The Gone Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  “No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “You plan on fixing up the house?”

  “Nothing major. Just working on making it livable.”

  “Well, good to meet you.” He sets down his shovel, then takes off his work gloves, and puts his hand out. “You’re Mr. Dee’s daughter?”

  “Cliff, her older son.” Sweat trickles down her ribs.

  “Ah, I think he passed before I was born.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Yeah, you would’ve been a baby then.”

  They stand there, saying nothing, reliving adolescent etiquette. Harlan yanks at a T-shirt half tucked in his back pocket and pulls it on.

  “My dad’s not here right now. Is there something I can help you with?” He lifts his hat and smooths back his damp hair. It’s a sort of dirty honey color.

  “Have you guys had any trouble with stealing out here?”

  “Someone break into your car?”

  “I mean like someone prowling around the house.”

  “Not in years far as I can remember.” Sweat is already soaking through his shirt. “Someone bothering you?”

  Should she tell him about the lights? Seems silly now.

  “It could be some kids looking to party out by the creek,” he says. “You should call my dad if anybody bugs you. I can give you his number.”

  “My uncle already gave it to me.” She slaps a mosquito feasting on her calf.

  “How long you planning on staying out there?”

  “A few more days.” She licks her thumb and rubs the bloody mark off. “I have my dog.”

  “I’ll give you my number too, and you can holler at me in case my dad doesn’t answer.”

  “That’s generous of you but—”

  “You got a piece of paper?”

  At the car, she takes a pen and torn envelope from her bag and hands it to him.

  “I’d invite you in”—he leans on the car to write, pausing to itch his stubble—“but I’ve got to hurry and clean up before I go to work.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “A hospice just north of town.”

  “You’re a nurse?” Ever since her mother’s death, she’s had a soft spot for nurses.

  “No, though I have been thinking of going back to school for it.” He hands her the paper. “I’m basically the cleanup crew. I make coffee, change beds. Sometimes I hold people’s hands.”

  “It must be hard to work there.”

  “Some days it is, when a bunch of patients die in a row. But we all feel down when that happens. The chaplain says to try to think of it as an honor to be part of their journey.” He clears his throat then wipes his hair back again. “I worked at a catfish plant before, but this pays better.”

  She looks up at the white house. “Do you know how long my grandmother worked here?”

  “Well, my granddaddy built this place in the thirties, but we owned the land awhile before—”

  “So you’re old money.”

  “I don’t think the family is what it was in his day. I couldn’t say when Miss Ruby started working here. That’s a good question for my dad. I remember Miss Ruby used to take care of the laundry and dinner and minding me. And that she was the sweetest, best-hearted lady, and the most forgiving. She passed when I was about six or seven. Did you come to the funeral? We might have met there as kids.”

  “No.” Billie folds the paper into a tiny square. It’s not his fault that he’s spent more time with her grandmother than she has. Or that her grandmother lived in poverty despite decades of hard work. Or that someday, like his father, he will own the land where her father is buried. She pushes the paper deep into her pocket. “Hey, do you know where I would get those plugs for bugs?”

  “Bug plugs?” He laughs.

  “Okay, that sounds weird. I mean the electric plug things that are supposed to kill bugs.”

  “Pest repellers? Walmart I guess. Or the hardware store downtown. Here.” He hands her back the pen. “My dad’s retired now so he’s around pretty often. You might want to call over here tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  She gets in the car. They smile at each other through the glass, between the weight of time and heat. His eyes are blue. This whole time she thought they were brown.

  Billie backs out to the end of the drive, stopping to look up at the white house. She has been here before.

  BILLIE HAS FIVE DREAMS THAT NIGHT ALL SET IN HER FATHER’S house. But it isn’t his house, it is somewhere else where the rooms spread into one another. In three of those dreams, the house has a basement, though she never goes down but stands in the doorway, hovering above the steps, waiting for what will come up out of the dark.

