The Tree of Forgetfulness

by Pam Durban

  “Some show,” Barrett said.

  “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

  “I guess I’ll find out soon enough,” Barrett said, but he turned in his seat to study the deserted road behind them, as though trying to memorize the way. Then he sat back. The high whine of the tires and the creaking of the suspension were the only sounds. He pulled a silver flask from his coat pocket. “You mind?”

  “Help yourself,” Howard said. “As you’re no doubt aware, Aubrey takes a special interest in hounding people about every aspect of the whiskey business. You might call it his personal crusade, though drinking itself seems a petty crime, or no crime at all, compared to others.”

  “Murder, for example.”

  “Correct.”

  When Barrett offered the flask, he took it. The whiskey felt bright and warm going down. It had an aftertaste like resin, the same as the whiskey that flowed from the oak cask he kept locked in the shed over by the icehouse. The familiar taste made him uneasy, but he certainly had no monopoly on the casks smuggled into town from the river. Other men had their Zekes to haul contraband for them. “You must have a good source,” he said.

  “The best,” Barrett said, toasting Howard with the flask. “I admire your skill with this automobile,” he said. “I’ve heard that driving a Model T is like doing the Charleston while loading a musket after a big night at the speakeasy.”

  “That about covers it,” Howard said.

  The night of the murders there had been no need to ask for directions; he’d only had to join the line of cars traveling north up the Columbia Highway, look for the big sweet gum where the man set up his apple stand every fall, and turn there onto a narrow dirt track that ran up the edge of a played-out cotton field and into a stand of pines.

  “I thought this was where we’d end up,” Barrett said quietly, when the sweet gum came into view.

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Once or twice,” Barrett said, sipping from the flask. “Never had a guided tour, though.” He laughed.

  A guided tour. His sarcasm was unnerving, as if someone had once offered him a guided tour, and he was repeating those words to show how rotten they sounded. Howard was grateful to be occupied with slowing the car, making the turn. With his right hand he eased back the throttle lever, while his left foot pressed the clutch toward neutral, and when the gear shifted, he stepped on the brake pedal with his right, swung wide, and shoved the throttle lever forward again.

  The track was heavily rutted from all the buggies and wagons and cars that had driven up there. He steered the Ford along the ruts, easing the throttle forward, until he came around behind the dense stand of tall pines. Then he pulled back on the left-hand lever, killed the spark to the plugs, and the engine shut down. The pine needles gleamed in the moonlight, the ground was dappled with light and shadow, and the trees threw their long shadows across the sand. The cicadas waxed and waned, and a breeze moved through the tops of the pines with a faint rushing sound.

  “Do you carry a gun, Mr. Aimar?” Barrett said, looking as thoughtful as if he’d asked Howard about his philosophy of life. He sat loosely at the edge of the seat, the flask held between his legs, looking through the windshield at something far away. Howard thought he might parse for the man the distinction he’d made for himself after that night between owning a gun and carrying one. “I own a .38,” he’d say. “I keep it in a box way up on a high shelf on the back wall of the shed where I park the car, but I don’t carry it.” But saying that might lead to more questions about motive and will and intent. It was best to answer the question as asked. “No, sir, I do not,” Howard said. “Do you?”

  “I was a medic in the war,” Barrett said. “Medics didn’t carry guns. We carried supplies to deal with what guns do. I got in the habit of not carrying one, and it stuck.” He took a long pull on the flask; he seemed to be in no hurry to get out of the car.

  “Let’s talk implicated,” Howard finally said. “Let’s talk degrees.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  They opened their doors and got out. “I can’t tell you how dark it was that night. It was as dark then as it is light now,” he said as they walked into the pines. “There were men all back in these trees, but you couldn’t see a foot in front of you.”

  “Why is it that the story of that night always comes back to how nobody could tell up from down?”

  “Because it’s true,” he said. He remembered blundering through the pines, holding his hands out in front of him to ward off the trees and the men who moved with him toward the torchlight in the clearing beyond and the low, angry murmur of the crowd.

