American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  “No, Daddy’s. Tell him it’s an emergency. I have one stop first, then I’ll be there—in an hour, or two at the most. Tell him I’ll be in the shed.”

  Faye paused in her jotting. “The what?”

  Jolie repeated herself and assured Faye: “He’ll know what I mean.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sam Lense had been an officer in financial services so long that he had seldom considered the implications of the pile of raw data he had boxed up and sent to the Florida Museum of Natural History sometime at the end of his storied days in Hendrix. His father still dutifully forwarded any inquiries to Sam’s old research that appeared in Len’s mailbox in Coral Gables, but Sam had never bothered to open them, much less given permission for the research to be posted online.

  He couldn’t imagine how it had come to light, and when Hollis Frazier left, he ducked out of his afternoon meeting and, with minimum effort, found the gaudy aggregate site on the Five Civilized Tribes, where his work had been dumped with senseless abandon: copies of the census; rough drafts on the Creek application; clues to the location of Camp Six; bits of transcribed notes from his interviews with two dozen people, mostly anonymous. The Creek data was jumbled together, lost in minutiae, while the Hoyts were lavishly dissected with great testosterone-fueled delight, down to a few fanciful theories of origin, tossed out in a tone of mild self-righteousness. Their participation in the Kite lynching was offered without question, the last paragraph so smug and incendiary that he rubbed his neck when he was done and thought, No wonder they shot me.

  He was spooked enough to get up and lock his office door before he read it again, wondering how Henry Kite had come to be so prominently figured. God knows he’d never gone to any pains to exonerate the murderous bastard. He couldn’t even remember who’d told him the nasty little detail about the severed fingers—either Lena or one of Jolie’s Hoytling cousins, surely. Then he remembered. Damn, it was Travis Hoyt.

  Sam found this a very interesting detail and sat back in his chair a long moment, absently tapping his pencil on his desktop in something akin to honest regret, thinking, poor Jol—she could run, but she couldn’t hide. He almost pitied her there on her hard-won perch at City Hall in Cleary, the picture of modern woman-power in a photo that had run in the Democrat when her cityscape had won some sort of national award. They’d photographed her on the square in downtown Cleary, surrounded by an adoring band of white-haired ladies and a square-jawed old man in a European-cut suit—the hundred-year-old boyfriend whose itch she was apparently still scratching.

  To Sam, she was a far cry from the Jolie of their youth, dressed in a pin-striped, Julia Sugarbaker power suit, as dark-haired and milk-skinned as ever, filled out to a handsome, formidable-looking woman. Her fragile self-image had been cured by a high-dollar haircut, her outsider sulkiness replaced by an insider confidence that was nearly as Teflon-slick as her brother’s, as was her personal charisma, which had won her many friends. The legislators of the state of Florida were aging out, and both parties were desperate for new blood and new faces to fill the seats of the Old Capitol. Possible names were often bandied about, and even in the cavelike honeycombs of DCF Sam had heard rumors of a dark-horse up-and-comer from Cleary, who had the backing of both Old Money and the Religious Right, but was somehow not a Republican, but a social-justice, yellow-dog Democrat, right out of the church, if such a thing was possible. There was talk of her running for higher office, a state Senate seat, or maybe her appointment to the chairmanship of something or other; something to get her out of the backwoods and to the national stage.

  Sam never added to the discussion, even to admit that he knew her, though a few loose ends and a nagging air of irresolution remained between them—not to mention four miles of healed-over chest scar. The old man’s implacable quest for justice shamed him, made him wonder if he had quit too soon in his search for his own family justice. God, when was the last time he’d thought of old Morris, moldering in an unmarked grave in some backwoods Baptist cemetery, grass-grown and unmarked? Had Sam ever even taken the time to tell Brice the sad and sordid little story? God, he was getting as bad as his father. Consciously or not, he was deep-sixing his son’s history.

  The thought was far from pleasant, and Sam was still sitting there, absently tapping his desk, when the phone buzzed on an outside line. He figured they were trying to shame him into joining the meeting and let it buzz a few rounds till it was so annoying he answered with a brisk “Yeah.”