  Rufus’s nails clip across the room and Billie lifts her head. He noses her feet, wanting to go out. She grabs her phone—it’s late. She pulls on shorts and lets him out front. In the kitchen, she brews coffee and pours the last of her cereal into a plastic cup, mixing in creamer and a little water. She eats a spoonful and spits it in the trash, then dumps the rest. The creamer must have gone bad, unless there’s something wrong with the water. It doesn’t matter. She’s leaving tomorrow, stopping by the cemetery to visit her father’s grave, then driving the first leg to Knoxville. Today is the day she must call Jim McGee, once she gets up the nerve.

  The house no longer feels sinister like it’s harboring a subterranean lair. She sits in Sheila’s chair, drinking her coffee black, staring up at tufts of old cobwebs wound around nails in the ceiling. The living room is littered with the contents of the three boxes of her mother’s things from Gran’s storage unit: newspaper clippings, old records, a program from the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1973, her baby book, a postcard from Memphis with Elvis in uniform sitting in the kitchen with his gaunt parents, her mother’s first and only book, Those Who Drank Gold, as well as her heavily underlined favorites: Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society; Hanawalt’s The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England; Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; and two books by Carlo Ginzburg with killer titles: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller and The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and even a couple of Billie’s old books—Flowers in the Attic and Summer of My German Soldier—slipped in. Her father’s out-of-print books are near the door: his two books of poetry, Race Records and Flatbottom Unrest, a random poetry anthology he coedited, and his play Hellhound.

  Out on the porch, she sits on a towel with her mother’s book, subconsciously keeping count of how many noblemen die of anal fistulas. The book opens with a discussion of the number of peasant children who perished in fires from candles catching on their straw mats or drowned in a ditch. Why were there so many ditches in fourteenth-century England? There’s a memento mori illustration on the first page: a skeleton Death grabbing the arm of its next victim—an unwilling nobleman in a poufy hat. Remember that you have to die. Like living with her mother you could ever forget.

  Instead of calling Jim McGee, she reads a chapter on Henry II of France’s childhood where his father, King Francis, is captured during a battle against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and King Francis offers up his two oldest sons, little Henry and his elder brother, Francis, to take his place in Spain while he supposedly pays off the ransom. The boys are six and seven. They are imprisoned for over three years.

  “As a result,” her mother writes, “Henry developed a brooding, solitary nature and a deep attachment to the ideals of chivalric romance. At sixteen, he acquired a thirty-five-year-old mistress, Diane de Poiters.” But he never outgrows her. Diane remains Henry’s mistress into her fifties, though not without some contrivance. She carefully cultivates her own physical beauty, dressing in her signature black and white; she lets him have a few lesser mistresses from time to time; and she encourages him to procreate with his wife, the queen, and
instructs the poor woman on how to do it right. When Henry dies in a jousting accident, getting a lance through the eye, the queen, a potato-faced, razor-sharp Medici, kills the eye gouger and tosses out the mistress.

  Her bookmark is a Polaroid of her parents. In it, her petite mother is wearing a sort of minicaftan, her face naked without her glasses, her blond hair loose and center parted. Her father stands a foot taller, smiling closemouthed in sunglasses, a white shirt, and jeans, his arm around her waist. They look at the camera like they know what each other are thinking.

  Billie puts down the book, looking out at the green spill of depopulated land. She lies back in the sun, knees up, just resting her eyes. She wakes to find Rufus curled next to her and her phone ringing. She reaches for it and knocks it off the porch. Whatever. Inside she brews more coffee, then squats in the living room and flips through the dusty records: Charlie Parker, Aretha Franklin, Ida Cox, Sara Martin’s “Death Sting Me Blues”—it feels like the Sara Martin record is missing. She shakes the album and a wad of typed pages drops to the floor.

