by Jane Gill
“It didn’t look too appetizing to me,” Susan said. “’Course, I didn’t see any buds on it. It just looked like long, triangle-shaped fingers with spikey thorns.”
“Oh, but you should see it when it blossoms,” Lu encouraged. “The flowers are huge, maybe six inches across. I remember my mother loved it when it bloomed. She’d take us out in the moonlight so we could see that big old tree full of blossoms.” Suddenly the emotions of the day overtook her. She stopped walking and turned to Susan, grabbing both of her hands in her own.
“Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake in my life,” she said. “Miss Pearl and I had a long talk this afternoon, and I need to tell you how sorry I am that I kept my family a secret from you, from everyone.” She wanted to say more, but burst into tears, the words catching in her throat. Susan threw her arms around her and let the sobs come.
“Mom, I love you, we all love you,” she said. “Please, don’t cry. It’s okay. Really, it is.”
Lu pulled herself away, wiped the tears from her cheeks with her palms and suddenly began to giggle. She put her hands on Susan’s shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “How did you get so smart?” she asked.
“I got it from you,” Susan answered, blinking back the tears in her own eyes. They turned together and walked back up the beach, holding each other in the twilight. Lu felt the waves lap at her feet as though they were washing away years of pain and leaving only glimmering shells on the moonlit beach.
It was just after 7:00 in the morning when Lu awoke with a start. When they returned to their room the night before, Lu called Reverend Parker and arranged a visit for the next morning. She was confident they could find his house now that they had been to Eatonville once already. Since their flight wasn’t scheduled to leave Orlando until late that afternoon, she intended for them to get up early and get on the road. But she’d overslept and now felt rushed.
“Susan,” she said sharply. “Get up, honey. We’ve got to get going if we’re going to get to Eatonville and visit Reverend Parker before our flight home.”
Susan sat up, still groggy with sleep.
“Yeah, I know,” she mumbled. “That’s what we get for sitting up half the night.”
Lu was busy putting her makeup into her suitcase. “I know, but I’m glad we stayed up,” Lu said. “There’ve been too many times when I wished we were closer.” She sat on the bed beside Susan. “I want to work on that from now on.”
Susan gave her mother a sleepy half smile and got out of bed. She looked in the mirror and patted her hair. “That’s the thing about cornrows,” she said. “This little pickaninny doesn’t have to worry about doing her hair this morning!”
Lu stepped up behind her and gave her hair a tug, “Yeah, but you’re my little pickaninny,” she teased.
“Oh, gosh,” Lu said, carefully making her way onto the interstate. “I hope we don’t hit a lot of traffic.”
“Mom,” Susan replied. “I’m sure we’ll get there in plenty of time. I’m just glad our flight isn’t until this afternoon so that we can do this. It’s like we’re getting all the answers this trip. Like it was meant to be, you know? It’s been incredible.”
“It’s definitely been interesting.” Lu acknowledged.
Chapter Thirty-One
When they arrived at Reverend Parker’s little yellow stucco house, he was waiting on the porch. Lu was relieved she hadn’t kept the old preacher waiting; they were only a few minutes later than expected.
The old preacher stood when they pulled their car in front of his house. He wore dark trousers with suspenders pulled up over a crisp white shirt, open at the collar, the sleeves carefully folded up to his elbows.
“I’m so glad you called,” he said as he greeted them. “It’s good to see you both again.” He held up a mug of coffee. “I’ve got a fresh pot,” he offered.
“That would be wonderful,” Lu said, even though she really didn’t want any. “Just a touch of sugar, please.”
“Go ahead and have a seat,” he directed. “I just swept the cobwebs offa’ everything.” He flashed a broad grin in jest. But Lu saw a broom leaning up against the corner of the house so she didn’t doubt for a minute that he had swept the porch carefully just for them. When he returned from inside, he had coffee for Lu and iced tea for Susan. Lu accepted the mug, grateful for something to do with her hands.
“Well, now,” he began. “What time is your flight home today?”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to be at the airport by 1:30 because of the security regulations,” Lu said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get here earlier. I hope we’re not imposing.”
“No, no,” he said. “All I got these days is time. Miss Pearl doin’ okay, is she?”
