Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  Nathaniel Greene’s daughters listened as Lewis described the hilarity that would occur each weekend night in the summer months and all week long in the winter travel season eight miles down the shore from their quiet household, though their father’s stern glances let them know that he expected them to stay far away. An enlightened invitation to dinner was one thing, his fair-skinned daughters crossing the color line another.

  The Greene family kept a black gardener named Axelrod, who also brought them buckets of oysters and who hummed when he worked, whether he was gardening or shucking. When the humming turned to singing, he sang in a language none of the Greene family understood. One morning, Viola heard Axelrod tell a meat deliveryman that Earl Hines’s Grand Terrace Orchestra would play at the Rendezvous Nightclub in American Beach that coming Friday night with a young singer named Billy Eckstein whose voice could melt a girl’s legs in her stockings.

  Viola whispered the news to Louise at lunch, and, on Friday evening, saying that they would stroll on the beach, they walked two miles down the shoreline on Fletcher Drive, then rode the rest of the way to American Beach in a cotton farmer’s Chevrolet that nearly ran over them in the dark before the farmer insisted they climb in with him.

  The lights, the music and laughter, and the smell of the ocean, whiskey, and tobacco gave the girls everything they’d been missing since leaving New Jersey, and though they’d promised each other that they would start toward home at ten p.m., midnight passed with a bottle of champagne on their table. At two a.m., they were dancing with men who might’ve been lynched for eyeing a white woman in any other part of Florida. During one drunken number, Axelrod stepped on to the stage and sang alongside Billy Eckstein whose voice, the sisters agreed, really could melt a girl’s legs in her stockings. When Axelrod stepped off the stage, he cut in on the man who was dancing with Louise, and the daughter of the insurance man and the family gardener stayed on the floor, fast dance and slow, until Viola tugged on her sister’s dress. The morning sun would rise on their empty beds if they didn’t get home soon.

  They crept through the back door, exhausted and happy, shoes in their hands, a little after four o’clock in the morning, but they found their father in the parlor with three neighborhood men, all holding shotguns. He’d convinced the men that if the girls hadn’t been murdered, they surely had been raped as they’d walked on the beach, and by the time the fact came out that they’d been drinking champagne of their own accord at American Beach, Nathaniel Greene felt so humiliated he was ready to board a train back to New Jersey, never to return.

  A sound in the kitchen startled me and got Percy to his feet. Johnny had dropped something metal in the sink. I called to him, ‘Are you all right?’

  He grunted a sound that I took to mean he was fine, and I kept reading.

  Viola stayed home after that wild night. She played the piano in the afternoons and sat at a card table with her mother and her mother’s friends in the evenings, and though her physical beauty grew so that she became a favorite of the Fernandina bachelors, something seemed to wither inside her.

  But Louise continued to sneak out, climbing down from her second-story window and riding to the Rendezvous in the front seat of Axelrod’s pickup truck. The girls’ parents never seemed to suspect, but Viola could smell the whiskey and tobacco smoke emanating from her sister’s skin when Louise slipped into bed in the late hours of the night.

  Two weeks after Christmas, Louise confided to Viola that she was pregnant.

  Johnny came into the sunroom, wearing the T-shirt that I’d helped him into but naked from the waist down. My stomach dropped. His hands were bloody up to the wrists, and he carried a steak knife, the blade smeared and speckled with blood. He had pasted his tangle of hair to his scalp with water or maybe a bloody hand. His eyes were wild with panic.

  I hardly got the words from my mouth. ‘What are you—’

  He seemed amazed by the obvious. ‘I cut myself.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked at his hands as if they were foreigners. ‘I didn’t mean to – an accident—’

  ‘You cut both hands by accident?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I went to him.

  He held the knife toward me and looked at me from the corners of his eyes. ‘No.’

  Percy barked and I stepped toward Johnny. ‘Are you going to cut me?’

  He stood still, and I realized that the idea had crossed his mind.

  ‘Do what you’re going to do,’ I said.

  He backed from the room.

  I caught my breath and followed him into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table under the bright kitchen light. The bloody knife was on the counter by the sink.

  I got two dishtowels from a cabinet and wrapped his bleeding hands. Tears had dampened his cheeks, but in the seconds between leaving the sunroom and my following him, he had stopped crying and his eyes were hard.

  I put Percy in the backyard, led Johnny to our bedroom, found shorts and his sandals, and helped him into them. I took him outside and to the car. As we drove to the ER, he stared out the passenger window into the dark. We said nothing. I knew what to say but was afraid to say it – he had hurt himself, and he’d seemed ready to hurt me. He’d gone too far.

  Johnny sat dumbly in a chair at Baptist Hospital Admissions as I explained what had happened. The intake nurse showed no surprise or evident interest, filling the forms on her computer with sleepy boredom. When we finished, she called for two male nurses who accompanied Johnny through swinging doors.

  The intake nurse said, ‘You understand that if your husband refuses to commit himself voluntarily, we’ll need the police to sign for an involuntary admission.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘You want me to call?’

  ‘I don’t think he meant to hurt himself.’

  Looking more inconvenienced than angry, she picked up the phone.

