“Then you need to eat what your Mama makes for you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Silently, he pulled down the covers. She was wearing a thin nightgown, thin enough that he was able to put his stethoscope against her belly and hear the baby’s heartbeat through the fabric, chugging along like a train underwater. Chuga, chuga, chuga… it was fast and steady. He removed the stethoscope and felt Victory’s pulse before turning back to his bag to put his things away.
“Well?” Victory asked anxiously. “Can you hear the baby?”
He nodded. “Strong and steady,” he said. “And I think if you eat regularly, you won’t be fainting anymore.”
Victory watched the man snap his bag shut. “Can… can I tell you something?”
“’Course.”
She took a deep breath. “I… I’m afraid of what Daddy is going to do once the baby is born,” she said. “I mean, having this baby isn’t going to be the hard part. It’s what comes after. Dr. Latling, what if Daddy tries to kill my baby when she’s born?”
Dr. Latling shook his head. “That’s nonsense, Miss Victory. You have to stop thinking such terrible things.”
Victory shook her head; she was no longer weeping, now deadly serious as she looked at him. “He will,” she insisted. “He killed an innocent colored man right in front of this house and that isn’t the first time he’s done something like that. You know it’s true. I’m afraid he’ll take my baby and bash her skull against a tree. Or he’ll have Terhune do it.”
Dr. Latling couldn’t very well deny what they both knew to be entirely possible. He’d been thinking the same thing all along – that maybe he was the only one who would be in a position to protect that baby. Still, he couldn’t give in to her fear.
“Miss Victory….”
She cut him off as someone knocked on her bedroom door. “Promise me,” she hissed quickly. “Promise me that when the baby is born, you’ll take her away. You won’t let him have her!”
Dr. Latling was clearly reluctant as he went for the door. “I’m not sure I can….”
“Promise me!”
He held up his hands to keep her from getting agitated. “Okay,” he said quickly. “Just calm down, Miss Victory. I promise. Everything will be okay.”
“Don’t tell Mama!”
He opened the door, his only reply, to see Caroline stand there, looking at him anxiously. “Is… is everything all right?” she asked.
Dr. Latling moved away from the door to collect his bag. “Everything is fine,” he said. “She’ll start eating now. I’m going to prescribe some iron pills, too. That should help.”
Bag in hand, he shuffled out of the room without another word. He could hear Caroline cooing to Victory, saying something about a woman named Lillian bringing her some grits and cornbread. But the doctor didn’t stick around to see if his patient would really eat anything; he just wanted to get out of that house.
His promise to Victory was something he tried not to think about.
CHAPTER NINE
Present
The house still smelled like Presbyterian chicken.
Coming in through the back door of Glory, the old screen door slammed behind Lucy as she inhaled the smells of the morning and headed into the kitchen where her parents were banging around. Bill was making coffee and Mary was still wrapping up cakes from the day before. They both looked over when they heard the footsteps, seeing that their child had finally made an appearance. Bill went back to the coffee.
“Good morning,” he said, plugging in the old percolator. “How’d you sleep?”
Lucy almost laughed at the question. She really did. Given that last night had been a game changer in the course of her life, the simple question seemed ludicrous. Instead of snorting at her father’s question, however, she simply set her big Vuitton on the counter and yawned.
“I never sleep well in hotels,” she said. “You guys didn’t stay here last night, did you?”
Bill nodded. “We did,” he said. “I thought it was safer that way. Big funeral yesterday and everybody knows Mama is gone, so I didn’t want anyone trying to loot the place. No alarm, no dogs around here. It makes a perfect target. I asked Tommie’s son if he’d assign extra patrols around the house and he said he would.”
Lucy scratched her head. “How long did the sheriff and his dad hang around after I left?”
Bill wiped his hands on a dish towel and went to hunt for some cups. “Not too much longer,” he said. “They escorted Clyde to his car and waited until he drove away. Sheriff Meade told us what happened in the kitchen. That son-of-a-bitch crawfished and came back around into the back of the kitchen after we told him to leave ya’ll alone.”
Lucy grinned faintly; her dad never really got mad but when he did, the Southerner came out in him, including an angry twang to his accent. As a kid, she had feared it. But as an adult, it made her laugh.
“Well,” she said. “I was pretty straight forward with him. I told him to leave me the hell alone so I hope he got the message. I don’t want to keep looking over my shoulder the entire time I’m here.”
Bill pulled the cups out of the cabinet. “How long are you planning on staying?”
Until I can track down a baby that was born in this house eighty years ago, she thought. But she didn’t say anything to that regard, at least not yet. She was going to have to find the right time to dump the revelation on her father and the morning after he buried his mother was probably not the right time.
Therefore, she was casual in her answer as she headed over to help her mom put away the rest of the desserts left behind.
“I’m supposed to fly back on Monday,” she said, unrolling cling wrap. “That gives me six days to do what I can around here. I figure there’s one hundred and eighty years’ worth of family history and junk all stored up in this house. I’m sure six days won’t even make a dent in it so I can extend that if I need to.”
“But you just got that job, honey,” Mary said. “You don’t want to jeopardize it.”
