He followed her to her crimson kitchen and the sound of a woman sobbing. “Hattie?” he said.
She looked up with red and swollen eyes. The handkerchief she clutched was no match for the weeping she was doing.
“Hattie,” he said again, taking a seat next to her, “what’s this all about?”
“It’s a foolish thing, really,” she said. “All this over a old chair.”
“A chair?”
“See, I’ve got this green wingback chair with a real thick seat cushion that Iris found on the curb—just put out on the street for throwaway—when she was at Spelman. Her and a girlfriend carried it all the way back to her do’mitory. She cleaned it up real nice and talked some boy with a truck into drivin’ her home for the Thanksgiving break so she could bring it to me. Don’t ever let on to Iris, Mister Ned, but I always preferred my rocker, and I never set in that chair but maybe one time when I first got it. Isaac, though, he loved it. Said it made him feel like he was settin’ in his very own liberry when he read his books there.
“Well, this mornin’ as I was straightenin’ up, I thought to myself I hadn’t vacuumed underneath that cushion since . . . well, since it was used a lot. And when I picked it up to clean under it, I seen my boy’s bookmark layin’ there. I guess it had slipped down under the cushion while he was readin’. Right away I know what I’m lookin’ at because I give it to him—a little gold cross with a purple velvet ribbon attached to it.”
“Hattie—”
“I found my Isaac’s bookmark, Mister Ned. I found his bookmark, but I’ll never find him. Why they got to kill the good ones, Mister Ned? He was just tryin’ to do right—and find a little happiness besides. They quarrel with him, fine, but why they got to kill him? He was a good boy.”
“Hattie,” Ned said, “do you know who killed Isaac?”
“No, sir,” she said. “Most folks think Reuben, that thug from down around Four Mile. I wish to goodness Isaac never took up them cards. I always told him they was trouble. Then again, there’s that awful Klan . . .”
“You want me to find out?”
“You done tried your best, Mister Ned.”
“Yes, but I tried my best workin’ with the law. This time I mean to use money. Money can find things county sheriffs can’t. ’Specially the one we’re stuck with—for now. But I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. So you just tell me—do you want me to?”
In the comfort of her mother’s kitchen, Hattie thought it over. “Yes, sir, I do,” she finally said. “I think I got to know—not so much who done it, but what happened to my boy. I don’t want you gettin’ yo’self hurt, though.”
“Don’t you worry about me. I got sense enough to know when to handle something myself and when to hire it done. Galls me no end to think about some no-account sleepin’ like a baby, thinkin’ they got away with this. Whether they turn out to be white or colored, I hope they spend the rest of their sorry life in the pen. Did one of your girls give you a ride over here?”
“Junie brung me.”
“Aunt Babe, you want to go over and stay with Hattie tonight? I can drive you both so Junie won’t have to make another trip.”
“What we gonna do ’bout Cyrus?” Aunt Babe asked.
“I’ll have Pete and Dovey look after him. They can fix him a bed on John’s porch till you get back.”
Aunt Babe disappeared into her bedroom. When she came back to the kitchen, Ned could see that she had packed a sack big enough to hold more than she needed for one night.
“Mama, what you doin’ with so many clothes?” Hattie asked.
“Ain’t no good to be all by yo’self with a mournful heart in the springtime,” Aunt Babe said. “All the happy flowers in bloom just make the darkness inside you that much meaner. I’m gonna come be with you for a while.”
Ned followed them out to his car and held the door for them. Cyrus watched from the porch as he drove them out of the hollow. The sun was sinking down as the Cadillac turned onto the highway, bound for the shotgun houses and dogtrots clustered up and down the road to Morning Star Baptist Church.
Fourteen
MAY 14, 1966
Lila stood before her son, tying his black bow tie. She couldn’t believe she had to reach up to do it. Just a year ago, Pete had shot up so fast that he had been lanky and rail-thin, and he was still growing. But now his muscles were beginning to catch up with his frame, his voice had changed, and he was losing that awkwardness that plagues all teenage boys early on. He was broad-shouldered like the Ballard men, and he had inherited Lila’s dark blue eyes. Still, he reminded her so much of his father. They shared the same dimpled smile and the same thick, wavy hair, though Pete’s was getting darker and softer than his daddy’s as he matured.
Really, where Pete favored Jack most was on the inside. They both genuinely cared about other people, maybe a little too much, and they both had a sixth sense when it came to the ones they loved—how they were feeling or when they were hurting. They would put themselves out in front to shield you even when they were the ones who needed shielding the most, and that made you pray for them a little harder than you prayed for anybody else.
“Mama, do you mean to turn me into a soprano?” Pete asked with a grin, tugging at his collar. She straightened his tie and helped him slip on the white dinner jacket she had bought for him at Loveman’s.
“You’re not too big for me to whip.” She smiled, smoothing the jacket over his shoulders and stepping back to make sure it hung perfectly. “You’re lucky we’re still having some cool nights. Your daddy and I got married in July, and bless his heart, he was sweltering in that tuxedo I made him wear. That reminds me—what do you do if Dovey gets chilly?”
