by Jackie Lynn
“You want something else to eat?” Tom asked.
I nodded. The half of the sandwich had not filled me up.
“I got peanut butter crackers at my camper. Iced tea,” I answered.
He grinned at me. “Food and wine of the gods,” he responded.
We gathered up his things, set the chair and cooler next to the cane pole and the old white bucket at the pier, and walked together to site number Seventy-six, to my travel trailer—away from the office and the pond and Deputy Fisk—right at the edge of the river.
He waited while I went inside and brought out the food. I watched from the window as he wiped off the table and the benches.
I put everything in a plastic bag and headed to where he sat and joined him.
When I noticed the time on my watch, it was after one o’clock in the afternoon and I realized I had been in love for more than one hour. Upon reflection, I do believe it was the finest hour of my existence up to that exact moment in life. But at the time, I understood I was neither able to explain it or define it, I only knew that I was so full of pleasure and joy and complete satisfaction in that brilliant summer day, that there was nothing nor anybody who could tamper with or destroy the delighted nature of my heart.
We ate peanut butter crackers and drank glasses of cold tea. We sat at the picnic table down by the river and had no cause to speak of death or life or even beauty. It was all stretched out before us.
The afternoon, like the Mississippi, sped past.
NINE
When Clara and her mother returned from the hospital in Memphis, the weariness draped across their shoulders like old wool scarves. Deputy Fisk had left, and Tom and I had shared a pitcher of tea and a list of our favorite things.
We named flavors of ice cream—chocolate for me, butter pecan for him—singers—he claimed Ray Charles, I picked Patsy Cline—and our favorite place to visit—both choosing the ocean and the time of day, again in agreement, saying that it depends completely upon the day.
We had spoken of our childhood dreams, where we had learned our greatest lessons, his from war, mine from love, and the grief we both felt in the loss of a parent. His father, my mother, and how we both thought of them, every single morning in the first hour of our waking.
He told me how he studied engineering at Memphis State University, but left school his junior year to sign up for military service because he was convinced that his father still needed a reason to be proud of his son, how he was one of the last men in the Navy to enter the Vietnam War and that he was there for only six months when they ended missions and ordered his ship stateside.
He explained that just two months before he returned to West Memphis, his father died, and that he was never able to show him the two Purple Heart medals he won when he shattered his knee and ankle after a bomb exploded on the road where he was driving his commanding officer from the ship to a remote base on land. He was never able to place in his father’s hands the Bronze and Silver Stars he was awarded for pulling the officer out of the burning jeep, nor could he show him the letter of special commendation he was given for the design work he did on underwater listening devices that the Navy still uses.
He said that he came back from Vietnam uninterested in science or engineering, uninterested in finishing college or building things, that the only thing which he still felt pleasure for was history. So he bought a trailer using the money he had saved during the summers of his teenaged years, leased a lot on the other side of the quarry that was next to Shady Grove, and read everything he could find about the South, about war, about Africa, and about the Mississippi River.
He started work at the docks on the other side of the river, the Tennessee side, he said. He worked for a long time, but then his knee hurt so often and so acutely that he took an early retirement and lived off his disability.
I told him about being a nurse, how fulfilling I found it to know things about the human body, how I was fascinated with the way things work, how I loved the heart and how consistently it pumped, in good times and bad.
We talked about Shady Grove, the fine location of the campground on the banks of the river, the hard edges to both Lucas and Rhonda, and how I felt both drawn to them and afraid of them at the same time, how Mary, in her tedious and high-strung way, held the place together. We talked about the recent arrival of the police, and even though he never asked, I told him about my father and the long hard way I grew up.
We spoke of summer fruits, peaches and berries, and the best way to make a cobbler crust—biscuit, not pie dough, Arkansas politics, the ease of interstate driving, the way his knee still ached on rainy days, and how we both, though neither of us had too much experience, preferred travel by train.
Finally, in conclusion of talk about shipping methods and river commerce, I asked him what had been on my mind earlier, the things I wanted to know that had been prompted by his treasure story, the gold at the river.
I asked him to tell me what he knew about Lawrence Franklin.
He said that in West Memphis, and particularly on the south side, it was a tight-knit community. Everybody knew everybody. He said that he and Lawrence grew up together, were childhood playmates, ran track together, went on double dates together, but that the years and the family business, college, military service, pulled them apart.
As adults, he said, as men who fished together, shared dreams together, he thought that they were good friends, but that the older he got the less sure he became that he really knew someone anyway.
I thought then about Rip, all the years we lived together, the evening meals when we sorted through the events of the day, the mornings when we dreamed, all the times I thought we were unfolding in front of each other, all the things I thought we were and yet learned later, we were not.
“Lawrence,” Tom said after I asked him what kind of man he was, “did not want to be an undertaker at first. It was handed to him, like the history of this place or the spelling of his last name. He had no choice since his father trained him from a child, his grandfather, too. Even as a boy, he dreaded what he knew his grown-up years would entail.”