  ‘Wait.’ I pulled out my cell phone. ‘My brother’s a cop. It’ll be easier on Johnny.’

  An hour and a half later, after Daniel had signed and dated the forms, a thin-haired doctor in green scrubs came to the waiting room and called my name. In a dimly lighted office, he said, ‘Your husband claims this was a mistake, though he can’t explain how it happened. As I’m sure you know, mistakes like this don’t happen. But he seems calm, and his thinking seems clear now. We can hold him for up to seventy-two hours, but after that the law says we need to cut him loose. He needs help. You understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘How bad are the cuts?’

  ‘I don’t think he meant to kill himself, just inflict some damage. Most of the wounds are shallow and none are on the wrists. We put twelve stitches in his left hand and bandaged his right.’

  ‘Can I see him?’

  His face hardened. ‘We’ve sedated him. There’s really nothing to see.’

  ‘I want to see him anyway.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. For the first twenty-four to seventy-two hours, patients are isolated. We’ll take good care of him.’

  ‘He’ll be furious with me for this.’

  ‘He may be. But I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. You’ve done the right thing.’

  A fern in a glazed pot stood on the carpet in the corner of the office. A white orchid stood on a black pebble display on a file cabinet. The antiseptic smell of the waiting room and the hospital corridors seemed far away. I said, ‘I need to get out of here.’

  Outside the hospital, the morning sun stung my eyes. A seagull shot through the sky toward the river as if something terrible and invisible was chasing it.

  I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to see the drying blood on the sunroom floor. I didn’t want to see the steak knife on the kitchen counter. If the hospital needed to reach me, they had my cell number. Percy would be fine for a few hours in the backyard.

  I got on the highway h
eading north over the Fuller Warren Bridge. When traffic unbottled on the other side, I drove toward Fernandina, stopped for coffee and breakfast, and, at ten a.m., walked into the Amelia Island Museum of History. The man who charged admission and ran the gift shop directed me to a volunteer docent named Phyllis Chin, a graying Chinese woman in pearls and a black-and-white paisley blouse. She offered to show me through the museum library and archives but said she knew the records as well as anyone.

  ‘What do you know about the Greene family?’ I asked.

  Her face lit up. ‘Controversial.’

  She told me about them. As I already knew, Nathaniel Greene and his family vacationed and then lived in Fernandina since the early years of the twentieth century, but so did Nathaniel’s two brothers, and before them their parents and grandparents. They had expanded their hold on the sandy soil and town governance ever since Nathaniel’s grandfather, at age eighteen, served on one of the Union gunboats that chased the last of the Confederate troops from the fort at the north end of Amelia Island.

  Nearly eighty years after that soldier sank his feet into the local soil, Viola Greene, having renounced the wild behavior that took her to hear Billy Eckstein sing at the Rendezvous, married Jonathan Phelps of the Phelps Paper Corporation family, merging money with money and a generally respected name with ruthless power. The Phelpses had grabbed hundreds of square miles of timberland throughout the Southeast, wresting tracts from families that had squatted on and sometimes owned outright the land for three or more generations. According to the local joke in Fernandina, when the fumes from the pulp mills got so bad that people had to close the doors and windows even in the worst summer heat, the Phelpses were printing money.

  Meantime, Louise fell as far as Viola climbed. She left Nathaniel Greene’s house – or he kicked her out – and she moved in with Axelrod, whose last name, from the time his grandfathers were slaves, was Jenkins, though he mostly went by the name Crowe. Nathaniel had run Axelrod off of his property upon first suspecting a relationship between him and his younger daughter. Then, during World War II, the ex-gardener made money pounding sheet metal at the Merrill-Stevens Shipyard and, after the war, raking for oysters on one of the barrier islands where he and Louise lived in a cottage and had nine or ten children, some said as many as twelve.

  I asked the docent, ‘Did Sheneel and Alex Greene come from Nathaniel’s family line or one of his brothers’?’

  She went to a computer and opened a database. After a few minutes, she said, ‘Sheneel is a direct descendant of Viola Greene-Phelps – Viola’s great-granddaughter, Nathaniel’s great-great-granddaughter.’ She searched again. ‘Alex is Sheneel’s half-brother. They share a mother, Laura Greene, Viola’s granddaughter – I don’t know how she got back to being a Greene instead of a Phelps.’ She read further and laughed. ‘This is why I love this stuff. The Greene family is very messy. Alex also has blood from Louise Greene’s side. His mother, Laura Greene, is a descendant of Viola, but his father a descendant of one of Axelrod’s brothers.’ The docent seemed pleased. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

  She crossed the library to a cabinet of map drawers, found a chart of the southern coast of Georgia – from the Florida state line to Savannah – and spread it on a desk. Running her finger to the north from the state border, she said, ‘A hundred years ago, this area, from the shore inland to the towns of Woodbine and White Oak, was mostly forest, and Axelrod’s extended family, all black, lived there, or that’s what the stories say. Supposedly, they owned it, but – again supposedly – they had no deeds to it. The Phelps family wanted the timber, and, around the time that Viola married Jonathan Phelps, the company went in with saws and trucks.’ The docent smiled. ‘It was basically robbery.’

