She loves being the center of attention. I can’t cover Heritage Week without a paean to Miss Hattie; readers won’t let me get away with that. And in fairness it would be hard to find anyone who knows more about the politics and culture of Lafayette and Taylor and Dixie Counties than does Miss Hattie. But you don’t exactly interview her. When you go to visit Miss Hattie, you’re not a journalist. You’re a scribe. You pull up a chair, you sit down, and you try to keep up.
While still ambulatory, Miss Hattie was a recurring guest at high school assemblies and homecoming parades. She remains the doyenne of Heritage Week and loves seeing her mug in the paper. Miss Hattie is very opinionated and dismissive of any authority, which drives her caregivers crazy.
I had an appointment loosely scheduled with Miss Hattie for the following week, so you can bet I was not pleased in the middle of my CNN interview to see Randall trotting up with his mobile phone.
“Sorry. It’s for you.”
Next thing I know, I’m speaking with some stressed-out nurse at Dowling Park directing me to drop whatever I’m doing and get over to see Hattie Briar. There I was, the big-shot journalist being summoned like a valet.
“Can’t this wait?” I grated over Randall’s phone.
“I’m afraid not,” came the reply.
“Is she dying?”
“I’m afraid not.”
I apologized to the newbie from Emory, grabbed a legal pad and a camera, and piled into my foreign SUV. Within minutes I was on a suspension bridge high above the river that Stephen Foster made famous. When Miss Hattie was a girl it was common to see the Suwannee coursing right up to stanchions of the Hal W. Adams Bridge. There were floods in those years, waters originating in the Okefenokee coursing south in combination with other tributaries to inundate homes and farms for miles on either side of the bridge. But now—?
When the Suwannee River is anemic and low. Sandbars that used to be invisible are now small islands sprouting tangles of grass and scrub. You can’t even take a Jet Ski through some places on the river, and it looks like that condition is becoming the norm rather than the exception. I used to put my Vespoli single in at the bridge for a scull down to Mearson Springs and back, but no longer. I tell folks that I retired my racing shell because there is too much debris on the river, too great a chance of running up on flint shelves or sandbars, not to mention Jet Skis and powerboats, but the main inhibitor keeping me off the Suwannee is my heart.
I have “some blockage” as Doc Trotter describes it, one of those women with a ticker that sooner or later is going to need tinkering. I rowed competitively through college with never a hint of a problem. I rowed doubles in the Head of the Charles nearly every year I was at the Globe and never missed a beat. But when I returned to my hometown I began to notice that I’d be short of breath. Sometimes a bit dizzy. I was rowing toward Branford on the Suwannee when I had my first “episode.” It was as though I suddenly could not breathe, like someone put a plastic bag over my head. I was in the middle of the river in a slender shell with rough water and in blind panic. And I was lucky. Lucky to get off the river and lucky to get an accurate diagnosis. Too often, women with cardiovascular disease are misdiagnosed or their symptoms are simply ignored. I got an appointment at Shands Hospital in Gainesville, did the various tests. “You’ll need a stent, sooner or later,” an intern told me. “Maybe a bypass.”
Maybe? That’s the best you can do?
I turned left past the bridge and days of glory to find the secondary road leading to Dowling Park. A few minutes later I motored past the stone gate which takes you into a mix of ranch-style houses and institutionalized construction, this last dedicated to the care of folks like Hattie who are in their last laps.
You can’t cut a mature tree of any variety on Dowling Park, so anything built, including the homes of retirees, is required to accommodate groves of water oak and hickory. The property is stunning. There are so many dogwoods that in spring you’re riding on a carpet of blossoms and the perennials are spectacular, hedges of azaleas broken with groupings of Ligustrum and pyracantha and nandina. Spanish moss hanging like laundry from oak limbs that run, in some places, no more than a child’s height off the ground.
I know my way to the “Extended Care” facility and arrived to find Hattie in her handmade rocker at a patio outside. She’s ancient and failing. As desiccated as a bag of sticks. I found her draped in a comforter, propped up to face the sun, eyes dark and bright and set as deeply in their sockets as berries pressed into a bowl of dough. A white-uniformed nurse in attendance was retrieving a carafe of iced tea from a lawn table nearby and I saluted to get his attention.
