by Pam Durban
Did you tell Mr. Barrett that what happened to the Longs was unforgivable? she says.
No, no, no.
Isn’t this you? she says, holding up a creased and yellowed newspaper clipping. “In the downtown office of a prominent local businessman with ties to one of the town’s oldest families, this correspondent was told that while what happened to the Longs was unforgivable, it was the work of a very small group of men, and this correspondent was treating it as if everyone in town was involved. ‘That’s what people resent, ‘said this gentleman, and as the six o’clock hour chimed, he brushed off his good gray fedora and settled it on his head.
‘But the identities of that very small group of men are well-known to a much larger group, so the question remains, who were those men?’ this correspondent asked.
‘Isn’t that what we would all like to know?’ he answered. But when pressed to name the unforgivable—the shotgun held under Albert’s jaw? the bullet fired point-blank into Dempsey’s heart? the pistol at Bessie Long’s head? the burning dress? the common grave? the silence that cloaks the guilty?—he had no answer.’ ”
He hates the way she reads, impartial as a judge. It fills him with despair to see that everything he would have burned has come into her possession. He despises every one of the words she’s just read, especially unforgivable. Hearing it again, he’s reminded of what he’d meant, what he still means. A wrong that cannot be righted, that exists forever beyond the reach of forgiveness. A wrong that stained and drowned the soul, like the sin in Libba’s favorite hymn:
I was sinking deep in sin
Far from the peaceful shore.
Very deeply stained within
Sinking to rise no more.
“You have no proof,” he says. “You have no right.”
I’m your flesh and blood, she says. This is my story too.
“Libba,” he shouts. “Water.”
But instead of Libba, he gets Cecile fussing with his pillow. He gets Lewis’s daughter, holding a photograph up to his face like a mirror. Look, she says. Be still. He smiles to feel that the girl has a heart after all, to see the man he was and will be again. This was Libba’s favorite picture of him: A man of substance in a double-breasted suit sitting easily in a chair with his legs crossed, a pair of black-and-white shoes on his feet, a cigarette held loosely between two fingers. His light hair is combed back from a high forehead, and he has strong lips and bold features, determined eyes behind rimless glasses. Libba made the appointment with the photographer. She brushed his suit and polished his shoes. At the studio she ducked under the black cloth that the photographer held up for her, studied her husband’s image floating upside down on the ground glass. “Look proud of yourself, Howard,” she said. He’d straightened the crease of his trousers, done his best. She’d mounted the picture in a handsome black frame edged with sterling silver filigree and hung it in the hall; every week Minnie polished that silver. But he’d rather not remember Minnie or Zeke. He’d banished them from his thoughts years ago, and he does not appreciate their showing up now.
Grandmother told me that you ruined those shoes by wearing them out dove hunting, says Lewis’s daughter. Said she found them in a croker sack down in the cellar. Every time she looked at this picture, she told that story.
He jerks the way you do when you wake from a dream of falling just before you hit the ground. Of course Libba had told the girl that story. Never could keep anything to herself, garrulous as the mockingbird in the cedar tree outside his window, telling the grandchildren about him in order to keep his image flickering in their minds. He can tell that Lewis’s daughter wants to believe that story about the shoes. She looks eager and hopeful, the way her father looked, waiting for the answer after asking for something. “Yes,” he says. “It’s true that Libba told the dove field story.”
But how did the picture come into this child’s possession? Libba would not have given it to her. “Are you a thief?” he says.
Of course not, she says. My father gave it to me after grandmother . . . , but he doesn’t hear the rest.
“Where is my wife?” he roars. “My house? My son? The pictures in my hallway?” He sees that he has frightened her, and he is not sorry. She deserves to be frightened for forcing him to remember things that are best forgotten, asking him questions that he answered seventeen years ago, bringing back the sorrow and draining his strength.
He feels hands on his arms, another blanket thrown over him. Libba’s frightened voice comes to him through heavy cloth. “Can’t you give him something?” she says. “Can’t someone help him?”