  He and Barrett walked out of the trees and stopped. “The crowd started here,” he said, “and bent like a horseshoe around three sides of the clearing.” Like the road, the ground there was churned up with footprints and hoofprints, wagon and buggy and tire tracks. He’d returned just once, the Sunday after. A crowd had milled around that day too, only this time it was made up of men and women in church clothes. Across the clearing he’d watched Aubrey Timmerman hold up his bandaged hands and tell his story. He’d been numb then, but remembering it now, he felt more certain than ever that he was right to bring Barrett here and set the record straight.

  “Someone had set a lantern on this pine stump,” he said. “People were yelling and running and raising so much dust, it was hard to see what was what.”

  “Yelling, you say? Any voices stand out?”

  Howard squared his shoulders. “It was right about here that I first heard the sheriff.”

  Now he had Barrett’s attention. He patted his coat pockets and pulled out a small notebook and a pencil stub. “You heard the sheriff yelling?” he said.

  “Yes,” he said. You’re in it now, aren’t you, Aubrey? he thought. You’re a big man, until you’re not, until someone steps in your way and says, “Stop, in the name of the law.”

  Barrett nodded. “All right,” he said, and he brought the notebook close to his face and wrote something down. “Where were you when the shooting started?”

  “Back in the crowd, somewhere along in here,” he said, gesturing around him. The moon had cleared the trees now and hung, huge and bright, in the sky. “Why does it matter where I was?”

  Barrett shrugged. “The sheriff seems to think you were—“ He flipped back a few pages in his notebook: “. . . close around, yourself.”

  So Aubrey had been talking, insinuating. “Well, he would know,” he said. “The crowd ended about here,” he said. “I had worked my way to the middle of it when the shooting started.”

  It came back to him now with startling force. The boom of the shotgun, the pop of pistol shots; the way he’d been pressed against the back of the man in front of him, pushed by the man behind as they surged forward as though they’d become one thing, a thing that opened its mouth and made a sound between a shout and a groan.

  After the shooting stopped and the echo sheered off through the trees, he started moving forward again, but his mind was blank, and it stayed blank until he got to the front of the crowd, where the men with torches stood, and he could see the boys lying in their blood, hear the sounds that the woman was making. “She was all shot up, but she was still alive,” he said. “She was crawling on the ground with her dress on fire, and someone came up behind me and put a pistol in my hand. ‘Go on,’ he said. “And when I didn’t, he took it back and shot her dead. At my feet,” he said. “Someone shot her dead at my feet.” He wanted to tell Barrett how it had been to see a woman killed and to try and apply the words that had been spoken in the lawyer’s office that day—justice and the righting of wrongs—to the mayhem and carnage of that moment. But Barrett wanted something else.

  “By ‘someone,’ ” he said, “you mean the sheriff?” His pencil was moving, but he watched Howard as he wrote, as if he were drawing him.

  Then, just as clearly as if he were lifting the newspaper from a bundle on the platform down at the depot, he s
aw the headline: “Witness Hints He Knows Who Fired Fatal Shot.” An eyewitness account by a prominent local businessman, Barrett would call what Howard had told him, and the sheriff would fill in the rest. And then what the sheriff had begun and he had come here to finish would start again. Resentment and revenge, revenge and resentment: a big wheel turning, carrying him and the sheriff through battle after battle until both were dead; turning long after they were dead if they’d tied their children to it. He thought of Lewis, chained to that wheel until the wrong the sheriff had done his father was finally avenged. “It was dark,” he said. “There was a big crowd, and it was dark. There were guns all through that crowd. It could have been anybody.”

  Barrett made a disgusted noise low in his throat. “So you hauled me out here to tell me that it was dark?” he said. “God Almighty, damn.” He shook his head, spat on the ground. “Or did you mean to tell me that it was you who shot her dead?”

  “No,” he said. “I told you, someone took the gun away.”

  “Which brings us back to the sheriff.”

  “It could have been anybody. I did not turn around.”