  CHAPTER 2—YOUNG THING BRIGHT

  In 1961, the day I found out that the first Freedom Riders numbered only thirteen people, I dropped out of college and ran like hell to the SNCC office to sign myself up. Not only was this my calling, but it was the calling I decided. Lucky for me, I was too naïve then to really think about what it meant to be stepping on one of these buses.

  It would be the first time I had been back in Mississippi since I left for school. I was scared, petrified, ready to piss my pants as many a man has done in the moment before battle. But this was my war and I knew it. I sat on the bus squarely between the mandated black section and the established white, both hands gripping my thighs because when I set them on the seat in front of me, they shook. Driving north along Lake Pontchartrain, I wondered if it was fate that the river near my hometown was the Yazoo, which happens to mean the River of Death. I passed the time by looking out of the window and counting telephone poles, but there was no escape from the dread.

  After what felt like years, we finally pulled into town and went by columned banks imitating the Greeks. By then, I was hoping some mythic quality from my childhood daydreams might rub off on me, and that if I didn’t live past today I could be someone folks would sing about. Nearing the courthouse, going past the Confederate monument, I spotted the mob. We all looked at one another on that bus as if to say: You are mine and if your blood should spill, I will feel it.

  As the bus made a wide turn, I pushed down my porkpie hat and prayed that my moral intention would cohere with my future conduct. Or if only for fifteen minutes my body would not betray me. The others around me—rabbis, barbers, students—were mostly “veterans” of the Movement and my age and color. But we suddenly seemed too small, even though that was what had first inspired me to join. And now that I was home in Mississippi, seeing the hissing, spitting crowd wielding clubs and bats, I knew how much I had never been welcome.

  When we stopped, there were shouts and howls, the sides of the bus being beaten in the name of Tradition. We stood and filed into the aisles with the hush of priests. My stomach cut itself open and acid filled my mouth. I was in the other theater of the blues. I was as close as I could ever come to being like Jesus.

  As I walked the length of the bus, I heard every step of my shoes down that aisle and the early afternoon took on the mantle of deep night. At the stairwell, I looked out onto savage faces who longed to take something, someone, me into their hands. But someone took my hand, somebody else began to sing. And for maybe thirty seconds, I was living philosophy.

  Once I stepped onto the road I took a hit right to the face. My eyes and nose broke open and ran into my shirt. Everything burned. I went maybe two more steps when a man with a lead pipe cracked my thigh. At first, I wanted to run. But as I backed away, I realized that a couple of people—our people—were getting through the crowd and making it to the station doors. So I picked up my head (I had long since lost my hat) and tried to join them. When I rushed forward, I saw that one of the girls, the only white girl of our group, Pia, had been knocked to the ground. A group of men had surrounded her, one kicking her in the stomach. The mob had a special kind of rage for those riders who were white. I pushed my way over and dragged her up by the shoulders. Until then, I don’t believe I’d ever touched a white woman, let alone held one in my arms, but the smile she gave me was pure and sweet as honey. We limped through the mob, taking our licks together until we stepped into the bus station and through to the white portion of the waiting room. Three minutes later, we no-good troublemaking lawless Commie agitators were being cuffed and loaded into the paddy wagon heading off to jail.

  In three years we would be back in Mississippi for a longer and deadlier siege, but I didn’t know that yet. Nor did I know how important Pia would come to be in my life.

  Holy Shit. Billie covers her face with both hands. She reads again. It’s him.

  She inspects inside each and every record, finding nothing. But this is him, this is Daddy speaking, this is unpublished, unread, unseen words direct from Clifton James. This is . . . Chapter 2. Where’s Chapter 1?

  She stands, whoops, jumps, and runs into the yard for her phone. Who to call? Uncle Dee? Jude? But what if for some weird reason Uncle Dee doesn’t want to publish it? He’s the literary executor, not her. And this isn’t fiction, it’s her mother meeting her father, and maybe the rest covers less savory parts of his life. Maybe Uncle Dee is the one who has the other chapter. Would he admit it if she asked? She goes back inside and throws herself into Sheila’s chair. If only one of the ghosts around here would tell her what to do.

