by Rita Kano
Shirley reexamined her memory of the position of Miss Bessie’s right hand forefinger, certain its placement was too precise and too contrived to be a coincidence. The Bible had to be the clue.
Wait a minute!
Bible. Bible. Bible. Shirley repeated to herself. What was it Miss Bessie said in the field outside the revival tent? Nobody reads the Bible anymore. Nobody cares. Bessie had said something to that effect, as best Shirley’s memory served.
Shirley held the Bible in her hands and ran her fingers over the gold trimmed pages and gold lettering. Her mind immediately jumped back to the diary Grandma Sadie described in the first entry published by the Purity Post. Like the Bible in Shirley’s hands, it had gold trimmed pages, too. The Bible. The diary. Gold trimmed pages and gold lettering. What did the similarities suggest?
Shirley’s thoughts raced to the end of her frown lines. Nothing … that’s what it meant. She sighed. Was she on a wild goose chase or did she, unlike Perry Mason, miss something? She needed to think. She needed a lot more time to think. But, it wouldn’t be here, she couldn’t afford to stay much longer inside Miss Bessie’s home. The risks she was willing to take for the sake of Martha Ann and Lizzie, as heartbreaking as failure would be … had their limits. She stood up and brushed off her dress. Charges of breaking and entering would be the sweet and bitter frosting on Purity’s Shirley Foster cake. If she were accused of…
Shirley’s mind blinked off as bright light smashed through the front room windows and jolted the air out of her. Headlights! A car … a car approaching … bouncing up the bumpy road to the house. “Oh, my god…” Shirley ducked behind the couch. Had a neighbor spotted the beam of her flashlight? The car’s gravel grinding wheels rolled to silence near the front porch. Shirley barely breathed as the headlights penetrated the sheer curtains, then winked out and thrust the room back to darkness.
Shirley poked her head around the end of the couch, listening intently for footsteps and the turn of a doorknob. After a few minutes of intense quiet and hearing no steps on the porch, she crawled over to the window and peeked through the gap between the curtain panels.
Outside sat a Sheriff Deputy’s car with the engine idling. Shirley’s throat tightened. Sipping in shallow breaths, she waited, expecting to hear the engine drown out, a car door slam and the sound of thick bottom boots clomping up the steps. Instead the headlights snapped back on and the deputy behind the wheel drove away.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” Shirley whispered, vowing never, never again to complain about a job half done.
She weakly pushed herself up from the floor, one hand on the corner of the table that held Miss Bessie’s phone. Shirley’s fingers knocked something off… something the shape of a small book. She glanced out the window to be sure the deputy’s car was out of sight, before shining the flashlight on the object. It was a green phone directory about the size of… Yes. Shirley’s jolt of inspiration sent goose bumps scampering across her skin. The personal phone directory was the same size as the pocketbook Bibles traveling salesmen give away to lure people into buying more expensive items.
Now, Shirley’s mind began to tick. Bessie had told her she hid the diary in a place no one would find it. Had the clever Miss Bessie Redding, being of sound conviction that no one reads the Bible anymore… Shirley inhaled to clear her head. Had she … was it possible she glued the cover of a small Bible over the diary with gold trimmed pages? Had she hidden the diary in plain sight among her other books?
Shirley aimed her flashlight and scanned the bookshelf. And there it was. A tiny, pocket size Bible. Shirley pulled the book from the shelf and held it reverently in her hand. Holy Bible, the outside read. Her eyes widened as she opened the cover.
Holy cow! She was right. The diary … she found Sadie Redding’s diary. Now… Shirley looked around nervously, now all she had to do was get out of the house undetected … and fast.
