American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  He had married before he left Hamburg and was quick to send for his wife and a son, who’d been born four months after he sailed and was now, by the standards of the day, nearly grown. Two more sons—twins—were born and died in Florida, but aside from these commonplace tragedies, Morris seemed to have prospered for a bare three years on his perch, there on the edge of nowhere, till the autumn of 1938, when Henry Kite showed up at the store just before closing and begged Morris to open and sell him cigarettes.

  Morris had relented and been shot in the eye for his pains, and Sam’s grandfather, then seventeen years old, had been offered the lead horse in the lynch party. He had refused, and the honor went to another man. Morris’s son and widow had departed Hendrix by train within the hour, heading south to Tampa Bay. They’d left with nothing but the clothes on their backs and heard of the attendant savagery only through the newspaper accounts that followed.

  Sam’s great-grandmother had eventually remarried in Miami, and the family’s only eyewitness to the murder, Sam’s grandfather, had died when Sam was young. He was nothing more than a dim, benign shadow, a gregarious old man by reputation, who favored Cuban cigars and spoke often of his digestion. He never willingly discussed the details of his father’s murder—the whys and the how and even where Morris’s body was buried, though the old man had been known to be observant, and the proper interment would have meant something to him.

  Sam gave his grandfather a survivor’s pass on his silence and didn’t overly judge him for it, though the utter absence of oral history made Sam’s job of historical reconstruction a thin proposition. He needed solid source material to unravel the niggling details of Morris’s final end, and in Jolie he caught a glimmer of hope that he might yet pierce the silence.

  • • •

  But first he needed hard data and began digging through the box full of federal census images he’d copied at UF, from 1860 to the last one released in 1930. They were often inaccurate and woefully incomplete, but in working out a framework of investigation, they were invaluable. He checked the enormous 1880 federal census first and found nine separate Hoyt households in District 59, a considerable local presence, as the state was only decades old. They were listed as white, which meant little to Sam, as local half bloods were ingenious in outsmarting state officials, and if they could pass for white, they would by God self-identify that way.

  For a good hour, Sam scanned rows of households, working his way forward to the turn of the century, when the lumber barons began eyeing the local forests, and Hendrix became an official boomtown. By 1920, the population had ballooned to eight hundred, with a working hotel, a railroad depot, a brothel, and many independent sawmills and logging operations. They made quick work of the red cedar, and ten years later District 59 was already in decline, the loggers and mule skinners and skilled sawyers forced to take lesser jobs collecting resin and distilling turpentine. Camp Six—an enormous turpentine-distilling operation—opened in ’29, and by ’35, his great-grandfather was living on its boundaries in Hendrix, his occupation listed as merchant, with a wife, a son in school, and two younger males—the twins who would die before they were out of diapers.

  Sam couldn’t remember Jolie’s father’s name till he saw it in the cribbed, sixty-year-old cursive of a census worker: Ray Hoyt, District 5, seven years old in 1930, living in a rented home with a single mother who was listed as head of household, with four children—all male, all laborers; none in school. Sam held his place, then counted back to the Lens store and found a mere fourteen households separating them.

  The number made him smile, as fourteen houses were nothing. Two of the Hoyt siblings were listed as millworkers, and four of their neighbors as working in “turpentine.” They were still hanging on to farming—tenant or sharecropping—in ’38, but lived on the cusp of Camp Six. Given the proximity to Hendrix, they would almost definitely have been customers of his great-grandfather’s store.

  Chapter Four

  Sam waited a respectable twelve hours before he called Jolie again, prodded along by Vic Lucas, who was temporarily manning the concession stand and disclosed that Lena and Jolie had had a tough parting Sunday night, with many tears and fears on Lena’s part that Jolie would pine away and die in her absence.

  “Were they that close?” Sam asked.

  Vic, who had the body of a longshoreman and a head the size of a dinner plate, nodded. “Oh, yeah. Really close, those two. Lena worries that Jolie—she’ll get stuck. These local girls—they get pregnant, they lose focus—and Jol—you met her, right? She’s too smart for that. Maybe too smart for that. We hope too smart for that.”

