Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  “Looks that way,” Thomas said. He turned to Cargie’s nephew, who stood at the foot of the bed. “Ritchie, would you mind tracking down my son? Cargie too.” Ritchie nodded and left the room. “Miss Caroline,” Thomas said, “could I steal just a minute alone with your sister?”

  “Of course you can. Guess you ain’t said your goodbye, what with herding everybody in and out of here.”

  “No ma’am, I have not. Thank you.”

  Caroline got up and left the room, and Thomas closed and locked the door behind her. He knelt beside the bed and kissed his mother-in-law on the cheek. “I’m here, Pretty Mama,” he said.

  “Thomas?”

  “Yes’m. It’s just you and me.”

  Pretty Mama smiled and raised her hand to his face. He grasped it and guided her palm against his cheek. Her hand was icy cold and dry, and Thomas covered it with his own. Warming it, he hoped.

  “Time’s here, son,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s gonna be okay.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Rebecca Pittman mustered her strength and opened her eyes. They were the same quick black eyes that had always put Thomas on his heels. “I’s talkin’ about your time,” she said. “Time to make peace with the past. You gots to tell Cargie.”

  “Tell her what, Pretty Mama?”

  “Go on now. You know.”

  Thomas’s mind raced. “After all these years? It would only hurt her. What’s the use in that?”

  Pretty Mama pulled her hand from his grasp and laid it against his chest.

  “You got old sin,” she said, “buried deep inside. You gots to confess it and get it out of you.”

  “Confess?”

  Pretty Mama closed her eyes again. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. “You’ll see.”

  The doorknob jiggled, followed by a knock. Thomas stood. He unlocked the door and opened it to David and Cargie. The boy was as tall and thin as his father had been at seventeen, and he looked as if he would rather be anywhere else but here. Thomas pulled David close and held him, making eye contact with Cargie over the boy’s shoulder.

  Cargie moved past them to her mother’s bedside. “She’s gone,” she said. Thomas continued to hug his son while he reached for Cargie’s hand and held it tightly.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  David was back in school and busy with football and everything else that goes along with senior year when Thomas finally worked up the nerve to sit his wife down in the living room after supper one night.

  Cargie said, “You must have something serious to say, Mr. Barre, if we’re in here.”

  “I do,” Thomas said, “and I’ve worried myself sick wondering if you’ll leave me over it.”

  “Go on now.”

  “You know about the Tatums,” he said. “In East Texas.”

  “Did something happen? Is everybody okay?”

  Thomas took Cargie’s hands. He kissed each one and then held them. “Just let me talk,” he said. “No questions until I get it all out.”

  Cargie pretended to turn a key over her closed mouth. She smiled and slid her warm hand between his again.

  “On a Saturday morning,” Thomas began. “A warm Indian summer day a long time ago, a boy went hunting and never went home again. His name was David Walker, and he was seventeen years old.”

  Thomas had kept a narrator’s distance when he told his mother-in-law the story so many years before. He’d talked about David Walker as if he were another person, even though Pretty Mama knew better. But once Thomas got rolling, telling his story to Cargie, he became lost in the brightness and nearness of his memories, as if they were from a day or two ago, rather than half a century before.

  He talked at length about the goodness of his mother and father and grandfather, as he would not have thought to do before he was torn from them. He described the white man, alive and in death, and once again he felt his hands grip the oar in fear and swing it without premeditation. Once again, his clothes were slick with Huck’s blood. Once more, he looked through the eyeholes of a Klansman’s hood and breathed the dead man’s stench. He got all the way to burying the stolen treasure under the Mooringsport railroad trestle before he paused to catch his breath.

  “Go on,” Cargie said. “Keep talking.”

  “I stole a pirogue and paddled into the Caddo swamp,” Thomas said. He told Cargie about building a hut out of switchgrass. About Old Gourd, the wood stork who was his only companion for weeks on end, and about the family of beavers who entertained him while he fished. He described Caddo in winter— a marble-floored cathedral of smooth black water and towering cypress.