Lu set her mug on the small table between them. “Oh, she’s just as sweet as ever. Yesterday when I visited she told me about how she and Jerome came to live near us. And, as I mentioned on the phone last night, she confirmed that we, Martin and I, that is, had an uncle. She said you know what happened to him.” She watched the preacher’s face carefully, even though she couldn’t read his dark eyes. As an adult, she felt awkward addressing him as an equal. He’d been such a powerful figure in her childhood.
Josiah Parker leaned back in his chair and formed his long fingers into a teepee. He cleared his throat. “The time comes in all our lives when we have to set things straight,” he said. “I kept a secret for a good many years because I judged that the truth would be too painful.” He cleared his throat again and sipped his coffee. “But way back after Sister Mayetta passed, the Lord began to talk to me about that secret and my part in it. And I knew then it was time to confess. The Word says that the ‘truth will set you free’, and I had come to a point where it was heavy on my heart that I should tell the truth.”
He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees and gazed at the porch floor. “It was way back long before you were born, 1945, no, it was ’46. Maybe in the spring that year, come to think of it. Your daddy was only a boy, eleven or twelve years old. I don’t rightly remember for sure. I was way up around Palatka at a revival up there. Oh, it was a big tent revival.” He looked at Susan. “We had one just about every year back then. So I’d been up there for a few days, you know? Anyway, it was the last meetin’, I believe it was a Sunday. Yes, that’s right. The last meetin’s always on a Sunday mornin’. After the service, why, we were all standin’ around, you know. I was givin’ a few last handshakes and words of encouragement to the faithful when this fella I knew from up around there, Beau was his name—I remember I was walkin’ to my car and Beau, he come over and grabbed me by the elbow and he says he’s got to see me real bad.”
The Reverend paused and looked off into the distance. “I can’t seem to recall his last name now, but maybe it will come to me. So, I said, ‘Well, here I am’.” The old preacher took another sip of his coffee and held the mug with both hands.
“‘No,’ he says. ‘I really gotta talk to you. I got big trouble out at my place, and I need you to come with me.’ He was lookin’ all around while he was talkin’, you know, scared-like,” the preacher said, looking directly at Lu to be sure she understood. “Now Beau, he had these big eyes. Real big eyes. I think they call ’em moon eyes. He always looked like he was glad to see you. It was sometimes a pleasure to see him, too, if you know what I mean. But he didn’t look glad that day. He looked like a man with a lot of worry on him. He asked me to come to Sunday dinner out at his place. I really didn’t want to go. I had already turned down a coupla dinner invites on account of I wanted to get home to my wife—before dark, you know?”
The Reverend stared at Lu. She nodded, realizing it had never occurred to her that the preacher was married.
He turned his head toward the hibiscus bushes that formed a hedge seperating his tiny yard from the street. “Anyhow, old Beau he was so agitated and scared that I said I would follow him on out to his place. You know, in case somebody was bad sick out there or somethin’.” He paused a
moment and then shook his head. “I sure wish I could remember his last name. But, no matter.”
He looked toward Lu and leaned back in his chair and inhaled. “We went on out to his place, and his wife and children all gathered ’round and Beau, well, he didn’t say anything whatsoever about me bein’ there. And his wife, she was behavin’ like she hadn’t expected me. That seemed a little odd to me, but she fixed a nice dinner, and then we set out on the porch with our coffee, and Beau still didn’t say anything. I could see he was nervous ’bout somethin’, but he didn’t say ’nothin’ practically through the whole meal. Yeah,” he interrupted himself, “it was the spring, because it was still cool. I remember now.” Satisfied that he remembered the season, he continued. “Well, finally, I decided that I needed to leave, and Beau he jumps up and says how he needs for me for take a little walk out to the field with him.” Reverend Parker tilted his head to one side. “I’ll tell you, Beau’s wife was a good Christian woman. That I knew. But old Beau, well, I wasn’t so sure he’d ever set foot in a church. I know he sure wasn’t at the revival,” he said. “So, I figured maybe he had put some pretty colorful sins on his soul over the years, and now he wanted to get right with the Lord. I told him we could take a little walk, but I was determined that after that I was leavin’ for home. I was dog-tired, and the way Beau was hemmin’ and hawin’ was beginning to get on my nerves.” Reverend Parker set his mug on the table next to Lu’s and cleared his throat once again.