“But he did it anyway?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“It’s a hard thing telling a father no.”
And I knew right then that even if there was nothing else, Lawrence and I were bound by the same household burden.
“So you think he was depressed then? That it was suicide?”
Tom shrugged his shoulders. And that was when I heard a car pull up. I turned to see the van drive forward and park at the trailer beside mine.
“No,” he answered. “But I doubt we’ll ever know the truth.” He added, “The law of the land doesn’t have a very good history of delivering justice for minorities.”
He paused a minute and turned to a more personal part of the relationship and the death.
“But maybe it was suicide, I don’t know. Lawrence wasn’t ever much of a talker and never really a person who expressed great emotion, but I do think he was content with his life. Once he took over for his father, he had great respect for the business; he took it as some kind of calling. And I know he was excited about finding this burial ground, that he had real purpose in trying to locate it and get it designated as a historical site. That was my job,” he noted. “I was trying to figure out how one goes about getting that designation. It’s a lot more complicated than you think.”
I nodded.
The mother got out of the driver’s side. Clara was riding beside her. I noticed the father and Jolie were not with them.
“But it’s true, isn’t it?” Tom asked quietly. “You never really know about folks, what they’re hiding, what pulls at them, what it is that makes them get out of bed in the morning or the thing that finally pushes them to jump in a river.”
I watched as Clara’s mother looked in our direction. She nodded at us, a means of acknowledgment.
Clara waved. I waved back. I turned to Tom to hear more, but he was staring at
the river, his gaze held to something I couldn’t place.
“I keep thinking that I could have been a better friend to Lawrence, that maybe if I had been paying closer attention to what was going on, I might have been able to see things were bad for him, you know, talked to him more about what he was facing.”
Clara and her mother walked inside their trailer. I could feel the weight of their steps.
“I did some work in a psychiatric hospital,” I said, watching my neighbors. “Some of the folks had really great friends. They’d visit, send cards, call them on the phone.” I noticed how the sky was changing around us, the afternoon clouds rolling in like tight balloons.
“The thing is, a person can have all the friends they need, lots of people around them, checking on them, caring for them. But if a person decides they’re done with this life, that they’ve worked at it from every angle they know, if they can’t find some measure of peace in the hours of their day, then having a friend doesn’t keep them from suicide. It just gives them a name to write on the note before they die.”
We stopped talking a little while and watched the horizon. We noticed the dark nature of the coming storm, the shifting of clouds and sun.
“Lawrence really wanted to know every inch of this the land around the river,” Tom said, as if I had asked for a memory.
“He stopped by my place awhile back and wanted to know if I had a relief map of the area.”
I turned to Tom. “What’s a relief map?” I asked.
“It categorizes the differences in height of landforms. I think he was calculating the changes along the river.”
“Well, that’s odd, don’t you think?” I asked.
Tom thought for a minute. “Not really,” he said. “Lawrence studied this area like it was a test he was taking. At one time, some years ago, before he heard about the burial site, he thought about buying a piece of waterfront property and putting the community cemetery down here.”
“That’d be a little dangerous, wouldn’t it, burying folks in a floodplain?”
Tom laughed. “Yeah, that’s what he found out. But I know he did a lot of research on the area when he was considering it. He was thinking more of an aboveground thing, a vault, I guess, something that wouldn’t be affected by the possibility of floods.”
I tried to imagine how anything would really be safe in an area so plagued by water troubles.
“Once he heard the story that there had been a burial ground for some slaves somewhere near here, he began really focusing on making the grounds more permanent.”
“That’s the story you mentioned that he was interested in?” I asked.
“Yeah. He said he read about it in some old letters, even found out their names. A boat capsized with three families of slaves and most of them drowned, including the captain and the slaveholders, but a few of them survived. The story goes that once they got ashore, instead of running to find freedom, they dragged up the dead bodies of the slaves from the bottom of the river and buried them somewhere near the banks. One of the men who survived was a Franklin.”
Tom took a breath.
“Lawrence figured the river had changed so much since those years, the old site was definitely eroded or underwater by now. I was trying to help him find it, but our research never amounted to much. But he kept searching because he wanted to find the place. He thought it was comforting to know some of his ancestors rested near here and comforting to know how far back the family business of undertaking death went.
“He said that regardless of what experts said about mud and a necessary elevation above sea level for proper burial, he thought the riverbank was a good place to lay the bodies of those who had been chained in boats and brought across the ocean. He thought being near the water would help their souls find their way home.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?” I asked.
“The day before he went missing. We were both getting our cars tuned-up. He was on his way back to the county library because he had found a new clue about the burial site and he was going to check that out. And then he said that the following day he had to go to St. Louis to pick up a body and that he was planning to stay the night, hear some jazz.”
