Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  Every bit of Delia was calculated to attract attention, from her glossy hair to her pedicured and sandaled feet. If Emma mentally subtracted thirty years of hard living from her memory of Liz, she got a fiery-headed bombshell. Liz wouldn’t have had Delia’s polish, nor her PhD, but she would have had the same unapologetic sex appeal. Being in the same room as Liz’s bawdy repartee had always made Emma want to loosen up and live a little.

  Emma, by contrast, wore her hair natural and was letting it gray at its own speed. Her clothes flowed free in places where women like Liz and Delia would have worn them tight. She thought of herself as sedate, conservative, even matronly, but maybe there was still a possibility of romance for her, after all.

  She checked her watch. Oscar’s five o’clock deadline had come and gone while she was on the water, but she would call him when she finished her sandwich. There was no sense in looking too anxious. Emma wondered what Douglass would think if he knew that she was learning to juggle men at this late date.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Faye’s brain was fogged when she reached the far side of the island and she was tired all over, so tired that she wished she could sit down in the weeds and stay there. There were times lately when she believed she was sad for no reason and that there was no beginning or end to it. Then she would remember the baby and remembered the beginning of it. When she remembered that there would never be another baby, she believed the sorrow would never end.

  She wasn’t sure how to find her way through the sadness, but right now she was sure that she needed to find the overgrown spot on her island that had once been a clearing. She remembered that her grandmother had told her something about those chunks of wood, something that Gerry and Nadia should know as they waited for the results of the arsenic testing, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Faye needed to find the place and sit there until her mind was still, until she could trust her memory.

  What had her grandmother said about the wood? Faye remembered that she’d said it had once been part of an old trough or tub, but that the trough had been cracked and broken to pieces for as long as she remembered. When was her grandmother born? Around 1930. So the trough dated to the early twentieth century or before. Maybe it was as old as the buried kerosene tank.

  Something else was brushing against Faye’s memory, but her mind had felt like a frail thing since the miscarriage. She walked straight to the spot where she’d found the wood and crouched there. Closing her eyes helped her call up her grandmother’s face. Without her eyes to distract her, she was free to focus on memory alone. She could hear the waves and the feel of the wind’s breath on her cheek.

  The waves and the wind hadn’t changed in the twenty-five years since she’d lost her grandmother. They hadn’t changed in thirty years. Three hundred. It took no effort to believe that her grandmother was there again, right there beside her. Faye missed her so. She could hear her grandmother’s quiet whisper over the noises of the water and air. “Mama said that this was where The Monster Man lived. This very spot.”

  Now that she was a mother, Faye marveled at her grandmother’s ability to tell her this scary story so matter-of-factly that young Faye hadn’t been left with a paralyzing fear of monster men. Faye’s grandmother hadn’t believed in any monster men, but her mother Courtney Stanton Wells had believed wholeheartedly, and Courtney’s fears had somehow gotten connected in Faye’s grandmother’s mind with a battered and broken wooden trough.

  Faye’s grandmother had said that Courtney was scared to death of The Monster Man. She’d tried to make her daughter believe in him, but Faye had known her no-nonsense grandmother. Good luck with any effort to make her believe in anything beyond the here and now. This had not endeared her to the minister who had spent a great deal of his career trying to save her soul.

  Faye’s grandmother had said that Courtney never went to this end of the island, not even when she was old. Courtney had put a lot of effort into convincing her daughter to fear this place the way she did. Therefore, after Courtney passed, Faye’s grandmother had liked to go there now and then, just to tempt fate and to vex her mother’s ghost. Not that she had believed in ghosts.

  “Mama said his cabin was over thataway when she was a little girl.” Faye’s grandmother’s hand had shaken when she pointed her finger, not from fright but from age and ill health. “She said if she went up in the top part of the big house, she could see his lantern glowing at night. One time, she saw that light spill out the door when he opened it up and come outside. She said that if she woulda tried to sneak through the woods and get a look at him, her mama would have switched her legs good. Mama wouldn’t never have done anything her mama told her not to do, because she was always a good little girl, but I would have. Just to prove he wasn’t real. Or if he was real, I would’ve wanted to prove that he wasn’t really no monster.”

