by Craig Shreve
My elder sister, Glenda, called from Baltimore, where she had settled to be close to the nursing home where our mother lived.
“Mama and I saw you on the news today. You know she’s not well.”
“How is she?”
“She’s not well, I just told you. Then she sees all this stuff about Graden on the news all over again. It’s not good for her.”
“Then why are you letting her watch it?”
“Don’t do that. Don’t you talk to me about taking care of Mama! I’m the one that’s here. Do you even care?”
Glenda raged at me for stirring things up, but I doubted that I was having the impact on our mother that she claimed. I had visited Ma a few times, and although there was the occasional spark of recognition, more often there was just a confused stare. Once, when I was standing in the doorway with the sunlight streaming in from the hallway window behind me, she smiled wistfully and called me “Graden.” I allowed her a moment of illusion, then backed out of the room and left the home. I never went back.
While Glenda shouted at me through the phone, I listened quietly, having no justification to offer her.
After a while Etta set up an email address for me, although I had no idea how to use it. She sent me printouts of the messages at first, but as they started to come in greater numbers, she insisted that I learn. And so I did. I received messages of support from blacks and whites alike, and I received messages of hatred from blacks and whites alike. I didn’t find the former encouraging or the latter troubling. There were eight men’s names in my folder, and one by one they were found. Six were still alive.
Daniel Olsen was the first. A television reporter from a local station tracked him to a run-down trailer park outside of Mobile, Alabama. The station paid to fly me in for the arrest. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been at the back of the group walking down the courthouse steps. His son, Earl, who’d been charged as a minor, was beside him. Daniel had his hand on the back of his son’s head, and neither of them looked up. They didn’t smile and wave like the others, and they weren’t dressed like them either. The six men in front of them were wearing expensive suits and ties and polished shoes. The Olsens were dressed shabbily by comparison, in plain brown shoes with simple pants and starched white shirts.
I stood on Daniel’s front lawn with a cluster of news cameras behind me. The driveway was cracked, and the pieces of pavement jutted up against each other like ice floes. The lawn was littered with small clay pots, some holding plants, others seemingly just filled with dirt. Grass was sparse. Neighbours opened their trailer doors to watch, standing half-in, half-out, gawking at the crowd approaching Daniel’s front step, but ready in a moment to duck back into safety. I stayed back while they knocked. When Daniel answered the door, he seemed bewildered at the sight of the cameras and the officers. He was wearing pyjama bottoms and slippers, and the few strands of white hair that remained flicked above his head in the wind. I could hear the TV playing behind him, but I couldn’t make out the show. An officer read the charges and handcuffed him on the front step. I heard one of the reporters say Graden’s name, but instead of clarifying things, the name only seemed to confuse him further. The reporter got close enough to push a microphone towards him.
“Do you recognize this man?”
The reporter tipped his head in my direction. Daniel turned towards me, but there was no visible response, and an officer shoved the reporter away.
When they put Daniel in the back of the cruiser, he still wore the same lost look that he’d had when they knocked. He said nothing except to ask if he could go back inside to get a shirt.
“How do you feel?” Etta asked me that night on the phone.
“I don’t know,” I replied, and it was the truth. I had difficulty connecting the helpless old man who had been led away to prison to the younger version of himself whom I’d last seen striding down the steps of that Mississippi courthouse.
“What about you?”
“I don’t know either,” she said. “In truth, I don’t feel like it changes anything. But I know that this means more to you. I know it’s … something different for you.”
I let that hang on the line between us and was grateful that she didn’t continue. It was true that I had hoped for more. I felt as uncertain as Daniel had looked, but I had started and I intended to keep going.
None of them were difficult to find, because none of them were hiding. Daniel’s brother, Patrick Olsen, was still in Mississippi. His son, Earl Olsen, was deceased. Rob Tywater and his cousin Barry were in Georgia. Blaine Pimpton was in Seattle, Paul Poust was in South Carolina, and Marty Bavon was also deceased.
I was there for every one of the arrests. I never went to any of the trials — I couldn’t stand to hear the details again, to hear the arguments of the defence, to risk having to stand on another set of courthouse steps if one of them were set free — but I was always there for the arrests. I looked at their faces and registered the stages. First shock, then disorientation, then indignant anger, turning, each one of them, to the camera to either shout or mutter some variation of “That all happened a long time ago …”
It never seemed long ago to me. Standing in the living room of my apartment in Detroit, it was still as fresh for me as it had been that summer in Mississippi.
Still wearing my coat, I walked into the kitchen to start the kettle.
I checked the cupboards. Just a few pots and pans, nothing I couldn’t leave behind. I went to the bedroom, opened the closets, then the bathroom, where I had left a half-bottle of aspirin and some eye drops in the cabinet. I put them in my coat pocket, then closed the cabinet and went back to the kitchen to fix my coffee.