“So me and Beau, we head out toward the fields. See, Beau didn’t have his own land. He was a sharecropping’ up there. There was an old fallin’ down barn on the property and an old shack. Beau takes off walkin’ out toward the shack. Finally, I says to him, ‘Beau, now, you called me out here because you said you had bad trouble and I been here all afternoon and I don’t see no trouble whatsoever.’
“Oh,’ he says. ‘I got trouble, Reverend. I got trouble, for sure.’ Then he starts fessin’ up how he was on his way home the night before after an evening of some drinkin’ and card playin’ with the boys when he stopped along the road.”
The Reverend nodded to Lu and Susan. “If ya’ll excuse me, I mean he stopped on the side of the road to relieve hisself,” he said. “And Beau looks down in the ditch, and here’s this little negra boy. Now Beau didn’t know what to do, so he looks all around and nobody’s comin’ down the road. He goes and shuts off his truck and climbs down in the ditch, and here the boy is dead. Beau gets real scared, then. He figured he couldn’t take the boy home, but he couldn’t leave him in that ditch neither. You see that, right?” he asked. Lu nodded and picked up her mug again, just to have something to do with her hands.
“Finally,” the Reverend said, “I guess he decided to take the boy home and bury him in his field. See, you couldn’t go to the law back in those days and just say that you found a body. Nobody did that. So he managed somehow to get him in the back of his truck and back to his house. He didn’t want his wife to know what he found. That’s why he put him out in the shed.”
The Reverend sighed. “And sure enough, there in that old shed of his in the corner, all covered over with some burlap, was the boy. Beau wouldn’t come in the shed with me. He said he’d stay outside and keep a lookout. He said that maybe before he was to bury that boy I could have a prayer over the body, you know?” Again he nodded, but more to himself than to Lu or Susan.
“It was real hot in that shed. The sun’d been beatin’ down on it all day. It was mighty close in there and dark. I didn’t want to be in there but, finally, I seen this bundle in the corner, and I pulled back that burlap. Well, the minute I laid eyes on that boy, I see it was young Jerome Stovall. He looked like he’d been beat bad—real bad. Bad enough to kill him.”
Lu saw Susan put her hand over her mouth. She held her own breath as the Reverend continued with his story. “Now, of course, I’d been up at the revival, so I didn’t know Jerome had run off. I couldn’t imagine what he was doin’ so far off, but I decided right then I had to carry him home. Beau was real relieved, but of course, that meant I had to go back into Palatka and send word to my wife that somethin’ had come up and I wouldn’t be home for another day.”
The old preacher stared off into space, as if he were talking to himself. “’Course, I knew in my heart that when I did get home, I probably wouldn’t tell her why I’d been held up. So that would be the first lie I planned, see? And one lie always leads to another,” He shook his head, mourning his lie. Then, with his forearms back on his knees, he said, “I went back to Beau’s house way after dark. Old Beau, he told me to drive in across his field. I didn’t want to drive my old Ford, that’s the car I had back then, through that field, but I didn’t have a choice.” He sat up again, explaining, “That night was real dark. There was about a half moon and some high clouds was movin’ through, so with my lights out, I could only see a little bit when the moon showed, but when those clouds covered the moon, it was black. I mean you could hardly see your hand in front of your face it was so dark. Beau was waiting by the shed. He didn’t want nothin’ to do with handling that body, though. I think he was scared of the dead. Some folks is real scared of somethin’ like that.”
Again, Lu nodded. She was hanging on every word as he related the tale of her young uncle’s murder so long ago.
“That was the night I was saved,” the Reverend suddenly confessed. He waggled his head ever so slightly and stared into his memory. “I was a young man back then and new to the ministry. Truth was, I liked myself pretty good back then, but I knew what nobody else knew, too—that I’d gone to preachin’ more for my own sake than the Lord’s.” He sat back and stared out at the hibiscus hedge again. “See, Preachers always dressed nice, and I had an aversion to gettin’ my hands dirty.” He looked at Susan. “Generally speaking, men of the cloth don’t get their hands dirty, and they’re always treated with respect—even by the whites. That’s what I wanted. But that night, oh, my, my, that night the Lord brought me face to face with my self-righteous ways. He taught me a hard lesson, Psalms 101:5 ‘… him that hath a high look and a proud heart will I not tolerate.’ Mmm mmmm.”
