by Janis Owens
It left Jolie to sit alone at her desk on pins and needles, waiting for the citizenry to show up and add their voice to the discussion. But she seemed to have stunned them to momentary silence, the lobby and hallway empty till just before lunch when Jim Nichols, editor of the Ledger, dropped by with a vanilla envelope that he laid on her desk with a terse “Lookit this.”
Jolie opened it gingerly, expecting the worst, but only found a sepia-tinted photograph of the lynching that had been widely distributed over the years, in historical journals and even posted on an Internet lynching site. She was about to tell Jim as much when he slid it aside and revealed another photo, completely different, taken at a different time.
“Bet you never saw this.”
She hadn’t. It wasn’t the usual Hendrix Lynching shot, of Kite dangling from the courthouse square, but a different photo altogether, of a line of men standing shoulder to shoulder, a jumble of corpses at their feet, grotesquely stiffened in rigor mortis, ropes still knotting their hands. It was a startling photo, not randomly snapped, but posed and defiant, the men dressed as for a wedding, in black suits and straw boaters and knotted ties over striped vests, cigars and shot glasses in hand. Their faces were caught with the crystal clarity of old-fashioned photography, handsome men in any day, a few boys among them in knee britches. The boys had the grace to look involuntarily stunned, though the men appeared untouched by the massacre before them, which included at least one woman. She was young and bound like the others, her heart-shaped face piteously uncovered in the sprawl.
“Polly Washington,” Jolie murmured, “Henry Kite’s sister. His mother was there, too—somewhere. My God,” she whispered, “I didn’t know such a picture existed.”
“Neither did I.” Jim took a seat on the edge of her desk. “It’s not the file copy, but out of somebody’s private stash. They must have slipped it in the mail drawer this morning. No note; unsigned. You wouldn’t happen to recognize any of them smiling faces, would you, Ms. Mayor?”
Jolie didn’t answer immediately, but turned it over to the back, saw that it was an original, not a postcard or reproduction. She flipped it back and held it to the light, told him after a moment, “Well, I don’t know for sure, but it was probably taken at the commissary, in Hendrix. That’s a Hoyt there,” she said of one of the men who stood proudly beside the city men, though he was perceptibly more country, his collar open, his grizzled cheeks unshaven. “Jimmie Hoyt.”
“Are you kidding me?” Jim asked, feeling in his pocket for a notebook. “Someone from Hendrix is actually naming names?”
“James Lea Hoyt,” she repeated without relish. “Standing over the corpse of a pregnant woman and looking mighty pleased with himself. A lot more pleased than he is now, burning in hell as he is.”
Jim scribbled the name. “Any more?”
Jolie had an idea but wasn’t certain enough to accuse. “Maybe. The ole boy in the middle—he has a banker-y look about him, does he not?”
Jim made a noise of mild hooting and scribbled down another name. “Girl, you’re meddling now.” He laughed, then admitted, “I already had him ID’d this morning, at the café. Easiest of the bunch—his picture hangs in the lobby of the bank. Got anything else you’d like to add? Somebody told me it was as bad as Rosewood.”
“Somebody told you right.” She didn’t jump at his offer, but recommended he search out firsthand witnesses. “There are a few, here and around. I have a couple of guests in the carriage house from Hendrix. They might talk to you.”
He scribbled down their names, then added as he slipped the photo back in its envelope, “Well, take care of yourself, Miss Mayor. This thang’s rattled a few cages, I can tell you that.” He shot a glance at the door to make sure they were alone. “This morning at the café, I had one upstanding citizen—and not a crank, either, but a pretty intelligent guy—tell me straight up that the reason you’re making such a deal out of it is the Jewish influence. In Cleary,” Jim said in a voice of utter disbelief. “I pointed out that your father was a preacher, your brother, Carl Hoyt—but he was set on it. Seemed to think it was the reason you’d folded to this liberal shit—that Jewish stain. And when you get to that point, you’re in koo-koo land—might get a swastika scrawled on your gate or a cross burned on your yard. Kind of shook me up.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said, a little more bravely than she felt, dreading the inevitable call from Hugh, which came soon enough.
Faye buzzed her on the inside line. “It’s Hugh, and he sounds mighty cold. I can tell him you’re at lunch if you want.”
