American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  She waited till they’d returned to the house and were putting up the groceries before she broached the real reason for her visit and nonchalantly asked Sister Wright what had happened to those old fingers she used to have in that old bottle, in the wardrobe. “The ones Carl was always looking at,” Jolie asked casually, making it sound innocent and intimate, something they’d laughed about at the dinner table.

  “Back in thet plunder in the bedroom, I reckon,” Sister Wright told her easily. “Ain’t seen ’em in a long time. Never would a seen ’em, it have been up to me.”

  “Well, whose were they? Brother Wright’s? Did he lose ’em at the mill?”

  Sister Wright paid her little mind. “Naw, shug, they come with the wardrobe, when his mamer died. All that mess back there—it come then.”

  “Well, d’you mind if I nose around back there? See what I can find?”

  Sister Wright was used to Jolie’s and Lena’s love of vintage plunder and told her, “Go ahead, shug. Will you stay to eat? I’m making pork and yellow rice.”

  She didn’t have to ask twice, as the Cuffey sisters were famous cooks, and Jolie had been too rattled that morning to eat her own breakfast. “Go easy on the hot sauce” was all she asked, as she was a famous wimp where local peppers were concerned.

  Sister Wright said she would, and while she heated up her iron pans and filled the little house with the savory smell of butter, saffron, and sautéed onions, Jolie went through the old wardrobe, drawer by packed drawer, uncovering a treasure trove of vintage slips and hats, yarn and crochet patterns, but no gin bottles. She was positive this was the right wardrobe and couldn’t imagine who’d have been bold enough to swipe a set of human fingers.

  She was close enough to Sister Wright to ask her that very question as she ate her pork and rice, which was a staple, there on the river. Yellow rice cooked with chunks of fresh pork, heavily seasoned with pepper and saffron, making it more Caribbean than Southern. In deference to Jolie, Sister Wright had made the mild version, which they ate on TV trays, so she wouldn’t miss her stories (that is, her soap operas).

  Jolie waited for a commercial before she brought up the fingers again. “Well, d’you think Lonnie, or any of his boys, might have got ’em?” Lonnie was Sister Wright’s only son who lived locally, a contractor in Bonifay.

  Sister Wright’s attention was on As the World Turns as she answered aside: “Naw, shug. Lonnie wouldn’t fool with them old thangs.”

  Jolie was feeling increasingly thwarted and was not even sure these were the right fingers, given that this was Hendrix. “Well, did you know any Fraziers around here, growing up? A colored family? Had a farm?”

  Like all Southerners, Sister Wright was always glad to recall some old name from her youth and thoughtfully wiped her mouth on a dish towel. “Well, Dicy Hitt married a Frazier—a soldier, from Tennessee. Wadn’t from around here.” She returned to the television. “Didn’t stay long.”

  She didn’t specify why they left. The boastful boys and the white folk in Cleary might rehash the details of the lynching, shake their heads in mock-dismay at the mutilation, and gawk at the oak where they hanged him, but here at ground zero, where the smoke had circled, and the corpses stank, nary a word was uttered.

  To Jolie it was confirmation that she was on the right track, and after making her good-byes to Sister Wright (with many assurances she’d come back Easter with Lena and go to church with her), she went out to her car and tried Carl’s office again.

  She spoke to one of his associate pastors, who explained that Carl was not only out of the office, but out of the country, down in Central America, and not due back till morning. The best Jolie could do was leave a message, then head into Hendrix, where she wanted to look around the only other cache of family plunder that came immediately to mind: the old shed behind the parsonage that had once been her father’s refuge.

  She didn’t bother to call ahead to the parsonage to ask permission, as El Bethel was truly on the edge of extinction, so small it no longer employed a resident pastor, even part-time. They made do with a part-time preacher named Brother Echols, who came over from Cottondale for funerals and other assorted emergencies—leaking roofs and the like.

