True Fires

by Susan Carol McCarthy

  “Christ Almighty, woman!”

  She’d cut him off. “My regards to the lovely Kitsy, sir. Gotta go now, sir. Good-bye, sir,” she’d said, then slowly, deliberately, hung up the phone.

  Of course, Jazz had sent flowers pleading “Patience, Ella. Love, Art.” Pink roses, which meant Paris to both of them. So far, she’d not replied, would not reply until the full force of her anger and disappointment subsided. Maybe, she wouldn’t reply at all.

  Lila squints at the door’s polished brass fittings, gleaming in a slant of midmorning sun. What if I don’t go back? What would the Assistant Chief of Sta f do then?

  Lila reaches for her coffee. Bleh! She sticks out her tongue at the gone-cold taste. A hot cup would be nice, but —she sighs— there’ll be no more co fee out of Sissy this morning.

  Aimless, in search of distraction, she returns to the stack of files in front of her, fingers the tabs whose typed titles list legal cases and rulings. Nothing here, she thinks, and pulls another stack toward her.

  On these folders, the tabs are handwritten in her father’s slashing scrawl. Some files are more interesting than others— particularly those with the names of local and state politicos. It would be easy, she thinks, to chart the Judge’s rise to political power, his increased fortunes in citrus and cattle, through the number of chits, favors, and payoffs, given and received, and carefully noted, in the margins of his chronological files. Through the years, she sees, his sidebar comments show a keen astuteness, an instinctive sense of timing, advantage, and opportunity. Sly old bastard, she thinks, begrudging him her respect.

  In another stack, there’s a file hand-tabbed simply and mysteriously “Ben.” Inside: a Certified Pedigree and Receipt of Sale for one “purebred gray Brahma herd sire, calved June 30, 1950, at 87 lbs., purchased April 3, 1953, at a certified weight of 1,029 lbs. Registration transferred from Breeder B. T. Hallwelle, Houston, Texas, to Owner Howard T. Hightower, Lake Esther, Florida, on April 3, 1953, for the sum of $750.00 plus shipping.”

  Hooah! Lila thinks, wondering if this is the very same blue-ribbon bull promised to Big Jim Yates, the soon-to-be-ex-Governor, at his panhandle ranch next spring.

  In other files are other Receipts of Sale for other bulls and cows, a whole herd, which Lila sets aside for forwarding to her father’s estate attorney, Paine Marsh. There was no specific mention of cattle in the Judge’s will, she recalls. Kyle claimed, and everyone assumed, the Judge had “transferred the herd to him months back.” Maybe he did, or maybe he didn’t. She’d have Paine inquire.

  In the meantime, what was she looking for, really? Would this be the place to find it?

  Here was another file tabbed simply “Missy” in her father’s own hand. She’d been surprised at how many “Missy” files there were, seeded throughout his cabinets, containing odd pieces of artwork, or school assignments, her Red Cross swimming certificate, a handmade Christmas card “To Daddy, From Missy-toe.” She and Louis must’ve been in first grade at the time, maybe second, about the same age as Franklin Dare’s little ’Becca.

  It was impossible to imagine the old man saving such things, tucking them away in tidy file folders with her nickname on it. Why were they still here? Had he forgotten them? Or, deliberately left them for her to find? Proof that, no matter what had passed between them, he was a good and loving father after all? Sonofabitch, manipulative to the end, weren’t you?

  Lila checks her watch—quarter to twelve—and wonders what her chances are of getting lunch. Sissy’s a tough old bird and, when riled, likely to pout till supper. I’ll give her another half hour, Lila decides, then make a sandwich myself.

  She turns back to the stack. Midway down is another folder tabbed “Louis.” Bastard, Lila rails at her dead father. Her twin brother’s files, scattered as randomly as her own, tugged at her in ways nothing else could. Flipping this one open, expecting some yellowing certificate from Pop Warner football, she’s surprised by the two small pieces of paper: On top, an address and phone number, written hastily, almost illegibly, in her mother’s hand. In “Jaxvile,” which was, no doubt, Jacksonville, Florida. The second, a personal check, also in her mother’s looping script, made payable to—she feels her heart fist inside her chest—“Bill Roy Thompson” for fifteen hundred dollars. With the Jacksonville phone number written on the memo line, bottom left.

