“I’m not joking. In 1913, south of Doddridge, I got into it with a Klansman and killed him. It was an accident.”
“Where’s the body?”
“The alligators took him. He’s long gone.”
Bates worked his mouth, drawing his lips in and pooching them out again. “Ain’t no crime without a body,” he said, finally. He waved at the pile of history on his desk. “Go on now and take all this mess with you.”
“But the law?”
Bates walked around the desk and came chest to chest with Thomas, undaunted by Thomas’s height or his evidence. “You listen, mister, and you listen real good. Today I’m the law in Miller County.”
“C’mon, honey, let’s go,” Cargie said.
Thomas did not move. He seemed stuck, as if he were set on penance he was being denied.
“God Almighty!” Bates flared, flushing all the way to his khaki collar. He wiped spittle from his lower lip and collected himself. “I can understand y’all wantin’ to do the right thing, but coming in here after half a damn century? In these times? You’re gonna have to find your peace somewheres else, mister. Now, you take all this and clear out. I mean it. You got no debt to Miller County.”
“Okay,” Thomas said. “All right.” He gathered the money and letter into the pouch and hastily wrapped the cord. They hurried out of the courthouse into the mild afternoon. Thomas stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned to Cargie. “What just happened?”
“Mercy,” Cargie said. “Mercy just happened.”
Chapter Seventy
1969
Mae had not seen Cameron, Louisiana, in twelve years.
To the day.
She arrived at the coast midmorning, having risen early to make the four-hour drive from Shreveport. She parked her sedan at a marina across from Monkey Island and walked down the wooden dock. In one slip was a pretty boat with Millicent painted in gold letters across the stern. A man in a captain’s cap was hosing down the deck, and Mae asked if he would take her out on the Gulf, just offshore.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “Done fishing. Got nothing but time this afternoon.”
Mae sat in the bow while the captain guided them out of the sheltered channel to open water. He pushed the throttle forward, and the boat plowed the buffeting waves. Mae hung on to the metal rail, riding high. Behind her stretched the empty beach, on which she and Hollister had enjoyed so many summer vacations, the last of which ended with them fleeing for their lives in the wee, dark hours.
“Stop here. This is good,” She called to the captain.
He cut the engine. Suddenly it was quiet, with only the sound of waves slapping against the varnished boat. The captain descended the steps from the bridge and came to stand beside her at the rail. Mae hugged her cargo tight against her.
“Take as long as you need,” he said. “I’ll put down the anchor.” When the captain returned, he stood with his back against the wheelhouse, giving Mae her space.
“Who’s Millicent?” she asked.
“My wife.”
“How long have you been married?”
He crossed the deck to the rail beside her. He wore a cap and sunglasses and a heavy, graying beard, so that his darkly tanned cheeks and nose were all Mae saw of his face. “We were married seventeen years,” he said. “Been widowed twelve.”
“Audrey?”
“Yes ma’am. Spent a day and a night in the deep, and my Millicent was torn from my arms. Our daughter too. Our son was sixteen and strong as an ox. He got through it in the top of a tree, same as me.” The captain gripped the rail with both hands and put his head down. Then he sighed deeply and straightened up. He ran one knuckle up under his sunglasses. “Can’t talk about it. Too raw. Even now.”
“My husband,” Mae pointed to the urn. “Hollister. We first came here in thirty-two. We were driving the beach road and happened on the Primeaux’s cabins.”
“Yes ma’am. We knew Tud and Flo. They perished as well.”
“I don’t believe they were ever found,” Mae said.
“No, they were not. There was nothing left of their place.”
“After Audrey,” Mae said, “we started going to Florida. The Panhandle beaches were as white as sugar and just as fine, and the water was so clear and blue. We drove down there every summer and had a good time, but it never meant as much to us as this place.”
“It does get in your blood.”
“I remember one time—gosh, I haven’t thought about it in years—one time, Hollister stood on the beach at high tide, right there.” Mae pointed. “Right . . . just there.”
She became quiet, remembering how he had looked. So handsome and young. Twenty-something and full of rye. Standing on the beach, just out of the waves’ reach. A little bit drunk, as he always was.
After a moment, the captain asked, “And what did your Hollister do?”
“He pointed at the Gulf, at the whole Gulf of Mexico, and hollered, really loud, ‘This far you may come, but no farther! Here your proud waves must stop!’”
“Book of Job,” said the captain.
“Is it? I never knew that. I thought Hollister came up with it.”
“This Gulf, she has a mind of her own. She doesn’t obey God or your husband.”
“No sir. Seems like most of life is of the same mind.”
Hollister had gone so quickly that Mae didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. They were in the kitchen—she was frying a chicken—and he went down on the linoleum. Suddenly. “Good Lord,” he said as he crumpled to one knee. He tried to catch himself on a barstool, and it clattered to the floor.
He rolled over and was unconscious by the time Mae got around the counter to him. She called for an ambulance right away, and she rode to the hospital in the back with Hollister and the attendant. The attendant paid no mind to her, but shouted to the driver, who relayed everything to the hospital on his radio.
