“But they found his truck in the hollow,” Pete said, sitting up. “If he made it to there, he musta got away from the card game okay. Maybe he ran off the road and hit his head. Maybe he’s wanderin’ around in the woods and doesn’t know who he is. Maybe he’s got that—that—amnesia, like on TV.”
“Honey, about the truck . . . it wasn’t wrecked. It didn’t look like he’d lost control of it and run off the road. Your granddaddy said . . . well, he said it looked like somebody had pushed the truck off the road and into some bushes. There were limbs piled onto it, like somebody was trying to hide it. They’re just not sure, sweetheart . . . if he actually drove it there.”
Still, Pete couldn’t give up. Searching for the tiniest flicker of hope, he blurted out, “Maybe he dusted his broom!”
“What?” his mother exclaimed. “Where did you hear that?”
Pete struggled to recover. “Me and Isaac—we heard this song . . . on the colored radio station one time,” he said. It was only a white lie to protect Isaac and the crowd at Tandy’s. “Isaac said it was about leavin’ and never comin’ back—dustin’ your broom.”
“Well . . . I’m not sure you’ve got any business listening to blues music—”
“You know about the blues?” Pete couldn’t believe it.
“Never mind that—”
“What if he did, though?” Pete asked excitedly. “What if he just didn’t want to plow cotton no more and left to go get a job on a ship or something?”
His mother gently took his face in her hands and asked, “Honey, you know Isaac as well as anybody. Do you really think he’s the kind of person who would abandon his family like that?”
Pete hated to cry, especially in front of his mother, but he couldn’t help it. She put her arms around him and held him tight as the sorrows of the day poured down like rain.
Five
APRIL 30, 1964
“Anything?” Pete’s grandfather was on the telephone with Agent Davenport. Daddy Ballard had gone down to the sheriff’s office and told him straight-out that if he wanted to keep his job he had better get on the phone with the FBI and get some help with this sorry excuse for an investigation.
Pete stood quietly and listened from the doorway of the living room. His grandfather was frowning, and Pete could see him clenching his jaw the way he always did when he was working hard not to lose his temper.
“So of all the fingerprints your men lifted from that truck, the only clear ones belonged to the sheriff?” There was a pause while Daddy Ballard listened and nodded. “And that red smear by the hood that appeared to be—” He looked up to see Pete staring and hanging on every word. “Now, son, you go on outside while I talk to Agent Davenport. Soon as Roy and Lamar get here, we’ll go fishing. I’ll let you know if I find out anything. I promise.”
Feeling a little sick, Pete slowly backed out of the doorway, went to the barn, and climbed the ladder to the hayloft. He sat down near the big opening where bales were pitched into trucks below and hauled to Daddy Ballard’s cows and horses in the wintertime. Aunt Geneva’s twin boys were walking toward the barn, but they didn’t notice him high above.
Pete heard the barn door open and the sound of fishing rods rattling as they made their selections.
“What was it them Callahan boys was tellin’ you while I filled up the truck?” Lamar said.
“They heard some stuff about Isaac, but I don’t know that there’s anything to it,” Roy answered.
Pete froze and didn’t make a sound.
“They said they heard the sheriff found a bloody hammer in the grass by Isaac’s truck, but he ain’t told it ’cause he’s hopin’ the killer’ll trip up somehow and give hisself away.”
“That sheriff’s a piece o’ work,” Lamar said. “Never woulda called the FBI if Daddy Ballard hadn’t made him.”
“Since they found Isaac’s truck on Hollow Road, the Callahans think somebody killed him and dumped him in them pig wells way back in there,” Roy said. “Man, if that’s what happened, ain’t nobody ever gonna find him. Ain’t no sheriff’s deputy ’round here gonna mess with them crazy hollow people. I heard that way back before the Depression, they kidnapped a deputy that come snoopin’ around—locked him up in a old shed for about a week before they turned him a-loose. They say he run all the way back to the highway and was bawlin’ like a baby when somebody stopped to pick him up.”