She rushed to the back door with the diary inside her zipped purse. Immediately upon opening the door, something streaked past her into the kitchen. Reluctantly, Shirley shone the flashlight around the room. The light revealed nothing, but Shirley’s instincts tingled. It hadn’t been her imagination. Many years of living as a social outcast had developed a strong sense of knowing when she was being watched and whispered about behind her back. Time and time again, the feelings most people chalked off to imagination, for Shirley, turned out to be something more akin to a superpower. Once, alone in the comfort of her home, she felt tension expanding the air, like a predator stalking its prey. Upon searching the room, the predator turned out to be a jumping spider. But something much larger had slipped past her, camouflaged by shadows. She flashed the light around the room one more time and heard a slight purring sound. Focusing the beam in the direction of the purr, she exposed the creature. In Miss Bessie’s dark leather rocking chair, a black cat stretched out, patiently waiting for someone who wouldn’t be returning.
“Oh, no you don’t,” said Shirley. “No. No. No. You can’t stay in here.” She picked up the cat. To her surprise the feline didn’t resist at all … unusual, at least, for her. Cats generally either ignored or avoided her. Shirley assumed they all sensed her disinterest. She hadn’t kept a cat since childhood. That one was black, too. Shirley remembered her name, Ebony. She also remembered the right back wheel of her daddy’s car crushing the little kitten her grandmother had given her for her birthday. Shirley’s final image of the kitten’s agony still haunted her. Running toward the piercing cry, she witnessed the tiny body writhing in blood red pain before succumbing to death.
“You’ve got to stay outside,” she said somewhat affectionately to the cat. “You’ll be better off there until Miss Bessie’s family arrives.” The cat purred in her arms. “My goodness but you are a sweet little thing, aren’t you?”
Shirley had the back door almost closed when the cat jumped from her arms and ran back into the house to the same chair. “No,” she said. “Bad idea. Very bad. I told you, you can’t stay in here. There’s no one to take care of you. Outside you can make do. Eat mice or lizards and crickets, and drink water out of ditches. You’re a smart kitty. You understand that don’t you?”
The cat purred. This time when Shirley reached for the creature, it escaped her grip.
“Okay. If you won’t listen, I’m leaving.” Shirley stood in the open doorway. “I’m leaving now. I’m closing the door. Sorry.” The door clicked shut. Shirley was halfway down the steps when to her surprise, she felt something rub against her leg and there at her feet stood the cat. “Well, now… for sure, that beats all I’ve ever seen. You are a smart one. You made a good decision, kitty. One I promise you won’t regret. No telling how far out of town poor Miss Bessie’s folks live or how long it’ll be before they arrive. And so … just in case … maybe I’ll check on you in a few days to be sure you’re okay.”
Shirley drove away as she had arrived, no headlights, and a stomach churning with excitement. She had the diary that could… her enthusiasm paused for a fleeting prayer. She had the diary that could … please God … help her find Martha Ann and save Lizzie.
“Holy… ” Shirley slammed on the brakes and almost swerved into a ditch when something fell from the roof of the car, so it seemed at that moment, and plopped onto the passenger seat beside her. Turned out Shirley not only had the diary … she had a cat.
“What in this world… How did you… You scared me half to death you little rascal? You can’t come home with me. I don’t like cats.” But when Shirley pulled off the road and reached over to open the passenger side door to shove the cat out, the creature stared contentedly into her eyes. “Oh, Lord,” Shirley moaned. “Okay. Okay, but not for long, you understand. Just… and I mean it… just until I can find you a good home. Don’t go getting any ideas to the contrary.”
With that settled and Grandma Sadie’s diary in her purse, Shirley’s burden of guilt, carried unconsciously for so many years for the way her tiny black kitten died, began to lighte
n. “Don’t get the big head when I tell you this Miss… or Mister Cat, whatever you are, I’m going to call you Grandma. That doesn’t mean I’m going to keep you. You just … I don’t know why, but you seem a whole lot wiser than other cats I’ve known and I’ve got to call you something.” Shirley glanced over at the feline passenger curled up on the seat next to her. And then, a warm, unfamiliar feeling radiated from her heart. Pleasant, but… it ran smack into the wall of a resistant frown. “I know what you’re thinking, Grandma. Oh, yes, I do. And it’s not going to happen. When you get to know me better, you’ll see the absurdity of a future together as clearly as I do.”
