Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  When Faye saw that Sly held a wooden locomotive in one oversized hand and a coffee cup in the other, she realized two things. She realized that he was a big man who wore blue jeans and work boots. And she realized that she loved him for his coffee cup. She loved him for deciding that coffee was a better bet for him than whiskey. Every day, he made that decision again.

  Maybe that love showed on her face, but all Sly said was, “Welcome home, Daughter. I believe my son has intentions of putting some meat on your bones. He’s frying chicken and okra. And also some corn. He just slapped the pulley bone out of my hand ’cause he says it’s your favorite piece of the bird. You better go eat it so’s he’ll quit yelling at me.”

  So she did. She sat at the kitchen table, so close to the stove that Joe could fork food out of all of his skillets, straight onto her plate. She gnawed the rich meat of a chicken thigh right down to the bone. She used her fingers to pop crispy rounds of cornmeal-coated okra into her mouth like candy. Joe’s corn, cut off the cob and fried in butter, dripped off her fork.

  He didn’t say anything. He just kept giving her food.

  The pulley bone, a palm-sized hunk of white meat clinging to a wishbone, was an odd dessert, but she saved it for last. Then she wrapped the clean wishbone in a napkin and tucked it in her satchel for later. The time would come, sooner or later, when she would know what wish should be made with it.

  ***

  The gargantuan meal had put Faye in bed before sundown. She had slept hard for five hours straight, and that was a better night’s sleep than she’d had in a month, but now she was done. It would be a long time before the sun showed its face, probably more, and she needed something to occupy her mind.

  Joe had been in bed maybe fifteen minutes. He was now sleeping like a man who’d cooked up ten thousand calories. She eased herself out from under the covers and found her satchel. Once out of the house, she opened it and pulled out her flashlight and Cally’s oral history.

  The flashlight led her out the basement door and up the stairs to the grand front porch of Joyeuse Island’s big house. Curled up in a rocking chair, she read her great-great-grandmother’s stories. Faye hadn’t given up on finding Elias Croft.

  She wondered whether Elias had been a common name in those days, because she remembered Cally mentioning a man named Elias who had lived on Joyeuse Island. She’d never had any reason to think that this man and the respectful Yankee captain had been one and the same. In fact, she had presumed that Elias had been one of the freed slaves who worked for Cally, but now she was beginning to wonder.

  Cally’s memoirs started before the Civil War and they stretched to the Great Depression. Based on what she remembered of Oscar’s story, she hadn’t had the impression that his Elias had lived into old age. Oscar’s great-great-grandmother had received letters about her Elias for years, it was true, but she had died prematurely of consumption and she’d still managed to outlive him. So he’d likely died after the Civil War, but before the turn of the twentieth century.

  The question to be found in Cally’s journal was when a man named Elias had lived on Joyeuse Island. If Cally had known an Elias during the Depression, then he wasn’t Elias Croft. If she knew him during Reconstruction, then perhaps he was.

  Not sure where in the sheafs of paper to look for him, Faye flipped to random pages until a familiar passage showed itself. This story of Cally’s Elias was overshadowed by a crisis that had nearly killed everyone on Joyeuse Island. It was a wonder that Faye had remembered his name in the first place.

  ***

  Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,

  recorded by the Federal Writer’s Project, 1935

  It was my job to keep the island provisioned, always. It was my job when the old Master was alive, and it was my job when my husband Courtney took over after the old Master died. After my husband Courtney died, it was still my job to stock the stores on this island, and it would be for all the rest of my days.

  Young Courtney don’t know she still needs me to keep things running, but she do. We raise most all our food, always did, but there ain’t never been a time when we wouldn’t have sorely missed the supply boat if it didn’t come bring the other things I sent away for. Even during the War, the supply boat got out here now and then, and it was always a happy day when the boat come out here to Joyeuse Island.

