“So help me if you say PE . . .”
“First of all, PE? Do you guys say PE down here? It’s gym. Just like soda is pop,” she joked.
“You are stalling,” he said, turning down a dirt road that Hannah would’ve most definitely missed. She knew they were close.
“Fine. Not woodworking and not gym. Science?”
Guy pulled the car up onto the berm next to an ancient-looking cast-iron fence with an arched opening where the name Bethesda was framed and spelled out in twisted metal. Even as a child, Hannah had found it strangely romantic—like the setting for a wedding, not a place to lay your loved one in the ground. But after burying her father, she understood a little more—it was a sacred place you trusted to hold your father, mother, husband, child. It was meant to be beautiful. It needed to be.
“Language arts,” he said, putting the car in park. “Like, creative writing and literature, poetry, and maybe a touch of journalism.” He took the key out of the ignition, and she thought she detected a touch of shyness in his answer when he stared off into the distance like he was checking out the cemetery gate.
“Wait, were you at the spelling bee in Coldwater last month?” Hannah put her phone in her pocket and decided to only take her notebook and a pencil on their expedition. “And you teach journalism? Dang. I’m learning so much about you.”
“Yes, ma’am, I teach the heck out of journalism. And I sure was at the spelling bee.” He opened his door, and a cool breeze cut right through the collected heat of the car. She shivered and braced herself for the cold, putting the pencil behind her ear.
“I was there too! I covered it for the Record.” She shook her head at the coincidence, not just at their first interaction but also the journalism connection. No wonder he wanted to help with Evelyn’s story.
“Yeah. I know,” he said. “I saw you.” He got out of the car, and Hannah followed him from her side.
“You saw me? That is . . . hilarious,” she said. “What else do you know about me?” she asked, catching up with him.
“Oh, you’d be surprised. I know you worked for the Tribune.”
“Everyone seems to know that.”
“You want to know the nitty-gritty?” he asked, glancing back at her over his shoulder. After talking to Monty every day, she could probably guess what Guy had heard.
“Let me guess, you heard that I went through a bad breakup, then had a mental breakdown, after which I lost my job at the Tribune, just in time to live in my parents’ house to watch my father die of cancer?” she said, finding it impossible to keep the bitterness out of her response. Or at least that’s what she’d assumed people said behind her back. She knew that’s what people said about her in Chicago. She had friends, obviously, but after being in a long-term relationship, many of them were surface level and shared. They sided with Hannah at first, after seeing Alex cut and run with a new woman, but when the depression made her pull away and her grief was no longer novel to them, nearly everyone faded away or she pushed them away, knowing they’d tire of her eventually. Maybe that’s why she blurted it all out to Guy like that. Even if he hadn’t already heard all the gossip, she’d rather tell him up front and let him bow out now.
“Whoa,” he said, breathing heavier than normal as they walked up the hill toward the cemetery. “I definitely didn’t hear all that. I knew your daddy passed away. I hadn’t heard about . . . the rest of it,” he said gently, slowing as he approached the archway entrance into the Bethesda Cemetery. A historical plaque, green with raised brass letters, stood just outside the gates. He stopped in front of the sign, suddenly somber, studying her.
“Welp, now you have,” she said in a low voice, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. “Looks like we’re here.”
Talking about her father outside the cemetery that held the rest of his family hit her in an odd way. He’d buried his grandparents, father, and brother here. She’d walked under this archway as a child after Papaw died, holding her father’s hand, wishing she could make him feel better, but already knowing that bringing back the dead was beyond her innocent pleadings with the divine.
Guy took the hint and let the subject drop, examining the entrance alongside Hannah. The carving of a magnolia flower sat at the top of the sign, above a brief history of the cemetery. A Presbyterian minister had created it in 1848. It took special note of the veterans of various wars buried there, and the victims of yellow fever and smallpox outbreaks that decimated the area at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. But Hannah knew from personal experience that the stories buried here went beyond wars and pandemics.