Jolie rubbed her eyes. “Put him through.” She sat back, eyes closed, till he came on the line.
He had none of the comic-tragedy he had the day before and spoke without preamble, his voice dry and matter-of-fact, and very, very distant. “Jim Nichols says you verified a mob photograph some well-wisher put in his mail drawer.”
He said it as a statement, not a question, and Jolie answered honestly, face down, eyes closed, “I did.”
“I see.” He added without breaking stride, “Well, I’m off in a bit. I wanted to give you a heads-up, that Dottie Lowe will be by next week sometime, for a key to the shop, to do an informal inspection.”
Dottie was a Realtor, the news an absolute surprise, so much that Jolie opened her eyes. “You’re selling the shop?” The florist shop had long been turned over to the hands of a manager, but was still Hugh’s baby.
“Yes. I’m putting it on the market. The river house, too. The drive is so long, and really, Florida investments—they’re tricky these days, and gas so high. It’s hardly worth the effort.” The delicacy of the backhand was such that Jolie was caught off guard, momentarily returned to muteness, as he rolled ahead, “I’m more than willing to sell back my share of the B and B, if it comes to that.”
Jolie had no polite answer to the offer as both of them knew her capital was nonexistent and bank loans on hundred-year-old money pits had long vanished. He was basically telling her she was history, though with enough silky finesse that she had no room for reproach unless she wanted to grovel.
“I see,” she finally managed in pale mimic. “Well. I don’t know what to say. It was fun while it lasted.”
She said it in a try at levity, but Hugh was truly beyond stabs at resolution or charm. “It was a waste of time,” he corrected, and without even a good-bye, the line was dead in her hand.
Jolie hung up slowly, stunned by the completeness of his withdrawal, and frankly unused to avuncular rejection. She felt suddenly, terminally wretched. Her abandonment was not made any less affecting by the view from her desk. The bank of old windows offered an idyllic snapshot of the old house’s backyard: bare, drooping chinaberry trees, climbing ivy. The greened and grimed marble birdbath was original to the house, too heavy to move. It had been there since the midtwenties, shabby, solid, and elegant.
No one could deny it wasn’t beautiful. No one could deny it was as fragile as a hothouse orchid and, just like that, gone.
• • •
Jim Nichols was as good as his word about penning a story on Henry Kite, though when the piece finally ran in the Ledger, it had been hugely edited and gutted of controversy. His publisher was a media company already on the ropes, and the new mob shot was quickly deemed incendiary and squashed for fear of lawsuits and lost advertising.
He was made to substitute it with a cropped version from the archives in Tallahassee, which was well within public domain, of Henry Kite’s battered corpse hanging from a limb at first light. The photograph was preferable in that it was taken at a side angle, so that the genital mutilation wasn’t obvious. Kite’s battered corpse was illuminated by the ghostly flash of an old camera, dust-covered, broken-necked, but isolated from all community, with no smiling faces circling him. No hint was given of the partylike atmosphere of the sturdy citizenry who’d posed around him to celebrate the collective murder of his kin.
To compensate, Jim ran a sidebar on the Frazier brothe
rs and their peculiar search for their father’s fingers, with the mayor quoted as giving them her full support, commenting with Hoyt dryness, “I wish I knew where they were. I’m about to be unemployed, I could use the money.”
In Hendrix, her dry humor was repeated with great appreciation, though not so much in proud Cleary, where her reopening of this long-forgotten epoch in local history was seen as tasteless and over-the-top, a sign that the essential instability of her Hoyt nature was rearing its ugly head at last. The rumor of the Jewish boyfriend didn’t help, and his frequent sightings, at dawn and at dusk, and picking up takeout at the café, were noted and disapproved of, if for no other reason than no one quite knew his name.
The talk ran hot and high for nine or ten days, but when no takers of the reward and no sign of the fingers appeared, the whole matter was written off as dramatic, pointless, and uselessly divisive. Now, as then, Henry Kite was too corrupt a figure to garner much sympathy on either side of the tracks. By the following commission meeting in February, the whole matter was firmly back under the rug, the commissioners looking to October for their revenge at the polls, their best energies returned to the pitched battle over the cell tower.