“That’s just a old tale,” Lamar said. “Them people’s odd, though, I’ll grant you that. I don’t know what Isaac woulda done to get hisself killed back in there. Then again, he wasn’t no saint—likable fella and all, but some of them card players . . . well, they ain’t choirboys, that’s for sure.”
“Sorry to say it, but if the boy’s dead, he’s dead,” Roy said. “I guess it don’t much matter where his body is—pig wells or not, it don’t change nothin’. Hate it for Hattie and Aunt Babe, though. C’mon. Let’s go in the kitchen and get us a Co-Cola for the road.”
For a few minutes after they left, Pete didn’t move. He had forgotten all about the pig wells, but they had been there forever. They were part of a sawmill that Hinkey Pickett used to run. Hinkey’s business had dried up during the Depression, and so did the wells. Then years later, a cholera epidemic hit the hollow, but this time it was after pigs, not people. Every single pig in the hollow caught the cholera and died. Miss Paul—short for Pauline, but nobody ever called her that—was Hinkey’s wife and the undisputed queen of the backwoods. She had commanded her kin to cast their dead swine into the dry wells to prevent the cholera from spreading. It all happened before Pete was even born, but the grown folks still talked about it. And you could tell those wells and the cholera spooked them even now.
He stood up and looked out from the loft, calculating how long it would take him to hike from his house—which was just a little farther away than Daddy Ballard’s—to the sawmill. He knew what he had to do. He would find a way to go. He would tell no one, but he would go.
Six
MAY 9, 1964
From the threshold of his mother’s kitchen, Pete peered into the cool darkness outside. It was less than a half hour before dawn. All that stood between him and his mission was the rickety screen door that had whapped shut so many times it was hanging a little sideways. It opened with a creak as he stepped outside.
He was out of the house long before his mother could make it downstairs and tell him he couldn’t go. Still, he hated the thought of making her worry, so he had left her a note on the kitchen table.
Patting his pocket, he made sure he had the rabbit’s foot—a little luck would come in handy today—and then tugged at the slim leather holster attached to his belt to see if it was secure. It held a bone-handled hunting knife that he had gotten for his thirteenth birthday earlier in the spring. At the pump house, he filled his father’s old canteen and looped the long strap around his neck, along with a frayed khaki knapsack that carried his food and a flashlight. With one last look over his shoulder, he took off running as hard as he could across the cotton field that began just a few yards behind his mother’s clothesline.
By the time Pete stopped to catch his breath, the dark morning sky was streaked with sunrise. He sat down and scratched his back against a fence post while he waited for daylight. Slowly the faint rays of light widened and brightened till the whole sky turned pale blue like a robin’s egg, lit with glowing feathers of cotton-candy pink.
Taking the rabbit’s foot out of his pocket, he turned it over in his hand. There was a little chunk of fur missing right at the tip. Once, he guessed, it had been snow white, but years of being clutched for good luck had yellowed it. He thought about all the early mornings just like this one, when Isaac would’ve stuffed the rabbit’s foot into his own pocket before heading out to the fields to meet Pete’s father.
Daddy Ballard wasn’t crazy about Isaac—said he did “too much carryin’ on.” But Isaac was Hattie’s son, and Daddy Ballard would tell anybody that Hattie was as fine a Chr
istian as any white woman in the Baptist church. She had cooked and kept house for him ever since Ma Ballard died. Pete spent enough time at his grandfather’s house to know that on those afternoons when Daddy Ballard was feeling especially lonesome, even if it was her usual time to go home, Hattie would find something to dust in the living room, where he liked to read his Birmingham News. As she flicked her feather duster over a lamp or a rocking chair, she would casually ask, “Mister Ned, anything of interest in that newspaper?” This would give him an excuse to discuss the affairs of the day with her, which never failed to cheer him up.
She was the only living soul he’d allow behind the wheel of the Cadillac that had belonged to his beloved wife. Hattie drove it to the Winn-Dixie every Monday morning to buy his groceries—the only time she ever wore her maid’s uniform. Daddy Ballard told her she could wear whatever she wanted while she worked for him, but she thought it best to make it clear to anybody looking that she was on a white man’s errand when she went to the grocery store. And he would always tell her to go on and get her groceries too, while she had the car. They could put it on his bill and settle up later, he used to say. But Pete knew every time she tried to pay him, he’d put her off: “Aw, Hattie, I ain’t got time to fool with that right now.”