“You have any idea what this is about?”
“No ma’am. ’Cept Miss Hattie said it couldn’t wait.”
“Any chance I can get some coffee?”
“I’ll bring you fresh,” he said, nodding, and with that excuse left me alone with Laureate’s oldest human being.
“Miss Hattie? Miss Hattie, it’s Clara. Clara Sue Buchanan?”
“I see you,” she answered dismissively. “Seen you when came thu the gate.”
I took another step forward and sure enough, from Hattie’s vantage on the patio you really can see up and down the river, all the way to the Park’s iron-gapped entry.
“I’m beginning to think you’re part Indian, Miss Hattie.”
Her arms rustled like vines in her wrap. “Ever’body think he a damn Indian.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I fidgeted for a pen. “Well, why am I here, Miss Hattie?”
“Cause God put you here,” she replied archly.
I took a breath. “I mean why have you particularly brought me here?”
“Got something fo’ you. Over there.”
She pointed a bony finger and I saw what looked like an antique stagecoach trunk deposited on the far side of the glass-topped table. It was probably a Jenny Lind, a round-topped steamer trunk sheathed in leather and wrapped at intervals with iron bands secured by brass studs. A treasure chest fit for Long John Silver.
“This yours?” I walked over to inspect.
“Usta be,” she sighed. “Long time ago I sold that chest to Barbara Stanton fuh fifteen dollars. Hadn’t seen it fuh years. Now she done brung it back to me like a bad penny.”
I was floored. Miss Hattie is old and revered but she doesn’t come from the same social circle as the Stantons. Not by a couple of stratospheres.
“And how do you know Barbara Stanton, Miss Hattie?”
“We’re dog kin. Through the McCrays. Barbara was an O’Steen b’fore she married Baxter Stanton. ’Fact, her Granddaddy O’Steen had hisself a house near the gulf not too far from that barn Babs and Rooster built.”
Something told me I better find a pen to go with my yellow pad.
“So you are not an intimate of hers, but she drives out here from the Keys to give you back this beat-up old steamer?”
“She did. An’ that was after Hiram Lamb offered her a thousand dollars fuh it.”
“One thousand dollars? For this trunk?”
“In cash.”
“And Mrs. Stanton refused?”
“She tole Hiram she lost track of it. Said it got moved with the other furniture after Senator Stanton was kilt. Then soon’s Hiram left, Miz Stanton called me and I told her bring me the damn thing an’ I keep it.”
“Why would Barbara agree to that?”
“Cause she din’ want Hiram to have it, why else?” The old woman clucked in irritation.
I took a second to frame my response.
“Miss Hattie, I understand that Barbara was keeping the trunk from Hiram. But why does Hiram Lamb want this trunk? Is it the box itself he wants, or something inside?”
“They ain’t nuthin’ inside.”
My news meter pegged from intrigued to irritated.
“Miss Hattie, you called me all the way out here to see an empty box?”
She shook her head.
“Ain’t what’s in the box
now that Hiram’s lookin’ fuh. It’s what used to be.”
“Okay, and what was that?”
She shakes her head wearily. “All I know is it’s got somethin’ to do with Annette McCray.”
“You mean Butch McCray’s mother? The woman hanged herself?”
The old lady wheezed laughter. Sort of like a Chihuahua with asthma.
“Annie McCray never hung nuthin’ but laundry.”
What? What had I just heard?!
Miss Hattie regarded me slyly. “An’ what about Butch’s daddy? Whatchu know about Harold McCray?”
“Just that he was killed in a hunting accident,” I said, repeating that commonly held knowledge. “It was deer season, somebody missed whatever they were shooting at, and Butch’s father caught a round.”
“Old Man Kelly found him,” Miss Hattie said, picking up the story. “That’s Hiram Lamb’s daddy, case you don’t know, and Roscoe’s. Now, those two make a pair, don’t they?”
“Pair of something, anyway,” I agreed, and the ancient woman laughed.
“Anyway,” Miss Hattie went on, “it was December and cold and I was splitting fatwood at the deer camp and Annie was piddlin’ over her needlework when Old Man Kelly brought Harold McCray in fum de woods. Had Harold thowed back of his truck like he was hog meat.”