  He was fortunately at the church that day, working on a sewer line in coveralls and leather gloves, a polite old fellow, who was obviously impressed when she introduced herself as Raymond Hoyt’s daughter—not because of her father, but because of Carl, who had a huge following in local fundamentalist circles.

  “Warch him on the television, ev’ry Sareday,” he assured her with an enthusiasm Jolie often encountered among the pious old folk around Cleary.

  He was happy to unlock the shed for her, only asked that she lock it back up when she was done, as they’d lately been targeted by local petty thieves. They’d lost a new Kubota tractor the summer before; a John Deere the year before that. “Lot of yo deddy’s stuff is still out there,” he told her as he wrestled the door open. “Books and pichures and sech, gitting kind of damp. You might want to thank about moving ’em.”

  He offered his advice mildly, though Jolie was washed with an unexpected guilt when she saw the stacks of molding boxes and assorted plunder that she’d piled on the old desk when she’d cleaned out the parsonage the week of his funeral. She’d meant to move them to town when she got settled, but had never quite got around to it. She was quick to make amends, promising the old pastor that she’d have the place cleaned out by Saturday.

  He told her there was no rush, just reminded her to lock up when she was done, and to watch for snakes. “Place is full of ’em,” he said as he screwed a new bulb into the overhead socket and yanked the cord, bringing the dim, high old barn to sudden shadowy light.

  She worked slowly and methodically, not sure what she was looking for, but confident she’d recognize it when she saw it. It made for heartrending work, the moldering smell of the place like a ghostly presence, evoking a familiar childhood scene, of going out to the shed after school or church and begging her father to let her go to the beach with Lena, or into town for a movie.

  In her mind’s eye, she could see him so clearly, sitting at the window at that ugly metal desk, a huge country man, much older than any of her classmate’s fathers, and poorer, too, with a cast in one eye, and hands as a big as a dinner plate. But he’d always smile and pull out his dilapidated wallet, telling the girls with mock annoyance, “You younguns are about to dollar me to death.” He never had a penny to his name, but he always gave Jolie something. He hated to see her and Carl go without, as God knows he had, his whole damn life.

  The weight of it was daunting, the top boxes full of church clothes that had been too big to give away, and even more poignantly a pair of his old Sunday wingtips so polished that the leather scrolling was faded to a patina of old age. Jolie held them to the light and tried to remember if he’d ever had a new a pair—probably not. He didn’t have the money and was of a generation that looked on cars and televisions and church shoes as old folks looked at marriage: till death do you part.

  The other boxes were filled with the tattered remains of literally hundreds of cheap spiral notebooks, scribbled in his strange, unschooled hand. (The Book of Danil, one read. Isiah, another.) She didn’t know if they were sermon notes or letters or a long-winded diary. He had been a great scribbler, her father. He was also a curious speller and had the penmanship of a trained bear.

  She could make little of them in the dim light and turned to the dust-coated old desk, which was a little more organized and yielded up a few items of interest: a dozen old family photographs pressed under glass on the top—of her and Carl at their graduations, and one of their mother, taken before her wedding. The drawers were filled with more notebooks and the remains of the Great Tabernacle Project: elaborate clothes and tiny bells and tiny plastic figurines and bulls and doves for sacrifice. She closed them carefully to get to the bottom drawer, which was stuffed with a piece of stiff cloth. She wiggled it out and shook off a
pound of dust and realized it was the old banner that used to hang over the pulpit in the church, faded purple letters on a lavender background, which read, Without a vision the people perish.

  She hadn’t time to do any more digging. The quick winter light was already fading, and she had yet to meet with Glen. She fished the photos from beneath the glass and gave the light pull a yank, then heard a noise outside, the crunch of footsteps on dry grass. She thought it was the old preacher, come back to check on his tractor, and was preparing to smile another round of thanks when Sam peered in the door, older and slightly stockier, though his eyes were unchanged. Even in the half-light she could see them, as light and curious as ever, taking in the dusk-covered tractor and high rafters as he stepped inside, feeling for a light switch.