  He told her about leaving the swamp in which he’d felt so safe and comfortable. He told her about meeting a father and his sons and a worn-out mule pulling a stump from the stubborn ground. He described at length the grinding, unending labor of cotton farming. He told her about Big Sherman’s optimism and Audie’s intelligence. About Sherman’s frustration and rage.

  He told her about the one and only time another person had washed his feet and how profoundly humbling it had been. About Luke’s precocious boldness and Zachary’s thirst to learn everything there was to learn. Zach had graduated from Wiley College in the class before Cargie’s. He became a journalist and a writer because that was the only profession that permitted him to explore all the things that interested him.

  “He lives in Chicago,” Thomas said.

  “I know,” said Cargie. “I’ve seen his letters.”

  Thomas told his wife about building a room for Audie and about Deet, who guided him every step of the way. He even told her about Joseph Baldwin III, who had unknowingly made a gift of the materials, and how Mr. Baldwin might even now be reaping a reward for his unintended generosity if Deet had anything to say about it. Then he stopped because Cargie had tears in her eyes. “Are you okay, honey?” he asked.

  She pulled her hands from his and brushed her cheeks with her palms. “Why am I just now hearing all of this?” she said.

  He did not know what to say.

  “Your name is David Walker,” Cargie said, as if she did not believe it.

  “It was David Walker. A long time ago.” He tried to meet her eye, but Cargie looked away.

  “What about your parents? Are they still living?”

  “No, Cargie, they passed. Years ago.”

  “Brothers and sisters?”

  “Just me,” Thomas said.

  “Only you? Did you ever go back and tell your mama and daddy that you were okay?”

  “I went back lots of times to check on them, but I didn’t—I couldn’t—”

  “Since we moved here?” Cargie interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  Cargie looked out the front window at the empty street.

  I’ve been thinking,” Thomas said, “that I should turn myself in. I need to confess.”

  “Confess? Confess to who?”

  Thomas shrugged. “Your mother said—”

  “What does Mama have to do with any of this?”

  “She knew, Cargie. I told her years ago. We never talked about it again, but right before she died she said I need to confess. To get the sin out.” The look on his wife’s face made Thomas think she was about to slap him, and he jerked back a little, reflexively, before he saw that her hand wasn’t moving.

  Cargie got up then. She moved stiffly after sitting for so long. “Let me tell you one thing, and you can take this to the bank,” she said. “You have four children, and every single one of them thinks you hung the moon. Your daughters are happy in their lives. Your son is in his senior year of high school, and you are not going to ruin it for him—for any of them—just to ease your guilty conscience. No sir! That’ll happen over my dead body.” Cargie poked Thomas in the chest with her long and surprisingly strong index finger. “Or yours,” she said. Then she turned around before he could respond and walked out of the room.

  Later that evening, Thomas knocked tentatively on t
heir bedroom door. Cargie did not open it, so he knocked again. “Not tonight,” she called from inside, and that night Thomas and his wife slept apart for the one and only time in their marriage.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Cargie suspected she knew the very night her husband told her mother about his past. She had worked late, going over a company’s financials that arrived in the mail that day, and as usual, she lost track of the time. Bill Cole had waited patiently to drive her home, and they had talked the whole way to Mooretown about the company’s strengths and weaknesses and whether or not they would invest in it.

  Cargie had come in, worn out and toting David—David!—in her ballooning belly, and she’d found Thomas and her mother at the kitchen table. They were drinking coffee, even though it was after nine. Neither of them drank coffee that late anymore. There was something about them that night, something Cargie had not been able to put her finger on. Now she knew it was her husband’s secret hanging silently between them in the yellow light. Thomas had tossed and turned all night, and she had scolded him for drinking coffee so late.