Lucy shook her head. “I won’t,” she said. “Trust me on this one, Mom. They recruited me very heavily and they won’t do anything to piss me off so I decide to quit. So if you need me to stay for a while to help out, I can do that. In fact, what are the plans for today?”
Mary looked at Bill, who was wiping out cups. His movements seemed to slow. “Well,” he sighed heavily. “I suppose the first thing we need to do is call Mama’s lawyer. She has a will but she may have updated it. I tried to get her to put everything into a trust but she wouldn’t do it. Said she didn’t need to. She didn’t own a credit card and paid everything with checks or cash. I have a joint bank account with her so I could watch everything she did, but I have to tell you that there just isn’t a lot of money left. She and Daddy have a checking account and a savings account, and they have some bonds, but that’s about it. Mama didn’t know this, but I started paying Daddy’s care from my own pocket about a year ago. The way things were going, it was going to drain everything Mama had to keep Daddy where he needed to be. So I can tell you right now that there won’t be much to go through. There just wasn’t much left.”
Lucy suspected as much but it was still depressing to hear it. “Where’s the will?” she asked. “At least let me get a look at that. You said she spelled everything out?”
Bill nodded. “She did,” he said. “My copy of the will is in my suitcase, up in the front guest bedroom. In fact, her lawyer is in town, near the square with the statue of Robert E. Lee in the middle of it. Mo Guinn is his name. Maybe you can give him a call today so we can start finalizing everything.”
The lawyer’s last name was pronounced “gun” and Lucy’s eyebrows lifted at the unusual name. “‘Mo Gun’?” she repeated. Then, she laughed. “That’s, uh, quite a name.”
Bill grinned. “I went to school with his kids, Jasper and Sue,” he said. “Jasper was a good friend in high school but Sue was a little strange. She used to smuggle her mother’
s peach schnapps to school and drink it at lunch time. By the early afternoon, she was wasted. I know this because for a solid year, I had my last period class with her. She was three sheets to the wind by then.”
Lucy snorted softly, shaking her head at the lawyer’s wild daughter. “If you went to school with his kids, he must be as old as the hills by now.”
Bill nodded. “Pretty old, but still sharp the last time I saw him.”
“And still practicing?”
“As far as I know.”
Lucy shrugged. “Then I’ll give him a call,” she said. “Let’s eat first and then we’ll get down to business. What’s for breakfast?”
Mary looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “What’s not for breakfast?” she asked. “Take your pick – five different kinds of cake, pie, chicken cooked ten different ways, potatoes, corn casserole… shall I go on?”
With that extensive menu, breakfast became a feast of nontraditional breakfast foods. The old refrigerator was stuffed to the brim and the counters were half-covered with things that would keep unrefrigerated for a day or two. Having not eaten since lunch the previous day, Lucy was starving and tucked into some re-heated chicken and dumplings that were out of this world.
They ate, drank coffee, and talked about the old state of the kitchen including the turn-of-the-century icebox and the old ice card that was still in the window. In the old days, it would tell the ice man how much ice they needed. Somewhere, there was an antique dealer just crying for some of these old things, Lucy thought, but she wasn’t sure her dad was ready to part with anything at this point. The icebox was going to stay in the kitchen where it had been for over one hundred years, at least for the time being.
In fact, the more Lucy sat and listened to her dad talk about his youth and days spent with his parents, the more she wondered if telling him about Mamaw’s letter would be wise. Her dad was a strong guy but in listening to him on this morning, he seemed emotionally fragile. She didn’t want to dump more on him.
Therefore, she quickly came to the conclusion that her quest for Mamaw would have to be her secret alone for the time being; at least until she felt her father was strong enough to handle the information.
But the time would come.
Stuffed full of chicken and dumplings and coconut cake, Lucy headed up to the front guest bedroom to find the will as her parents hung out down in the kitchen, finishing their coffee. She took the back stairs to the second floor, pausing to look into every bedroom again as she went, smelling the dust and oldness that conveyed the passing of days gone by.
The back bedroom next to Mamaw’s bedroom was the one Lucy had slept in as a child. It had very old wallpaper with big, pink cabbage roses and pink chiffon curtains with velvet ribbons. It was a perfect girly bedroom but she knew it hadn’t been Mamaw’s room as a child. Mamaw had the honor of having a front bedroom which was now the guest room where Bill and Mary were sleeping.
After reading Mamaw’s letter, that room now had special meaning to Lucy. Daddy murdered poor Aldridge. Even as she crossed the hall, making her way to the bedroom, she could feel the pricks of horror peppering her skin. It was the realization of looking at this bedroom now in an entirely different light, knowing what had occurred here. Knowing that, more than likely, an interracial baby was born here and swiftly taken away as the mother screamed in agony.
With those thoughts, Lucy had worked herself up so much that she actually felt nauseous by the time she entered the big bedroom. But the room was quiet, bucolic, with the massive four-poster bed, decorated in shades of gold and green. Nothing here suggested any horror from the past.
The room had four enormous floor-to-ceiling windows and Lucy made her way to the two windows that overlooked the front of the house, the big yard, and the street beyond.