He cleared his throat vigorously and went on with his story. “‘Beau,’ I says, ‘You got me out here to take care of this boy. Now you gotta help me get him in the car.’ But old Beau, he was turnin’ his face all around there in the dark of that field, like he was expectin’ somebody was gonna see us out there.
“‘Preacher,’ he says, ‘I can’t be doin’ that. I don’t know what ever possessed me to bring him here in the first place. I been a wreck all day long.’
“So I hollered at him as loud as I dared, ‘Beau, get yourself in here and help me, or I’ll leave the boy right here!’ Well, that did it, and the next thing you know we wrapped little Jerome in some more sacks, and me and Beau, why, we put him in the trunk of my car so I could carry him to his folks.” Reverend Parker swept his hand over his forehead as if to erase the memory. “Now, I’ve always been a strong man, but I tell you, I ain’t never carried anything in my life was as heavy as that young-un was that night. Not before or since! I pulled my old Ford—that’s what I drove back then, a 1940 blue Ford coupe.”
Lu didn’t follow why she and Susan needed to know what kind of car he drove, but she smiled a weak smile of understanding and he went on.
“I pulled out onto Route 17 and headed south, all the while tryin’ to negotiate with God, you know.” He raised his eyebrows as he quoted his own conversation from that night. “‘Oh, Lord,’ I says, ‘I am just tryin’ to do what’s right here. All I’m askin’ is that you’ll give me your blessin’ this night. I’m mighty sorry about the lie I told my wife and I will repent of that and I will never tell another lie as long as I live. Just help me, now, Lord. That’s all I ask. Don’t let nobody know I got this boy in my trunk.’ Well, those clouds I told you about?” He looked at Susan, who was hanging on his every word.
“Those clouds were just flyin’ across the moon, but I was caref
ul to stay below the speed limit. Pretty soon, another car came up the road at me, from the south, and it was moving at a good clip when it passed. I watched in my rear-view mirror. Sure enough, it was the Sheriff. ‘Lord,’ I says. ‘Don’t leave me, Lord, don’t let him see me out here driving after dark.’ ‘Course I watched in the mirror, and the Sheriff’s car slowed and turned around. Then I saw the red light flash.
“Well, when I see that the Sheriff was after me, why, I pulled off the road. The Sheriff, he pulled right up behind me. My heart was poundin’ like a sledge hammer, and there I sat makin’ sure my hands was up high on the wheel where he could see ‘em.” The preacher raised both his fists showing how he had gripped the steering wheel that night. “Then the Sheriff turned on a spotlight and it glared right in my mirror. It near blinded me, I can tell you. But I figured he wasn’t takin’ no chances, so I just set there, stiff as Lot’s wife. I couldn’t see because of the light in my eyes, ‘course, but I just knew he stepped out of his car with his hand on his gun. The next thing I knew, he rapped on my window and motioned me to open it. My hands was sweatin’ so bad, I could hardly roll it down!” The preacher looked at his palms as if the sweat was still there.
“‘Whatcha doin’ out here so late, boy?’ he says. And before I could get the words out, he’s ordering me to show him my driver’s license and the car registration. All the while, he’s chewing on the end of a big old wet cigar. I could see that now ‘cause he was right next to me, see?” The preacher nodded at Lu and she mouthed a yes.
“So there I am, doin’ my best not to look at that red hot cigar and I’m fumblin’ around in my wallet hopin’ he sees that I’m a preacher. You know I still had my preachin’ clothes on,” he said. “Then he grabs my wallet outta’ my hand and stares at my license in that spotlight. He looks up at me and then he musta’ finally seen that I was a preacher, ‘cause he says, ‘What you doin’ out here on this road tonight, Preacher? It’s mighty late to be makin’ house calls, ain’t it?’ and he hands me back my wallet.