  The line was silent a moment, then a woman asked in a small, slightly Southern accent, “May I speak to Sam Lense?”

  He blinked at the accent and sat up straighter. “Jolie?”

  “No,” she murmured, her voice muted, as if on a speakerphone. “It’s Lena. Lena Hoyt—Carl’s wife,” she added, as if she and Sam were slight acquaintances. “My father ran the campground—Vic Lucas.”

  Sam had never for a moment forgotten any of the characters of his old folktale. “Yeah. Lena. Sure. What’s going on?”

  His briskness seemed to intimidate her, as there was another silence, then a small, tentative question: “Did Jolie call you?”

  “No, haven’t talked to her. Why d’you ask?”

  After a small exhalation of breath, almost a sigh, Lena made a subtle attempt to backpedal. “Oh, nothing. Just—how have you been? Are you good?”

  “I’m great,” he snapped, impatient with the evasion. “What’s this about? The bullet in my back, or the Hendrix Lynching?” For a moment the line was open, suspended in some palpable emotion, dread or shock or fury, which only made Sam more aggressive. “They’re onto it, Lena. People are making inquiries. The cat is out of the bag.” He was drawing his breath to ask to speak to her husband when she hung up on him, just like that, in a way that was just so very Hoyt and cowardly and bullshit.

  He slammed the phone on its cradle and wiped the contents of his desk to the floor in an angry swipe of impatience—a not-uncommon gesture in the world of public finance that drew no attention at all on this end of the building. While the papers were settling, he tapped around on the computer and found a number for Cleary City Hall and, with a concerted effort at civility, sat back in his chair and asked to speak to the mayor.

  He was ready to go to war, by phone, if necessary, but the clerk, who spoke in a nearly indecipherable South Georgia accent, informed him that the may-yah was out of the office. “Is this Brutha Caal?” she asked brightly. “Returning her call?”

  Sam lied without compunction, “No, this is his assistant. He is momentarily unavailable, but needs to speak to her badly. Would you mind giving me her cell number? Carl seems to have lost it again,” Sam rumbled good-naturedly.

  The ruse seemed to work, as she murmured, “Well, none that would work in Hendrix. That’s where she was headed. She left him a message”—she paused—“for him to meet her by the shed. Or rathah, in the shed.”

  Sam sat up. “You mean her father’s shed? The old tobacco barn? Behind the church?”

  Something in his curiosity must have alerted her, as she was suddenly less forthcoming, though relentlessly cordial, drawling, “And what did you say yo-wah name was?”

  Sam was already standing for his coat and, in a moment of devilry, answered, “Henry Kite. You can tell her I called.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Well, you sho made a mess of thet” was Charley’s only comment after Hollis returned to the car and described in some heat and detail his sharp little clash with the mayor.

  Enough wisdom was in the statement that Hollis didn’t bother to reply; it would only lead to an argument. He wasn’t proud of himself for losing his cool and wanted to follow his leads before the mayor could make any phone calls to Hendrix and warn anyone he was coming.

  When the light changed, he wheeled the Lincoln around in a complete U-turn, so abruptly Charley grabbed the hand grip and asked, “Where we headed?”

  “Hendrix.”

  “Good,” Charley replied, with such sa
tisfaction that Hollis smiled despite himself.

  Of all their kinsmen who’d survived the Trouble, Charley had been the least affected, due in part to his innate courage, and in part to his not having been home for most of it, but deep in the swamp, indulging in a youthful passion for fishing. He was on the far end of the swamp, seining fish and drying them on a spit, when Mr. Goss was shot and was still there two days later when the whole town exploded. He had seen not a trace of blood or gore. But he had come home that evening at dusk, exhausted and ready for bed, only to be hustled on the Camp Six train by his hysterical mother, who put a knapsack of corn bread in his lap and told him to look after Hollis, who was yet a boy in knee britches.

  Charley had never run from a fight in his life and was big enough to have planned to jump the train in Cleary, with or without his crybaby brother, but a sawyer from the mill, a big Irish man, with a gimpy arm and a face of terror, read the plan in his face and begged him not to return to Hendrix, for his father’s sake if not his own. “Nothing for you back thar, young man,” he advised, wringing his withered hand in his good one, “and no place for a chile.”