At breakfast every morning at the B&B, the Frazier brothers woke early so they could discuss their search with Sam, who had to leave by seven to beat the traffic on I-10. He was never optimistic of the chances of recovering seventy-year-old relics, but the brothers continued to entertain a small hope that their public call for the return of their papa’s fingers would be answered. Black Cleary was still a close community, and as the weeks passed, they were often buttonholed at the barbershop or grocery store and offered other leads: names, kinfolk; distant aunts and cousins the brothers had lost touch with who still lived in West Florida.
They followed up on all of the leads with the tenacity of a private eye and, in time, unearthed a tiny remnant of Hitts, Bankses, and Kendalls, sprayed out in a crescent-shaped diaspora from Tallahassee to the Alabama line. Among them was a long-lost niece of their uncle John, even older than Charley, who’d spent her retirement pecking out genealogy records from the local courthouse and generously donated copies of her voluminous Hitt files, which went back to Adam. They spent a pleasant few evenings with her at her house on Lake Talquin. They even waded, en famille, into the National Forest on the east side of the river with Mr. Dais as their guide and found the limestone foundation of the original Hitt homestead. Hollis had no memory of it at all, but Charley was much moved by the visit to the old limestone foundation of the house and tobacco barn, including the old brick kiln where their papa had cured his homegrown tobacco.
Charley was too blind to identify many other markers, but was sure of the kiln and stood there, his hands on the arch of brick, and talked about his good father, who hadn’t as much faith in King Cotton as he had in night-shade tobacco and had spent many afternoons at the old store trying to convince his neighbors likewise.
Charley took one of the loose bricks when he left, figured it was as close to a memento of his papa as he’d find. Hollis was too stubborn to admit defeat and was implacable in his search for the fingers themselves. He left the house shortly after Sam every morning and talked to people in Cleary and Hendrix and all the way to the coast. In the afternoon, when the cold was gone, he drove Charley down to the KOA to fish from the bank with a cane pole. The local fishermen who daily launched and returned at sunset could not resist stopping by to comment on Snowflake’s breed, size, and likeness to a polar bear. They’d read Jim Nichols’s article in the Ledger, and once they connected Hollis to the Great Finger Search, they were quick to volunteer their own family histories of the Trouble, with none of the Chamber of Commerce squeamishness of the townsmen in Cleary, nor any doubt that such relics still remained. Pieces of the rope were the most common report, but few of the current generation had seen any actual fingers.
Even Hollis began to understand the uselessness of the task and, with the end of their month’s lease rapidly approaching, was making noises of resignation and acceptance. Then on the morning of the eleventh, as Jolie was driving to work, she was interrupted by Vic’s teenage clerk, who was calling on Vic’s orders and was hopping with excitement. He wouldn’t divulge any details except to say it was big, it was incredible, it was crazy. Jolie and the old men should come straight out, as soon as they could, they wouldn’t believe it.
Jolie turned around in the intersection and rounded up the Frazier brothers and drove them straight to the KOA, to the worn oak counter of the concession stand. Vic and his clerk and a storeful of tourists waited there, Vic red-faced and practically hopping, he was so excited. His sense of military ceremony called for a moment of gravity as they gathered at the counter, his face darting around the room.
“Is Sam coming?” he asked. “No? Well, then I’ll show you. Out of the blue, you will not believe. Left on the steps, no note, just there. I don’t know if they’re the right ones, but, God, they’re somebody’s.” He reached under the counter and triumphantly slapped a small, fluted bottle on the counter, clear and flask-shaped.
Hollis murmured immediately, “It’s gin. That’s a gin bottle.”
Jolie had no interest in looking at anyone’s severed fingers, then or ever, and it took a bit of persuasion to get her to brave a peek. “Maybe,” she offered helplessly. She passed it to Charley, who couldn’t see well enough to make a call, leaving Hollis to act as resident expert, holding up the bottle and trying for a better look in the dim light. He turned it this way and that and finally jumped up on the counter and held it to the fluorescent light for a better look. He stood there, peering closely at the dusty old bottle, then bent and hopped off the counter with the vigor of a younger man. He told his brother, “They got calluses, and dirt under the nails.”
Charley took the bottle back and turned it over in his hands, feeling the scrolled, raised lettering on the face of the cloudy glass. “Whut does it say?” he asked Hollis. “There’s something on the bottle.”