  Tea. Coffee. The supply boat brought us wheat flour and sugar, when I had the money. Most medicines, I could make for free out of weeds I found in the woods, but some of ’em needed to be bought and paid for. Castor oil comes in handy, sometimes, and cod liver oil, and Elias swore by something he said was a distilled homeopathic oil that come all the way from India. “Jowl mooker” is what he called it, and I do think it was a help to him at times.

  The supply boat brought yard goods to sew up into clothes. Kerosene. Newspapers and books. Records, after we got the Victrola. It was all I could do to keep everybody on the island from a-gathering at the dock as soon as that boat come into sight, but I always shooed ’em away. How was I supposed to keep my accounts straight if I had a hundred people watching me tally up the deliveries?

  I met the boat when it come in the rain and in the cold. I met the boat the day after we put my husband Courtney in the ground. I met the boat the morning of the day young Courtney come into the world. Many’s the time I carried her on my hip down to the dock, my account books in my free hand. I go with her now, never mind how much she fusses when I mess with her bookkeeping. Only one day did I miss that boat, and it was the day I was in the bed with the yellow fever, me and everybody else living in my household and in the workers’ cabins out back. Everybody on the island was down with yellow fever but Elias. I guess it was the only time he was happy to live all by hisself.

  I was as scared as I ever been. I’d tended many a soul with yellow fever and I knew what it was like to die from it, blood a-running out your eyes and your mouth. Still, I think I would’ve crawled to that boat on my hands and knees out of nothing but habit, if I could just have got out of bed. Sometimes I think it’s habits that keep us a-going. Breathing’s a habit, and that’s a fact.

  Elias went down there to the dock, wrapped up in a scarf and hat in the full-out summertime—I told him not to go, but he did—and he told the boat captain how it was. The captain went straight back to shore and sent us a doctor.

  We all lived, and I credit Elias and the captain and that doctor for a miracle. Nothing I ever done for Elias in all the years I knew him could add up to what he done for us that one day. He took a risk to do it, and he shouldn’t have. I told him not to.

  ***

  So there he was. Elias. Was this Elias Croft? Was the Yankee Captain Croft named Elias? Did anything in Cally’s stories connect the two men? No, not that Faye could see.

  Did those stories suggest that Cally killed either man or kept him captive? No. Did they clear Cally’s name? No. She revealed no murderous feelings for the man she called simply “Elias,” and she’d seemed to have warm feelings about her encounter with “Captain Croft.” but that proved nothing.

  Could Faye put a date on the story of Elias and the supply boat? Not really. Cally herself had said she met that boat for her entire adult life. But what about the part of the story that mentioned yellow fever? Faye remembered that the last big yellow fever epidemic in America had happened in New Orleans, sometime after the turn of the twentieth century, and this gave her an idea. She shot off a text to Magda:

  Can’t sleep, so I’m sitting on my front porch worrying about really important stuff like when the last big yellow fever epidemics came through this area. Late 19th-century, right? Were there any particularly bad years?

  Magda turned her phone off at night, so she would wake up to this question. If Faye had resisted off-loading the question onto Magda, she would have lost any slender chance that she might go back to sleep, but now her mind could rest. More likely,
her mind could find something else to fret about.

  Faye re-read the passage about Cally’s Elias one more time, then she did it again. The second reading gave her another question for Magda, who had gotten used to Faye’s weird texts years before. She typed a particularly random question into her phone and sent it to Magda:

  Still can’t sleep. Were there any popular homeopathic remedies imported from India in that same time period, the late 19th century? Were any of them named “jowl mooker”? Or something like that. I don’t know a word of Hindi or Sanskrit, so you could tell me it was another word for hog jowls and I would believe you. I would also start getting hungry for hog jowls, which I do believe is happening right about now. Hope you’re sleeping well.

  Magda might bark at her for bothering her with weirdo questions, but Faye knew it was an act. Her best friend and former professor lived for weirdo questions.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Sometime during the night, Faye had figured out how to curl herself into a ball that fit comfortably between the wooden arms of her rocking chair. Almost comfortably.

