The Hound of Justice

by Claire O'Dell

  I turned the engine off and listened to it tick for a moment. Eight twenty. Not that late, even for country hours. The porch was dark, but I could make out dim lights from farther in the house. So maybe I was expecting a welcome committee?

  At that I had to laugh. I slung my bag over my shoulder and climbed the two steps to the porch and the front door. No doorbell, of course, so I knocked politely.

  Almost at once the door swung open. A skinny girl confronted me, head cocked, eyes narrowed. She wore baggy jeans and a T-shirt with the logo from a video game company. Her hair sprang out in a wild mass of corkscrews. She eyed me and my device with a far-too-knowing expression.

  “Are you Tamika?” I said. “I’m your cousin Janet.”

  “I know that,” said Miss Shade.

  An older girl, sixteen or seventeen at least, shoved Tamika off to one side. “Cousin Janet. I’m Letitia. Never mind this little pest. Come inside. Let me take that bag for you.”

  Letitia relieved me of my carry-on and ushered me through an old-fashioned parlor and into the even more old-fashioned kitchen. Memory washed over me like a waterfall, cold and clear. The brick tiles. The broad wooden table in the center of the room, with half a dozen chairs around it. The enormous double sink, the dishes from the evening wash-up stacked in the drainer. The strong smell of soap, leavened by the soft scent of yeast.

  Meanwhile, Letitia was explaining how Aunt Jemele was upstairs with her mother, tending to Gramma. I vaguely remembered Letitia’s mother, my father’s much younger sister. Letitia set my bag next to the table and motioned for me to sit down. “Just wait here a moment. I’ll go for Aunt Jemele.”

  She vanished through another set of doors. From a distance, I heard the noise of many feet trampling, then Letitia shouting, and another voice—a boy’s this time—shouting back.

  I took a seat at the kitchen table and ran my fingers over its surface. Ancient. Planed smooth by a great-grandfather or an even more ancient great-great-cousin. A few dents here and there, probably owing to an obstreperous cousin. Tamika or someone like her. Might’ve been me.

  I heard the heavy slow tread of footsteps and swiveled around.

  A gray-haired woman entered the kitchen. She wore a loose cotton dress and a dark blue scarf over her braids. Her face was seamed from age and weather, her lips were pale against her dark skin, and she moved awkwardly, as if she weren’t used to the changes that age and weight had brought. She might have been in her sixties. A bit older than my father would have been, if he had lived.

  The woman eased herself into a chair opposite me. “I see you still a curious girl,” she said. “I’m your Aunt Jemele. You can stop staring at me now.”

  I recognized her voice from our last phone conversation. A low and lilting voice, as smooth as molasses. I could just call up a memory of a much younger Jemele, her eyes black and snapping, as she traded jokes with my father.

  “Aunt Jemele. I’m sorry to come so late—”

  She shrugged. “Don’t matter. I know the roads aren’t so good.”

  “That,” I agreed. “Besides, I didn’t want to drive too fast and get a ticket.”

  Jemele gave a wheezing laugh. “No, that you don’t. Good to see you ain’t forgot everything. We’ll get you set up here for the night. You must be parched, too.” She rapped on the table. “Young Benjamin! Tamika! I know you both listening behind that door. Get yourselves in here.”

  The double doors banged open. Young Benjamin and Tamika piled into the kitchen. Both of them kept their expressions meek and dutiful as Jemele told Benjamin to carry his cousin’s bag up to the old sewing room, and how Tamika should fetch that plate Jemele had set aside from supper. Both murmured, Yes, Aunt Jemele. For sure. Doing that right now. But I saw how they glanced at me with sharp gazes.

  Benjamin slung my bag over his shoulder and hurried from the kitchen. Tamika drew a plate of biscuits and gravy from the oven. She set the plate, two glasses, and a pitcher on the table, then ran out the door at her aunt’s command.

  Jemele herself poured me a tall glass of iced tea, sweet with sugar, just the way I remembered from times and years long ago.