Lewis’s daughter holds up another photograph, and the roaring stops. “Ah,” he says, looking at his Libba smile at him from the greenhouse door at dusk, her body outlined by lantern light, a few strands of hair straggling out of a soft bun. “Her lamp does not go out at night,” he whispers, and the curious grandchild leans close to hear more. Her hand rests lightly on his arm.
“She loved proverbs,” he says. “She had one for every occasion. ‘A soft voice turneth away wrath,’ she’d say. ‘A good wife is more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain.’
“I built that greenhouse for her the year that Lewis was born. Dr. Hastings didn’t buy a single pane of glass.” When he sees that she likes this story, he goes on. He tells her about kneeling on the ground with the sun on his back, smoothing mortar along the bricks of the foundation wall. Libba was so pregnant with Lewis she couldn’t stand up for long, so he brought out a chair from the kitchen so she could sit and watch him work.
She was waiting at that same door the evening he came home after saying too much to Curtis N. R. Barrett, and he’d gone in gratefully, out of the low gray winter twilight into the lantern light, into the warm, moist, earth-smelling air, into her arms.
“She was dividing Dutch iris roots,” he says. She must have figured he’d come there to help. “ ‘Pick up a clump and flex it,’ she said to me. ‘You’re looking for the compliant junctures.’ ” He flexed a complicated clot of tubers, sliced through the thickest part.
“Guess who came to see me today?” he said.
“Who?”
“Mr. Curtis N. R. Barrett.”
“Oh?”
“I’m not the only one he visited,” he said, so she’d understand. “He’s talking to everybody in town about those killings.”
“Well, what could you tell him, Howard, when you weren’t there?” She was faster than he at dividing the root clumps, faster and more precise, and remembering her skill, her sureness, remembering the two of them together that night, is making him feel stronger, the way the water she gave him earlier did.
“I said it was a terrible thing, a very regrettable affair. ‘But sometimes it takes a violent storm to clear the air,’ I said. And that is exactly what that night was. A violent storm that only the Almighty could have stilled, a cataclysm beyond the reach of human judgment or control.”
6
Minnie Settles
November 1926
SHE STOOD AT the sink with her hands in the soapy water and watched discreetly as Libba parted the short yellow curtains and looked out. Spying on her husband again, checking to see whether he’d left for work or if he was walking back to the house for a clean handkerchief and another minute in her arms, the way he did nearly every weekday morning now.
This morning he must have made it out of the driveway because Libba dropped the curtain and turned away. Minnie looked down at the water but not fast enough to miss the way Libba stared around her own kitchen like she didn’t know the place. She had no time for sympathy. In less than three hours the Little Garden Club would arrive for their last meeting before the flower show, and she had a mile-long list of chores to finish. The day began when work began, and it ended when work was finished. She’d been idling in the kitchen long enough, waiting for Mr. Aimar to go; now it was time to get busy, the way she’d done all her life.
By
the time she was old enough to work, they were farming cotton on shares for Mr. Gregorie, but she’d heard stories. Back in slavery times her mother’s family had worked in rice on Tomotley Plantation, down in Beaufort County. “Girl,” her mother always said, “that was toil the likes of which you better hope you never have to bend your back to.” Vast, flooded fields and labor endless as the tide that pushed the river over the dikes and into the rice. They and their kin had fled those fields early in the Civil War, right after the Union army occupied that part of the coast.
As a child in Aiken County, she’d followed her parents and her brother up and down the rows of Mr. Gregorie’s fields, filled her sack with cotton and dragged it to the scale, watched to make sure that the fat man tending the scale wrote down the correct weight next to her name. “No bigger than a minute,” he said. “And look at her go.” After her father died, her mother moved them into Aiken, sent Minnie to the Schofield School. She graduated with a housekeeping certificate on top of a general high school diploma, worked around town for a few other families before the Aimars hired her. Now her work was here. Laundry on Monday and mending on Tuesday. On Wednesday she polished the silver, cleaned the pantry and the icebox. On Thursdays she cleaned the living room, the hall and the stairs, the dining room, and the long, narrow closet in the hall where the coats and hats and overshoes were kept. Fridays she tackled the bedrooms and bathroom. Saturdays she tidied closets, scrubbed the kitchen and the icebox, again. Every day but Sunday she cooked and served three meals. Last thing every night she brushed Libba’s hair while they planned the next day’s meals and errands.
