The Tree of Forgetfulness

by Pam Durban

  While the choir sways and sings “Precious Lord,” he helps carry his mother’s casket to the back of the church and set it on a stand, so that people can file past on their way out and say their last good-byes. So many old ladies kiss and hug him that his face and collar are soon smeared with lipstick. When her time comes, Mrs. Aimar holds onto one of the coffin handles like she’s taking it with her. Lewis and his daughter have to pry her fingers loose and lead her away.

  Outside the air is smothering, the light bright as tin. Thunderheads race toward them from the west. They will have to hurry to the cemetery on Toole Hill to outrun the storm. Or maybe the lightning and the rain will beat them there, and they’ll get to keep her on earth a little longer. He puts on his dark glasses, stands behind the hearse while Jackson’s men slide his mother’s casket in. He helps his wife and daughters into the car from Jackson’s. Maybe he can get in, too, before the Aimars catch up with him. Maybe he can ride away without having to speak to them.

  “Zeke?” No one here calls him that, except for them. He stops, turns. Today he’s doing what his mother would have wanted; she would have been polite, so he will be polite. Maybe that was where she went, he thinks. All those years of being mannerly gave her a lot of practice in keeping her distance, and finally she just walked off into it.

  Lewis Aimar extends his hand, and he takes it. “Sorry about your mother, Zeke,” he says. “Sorry for your loss. I remember her fondly; we all do. She was a fine person, and we’ll miss her.”

  Lewis Aimar has squint lines around his eyes, the open face of a man with few regrets and nothing to hide. He looks Zeke in the eye, as though there’s only goodwill between them. Goodwill and good memories of himself as a little boy, riding all over town in Zeke’s wagon.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “You know my daughter Elizabeth?”

  “I do not,” he says. “How do you do?”

  She shakes his hand as well. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she says. Her look is keener, the presumption of goodwill not so apparent.

  “Thank you.” For once, he thinks, Libba Aimar is waiting her turn. Up close she looks more bedraggled and blank than she did in church. Picked threads on her suit jacket, a loose button dangling. His mother kept herself up. Sorting through her clothes, he hadn’t found one unmended rip, one missing button or sagging hem. It makes him proud to remember that, proud and fierce and superior: You’ve gotten pitiful, and my mother never did. But right behind that feeling comes another one. He remembers hearing from one of the Daughters of Zion that before he came down to look after his mother, Libba Aimar had visited every day, bringing homemade soup and flowers from her garden. She’d sit with her for hours, they said. And that is the essence of the problem with being here: how confusing everything became when you weren’t studying this place from a distance; you were down in it, part of it again, if only for a little while.

  “Ezekial,” she says. She holds out both hands, her head held to one side in the old, charming way, and there’s nothing to do but take her hands in his own. “I’m sorry it took this sad occasion to bring you home.”

  She looks haggard and hollow, with the same look in her eyes he saw in his mother’s in her final days: a dark presence regarding him from far away. It won’t be long, he thinks, before her people will gather in a different church to see her off, but—the thought pours over him like cool water—he won’t be among them. He will not come back here again. He tries to pull his hands free, but she holds on.

  “We will miss your dear mother,” she says. “She was so good to me. She was so . . .” He waits while she bites her bottom lip and rummages for the word, fear in her eyes, as though she’s forgotten where she is or what she’s doing there. The loose skin of her hands slides over the thin bones, and he squeezes her hands to show he’s listening.

  “. . . so good and true,” she says.

  As soon as she says it, something inside him slams shut to keep it out, but it slips through anyway, and he’s aware that she hasn’t come close to saying what he wants to hear. He doesn’t know exactly what it will be, only that he will know it when he hears it, and he hasn’t heard it yet. He only knows that she is stronger than any confused old woman with one foot in the grave has a right to be, and she still won’t let go of his hands.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped, guided, and supported me throughout the process of researching and writing this book. I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions:

  The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, for several residencies during which this book was written and revised.

  The Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina and its chair, Beverly Taylor, for granting me a research leave at a crucial point in the writing.

  The Institute of the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina, where I spent a semester in good conversation with colleagues during the formative stages of imagining this book.

  Aaron Marcus, for his skillful research into Oliver H. P. Garrett’s reporting for the New York World.

  Alan Shapiro, John Rosenthal, and Ann Loftin, friends to the manuscript and to me.

  The late George Garrett, for generously sharing written material and recollections of his uncle, Oliver H. P. Garrett.

  Fitzhugh Brundage, for an early conversation that helped to orient me to my subject.

  Jan Nordby Gretlund, for honoring my work in Denmark and for all his help over the years in keeping my work visible.

  Michael Griffith, extraordinary editor, whose questions and challenges helped to make the prose cleaner, the insights sharper.

  Peter Perlman, whose love, care, support, and encouragement mean everything to me.

  I am so grateful to you all.