The Tree of Forgetfulness

by Pam Durban

  In New York men like J. P. Gibson were his allies: private eyes, house dicks, and police detectives, bodyguards and men who stood at the speakeasy doors; they were skillful with a blackjack, indifferent to fear, some of them veterans like himself. Barrett was so happy he whistled all the way from the courthouse to the depot, where he wired Swope: “Dam cracks. Hoping for flood. More to follow.”

  He waited two days before he went to see the sheriff again, allowing enough time for J. P. Gibson to rattle the lawman’s chain, allowing him time to think through his own strategy. The jail was situated in back of the courthouse, surrounded by a high stone wall. He went in through a gate at one end of the wall, crossed the sandy yard, whistling, and stepped up onto the limestone stoop. The sheriff’s back was to the door; he and the jailer, Robert Bates, sat across from each other at a table in mid-room, reading newspapers. When he knocked, the sheriff didn’t turn.

  “Come on in the house, Mr. Barrett,” he said, sounding bored.

  “How’d you guess?” Barrett stepped inside and waited for his eyes to adjust. The only light came from one bare bulb hanging by a frayed cord.

  “It’s my job to know who’s coming up behind me,” the sheriff said. “I know your walk and your whistle and your knock.”

  “Of course you do,” he said. This morning Zeke had told him that the sheriff was a veteran too, and that made him a different kind of adversary, one who grasped the logic of survival as well as he did: If it comes down to me or you, it’s going to be me. The sheriff stood up from the table and turned around. Barrett had never seen gravity so hard at work on a living man. His eyes, mouth, the flesh of his face itself, all trended south. He wore a black suit coat and dark trousers, a shirt with a tight, narrow collar band buttoned all the way up to his chin, round eyeglasses.

  “Look who’s here, Robert,” the sheriff said out of the corner of his mouth. “This Yankee reporter can’t get enough of us. I’d shake your hand,” he said, holding up two bundles of bandages, “but I won’t.”

  Robert Bates snickered, shrugged, hunched lower over his paper.

  “Robert, go see that those prisoners get fed,” the sheriff said without shifting his eyes from Barrett’s face.

  When Robert was gone, the sheriff looked somber, as though he had weighty news to tell. “I sent my jailer away so we can talk in private,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something, Mr. Barrett, and I want you to write this down.” He watched like a hungry man eyeing food as Barrett retrieved notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket and laid them on the table. “You know,” he said, “when a man has been trying to administer the law the best way he can and them dirty political dogs say things, it’s tough, I can tell you. All the time I’ve been sheriff, I’ve been giving the bootleggers hell, and now they’re trying to drive me out. But I haven’t the blood of them Longs on my hands. I wouldn’t do a thing like that. I’m going to heaven; nobody’s going to meet me in hell. No sir.”

  He looked at the notebook, but Barrett let it lie. “Did you tell that to Mr. Gibson?” Barrett said.

  “I haven’t had the opportunity yet, but I sure-bud plan to.” When Barrett still didn’t make a move toward his notebook, the sheriff trudged on. “I have something to show you,” he said, and he crossed heavily to the rolltop desk next to the window and pawed out a few typewritten pages, clapped them between his bandages, and slid them down onto the table in front of Barrett. “My sworn testimony to the coroner’s jury,” he said. “Go on, read it out loud.”

  Barrett got out his glasses and slipped the wire stem over one ear, then the other. He cleared his throat. “I got to the jail, and fifteen or twenty men I guess were in front. I got on the steps there, and I said, ‘Men there is nobody in Aiken County that has been hurt worse over Sheriff Glover’s death than I am, but I am the sheriff now, and sworn to protect these prisoners, and I am neither scared of hell or heaven, and the first man that tries to go in this jail is going away from here tonight.’ ”

  Barrett read the rest quickly, the facts so familiar he could have written the affidavit himself. Another version of the official story. The sheriff dispersed the crowd, but when he turned his back, they swarmed into the jail like a flock of blackbirds and overpowered him and Robert Bates. The electric lights were out, and it was dark in the jail, confusion and darkness on every hand.