  Cargie tossed and turned all night herself after Thomas told her. She turned his story over and over in her mind. It wasn’t hard to believe a Klansman had assaulted him—that had been common—nor was it difficult to comprehend the fear he must have felt, for his own safety and the safety of his family. She understood completely why he had run away and hidden. But Cargie could not reconcile the man she had known for forty years—the man who had shown so much love and kindness to everyone, even the cast-off dogs who wandered into his yard—that man, with a man who had left his own mother and father to wonder what had become of their only child long after the danger had passed. Who had left them to wonder for the rest of their lives!

  She had to get to the bottom of why. If she could.

  “Who else knows about all of this?” Cargie asked Thomas the next morning. He had made her breakfast, as he did every morning, and he sat across the table from her, drinking coffee while she ate it.

  “Nobody.”

  “Except Mama.”

  “Nobody living,” Thomas said.

  “Why her and not me?”

  Thomas shook his head.

  “Say,” Cargie insisted.

  “Because I should’ve already told you, Cargie. Before you married me, but I didn’t. And then I couldn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you now.” He got up from the table and went to the stove, where he fussed with the greasy frying pan.

  “Why did you tell me, husband?” She could not bring herself to call him Thomas. Or David. He turned around, and this time Cargie met his eye. “Looks to me like you were well on your way to taking this to your grave,” she said.

  “I was.”

  “If I had known before we married, I would’ve insisted you go to your parents and put an end to their wondering and worrying. Your grandfather too. Maybe him especially. I wish I had known.”

  “Gramps had already passed by then.”

  Cargie’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

  Thomas sighed. “I read about it while I was working in the library at Wiley.”

  “When did your parents die?”

  “Daddy died in forty-one, and Mama the year after.”

  “Lord, Thomas, they had three grandchildren by then! What would it have meant to your mama and daddy to be able to enjoy them? What would it have meant to our daughters to know their grandparents? I just can’t . . . I can’t understand this. There’s no excuse.”

  Thomas turned around and faced the stove, his palms flat on the tile countertops on either side of it.

  “Help me understand,” Cargie said.

  Thomas looked down. He shook his head. Then Cargie saw his shoulders buck and heard her husband sob for the first time in forty years. She had never seen more than a silent tear run down his cheek before. Certainly, she’d never heard him weep, as he was doing now over the stove. She felt pity then. She got up from the table and went to him, but he was lost in his grief and didn’t seem to know she was there. She took him by the shoulders and made him turn around.

  “Look at me, Thomas.”

  He would not look up.

  “Come, sit down.” Cargie led him at the table and he sat. With some effort, she knelt in front of him.

  “This is a terrible thing you’ve done,” she said. “And I’m not talking about that white man. I’m talking about your parents, Thomas. You should have gone to them when it was safe to do so. You should have told them, for their sakes.”

  “I couldn’t,” Thomas said. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t face them.”

  “Yes, I do understand. You didn’t want to face them, but you could have.”

  Thomas shook his head.

  “Yes,” Cargie said. “You could have, and you should have. It was wrong of you not to. That’s the sin Mama was talking about.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, Thomas. You stayed away because you were ashamed. You’ve been lying to yourself for a long, long time. You stayed away for you, not for them.”

  Thomas looked up at her then, and Cargie saw the truth in his eyes.

  “My God,” he said. “What have I done?”

  “We’ll get through this,” Cargie said.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  1968

  As soon as David went off to college, Thomas was determined to turn himself in for his moldy crime, and nothing Cargie said could put him off that notion. He wanted to gather their children and tell them the truth before he and Cargie headed out, first for Mooringsport, then to the Miller County sheriff’s office in Texarkana. He pestered Cargie about it for weeks, and he brought it up again on the eve of their departure.

  “Let’s just wait and see what happens,” Cargie said.

  “There’s a real good chance I won’t come home tomorrow night, Cargie.”

  She sat on the bed and patted it for Thomas to sit beside her. “You’re gonna have to trust me this time,” she said. “Do you trust me?”

  “I trust you, but I think it’s a mistake.”