Chapter 10
Warnings from the Past
At home, Shirley ate the remaining three cold fries and prepared for bed, where she planned to read Grandma Sadie’s diary. The cat followed her from the bathroom to the kitchen where Shirley poured a glass of milk. She loved milk. Her nightly routine included half a glass, sometimes warm, before turning in. Grandma rubbed against Shirley’s legs as she turned the glass up and enjoyed her favorite beverage.
“What is it?” she asked Grandma. “What do you want? Oh… are you hungry?” Shirley opened the refrigerator door. “Sorry, that was the last of the milk. I’m not used to having guests, which was exactly my point earlier on the way here. You see? You and I… uh-uh, no. You and I would never work.” Shirley rummaged through the refrigerator. A mashed up wiener satisfied Grandma the cat quite well. With a full tummy, she went off to sleep on the sofa.
Opening Sadie Redding’s diary shaped a moment of elation, quickly followed by disappointment. As Shirley thumbed through the pages it became clear there wasn’t all that much to read. Half the book was blank. Shirley fluffed up two bed pillows, propped up and began to read. The first few paragraphs were those she had already seen; the ones printed in the Purity Post. But, for the sake of refreshing her memory and the possibility of gaining new insight, she started at the beginning.
Time’s a funny thing. It doesn’t know how to stay put. Just when a body thinks they’ve got it pinned down with one thumb and reach out with the other hand to grab it … there ain’t nothin’ there but dust. And since dust is dust, I ain’t going to start by telling you when or even where all this took place. If I told you that I’d be trying to pin time down and I already know how useless that is. So, I’m just going to tell you how it looked and how it felt and you can try to pin it down if you ain’t able to resist the need. The point is nobody should be forgotten the way my dear Glory was or poor Isabelle. I swear by all that’s holy, there ain’t never been either a child or a mother closer to being angels than those two dear ones, from their red hair to their skin, as soft and creamy as buttermilk pudding.
Shirley skimmed through the next few repeated paragraphs until she found the continuation.
I felt a shudder in my bones the day he walked into the meeting hall where Sunday services were being held. Me, Glory and Isabelle were sitting near the front of the hall, so the first thing we heard was a growing buzz of whispers, moving closer and closer. All at one time, we turned our heads to see what was causing the commotion.
The hair on his head was long, straight black and shiny, held in place by a band of some sort, colorful and well-crafted it seemed to me.
The preacher stopped in the middle of his sermon about judgment and the virtue of leaving the reckoning of sins to the hand of God … if only somebody had been listening.
Indians came into town now and then, but I had never seen this one. And the ones I had seen never walked with their head held high as his… like he was on equal ground with the white man. But, this one did. He walked right up to the pulpit; his eyes straight ahead, not once looking from side to side, like he had a vision nobody else could see. He walked up, placed himself next to the preacher and then looked at my Glory. He didn’t say a word. He just looked and when I looked at Glory I saw something in her eyes I’d never seen before. In her eyes was … well, it was like she’d just seen life for the first time.
Words can’t quite describe the change in the air we was breathing. The whole congregation was taken aback. They, like me, didn’t have no idea what was happening before their eyes that day. But I did know one thing. I knew that whatever else that Indian was, a man of great courage stood before us all… as brave as any man whatever went off to war. A chill spread over me then. My heart knew this man didn’t stand much chance of surviving the battle he had started.
When the men in the congregation come to their senses, they grabbed the Indian and threw him out onto the street. Me and the other womenfolk watched from the meeting hall windows. It had been raining the whole day long. The men folk kicked him around in the mud until he was covered from head to toe. The Indian didn’t fight back. So it went until the men had enough and they come back inside. Glory and me were the last at the windows. We watched as the Indian rose to his feet and hobbled away. I had to pull Glory back to her seat. May the Lord forgive me; I heard little more of the sermon that Sunday morning. I kept looking at Glory, wondering what she and that Indian had seen that nobody else saw.