She was famous all over town for her skill at the washtub and ironing board and mangle. She had a callus on her pointer finger from licking the tip and touching it to a hot iron. “Working her magic,” Libba called Minnie’s way with a shirt, a blouse, a fine linen tablecloth, or one of the new corsets with the dangling stocking clips. The Aimars kept a washing machine on the back porch of the house, where she washed the bedsheets and dishtowels and the like. They had a mangle in the cellar, where she pressed the table linens. She was happy to use the machines for those chores, but for the fine laundry she still favored a copper boiler, an iron kettle, her own brew of bluing and soap flakes and bleach mixed into boiling water.
“My good right hand,” Libba called her. “My dear Minnie. My treasure.” Libba’s friends brought their laundry to Minnie, and she was their treasure too. She’d heard herself called every pretty name in the book, and not one of them worth the breath it took to say it if they ever turned against her. The word going around was that Bessie Long had been taken to the killing ground in her shift, denied even the minor dignity of clothing.
Libba walked to the canary’s cage, lifted off the canvas cover, and dropped it into the drawer where it was kept. “All right, Louie, rise and shine,” she said, and the bird hopped up onto his perch and started singing. Lately the cover stayed on the birdcage until Howard left for the office because Louie’s shrill singing, the clicking of his beak on the cuttlebone, made Howard nervous. It looked like everything unsettled Mr. Aimar now, Libba had told Minnie, and her husband’s jumpiness, the wincing, hunted look that often appeared in his eyes, made her remember that the obituary had listed the cause of death of Mr. Aimar’s father as “nervous prostration.” Not even her own doctor father had been able to explain to her satisfaction what that meant, only that it was dire, unpredictable, and likely inherited. That was why the house had to be kept calm and quiet until he left for work. Once he was gone, Minnie could bang her pots and pans, Louie could sing his heart out, and Little Mister could clomp down the stairs, eat the yolk out of the middle of a fried egg, and ride off to school in Zeke’s wagon. They could all get on with the day.
Libba sat down at the small white table beside the pantry door with her hands folded tightly on the tabletop. She wore a plain white blouse and a dark-blue skirt, and her hair was pinned up on top of her head. She always dressed for breakfast, wouldn’t dream of coming to the table in her bathrobe. “Looking slovenly,” she called it, and she wouldn’t have it.
“Oh, Lord, Minnie,” she said. “What are we going to do about my husband?”
She’d been dreading this invitation to sit and talk, the way they’d done nearly every morning for the ten years she’d been working here. The two of them sitting down for a few minutes before they both got on with the day, puzzling out what to do about Little Mister’s bed-wetting or Libba’s friend Olivia, who couldn’t seem to keep it straight what day she needed to pick up her laundry.
“You’ll think of something, Miz Libba,” she said over her shoulder, careful to keep the we out of it. Because there was no we anymore, not since the morning of the night the Longs were killed, when she’d heard a car door slam and seen Mr. Aimar hurry across the driveway to the spigot outside the greenhouse, where he washed one shoe, then the other, under the running water. Now those shoes were up in this house, under the same roof with them. Yesterday afternoon she’d come across Libba carrying a croker sack into the hall closet. “Oh, Minnie,” she said. “You startled me.” She held up the sack, told some story about how Mr. Aimar had worn his good shoes out dove hunting. “Can you imagine?” she said.
