by Nevada Barr
“Mama’s apartments being at the back of the house like they are, she can’t much see or hear folks coming to the front,” Raymond explained.
“I see and hear just fine,” his mother reproved him. “Doyce parks right out back, there,” she pointed a bent and knobby forefinger at a heavily draped window opposite where Anna sat. “I’d of heard if he drove in or out and he did no such thing.”
“Did anybody else drive in or out?” Anna asked.
“If they did they didn’t come to the back. Everybody who knows us, everybody welcome in our house, knows to come to the back.”
Anna had been put in her place and acknowledged it with a nod. The information wasn’t without value. If Doyce had not taken his truck and his killer or killers had come to the front of the house to fetch him they were, by Mrs. Barnette’s definition, not friends. Yet he knew them and trusted them enough to leave the house and go with them.
“That’s helpful, Mrs. Barnette. Thank you.”
Barth cleared his throat. Anna’s interest in the smashing of the car that she wasn’t in was well and good, but he wanted her to move on. Barnette air was not healthy for a black man. Anna didn’t wonder why he didn’t speak for himself. Barth Dinkins as a man was interested in the treatment of African-Americans, socially, politically, historically. Barth Dinkins as a law-enforcement ranger was interested in results. Anna guessed Raymond might not be as racist as his mother, but the only way a black man would get a satisfactory response out of either of them would be with a baseball bat and maybe not then.
They’d agreed to come at Barnette obliquely regarding the little grave. Anna sipped the excellent tea as she thought about that.
Old people like to talk about the past. Why this was so, she wasn’t old enough to understand, only that it was. “Mrs. Barnette,” she began. “Raymond was showing me a picture of one of your ancestors. Papa Doyce. The photo was taken in eighteen sixty-one if I remember right. Eighteen sixty-one?” she looked to the undertaker for confirmation of this unimportant detail simply to include him in the conversation. After all, he was the one the chitchat was designed to lull into a false sense of security.
In that she’d failed utterly, though she couldn’t imagine why. He was still perched on the low footstool, his teacup and saucer balanced on knobby knees, but the unexpected bonhomie with which he had ushered them in vanished. Fear replaced it, not of Anna but of his diminutive mother.
Mrs. Barnette’s sporadic deafness had not saved him. She’d heard every word Anna’d said and was not pleased.
“I didn’t show her the picture, Mama. She went into my office when I was in the shop.” Raymond’s defense was that of a frightened schoolboy.
Mama Barnette stood up, leaning on the arm of her rocker, glaring at her younger son. Her free arm was raised, arthritis making a claw of the hand. Anna watched in fascination, wondering if she was going to strike Raymond.
The hand lowered harmlessly, and she settled her frail bones back into the cushions of her chair. Plucking the shawl she’d dislodged back into place, she muttered what sounded like “no more brains than a coon.”
Since the paternity of the Barnette line was not Anna’s eventual goal, she shifted the conversation away from Papa Doyce. “Actually, what I was most interested in,” she said brightly as if the bizarre vignette of family dysfunction had not transpired, “was the other fella. In that old photograph there were two men. Papa—your ancestor—and a colored man.” Anna hoped Barth would forgive her the now politically incorrect term. She used it intentionally to soothe the old woman. African-American undoubtedly struck her as impossibly uppity. Like Barth, Anna wanted results.
Mother and son glared at her with fixed expressions. Anna was getting the same vibes she’d gotten when she did a night rotation in the psych ward for her emergency medical technician’s certification. “Keep an eye on Kenny,” a nurse had warned as she went off duty. “When his eyes stop moving and he just sits, he’s usually getting ready to have a psychotic break.” Kenny was straitjacketed and in a padded cell by 4 A.M. Anna had a loose tooth and the beefy orderly who’d finally been able to restrain him had a savage-looking black eye.
“The colored man in the picture; his name was Unk. Unk something.” The brightness of Anna’s tone was tarnishing rapidly and she faltered to a stop. “Unk’s an odd name,” she said just to say something.
“Short for ‘uncle’” Barth volunteered.