  ‘How did Louise and Viola get along after that?’ I asked.

  ‘They both lived into their eighties, and the stories say they never talked again. But they had other reasons to be mad at each other, and these things usually are more complicated than they look from outside. Alex Greene, with blood from both the black Greenes and the white Phelpses, is evidence that other parts of their families got over their anger.’ Again she smiled, as if inviting me to share the pleasure she felt in the disorder of human relations.

  At eleven-thirty, I drove across town to the little yellow house where Johnny had said he’d talked with Sheneel’s brother. A red motor scooter leaned against a dying palm tree in the front yard. Inside the front porch, as Johnny had said, newspapers covered the front windows, blocking the sunlight or warding off evil. I got out of the car to see more clearly. No birds sang. No traffic passed. In the distance, smoke rose from a mill smokestack. I walked across the sandy lawn and knocked on the porch door. When no one answered, I stepped into the porch and knocked on the door to the house.

  No answer.

  But as I started to leave, a man’s voice spoke from the other side of the door. ‘What?’

  I said, ‘My name’s Lillian Turner. I was one of Sheneel’s teachers. You talked to my husband yesterday.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Would you open the door?’

  Again, nothing.

  I said, ‘My husband is in the hospital.’

  The lock clicked, and Alex Greene opened the door. ‘Why?’

  The house behind him was dark. He wore black shorts and a baggy white T-shirt with a single word scrawled on it in black marker – Ngafa.

  ‘I don’t know why. He hurt himself. He meant to.’

  His face was blank. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do I get to come in?’

  The house inside was hot and smelled of his sweat. He cleared a blanket from a couch and let me sit. I said, ‘Sheneel was a good person. She was …’ Like a wren, I thought. ‘I miss her.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘I need to understand.’

  He let that hang in the air. My presence in the house and my selfish needs were unfair to him and hurtful. I should have apologized for coming and left him alone. Instead, I nodded at his T-shirt and said, ‘Ngafa?’

  ‘You came here to talk about my shirt?’

  ‘That’s Sheneel’s word. It means bad spirit?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It means hidden devil.’

  ‘Sheneel told me—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what she told you.’

  ‘It’s Gullah?’

  ‘Gullah, Geechee, Mende. Yeah.’ He was holding in his anger. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I need to know,’ I said.

  ‘What’s to know?’

  I said, ‘The police arrested her last summer.’

  He looked surprised but smiled. ‘She was partying and got a little crazy.’

  ‘In what way crazy?’

  Still smiling. ‘She had a blade.’

  ‘Did she cut herself?’

  ‘Someone else. It wasn’t bad. Band-Aids.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘A friend who had it coming.’

  ‘And this friend called the police?’

  He shook his head. ‘I did.’

  ‘Why? If the friend had it coming.’

  He stared hard. ‘Because she would have killed him if I hadn’t called.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, though I didn’t. The living room was barely furnished. ‘I read the report. It said she bonded out of jail the next morning for ten thousand dollars. Where’d she get the money?’

  ‘We have family here. They helped.’

  ‘But not Sheneel’s mom and dad.’

  ‘Our mom is in New Mexico. For the last two years.’

  ‘What about her dad?’

  His smile disappeared. ‘He doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Does he live around here?’

  He just stared.

  ‘What happened to the charges?’

  ‘The police dropped them. Our friend decided not to testify.’

  ‘That was friendly.’

  ‘Not very.’ He gave m
e a wooden look. My questions had seemed to penetrate only his outer skin. I had no business being here and asking about Sheneel’s personal life. If I was unable to stay away, that was my problem, not his.

  I stood. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said – empty words. My sorrow would do him no more good than my inconsiderate questions.

  He watched me walk to the door, but before I could step outside, he spoke. ‘You’re pretty. Like Sheneel said.’

  Sweat broke on my arms. ‘I want to give you something,’ I said. ‘Do you have a pen and paper?’

  He went to the kitchen and came back with a marker and notepad. I wrote:

  You saturated Sight,

  And I had no more Eyes

  For sordid excellence.

  I tore the sheet from the pad, folded it once, and gave it to him. ‘It’s from a poem that I never taught to Sheneel but should have.’

  I drove home. I fed Percy. I scrubbed the sunroom floor and the kitchen counter. I cleaned blood from the steak knife, thinking I would put it back in the knife drawer, but instead wrapped it in newspaper and carried it outside to the garbage. I called the hospital to check on Johnny, but the nurse would tell me nothing. I repositioned the lawn chair in the backyard and tried to read a stack of student essays, but I couldn’t concentrate. When the phone rang, I ran to it, though I expected no news from anyone.

  Daniel was on the line. ‘How’s Johnny?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. They isolate patients at first.’

  ‘When you see him, tell him I’m pulling for him.’

  ‘Thanks, Daniel.’

  ‘You’re my little sister. You’d expect something else?’

  TEN

  Stephen Phelps

  Bastard on the line, Christina said. No, she wouldn’t. ‘Alex Greene on the line,’ she said, as if he deserved the respect – and that’s why I paid her: to sit politely outside my office with her knees pressed together under her neat little desk.