  “Too dark to tell one buzzard from the other?” Barrett said.

  “If that’s how you want to look at it.” He wouldn’t be provoked.

  “What a waste,” Barrett said. “What an insult to the memory of thousands of men whose killers will never be known not to name killers who can be, and are. So tell me again, what exactly did you do that night?”

  “Nothing,” Howard said. “God help me. I did nothing.”

  And then, almost as if speaking to himself, Barrett said, “So that’s how you got blood on your shoes.”

  The breeze had stopped, and the trees stood motionless; their long, straight shadows fell across the clearing. Howard heard the rasping pulse of cicadas and, from somewhere far away, the baying of hounds. He saw himself from far away too, and he imagined he had a gun in his hand. He raised it and fired, and Barrett fell and lay as still and empty as any of the dead; an emptiness so complete that once you saw it on a human face, you could never again believe that death was anything but oblivion.

  He imagined himself driving back to town, setting the gun on Aubrey Timmerman’s desk, and telling him what he’d done. At his trial he would claim self-defense. “If killing Curtis N. R. Barrett was evil,” he would say, “it was a necessary evil, committed in defense of a marriage, a family, a community, a way of life.” No jury of his peers would convict him because every man among them would know what self he had been defending and why.

  He would gladly have left Barrett there if the man hadn’t sprinted to the car as Howard was turning around, jumped onto the running board, and pulled himself inside. As soon as they were back on the highway, Howard pushed the Ford into cruising gear. “Look here, Aimar,” Barrett said, with the false heartiness of a man trying to bluff his way out of a bad situation, “what I said about your shoes was pure speculation.” He waved his hand through the air, erasing the words. “I know from personal experience that if you’re standing close when someone’s shot, the blood finds you. See what I’m saying?”

  “What kind of fool do you take me for?” Howard watched the road ahead as though he were following a trail of bloody footprints that led from his wife to Minnie. No doubt, Minnie had been given the shoes to clean and the story of the dove field to contemplate. But Minnie would have had her own story. She’d come out onto the porch of her house that morning, shading her eyes against the rising sun. And then, because there was no Zeke without Minnie, no Minnie without Zeke, the trail led straight to the boy whom he’d fed and housed and loaned money to buy his horse and wagon, the one he’d trusted to drive to the river landing and back and paid top dollar to do it and helped in every way it was possible for a white man to help a colored boy. That same boy had shown the shoes to Curtis N. R. Barrett and told the reporter what his mother had told him and given Howard a permanent place on Barrett’s list of those who were up to their necks in gore, implicated to the highest degree.

  15

  Aubrey Timmerman

  December 1926

  HE WAS USED to the calls from the governor’s office now; he knew how to read the signs. On the good days the governor himself was on the line. “Aubrey,” he’d say, with a big sigh, “need to see you again, son.” On those days the sheriff could relax, because when Governor McCormick claimed him as his flesh and blood, he could count on a warm welcome at the statehouse. His Honor was a small neat man with a soft moon face and mild eyes; he perspired in every season, was forever mopping his face and neck and palms with a big monogrammed handkerchief. On the good days the governor would bustle out of his office and rest one moist hand on the sheriff’s shoulder, tell his pretty secretary to bring his hardworking boy a Coca-Cola. Then they’d stroll into His Honor’s office, where the windows and their green velvet drapes almost touched the ceiling and oil portraits of the men who’d gone before them into glory looked down from every wall. Wade Hampton was there, Cole Blease and John C. Calhoun and Pitchfork Ben Tillman—in profile, to hide his missing eye. To the side of the governor’s desk stood three flags: Stars and Stripes on the left, the palmetto and crescent moon of South Carolina on the right, and in the center, a step in front of the others, the flag of the Confederacy. The men on the walls would have disapproved of any other ranking.

  On the good days, once they’d settled themselves on opposite sides of the governor’s gleaming mahogany desk, the glass of cola was brought and set down on a glass coaster in front of the sheriff, and the secretary went out, closing the tall double doors behind her. Then Aubrey Timmerman could get down to the business of bringing the governor up to date on the progress of the investigation in Aiken County.