“Ah,” Anna said, “Restin. That was it, Unk Restin. Anyway Ranger Dinkins here has been doing historical research on—”
Mrs. Barnette came out of her chair a second time, the deep well of anger in her overflowing—erupting. The soft mouth, rubbery without dentures, pulled back, exposing bluish gums. Flecks of spittle glistened at the comers.
“Get out. You get out.” Mrs. Barnette hissed rather than shouted, vocal cords and lungs papery with age. “Bringing niggers, comin’ into my house. You’re a disgrace.”
Anna had risen but not yet moved. The woman, so small and wrinkled, hair thinning over a baby-pink scalp, struck her as the alpha and omega of human evil; the crone and the babe united in hatred. Like the apocryphal mouse with the cobra, Anna was mesmerized and couldn’t make her escape.
Mrs. Barnette tottered forward, the mangy pink slippers shuffling across the carpet like newly resurrected creatures from a Bhorror movie. “Out. Out.” The spit at the comers of her mouth speckled the air with each explosive utterance.
“Take it easy.” Anna raised her hands to calm and, if need be, defend. “No offense meant. Thanks for the tea.” She backed away until she was stopped by the solid bulk of her field ranger standing in the doorway. “Barth, we’d better be going.” From behind her came a grunt of what she assumed was assent, and the reassuring wall of flesh at her back moved away.
Mama Barnette stopped advancing. Shaking with the burden of her years and her rage, she glared at them, the flames of the open fireplace painting a rosy hell behind her.
“Sorry to have upset you,” Anna said, then turned and followed Barth, already halfway down the stairs. When she left, Raymond was still sitting, knees as high as his elbows, on the footstool, cup and saucer in hand. Perhaps the Barnette men chose to deal with the dead because, as children, the living they’d known were too difficult to have relationships with.
Cold struck Anna the moment she escaped out onto the porch. Drizzle had turned to sleet and was icing everything on which it fell. After the over-heated, rebreathed air of the upstairs room it felt grand, but too long out and it would chill to the bone.
“You were wise to hang on to your coat,” Anna said.
“Instinct,” Barth said. For a second Anna thought he was going to offer her his jacket but professionalism overcame southern gallantry and he didn’t.
“Jesus, that woman. Why didn’t the slaves rise up and do some real damage?”
Barth chose to answer her question seriously. “I’ve thought about that. Slaves weren’t a people. We were from different tribes, different parts of Africa. No common language. No common history. And each plantation was its own little world. The owner the dictator. Slaves couldn’t communicate with each other. Revolution has got to have either leaders and communication or a whole bunch of mad people all together, like a mob. American slaves had none of that.” He said nothing for a minute, then added, “Just me thinking. No big scholarly study or anything.”
“Works for me. Let’s get out of here.”
“You want to go back and get your coat?”
“I’d rather die of pneumonia.”
“Ranger Pigeon.” The call stopped Anna just as she was about to duck into the sane space of Barth’s patrol vehicle. Claudia trotted out from the shelter of the front porch, exposing her pink sweat suit and unprotected head to the inclement weather. Rolled tight under her arm, safe and dry, was Anna’s rain jacket.
“Your wrap,” Claudia said and handed the garment over.
“Why didn’t you put it over your head, for
heaven’s sake?” Anna laughed.
“I didn’t want it getting all nasty in case you might could be having to sit in it for a white.”
“Hop in,” Anna said on impulse. “I’d like to ask you a couple questions if I may.”
Claudia glanced back at the house, then over to Barth who, either because of good breeding or good training, chose not to get into the car until Anna did. Good backup was tough to provide from a sitting position.
Anna couldn’t tell if Claudia was concerned about her employer or didn’t want anything to do with law enforcement. In Mississippi, as in the rest of the country, cops whether in green and gray or blue were not the first people to whom an African-American would turn in times of trouble or reach a hand out to help when asked to assist in an investigation.