  She hadn’t slept. Sometimes she’d surfed the web on her phone. Sometimes she’d made notes on Cally’s reminiscences and how they might relate to Elias Croft. Sometimes she’d just studied the porch ceiling over her head. She knew it was blue because she’d painted it that color, but everything outside the circle of her flashlight was rendered in shades of gray. The luminescent screen of her phone was so out-of-place that she sometimes flicked it off, just to let her eyes rest.

  Water sounds reached her ears. The sound of water slapping the bottom of her dock told her drowsy brain that the tide was high and the seas were rough. Wind on her face told her that the rough seas were driven by a storm far away. She didn’t have to think about these things. She just knew, just as she knew that a faraway buzz, growing louder, was a boat coming her way.

  Her eyelids slid open and shut a few more times before she could rouse herself enough to check her phone for the time. It wasn’t seven yet. Even Gerry’s workaholic remediation crew wasn’t dedicated enough to get out here this early. Who was out there and why were they coming at this hour?

  Faye hated unannounced guests, which was fine, because she never got them. The only good explanation for the coming boat that Faye’s sleep-addled brain could manage was a surprise party. Her birthday was weeks away and so was Joe’s. Michael’s was months away. So was Amande’s, and she wasn’t even home. She had no idea when Sly’s birthday was, and she had no idea if he had friends who might throw him a party. If he did, they were in Oklahoma.

  She shook off fatigue and stood up. From this angle, she had a better line-of-sight to the dock. It was still obscured by trees, but she could see water glinting through their leaves. When the unidentified boat pulled alongside her dock, she could see the movement of more than one person as they secured it and walked her way. Unseen strangers made her think of Liz and Emma, and she wished very much not to be alone.

  Faye was on a porch that stood a story above the ground. Joe was below her, surrounded by the thick masonry walls of an above-ground basement. She could scream her loudest and he would never hear her. Fortunately, she had a cell phone in her pocket.

  She dialed his number and prayed he hadn’t silenced his ringer. Rewarded by the rumble of his sleepy voice, she said, “Somebody’s here. More than one somebody. Come up here on the porch now, and bring your dad.”

  ***

  Faye and Joe had been sent back into their own house. They sat downstairs in their living room, surrounded by four cold thick walls lit by a single window. When they’d converted the basement of the big old plantation house into living quarters that they could afford to heat and cool, they’d cozied up this room with yellow paint and shelves of books. Somehow, being ordered to wait downstairs by people who had taken over their own front porch had caused “cozy” to quickly shift into “claustrophobic.” Michael was still asleep and neither of them was hungry, so they’d had nothing to do but sit and wait.

  Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Steinberg had asked straight out to talk to Joe’s father alone. Sly had given a quiet nod of assent, so Faye and Joe had backed away. They’d left him on the porch standing in a wary position, legs flexed and both arms slightly extended as if to ward off an attack.

  Joe sat across from Faye, looking afraid, and she couldn’t think of anything comforting to say. She had just put her hand on his knee and held it there while he covered it with his own.

  Neither of them asked the obvious questions, “What do they want with Sly? They were just here yesterday. What’s changed since then?”

  Joe managed to sit still for three minutes, tops, then he hopped up and said, “Dad’s gonna need some coffee when this is over. I’ll go make some.”

  Faye felt the same need to do something useful, but what would it be? Maybe she should go fetch a carton of cigarettes and a lighter so that she and Joe could meet Sly at the door with both caffeine and nicotine for comfort?

  No, that was going too far. Michael and Amande deserved a grandfather who wasn’t crippled by emphysema or dead of cancer.

  As it turned out, she wouldn’t have had time to find the cigarettes. Sly was downstairs before the coffee had brewed. He sank into the soft cushions of the easy chair that Joe had just left and asked, “Do you know who Delia Scarsdale is?”

  “Yeah. She and a man named Oscar Croft are here on vacation. They’ve been around for weeks. You haven’t met them?”