  So Cally had believed in him, too. She’d believed in him well enough to take a switch to her daughter Courtney to keep her out of these woods.

  Oscar Croft believed that Cally herself was a monster. He thought she’d imprisoned a man and, eventually, killed him. And he thought she was cold-blooded enough to write his wife when she was done and tell her he was dead.

  If she were holding a man prisoner on the far end of her island, would Faye threaten to take a switch to Michael, if it were the only way to keep him from finding out? It was a pointless question, because Faye could never make herself believe she could hold someone prisoner. If she couldn’t imagine that, then she certainly couldn’t imagine beating the curiosity out of her own child.

  Faye reached into her satchel and pulled out photocopies of the sheaf of pages she’d found in her two-hundred-year-old house. They had been hidden in a book even older than the house. When the oral historians from the Federal Writers’ Project had come to ask Faye’s great-great-grandmother Cally Stanton for her memories of being a slave, Cally had given them a lot more than tales of the time before emancipation. She seemed to have given them every memory she had. Parts of her oral history read more like the transcript of a session on an analyst’s couch than straight-ahead autobiography.

  Faye had pored over these pages. She had thought often of publishing them, but she’d always shied away from showing this private thing to the world. Perhaps it was silly of her. Cally had told the stories to someone who intended to publish them but never got around to it, but Faye didn’t think a woman who lived her whole life on an island that rarely even got mail could have conceived of the digital age and its absence of privacy.

  On these pages, Cally had left behind a real and gritty look at what it was like to be enslaved, but she’d also left herself here. Anger, love, regret, pride, an occasional bit of spite—Faye felt like she knew Cally. She felt like some parts of her were Cally. Nothing could sway Faye toward Oscar’s belief that Cally had killed his ancestor Elias Croft…nothing but the fact that she was pretty sure that Cally herself had mentioned the name Croft, maybe more than once.

  Faye had been carrying these pages around for weeks. She’d been afraid to read them, afraid they might tell her that she was descended from someone who did something purely evil. If she let her mind slip down that path, she was only steps from believing she had inherited the same taint from Cally or, before her, from Andrew Whitehall, the slaveowner who had raped Cally’s mother. And if it were true that evil could be handed down in that way, then maybe it was her fault, after all, that the baby had died.

  Joe wouldn’t let her voice that fear, but he couldn’t stop her from feeling it. Liz’s death seemed to carry the grisly proof of it. So did Chip’s and Wally’s. And Douglass…oh, how could she even stand to think that his death might be her fault? Maybe everything she touched was doomed to go to dust before its time.

  Faye knew that she shouldn’t be alone these days. Without Joe or Magda or Emma nearby, it was too easy to listen to the doubts that whispered to her when no one else could hear. It wa
s unwise to re-read Cally’s diary, looking for evil, without mooring herself to her friends and their stability. Unwise or not, here she was doing it.

  Leaning back against a tree, Faye thumbed through the familiar pages. She turned to the end, because she remembered that Cally had closed her memoirs with the story of the day Yankee soldiers came to Joyeuse Island. Cally’s common-law husband, Courtney Stanton, had just died, and she had named their baby girl after him. How odd to think that Oscar’s great-great-grandfather might have been there that day, alive and looking at young Cally and her new baby.

  ***

  Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,

  recorded by the Federal Writer’s Project, 1935

  I always laugh when I remember the day the Yankees came to liberate the slaves on Joyeuse. They were naturally more gape-jawed when they found us already free.

  Mister Courtney always said I was a charming liar. Well, I did him proud that day. I knew it wouldn’t be safe to let anybody, not the Yankees or anybody, know that we didn’t have a master any more. The laws weren’t good back then and the courts were even worse. Somebody was liable to come take the land—my land—and make my workers farm it for just about nothing.

