The Ancestors

by Brandon Massey

  “Hush, Davie,” Grandma said. “Walt’s right. Forget about that, baby.”

  “There’s a hole—over there! A dog was chasing them, and they fell in. I know it. I almost fell in, too!”

  Grandma sent a withering look Dad’s way. She was so mad at Dad for taking them out into the woods at night, she probably could barely think of anything else.

  “Somebody has to find the bodies,” Davie said. “Or it’s all for nothing. Just tell them to dig. Tell Miss Timmons her brothers are here. If she wants to find them, she’s got to dig.”

  The particulars are unnecessary. All three Timmons boys eventually died, though not at once. Isaiah Timmons died never knowing that his sons lay trapped in the abandoned cellar of a house knocked over in a twister in ’02. That house had crumbled like toothpicks, but the barn beyond it hadn’t had a scratch. Such is the way with twisters.

  The boys’ mother, Essie, would walk the ground within a stone’s throw of her sons’ burial place on three separate occasions in the fifty years before she died. She never knew, not even a hunch.

  All Old Man McCormack ever knew was that someone had killed his dog.

  The dog was found, at least.

  There was no justice in it. All four of the deceased thought so.

  After Davie and Neema were released from their night’s stay at Tallahassee Memorial, Dad moved them to the new Quality Inn that had just opened off of the 10, only ten minutes from Davie’s grandparents but safely across Graceville’s boundary. Technically, out of town.

  Neema wouldn’t hear about sleeping at the house another night, even when Grandma promised to put the dolls away. But Davie wasn’t ready to go home to California yet.

  Not until he knew.

  Grandpa Walter and Grandma were sweetness and spice around Davie, but Davie knew they were furious with Dad for taking his two children into the dark woods. What were you thinking? Mom was on her way, too. Dad had tried to sound happy when he told Davie she was coming, but the dread on Dad’s face had been hard to ignore.

  So Davie knew there was really nothing in the way of it now. So much for their month apart. So much for Imani’s plans to change Mom’s mind. The future was here, a month early.

  To take his mind off of the impending disaster, Davie checked his video footage.

  The footage of the living room only showed the broken windows—not the breaking windows, a key distinction—and conversations between him, Neema, Dad, and Grandpa Walter. No splashing or shrieking on the video. Same old same old. Nothing new. Even the shadow of the Timmons boy in the kitchen doorway wasn’t as distinct as it had been the first time, and the first time it had been pretty sucky.

  The footage got better in the woods, but Davie had to stop the tape when he heard Neema scream. Out of nowhere, he suddenly heard all of it: Barking. Voices. Water. Not as loud as it had been, but undeniably there—true ghost phenomena, when he was ready to show it. He just wasn’t sure when. Maybe soon, maybe not. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.

  Davie found that it was hard to know anything anymore.

  Dad quietly let himself into the hotel room and motioned Davie over. Grandma had dozed off in the hotel room’s recliner and Neema was curled up sleeping at the foot of the bed, where she’d been watching the Disney Channel at a low volume. Hopping with his crutch, Davie followed Dad into the hotel room’s bathroom. The bright lights made Dad look older.

  “So . . . they’re digging,” Dad said, out of the blue.

  “Right now?”

  “Started this morning. Mom and Dad didn’t think I should say anything, but I thought you deserved to know, Davie.”

  Dad said it as if it was something to think about.

  “I have to go,” Davie said.

  Dad’s face flinched, a tic that almost closed his right eye. “How’s your leg?”

  Davie’s back thigh radiated pain, flaring with every step, but that was irrelevant. “Painkillers,” Davie said. “It’s fine.”

  “Davie, they might not find anything. Or, maybe they will. Either way, it’ll be hard.”

  If Dad hadn’t been there . . .

  The thought began as a constant refrain in his mind, but it never finished itself. That thought didn’t need finishing, because he would be dead if his father hadn’t been there. Davie knew that as well as he knew his name. But they hadn’t talked about it yet. Dad had never told Davie what he thought had happened in the woods. Maybe he didn’t need to.

  “Is Mom coming to take us now?” Davie said.