  Cargie wasn’t worried about Thomas going to jail because she had taken out insurance against it. She couldn’t just sit by and watch her husband destroy himself and their family, so she had gotten the number of a high-profile civil rights attorney in New York City and telephoned his office. The man charged her a fortune, but in return he agreed to clear his schedule and wait by the phone on the day Thomas turned himself in. If Thomas ended up in handcuffs, Cargie would make the call, and that famous Yankee lawyer would hop on a private jet to Little Rock, where he would explain to the Arkansas governor himself what was about to happen when Thomas’s story hit the front page of every major newspaper in the country.

  “If those rednecks think Little Rock is a nightmare now, just wait ‘til I’m finished with them,” the attorney said. Cargie thought the lawyer was excited enough at the prospect of taking up Thomas’s fight that he might have paid her for the privilege if she had been inclined to bargain.

  Cargie crawled under the train trestle at Mooringsport because her husband was too large and too stiff to do it himself. Thomas followed her progress, walking alongside the trestle, hacking down the overgrown brush with a machete and occasionally dropping to one knee to see where she was. It crossed Cargie’s mind that anyone who saw them would think they were crazy old coots.

  “Lord have mercy . . . humph!“ She pulled and pushed herself up the rising bank under the trestle, flat on her stomach and grateful for thick blue jeans and a denim jacket that saved her knees and elbows. She ducked her head as the space between the dirt and the tracks tightened, then she laid her cheek against the back of her hand to rest a minute.

  Thomas got down on one knee and peered at her between the old creosote-soaked stanchions. “You okay, honey?”

  “I’m fine. Just catching my breath.”

  Thomas tapped a timber with the tip of the machete. “I believe it’s this one. It’ll be on the uphill side, r
ight close to the timber.”

  Cargie inched forward, and Thomas cut down the rest of the brush to let in the light. She used a flashlight to swipe at glistening spiderwebs—Cargie hated spiders—then she stuck her hand out into the sunlight and wiggled her fingers. “Trowel,” she said, and Thomas handed it to her.

  She scraped away a layer of gravel with the edge of the trowel. She kept scraping, shaving away the dirt as carefully as an archeologist unearthing fragile bones. Before long, the trowel scratched something besides loamy soil. Cargie shined the flashlight into the shadowy hole and began gently brushing dirt from oilcloth that still showed its red gingham check. “Lord God Almighty,” she whispered.

  She pulled the package from the hole and let the rotted cloth fall away. A leather pouch with a thin cord wrapped around it twice. She laid the pouch aside and reached into the hole again and pulled out a dirt-crusted bottle, the label still legible. Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey.

  “Do you see anything?” Thomas said.

  “I found it. It’s here.”

  She pushed the pouch and bottle into the sunlight and scooted back down the bank until she could crawl out where she had entered. Thomas was waiting for her and helped her get up. He bent over and brushed the dirt from her knees while she brushed at her elbows.

  They walked to where Thomas had stood the bottle on one crosstie and laid the pouch on another. Cargie unwrapped the leather cord, which did not break, stiff as it was. She opened the flap and pulled out the money and the envelope. The money clip fell to the ground, but Cargie only glanced at it. Thomas picked it up. He worried the clip in one hand while Cargie opened the envelope with the Klan’s seal, darkened with age, still affixed to it. “What does ‘Non Silba Sed Anthar’ mean?” she asked.

  “‘Not Self, But Others.’ It’s a Klan slogan.”

  Cargie pulled the letter from the envelope and read it aloud. When she had finished reading, she said, “There wasn’t one of them brave enough to put his name on this, was there? Grand Wizard of the Invisible Realm my foot. This sounds like something little boys in a secret club would write. But they weren’t children, were they? They were grown men, and violent ones at that. Reading this mess makes my blood boil, Thomas. This was wicked, wicked business. Through and through.” Cargie stuffed the letter back into the envelope and handed it to him. “I say good riddance to the lot of them, especially that devil who was carrying this. You did folks a favor stopping him.”