  Sam did, too, and was careful to go about contacting her with all propriety, careful not to offend the medieval father, who (rumor had it) wasn’t fond of frivolous attention and was so massively proportioned that he made Vic Lucas look like a toy poodle. Sam knocked on the parsonage door the day after Labor Day—the first Tuesday in September—though the heat hadn’t let up so much as a degree, the sun slanting at the old porch with a relentless glare.

  The peeling white paint on the parsonage porch conveyed a general air of benign neglect, a row of wood fern and begonia withering in the furnace blast of the dog-days sun. There was no immediate answer to his knock, nor was there a car in the drive, though Jolie had mentioned her father shared a car with her uncle Ott and only used it for grocery runs and hospital visits to ailing parishioners.

  Sam couldn’t tell if anyone was at home or if they were dodging him—and God knows, he was used to that in Hendrix. He had gone to the great trouble of borrowing an iron and ironing his shirt and hated to have to re-iron it. After a cautious glance in the window, he caught a flutter of movement somewhere back there—a bit of steam rising from a pot perched on an old stove. He went around in search of a back door and found it on the side, a little stoop that opened to a kitchen, Cracker-style, as if it had once been detached from the house.

  Jolie was there, visible through the steamed glass at the stove, carefully dropping red potatoes in a steaming pot, one at a time, frowning at the splash, careful not to be burnt. She was obviously not expecting anyone, and as Vic had warned, taking Lena’s departure deeply, her expression one of profound, yet accustomed, loss, as if used to carrying such a weight. She seemed curiously diminished in the poverty of the old kitchen, which was jarringly ill-kempt to his city eyes—the screen door so torn it was almost bare, the countertop cheap, peeling linoleum, as was the floor. Student fieldworkers were warned that rural life could be primitive, and that’s what it seemed to him, of the sort more easily digested when in old photos of a different generation; not someone as young and vulnerable as Jolie appeared, standing at the stove, frowning at the steam.

  He hesitated a moment, then tapped on the glass. She left the stove to peer through the window, and when she recognized him, her face brightened so sharply it lifted the entire room, the air of stale despondency replaced by an all-embracing welcome.

  “Hey—come in,” she said. “Did you knock? I can’t hear people back here.”

  She said it all in one welcoming burst, but he was hesitant as he stepped in the sloped-ceilinged little room, which smelled of old coffee and damp cypress and was muffled by an ancient window air-conditioning unit that roared like a jet engine. His reticence had less to do with her welcome than the zippered terry robe she was wearing, of the sort worn by old Cuban women in Miami, when they watered their hibiscus. It hit her at midthigh and was partially unzipped, revealed an intriguing inch or so of what appeared to be transparent white lace on pink, slightly sunburnt skin, making this housecoat a considerably more complex garment.

  He stood there, taking it all in, till it occurred to him that, being the visitor, the onus of explanation was on him. “No—that’s fine. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Is your father home?”

  She returned to the stove, oblivious of the robe and her casual dress, as if he were a cousin who’d dropped by for supper. “Yeah. Around back. He doesn’t come
in till dark, usually. Want some tea?”

  Here on her own territory she talked much more quickly than she had in town; so quickly and country that he passed on the tea (because he didn’t understand what she was offering) and hesitated at the door. “Well, do I need to talk to him?” he asked. “Get permission?”

  “Permission for what?”

  “To enter. Lena said he’s a little strict. I believe the word she used was medieval.”

  Jolie dismissed it with a comforting ease, gesturing him to the front of the house and explaining, “She’s just feeding you the Hendrix Scare. Daddy’s all right. He’s got a bad eye, which makes him kind of scary. But he’s a teddy bear. Been a preacher for, like, fifty years.”

  Sam was not reassured by the assessment and followed along with his head up, through a high-ceilinged dining room to a mirror-size parlor—a sitting room, settlers used to call them—hardly bigger than the porch. It was outfitted with the same worn care as the kitchen, though there was some sense of decoration, the walls a soothing mint green, adorned with an assortment of family photos in identical flat-black frames. The monotone frames gave them a curious unity, as there was no rhyme or reason to their selection. Historical sepia photos hung in identical frames with a color studio shot of Jolie in her high school graduation gown, so generic it might have been taken at Palmetto High in Miami.