“I offer her my jacket.”
“That’s right. And at the dance?”
“I walk her to a seat and ask her if she’d like some punch.”
“You escort her to a seat. She’s a girl, not a horse.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’ve been good about opening doors for ladies since you were little, so I’m not worried about that. But don’t forget, now, to offer Dovey your hand and help her out of the car like I showed you. And then you offer her your arm—”
“Mama, how we gonna get home if I ain’t got no arms and hands left, what with me offerin’ her this one and that one all night?”
“‘Ain’t got no’? Really? Is that how they teach you to talk at that school?”
“Okay then, if I don’t have any arms and hands left . . .”
“Oh, hush up,” she said, fussing with his lapels. “Good manners are important. They tell other people, especially girls, what you think of them—and whether you’ve got any sense. One of these days you’ll be glad I taught you not to act like a hooligan.”
“I know.”
“Now, you’ve got a full tank of gas?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And the extra money I gave you is in your wallet?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you won’t forget Dovey’s wrist corsage in the refrigerator?”
“No, ma’am.”
“And you remember she has to be home by nine and you need to be home not long after that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you know you’re only allowed to pick up Dovey—and I mean you slow that car down to a crawl going over those bridges in the hollow—drive to the dance, and come straight home, no place afterward? I don’t want to hear about my car being seen in Childersburg tonight.”
“Mama, if I even looked toward Childersburg with Dovey in the car or got her home five minutes late, her daddy would murder me.”
“That’s true,” Lila said. “I guess he’s pretty scary, huh?”
“Yes and no,” Pete said as he thought it over. “He’s not mean or anything. And he teaches me a lotta stuff in his shop. I sorta like him. It’s just hard to know what he’s thinking.”
Lila smiled. “So I’ve heard. Long as he’s got the bluf
f on you, I guess all I need to do is tell you to act like a gentleman and have a good time.”
He started for the kitchen.
“Oh, son?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Your daddy would be real proud.”
Lila hugged Pete and kissed him on the cheek before he went into the kitchen to get Dovey’s corsage out of the refrigerator. She watched from her screen door as he pulled out of the driveway in her Buick.
When Pete was out of sight, Lila went into her kitchen and readied the coffeepot for a long night. Part of her was so happy for Pete and Dovey, setting off on their first real date, and part of her wouldn’t stop worrying till they were safe at home again. This house felt so empty the minute Pete walked out the door. It took everything she had to make sure he never knew that. She would not allow her own loneliness to deny him even a minute’s happiness. He had been through enough.
She glanced at the three messages by the telephone. They were all in Pete’s handwriting and all said the same thing: “Mr. Harris called.” Sooner or later she would have to face the music. A kind and decent man, Garland Harris made no secret of being smitten with her. Shouldn’t she be grateful for that? Shouldn’t it be enough? She poured a cup of coffee and picked up the phone.
At least half the boys driving to the spring dance tonight didn’t have a driver’s license yet, but since most of them had been plowing cotton and hauling it to the gin since they were twelve or thirteen, the town policeman, Chief Thurgood, looked the other way this one night of the year. As long as you were at least fifteen and didn’t speed or do something really stupid, you could take your date to the dance without the humiliation of being delivered to the school by your parents. And almost none of the boys ever got out of line because they knew the chief could match every car in town to the parents who owned it and wouldn’t have any trouble figuring out whose daddy to call.
Pete didn’t really care about the dance, but he was beside himself to have a real date with Dovey. His mother had given the two of them a couple of dance lessons in the front parlor. As with everything else, Dovey caught on right away. Pete was a real klutz at first, but once he stopped trying so hard and just followed the music, he did alright.
Lately his mother and Dovey had been spending a lot of time together. Awhile back, Dovey had mentioned that his mother seemed to talk a little differently from her. Later, when she heard Pete’s mother correct his grammar, Dovey had asked if she could be corrected too.
One day Dovey was helping rearrange the china cabinet at Pete’s house and asked his mother what those smaller plates were for. In a flash, his mother had taken down a whole place setting and gathered some of Ma Ballard’s silver out of a wooden chest on the buffet. One piece at a time, she showed Dovey how to set a formal table. Pete left the two of them alone, but he could hear them from the front parlor.
“How did you learn to do all of this?” Dovey asked with that slightly forlorn tone that crept into her voice anytime she came upon some bit of information that she thought everybody else had known all along.
“Someone taught me, just as I’m teaching you,” his mother said. “No woman’s born knowing all of this, Dovey. We all have to learn, and we all make mistakes. Don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise. Just always remember, the whole point of setting a pretty table or cooking a special meal is not to prove anything to your company but to make them feel comfortable and welcome. As long as you manage to do that, you can serve the salad in a soup bowl and the pot roast with a shrimp fork—it won’t make one bit of difference.”