  The man’s fear was a terrible thing to behold, and the old train thumped and struggled along, stopping time and again to pick up stragglers along the narrow spur of railroad that serviced Camp Six, which was so far into the swamp the tracks were usually deserted. Now, they were lined by desperate faces, shouting out with beseeching voices—the voices of desperate women in nightclothes and aprons, who foisted their nursing toddlers on strangers who had a seat and begged the conductor to take more. The gimpy-armed Irishman gave up his seat to a clutch of damp-dressed, hysterical women from the Camp, who told a disjointed story of a freakish turn of evil brought to them by the hand of Henry Kite.

  Charley was finally afraid when he heard the name, as Kite was a familiar character around town. Light-skinned and feckless, he had been raised by a mother and an aunt who were devoted to him and his white skin and brought him up to believe he could do no wrong. He’d taken them at their word and never worked a steady job, but drifted in and out of trouble, a gambler and provocateur, who rode about town on a fine gentleman’s horse, with an air of invincibility that to black Hendrix was an invitation to trouble. Camp Six tolerated him because of his good looks and devoted mother, but white Hendrix had no use for him at all, and when the first frost fell, he’d been dogged by rumors that he was filling his mother’s smokehouse with other men’s hogs.

  It all came to a head the afternoon Charley left to go downstream, when Kite had walked into the company store before closing to buy cigarettes from the German, who hardly spoke English and greatly depended on his son as his translator. Some said Kite had drawn. Others whispered it was the opposite—that the German had shouted at Kite, who had sworn an oath he’d never take another word from a white man and dropped him with a single shot. In any case, the German had died before he hit the floor, and Kite had lit out for his mother’s house, that place of historical refuge. Such was his insolence, Kite had stayed to eat supper, or so the rumor went, and when Mr. Goss and his deputy came for him, Kite talked them into letting him go inside for his shoes to wear to jail. They had somehow agreed, and when he emerged from the bedroom, he had a gun in hand and shot Mr. Goss just as he had the shopkeeper, at point-blank range, scattering bone and brain over his shrieking mother’s hearth.

  Such were the rumors Charley heard that night on the packed, hysterical train, though the worse news came when he found Tempy waiting at the station in Montgomery, a neighbor’s bawling child in one arm, her own baby in the other. She was hardly more than a child herself, and tears ran down her cheeks as she told him how his papa had been caught that morning, in his own fields. The men from Camp had run him down with their horses, had accused him of hiding Kite. When he denied it, they’d laid his hand on a tree stump and cut off the middle fingers with one swipe of the ax, trying to make him talk. They would likely have killed him or taken him to town and thrown him in jail with the rest, but a doe had been flushed out by his scream, a distant flash of white they’d mistaken for Kite, making a break through the brush.

  They’d gone after it with a holler, and Charley’s papa had made his way back to the house, his dripping hand wrapped in a handkerchief, dizzy with blood loss, though he refused to find a doctor, or to leave himself, at least till his boys came home. He sat with one bloody hand pressed to his chest, the other holding a shotgun in a vigil so taxing that Tempy later swore his hair turned white in the space of a night. The night was so evil you could feel it on your skin, taste it on the ash that began to fall at dawn after they set the gum pots on fire. The flames roared and lit up the sky, so bright that Papa’s porch was as light as if in the midday sun, as the turpentiners and their families began their tramp to the train tracks, alone and in families, many wet from swimming the river.

  As they paused for a drink at Papa’s well, they whispered stories so savage that Papa became convinced that Charley and Hollis had been caught in town, that two of the corpses on display at the commissary were those of his sons. By midday he’d lost all hope and, in stark desperation, lit out to town to retrieve their bodies. When Tempy stumbled upon Charley in the crush at the station that morning, she nearly fainted dead away, thinking she was seeing his ghost.