Pete was there the day she tried to put her foot down and pay him back. Daddy Ballard had let her say her piece, and then, peering up at her from his newspaper, he countered, “Hattie, you scrub my floors, you wash my clothes, you cook my food, you look after me when I’m sick, and you generally put up with me day in and day out. Don’t you reckon you earned them groceries?” She had thought about it for a minute before giving him a quick nod and heading back to the kitchen. From then on, they were fine about the Winn-Dixie.
Of all the white people she had worked for, he was the only one she invited to her three older daughters’ weddings. He went too. And when her youngest, Iris, got accepted to Spelman but didn’t have the money to go, Daddy Ballard paid her tuition and drove her to Atlanta himself. In their way, he and Hattie were friends. Pete had never thought about it before, but now he had to wonder—if Daddy Ballard could help Iris go someplace she had dreamed about, why couldn’t he help Isaac get out of the fields and onto that ship he so wanted to sail?
Pete stood up and dusted off his jeans, then squeezed through a barbed-wire fence and trotted across the pasture. Weaving through a little band of woods, he made his way to Hollow Road and followed it to Copper Creek. By the time he got there, the sun was already hot enough to prickle his arms. He sat down on the old wooden bridge and dangled his feet over the water while he hurriedly ate two cold biscuits with ham left over from supper. Then he refilled the canteen with ice-cold creek water and made his way down the road, kicking an empty Campbell’s soup can somebody had tossed out.
Before long, he had kicked the can all the way to the crossroads, which led east to the main highway or west through the hollow and down to the river. Right behind the split was an old shotgun house flanked by two ancient pecan trees. The front porch was warped, and there were concrete blocks where the steps should’ve been. He had always thought this old house looked sort of perched, like it might fly off at any moment. It was the home of Aunt Babe, Hattie’s mother.
When Ma Ballard was growing up, Aunt Babe had cooked for her family, the Jacksons. Aunt Babe had worked for them since she was a girl, and she could name every knot on every limb of their family tree. But everybody knew that Ma Ballard—“Sweet Ginia,” Aunt Babe called her—was by far her favorite.
Pete jumped at the sound of Aunt Babe’s rocking chair slamming against the front wall of the house when she stood up. He hadn’t seen her sitting there on the porch, but she had seen him. Unlike Hattie, who was tall and lean, Aunt Babe was five feet tall and about that wide. Now that she was a little feeble, she sometimes walked with a red cane that Isaac had made for her. Aunt Babe loved red. Even the walls of her tiny kitchen were covered with old newspapers and the lids of Prince Albert tobacco cans spray-painted bright crimson.
She took her time coming down the wobbly stack of blocks and then marched across her front yard like she was about to get to the bottom of something. “Pete McLean, what you doin’ way out here without no grown folks?”
“Nothin’, Aunt Babe—just on my way to the creek to go wadin’.”
“You ain’t never set foot on no creek bank I know of without a fishin’ pole.”
Pete rolled his foot back and forth over the soup can and fingered the rabbit’s foot in his pocket while he tried to think up a lie the old woman might believe. “Well, I’m—I’m lookin’ for a spot to build me a fort.”
“Naw y’ain’t.”
“No, really, Aunt Babe—”
“Lyin’s a sin, Pete McLean. Yo’ mama got Jackson blood. You gonna stand there in front o’ my house and tell me Miss Lila, what got Jackson blood, done raised herself a hell-bound liar?”
“No, ma’am.”
“The truth then—speak it now or we fixin’ to get down on our knees right here in this yard and pray you don’t bust the gates o’ hell wide open.”
Pete took his foot off the can, stood up straight, and looked Aunt Babe square in the eyes. Then it all came spilling out.
“I’m goin’ to the pig wells, Aunt Babe. Roy and Lamar, they said Isaac prob’ly got hisself killed over cards or something and that somebody mighta pitched his body over in them wells with all that cholera. Don’t seem like nobody else is even lookin’ for him. So I mean to find out if he’s in there. And if he is, I know Daddy Ballard will come and get him out. And Hattie can have him a funeral. Isaac never woulda left Daddy down in no hole, and we oughtn’ to leave Isaac in one neither.”