  Lila knew the date without looking: January 9, 1943, the day before she and Louis turned twenty-one, when, legal at last, Louis had planned to announce his engagement to Lynette Thompson, Bill Roy’s only daughter.

  The day of the party, Lynette went missing. Louis spent hours looking for her, and, that night, accused the Judge of buying Lynette’s father off.

  “Where is she, you sonofabitch?” he’d roared, oblivious to all the others in attendance. “Tell me, or I’ll shoot your god-damned head off!” he’d threatened, brandishing the Judge’s own revolver in his face.

  The Judge had sworn “before God and these witnesses” that he knew nothing about Lynette’s disappearance.

  “Besides, Louis-honey,” Violet, already deep in her cups, had crooned, “everybody knows that girl’s nothing but trash. Even Kyle’s had her,” she’d said, slick as a snake. “Haven’t you, Kyle?”

  And, right then, in front of everybody, Kyle DeLuth had bald-faced lied, “Sure. Matter of fact, we had a kinda slipup. She’s in Jacksonville right now gettin’ it taken care of.”

  Everyone was stunned. Louis was shattered. And, the betrayal—not by Lynette, Louis knew her heart—but by his own parents and his supposed best friend propelled him into a spitting, flailing, pistol-whipping rage that took half a dozen grown men to subdue.

  In the end, it was Hamp, talking calmly, who took the gun, gently, out of Louis’s hand. And walked him out of the house, a companionable arm flung around his shoulder, to “get some air.” Lila could have, should have, joined them. But she’d felt frozen, statue-like, in place, wondering if what she’d seen had actually happened. Was it possible she’d imagined the whole thing?

  Afterward, Louis left. Without one single word to her. On the joint birthday that was supposed to get them both out from under the Judge’s thumb forever. It wasn’t a deliberate cruelty—her brother wasn’t capable of the kind of calculated abuse that was so clearly their parents’ stock in trade. The pain Louis caused was haphazard, accidental, on account of his lifelong inability to see the big picture.

  They found his car outside the Army recruiter’s office, who confirmed he’d presented himself “for immediate enlistment” and been transported to basic infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  No doubt he would’ve contacted her eventually. But, before that happened, Louis Hightower, her heart’s twin, was dead in Tunisia—in the bloody hand-to-hand fighting beneath the date palms of El Guettar—and, in a manner of speaking, so was she.

  After the funeral, the dismal folding of the flag, the bleak descent of the coffin, she’d meant to drive home, meet Hamp. But the road east, to the coast, came first. And she found herself turning, following the narrow black ribbon through miles of brooding hammock and pine woods to the broad blank sands of Daytona Beach. She’d stood for hours, staring at the gray ocean of tears whose far side wept on the shores of North Africa.

  Her own eyes were dry. Numb with grief, dumb with despair, she must have drawn the attention of the women, dressed in olive drab, strolling the boardwalk. Someone took her hand, drove her car, parked it near the pier in front of the W.A.C. recruitment office, escorted her onto the bus, and into the nearby basic-training camp. Weeks later, way too long to ever make it right, she realized, with a jolt, that she’d done to Hamp exactly what Louis had done to her.

  STILL ON THE FLOOR, Lila rocks back, shaking off the same sense of dizzy paralysis that kept her away from high places, the tops of tall buildings. What some people called fear of heights was, for her, the terrifying urge to jump.

  She looks down at the check, surprised to find it still in her hand. The tru
th, the shocking proof, of—Wait a minute. Questions and answers fly up, hard and fast, out of the looping holes of Violet’s signature: The check was drawn off a joint account. But when, in Paine Marsh’s office, Lila had wondered why all of the Judge’s accounts were in his name only, Marsh had replied, “Oh, your daddy took your mamma off things years ago.” How many years, exactly?

  Lila pulls in her feet, cradles both knees between her arms. Was it possible that Daddy’s oath that night was true? That he had no more knowledge of Mamma’s scheme, or Kyle’s connivance, than I did? That, all these years, I’ve hated him for something he didn’t do? The check, released, seesaws to the floor.

  Of course. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Louis’s public betrayal was too clumsy, too obvious, too out-of-control to have had the Judge’s hand. It violated one of the old bastard’s cardinal rules: “If you set out to trap an alligator, you better damn well be prepared to catch one!”