  “Nope.”

  Remembering the photo of Sly chasing Michael toward the back door of Liz’s restaurant while Oscar and Delia approached from the parking lot out front, she said, “You probably saw them one of those times when you and Joe were eating breakfast at Liz’s. Older guy? Young woman, long blonde hair?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. I spent most of my time joshing with Liz while she slung hash. If Delia and what’s-his-face was there, I might not have noticed. Anyways, the sheriff wants to know what I was doing last night when somebody broke into her bedroom and attacked her. Delia, I mean. It was Delia that got attacked.”

  “Was she hurt? What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” Sly fumbled in his pocket and came out with an empty pack of cigarettes. The defeated slump in his shoulders made Faye almost sorry that she hadn’t brought him some.

  “What did the sheriff say to you? Does he have any idea who did it?”

  “They showed me a belt the guy left behind and they asked if it was mine.”

  The intruder had taken off his belt. This didn’t sound good.

  “They don’t think it was you, do they?”

  “They came straight here, so they must think it was me. I told them hell, no, it wasn’t my belt, because I was wearing the only one I owned. Then I didn’t tell them no more.”

  “They’re already out here talking to you, right after it happened? Sly, you need to get a lawyer.”

  Sly shook his head. “I might’ve told ’em I was gonna call my lawyer, but I didn’t mean it. I had a lawyer once, and he didn’t do me a damn bit of good. How could he? That time, I did the crime. This time, I didn’t. And I can’t afford a lawyer anyway. I believe I’ll take my chances.”

  “You didn’t give them an alibi?”

  “I was in bed. By myself. Asleep. What kind of alibi am I gonna give?”

  “I have one for you.”

  And Faye was out the door, brushing past her husband, who was standing in the door with a brimming cup of coffee in his hand.

  ***

  Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  Faye told herself to move fast, because she needed to talk to Sheriff Rainey right this minute, before Sly solidified in his mind as the most likely suspect. She dialed Sheriff Mike’s number as she ran. He was retired, so he didn’t officially know anything about current criminal activity in Micco County. In reality, he knew everything.
>
  The tone of Sheriff Mike’s voice told her that the crime hanging over Sly’s head was disturbing him. This was significant. Sheriff Mike had seen almost everything in his long career.

  “Yeah, I heard about what happened to the nice tour guide lady.” Sheriff Mike’s voice was quiet. “Bad thing. It was a real bad thing.”

  Faye was running and breathing hard, but she could gasp out short sentences. “Was she hurt?”

  “She’s okay, but it could’ve gone another way. Somebody busted in her window. Ripped the bedspread off her bed before she was good and awake. Wrapped it around her head so she ain’t gonna be able to identify anybody on sight. Tried to use the sheets to tie her to the bedposts, but she got away long enough to open the bedroom door and make some noise. The bastard went out the window before Oscar came running.”

  Faye tried to shake the image of Delia, sprawled across her own bed while a man she couldn’t see removed his belt. “When did this happen?”

  “It ain’t been long. Sometime in the wee hours, a long time after midnight.”

  “That’s what I thought. Thanks, Mike.”

  Her feet pounded the dock’s wooden boards as she turned off her phone. Sheriff Rainey and his deputy were already in their boat, pulling away, but they looked up when she bellowed, “Wait!”

  Sheriff Rainey idled the motor and reached out an arm to keep the boat from banging into the dock. The water was rough and it wasn’t easy for him to keep his grip, but he hung on and waited for Faye to speak. She leaned forward, hands on her knees, and held up a hand while she tried to catch her breath.

  “I know where he was. Sly. I know where he was. I can give him an alibi for last night. It wasn’t Sly who tried to hurt Delia.”

  The sheriff said, “I’m listening.”

  If they figured out she’d talked to Sheriff Mike, he’d never give her insider information again, so she couldn’t let them know that she knew the timing of the attack. She had to act like she was guessing.