  They tied him and Robert up back in the kitchen and dragged the Longs from their cells. By the time the sheriff freed himself and found his gun, figured out where they’d gone, and raced after them out the Columbia Highway, found the turnoff and made his way up the edge of that field into the piney grove, the three of them were dead. All that was left for him to do was to beat out the fire in Bessie Long’s dress. “Et cetera, et cetera,” Barrett said, setting the paper down on the table.

  “That there is the God’s honest truth,” the sheriff said, holding up his hands again.

  Barrett shrugged. The notebook stayed closed. “How are those hands healing?” he asked.

  The sheriff studied them, back and front. “Coming along,” he said. “They’re starting to itch, and Dr. Hastings tells me that’s a good sign.”

  “Dr. Hastings, the coroner’s physician? He takes good care of you, does he?”

  “He’s a doctor,” the sheriff said. “That’s his job.”

  “And you’re the sheriff.”

  “Now who do you suppose has been spreading that rumor about me?” he said.

  “It’s all over town,” Barrett said. The sheriff’s name was at the top of Leland’s list. Barrett wanted him to know he knew that.

  The sheriff wanted him to know something too. He settled his bandaged hands on his belly, looked up with his sharp green eyes. “You and Mr. Gibson have a pleasant outing with the Rainey girl yesterday, down there in the valley with old James Moseley?”

  “You tell me.”

  “All right. You did.”

  Barrett said nothing, trying to regain the high ground. He’d hoped to be the one to spring the news about the girl’s affidavit. She’d been a prisoner in the jail on the night the Longs were killed. Gibson hadn’t wanted to let Barrett go with them—so much for allies—but he’d talked his way into the car, and he and Gibson and the Rainey girl had driven down to Graniteville to swear her affidavit in front of Moseley, the justice of the peace. They’d avoided the Augusta Highway, found their way down to Graniteville along the hard clay back roads. The two men in the front and the girl in the back, a tired-looking girl with wary eyes, a dark shingle of hair, a necklace of puckered gold berries on a dirty string around her neck. “Chainy-berries,” she called them when he asked, then looked at him as though she’d never seen anything like him before.

  “You being a stranger and all, there’s a few things about old Moseley that you need to put in your hopper,” the sheriff said. “I don’t know what he’s got against me, but he’s always had imaginings. He told me once he thinks he’s the reincarnation of some general from three thousand years ago. Him and that Charlie George down at the Graniteville train station, they both have it in for me.”

  “He said the same about you,” Barrett said. “That you have it in for him, I mean. Some Klan business from way back when?” Moseley protected himself from his imaginings with loaded guns. A shotgun leaned against a doorjamb, a pistol on a table. Moseley himself wore a .45 in a holster, and his three sons each carried a revolver. He’d watched them through the window of Moseley’s stuffy office, patrolling the yard while his wife served them iced tea from a pitcher on a tray.

  “Ah, hell,” he said. “Like I said, he’s always had imaginings.”

  “The Rainey girl said you gave her a pair of shoes when you let her out of jail,” Barrett said.

  “The poor sorry thing didn’t have any,” he said. “All’s I’m saying is that there’s things you should know about that little old girl that it’s not Christian of me to divulge, and I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t my duty and you a stranger here and unfamiliar with a lot of things.
” He was a deacon in the Baptist church down in Graniteville. A God-fearing, Bible-reading man, his pastor said.

  “Shoot,” Barrett said, and for a second the sheriff’s face lit up the way a match flares in a dark room. Don’t I wish?

  “You ask any law-abiding citizen in this county about that bunch, you’ll get you an earful. To start with, her family’s all bootleggers,” he said. He’d known her people out in the Ellenton section for longer than he cared to remember, and the whole time he’d been sheriff, he’d been slapping them in jail for one thing or another, liquor mostly, which they all made and sold and drank. Ella was in jail in the first place because she’d tried to run away from a car full of gallon jugs of whiskey and beer that he’d stopped one night on the Aiken-Augusta highway.

  Now Barrett opened his notebook, thumbed back through a few pages. “She said her father was a constable in Ellenton,” he said.

