. It was a long bus ride every day out to Sunflower. My man was off in the war himself, and I had a baby boy. He was three then, Jordan.” She nodded at the photos on the wall. “I was cleaning houses for white families over across the river, and my mother was here, looking after Jordan. It was good company for him to have little Emerald around.”
She gave a surprised laugh. “Her name wasn’t Emerald, it was Esmeralda, but Jordan couldn’t say that. He said ‘Emerald,’ and we—Lucinda and I and my mother—loved it: she was a jewel of a child. I’d forgotten that. She was such a smart little girl, knew her letters when she was three, always asking the deepest questions, about God and life and where was her daddy, and how she was going to be a ballerina or a pilot when she grew up.”
Albritten sipped her tea, the smile fading as she looked into a bitter distance. “You have to understand, this was a hard town to be black in. They fancied themselves, the white folks did, they fancied themselves because they were descended from the people who made Kansas a free state back in 1861, but they weren’t descended from John Brown, no, ma’am. They wanted a town that was all white, and so they kept black folk over here in the river bottom. Black children drowned in that river every summer—they weren’t allowed in the pools in town.
“Restaurants, only five restaurants in town would serve a meal to a black person. We sat in a corner of the balcony in the m
ovie theaters. They had a Ku Klux Klan chapter up at the university, and the basketball coach—he’s like a saint or a hero in this town—he was a big Klan booster. When Wilt Chamberlain showed up, he made them change some of their ways, but it went on for a long, long time. Ferguson, all these black boys being killed today, it’s just another chapter in a long book.”
She looked at me again, the same measuring look she’d given in the doorway. “I worried about Jordan over at the high school. They wouldn’t let him into the college-prep classes, you see. One of the women I cleaned house for, she was on the school board, I tried to talk to her about it: my Jordan was as smart as any boy in that school. She fired me on the spot. Uppity, I was. When he organized a protest among the black students, I was afraid for what would happen to him. Soon as he graduated, off he went to Vietnam, no college deferment for him. Although he made it through Howard when he finally came home safe again.”
A sense of shame made me hold myself completely still, the glass of iced tea freezing my fingers. Peppy looked worriedly from me to Ms. Albritten but fortunately didn’t move.
She gave a heavy sigh. “This part of town, in the river bottom, this was where we were supposed to live and get over to the main town as best we could to do the dirty work, the heavy lifting. The house where Emerald and Lucinda lived, where little Katniss is now, it was like most of the houses over here—no real floor, just plywood over the dirt. When the flood came, that plywood was no more cover than an umbrella in a blizzard. Water pushed up—it happened so fast we were lucky we got away with our lives. We lost everything. Lucinda, her wedding pictures, her man in uniform on his way to the fighting, all that disappeared like dishwater down a drain. I managed to save my grandmother’s silver spoons and the family Bible, but that was all.
“And then the waters receded and we had mud and mold and disease, but would those white landlords lift a finger to help? We had to clean and fumigate on our own. Those flimsy plywood floors, they came to put those back in but wouldn’t clean up the dirt first.”
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