  Dad didn’t blink. “Looks that way.” He made a fist before slowly fanning his fingers.

  They stood in the bathroom, quiet. Dad’s fingers drummed on the sink’s fake marble counter. Dad didn’t seem like the man who had been crying in the kitchen anymore.

  “I’ll tell her it’s not your fault,” Davie said.

  “It has nothing to do with that. Or you. That’s the truth, Davie.”

  Davie believed him, but he also remembered the animal terror and loathing on his father’s face when he was swinging his shovel at the invisible thing chasing him and Neema. He wondered if Dad would feel that about Mom one day, or if maybe even he would. He wished a fight wasn’t coming. He would have to choose sides.

  “What time is Mom getting here?”

  “Late. Seven.”

  There was still time for things to stay the same. Just for a while.

  “Don’t you want to see the bones too, Dad?”

  “I just . . . want to be careful about it. I’m on thin ice around here, Davie.”

  Davie hoped Dad wasn’t convinced there had never been a dog, that maybe they had been attacked by a hungry bear in the dark. He hoped Dad wouldn’t start forgetting.

  “But you want to, don’t you?” Davie said. “Don’t you want to see?”

  Dad bit his lip and nodded.

  So, they left a note for Grandma on Quality Inn stationery—and they went.

  The dig for the bones of Isaac, Scott, and Little Eddie Timmons had begun quietly, without fanfare. The attorneys for the warring parties—the developer, Stellar Properties Inc., and a group of residents calling themselves the Graceville Citizens Action Council, of which Miss Essie Timmons was an honorary chair—exchanged phone calls and reached a compromise.

  The digging had begun only a day after the missing family told its ghost story.

  At dawn.

  Despite the instability at the surface, much of the old abandoned cellar had filled with debris and soil over time, so it wasn’t as easy as finding a ready tunnel. The dig took time.

  As the day wore on, a bulldozer and small scooper wound their way down the newly worn path to the abandoned tobacco barn that developers would have razed the week before, if town politics hadn’t hung them up. They would have found the hole themselves the hard way, so it was best it was found before someone got killed.

  The company CEO, who’d approved the dig personally, thought it was a win-win: His company could demonstrate goodwill to the superstitious, rustic locals and symbolically lay the whole issue of corpses to rest. (“You see?” he could say. “This proves it for once and for all: No more bodies here!” It wasn’t exactly the ideal slogan for a housing development, but it was an improvement over their current PR standing.)

  Neighborhood Watch, which had transformed into a satellite of the Graceville Citizens Action Council, had volunteers up and down McCormack Road who called multiple numbers on their phone trees when they saw construction trucks on the move. The movement of workers and equipment to Lot Sixty-five gained more attention on a Saturday than one might think.

  By midmorning, a good crowd had gathered at the edge of the dig.

  In fairness to the Timmons family, the excavation was eight feet by eight feet, which Stellar had argued was more than enough of a safety margin for finding the bones. A square block of the soil would be dug up, bit by bit, and the dig wouldn’t end until it was twenty yards down. Almost like digging for oil, some onlookers thought.

&nb
sp; While one set of workers hauled up the soil, another sifted through it looking for bone fragments, with help from students from the anthropology department at the college. Adults shooed children away from the sifters, and police officers shooed adults and children alike away from the growing hole, which looked more deadly as the day wore on.

  Before noon, there were three occasions of great excitement at the dig on Lot Sixty-five.

  The first was when a green van from Graceville Glen Retirement Home came bouncing along the path, and two uniformed workers wheeled out ninety-one-year-old Essie Timmons, named for her mother, who had spent her lifetime drowning in her mother’s grief about her three lost sons. Essie Timmons had been raised in the shadow of her dead brothers, and her mother’s obsession with finding out the exact how and why of their vanishing had been bequeathed to her. In the 1940s, she had written a book on the subject, Three Brothers: The Timmons Family and the Graceville Riots. (She owned the only three remaining copies, and she never allowed anyone to touch their pages.) She had always given talks at the elementary school on the subject until her stroke a decade before. But while her body was diminished, her mind was sharp.