Hannah took a picture of the sign with her phone.
“Are you ready?” Guy asked, pulling the collar of his blazer up around his ears. Hannah’s phone buzzed in her hand. She glanced down and saw Alex’s name. Her heart fluttered the way it used to when they’d first started dating and she couldn’t believe the smart, handsome, popular frat boy was interested in her out of all the girls who flirted with him in her dorm. She couldn’t help but smile before dismissing the notification and putting the phone in her pocket.
“Beyond ready,” she said, the grin lingering on her lips.
Guy glanced away quickly and then gestured toward the worn path walked by mourners for the past 170 years.
Guilt hit her in the gut. Alex was engaged to another woman and he’d broken her heart; he shouldn’t be able to make her smile. But he did. And she’d let Guy see her weakness, even if he didn’t know it. She’d be stronger, she told herself. She wouldn’t let Alex take over her brain again. But even as Hannah followed Guy through crumbling headstones, half covered in moss, with names and numbers carved generations ago, she couldn’t stop wondering if Alex loved getting her texts too.
CHAPTER 17
“Over here!” Guy called from behind a row of shrubs. They’d been combing through the headstones, using an online directory set up by the local historical society to search the cataloged memorials. Without Evelyn’s last name, they’d checked all gravestones with names starting with an E, but so far there were no good options. They’d looked at all the Browns and searched for any Westbrooks, but nothing matched the dates that would line up with Evelyn’s life. Evelyn’s family was not in this cemetery. But that didn’t stop Hannah from being mesmerized by the names and dates on the headstones, especially in this older section of the plot. And when Guy called to her, she had to actively slow her steps to keep from running in what should be a solemn place.
“What have you found?” Hannah asked, a little out of breath from her speedy walk. It was still cool out, and when the wind rose, it cut through all her layers, but it was only her hands that were cold.
“I think I found your family,” he said, pointing to a line of headstones, some sunken into the ground and overgrown with moss and crabgrass, others part of a curved white monument with fading names carved into the limestone that read Williamson.
“Oh my God, that’s amazing.” Hannah took pictures and read through who rested there. Dates went back to the 1840s when the cemetery was first founded. She knew her father’s family had helped settle Senatobia, but seeing their actual resting places made it even more real. She was surprised her dad had never shared this with her on one of their visits. She knelt to get a closer look at some of the nearly buried headstones that were harder to read.
“There are more over here too,” he said, stopping by a tall obelisk that looked newer or quite possibly was made of better materials than the other ones that seemed to be melting away with time. But Hannah barely heard him. She’d found Mamaw’s mother and father: Calvin and Florence Patton.
Guy left his discovery and stood by her side as she knelt in the grass to get a better look.
“This is my great-grandma. Mamaw’s mother,” she said, tracing the family tree in her head. “She died before I was born. Mamaw and Papaw didn’t talk about her much, but my father had some stories, let me tell you. She was a hard woman—cold, I guess. My
dad used to tell this story about Papaw voting for JFK. Grandma Patton wouldn’t let him in the house for a year. Broke Mamaw’s heart that they couldn’t visit.”
“Sounds like your papaw was headstrong. I’m guessing it runs in the family,” he said, making a joke, but Hannah was too lost in her thoughts to pick up on it. She spoke half to herself and half to Guy.
“I don’t know what he was,” Hannah said, not sure what to think of him anymore. The longer she lived in Tate County, the harder it was to know how to judge her ancestors. “To be honest, I don’t know much about anyone buried here. We barely visited, and my dad didn’t tell us much, you know? From what I could piece together, I think Mamaw Patton liked her little bubble of a world. She couldn’t see the need for any change. My dad used to call it brainwashing. He said it’s the reason he never moved back here. He was afraid of it. Afraid of it for us.”