For the past couple of weeks, it was the dance, not the china cabinet, that had Dovey’s full attention. Every time she saw Pete, she peppered him with questions. What did the girls wear? How did they fix their hair? How many people would be there? What did a gym look like? Who decorated it for the dance? What did everybody talk about? He knew she was scared to death of the school, so he kept reminding her of how terrified she had been the first time she went to church with him. Now she went every Sunday and was thinking about joining the choir, mostly because everybody begged her to the minute they heard her sing.
When word first got out at First Baptist that Dovey was a Pickett, the church ladies had seized the opportunity to gather information—always with a polite smile, but it wasn’t hard to guess what they were up to.
“And how is your grandmother faring, honey? Now, does she still preach in your family barn on Sundays? Well, what a blessing that must be, worshiping together and all. Anything . . . unusual happen . . . in your lovely family services, dear?”
Dovey took it all in stride—all except for Miss Thelma, who had made the fateful mistake of coming at her with “I believe in speaking my mind, and if you ask me, Pauline Pickett has absolutely no business keeping children out of a proper Sunday school.”
“But I didn’t ask you,” Dovey had said, giving Miss Thelma the stare. And Miss Thelma, just like Judd Highland before her, had suddenly found someone in the churchyard who needed her immediate attention.
Pete pulled the Buick slowly into Dovey’s yard, hoping her father would notice what a careful driver he was, and carried the white corsage box to the front door.
John Pickett greeted him with a shotgun in his hand. “C’mon in, Pete,” he said. “I was just cleanin’ my gun—thought I might go after some rabbits next week.”
“Yes, sir,” Pete said, eyeing the Remington.
“What you got there?” Dovey’s father asked.
“A wrist corsage for Dovey. Mama helped me pick it out. Hope she likes it.”
“Dovey, honey,” her father called, “Pete’s here.”
Dovey came into the front room. She and Pete had grown up right in sync. Now that he was fifteen and she was close to it, he was still about a head taller than she was, just as he had been the day they first stumbled onto each other at the sawmill. But Pete wasn’t thinking about that. He wasn’t really thinking about anything at all because the first sight of Dovey on any given day tended to shut his brain down, and that was especially true tonight.
She told him that her Aunt Lydia had worked on her dress for a solid week. Dovey chose the pattern, and Pete’s mother somehow managed to buy the fabric without offending the Pickett women. His mother said they had decided on silk and lace for the bodice, whatever that was, and silk and chiffon for the floor-length skirt. All Pete knew was that the dress was a pale shade of Dovey’s eyes—a beautiful bluish green—and it made her look like a princess.
She wore her hair down, with a pretty pearl barrette on one side. A few weeks earlier, she had shown Pete a picture in a magazine of a girl with her hair teased high and piled on top of her head. “Is this what I should do for the dance?” she asked.
“Why would you want to gunk up all those pretty curls in your hair?” he replied. He truly needed help understanding such a baffling thing, and that had made Dovey smile. The only jewelry she wore to the dance was Pete’s locket. He had given her other presents, but he could tell the locket was still her favorite. She had told him that she kept it on a little table by her bed so it would be the first thing she saw every morning and the last thing she touched each night.
“I need to remind you of anything?” her father asked Pete.
“No, sir,” Pete said. “To the school and back and no place after, home by nine or I’m a dead man.”
“That’s exactly right. Now, y’all have a good time.” Dovey’s father kissed her on the forehead as he told her goodbye.
Pete had pulled into the school parking lot and shut off the engine before he realized he had never given Dovey her corsage. He had carried it into her house and back out again, set it in the car, and driven it all the way to the dance.
“Oh, man!” he exclaimed. “You must think I’m the biggest lunkhead, Dovey. This is for you.” He took the delicate flower out of its white box and slipped it over her wrist.
“I’ve never seen a flower like that,” she said with a little gasp. “Wh
at’s it called?”
“It’s an orchid. Mama said it would look pretty with your dress. Now, why didn’t you thump me on the head and tell me to take this durn flower out of the box and give it to you?”
“Because I didn’t know there was a durn flower in the box. For all I knew, you coulda packed us some leftover chicken in there.”
They both laughed, like they had so many times as kids teasing each other on the creek bank. But Pete saw Dovey’s expression change when she looked up to see all the couples start filing toward the gym. Some of the girls had that big hair she had shown him in the magazine. Little clusters of them were scattered here and there, admiring each other’s dresses and giggling about whatever it is that makes girls like that giggle. The stag boys were huddled at the back corner of the gym, smoking Lucky Strikes.
Dovey looked at Pete with terror in her eyes. “I don’t belong here,” she said.
“You belong anywhere you wanna be,” Pete said, turning to face her. “You’re the prettiest girl here tonight, Dovey—and the smartest, school or no school. Do you wanna be here—with me, I mean?” A little afraid of her answer, he stared down at the corsage on her wrist, lightly running a fingertip over the delicate orchid.
“I want to dance with you in this dress and wear your pretty flowers,” she said. “But I don’t think I can go in there with all them—all those—girls.”
“How many kids you reckon we’ve seen go into that gym while we were sittin’ here?” Pete asked.
“I don’t know . . . thirty or forty? Why?”
Missing Isaac Page 10