  When did he find out? Why didn’t he tell me? But, of course, after Louis left, she’d shut both of them out, then left herself. And when she returned, he was on his deathbed, unable to speak. Except—EXCEPT—through this file, planted innocuously, a deceit to Mamma’s prying eyes, yet here nonetheless, directly in my path. “The truth will out,” he always said.

  Oh, Daddy. Lila’s eyes stray back to the floor, the awful affront of the check’s amount. Fifteen hundred dollars. How could so much loss and su fering be purchased so damn cheaply?

  With a cold hand, one careful thumb and forefinger, she reaches out, turns it over, sees the endorsement.

  “Bill Roy Thompson,” it says, with a valiant flourish at the end. Underneath his name, Lynette’s father had added and underlined, in bold, block letters, the chilling pronouncement:

  “BURN IN HELL!!!”

  We did. Anguished eyes rise to the ceiling, toward her mother’s velvet-draped, bottle-shaped cell. We do.

  32

  Early afternoon, Daniel calls to Aunt Lu, who sits at the kitchen table reading library books—a whole stack of ’em brought out by the newspaper lady, Miz Barrows—to the girls.

  Lu comes outside to check his work. “You done a fine job on them bean rows, boy,” she says, and releases him to the woods. “Supper’s at sunset. Don’t keep us waitin’, hear?”

  Feeling like a noose unloosed, Daniel races out of the clearing, across the field, past the circle of Sampson’s beehives. One of ’em, he notes, looks woppy-jawed. He stops briefly to investigate, spots the series of small tracks, five-toed, some with the inner toe splayed open like a thumb. Dad gum possum, he thinks, and sees with a shock the striped husks, piled ankle-high, in front. Sucked the life plum out of ’em!

  Daniel scans the field for signs of the possum’s path, a den or a burrow. Mebbe Pap’ll come out on a possum hunt tonight, he thinks. And he feels his taste buds swell and sweat in hopes of possum slow-cooked with carrots, onions, and sweet taters.

  He slips a dozen or so of the husks into his pocket—to show the Ol’ Seminole, if I see ’im, or Pap, later on—and, after straightening the hive top, runs on to the waiting woods.

  The sandy trail, now hardened by the rain, is where he remembers it, narrow and hugged by pines. He slows to a lope. Shafts of sunlight sift through the high branches, speckling the ground with bright flecks of light, like powdered sugar on a griddle cake. Dozens of birds caw and chitter.

  “Woods is woods,” Sampson had said. But these are mightily different from the ones up home. Missing are the hardwoods, so colorful this time of year, the hickory and sassafras, dogwood and maple. Here are oaks of a different kind, and scrawnier pines, and the tall brooding sentinels he knows to be cypress. But there’s the familiar flicker of redwing; the ratchet of woodpecker; the thrum and drone of a million insects, and, everywhere, the spring of ferns, the thrust of seedlings, the determined clutch of vines. The lushness of life never fails to set his heart leaping like a grasshopper from stem to stalk.

  Daniel finds it easy to retrace his steps, to find the big tree root that, just two days ago, sent him sprawling through the bushes to the river where Sampson caught the catfish. Aunt Lu had soaked that fish overnight, as Sampson had said, and fried it crispy with cornmeal, the meat flaky and sweet. Beyond the root, the path parallels the whisper and scent of the river, then hooks right, over a rise, into denser growth.

  At a fork in the trail, Daniel hesitates. The left, he thinks, crooks back toward the water; the right ambles deeper inter the woods. In the midst of his decision making, he hears, off to the distant right, the whistle of an almost whippoorwill. “It’s him!” he yelps and sets off like a dog to the hunt.

  Up ahead, in the heart of a clearing, surrounded by pines as high as a church house, Sampson stands grinning welcome.

  “How’d you know I was in the woods?” Daniel asks, breathless.

  “Got my ways, heh?” Sampson tells him, pointing to a saw-grass basket suspended by a string off a tree limb.

  “What’s that?” Daniel peers up at it. Then adds, with a sharp intake of breath, “A beehive in a basket?”

  “Small one, guards camp.”

  Daniel feels his face scrunch up in disbelief.

  “Hive has guards all over th’ woods,” Sampson patiently explains. “Fly faster than a man can walk. Sets off a warnin’ dance for the others, shakes the bones for me.”

  Daniel studies the quivering basket, and the jangle of dried fish bones dangling beneath it. “It’s a signal,” he marvels. “And you knowed it was me?”