  She had hugged him and Hollis fiercely and hustled them off to another train—a regular one, with a porter, that she paid for with hard cash, which took them straight up the Mississippi to shelter with some of their father’s Arkansas kin. The trip north was interminable, and Charley would remember it to the end of his days, sitting at the smeared window of the old coach that smelled of coal heat and cracked leather. A cousin joined them in Vicksburg, yet another shivering survivor of Camp Six. While Hollis slept on Tempy’s lap, the cousin whispered details even more nightmarish than the stories told at the well. How they’d caught Kite the night before and taken him to the river to kill him; how you could hear his screams for miles around, unintelligible at first, till he’d started calling for his mother, over and over, “Ma! Ma!”—his voice echoing over the pungent smoke of the burning pine.

  Charley was old enough to have cursed Kite himself by then, for bringing this nightmare upon them, but the story of his end was so horrifying that it made Tempy start crying again, and even got Charley to bawling, not for the murdered Kite, but for his papa. For a black man to have gone back into town that night was suicide, and the cousin claimed to know for a fact that Buddy was dead, as she’d seen his cut-off fingers with her own eyes, stoppered up in an old gin bottle. A white man was showing it off around town, souvenirs of the kill.

  Charley had no reason to doubt her word, and he and Tempy and their Arkansas kin had grieved his parents as dead for nearly a month, till they unexpectedly appeared on his uncle Ned’s doorstep the first day of December with nothing but a valise between them and the clothes on their back. By Christmas, all of them were there, except for Tempy’s husband, Johnny, who’d insisted on staying, not wanting to give up Tempy’s share of the farm. He’d survived awhile, a few months at least, till a runaway mule had overturned his wagon and broken his neck—or so they heard. Such “accidents,” though, were common in Hendrix after the Trouble, and for all they knew, he’d ended up at the end of a rope like Henry Kite.

  Tempy remarried eventually, and though she never returned to Florida, she and Charley’s mother spoke of their lives on the river with a wistful longing till the end of their days. He could remember them rocking on the porch and recalling old family names, their faults and credits, their exact connection to the larger Hendrix clan. Over time, these stories took on mythic proportions that annoyed his papa, who had no love left for Hendrix and disapproved of such sentimental nonsense. They never farmed again. Charley took a job working on a boat on the Arkansas side of the river, where both his parents eventually died, his mother in ’58, his father in ’73. Only when he was dying did Charley’s papa ever voice a single wish about the Trouble: that he could’ve
got his fingers back before he left Florida so they could be buried decently with the rest of his mortal remains.

  “Don’t begrudge the skin I lost from my leg,” he said of a shin wound he’d got in the trenches of the Argonne Forest, “but I do begrudge them fangers.”

  He made no more of it, as he wasn’t a whiner, their papa, though the seed of a bizarre plan to retrieve the fingers took root in Charley’s mind. When Hollis came home from Germany for their father’s funeral, Charley tried to talk him into going back then, but Hollis wouldn’t hear of it. They argued it for three straight days, till their aunt Tempy caught wind of Charley’s plans and had all but taken to her bed with horror, making him promise he’d do no such thing.

  She was so adamant that Charley had backed off, planning to return when she died, which was a long time coming, as Tempy was tough as a pine knot and lived to a ripe old age of ninety-three. Charley was already losing his sight by then, and though Hollis lived across the river in Overton Park, he was too wrapped up in his money and his women to take off a week to drive to Florida. Hollis told Charley that he would just as soon spend a week in hell.

  • • •

  But the seed was planted, and when Hollis came upon the old names on the Indian site, he knew it was time to get his ass in hand and do the right thing. Once en route now to Hendrix, Hollis put aside his bickering and described the passing scenery for his blind brother in an offhand monotone: “New roof on the courthouse; tin, looks like. Maybe aluminum. Hell of a lot of car lots, and fast-food joints. God, a scat of ’em. Fat bastards,” Hollis muttered, as these same franchises were his most vicious competition back in Memphis, the $2 whores of the restaurant industry. “City Hall is where Buddy Smith used to live,” he said as they made the edge of town. “The millpond’s still here—a restaurant in the icehouse. ‘The Catfish House,’” he read as he passed the sign, “‘$4.99 Special.’ Huh. Bet it’s thet farm-raised crap.”