“Poor Annette. She must have been devastated.”
Miss Hattie spit carefully onto the patio. “Annette McCray was a hussy.”
“Hussy?! What d’you mean by that, Miss Hattie?”
“I mean that Annie McCray was getting grits off Kelly Lamb,” Miss Hattie declared. “An’ that’s the God’s truth.”
I leaned back.
“Well, that puts a different light on things.”
“Don’t it now?” She smiled wickedly.
“Bolsters the case for suicide too. Annette had to feel guilty as hell for cheating on her husband, and then to see Harold dead in the back of her lover’s truck? That’d be enough to throw most anybody.”
“I was there,” Miss Hattie reminded me. “And I’m tellin’ you Annie never missed a stitch.”
“I still don’t see why Hiram Lamb would give a tinker’s damn about a dead woman’s luggage, Miss Hattie.”
“Ain’t a box in the world don’t keep secrets,” the crone replied, shifting in her rocker like a rustle of leaves. “But not everything a secret. It ain’t no secret that Annie inherited the McCray homestead with Harold’s death; that’s public knowledge. And it ain’t no secret that if Annie had died without a will or other arrangement, every foot of that land would of gone straight to Butch, him being her blood and all. But Annie did make out a will, didn’t she? Butch’s mama made herself a will and named Old Man Kelly her sole heir and beneficiary. Them papers was notarized weeks before Kelly and Annie got hitched.”
“You think it was a condition of marriage?” I asked Miss Hattie. “Do you think Kelly Lamb told Annie he wouldn’t marry her unless she made him her heir?”
“Could be.” Miss Hattie shrugged. “Or maybe Annie used the will to get Kelly to take care of Butch. Or mebbe they was other reasons.”
“Other reasons?”
“Three months after that will was recorded Annie was dead.”
“Ruled a suicide wasn’t it? And there was an inquiry by the county coroner—no foul play suspected. It’s all in the Clarion.”
“Well, if it’s in the newspaper it’s got to be true,” Miss Hattie said, making no attempt to soften her sarcasm. “Just like when Harold McCray got shot. No foul play there neither.”
No foul play. But lots of apparent coincidences. And lots of land at stake.
“You have any idea who Annie got to draft her will, Miss Hattie?”
“Could be somebody at the courthouse, but I doubt it. More likely somebody she trusted. Maybe at Shamrock. Annie worked at the mill over there. Putnam Lumber—you familiar?”
“I’ve heard of it. Over near Cross City?”
“Ah hah. But I bet you a bright penny there ain’t nuthin’ wrote down about Kelly makin’ Butch his ward. Folks thought well of Kelly for takin’ in a retard, but I know for a fact the old man tried his best to put Butch out here in Dowling Park, at the orphanage.
“Made Annette mad as a hornet. One time during tobacco season, I was at the barn and I heard Butch’s mama and Kelly goin’ at it tooth an tongs, and Annie told Mr. Lamb if he wanted to keep her land and her bed, he had to keep Butch too. ‘Wills can be changed, cain’t they?’ That’s what she told him, and she meant it too. She always looked out for Butch, yes, ma’am. And then couple months later she’s hangin ’ in a smokehouse like a side of venison.
“I rode out to the house after the funeral, and there’s Butch sittin’ on the porch in the middle of his mama’s effects, tears runnin’ down his cheeks. Mother gone, now, along with daddy. That’s when I got Annie’s trunk. Her Granpa O’Steen brought it out after the funeral. Said Annie had asked him to keep it for her. Out at his place. Near the gulf.”
“Did he say why?”
“Just said she sent it to him from the timber camp. Y’know Annie worked out there for a while, at the Shamrock mill.
“But once Annie was dead and awl, Mr. O’Steen figured he oughta git that old steamer back with the rest of her possessions. Most of her personals that was packed up inside was give away by the time I got there. Dresses and towels. Pots and pans. I got this here trunk along with a milk stool and a washboard.”
“But she didn’t leave her son anything?” I asked. “Not a thing? Even Kelly left Butch a half acre.”
“That was white of him.”
I stretched out to tap the brassy trunk with my toe.