  So I told them the master and his wife had gone to Tallahassee that very day to pledge their allegiance to the Yankee flag. Then I showed them young Courtney, my baby, and made sure they knew that my job was to take care of the master’s heir. I forgot to mention that young Courtney was a girl and not entitled to own anything in her own name. I also forgot to mention that she wasn’t white, so she wasn’t entitled to anything in this life at all.

  ***

  Nope. There was no answer on this page. After this passage, Cally had rambled on about her life since the Yankees left, but there was no mention of Elias Croft on those final pages. Faye’s sanity breathed a sigh of relief, but Faye herself wasn’t done. She was sure that she remembered a Croft figuring into Cally’s story somehow. The reminiscences of old people don’t flow with the predictability of carefully composed history, so she flipped back a few pages, looking for him, and there he was.

  ***

  Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,

  recorded by the Federal Writer’s Project, 1935

  When I heard that the Yankees was coming to Joyeuse Island, I knew I was going to have to give a little so that I wouldn’t lose a lot. I’d hid the valuables, but I couldn’t hide all the food, being as how a lot of it was still walking around on four feet. I thought maybe if I showed the soldiers a bit of hospitality, they wouldn’t take my livestock and raid my garden and leave us to starve.

  It’s a good thing that boats move slow and armies move slower. One of the young’uns was out fishing that day afore the sun was up good, and she come running with the news. Men in blue coats was gathered on the shore, making ready to get in their boats. The hurricane washed away everything on Last Island years afore that, so I knew there was only one place they was planning to go in those boats. Here. To Joyeuse Island. And there ain’t never been a group of men that big that wasn’t hungry.

  I sent the young’uns to take the pigs and cows into the woods. Wasn’t nothing I could do with the chickens but let ’em run wild and hope the Yankees wasn’t fast enough to catch ’em or stupid enough to shoot at ’em and risk killing folks standing nearby. I told the women to each one pack a basket of food from the larder—sacks of meal, slabs of salt pork, bags of dried peas—and to high-tail it into the swampiest land they could find. I wanted it to be hard for the soldiers to find the food but, more’n that, I wanted it to be hard for them to find the women.

  Then I told the men to arm themselves with what they had, which was farming tools. A strapping field hand will make you think twice if he’s standing there holding a scythe or a sickle or even a good stout rake. My field workers and their rakes met the soldiers at the shore and, when their commanding officer asked them who was in charge, they brought him to me.

  Captain Croft treated me respectful. He listened to my lies about how the owners of Joyeuse was loyal Union citizens who’d be coming home any minute now. He seemed as concerned as I was about how those loyal Union citizens wouldn’t be too happy if they come home and found that their very own soldiers had left the place in a mess. Then he told me his soldiers was hungry and asked me what I’d do in his shoes.

  I was ready for him. I showed him a big crate full of rags his men could use for bandages and another crate loaded with moonshine to ease their pain. All my life, I’d tended everybody on the island when they was sick and I knew he had men who was bad wounded and needed more ‘n that, but it was all I had. Then I took him into the workyard where the cooks were stirring great pots of hominy. I told him to tell his men to get in line with their cups in hand, because there was enough in those pots for everybody to have some. Then I pointed to a great big pile of roasted sweet potatoes and said they could have one apiece. It was a feast for a bunch of men who’d been living on hardtack, and I hoped it was a big enough feast to buy their friendship.

  Captain Croft touched his cap—and me not a white woman!—and went to give his troops the good news. We had some lean times that winter when we wished for those sweet potatoes and pots of hominy, but that food did its job. The Yankees went away and nobody got hurt. Not even any of the pigs.