Being June, the grass was heavy and green, and the overgrowth was thick with moisture. There were big trees in the yard, six of them, that she once remembered Pop telling her were cherrybark oaks. They were huge, with big trunks, and certainly big enough to be several decades old. There were smaller trees around, colorful ones, but she didn’t pay much attention to them. She was more focused on the big oak tree directly in front of the bedroom.
The branches were big, old, and gnarled. This tree was undoubtedly here in the nineteen thirties. Did the old oak hold the secret of Aldridge Ragsdale’s murder? Was it a witness to the death of an innocent man, weeping silent tears at an injustice that was so common in the south back then? Not knowing the details of Aldridge’s murder, Lucy could only guess what happened but whatever it was and however it happened, it sickened her to think of it.
“Hey.”
The voice from behind nearly startled Lucy out of her skin. She whirled around to see her father coming into the room, heading for his suitcase. As she stood by the window, trying to get her heart started again, Bill opened up the suitcase on the end of the bed.
“Did you find it?” Bill asked as he opened a zipper pocket. “Wait – here it is.”
Lucy took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. “I didn’t even look yet,” she said. As Bill pulled out a manila folder, her gaze returned to the tree outside the window. “Hey… Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I was thinking,” Lucy said hesitantly. “Remember yesterday at Mamaw’s funeral when I asked you about the stories about Laveau? I meant specific stories about what he really did around here that has everyone so hush-hush.”
“I know.”
“Since Mamaw never really spoke of him, the only story I did hear was something from Aunt Dell on how he ran a bootlegging operation. Did you hear that one?”
Bill nodded, glancing into the folder. “Yes, I’ve heard that one,” he said. “Aunt Dell likes to talk. She’d be the one to tell you all of the stories. She was Mama’s first cousin on her father’s side and she knows everything. If you really want to know the stories, ask her. She was here last night, you know. She asked for you.”
Lucy nodded, her focus still riveted to the gnarled old tree. “I know she did,” she said. “I was just wondering what more you’d heard. I feel like now that Mamaw is gone, we can talk about those things. Get them out in the open. I mean, Tommie Meade came yesterday to apologize for his family’s involvement in Laveau’s dirty deeds. What the hell was so bad that he felt he had to come and apologize?”
Bill closed the folder, looking at his daughter. “Is it that important for you to know?”
Lucy pondered the question. “Yes,” she said after a moment, “I really think it is. I never really cared much before, but now I do. I need to know why, specifically, Laveau Hembree was such terrifying man. I don’t know why I need to know, but I just do. Maybe I just want to understand my family history a little better.”
Bill scratched his chin, thinking on what he would tell her. She was certainly mature enough to handle the truth but he’d spent so many years either ignoring her questions about it or changing the subject that it was hard to know where to start. As a member of the Hembree family, he supposed she had a right to know the legacy behind the family name, good or bad. It wasn’t unusual that these questions should come up now after his mother died since no one ever talked about it when she was alive.
“Laveau was a bastard from the time he was pretty young, so I understand,” Bill finally said. “He was a thief and a gambler in school and it grew into bootlegging. He didn’t have any formal education past the eighth grade but that wasn’t unusual down here, especially in more rural areas. Aunt Dell told me once that Laveau also was a loan shark of sorts and beat people up when they didn’t pay on time. Pretty nasty stories about what he’d do to men’s families and homes if they didn’t pay him back.”
Lucy turned to look at him. “Seriously?” she said, incredulous. “That makes it sound like he was a gangster.”
“He was.”
“But he lived in Mississippi!”
Bill shook his head. “He had connections in New Orleans,” he said. “Organized
crime, evidently. At least, that’s what Aunt Dell told me. Look, if you want to hear more, ask her. I really don’t know much more than that.”
Lucy wouldn’t let him get off so easily. “So this man, who owns a plantation and acres of land, ends up being a loan shark with connections to organized crime?”
Bill shrugged. “Times were tough back then,” he said simply. “I guess he couldn’t depend on the sharecroppers to keep this place supplied with cash.”
It made some sense; the economics of the early part of the last century hit the people in the country the hardest. Lucy thought on her gangster great-grandfather, her focus turning once more to the tree outside the window.
“Do you think he committed murder?” she asked.
Bill found himself looking out of the window, too, just because something out there had Lucy’s attention. “I do,” he said quietly. “There are rumors of instances where he killed people related to his loan shark business, but when he was really in power – oh, back in the 1930s – he and the town sheriff were in cahoots. My daddy told me that Laveau had the sheriff on his payroll. I’m sure Laveau did a lot of things we don’t ever want to know about.”
Lucy already knew the part about Terhune Meade thanks to Mamaw’s letter, but the mention of the loan sharking was new. She hadn’t heard that one before.
“Do think he might have even lynched people?” she asked. “I mean, that kind of thing happened with a fair amount of frequency down here. There are dozens of documented cases.”
Now Bill was looking at the tree outside of the window, too. It seemed that’s where Lucy’s attention was.
“Are you asking if I think he lynched people here on the property?” he asked, watching her nod. Reluctantly, he sighed. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”
“But you haven’t heard any stories about it?”
“No, thank God.”
In the Dreaming Hour Page 9