“Jaundice,” the attendant called, and it was repeated into a microphone at the end of a coiled cord coming out of the dashboard. Mae had tried to rouse Hollister on the kitchen floor. She had gone as far as lifting his eyelid, and the white of his eye had been as yellow as a daffodil.
Blood trickled from Hollister’s nose. His mouth. His ears.
“Coagulopathy!” cried the attendant, and the driver stepped on the gas.
Mae laid her hand on Hollister’s stomach, which had swelled like a pregnant woman’s. When had that happened? They reached the hospital, and she held onto the gurney until it was shoved into a room she was not permitted to enter. A nurse directed Mae to a waiting area, where she sat and worried.
In a little while, a young doctor came out and sat beside her. “Mrs. Caine, your husband has suffered acute liver failure.”
“Will he be okay?”
The doctor pressed his lips. Shook his head. “How long has Mr. Caine been an alcoholic?”
“An alcoholic?“
“Yes ma’am,” the young doctor said mildly. Respectfully. “How many years?”
Mae thought about it, really thought about it, as she had never permitted herself to before. “All of them,” she said. “All the years.”
Mae declined the nurse’s offer to call family and friends. Hollister would not have wanted anyone to see him like this. She sat by his bedside and held his warm and swollen hand until he expired a few hours later.
Mae took the top off the urn. It was hard to let him go. Many times since January, while she waited for this anniversary to come, she had opened the urn and breathed her husband’s burnt mineral purity.
“Can’t anybody or anything take him away from you,” the captain said.
Mae nodded and upended the urn over the side. A flurry of ashes fell into the soapsuds water and quickly disappeared. The rest were carried away on the Gulf breeze. She shook the urn, then threw it as far as she could.
She turned to the captain. He had removed his cap, showing a forehead as fair and smooth as hers. He began to sing “Amazing Grace�
�� in a clear choral voice. Mae joined him, and they did not let up until every word of every verse had been loosed upon the fickle sea.
“‘Twas a sailor wrote that,” the captain said. He settled his cap and went forward to raise the anchor.
Chapter Seventy-One
1972
Bill Cole finally went to the doctor when he was unable to shake off a cough that had persisted for weeks. The doctor pronounced that he was at death’s door with lung cancer, even though he had not smoked a single cigarette in his life. “The doctor said it might’ve come from that mess we breathed back in the war,” Bill told Cargie over their afternoon Spanish peanuts and cold drinks. “Or from all these dry-cleaning chemicals. Lord knows, I’ve inhaled enough of them.” He munched peanuts as if it were any other afternoon. “But then he said maybe it was none of that. Might just be bad luck.”
“Isn’t there anything they can do?”
“He offered the chemotherapy.” Bill paused and sipped his Coke. “But he did not recommend it.”
Cargie was speechless. She did not believe she could have felt any worse if the death sentence had been hers. They sat a while, not counting the morning’s money or receipts. Cargie opened the desk drawer, reached way to the back, and took out the diary. She placed it between them.
“Oh,” Bill said. “I wondered where that got off to.”
“It was wrong of me not to tell you. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” he said quickly. “To tell you the truth, Cargie, it was right nice knowing you took an interest.”
Cole’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry closed its doors when Bill died, and Cargie had no stake in the disposition of the business, having remained an employee through all the years. Neither did she receive the payout Bill made to the others who had worked for him, some for decades. She wouldn’t have stood for it if he’d offered.
But there was one final reconciling that needed to occur, and that was the disposition of the partnership Bill and Cargie had created. The two of them had ridden the coattails of scores of companies that Cargie vetted. A few—Electric Boat, International Paper and Power, Douglas Aircraft—had clawed their way out of the Depression, made money hand over fist during the war, and adapted to a new America afterward. All the while, the value of their equities multiplied like rabbits in spring.
Ever the fiscal guardian, Walter Addington was the one who had suggested the two entrepreneurs form a corporation to protect the wealth they were accumulating. Cargie conducted weeks of research and came to the same conclusion. “What should we call our company?” she had asked Bill.
“I’ve been noodling on that. I like the idea of working our names in. What do you think of Barre-Cole.”
“Sounds like we want to ban fossil fuel.”
“Cole-Barre?”
“Cole-Pittman,” Cargie said.
“Pittman?”
“That’s my maiden name. Go on now. Write it down. Let’s see how it looks.”
Bill wrote Cole-Pittman Enterprises on the back of a receipt. “It has a good ring to it,” he said. “You sure about this?”
“Yes sir. I like it. Don’t worry about Thomas. Trust me, he’ll understand.”
After Bill was planted and mourned, Walter Addington telephoned Cargie and asked her to come down to the bank. “We need to meet with the attorney,” he said.
The morning of their meeting, Cargie stood on the sidewalk in front of First City Bank. A few years before, she would have been tackled by a guard if she had tried to waltz in the front door to do business with one of the tellers. Because Cargie had not been permitted to conduct transactions in person, the bank president himself had tended the savings account she opened there after the Crash.
But times were catching up with Cargie, even though she had not lifted a finger to help them along. She’d never darkened the door of a white-owned soda fountain, much less refused to leave in protest. She’d never insisted on sitting in the front of a streetcar or a bus, nor had she risked life and limb to march for the rights of black folks. Or women. Or anyone else, for that matter.