  Jolie was momentarily frozen in place, unprepared for the happy leap of her heart at the sight of him, so instinctive and visceral that it made her heart beat in a traitorous gallop in her chest. Hugh had for years been begging her to see a shrink, but she’d never quite got around to it. In that split second of meeting, she wished she’d done the difficult work of digging up all the roots of pathology and attachment disorder and whatever the hell made Hoyt women so vulnerable to the lure of the bad man.

  As it was, she had only the old armor of indifference and detachment to protect her, and for the second time that day, she used the Lord’s name in vain, quietly and vehemently, the emphasis on the damn.

  • • •

  Sam’s reply was equally profane, as he was blinded by the step from light into the dark shed and couldn’t see anyone. He called her name twice, which irritated her even more, as it assumed a great welcome, as if he imagined that she’d been huddled there twelve years, awaiting his glorious return.

  She didn’t bother with a greeting, just yanked the light chain and asked with small patience, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Sam raised an arm to block the shock of light and, when he saw her, didn’t answer immediately, but just stood there staring with his old absorbed interest, so long that Jolie was finally flustered.

  “What?” she asked, but he wouldn’t be hurried.

  He just lowered his arm slowly and murmured in a mild, speculative voice, “Nothing. It’s just strange, actually seeing you. I was beginning to think I’d made you up. But here you are, Jolie Hoyt. In the flesh.”

  Jolie didn’t know what to make of it, his tone not admiring as much as disbelieving, as if he truly had doubted her existence.

  “Well, it’s me,” she assured him, trying to move things along, discomfited by his closeness, and his presence, and his old lazy curiosity, which moved from her to the wall of stacked boxes, with equal speculative interest. “And if you’re on the scent of the reward, they aren’t here, and they never were. I’m not even sure they’re the right ones—and there was never a rope,” she added with particular emphasis, as if it were a matter of long debate, as she rolled the banner under her arm in preparation for leaving. “That was some bullshit legend Carl made up at the fish camp.”

  She stopped abruptly and finally gave him room to answer. He offered, not unkindly, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Jolie was usually not so excitable and was beginning to feel positively unhinged. “Then why the hell are you here?” she snapped.

  He seemed unmoved by her edginess and glanced closer at the boxes, as if trying to read their labels, still on a genial hunt for clues. “Your sister-in-law called me at work—sounded a little upset.”

  “Lena? How’d she even find you?”

  “Couldn’t say,” he answered mildly, moving along the walls, occasionally poking at a box for a closer look. “We didn’t speak long. As a matter of fact, she hung up on me. Seems to be a lot of, ah, negative activity going on out here. A man named Hollis Frazier unearthed the old Indian study—”

  “That was the Indian study? That rambling, incendiary bullshit about the Hoyts? That’s what you were working on all those months?”

  Her assessment was so painfully honest that Sam paused in his perusal of the boxes to point out, “Well, it was a rough draft.”

  “It never mentioned the goddamn Indians,” she breathed, “just all that crazy shit about the Hoyts and the conquistadors, and Roma Gypsies.”

  Her outrage was so matter-of-fact that Sam had the grace to look a little sheepish. “Well, that was anthropological thin ice, part of a letter I wrote Dr. Keyes pretty early on. The lynching chapter—that was an independent thing I was looking into, on the side. I forgot I even mailed it.”

  “Did anyone else read it?”

  “Not in Hendrix. Why d’you ask?”

  Jolie looked at him with her old wonder. “You might recall you got shot.”

  “Oh. Well, not because of that. Nobody read it but me.”

  Nobody had to, Jolie almost replied, but thought better of it, and only paused long enough to ask the real $250,000 question: “Who fed you all the insider detail on the lynching? Surely not Uncle Ott?”

  “No,” Sam admitted, his attention on a notebook he fished out of a box, which he gingerly held to the light. “I never talked to the old folk about the lynching. They wouldn’t answer. But a few locals would talk, mostly in Cleary, and a handyman at the campground. He talked about it with pride, as if it was Hendrix’s finest day. Your cousin Travis told me about the fingers.”