“Please,” Anna said. Barth’s car was equipped with a cage, a dense wire screen separating the backseat from the front to both incarcerate criminals and protect the arresting officer. Anna closed her own door and opened the rear door. She slid in first to show Claudia it wasn’t a trap. “Come on,” she said. “You’re getting soaked.”
Claudia hesitated a moment and Anna thought they’d lost her. A decision was made and the woman bundled herself in beside Anna. In a nervous reflex, when she heard the door latch, she reached for the handle.
“They’re disabled,” Anna explained. “But I think we can trust Barth to let us out when we’re ready.” She smiled reassuringly and Claudia settled. “Thanks for bringing me my coat. I didn’t have the nerve to go back for it.”
Claudia laughed at the admission of cowardice. “I heard. When that old woman gets the wind up, she’s a holy terror.”
“Do you know what set her off?”
“The Missus has a big old well of nastiness. She’s been some worse just lately. A few days back when I come over she’d wore herself out somehow. Clothes were muddy, she was all over scrapes and her old hands was so sore she couldn’t hardly lift a cup. She’d been rampaging but wouldn’t say as to what. Since, she’s been just hardly fit to live with. When she gets on a tear, it could be most anything. Her main most hatefulness gets let out when she gets on the subject of blacks—” she shot an apologetic glance toward Barth. His face was impassive, unreadable. “African-Americans,” she corrected herself. Claudia was older than she looked. Closer to fifty than the mid-thirties where Anna had pegged her on first meeting.
“She’s just about scared to death with all this talk the government’s been doing about reparations. Seems ya’ll are going to come smashing in with jack boots and parcel out her things to the black folk. Everybody knows it’s just politicians talking. Nobody’s going to do anything.”
Anna couldn’t argue that. She changed the subject. “Have you been here all day?”
“I come in around nine most days and leave after I get the old lady’s supper around six. Today I was running late. I been here since twenty-three minutes after. She’s got nothing better to do than watch that clock over her door. Days she needs to bark at somebody, I think she sets it ahead on purpose so’s she can fuss about me being late.”
Anna wouldn’t have put any wicked pettiness past Mama Barnette. “Were you here when Raymond came over?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Barnette came in after eleven. I heard him rattling around downstairs and Miz Barnette sent me down to fetch him but he’d gone out again, didn’t come back for near an hour.”
“Did you see where he went?”
“He was walking out to the shed behind the house. I waited on him, thinking he was coming right back. He went in and come out with a shovel, then he takes off toward the woods.”
“Was he carrying anything besides the shovel?” Anna asked.
“He had a big old box under his arm. Must’ve been pretty heavy. He kept hitching it up on his hip like.”
“Did he have the box when he came back?”
“I wouldn’t know that. I was back upstairs tending to Mrs. Barnette and didn’t know he’d got back till he come upstairs.”
Anna’s eyes met Barth’s. They’d learned nothing new but the confirmation was useful. Raymond had indeed buried something, probably a child’s coffin, in the woods.
“Does Mrs. Barnette—or Doyce—have any pets. Cat? Dog? Anything like that?” Anna asked.
“Not since I’ve known her, which is twelve years now. She doesn’t hold with animals in the house. Says she wasn’t raised to live with livestock.”
“Does Raymond keep pets at his house, do you know?”
“No, ma’am. I do for him every other Thursday. He’s not even got fish in a tank.”
Not a dead pet theory; Anna figured that but needed to cover all the bases.
“We were talking about an old picture. Real old, eighteen hundreds,” Barth joined the conversation. “I’ve never seen it but Anna says it was of the ancestor that started the business, a Papa Doyce. There was an African-American man beside him in the picture named Unk Restin. That’s what we were talking about when Mrs. Barnette got riled up. You know anything about that? Seen any pictures around the house or anything?”
“No,” Claudia said. “There’s no pictures of colored folk anywhere ... wait there...” She pushed her thoughts back a few years. “We—Mrs. Barnette and me—were cleaning out the closet in the spare bedroom a while back. There was boxes of old pictures just thrown together loose. She showed me a picture then. There was this black man working beside another man on a wood thing, maybe a table or something they were building. Miss Barnette showed it to me and said, ‘My husband’s daddy was taught to call him uncle. Just makes me want to spit. A nigger uncle, can you beat that? And him as greedy and uppity as they come.’ She tore up that picture, then had me throw the whole lot into the incinerator out back.” She looked at Barth, then at Anna, for approval. “That was all,” she said. “Might not even have been the same man as you’re talking about.”