Cargie wished she had been as courageous as Shirley Chisholm, a black Congresswoman from New York—the first member of Congress to be both black and female. Chisolm had gone as far as announcing her bid for the job of President of the United States—President of the United States!—despite everyone knowing she could not possibly win. Chisolm would lose, and she knew it, but she fought the good fight anyway to inch folks closer to where they needed to go.
As Cargie stood on the sidewalk in front of First City Bank on a pleasant April morning, she concluded that her own journey had been undeservedly easy. Every valley had been raised and every mountain made low. Every rugged, impassable place had been smoothed in front of her, thanks to the men in her life: Thomas Barre. Bill Cole. Walter Addington. The pure kindness of these men loosed Cargie’s emotions. She ran into the bank, through the lobby, and into the ladies’ room, where she locked herself in a stall.
“Are you okay in there, honey?” a woman asked through the door.
“I just need a minute,” sputtered Cargie. She stayed put until her hiccupy torrent subsided. Then she washed her face and went to her meeting.
Mr. Addington’s secretary stood when Cargie approached her desk. “Mrs. Barre! We were a little worried about you. May I get you something to drink? Would you like a cup of coffee or tea?”
“No ma’am. Thank you.”
“In here then, please.” The secretary opened Mr. Addington’s door. “They’re waiting for you.”
Cargie had not met Mr. Seele, the attorney who handled Bill’s affairs and drew up the papers for their corporation. The lawyer popped up from his chair as if the Queen of England had walked in. “Mrs. Barre! It’s a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.”
“Pleased to meet you as well, sir.”
“Please, Cargie, have a seat,” Walter said.
“Your time is valuable, so I’ll get right to it,” said Mr. Seele. He picked up a single sheet of paper from the edge of the desk. “Mr. Cole signed this addendum to your partnership.” He handed the paper to Cargie.
“When?”
“Not long after you formed Cole-Pittman. As you can see, it’s quite straightforward, stipulating that his interest transfers to you in the event of his incapacity or death.”
“What about Mrs. Cole?”
“Mrs. Cole?” Mr. Seele looked at Walter Addington.
“Vida Cole is well supplied,” said Walter. “Bill set up a generous trust for her and other members of his family before Cole-Pittman was ever conceived. Vida will never do without.”
“Still . . . it doesn’t seem quite right.”
“Carrying out Bill Cole’s intention is entirely the right thing to do,” said Mr. Seele. “Legally and morally.”
“For the record, Cargie,” Walter said, “I concur without reservation. Bill always believed the company rightfully belonged to you.”
Cargie was glad she had already cried all her tears. “Very well,” she said, “but tell me about these trusts.”
Chapter Seventy-Two
1987
On a Wednesday morning in October, when Thomas Barre was ninety-one years old, he put on his hat after breakfast and walked down the street to Lydie Murphy’s house to have coffee and invite her to supper that night. The weather had been warming up since the weekend, and the sky was brilliant blue without a cloud in it.
Lydie answered the door. She had not found a live-in maid to her liking after Mavis passed. She had finally given up the search and hired two thoroughly tattooed former drug addicts, sisters, who cleaned houses and called themselves the Mopsy Twins. The twins drove a white van with a professionally painted logo on the side, and they did not mind coming out to Mooretown once a week to clean Lydie’s mansion. Lydie paid them well, having a soft spot for down-and-outers trying to make a fresh start. After almost sixty years, the defiant swagger of Lydie’s youth had mellowed, and she’d aged into an agreeab
ly piquant matriarch. Thomas enjoyed her company immensely.
Lydie had taken to cooking. She raised her own vegetables and herbs in a large garden she planted in the vacant lot beside the mansion. She did not own the lot, but nobody made a fuss about her using it. It seemed to Thomas that folks avoided taking on Lydie Murphy.
Lydie took her cooking as far as attending a month-long course at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. She took Becca, who saw and did everything there was to see and do in Paris while Lydie took her daily instruction. Thomas had to admit that Lydie came back a better cook than when she left.
Thomas and Cargie had traveled to France themselves. France was the first big trip they took after all the children were out of the house and following their own paths through the world. Many more vacations followed, so many, in fact, that the kids teasingly called their parents the Mooretown Globetrotters.
Cargie had mapped out a route through France that covered all the places she wanted to see. They rented a Renault and drove for miles through verdant farmland alongside the lazy Le Meuse river. Signs of the Great War were everywhere. Overgrown trenches and shell holes interrupted just about every plowed field. They saw crumbling German pillboxes too, in which the weary German soldiers had vainly tried to withstand French and American forces. A half dozen times, they passed rusted, mud-caked artillery lying beside the road. One farmer left his tractor and trotted across the field when he saw them get out of the car and walk toward the shells.
“No!” he hollered. “Danger!”
Thomas held up his camera. “Image,“ he yelled back, “No toucher.”
The farmer nodded, gave Thomas a thumbs-up sign, and returned to his work. Thomas knelt to take a photograph of the three ancient shells lying in the soft grass.
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