  Travis was one of Uncle Earl’s bunch, an ex-Marine who’d transplanted himself to Colorado, where he spent his winters hunting elk and made a living building custom houses.

  Jolie might have guessed he was the Hoyt sieve and murmured, “Idiot,” with such contempt that Sam glanced up.

  “Idiot because he’d discuss it? Or idiot because he was proud?”

  “Both,” she said, tired from the complexity of the long day: the set-to with Mr. Frazier, then the trip to Hendrix and the memories the old shed had evoked, a strange and potent grief, as if her father had just died. Even the traitorous surge of joy she’d had at first sight of Sam had burnt out quickly in the absence of touch and warmth and rekindle, leaving her tired and blunted and feeling a hundred years old.

  She was ready to leave the swamp and return to the real world, get through the meeting as quickly as possible, then get home to find a more reliable source of warmth—say, in a glass of Jim Beam. But Sam didn’t look at all eager to leave, his terrier-urge to dig obviously stoked by the old notebook he held to the light, still trying to read. “Is this your father’s? All these boxes and notebooks—they’re his old projects? They’re getting water-damaged. How long have they been here?”

  Jolie was already feeling enough guilt about the shoes and the banner and sidestepped him deftly with a flash of a politician’s smile, calibrated for warmth, sincerity, and enough laugh lines to make it seem real. As much as I’d love to stand here and chat about old times, I really do have an appointment in town with the city attorney, who isn’t too big on women mayors, or being late, either one.”

  “Well, great. Have fun. I’ll lock it up when I’m done.”

  “I’m afraid I promised Brother Echols I’d make sure it was locked up. They’ve been having a little trouble with theft,” she said, emphasizing the word and giving him the old mayor-stare, so he knew exactly whom she considered untrustworthy between them.

  He looked mildly annoyed, but didn’t argue, just asked as she was locking up, “So did you really think you’d find the old fangers out here with the Tabernacle and the chart on Revelation?”

  Jolie was not about to fall back into the trap of being his best old girl Friday and just set the lock, then headed for her car, with Sam strolling resolutely beside her, still yammering on about the notebooks. “You have to keep an eye on documents, Jol—especially paper. They’re fragile, and irreplaceable, not to mention first-source documents. They really should be archived and kept in climate control.”

  Jolie found both his use of the diminutive and his professional word-dropping a little needling, a whif
f of the Wise Sam of Old, who schooled her in so many wonderful things, the removal of her hymen being foremost.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she repeated as she paused to open her trunk.

  It naturally wasn’t enough for an old crusader such as Sam, who confronted her squarely, as if she were abandoning a live baby. “I can’t believe you’re just leaving it out to rot. If you don’t want to bother with it, then donate it to UF, or FSU—or give it to me. I’ll come out here on the weekend and archive it.”

  Jolie hardly considered it. “I don’t think so.” She slammed the trunk.

  “Well, why not? You and Carl don’t give a shit about any of it, do you? You got out of Hendrix and you sucked up to money, and you put it all behind you—became these soulless sellout wonders.”

  Jolie didn’t flinch at his reasoned appraisal, just felt for her keys. “Well, I’m sorry we disappointed you. I know you had such high hopes for all us poor old gheechies back in your missionary days. Same old story”—she climbed in the car—“the missionaries leave, and the natives revert.”

  “Missionary, my ass,” he snapped, then repeated, nearly word for word, the same question Hollis Frazier had asked on the porch, not two hours before. “God, Jol—what are you so afraid of? That you’ll lose your job? Or that ridiculous, hundred-year-old boyfriend? Tell me it’s not that.”

  The question was absurd, but in its raw honesty, at last, endearing. He was a dumb ass, but sincere, and she tried to part in peace, pausing before she shut the door to offer a bit of hard-won advice. “Do yourself a favor, Sam. Give up on Hendrix. You never got it. You never will.”