  Essie Timmons’ dark face was deeply webbed by her age lines, but her cheekbones were still a carbon copy of her dead brother Isaac’s. She wore a mound of white hair so vivid that it was visible from a distance. She never left her wheelchair and had trouble holding her head upright, so she looked more dead than alive. But no matter. While a uniformed worker stood over her with an umbrella, Essie Timmons sat out in the sun and watched the workmen dig.

  Every once in a while, a well-meaning citizen came up to the old woman to offer her a cold drink, or to ask her if she was hungry. Essie Timmons just raised her hand to motion them away. Her eyes were an eagle’s, never distracted from the rising clumps of Georgia clay soil.

  Watching and waiting.

  The second event of great excitement was heralded by a murmuring through the onlookers that spread from one end of the gathering to the next: McCormack’s here.

  Frank McCormack was a slightly built man of seventy-two, whose face looked much older. He owned the land where the first bodies had been found, and his grand old house on the hill was visible from the Stephenses’ windows.

  In the wake of that ill-fated dig on his property, nearly two miles from this one, word had spread that his great-great grandfather sanctioned the burial—on his own land—of twelve black men killed in the Graceville riots. A different reporter called him about it every other week, the latest from as far as California. As if that wasn’t enough to make his stomach ache at night, Frank McCormack had lost millions of dollars when the construction on his lots came to a halt, and much of that money had been lost because of Essie Timmons.

  Although they technically weren’t in sight of each other yet, it was rare to see Frank McCormack and Essie Timmons in the same company. Their families hadn’t spoken for generations. And there they both were, at the dig.

  The third unexpected thing was when the boy and his father came.

  By that time, the number of onlookers at the dig had swelled to at least sixty, maybe more, with yet more planning to come watch the spectacle on their lunch breaks. No one had wondered before why the Stephens children weren’t there, given their ordeal, so the boy’s arrival was that much more a surprise. He was so small! And so brave.

  A crutch was the only visible sign of whatever had happened to the boy in the woods. Both the father and son had the haunted look of war veterans, and they stayed close to each other, but far from everyone else, standing in the shade of a live oak as old as the tobacco barn. Their shyness was understandable, after what they’d been through. (And the Stephens clan could be stand-offish, so it was to be expected.)

  Some of the onlookers speculated that Davie Stephens had dreamed it, and he’d found the burial site sleepwalking. Others were sure that the ghost of the Timmons boys had taken him by the hand and led him to the collapsed cellar. As for the reports of a wild animal attack, no one gave that much credence. (“That’s just crazy talk.”)

  In any case, the Stephens boy’s presence made the dig seem even more significant—perhaps, in a way, even historic. A few people grumbled about poor taste when Hal Lipcomb showed up selling roasted ears of corn and bags of pecans from a basket, but he sold plenty. If it felt more like a town fair, so be it. This wasn’t something that happened every day.

  “Don’t you get your hopes up, Miss Essie,” said the man holding the old woman’s umbrella. His name was Lee, and he loved his work; every old woman reminded him of his grandmother, who had raised him and whom he missed every day. He didn’t want any more heartaches for Essie Timmons. He had warned her not to come. Not being from Graceville, he didn’t understand all the excitement about somebody claiming they’d seen a ghost.

  Essie Timmons nodded, barely hearing him. Her eyes on the clods of falling dirt. “The boy said so,” she said.

  One of Frank McCormack’s sons, Sam, who had driven to the dig from his tax attorney’s office in Tallahassee, sighed and ran his fingers through his sandy hair. Tobacco squirted from his teeth to the soil below. He noticed that he and his father were only two of a handful of white people at the gathering; his wife said that noticing such things made him a racist, but he noticed all the same. Lately, race was all anyone wanted to talk about, and Sam McCormack was so sick to death of it that he didn’t care if he was racist or not.

  “Reckon they’ll find anything?” Sam McCormack asked.

  Old Man McCormack shielded his eyes from the sun with his palm. He ventured a quick glance at Davie Stephens before his eyes went back to the dig. “He’s the right age,” he said. “For seeing ’em.”