  “Mischief, both of them,” she said. “Just like their daddy, may he rest in peace. That would be your Uncle T. J. He died a couple years ago. Cancer. That’s when Mattie came back home with the children.”

  Home. As though there could only be one home in the universe.

  Aunt Jemele continued to give me the family update while I ate my biscuits and drank the iced tea. News about nieces, nephews, cousins, second cousins, the extended family of in-laws and others less easily categorized. Most of my family had stayed in Georgia, though many of the older grandchildren had moved away, to university, to the cities. To a life far away from a dirt farm.

  I wiped my mouth with the napkin and poured myself a second glass of tea before I asked my next and most necessary question.

  “How is Gramma doing today?”

  Jemele shrugged. “’Bout as well as you might expect.”

  In other words, not good. Though I knew “not good” could take any number of forms.

  “She knows you coming,” Jemele added.

  “And doesn’t like it one bit,” I said.

  My aunt laughed, a soft, wheezing laugh. “Damn. You got that right. Come on. Finish up that plate and I’ll take you to see her.”

  She took me up the winding stairs at the back of the kitchen, along a dimly lit corridor toward the front of the house. More and more, I recalled walking down this same corridor, to another set of stairs that led to the attic bedroom I shared with Grace and several other cousins. From the thumping overhead, the attic still housed a number of younger cousins, nieces, and nephews.

  Jemele stopped in front of a closed door. Gramma’s bedroom, my memory supplied. She knocked.

  “Mamma? Janet’s here to see you, just like you asked.”

  A pause, then a querulous voice said, “Don’t know why you bothered to knock. Tell the girl to come in. And don’t you come in either. I don’t want you fussing over me.”

  Jemele shook her head with obvious exasperation. “I’ll go see about your room,” she said in a low voice. “Just remember she gets tired easy.”

  Leaving me to face the lion’s den. Well, Daniel survived; maybe I would too. I pushed the door open and went into my grandmother’s bedroom.

  It was as though I’d stepped back in time, a century or more. The old-fashioned oil lamp that gave off a softer light, or so Gramma had always claimed. The enormous rag rug, which Gramma had inherited from her grandmother. The even more ancient wardrobe off to one side. The pale curtains that had once been the purest ivory but had yellowed over time.

  An old and musty smell filled the air, layered over the fainter scent of soap and wood polish. My grandmother was sitting up in her bed, a quilt wrapped around her shoulders. She regarded me with a clear and steady gaze. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  “Hello, Gramma,” I said.

  She snorted. “You come here awful late, girl. Did you find some trouble along the way, or did trouble find you?”

  You a heap of trouble, girl. What you doing teasing your sister like that?

  “No trouble at all,” I said. “I was just driving careful like.”

  Another snort. “Come over here. I want to get a better look at you.”

  She patted a spot next to her. I obeyed and settled onto the edge of the bed.

  She had aged. Oh, sure, I had expected changes, especially from what my aunt told me. But the lamplight, that soft and golden and treacherous lamplight, made clear what mere words couldn’t. Her hands were sticks, the fingers bent. She was nearly bald. What little hair remained billowed out like a ragged white cloud, too fine to braid. And time had etched a thousand lines over her dark brown face.

  Her eyes, however, were bright as she returned my gaze. “You ain’t changed one bit, have you? Staring is rude, girl.”

  “Sorry,” I said at once. “It’s
been so long since . . .”

  “Since you got too big and important. Don’t go making some mealy-mouthed excuses. Your father—”

  She broke off and stared at Lazarus, lying innocently on my lap.

  “What fool thing have you done, girl?”

  “I signed up for the army, Gramma.”

  My grandmother shook her head. “Don’t see why you done that,” she muttered. “Worse than your father, him always thinking he knew what was right. Told him he oughtn't go up north. Selfish boy.”

  The brightness faded from her eyes. She turned her face away, her lips pressed in a thin firm line and tears tracking over her cheeks. I wanted to wipe the tears away, to tell her I understood, but she jerked her face away while she continued to weep.