18
On the drive back to Mt. Locust Ranger Station to get Anna’s car, she and Barth chewed over the eventful tea party. Barth drove, his square, clean hands neatly in the ten and two positions on the steering wheel. Anna talked. “Papa Doyce and Unk Restin have something to do with the gigantic chip Mama Barnette carries on her shoulder. Papa Doyce, white. ‘Uncle’ Restin, black. They inspired or triggered the old bat’s racism.”
“Maybe she comes from African-American stock. If she is a descendent of the Unk Restin in the picture she’d be what? An octoroon if everybody married white on white from then on,” Barth said. “Maybe Mrs. Barnette’s spent her life ‘passing’ and thinks we’re going to find out.”
“Who’d care? Ancient history.”
Barth looked at her from the comers of his pale eyes. In the shadowless light of the winter afternoon they were more gray than green and as transparent as water.
“What?” Anna asked when he just smiled and shook his head.
“Everybody’d care. You still got your head in Yankee sand if you don’t know that yet. Down here—shoot, clear throughout most of the South: Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina—being of mixed blood’s not exotic. Black mixed with white, now that’s nothing. You get one Nigerian, one purely African man down here at seminary school or something and you can see there’s not a drop of pure African blood in Mississippi. That Nigerian’ll be black like a radial tire is black. Around that man we’re just a rainbow in browns. Black mixed with white’s a fact of life, an improvement.” The word was sour in his mouth. “Even with us. Look at our heroes. They look like white folks in bad wigs. Only the sports stars look black and a lot of those guys get admired for being strong or mean.” Bitterness got the best of Barth on the last word, and he took a short break to regain the control he used to survive in government service, in law enforcement. When he spoke again he’d leached so much emotion from his words he sounded like a scholar on the lecture circuit.
“What’s no way acceptable is white mixed with black. A chemist wouldn’t admit any difference but Miss Barnette’s lady friends woul
d. She’d no longer be okay, nobody’d be afraid of her anymore. She could still have friends—white friends—but not with anybody she’d want to be friends with.
“Ancient history just happened this morning for a lot of these old folks,” Barth finished. He pressed his lips tightly together. “Sorry,” he said.
“No. No. You’re right.” The apology made an awkwardness between them. Anna wondered if he was embarrassed because he’d shown his feelings, because hers might not be the same, or because he was annoyed at himself for wasting energy and air on something he could not change.
“See if you can’t trace this Unk Restin. If he was a worker when Barnette’s was a carpentry or cabinet-making shop there may be labor bills submitted for his work—”
A thought occured to Anna. She’d had it before but it had been lost in a pile of higher priorities. “See if he might be linked to Lonnie and his family.”
“I already talked to Lonnie Restin’s ma,” Barth said. “They can’t trace themselves back more than a couple generations. Trouble is lots of times every slave on a plantation went and took the master’s name. Then you get a passel of unrelated folks, black and white, with the same last name.”
“Do what you can,” Anna said.
“I will,” Barth said. “There’ll be something: birth, death, sale. If he could read or write he may’ve signed chits for supplies.”
Anna shut up. Barth knew more about tracking individuals through time than she did.
“Barnette’s was a cabinetmaker’s. They might have old records of building slave coffins. Doggone it.” Barth twisted his hands on the wheel, wringing the metaphorical neck of an evil thought. “I wish Raymond Barnette wasn’t sneaking around in the trees burying little kids’ coffins. It’d be a whole lot easier if he’d cooperate on this thing.”
“You don’t think the one could have anything to do with the other?” Anna asked. Barth’s ramblings had shifted pieces of information around in her brain. The pieces weren’t exactly falling together, but several of them were beginning to align.