  Sam was instantly drawn to the wall, which, Jolie explained, was a brainchild of Lena’s. “The black frames—we collected them all summer and painted them. It took forever. She calls it the Rogues’ Gallery.”

  “Interesting,” he murmured, pausing next to a photo nearly identical to that of Jolie, only black-and-white, maybe thirty years older, of a somber, dark-haired woman, obviously closely related to Jolie, as if she were her near twin. “Your mother?” he asked, and got a quick nod.

  “Her graduation picture. She died when I was three,” Jolie added quickly, as if used to the order of question and adept at heading it off.

  Sam raised his eyebrows at the quickness of her response, but didn’t press for more details. He didn’t comment at all other than for a mild “She’s beautiful. Looks Apache, or Otomi. Hell, maybe they were Blackfoot. Was she from Hendrix?”

  “Sure,” Jolie answered as she dropped onto the sofa. “Her and Daddy really are third cousins, or something—which if you ever meet my brother will explain a lot.”

  She smiled at his laugh—a smile of uncomplicated pleasure and unexpected sweetness, which, in its way, was as fetching as the abbreviated robe and long, bare legs. She threw them out on the sofa before her with such innocence and lanky country ease that it was apparent she hadn’t a clue to their power. He made an effort to ignore them, returning to the wall and her equally intriguing history, asking over his shoulder, “What was her maiden name? Ammons?” as he’d noticed a generational alliance between the two families on the census.

  “Yeah. She was an Ammons. A lot of my cousins are Ammonses,” she volunteered, seemingly impressed. She paused, then added after a moment, more in statement than question, “You really have dug up the county, haven’t you?”

  Sam was brought up short by the offhand observation, enough that he turned and met her eye and found her face interested and speculative, as if she were adding up a few internal figures of her own.

  He would later regret not telling her the curious truth of his search right then—casually, no tangled loyalties, just a blunt statement of fact. But he was too unsure of his reception to trust her with so strange an obsession and sidestepped her smoothly, with a mild admission: “That’s why they pay me.”

  He said nothing more, just returned to the wall to inspect the other photos, many of a little boy, presumably her brother, Carl, and a cache of vintage photographs, the largest of a worn, rawboned old farmer in a slouch hat and overalls, holding a horse by the reins. March 26, 1926 was written in labored cursive on the face of the photo, the date catching Sam’s eye, as the old man was almost certainly a citizen of the 1930 census.

  “So who’s the old guy, with the horse?”

  Jolie sat up a little to make sure they were talking about the same picture. “That ain’t a horse,” she murmured. “That’s my great-granddaddy and his mule, Old Grey.”

  The blazed forehead and lanky ears looked pretty horsey to Sam, who peered closer. “How d’you tell the difference?”

  Jolie’s face took on a hint of amazement. “Well, try breeding them, for one thing.”

  The remark meant nothing to Sam, who continued down the line, occasionally asking for clarification, though the old boy with the mule was by far the most interesting find. He was itching to ask her outright if she knew the location of the old turpentine camp that had gone by the strangely generic name Camp Six, but once he finished with the Rogues’ Gallery, there was nothing to interest him but her legs, which were indeed distracting.

  Family history, and history in general, suddenly seemed of small consequence, and with no more talk of mules and men, he took a seat in the only chair in the room: an ancient recliner upholstered in a beaten and faded olive plaid.

  “So how are you holding up?” he asked solicitously. “With Lena gone? Vic says it’s been tough.”

  “I’m all right,” she said, so stoically it seemed automatic and hardly felt, then, in a closer stab to truth: “I wish I could cry.”

  Sam had never met a buried neurosis he didn’t like and asked, “Why can’t you cry?”

  She shrugged again—that small hitch of her shoulders so natural it was almost a physical characteristic, that Who Knows? denial of personal opinion, common among poor people in the South. “I don’t know. I couldn’t cry when Carl left either.”