  A creak in the floorboards sounded just outside the room. Jemele, keeping watch. I was about to stand up and make an excuse to leave when my grandmother murmured something inaudible.

  “What was that, Gramma?” I said.

  “Don’t want to go away. Don’t want them to lock me up. I told Jemmie that but she don’t listen to me. No one does anymore.”

  The woman who had ruled our family. I felt a dull ache in my chest. Grief. Pity. She would hate my pity, even now. I kissed her cheek, which she allowed, and stood up from the bed. Her attention had wandered, and she was plucking at the quilt that lay over her lap.

  I’m going now, Gramma. But I’ll come back. I’ll make sure you’re looked after.

  Jemele was waiting outside. “Don’t pay her no mind,” she said softly. “She gets caught in the old times. Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”

  She brought me to what had once been my great-grandmother’s sewing room, then later a storage room for blankets and quilts, and oddments of furniture, most of them from an earlier century. Most of the oddments remained, and from the looks of it, two or three of the young ones bedded here.

  “I’ll fetch you a pitcher of water,” Jemele told me. “Then I got to get back to your grandmother. You remember where the bathroom is?”

  She fetched the water, then left me with the comment that folks got up early, but she’d make sure I had a good breakfast waiting for me. Young Benjamin had set my bag on the bed next to the window. I drank a glass of water, changed into the new set of pajamas I’d bought for the trip, then opened up my bag and laid out my supplies for Lazarus. There wasn’t a good level surface anywhere but the floor, but the floor was good enough.

  I spread out the towel I’d brought, arranged the wipes and powder and disinfectant. Right before I tapped in the sequence to release my device, I thought I heard soft footsteps outside the door, then whispering.

  Cousins. Curious ones.

  I resisted the urge to open the door and read them a lecture on privacy. They were kids, and kids would always be curious. Instead, I turned the latch and went back to my preparations for the night. Lazarus went into my bag, which I tucked underneath the bed itself. Then I stretched myself onto the thin mattress, pulled up the quilt that some unknown cousin or aunt had stitched, and stared up into the darkness.

  I wish I’d come down sooner.

  You were busy. Busy getting shot. Busy patching your life back together.

  Even so . . .

  Well, you’re here now.

  I was, but not because I was a dutiful granddaughter. That would be Grace, who called or wrote letters every week to our aunt.

  Grace is a busybody, said my not-so-dutiful self.

  True, that. But her character flaws didn’t erase mine.

  So, I’ll just have to keep that promise and come back. I’ll have to make sure Gramma gets taken care of.

  15

  * * *

  DATE: APRIL 18. Time: Way too early, what with me getting little or no sleep. Though Micha had given me no orders about my journal, I knew enough to leave it behind with a postscript about buying a new one next month. I was sick unto death of feeding the FBI fake entries. Instead, I’d bought a cheap spiral-bound notebook. These pages weren’t the high-tech, touch-and-turn-to-ashes material that Sara had once supplied me with, but they would burn easy enough. Consider this (these?) my last recorded thoughts before we take off into the wild.

  So. Last thoughts and testament.

  I dreamed last night. I dreamed of my parents, that last visit before I entered the service. It was night. Rain poured over the windows of their small house; it dripped from the gutters and drummed against the roof. Mom and Pop sat across from me at the kitchen table. Grace had gone home to her husband and daughters, but not until she had made her opinion clear.

  I want to serve my country, I said.

  You can serve your damned country here, at Georgetown, my father had snapped back.

  Hush, my mother had said. You know she’s doing exactly what we taught her, even if we don’t exactly like it.

  Goddamn right we don’t like it, my father replied. Then, in a different voice, not angry but close to breaking, Janet, why? What’s the real reason you’re doing this, girl?

  Before my dream self could answer, a great noisy bell woke me. I bolted upright in that hard, narrow bed. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was. A rush of footsteps down the corridor brought me back to the real world. Georgia. The dirt farm. A living therapy session, and like any I’d experienced with Faith Bellaume, so very painful and peculiar.