  Early this morning, however, the pretty secretary had called and spoken to him in a crisp voice without a flicker of welcome in it: “Hold for the governor, Sheriff Timmerman.” That was the sign that this would be a bad day, and he knew why.

  For the last few days Gibson’s blue touring car had been seen gliding up and down Laurens Street or staggering along a washboard road out in the county or nosed up to a small white house in one of the Horse Creek Valley mill villages, and this meant that a fresh batch of affidavits would soon be on their way to governor. Worst of all, two days ago Gibson’s car had been parked for a solid hour in front of John Moseley’s house in Graniteville, and it wasn’t the first time the governor’s detective had paid the old man a visit. Hearing that Gibson had visited Moseley again had made the sheriff’s heart clench for a second, followed by the lighting of a deep and murderous anger at the injustice of the role the vindictive old lunatic had come to play in this business. In every corner of Moseley’s haunted house of a mind, the old man kept ledgers in which he traced the strands of the web of corruption he swore was spun all over Aiken County, insinuating to Gibson, to Barrett, to anyone who would sit still long enough to hear him out, that from the lowliest jailer and chain gang guard up through the ranks of local law enforcement, the whole county was honeycombed with Klan and that the hand of the Invisible Empire had pulled the strings in the Long killings.

  John Moseley knew these things because he’d once been a big shot in the Klan, back when it was the one true Klan and its stalwarts were the Red Shirt men of Hamburg and Ellenton, members of the local gentry and high-office holders whose names never appeared on any membership rolls. But then, so his account went, along came the thieves and thugs and murderers and bootleggers, the hutch dwellers and croppers, the white trash and corrupt lawmen, who drove the good men out until the Klan you had now was a rump Klan, a gang instead of an empire, lawbreakers instead of defenders of the law. The sheriff thought he might need to remind His Honor, in case he had forgotten, that two of the governor’s cousins were on Leland Dawson’s list; they were all in this thing together.

  Waiting for the governor, the sheriff tapped a pencil on the desk, looked out the window. It was a brilliant winter day, the light as clear as water in a tall
clean glass, sunlight flashing like diamonds through the dark canopy of leaves on the water oak in the yard between the courthouse and the jail. He wished he could go out into that beautiful world, tip back a chair against that old oak and take his ease; every man had the right to do that once in a while. He wished he had his old job back: steering the trolley car, collecting fares, swinging the door open and shut at every stop, sending Negroes to the rear or telling them to wait for the next car if white people had taken all the seats. Brakes and gears and rolling down the track, keeping to your timetable—that was all there was to it. The trolley ran straight as an arrow out Trolley Line Road from Aiken to Augusta, Augusta to Aiken, and looking back on it now, it seemed that he’d steered that car through a simpler world, a simpler time, where colored and white had both been happier. Now he rued the day he’d said, “You bet,” when Bud Glover asked was he interested in becoming a lawman.

  Then the governor was on the line. “Sheriff Timmerman,” he said, “I will see you in my office at three this afternoon, sir.”

  And so, once again, the sheriff sped along the hard clay highway toward Columbia, glaring at the leftover cotton bolls on the brown plants in the fields beside the road as if they’d sworn affidavits against him too. He’d gotten wind of the latest batch of documents; he still had friends who wished him well and wanted him to stay out in front of what was coming at him, like Ella Rainey’s latest contribution to the public good.

  “Sheriff Timmerman came up and asked did I know any of the people who had taken the Negroes. Just the sheriff and Bates, I said. I did not tell him I knew Smith and Gaddis. He turned pale as a ghost and said it wasn’t him I’d seen. I told him that he was the only sheriff I knew. He said it wasn’t him, and he left.”

  He drove on through the drab endless fields, rehearsing how he’d respectfully ask the governor to recall that he’d risked his life one time to save those three on the night Earl Glover was killed; he didn’t see how he could have been expected to do it twice for three murderers who were guilty as sin.