“He had plans to be somewhere?” I asked, thinking that it seemed very odd that a person would be getting his car tuned-up and planning a work trip if he was considering suicide.
“Yes,” Tom replied. “That’s how they knew he was missing. The hospital from St. Louis called looking for him.”
“Did you ever find out if his clue led to anything? If he discovered some new information at the library?”
Tom shook his head. “No, I left that morning and was gone until the next day to see a cousin in Fort Smith.”
Before I could ask another question about Lawrence, define my interest in him, or consider whether or not he had found out anything about the land around Shady Grove, Clara showed up beside us. She must have come from behind the campers, then snuck around the table, for she suddenly appeared at my side.
“Hey,” she said, announcing herself, startling both of us. She had taken off her shoes and was eating a Popsicle. The grape syrup trailed down her arm.
“Hey,” I responded, surprised by the sudden arrival.
“It’s going to rain,” she said. She was studying Tom; her tongue, stained purple, darted across her frozen treat.
“Uh-huh,” I agreed and then noticed her interest in who was sitting across from me.
“Clara, this is Mr. Sawyer.”
Tom reached out his hand to her. She held the Popsicle tightly and just watched him. He pulled his hand away and nodded at the little girl.
“I’ve seen you fishing,” she said, eyeing him closely.
He replied softly, “Yes, I bet you have.” The smile stretched across his face.
“Where are Jolie and your dad?” I asked.
“They’re at the hospital,” the little girl reported. “She has to stay. We just came to get some clothes.”
She finished the Popsicle, put the stick on the table, and wiped her hands down the front of her shorts; the syrup was still smeared down her chin and along the bony part of her arms.
“So, you have to go back then?” I asked.
She nodded. A slow, tiresome gesture, the response of an obedient child, a dutiful sibling. She turned to watch the river darkening in the approaching storm.
And then, I don’t know, maybe it was the newness of love, my heart widened by its possibilities, maybe it was the marching of clouds above our heads, the suddenness of atmospheric fluctuation, or maybe it was the sadness of the little girl, so deep within her eyes that it pushed aside the softness of childhood. I’m not sure where the question came from, but I asked.
“Would you like to stay with me?”
Clara didn’t answer. She peered directly into my eyes, then turned and ran straight to her camper and inside to her mother. Startled once again by the quickness of her movement, I wasn’t sure if she was excited about my invitation or if I simply scared her away.
I glanced up at Tom and suddenly realized I had just altered any plans for us to spend the rest of the afternoon together. I almost apologized for what I had done. But before I could say a word, he stood up, and thanked me for the tea and crackers and, as he called it, “for the polite exchange of ideas.”
“It looks like you’ll be busy for a while, but if you find yourself without anything to do later this evening”—he turned toward the path behind him, the one beside the pond that went to the quarry—“my place is just on the other side of those hills of rocks.” He turned around to face me. “You can’t miss it.”
I was sure I wouldn’t, but before I could say anything in response, I heard the sound of a camper door close behind me. I turned to see that Clara was leading her mother in our direction.
Tom waited until she arrived, made a brief introduction, and then headed to the pond to get his things. I watched him walk away, the sun and everything perfect from the after
noon balanced so easily across his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” the young woman remarked, noticing my attention in Tom’s departure.
“No, no,” I responded. “It’s fine,” I added, pulling myself to the things at hand.
“I’m Rose,” I introduced myself, leaning up against the table.
“Janice,” she replied, “I’m Clara’s mother, Janice Miller.” She seemed awkward standing beside me.
“Here, sit down, if you’ve got a minute.”
And she stepped around the table and sat down across from me. Clara followed her.
Janice was not yet out of her twenties. She was round-faced, brown as the river bottom, eyes as sad as Clara’s. Her hair, darker than her face and eyes, fell just below her chin, and she wore a row of earrings in her left ear. Tiny gold hoops all the way up and around the edge. She held her hands together in her lap. She was hunched, leaning forward as if her heart was too heavy to sit up straight.
“Clara has shown me quite a welcome,” I said, beginning a conversation.
Janice smiled. “She’s a good girl.”
I nodded and the young child grinned.
“She says that you offered to let her stay with you while I go back to the hospital.”
“Yes,” I answered. “I did.”
Then I thought maybe she’d want some information about me, that a mother didn’t just leave her child with a woman she didn’t know.
“I’m here for a few days while my car is being worked on.”
She turned to see my camper.
“I’m moving west,” I said.
“From North Carolina,” Clara added.
“Yes,” I replied, “from North Carolina.”
“We come from Kentucky,” Janice reported.
“I told her, Mom,” Clara said.
The young mother nodded and there was a pause.
“I guess she told you about her sister then?” she asked. “About why we’re here?”
“She just said she was here to see a doctor in Memphis.” I wasn’t sure how much she wanted me to know, so that was all I revealed.
“St. Jude’s,” she replied. “We brought her to St. Jude’s.”