She didn’t understand how to find the balance between pride and shame, something she’d not been taught as a child. Even while loving his family, her father had rejected his roots, and his southern heritage was easy to vilify and condemn from the suburbs of Chicago. He spoke of the Klan that ran rampant in Senatobia when he was a boy and the way his grandmother would speak about people of color. What was it like watching people he once respected in his town do despicable things, like their neighbor Joe Nearwad, who tried to stop the integration of their elementary school by forming a barricade? Even his own grandmother was an open bigot who banned Mamaw and Papaw from their home because they voted for JFK and wore black when Martin Luther King was shot. He’d explained that it was one thing losing respect for your neighbor; it was another thing losing respect for your family.
And here she was, the woman, the myth, the legend, the villain in many of her father’s stories about why he left Senatobia and never moved back. But here, seeing her buried six feet in the ground, a cold, fading stone the only reminder of her existence, Hannah wondered how such a beautiful and loving woman like Mamaw had come from such a hardened woman as Florence.
“Did you see these?” Guy asked, pointing to a trail of small headstones, some so buried by debris that she could barely make them out. Each one read Infant Boy or Infant Girl with a single date underneath or, on a few, a dash between two dates that were horrifically close together. Hannah had known that Mamaw’s brother was nearly a teenager when she was born, but she didn’t realize such sorrow had preceded her birth. Hannah counted: one, two . . . four . . . seven, eight. There were eight infants buried next to Mamaw Mable’s mother. Eight.
“What the hell?” The grief was immediate and inexplicably real. They’d seen plenty of headstones marking the short lives of infants and children, but nothing like this parade of painful memories. Hannah used a stick to dig out the last two rectangles, almost in disbelief. The dates ranged over a dozen years. “She must’ve been pregnant or recovering from childbirth for more than a decade.”
“I can’t even imagine losing one child, much less . . .” Guy stopped, like saying the number would be too much, and Hannah swore the words caught in his throat at the end. Hannah understood that emotion. She felt it also, but there was another feeling that was rising inside her and taking over the sorrow of those lost little children.
“Why didn’t I know about this?” she asked, frustrated. “These are Mamaw’s siblings, and she never even mentioned anything about them. Why does everyone hide from sad things down here?”
She tossed the stick and stood up, frustrated. All the strata she had to go through to get to even the top crust of the true story when it came to anything in this town made her want to scream. She’d just told Guy her whole breakdown story, and they’d spent a handful of hours with each other. This detail from her family history meant nothing when it came to the real reason she was at the cemetery—Evelyn—but it did matter if there was some genetic issue that caused the stillbirths. Did Mamaw lose any babies? Hannah didn’t even know. No wonder it was so hard to find out information on a stranger when she didn’t even have the full story about her own flesh and blood.
“It’s just the way it is round here.” Guy followed Hannah as she moved away from the plot holding her great-grandparents and their children.
“Exactly,” she said, feeling defeated. She checked the time—they still had a few minutes left before her self-appointed deadline, but she was done with this wild goose chase. “We’d better get back.”
“All right,” he answered, pausing. “Would you mind terribly if I took a minute—alone?”
He checked his watch and then gazed out over toward the newer part of the Bethesda Cemetery. Hannah’s eyes followed his. She knew she should go too, find her grandfather and uncle, pay her respects. She’d been filled with curiosity and wonder at the exploration of her family history and becoming acquainted with the people who had made it possible for her to be in this world. But when it came to visiting the graves of those she knew, and mourned, who reminded her of her father’s headstone in a cemetery in Illinois, which she hadn’t visited since his funeral—she didn’t want to do it without someone to hold her hand. She’d only visited her papaw’s and Samuel’s graves with her father by her side.
“Yeah, I’ll meet you at the car,” she said. He tossed her the keys, and she turned her back on him before she could see which direction he went.
He tumbled into the car, shivering but smiling, five minutes later. Hannah glanced at her phone one more time. When the text buzzed through, she assumed it was Alex, but peeking at her phone she saw Peter Dawson’s name instead, following up on Hannah’s trip to the Pines. She quickly wrote and sent a response, then stowed her phone.