  Sam just nodded, still a little distracted by her casual state of undress that was setting off a purely sexual buzz in his head that hummed like a hot wire, making a true analysis difficult. “You mean your brother, Carl? Her boyfriend?”

  Jolie grunted at the word. “Well, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call him her boyfriend. Carl’s three years older than Lena—or three years physically. Emotionally, he’s about eight.”

  “That him?” Sam asked with a nod at the wall of photos of the dark-haired child who was obviously kin to Jolie, with the same thick block of hair and straight eyebrows.

  She nodded. “Yeah, that’s Carl. He doesn’t have as much hair anymore. I think he’s already losing it.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Sam murmured, feeling for the lever on the recliner and kicking out the footrest, making himself comfortable as he dug into the domestic history. “Yeah, she told me how you and her, you got in a fight once, when you caught them on the couch. Said you were pretty hot.”

  Jolie looked utterly astonished and muttered, “She told you that? Good God—what a thing to tell.”

  Sam found her puritanical tone disappointing (aye, heartbreaking, when coupled with her legs) and hastened to defend Lena. “Well, he was her boyfriend. And these things do happen—” He stopped short as Jolie obviously wasn’t buying, her lanky hospitality literally folding up as she threw her feet on the rug and faced him with direct, gunslinger eyes.

  “Yeah, it does. It happens all the time—but that don’t mean it’s right.” Then she asked, as if giving him the benefit of the doubt, “Did she tell you how old she was?”

  “Sixteen? Seventeen?” he offered, and was cut off with a snort.

  “Sixteen, my butt. She was fourteen. She just moved here—was barely out of a training bra. And I wasn’t hot with her, I was hot with my idiot brother, who was raised to know better. Daddy was—he was beside himself. He put Carl’s stuff on the porch—sent him away that very night.”

  Sam was a little shocked at the severity of the punishment for what sounded like a bit of minor philandering. “To where? You mean, like, military school?”

  Jolie had the grace to look a little embarrassed at the query, sitting back and finding a sofa pillow to clutch to her chest. “Well, Bible college, if you must know. Claims to hav
e got rededicated down there, but I don’t trust him any further than I could throw him. Not where Lena’s concerned.”

  This was more to Sam’s taste, wonderfully Southern and quirky. “Oh, well, I wouldn’t worry too much with Lena. Last time I saw her, she was headed out with a surfboard tied to her roof. She seems to have escaped Hendrix, hymen or not. So there goes that theory.”

  It was the kind of audacious remark you make to a potential girlfriend to see if she’s on the same page with you, though Jolie didn’t laugh.

  She just met his eye levelly and commented in a dry voice, “You two must have had you a right long talk after you dropped me off from the beach.”

  “Not long”—he smiled—“but instructive. All about the Sisters. And the rules—which, I must say, she didn’t seem too worried with breaking.”

  He said it in a tone of mild challenge that Jolie rose easily to answer. “Yeah, well, the thing is, with Lena, she ain’t really from around here. She’s got three married sisters and a rich granny in Naples and can come and go around Hendrix pretty much as she pleases. Not all of us got that luxury—you know what I mean?”

  Jolie said it with those level, unblinking eyes that were daunting in their absolute certainty, the same expression that had thwarted him through many a screen door in Hendrix. But he had never minded sparring with a half-dressed woman and smiled. “No living in a trailer, putting a crease in the mayor’s dress pants, for Jolie Hoyt?”

  “No ironing for the rich folk. Not this Cracker.”

  Sam laughed aloud, as he had sprung from a long line of socialist-leaning Democrats and found her hard-nosed defiance just delightful, the stuff of birdsong and hot baths. It made him comfortable enough to lean in and kick down the footrest and ask in a tone of confidential confession, “Well, listen, Jol—can I ask you something? A favor?”

  At her nod, he asked, “Could you go put on some clothes? I mean, that butt-hugging robe is just freaking me out—it really is. If your father comes in, I’m gonna have a heart attack and die on the spot. And he’ll know what killed me.”