  Sampson shrugs. “ ’S why I whistled.”

  Behind the old man, Daniel sees something else that fills him with wonder. “That your house?”

  “Chee-kee,” Sampson says, giving a name to the three open-air structures of cypress poles, supporting peaked roofs of palmetto thatch. “Sleep, eat, work, heh?” Sampson points, each one containing objects that bear witness to its use. “Thirsty?” He turns to the fire in the clearing’s center, ladles a liquid out of an iron pot into a tin cup.

  Daniel follows him, takes the warm cup and asks, “What’s this?”

  “Sofkee, Seminole, drink,” he says, with an encouraging wave of his hand.

  Looks like tea, Daniel thinks. “Tastes like corn,” he tells him.

  “Yes.” Sampson pours himself some, sits on one of the two log stools beside the fire. Daniel joins him, openly staring ’round the clearing where Sampson lives, taking in the jumble of deer hides and hammock where he sleeps, the pinewood bench and table where he eats, and the cast-iron pots, the racks of honey jars, the odd tools and frames and stacks of wood for constructing hives. Off to the side of the work structure— chee-kee, he called it—is the three-wheeled cart he used to transport his hives into their field.

  “You live here alone?” Daniel asks.

  “Yes.” The Ol’ Seminole nods, sipping his drink. “ ’Cep’ for Mose.”

  “Mose?” Daniel scans the camp again, as if he missed someone.

  “Mose, heh?” Sampson laughs and pats the hump beside his stool that Daniel had thought to be a rock.

  “A turtle?” Daniel exclaims. “Biggest ol’ turtle I ever seed!” he says and gets up to examine the thing.

  Mose’s head, halfway out of its shell, casts an angry eye at Daniel, then retracts back into rocklike stillness.

  “Look at him!” Daniel rubs a hand across the ancient hump, traces the shape of a brown six-sided section.

  “Hex,” Sampson says, softly.

  “What?” Daniel looks up.

  Sampson points to the shell section beneath the boy’s finger. “Hex,” he says. Then, in explanation, “God’s Eye.”

  “God’s what?”

  “Eye, eye, heh?” the old man points to one of his own dark eyes, then back to the turtle. “God’s Eye.”

  “You talkin’ Indian stuff?”

  Patient, Sampson spreads his wide smile. “God,” he explains gently, “loves ever’thin’. Some more’n others. Fav’rites have the hex, called God’s Eye. Turtle
shell . . .” he traces a six-sided section of Mose’s shell lightly. “Honeycomb, snowflake . . .”

  “Feldspar?” Daniel asks quickly, remembering the familiar six-sided shape in the mineral’s creamy crystals.

  “Yes. And you.” Sampson holds up a hand, palm forward, separates his thumb from his fingers, and his fingers in the middle, two from two. Daniel, curious, does the same. The old man bends forward, and, softly, traces the six-sided shape that outlines the boy’s palm: little finger to center, one; center to pointer, two; pointer to thumb, three; thumb to wrist, four; across wrist, five; wrist to little finger, six. “God’s Eye, on you, heh?”

  Daniel studies his palm, wondering what it means, to have a hex on your own hand? It was, indeed, the identical shape, almost the same size, as the six-sided hex on the old turtle’s back. The same shape that defines a honeycomb, and a hornet’s nest, and so many of the rock crystals he’d collected up home. What does it have to do with God? And with this ancient Indian who seems to know more than any man he’s ever met?

  “God’s Eye means special,” Sampson says, in answer to Daniel’s thoughts. “Special to God, heh? Means honor the Most High. Means protect the Least Low. In children, means grow. And live!”

  “Live?” Daniel says, baffled. “Ever’one does that.”

  “No. Some families fall apart. Hives fail. Children die young.”

  “Oh, hives.” Daniel suddenly remembers and reaches in his pocket to retrieve the bee husks. “Possum got inter one of yourn. Left a pile of these outside.” He shows Sampson the empty, weightless remains.

  “Ohhh.” The old man says it sad, mournful. He takes the husks, cradles them in both hands, lifts them up. “Honor the Most High,” he says, his voice like smoke rising skyward. “Protect the Least Low,” he whispers, lowering his palms reverent as a prayer. Then, with a look that Daniel recognizes as genuine sorrow, he bows his head, lets each husk slip slowly, silently into the fire.