  “Yeah, just right,” his son said. “And it’s summer.”

  Essie Timmons, far across the plot, whispered to her attendant: “He saw them. They’re down there. He says they fell.”

  Davie hadn’t realized how much he was considered a celebrity until he and his father arrived at the dig and people stepped aside to make way for them. He’d never experienced so many eyes on him, like a movie star. The hush following his every step felt as dreamlike as the shouts and screams he’d heard in the night.

  Davie took his father’s hand as he walked, like Neema would have. He felt eight years old again. Davie hadn’t expected so many people either, like someone had sold tickets.

  What if everyone ended up thinking he was a fool?

  A hydraulic shovel was set up over a gaping hole, which reminded Davie of the hole he thought the Timmons boys had dug, with the dead dog lying beside it.

  Thoughts of the dog made Davie shiver. He blocked the memory by watching the people picking through clumps of soil, and his heart caught when a young woman in a white T-shirt with a university logo pulled up something big enough to be a leg bone.

  But it was just a heavy stick.

  Davie’s heart pummeled him. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to come.

  “We’re here in Graceville, Florida, at a most unusual community event,” Dad said. Davie thought his father was talking to him, but when he looked up he saw that his father was shooting the video camera, panning across the crowd. “Three young boys have been missing for nearly one hundred years, and these Graceville residents believe the bones of those boys will be found. Here. Today. And they believe it because of ghosts.”

  “Hope you’re not recording over mine,” Davie said. Part of him knew he wouldn’t care, in some ways. The video of that night only showed part of what had happened.

  “Fresh tape. Yours is safely labeled, in the drawer.”

  Davie smiled. Dad was right: It felt safer to look at everything through a lens. Like someone else. His eyes followed his father’s camera to the shell of a tobacco barn, nearly hidden within the trees. Next, two young boys buying roasted corn from a vendor. Girls climbing a tree. An old black woman sitting in a wheelchair under a caretaker’s umbrella.

  Dad put the camera down. “That’s Essie Ti
mmons, Davie,” Dad said. “Those boys were her brothers. Do you want to go over and . . . ?”

  Davie shook his head, mortified. He wouldn’t be able to talk to her about the boys.

  “That’s okay,” Dad said. “I only said it in case you wanted to. You’ve done plenty.”

  “Are you making a documentary?” Davie said.

  Dad nodded. “Actually, we are, if that’s okay with you. Forget a grant—we can get investors. A ghost story. Then I could take some time off.”

  “What for?” Davie said. He hoped Dad wasn’t going to go off to hide in his work.

  “To go to Ghana.”

  Davie was afraid he had heard wrong. “I thought you didn’t want to go.”

  “Shouldn’t we all be in one place?”

  Davie nodded, blinking to keep his tears away. “Does Mom want you to come?”

  “I think so,” Dad said. The tic squinted his eye again. “We’ll see.”

  That answer was a kick in the stomach, far from the assurances Davie had hoped for. But that was growing up, Davie figured. Gloves off. The bites are real.

  The truth would have to do.

  A workman wearing a red helmet popped up above ground to wave his flashlight frantically. “Hold up!” he said. His voice tremored with excitement. “Look at this!”

  By then, in the middle of lunchtime, the crowd numbered more than a hundred.

  The woods went silent as the machinery stopped. Miss Essie Timmons sat up straighter in her wheelchair than she had in years. Old Man McCormack began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Both of them were begging God for relief.

  A far-away dog was barking, mostly yapping, but Davie and his father were probably the only two who noticed the sound. The barking raked across Davie’s memories, sharp as teeth. Davie closed his eyes, feeling a lightheadedness he knew might make him faint.

  That’s not him. He’s not real. He won’t come out in daylight.

  Slowly, Davie’s heart slowed. His breath melted in his throat so he could swallow.

  A sound Davie would never forget traveled through the crowd. A chorus of gasps first, almost one collective breath, then a continuous hum from one throat and chest to the next, some high, some low, a sound of depthless grief and boundless wonder. Davie felt his father’s hands squeeze his shoulders hard, clenching so tight it hurt.