by Robert Inman
“I’m glad to hear that. So do I.”
“I realize …” He stopped, cleared his throat. “I want him to win this race if it’s humanly possible.”
Bright thought of Harley Gibbons. “Because you run a big bank?” Then she thought, I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve caused enough trouble. I need to curb my tongue and get my money and get out of here.
“No,” Beaulieu said. “Well, that has something to do with it. But Fitz is a friend and he’s a man who’ll look you in the eye and do what he says. You and the congressman raised him right.”
Bright thought for just an instant that she was going to cry then, but she took hold of herself quickly. “That’s very kind of you,” she said softly.
The branch manager and a security guard walked out with them to their car, the guard holding the manager’s nice leather briefcase filled with the money. A thousand fifty-dollar bills, she calculated.
“I’ll get your briefcase back to you as soon as we get home,” she promised. “I’ll put it on the bus.”
“No hurry,” Purcell said. He still looked a little stunned by the whole business.
There was a parking ticket on the windshield of the Plymouth and the security guard plucked it off, stuck it in his pocket, handed Bright the briefcase through the open window. She passed it to Jimbo, who held it in his lap as they drove away, waving back to the two men from the bank standing on the sidewalk, watching them.
“What am I gonna do with this?” Jimbo asked. “I can’t ride all the way home with it in my lap.”
“You’re my bodyguard,” she said. “Both the money and I are your responsibility.”
He thought about it for a moment and his shoulders straightened. “I’ll sit on it.” He rose up from the seat, tucked the briefcase under him, sat down again. “There,” he said, giving her a firm look. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
They stopped at a nice little café in a town just outside the capital and had a good meal while Jimbo sat protectively on the briefcase. And then they headed south toward home as the night closed in, turning things purply soft. Jimbo fiddled with the radio for a while, listening to snatches of music and talk from St. Louis, New Orleans, Nashville. But the tired old tubes wouldn’t hold a station for long, and he gave up eventually and turned it off with a click, then leaned his head back against the seat.
“Tired?” she asked.
“Ummm-hmmm.”
“You can crawl in the back seat and go to sleep if you want.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll stay up here with the briefcase.” He sat up high in the seat with the leather case underneath him.
“Isn’t that uncomfortable?”
He shrugged. “Not much.”
“Well, I think you could slide it down under the seat and it would be just as safe. Then you’ll know it’s right under you in case you have to grab it and run.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Oh, in case terrorists attack the car.”
He laughed at that, the thought of the car under attack. Then he stowed the briefcase away under the seat and sat for a long time looking out the window at the gathering night, trees and fields, houses and crossroads stores fading into darkness, replaced with warm squares of lights in windows and stark blue-white security lamps in the farmhouse yards. “You better turn on your lights,” he reminded her, and she switched them on and they splayed weakly across the road ahead.
She slowed to forty and crept on into the night while the wind at the open windows sang in baritone, a low, fitful song. Traffic was light, on occasional car or truck that appeared suddenly behind her and then whisked past. She had not driven at night for a very long time, but there was something comforting about it, like pulling a thick winter quilt about you, feeling the nubby texture of stitches made by deft hands —in and out, in and out, weaving time itself into the fabric. She felt the same kind of familiarity now —the wind at the window, the swish of the tires, the low throb of the motor, all of it swaddled by the night. You didn’t need to see the landmarks when the road led so surely home, long stretches of warm, velvet blackness speckled by lights that kept the night at bay.
“I used to go to the capital with my father when I was a little girl,” she said, speaking as much to the night as to Jimbo.
“Was he the guy in Congress?”
“No, that was my husband. Your grandfather.”
“Who was your father?” He turned to her, his face pale and fragile in the dim light from the dashboard.
Ah, where to begin? “He was a lumberman,” she said.
“What’s a lumberman?”
“Well, he owned a sawmill by the river in town, and he had a lot of men who worked for him. They cut timber all through the forests, even up in this part of the state sometimes.”