  The sheriff laughed, braced his hands on his knees, and went on laughing. “Did she say that? I guess the old loony spent so many days in the custody of lawmen, he started to believe he was one.” That was how it went, the sheriff said, until one day, lo and behold, the old man turned up with a bullet through his head out in the piney woods behind the family shack where his daughter always went to whelp her young.

  Barrett flipped through more pages in his notebook. “Just give me a minute,” he said. “She said she heard your voice at the jail that night. Said you came up the stairs—here it is—‘talking and laughing.’ ”

  Everything in the sheriff’s face stopped working at once, as though a gear had jammed in some good-humored machine. “Now look here,” he said. “I don’t know why she’s telling dirty lies about me, but now that she is, I’m going to have to go look into it.” He stood up from the table and crossed the room like someone excused from the witness stand, snatched his hat off a nail driven into the wall beside the door. “Why don’t you take your notebook,” he waved one bandaged hand in Barrett’s direction, “and do some digging of your own. Instead of listening to whores and liars, why don’t you go up to Laurens Street and call on the gentlemen in their offices? Ask them whose voices they heard that night. Go ask your friend Aimar. That’s all I have to say at this time.”

  “One more question, sheriff. “Where did you serve?”

  “St. Mihiel,” he said, without turning. “And then the Meuse-Argonne. And I wouldn’t try and use that against me if I were you.”

  “I was at Château Thierry,” Barrett said. “And Château des Dames.”

  “Then you’d think we’d still be on the same side of things,” the sheriff said as he shoved open the screen door so hard it banged against the front wall of the jail.

  Back in his room Barrett wrote in his notebook and drank a glass of the whiskey Zeke had brought. It was strong and lively, with a bite, a burn, and when that glass was empty, he poured and drank another. It was three minutes to six when he arrived at Howard Aimar’s office. The sun had dropped behind the buildings, and the gold letters on the glass door had gone dull. A cold peach light flooded the sky, and up and down Laurens Street the striped awnings were being rolled up for the night. At the end of the block the last trolley turned the corner and was gone.

  A bell tinkled as he opened the door. The view from the front counter was what you’d see through the wrong end of a pair of field glasses: A man at a desk at the far end of a long, dim tunnel. A neat and natty young man in a gray pinstriped suit and rimless glasses, an old man’s despair rounding his shoulders. Barrett often made snap judgments, but he didn’t spare himself. “Body and imagination spurred by Dionysian longings, checked by Puritan steel,” he wrote in the character assessment he drew up, after the war. “Result: much bucking and rearing, but no ground covered.” He did not lack sympathy for this man and his life. If he’d gone home to New Bedford, he’d be sitting in an office like this on the mezzanine overlooking the weave room at his father’s mill. But he was done with carrying out the plans and wishes of others.

  “We close at six, sir,” Howard Aimar said without looking up from his papers. Barrett walked through the swinging gate beside the front counter anyway. “I’ll just take a second of your time,” he said. Another lesson learned in France: nothing to be gained by hanging back. If a bullet has your name on it, hesitating won’t keep it from finding you.

  As Barrett walked toward him, Howard squared the stack of papers, straightened the line of fountain pens on the desk. “Mr. Barrett,” he said. “May I help you?”

  Barrett was used to the formality now; it was the way they let you know you’d never get close enough to merit a first name. “Mind if I get a squint,” he said, nodding at the picture over Howard’s desk.

  “Help yourself.”

  Up close he saw cannon fire and sabers flashing through smoke and dust, a churning chaos of red and blue uniforms, dying horses and pale dead men, sunlight spread like a blessing over the heroes and their blood. “That was the moment,” Barrett said, and Howard Aimar looked puzzled.

  “The end of Napoleon,” he said. “It’s rare when one moment in one battle makes all the difference. Didn’t happen in my war,” he said. Then, to stop that thought from picking up speed, he said, “How’d you come by the picture?”