  ***

  Faye saw nothing in this account to suggest that Cally ever changed her mind and murdered the man who had touched his cap out of respect for her…if this Captain Croft and Oscar’s ancestor Elias were one and the same. Maybe Oscar could help her figure out whether their families were linked by the meeting Cally described. More likely, Delia was the one who could make the connection, if it existed, but Faye didn’t want either of them examining every twig on her family tree. She wanted privacy, time alone to heal. She wanted Oscar and Delia to go away and leave her alone.

  Faye was glad that she’d procrastinated about publishing Cally’s story. She had no professional or personal obligation to share it with Oscar or anybody else. She put the pages back in her satchel, leaned back against the tree, and rested while the sun finished going down.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was completely dark outside, except for a moon that was just past full. Michael was asleep, so the house was quiet. Joe had no idea where his wife was, nor his father. He was alone.

  Faye had been gone for hours, but Joe couldn’t go after her now. Well, he could, but it would require waking up Michael and walking through the dark woods with him in his arms.

  Alone, armed with only moonlight and instinct, he could have found Faye’s hiding place. But carrying a squalling two-year-old? He would only find her if she wanted to be found. If he’d known that his father would be so late coming home, he would have tried to find Faye while the sun was up and their toddler was awake and happy.

  Maybe it was just as well that he hadn’t gone after Faye. Before he went looking for her, he needed to decide what he was going to say.

  ***

  The gentle knock at Emma’s front door surprised her. She had been tired from being out on the water, so she’d bathed and dressed for bed before the sun was gone. It embarrassed her to think that someone might see her in her nightgown so early. She might be an old woman, but she didn’t like to act like one.

  Emma didn’t recognize the knock and she had no notion of who might be at her door. Her heart fluttered a moment, reminding her that Douglass had died at the hands of intruders in their home, but she told it to settle down. Her husband’s murderers had not knocked politely and waited for him to answer the door.

  A stout replacement stood in place of the door destroyed by those killers. It had a deadbolt that shot deeply into the doorframe to hold it shut, because Sheriff Mike had made sure of it. There were little wires on her front door jamb, attached to a security system that was monitored by people who wouldn’t hesitate to come when called. A heav
y-linked chain hung above her head, and there was a peephole right at her eye level that she never remembered to check before she opened the door. Tonight, she checked it.

  She couldn’t see her visitor’s full face, but she could see enough to know that it was Oscar Croft. What to do?

  On the one hand, the man had asked her out, and she had already decided that she would say yes if there was a second invitation. There was no more danger in opening the door now than there would be when she got in a car with him to go to dinner.

  On the other hand, though her bathrobe covered her from chin to toes, she wasn’t comfortable letting a man see her in clothes that in any way suggested a bedroom. Also, she had the sick feeling that always came when something wasn’t right. She’d felt it, hard, on the night when she came home to a busted-down door, before she went downstairs and found her dying husband.

  Tonight, she just felt a twisting inside her chest that asked why this man couldn’t wait until she returned his call before he showed up on her doorstep. There was eager and there was too eager.

  She waited, just on the other side of the door, as he tapped gently again. After a third knock, he went away, but Emma was no longer sure that she would accept any invitation that Oscar made in the future.

  ***

  It was late. Faye doubted Joe was asleep yet, but she had to go home sometime. Maybe she would get lucky and find her husband snoring. She pulled a small flashlight out of her satchel and started heading to the house. After twenty minutes of picking her way, keeping each step within the circle of light cast by the flashlight, she could sense open space ahead. In the center of that open space was her home.

  Just before she came into the open, she smelled smoke and saw a faint glow through the underbrush. Sly had built yet another fire at yet another random place in the woods. Before she could back up and find another route home, she heard a deep, quiet “Hey,” in a voice that wasn’t quite Joe’s. She stopped in her tracks. Out of reflex, she thumbed the flashlight off to make herself harder to see, but the effort was futile. If she stepped off the path to flee, he would be able to follow the sound of her crashing through the underbrush. If she stayed on the path, he would be able to follow it straight to her. But why did she care whether or not her father-in-law could find her?