“Like Paul Bunyan,” he said.
Bright smiled. “He didn’t have an ox, but he had teams of horses at first and then he had big trucks. He was a very progressive man, my father. He was the first timberman in this part of the country to use trucks. His crews would go to the woods and cut the trees—huge trees, so tall you couldn’t see the tops of them from the ground. And then he figured out how to take his sawmill to the woods, and they would cut up the trees right there on the spot and haul the lumber to town. Daybreak to dawn.” She talked on, telling him about the lumberyard, the big whining planer mill under the long tin-roofed shed, the sawdust matted underfoot, the smell of fresh-cut wood and resin thick in the air, her favorite spot in the elm tree just outside the window of the small office building. She lost herself in the story, deep in the cocoon of the rushing night and the humming wheels of the car. She felt Dorsey Bascombe’s strong arms lifting her out of the tree onto his shoulders. When she looked down, his tall leather boots seemed to be a mile below. They strode the grounds like a two-headed giant, calling out to the sweating black men who tended the great throbbing mill, waiting for the noon whistle. It was noontime only when Dorsey Bascombe said it was. He was the most powerful man in the world, a man who held sway over time itself. They stopped and Dorsey pulled his watch from his pocket, snapped open the cover, gave a nod. And the whistle sang out across the yard, across the shimmering river nearby, across Dorsey Bascombe’s town …
She stopped abruptly, blinking herself back to the present, and looked over at Jimbo. He had fallen asleep, his head lolling against the seat back, mouth open. She reached for him, pulled his head down into her lap. He nestled there, cuddling against her like a small, tired animal.
He had withdrawn into his own world of dreams, but he had left her with her own —the man in the tall leather boots and the other one who strode the landscape in a much different but still powerful way. One man whose world had consumed her, the other whose world she had never truly known. She faced them both now, memories she had had tucked away for so long, like musty remnants of childhood dresses in a cedar chest, hidden in a corner of the attic. One got on with things and got along, because the alternative was abiding despair. And Bright Birdsong had never been a despairing woman. She coped, she took responsibility for herself, she did what needed to be done. When you didn’t have time or inclination to bother with ghosts, they kept to themselves. They were shy creatures.
But as she rolled on through the night, she felt the palpable presence of her ghosts, and for the first time in a long time, the old sense of loss and abandonment. Things lost, things missed, things left unfinished.
Her children. She thought of Roseann and Fitz, both of them angry with her now, one violently so. Their bitterness, she realized, had little to do with the money or with the business of the town council. It was the old thing, the thing given voice by both of them in the space of five hours today. You were never sorry. An ancient grievance, a ghost of another sort, this one a beast that had ripped open old wounds and exposed them to the fetid air. This ghost, joining company with the others, filling the car now with their presence, no longer the shy and unthreatening creatures she had
imagined them to be. She felt a growing panic, her old heart racing with apprehension. She wanted to shake Jimbo awake and cry, “What must I do?” But he wouldn’t know. He stirred in sleep, made a soft snuffling sound and edged closer to her.
So she rolled on through the night, haunted by ancient spirits. Her brain swirled and eddied like a storm-choked river, and from the dark water, hands reached up to her. And then voices, emboldened by her sudden vulnerability. Fitzhugh, pleading: “Come away with me and be mine and only mine!” Roseann, accusing: “You killed him!” And Fitz, scolding: “You’ve always done pretty much what you wanted.”
She gasped, her eyes wide with fright. And then she began to cry, the tears coming despite all she could do to hold them back, coursing down her cheeks and blurring the night through the windshield. The car lurched and she gripped the steering wheel in terror, realized that a wheel had slipped off the shoulder of the road. She jerked it back and then she mashed on the brake and stopped the car dead in the road and sat there, her heart in her throat and her breath coming in labored wheezes. The voices all cried out at once now. “Why? Why?”
And then it came to her, an illumination, an answer wrenched from the depths of her soul. Because I never came down from Dorsey Bascombe’s shoulders.