The call had come two weeks ago as an anonymous tip, left after I had been featured on a national news special. Someone thought that they recognized a man in the picture. Earl Olsen. Etta warned me that the caller could be a crank. We’d had plenty of bogus tipsters over the years, but I checked into every one of them, no matter how far-fetched they seemed. Earl’s father had told investigators years ago that his son was dead, but after the call, I got in touch with the coroner’s office and the Jackson county police department. Neither had a death certificate or any official record. The official I spoke to confessed that records older than ten years were spotty at best. The sheriff’s office had moved in 1973 and several boxes were lost. Records didn’t go electronic until 1997 and it wasn’t until 2001 that all of the old records had been completed. I had to know.
I poured the coffee into a thermos. I dropped the aspirin and eye drops into a suitcase on the table and closed it. Everything else I owned was already in a duffel bag in the backseat of the rented Explorer that was parked outside. I left an envelope on the table with the key to the apartment and enough cash to cover two months’ rent, then I picked up the suitcase and the thermos and walked out.
◀ 3 ▶
Mississippi, 1946
My mother spent thirteen hours in labour, sweating and screaming in my parents’ bedroom with Aunt Louise at her side. The radio was on, tuned in to the country station because that was the only station we could pick up and at that not very well. Hank Williams’s voice scratched and warbled through the static, but it couldn’t drown out the sounds.
I went back and forth to the kitchen, bringing buckets of water from the well, which our father would pour into a pot and heat over the stove, or else fetching a fresh blanket when the one our mother covered herself with had soaked through to the point that it needed to be rinsed out and hung from the clothesline in the backyard.
The rest of the time I sat on the porch, staring out past the thin red line of the county road and into the stand of pine trees in the distance beyond. Glenda and Etta had been sent off to a neighbour’s house during the birth. Though Glenda was a year older than me — seven to my six — Papa apparently thought that seeing Mama in pain was OK for me, but not for my sisters. I didn’t remember Etta’s birth, don’t know if I was there or not, but this time
around I was present and I prayed hard. I prayed for a boy, because then he would be able to help in the fields in a few years’ time, unlike my sisters who were mostly given just house and yard work as chores. I went through names in my head, weighing each one, and in the end, I decided on Henry. I hoped it was a boy, and that they named him Henry. I got half my wish.
Aunt Louise guessed that Graden must have been near ten pounds at birth. He was big to begin with and he kept growing at an impressive rate, leading Ma to sometimes chide that he was “too slow being born and too fast growing up.” I’d prayed for a brother who could help in the fields, and I got more than I could have expected. By the time Graden was eight, he could pull as much cotton in a day as I could, though still not as much as Papa. By the time he was twelve, I had a hard time matching him. Walking in the row beside him, we would sometimes talk, sometimes sing, but even when we were silent I could see his lips move. I asked him one time what he was doing.
“Lessons,” he replied.
“Lessons?”
“Yeah. I’m trying to memorize all the states.”
“What for? You ain’t ever going to leave this one.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Do too. This is where your family is. You got a head full of stuff that you don’t need.”
He didn’t look up, just kept trudging along, working his fingers through the bolls, and depositing the cotton in his sack. He was silent for a few steps, and when he did continue to speak, it was with his head down, as if he didn’t want me to hear the words coming out of his mouth.
“You know there’s places up north where black men have jobs. They get dressed up and go to work and get paid, just like white folks.”
“There’s places like that right here in Mississippi. It don’t mean nothing to you though.”
“Maybe it does.”
“Now hold on. All that schooling’s messing you up. Papa gets paid. How you think he bought this patch of land? People get rich off cotton.”
“We don’t. If you hadn’t dropped out of school, you might have learned that.”
I stopped to argue, but Graden just kept picking, and I had to bend back to my work to try to keep pace.
The next morning, Graden was not at breakfast. Mama asked if any of us had seen him. The girls both said no, but Etta fidgeted nervously. Papa looked up from his plate and fixed me with a stare.
“We got a lot of work to do today. If your brother ain’t around, it’s going to be a long day.”
A long day in Papa’s mind meant working well into the night. He finished his breakfast and walked out the back without saying another word. Mama cleared his plate, and Glenda got up to help her. When Mama’s back was turned, Etta shovelled a few bites of potatoes and a piece of bread into a napkin and quickly wrapped it beneath the table. When she saw that I had noticed, she gave me a look like a puppy begging for table scraps.
I didn’t say anything. She walked out to the front where I knew Graden would be hiding beneath the porch, waiting for the house to empty so that he could dash unnoticed to the road and off to school. Etta came back into the house without the napkin. She gave me a shrug and made a childlike effort at an innocent face, then continued to help Mama with the dishes.
When Graden returned home that afternoon, he changed his clothes and came out to help in the fields, and when the work was done, I could hear the paddling he took from Papa in our parents’ bedroom. He limped into our room with tears on his cheeks, but I had no sympathy for him.
“Serves you right. You know I had to work twice as hard while you were running off.”
Graden lay face down on his bed. “School’s important.”
“Not getting whipped by Papa, that’s important. What are you learning that’s worth that?”
“I could show you. I can teach you, if you want.”