Aunt Babe took a step back and studied Pete’s face. “How old is you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Mm-hmm. That’s when all you boys gets the crazies. Come up here on this porch and let me see what do I think about all this.”
Pete followed her and took a seat in the rocking chair next to hers.
“Now, let’s us back up a little. You say Roy and Lamar done give you this idea?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They ain’t the sharpest tools in the shed. What exactly they say got you all worked up?”
“They said the Callahan boys—”
“Callahan? Now there’s a no-account bunch o’ white folks if ever I seen one. What that trash know ’bout anything?”
“Well, the Callahan boys told Roy and Lamar that they heard the sheriff found a bloody hammer in the grass by Isaac’s truck, but he ain’t told it ’cause he’s hopin’ the killer’ll trip up somehow and give hisself away.”
Aunt Babe rolled her eyes. “What that sheriff plan to do? Park his big self at the mercantile and lock up ever’body what shows up lookin’ to buy a new hammer?”
“Roy and Lamar say the sheriff’s a piece o’ work,” Pete went on. “They say he never woulda had sense enough to call the FBI if Daddy Ballard hadn’a made him.”
“They got that much right. Keep on.”
“Well, since the deputies found Isaac’s truck in the hollow, the Callahans said somebody musta killed him and dumped him in them pig wells way back in there. And Roy and Lamar said if that’s what happened, ain’t nobody ever gonna find him, because ain’t no sheriff’s deputy ’round here gonna mess with them crazy hollow people.”
“Now you stop right there,” Aunt Babe said. “First off, you know good and well them crazy hollow people, as you done gone to callin’ ’em—they got a name, same as you. It’s Pickett. And they ain’t crazy—well, Paul might be a little teched in the head, but all in all, they ain’t crazy. They just poor. You think it make somebody crazy or bad just ’cause they ain’t got as much as you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Yo’ granddaddy’s one o’ the richest men in the state o’ Alabama, and he was friends—good friends—with Hinkey Pickett they whole life. They growed up fishin’ these creeks together. You know that?
”
“No, ma’am.”
“Mm-hmm. Seems to me they’s a lot you don’t know. That sheriff’s dumb as a post ’bout ever’thing ’cept one—stealin’ from colored folks. Used to come after our men with all kinda silly charges and throw ’em in the jailhouse till the families could come up with some cash money to bail ’em out. Wasn’t never nobody but him in sight when we paid it. You ask me, all our money paid for that bass boat o’ his.”
“But he don’t steal from y’all no more?” Pete asked.
“Knows he best not.”
“How come?”
“’Cause a while back, he make the mistake o’ lockin’ up Isaac. Hattie finally got her courage up and told yo’ granddaddy what was a-goin’ on. Ain’t nobody paid no bail money since then.” She scrutinized Pete’s face. “Tell me something. What you think happened to Isaac?”
“Well, Roy and Lamar said—”
“I don’t care ’bout Mutt and Jeff. What you think?”
Pete stared at her and thought it over. “I don’t know what happened to him, Aunt Babe. But whatever it was, I know it wasn’t his fault. Them Callahans said Isaac got in with the wrong crowd when he was playin’ cards. They said whatever become of him was his own doin’. But I don’t believe that. I think somebody did something bad to him, and there wasn’t nothin’ he coulda done to stop it.”
Aunt Babe’s expression didn’t change. “Who you think done that?”
“I don’t know,” Pete said. “I was always kinda scared of Reuben.”
“You best be! Reuben knife his own mama for a five-dollar bill—don’t you never let me catch you nowhere ’round him.”
Reuben was part of the card-playing crowd that met in an old abandoned shed on Friday and Saturday nights. Pete had been with Isaac in the field once when Reuben stopped by to tell him about a poker game. Isaac’s smile had disappeared the minute he saw Reuben’s truck, and he had motioned for Pete to stay behind him while they talked. Something about Reuben made you want to run home and hide under the bed.
Missing Isaac Page 4