  It was a story Howard Aimar seemed relieved to tell. It had hung over his father’s desk in the pharmacy in Augusta, he said, and now it hung over his own, and he hoped that one day it would hang over his son’s desk, and his son’s and his son’s. In his time here Barrett had noticed that much stock was placed on handing down and passing on, on loyalty and honor and keeping it in the family. They were bound to each other in so many ways that sorting out the connections would be like trying to untangle the root system in the ground beneath an ancient forest. Tangled, the upholsterer’s wife should have said, not crooked.

  A small black crucifix with a silver Christ hung on the wall under the picture of Waterloo. “You’re Catholic,” Barrett said.

  “I am.”

  “Did I see you at the depot this morning?”

  “Could be,” he said. “My wife likes me to pick up the State; she keeps up with women’s club doings and the like.”

  “I have met your wife.”

  “So she tells me.” Aimar glanced at the wall clock with the slowly swinging pendulum, and when it began to strike six, he stood and patted his pockets, looking distracted.

  “I’ll let you go home to your dinner,” Barrett said.

  “Dinner is the midday meal, Mr. Barrett. The evening meal is called supper.”

  “You’ve saved me from further embarrassment.”

  “Happy to oblige.” Howard switched off the desk lamp, put on a good gray topcoat, a soft gray hat. “What can I do for you, Mr. Barrett, in the few minutes remaining to us?”

  The unexpected kindness of the man’s tone unnerved him. Invite me to whatever you call the evening meal, he didn’t say. Have a drink with me. “The sheriff says I should go up and down Laurens Street and ask every man where he was that night, what he saw and what he knows. So I thought I’d start with you.” Remember his face, Barrett told himself. The startled face of a man in a dark room at the instant a light snaps on.

  5

  Howard Aimar

  June 1943

  HE WAITS BEHIND the privet hedge at the bottom of the yard behind the house, hoping that Libba remembered to oil the squeaky hinges on the back screen door. He’s been here since two forty-five, the chosen time, but now it’s three, and still she has not come. He studies the window of her second-floor bedroom, and when he cannot look any longer—because no one could be awake in a house so dark and still, because she could have been caught or changed her mind—he watches the pale sliver of new moon whose faintness had caused them to choose this night to run away and get married. He watches the moon, and when he looks toward the house again, Libba is running down the yard. Her legs flash white across the dark grass; the suitcase she carries is weightless. He steps out from behind the hedge. “Over
here, my heart,” he whispers.

  Someone sits on the bed, pulling the sheet tight across his chest and thighs. Are we going now? he tries to say, but water trickles into his mouth and down his throat, and he knows by the path the water takes that Libba is pouring it. She carries the map of his body; she knows the way down his throat and into his belly and on, to his cock and his balls. He has never said those words to her, to anyone. The man who made love to his wife in the dark did not know those words, but the man he is becoming does. That man speaks, and she turns to him, opens her robe.

  “There’s that smile,” Libba says, from somewhere above him. “You just needed some water, didn’t you, sweetheart?”

  The water trickling down his throat tastes like it has flowed from the kitchen tap at home. Even on the hottest summer days, the spigot there runs cool; the water tastes clean and bright and smells faintly of iron and stone, like the depths of the earth must smell. He will drink some of it soon, as he always does when he comes home after being away. Any day now he will run up the back steps and go into his house through the kitchen door. He will walk over to the sink, wrench the tap, fill his cupped hands, and drink and drink. “Use a glass, Howard,” Libba always said. “Don’t drink like a field hand.”

  It would be like Libba to bring him water from his own house. A mason jar of it held on her lap while Cecile drives them to the hospital. She is a genius at matching the cure to the disease, the gift to the need or desire. “Swallow, Howard,” she says, but his throat refuses, and a man says, “That’s enough.” The water stops wandering down his throat, but before Libba’s weight leaves the bed, he’s thirsty again. He opens his mouth like a baby bird, but nothing comes.

  Lewis’s daughter is not like her grandmother or his own daughter either. It would not occur to her that he might be thirsty. She’s like her father: agreeable one minute and so obstinate the next that it sometimes took a few licks with the belt to make Lewis mind. She has Lewis’s wariness too, a look that says that at any moment she expects to have to fight for what she wants. But he can’t take a belt to this one; he cannot lift his arms.