“Don’t need you teaching me anything. I’m not the dumb one.” I rolled over and went to sleep.
It was not the last time that Graden skipped field work in favour of school, far from it. Despite my protests, and Papa’s whippings, he continued to do so any time that he felt he was falling behind in class. Rather than deter him, the punishments only seemed to strengthen his resolve. Papa had not gone to school past fourth grade, and Graden endured each whipping with a sorrow not for himself, but for our father’s lack of understanding. Each time he returned to the room sorer than the time before, and each time he offered to teach me. I had only lasted in school to the eighth grade myself, and even at that I hadn’t put in much effort. As the eldest son, I had set myself to farming and hadn’t looked back. I refused Graden’s offer of lessons each time he made it, but I was beginning to grow curious about what was in those books that made him willing to endure so much pain.
Skipping field work wasn’t the only trouble that Graden got into as a boy. He was always getting caught sneaking bits of food to the mule or, when we could afford one, to the pig, or sometimes even to the foxes and coyotes that crept as far as the edge of the bush.
More than once Papa admonished him. “Them animals is good for two things — eating and working.”
Each time he was caught, Graden would find his portion of dinner to be a little smaller than everyone else’s, but he never let that discourage him. One day he found a crow with a broken wing behind the barn, and when he brought it to the house, Papa took one glance and told him it was going to die. Graden stubbornly went to work on nursing it back to health.
He built a makeshift heater — an old cigarette tin set over a low-burning lamp. He tied the bird’s wing against its body with twine, lined the tin with wild grass, and set the bird within it. He fed it kernels of corn and bits of bread, read to it, and hid it under his bed when he left the room, knowing that if our father found out, he would be annoyed that Graden was wasting food and lamp oil. I made fun of him, told him that when his pet crow was healthy maybe he could get on its back and fly away to all those other states he had memorized, or that maybe when it died Mama would cook it in a stew or a pie, but my teasing never drew a response.
Papa was right, of course. The bird only survived for two days. I came into the room one night and found it still and stiff in the nest he had crafted for it. Pressing its wing between my fingers, I could feel that the feathers had already turned coarse and brittle. Seeing it lying there, fragile and useless, I was angry at Graden. Angry at him for sneaking off to school while Papa and I worked. Angry at him for his big words and big ideas, and for the way he seemed to feel sorry for us if we didn’t agree with them. Most of all I was angry at him for wasting time on this stupid little bird. There were flocks of birds around the farm all the time, and there was nothing special about this one except that it had been foolish enough to crash into the barn and break its wing. And Graden had been foolish enough to give a damn. I decided to teach him a lesson. I poked my head out into the hallway.
“You almost ready for bed?”
“Yep,” he called back from the kitchen. “I’m just helping Etta with something. I’ll be right in.”
“All right then. I’m tired. I’m gonna put the light out.”
I didn’t want to touch the bird again, but I cupped it in my hands and lifted it out of its tin. I laid it carefully inside Graden’s pillow case, then brushed away a few stray blades of grass that had stuck to the dead crow’s body. I changed quickly and put out the light, then crawled into bed. It wasn’t long before I heard him crack open the bedroom door.
“You awake?” he whispered.
I pretended to sleep. He hesitated, then came in and closed the door behind him. I heard him scuffling about the room as he looked for his bedclothes and changed in darkness.
I stared up at the ceiling waiting for a screech or a cry, but there was neither. He must not have noticed it at first. He lay down for a bit, and I could hear him shifting to get comfortable. It was only after several turns that he made a throttled, hiccupping sound. I could just make out his form, sitting upright and patting hi
s pillow.
“What is it?” I whispered.
I waited for his reaction, ready to mock him and his stupid bird, ready to tell him to get his head down out of the clouds.
Instead of answering me, he climbed out of bed. I heard the same scuffling sounds as he got dressed and, when I squinted in the darkness, I could see that he had kneeled down. I couldn’t clearly make out what he was doing, but he appeared to be patting the floor. I heard a scraping noise and realized he was looking for the cigarette tin. The bedroom door cracked open, and he tiptoed outside.
I waited a few moments, then grabbed a shirt, and followed him. The backyard was bathed in bright moonlight. In the far corner, I could see Graden on his knees on the ground, digging a hole with his hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Burying it,” he replied.
“It’s just a bird. Leave it.”
He turned to look at me, standing on the porch. I expected anger from him, but there was none, and the anger I had felt earlier seemed suddenly far away.
“I’m … sorry. It was me.”
The words felt stupid coming out of my mouth. Who else would it have been? He turned away and continued digging.
“I didn’t kill the bird, though.”
“I know.”
The disappointment in his voice was clear. I would have preferred his anger. There was nothing more to say. I left the porch and went to kneel down beside him, wordlessly pushing aside handfuls of dirt. After laying the bird to rest, Graden delivered a short prayer. When we returned to our bedroom, it wasn’t Graden who cried, but me. It was the first time that I broke my brother’s heart, but it wouldn’t be the last or the most painful.
◀ 4 ▶