A week passed and the town was still up in the air over the blasphemous events of the Sunday prior. I expected it would pass soon and spoke no more of it … nor did Glory.
Another week passed and things were calming down a bit when I heard a knock at the parlor door. I called out to Glory to answer the knock. Looking around from the kitchen, I saw a young man, someone I had no recollection of seeing before, pass a note to Glory. When I asked her if somebody had died, she said, no, that a classmate stopped by bringing news about an upcoming school picnic.
She didn’t see me watching as she read the note. And once read, seeing her toss it into the fireplace to the embers of the morning fire. When she left the room, I hurried over, pulled out the note and found it only scorched a mite around the edges. The note was from the Indian. He asked that she meet him that same night at a place called Old Tree Hill and if she didn’t, he’d never look upon her again.
I know now I should have just let things be and work their way out as the merciful Lord would have them. But I didn’t. No, I didn’t trust the Lord, as I should have. I went off to the sheriff and showed him the note and asked that he be there at the appointed time and place to watch after my Glory.
I could have asked Glory not to go, but the good Lord knows… ask that redheaded child not to do something her heart had a mind set on and nothing could stop her. I had seen the look in her eyes and knew her mind and heart was set on something she most likely couldn’t find the words to express. What I’m saying is… I meant no harm to anybody.
The next morning I was happy as a whippoorwill to find Glory asleep in her bed. I thought my fears had been for nothing. About two hours later, I heard commotion in the streets, excited talking and loud boasting of the town’s men, saying, “He got what he deserved.”
It would soon come to my knowing that the sheriff had taken a gang of men to the meeting spot and … as I suspected she would … Glory had gone to meet the Indian. The men waiting and hiding in the woods heard my Glory and the Indian exchange words but were too far away to understand them. They only watched until the Indian took Glory into his arms and kissed her. One of the men yelled out, “Savage.” And all the aching bitterness that gathers in men’s hearts found release. They took the Indian and lynched him from that old Elm tree. I heard in whispers here and there that the Indian took a long time to die. Longer than most, they said. Everybody whispering was in agreement on that. Nobody had ever seen a man so determined to stay alive.
To my poor heart’s regret, Glory saw it all. It took two men to hold her back from him … until his kicking stopped and she collapsed.
The men who hung the Indian claimed he had been caught stealing a horse from the livery stable. They told it that way to save Glory’s honor, they said. A lie though it be, the story stuck. Nobody questioned it. After all, the heathen, as most called him, got what he deserved.
Acc
ording to custom, the Indian had been given the chance to speak his last words. Turned out, the men who placed the noose around his neck didn’t get what they were expecting. He didn’t beg for his life. He only said, calmly and surely: From moon to moon, find me or find death.
For a while, nobody knew what it meant.
In two weeks’ time, everybody knew. The Indian had placed a curse on the town. Glory disappeared and then Isabelle. Never to be found. Both my red haired angels with buttermilk skin were gone forever.
Another two weeks later I heard the rhyme for the first time. There was children in the street skipping rope and singing: A redhead goes missing and nobody cries. Look in the closet, you’ll find their lies. Tell what you saw and everybody dies.
Hard as I tried, I couldn’t get anybody to help me look for my girls. They were forgotten. So easily forgotten, my heart broke to pieces. But I, like all the rest, kept the secret.
Shirley turned the page. In large, bold letters was the last entry.
Find the Indian.
“What? That’s it?” Shirley exclaimed. “What do you mean find the Indian? The Indian is dead. Long dead.” Shirley slapped the diary that had been so precious to Sadie Redding down onto the bedcovers. “This just keeps spinning from impossible to impossible,” she mumbled. “What am I going to do now? What were you thinking, Miss Bessie? There’s nothing in Grandma Sadie’s diary that helps?”
No sooner had she said grandma than the cat leapt up onto the bed and rubbed against her arm. It had a surprisingly soothing effect on Shirley. “Yes,” she said to Grandma. “You’re right. Tomorrow things will look better.”