“I’d like to take a look, Miss Hattie.”
“Go on then.”
It was a heavily built luggage, but not overly large, the sort of chest you’d imagine filled with diamonds or rubies or pieces of eight. I slid a bolt from its staple and when I flipped up the hasp was immediately taken with a familiar perfume. The box’s unlined interior was constructed of marvelously fitted strips of red cedar and the distinctive aroma of that timber remained undiminished over the years.
I saw a nameplate bolted on the underside of the lid, a strip of brass clearly engraved in an elaborate cursive Annette Elizabeth McCray. But there was nothing else to see. No diamonds or rubies. Not even a speck of lint.
“A thousand dollars is a lot to pay for an empty trunk,” I remarked.
“Hiram don’t know it’s empty,” Hattie pointed out. “He must expect to find somethin’ in that box, somethin’ Annie put there, an’ I know in my bones that whatever it is, has got somethin’ to do with Butch McCray.”
I felt hair rising on the back of my neck.
“Pretty gutsy of you, Miss Hattie,” I said with a wink. “Hiding this thing from Hiram Lamb.”
“Ain’t guts. Money and greed have dragged evil into Laureate. That’s why people been seein’ things. Hearin’ things. They’s signs all over the county, as you know full well. And now I’m havin’ visions of my own. I don’t know if they angels or demons, but I’m too old to risk my redemption. ‘Keep a’holt of Annie’s box.’ Thass what I hear at night. ‘Keep Annie’s hope chest hid away.’”
“But it’s an empty trunk, Miss Hattie. What would be the harm in letting Hiram have it? Why not just give him the damn thing and be done with it?”
“NO!” She shivered beneath her thin blanket. “Only thing keepin’ Hiram Lamb from puttin’ Butch away is the fear of that box. He find out iss empty, Lord—! They be nuthin’ to hold him back!”
“And if Hiram comes out here looking, what are you going to do, Miss Hattie? What’ll you tell him?”
“Question is, what will you tell him?”
She turned to face me squarely, eyes bright and deep and dark, and I knew then why Miss Hattie had summoned me.
“I don’t know, Miss Hattie. I’m not sure I should get in the middle of this.”
She regarded me a moment.
“Used to be.”
“Went after all kind of people, what I heard. Judges and politicians. Mobsters. Movie stars.”
“No celebrities,” I said. “Pretty much everyone else.”
“Well, if you don’t break this here story, Butch McCray is gonna be dead in a ditch or locked in a crazy house. You gone let that happen, Clara Sue? Are you?”
What makes you believe one thing and not another? One person, and not another?
All I can tell you is—I believed Hattie Briar.
“I’ll do what I can,” I promised.
“All anybody can do,” Miss Hattie said, ending our pleasant soiree with a dismissal.
It was the last time I saw her alive.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Flying Saucer Sighted near Blue Springs
The Clarion
I left Dowling Park with a tangle of questions begging for attention, none of which I could tackle until I’d documented the epic contest between the Laureate Hornets and the Lake Butler Tigers. I got back to Laureate ten minutes before kickoff and had just parked my 4-Runner in the sandlot behind the school’s stadium when I saw Connie Koon striding over in denim jeans and jacket. I knew what to expect. Donna and Darla Koon had been jointly anointed homecoming queen and their mother had already told me she didn’t like the shots I got of her twins during the parade.
“You got ’em mashed all together!” Connie railed anew as I slung my camera over my shoulder. “You cain’t tell ’em apart!”
“Well, they are twins, Connie.”
Sometimes I get the feeling I’m not reading Connie rightly. I must have wrinkled her peanut somehow or another, though in this case I freely admit that Connie was not the only parent unsatisfied with my photography. I’d never had so many people bitch about my homecoming pics. On the other hand, folks all over the county seemed primed to fight over most anything. Even the normally placid competition for “Best Float” generated a war of vitriol. Hard to imagine that concoctions of Styrofoam and bunting could generate such passion, some parents outraged that the Royal Ambassador’s entry beat out the senior float, other parents excoriating a faculty who would allow alien influences in the school’s competition, though whether the despised aliens hailed from the Milky Way or Mexico was never specified.
Post Facto Page 12