  There’s always the Good Doctor, as her mother used to call him, though of course Mom was being facetious. Dr. Melvin Hurley (B.A. University of North Carolina, M.A. University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D. University of Chicago) (primary research areas: African American literature and social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasis on black radical movements) (author of The Long Dispossession: The Counter-Reconstruction) (Dissertation: “The Diaspora of Memory: The Violent Resurrection of the Surreal in the Poetry of Clifton James”) has been working on the only biography of her father for ten thousand years. This book, tentatively entitled The Prophet of Avalon, is a book that will place her father (according to Hurley’s faculty page) on “the pantheon of black genius.”

  Maybe she could leak its existence to him first, in case her uncle disappears it once she hands it over. But her mother did always seem to despise Hurley, probably hating the role of Artist’s Wife/Helpmeet/Muse. As far as Billie knows there is no one else interested in her father’s work; certainly no other scholar has ever contacted her about him. Though why would the chapter be in her mother’s stuff? Jude said her father pretended the decision to divorce was mutual, but it wasn’t. He wanted to move back to Mississippi and he didn’t want her mother coming with him.

  After e-mailing Dr. Hurley from the library, Billie follows a log truck to a restaurant in the next town over, passing a record number of unrepaired cars with crushed hoods along the way. She walks through a glass foyer lined with community magazines and old Mardi Gras beads. Two construction workers coming out smile at her. She forgot to put on a bra. Turns out the restaurant is freezing and the corn bread is bad.

  In the booth behind her, a man with a silver-brown ponytail and blue coveralls devours a chicken-fried steak. He’s loud on his phone but she doesn’t mind because it makes the place feel less deserted. She orders sweet tea and coffee, plays with her bendy straw as she reads the chapter again and again. The chicken-steak man gets up to go to the bathroom, leading with his belly. There are bits of corn bread in her hair. At least she brushed her teeth. She shakes out her hair and picks up her mug. The coffee is thick and cold as eels, a medieval delicacy.

  Her phone rings. An unfamiliar number.

  “Hello, is this Miss James? This is Dr. Hurley.”

  She smiles at the chicken-steak
man as he comes back. Looks like she won’t be leaving tomorrow after all. She wants to know all the stories of Greendale’s abandoned houses, secret affairs, and ruinous personal wars.

  Lola

  HE ACTED SURPRISED WHEN SHE BROUGHT UP THE WOMAN’S NAME. Not surprised-scared, more like surprised what’s-the-big-deal. Like he had nothing to hide. Lola relaxed about it while they were talking, but now that she’s on her way down to Mississippi, she’s suspicious again. Some men lie so good they fool themselves into thinking that they did nothing wrong.

  Yes, she wanted to come back down for Billie, but it was also the perfect excuse to leave town. My cousin needs me. And she needs Billie to keep her from doing something stupid in this damn stupid relationship.

  Billie takes their tray of tamales from the counter, laughing with Cedric, the owner, who Lola has known since she was a baby. Billie sits down across from Lola all smiles. “He promises me that these are the best tamales in town.”

  “Best in the state.” Lola takes her plate from the tray. “You been listening to me go on about my man all morning. What about you?”

  “Wait. How spicy are these?”

  “Just try it. Are you seeing someone?”

  “No.” Billie chews ice from her cup. “I’ll probably end up alone.”

  “If those are your table manners. And you’re fine with that?” Lola peels the foil back from her tamales. “Now these are beautiful.”

  “My mother was a bachelor.”

  Lola unwraps the glistening corn husk. “You mean single?”

  “I prefer the term bachelor. Do I eat it with my hands or fork?”

  “If you don’t want to get messy, use a fork. Or you could scoop it on a cracker. Here.” Lola tosses a packet of crackers onto Billie’s tray. “You want kids?”

  Billie cuts the tamale with a fork. “I like kids. But I don’t get that baby feeling, you know?”