By ten o’clock a dozen thin white china cups and saucers were arranged on a linen cloth on the freshly polished silver tray. In the front room the fire was laid, chairs carried in from the dining room. She’d changed into a black taffeta uniform and a clean white apron, pinned the stiff white cap on her head, and though she’d dusted the front room yesterday, she dusted it again. She brushed the feather duster over the frame of the picture of the high-and-mighty man on his high-and-mighty horse, over the lampshades and along the mirror over the mantel, over the clock and the two porcelain spaniels that guarded it. She even got down on her hands and knees and dusted the claw feet on the marble top table in front of the settee; she’d been raised to do a good job, no matter what.
Before she went upstairs to change, Libba stood in the doorway and admired the front room. She said she hoped the ladies would appreciate the way the yellow, bronze, and red in the arrangement of fall daisies and autumn leaves on the mantel picked up the colors in the wallpaper. She hoped her attention to detail, the care she’d taken with the room, would inspire them to strive for greater heights. Next to her husband, her son, and her church, Libba loved the Aiken Flower Show best. Her mother had started it, and in the six years since her mother passed and she was elected president of the Little Garden Club, she’d been working to make the show better every year. She was determined to make this year’s edition perfect to the last detail, nothing overlooked or forgotten or sloughed off or haphazardly done. Every i dotted, every t crossed, she said, in memory of her mother and her brother killed in the war and for the sake of her husband and the town she loved that had lately been so maligned.
But when the ladies started arriving, no one seemed to notice the front room. In the foyer the younger ones squeezed hands and kissed cheeks. They all dressed like Libba, in long skinny dresses with shiny stockings and high-heeled shoes, and they turned in front of each other, showing off. A few wore big curls pasted to each cheek. The old ones still dressed in long dark skirts and plain white blouses, as they’d done throughout the war, as if they hadn’t heard that it was over. As soon as she’d taken their wraps and they were all settled in the front room on the sofa and the dining room chairs, Minnie served the pound cake and poured the coffee and listened to them talk and whisper among themselves about everything but the room that Libba had made so welcoming for them.
Meanwhile, Libba sat there in her skinny plaid velvet dress with her ankles crossed, the cup and saucer balanced on one knee, pretending it didn’t bother her that nobody had noticed how she’d decorated the room. She chatted to this one and that one, smiling at them like her smile was a prize they’d won, but Minnie could tell she was upset. The more bothered Libba got, the bigger and brighter she smiled. She was tempted to say something, the habit of
loyalty as hard to break as any other. Maybe they’d forgive her for stepping out of line. “What do y’all ladies think about that pretty arrangement?” she’d like to say. Or: “You know, she had me make this lemon pound cake because one of you said it was her favorite.”
Instead, she poured coffee and listened, fought back the temptation to answer a question or two herself. “Do we know for sure,” asked old Miss Rosamond Phelps, “that the governor was sent a list of names?”
“Yes, ma’am, he was,” Minnie didn’t say. “Thanks to Mr. Leland Dawson. Honor his name.”
Curtis N. R. Barrett came into the conversation too. His name was spoken with mockery and outrage. Finally, someone said, “What do you think, Libba?”
“What do I think?” she said, and she put a finger to her lips, pretending to mull it over. “Well, yesterday I was down at Hahn’s, picking out potatoes for Sunday’s au gratin, and he came in and walked right up to me. ‘Mrs. Aimar,’ he said, and I said, ‘Mr. Barrett,’ and I went right on sorting my potatoes.” She had their attention now, Minnie’s too; she went around the room with the coffeepot again. Zeke had told her about driving the man all over town, the errands he ran for him almost every day. “You stay clear of that whiskey mess,” she’d told him, but from the way he cut his eyes away and mumbled into his shirt collar, she knew it was too late.
Libba said that she and this Mr. Barrett exchanged a few words about potatoes. She filled her sack and folded the top down and creased the fold, and then she said, “How do you like our little town, Mr. Barrett?” and he said it was very pleasant so far, though he doubted it would stay that way for long, where he was concerned.