  * * *

  I set my pen down and regarded the page. Nothing there that hinted at Sara Holmes or Nadine Adler. That would change soon enough, but after the past week of endlessly pretending, I had needed to vent without any second thoughts about who might read my words.

  The skin across my forehead felt tight with the promise of a headache. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and considered the subject of coffee. The window, just visible with dawn, showed a murky gray sky, and from far off came a rumbling that implied rain. By habit I clicked on my cell to check the weather report.

  The cell lit up with four bars. When I tapped the weather app, the display flickered a moment before a message popped up. Thunderstorm warning starting 11 a.m. throughout central and southern Georgia. High winds and possible flooding.

  Time to get packed and moving.

  The kitchen was empty when I made my appearance. Just as Jemele had promised, a pot of coffee stood on the stovetop, and a tray of biscuits warmed in the oven. I had settled into my breakfast when Jemele came into the room.

  “I see you figured things out,” she said.

  “I did. Thank you.”

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and lowered herself into a chair. “So, tell me, Dr. Janet Watson, what you planning to do?”

  The look she gave me was shrewd, almost suspicious.

  That’s my imagination, I told myself.

  “You said you had a list of home services,” I said. “I thought I’d visit them—yes, I know you did that already, but it’s different, with me being a doctor and all. I also wanted to visit the county office for medical assistance.”

  “We don’t need welfare.”

  I’d heard that same tone from my father, when my mother suggested a government scholarship for me.

  “It’s not welfare,” I said. “It’s what we all pay taxes for.”

  Her only answer was a hunh.

  “Besides,” I went on, “those county offices have records for all the home care outfits. If you have that list of services you contacted, that might save me some time.”

  “Thought you might say that,” my aunt said. She dug a crumpled sheet of paper from her apron pocket. “Here’s what I already came up with. Marked what I thought about some.”

  I scanned the list but didn’t recognize any of the names as national chains, which was good. Most of the national chains had nothing in mind but profit, at the government’s expense. With single payer, you were guaranteed basic care, but with the conservative politicians fighting every inch of progress, we’d ended up with each state writing its own definition of “basic.”

  “Any of these o
ffer a home visit plan?” I asked.

  Another hunh was my answer. “You’d think they would. Some do, but damn, they charge a lot.”

  Which didn’t entirely surprise me. Home services could not bill for meals or linens or any of the other extras that residential homes provided. Fewer charges to the government meant fewer items with a profit margin, so they would hike the prices even more for the services that remained.

  I drank another cup of coffee. Eyed the pot on the stove, and wished I’d brought more Advil. “I’ll see what I can do. Expect me back in a week. Two at the most.”

  “And then what?” my aunt demanded. “I thought you was coming down to help out. Looks more like you’re running away again.”

  “I am not—”

  I wanted to shout that I was not running away, goddammit. I went to war to serve, not run away. And look where that got me. It took all my strength to keep from pounding the table. I managed to suck down a breath, then another, until my blood stopped pounding and the red gradually faded to the ordinary gray of a rainy morning.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Jemele,” I whispered. “I . . . there were times, a time, last year . . .”

  “Never you mind,” she said just as softly. “I’m sorry too.”

  We muddled our way through the rest of my breakfast. She cooked me hash browns, a half-dozen fried eggs, and a panful of rashers. I ate everything and drank the rest of the coffee. By the time I’d finished, my nerves had settled. Goddamned family, my father had cursed more than once. But oh, family could be a blessing, too.

  After breakfast, I fetched my bag from my room. Jemele walked with me to my rental car. The air felt damp and cool, and overhead the clouds scudded across a muddy gray sky. The farm had changed a great deal in the past couple decades. In the sunlight I could see how much. The old barn had been torn down and replaced. The cornfields had been planted with short dense crops. Peanuts? But balanced against the seeming prosperity was the farmhouse itself, the porch sagging, the pale blue paint cracked and water stained.