>
They came at long last to the outskirts of town, the old woman and the young boy in the old rumbling car, refugees from the night.
As they topped the rise on the River Bridge, Bright saw the glow on the horizon, well beyond the dark place at the end of the street where her own house would be. She thought first of the football stadium. She could sit on her own porch on cool fall evenings and see its lights like something atomic over the treetops, hear snatches of cheering and the thump of a bass drum. But no, the football stadium was well off to her right now, not far from the riverbank. This was something different. Then she saw the lick of flame against the sky and she realized with a flash of horror what it was. Booker T. Washington is burning!
She fled from it. At the bottom of the bridge she turned into a driveway, backed into the street and retreated over the bridge. She drove fast out the road along the river, the car devouring the highway as if it might outrun the pale glare of its old headlamps. Eventually, she reached the place she was looking for and turned off the pavement down the dirt road. The car bumped and heaved along the ruts with the trees close on either side.
Jimbo awoke with a start. “What’s that?” He rose up in the seat, rubbing his eyes.
“Nothing,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. “Go back to sleep.”
He looked at her for a moment, then put his head back down in her lap. She slowed, picking her way along the rutted path, tall weeds scraping the underside of the car. Finally they broke from the woods into the clearing and the lights of the car bathed the front porch of the camp house and she saw it as she had seen it in her imagination that very first day when she and Dorsey had come here together. She stopped the car in front of the house and turned off the engine, sat listening for a moment.
He was still here, she thought, the tall man in the brown leather boots who passed pieces of unbearably sweet candy under his desk to the tiny creature who burrowed there in the safe darkness. His very blood was deep in this ground. The river ran through his veins, and his voice was carried on the wind that rustled the trees with a faint breeze. She was afraid, terribly afraid. But she took a deep breath and calmed herself. Dorsey was here. And now, he was the only refuge she knew.
Dorsey Bascombe would talk to her, and she would listen. And then she would know what to do.
17
The house of death. It had been lifeless for so long, and now it teemed with people, a constant stream of them, ebbing and flowing across the yard, through the front hallway and into the parlor, like a river out of its banks. They came because Dorsey Bascombe was the one man their town could not afford to lose, and yet he lay upstairs with a great, gaping hole in his shoulder, his heartbeat a mere flutter, his life slowly draining into the blood-soaked mattress.
The men who went rushing to fetch Dorsey back to town from the camp house had gone back later, had handled the body of the dead foreman O’Marron roughly, had tossed it into a hastily dug shallow grave without benefit of coffin or clergy. It was whispered in the house of death that one of the men had urinated on the corpse before they covered it with earth. But they didn’t dwell on O’Marron. He was better forgotten.
They came to tend the living and the dying and they brought food, great heaping bowls and platters and hampers full of it, as if they could by the sheer weight of okra and fried chicken and fruit salad stop the hand of death, or at least delay it for a while until they had had proper time to intercede for Dorsey Bascombe’s soul. Hosanna took it all to the kitchen, muttering darkly, “Folks don’t think I can cook?” Much of it went fairly quickly out the back door to her part of town. “Nigras ain’t never eat so good,” she said. “Mr. Dorsey would like that.”
They came to console, to pray (the town’s ministers took turns leading an around-the-clock prayer vigil in a corner of the parlor), and to see how the young widow-to-be was holding up.
They found Elise Bascombe remarkably composed, tragically pretty, seemingly in complete control of both herself and the situation. She greeted the guests solemnly at the front door, made them feel at ease, accepted their offerings, guided them to the parlor, and then withdrew discreetly at regular intervals to go upstairs to her husband’s side. They marveled. Was this the same Elise Bascombe who had collapsed from sheer fright at the Study Club meeting? This young woman had poise, backbone, breeding. She seemed to draw on some secret reservoir of strength and grace in her husband’s darkest hour. She was much admired, much complimented. Only a few wagging tongues wondered why it had taken the approach of death to bring her out of her shell.