The glass was too cloudy to read, and an Ohio Yankee, who’d wandered in to buy the Times for the crossword, provided his pencil for a quick rubbing of lead on an old receipt on the countertop. The image emerged on the back of the thin paper, written aslant, in curvy, sideways lettering: H & A Gilbey LTD and to the side, in that same flowing lettering, Gin.
When Hollis read it aloud, Charley finally smiled, brilliantly and without reserve. “Thet’s it. Thet’s what they told me,” he murmured, feeling around for his brother and gripping his fur lapel. “Hollis. It’s them. It must be.”
Vic and the bystanders clapped and yammered and pressed for a closer look, though Hollis was momentarily too moved to speak. He lifted the cold glass to his lips and kissed it, whispered, “Papa, you’re coming home.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
The Frazier brothers left the next morning, anxious to reunite their papa’s fingers with the rest of his mortal remains at the Veterans Cemetery in North Little Rock. Jolie brought them their breakfast early and chatted with them while they finished the last of the hellishly hot sausages, then presented them with a parting gift—small, flat, and tissue-wrapped. She thought they “might like a copy of it, to take back to Tennessee.”
Charley thanked her even as he was tearing off the tissue on a silver-framed sepia photograph of an upright old farmer standing in a cutover cotton field the first day of seeding. He was holding a brace of mules by their traces in a standard photograph of the day. Charley couldn’t make much of it, even with his magnifying glass, though Hollis smiled when he got on his reading glasses, told him, “Well, it’s Sip—out standing in a field, with his mules. He’s mama’s oldest brother—died of malaria. I declare. Where’d you find it?”
“Sam dug it out of the State archives. He’s a Hitt, on the 1842 Creek Census. You’ll be pleased to hear you two gentlemen are now eligible for minority status in the gret state of Florida.”
Jolie walked them down the cold drive to their car and helped Charley p
ut away his Walmart luggage, while Hollis settled Snowflake in the back. Hollis was anxious to get on the road, though he hesitated before he got in himself, a little awkward now that their parting was upon them as he’d grown fond of their landlady. She was a true swamp-running smart-ass of a Hoyt, but by-God faithful, in her way. Neither she nor Vic Lucas, or even his skinny teenage clerk, would take any of the ten-grand reward, which didn’t please Hollis as much as it made him feel uncomfortable, as if he hadn’t carried his weight here among the homefolk.
He offered it again, there in the drive, but Jolie just shook her head. “You know, Mr. Frazier, you ain’t the only one around here whose Papa didn’t get such a fair shake. Finding them fangers was the only good luck anybody’s ever had in Hendrix. I was proud to be a part.”
Hollis could hardly argue with such a stand and let it go at that. He just glanced around the deep lawn and ivory-colored house and allowed after a moment, “Well, you got a nice place here, Miss Hoyt. You done well for yoursef.” That was about as high an accolade as they gave, down in Hendrix. He climbed in his car and lowered his window. “I need to brang my girls down here sometime. They’d like your house. They like old stuff, both of ’em.”
“I’d like that.” Jolie smiled, then asked with a glimmer of Hoyt needling, “You gone take ’em out to Hendrix?”
Hollis lost his smile in an instant. “Shit,” he said, so shortly and succinctly that Jolie burst out laughing.
“Well, you take care of yoursef, old man,” she told him, then bent to the window and told Charley the same. She told him to come back and go fishing when it was warm. “Not cane fishing—fishing down in the swamp. They still got fish down there, catfish the size of footballs.”
Charley assured her he would, and with a few more waves and promises to keep in touch, the brothers backed out. They exited the county much as they’d entered it: up Highway 231 and upcountry to Montgomery and Birmingham and crosswise through Tupelo, crossing the Tennessee line just past dark. It was a long drive, but pleasant, their talk still focused on Hendrix and Camp Six and the long-scattered families who’d once lived there. They reminisced about their good papa and their hardworking mother; about the musical Kimbralls and Big Dave Bryant. But mostly they talked about the Hoyts, whom their aunt Tempy had often recalled in her exile. Her stories were of a tall and unruly clan of half bloods, with white pretensions and quick-tempered ways, who owned the rowdiest camp on the river and lost their daughters to rich men.