“Oh, it’s nice and warm in here,” Guy said, pressing his hands to the heating vent and bringing just enough of the fresh air in with him to make Hannah shiver.
“Yeah, I’m pretty proud of my car-warming skills. Comes from living in a tundra.” She avoided asking about his little solo walkabout and talking about her stupid emotional outburst or the fact that even with Guy taking time out of his day to drive her around town, they’d come up with nothing helpful for her Evelyn story.
“Well, I’ll return the favor when summer hits. You haven’t known hot till you know Mississippi hot. It’s like walking around in boilin’ water.”
Summer. Would she still be here in the summer? She’d planned to stay until Mamaw got back on her feet, but that was before the plans for the extension on the back of the house and the job at the Record and discovering Evelyn. Staying in Senatobia would be easy enough—no rent, a built-in job, less pressure from her mom, and no constant reminders of the way things used to be. But staying here still felt like giving up on the goals she’d always had for her future. She wasn’t ready for that just yet, especially now that her engine was no longer totally idle.
Guy took a U-turn, kicking up dust that surrounded the car in a whirlwind, and headed back to the main road. It was already 1:25 p.m.
“Damn, I didn’t realize it was so late. You’re not gonna make it back in time for your class,” she said, wishing they hadn’t tried to squeeze in this failure of a trip.
“It’s okay. I have a planning period after lunch. I can be a few minutes late.” Stopped at a red light, he wiggled out of his blazer and expertly tossed it onto the back seat without leaving one wrinkle.
“That’s right, you are apparently an English teacher, per our conversation before traipsing around a graveyard and finding absolutely nothing.” She tried to be playful again, but it fell flat. There was a weird vibe in the car, and Hannah knew she was the cause of it, but she didn’t know how to change her emotions like changing the gears on a vehicle, as Mamaw did.
“You have a strange definition of nothing. We found out a whole lot of something if I do remember correctly.”
“About my family, sure. But that doesn’t help with my story. No one cares about the Williamson family line, and it wasn’t worth making you late.”
They made it back to the Record offices in what seemed l
ike half the time it had taken to drive out to Bethesda. Guy positioned the car as close to the stairs as possible and then turned his full attention to Hannah.
“Calm yourself,” he said, touching her shoulder gently with his fingertips. The phrase threw Hannah off enough to stop her from responding immediately. “I chose to come with you, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And if anyone made me late—I did. I wanted to see my grandma.”
He enjoyed himself. She liked knowing that. She liked it a lot. Then the time caught her eye again.
“Shit, it’s late. You need to go.” She pointed at the clock and gathered her things while Guy watched her. He always kind of smirked when Hannah swore. She wasn’t sure if it was a criticism or respect. As she was about to pop out of the car, Hannah reached for the pair of coffee cups. “I’ll toss these.”
Guy placed his hot-to-the-touch hand on top of hers to stop her, and it did the trick. Instead of making her nervous this time, his sure demeanor calmed her.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Okay,” she said. Her breath caught in her throat, and she didn’t pull away. “Well, um, thank you for going with me and driving and, you know, the coffee. Next time it’s on me.”
“You’re welcome.” He took his hand back and placed it on the wheel. “Thank you for the good company. If you ever need a ride somewhere, let me know. I won’t even charge ya.”
“Yeah? I’ll take you up on that offer. Thank you. But, seriously, if there’s anything I can do to repay your way-too-generous help, you’ll tell me, right?” She had a feeling that Guy Franklin would be a priceless resource with his knowledge of the town and what seemed to be a natural instinct for story and research. It didn’t hurt that she was starting to enjoy his company.
“I might need your assistance when my journalism unit comes around in the spring,” he said, once again opening a tiny window into what her life would be like if she decided to stay here past Mamaw’s recovery period. The view wasn’t as terrible as she’d expected.
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