The one constant in the house was the doctor, Finus Tillman, perhaps Dorsey’s best friend in this town. It would not do, he said, to try to move Dorsey to the hospital in Columbus. It was too risky. So Finus Tillman moved in, black satchel and suitcase, and they set up a cot for him in Dorsey’s bedroom. For two days he hovered over the blasted near-corpse on the bed, doing what he could to stanch the steady drip of blood from the horrible wound, grinding his teeth in frustration as the pulse became weaker and the patient slipped farther into darkness. So very much damage had been done. The left side of Dorsey’s chest was torn away. Several pieces of buckshot were lodged perilously close to the heart. The doctor did not dare touch them. The left arm was riddled and withered—bone shattered, flesh shredded, blood vessels severed. On the morning of the second day, Finus told Elise that Dorsey could not live. She must prepare herself. Elise nodded, pulled a chair next to her husband’s bed, took his limp hand into her own, and waited for the end.
Bright knew little of this until later, because they had sent her straightaway to the Hardwicke home. A house of death, Elise said, was no place for a child. Bright never forgave her for that.
Fincher and Fostoria didn’t seem to know what to do with Bright, and so they did too much. They hovered about her like dark angels, clucking and cloying, until she thought she must scream from suffocation. Bright could tell that the whole business was a great strain on them, trying to fill the silence, hoping to God it would soon be over and they could be relieved of this awkwardness. She wanted them to go away and leave her alone, or better still to take her to her father. But she didn’t say any of that because it would be mean and tacky and she didn’t want to do anything to make anyone mad with her. If she was bad, her father would die Godless. She was petrified with fear of that.
So she said not a single word to the adult Hardwickes. As far as they knew, she was still mute. In truth, the horrible blast of O’Marron’s shotgun had loosened the grip of whatever beast had gripped her tongue in its hoary fist these past months. Words had come spilling from her mouth in a torrent there in the field when she had run for help. She had spoken because she simply had to. Bu
t when the first feverish babble had died in her throat, she closed her mouth again and retreated into the silence of her own counsel.
She revealed herself only to Xuripha, and then only in the deep silence of night. The Hardwickes established Bright in Xuripha’s room, where there were twin beds, and Xuripha’s disapproving silence let her know that she was an interloper and, more than that, a freakish curiosity.
On the evening of the first night, Fostoria tucked them both into bed and turned off the light, and Xuripha waited until the door closed and Fostoria’s footsteps faded down the hall. And then she said, quite loudly, “Your father’s almost dead. I heard ’em talking. He won’t last ’til daybreak.”
Something snapped in Bright. She threw back the covers and leapt from the bed and stood trembling with rage over Xuripha’s prone form. She hissed. Like a snake. She felt the venom surging through her veins, the furious sound seething through her clenched teeth, and she raised both her hands, curled into wicked claws, preparing to strike. “If you say another word to me, I will bite you on the neck and you will die a horrible death!”
Xuripha cried out in terror, clutching the sheet up around her neck.
“Shut up!” Bright hissed. “Just shut your stupid mouth!” She stood frozen with rage for a moment longer, making sure that Xuripha was thoroughly terrified, and then she got back into her own bed and lay there listening to the wretched whimpering.
It stopped after a while and Xuripha said in a tiny voice, “I didn’t know you could speak.”
“Yes, I can speak.”
“When did it happen?”
“When the man shot my daddy.”
Xuripha sat up in the bed. “Why didn’t you speak all that time?”
“None of your business,” Bright said shortly.
Xuripha didn’t say anything for a long while and Bright huddled under the sheet, listening to the crickets in the grass outside the window, hoping Xuripha would leave her alone with her misery. Finally, Xuripha said, “I’m sorry. Truly I am.” And then after another moment she got out of her bed and came to Bright’s and climbed in with her and put her arms around Bright and hugged her very tightly. Bright stiffened, wanting her to just go away, feeling the ache and grief hard like a rock inside her. But they lay there together for a long time and Bright began to let go a little and then the tears came and it was better.