A Long Time Gone

by Karen White

  “Well, some guy in Indianola dropped dead when he heard about it while watching the news on TV. I guess he was a big fan.”

  “Cousin Emmett had a stroke when he heard the news, too. He always had a limp after that.” Carol Lynne dug her trowel into the ground and twisted it just like I’d shown her.

  “You remember that?” I asked softly. “You remember when President Kennedy was shot?”

  She stared at the handle of her trowel that was sticking up out of the dirt, as if she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do next. She nodded. “It was really sad. I was in a bus station. With Jimmy.” She smiled, as if she’d just won an award for pulling an obscure name from her past out of the ether. “There was a TV on and then people started crying. I remember that.”

  “Do you remember my high school graduation? When my heel got caught on my gown and I fell when I went up to get my diploma?”

  She stared at me blankly, her smile dimming.

  “Or how I was voted most likely to be famous? Do you remember that?”

  I heard the sound of a pencil scratching across paper and saw Chloe jotting down what my mother had said about Kennedy’s assassination, and I knew I’d have to use it in an article. I was jealous of those memories of a time and place that had nothing to do with me, jealous of a boy named Jimmy who played a larger part in the play that had become her past than her own daughter, whose presence had been relegated to backstage. It was almost as if the very existence of my childhood hinged on my mother’s ability to remember it.

  “Here’s another one, Vivi. About that blues singer guy Mr. Montgomery was telling us about who made a deal with the devil and sold his soul to make him the best guitar player ever. It’s a real place—at the crossroads of highways Sixty-one and Forty-nine in a lame-sounding town called Clarksdale. We should go there and take pictures.”

  I barely heard her as I tried to fill my empty lungs with air, each breath full of the hurt of being forgotten, of being replaced by memories of people I’d never known. I thought of my purse and the single pill I’d found at the bottom of it when looking for a pen. I’d left it there; I wasn’t sure why. But all I could do right now was think about it, and think about making an excuse to go upstairs and take it so that all this pain would stop and I could forget just as easily as my mother had.

  “For your column,” Chloe reminded me. “Do I have to write it, too, or do you just want me to do all the research?”

  I cleared my throat. “No, but thanks.” I stuck my bare fingers in the dirt and squeezed as if that could ground me. It calmed me, and I could almost imagine it was Bootsie’s hand in mine instead of a fistful of dirt. I smiled at Chloe. “You’re doing a great job with the research, and I think we’ve got two winners there. But why don’t you put that away now. It’s time for your science lesson.”

  She actually groaned. “Just don’t make me put my hands in the dirt. Do you know how many germs are in there?”

  “That’s why it’s called dirt. And I didn’t ask you to eat it, just dig little holes and put seeds in them. I’ve marked off an entire section just for you, so you can be responsible for your own plants.”

  With great exaggeration, she slapped the papers down onto the seat next to her and stood. “I’ll work with Carol Lynne, since we’re both newbies and you’re the professional. That makes us even.”

  “I didn’t realize this was a competition,” I said, amused despite myself.

  “Dad says everything’s a competition and nobody remembers who comes in second.”

  I bit my lip hard to keep from blurting out what I really thought about her dad and his nuggets of wisdom. “Fine,” I said, handing her a bag of Bootsie’s seeds that Tommy had given me. “These are lima bean seeds. Dig your holes two inches deep and four to six inches apart so they have room to grow. I’ve already prepared the soil with compost and fertilizer, so I don’t want to hear you complain about getting dirty, okay?”

  She scowled up at me but I kept on talking. “I’ll show you each day what you need to do with your plants to keep them healthy—and a lot of that depends on the weather. Cora said she was picking up a garden journal for you to keep all your notes.”

  She took the seed bag with an eye roll and a heavy sigh, but I could see that she was also looking at the lines drawn in the dirt with interest. “I have another trowel in the toolshed,” I suggested. “Although, to be honest, I find that using my fingers is best for such a small hole. But I know how you feel about getting your hands dirty.”

  We both settled our gazes on Carol Lynne, who still crouched on her knees in front of the same hole she’d begun to dig, examining it as if she weren’t sure about what happened next.

  “That’s okay,” Chloe said, getting down on her knees in the dirt next to my mother. “We’ll share.”

  She placed Carol Lynne’s hands around the trowel, then put hers on top, and together they flipped the tip out of the dirt, excavating a perfectly round hole a single inch deep. She held open the bag and my mother selected a seed after picking up then putting back three, then placed it in the hole. Then they both scraped the loose dirt back over the hole and pressed it down snugly, Chloe’s round hands almost completely covered by my mother’s older ones.

  “Don’t pack it too tightly,” I said. “The little shoots are very delicate and not strong enough to break through hard ground, so don’t smother them. And then they have to figure out how to stick their heads out into the sunshine on their own. All you can do is watch and hope for the best, because you’ve done everything you know how to do.”

  “Like we’re the mothers and these are our little babies,” Carol Lynne said, her voice as clear as a child’s.

  Chloe laughed, a sound I hadn’t heard a lot of in the last few years. “You’re right!” she said. Their eyes met and they smiled at each other like a freaking Hallmark Channel movie.

  I looked away, sad yet somehow contented, too. Chloe was different here, despite all of her protestations. It had been a good thing for her to come; I could see that now. Not because of me, but because of the opportunities in compassion she could experience for the first time in her life.

  By the time they were finished with the first hole, I’d already planted three seeds. I kept silent, reminding myself that it wasn’t a race.

  We worked side by side for about an hour in the hot sun, Chloe and my mother singing harmony to the song “Mockingbird” over and over. I had no idea where Chloe had picked up the lyrics to that, but assumed Hailey must be responsible.

  At the sound of a car door slamming, I stood. “I think that’s Tommy, and I need to see if he’ll look at the photograph. I’ll bring you both some lemonade on my way back.”

  I brushed off my stiff knees, then hobbled around the house instead of through it, still minding Bootsie’s rule about keeping the dirt in the garden and not in her house. I was surprised to find three vehicles pulled up in the drive in front of the house, recognizing Tripp’s truck and the sheriff’s cruiser. Tommy stood halfway between the drive and his shed, seeming as surprised to see the two men as I was.

  The sheriff tipped his hat at me as he approached. “Good afternoon, Miz Moise. Hope I’m not disturbing you. Just thought it was time we talked again, now that we know the deceased was a relative of yours.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, wondering what other information he thought I might have that I hadn’t already given him.

  “Why are you here?” I asked Tripp.

  “It’s always nice to see you, too, Vivi. I’m here because I’m celebrating a good closing on a house I never thought would sell, and it’s a slow day for calling souls to heaven. So I thought I’d come get you and Chloe and head out to Horseshoe Lake to show her how to fish. I figure Cora could make it a science lesson, or maybe we could do a math lesson, where Chloe adds up how many more fish I catch than you.”

  “As if,” I sai
d, using one of Chloe’s favorite expressions. “But I think Tommy’s supposed to take her out in the tractor today to teach her about pesticides.”

  Tommy walked closer, shaking his head. “I’m having to replant my back thousand acres because the dang planter is broken again, and got the seed depth all wrong. Weather’s still a bit cool for May, so the new seeds might have a chance. Came back to get more tools I didn’t have on the truck to see if I can fix it.” I remembered Emmett telling us that farmers spent most of their time repairing equipment, since it was always easier to figure out a way to fix something than figure out a way to pay to replace it. “Next week I’ve scheduled a crop duster, which might be even more interesting.”

  “Then fishing it is,” Tripp said, rubbing his hands together. “We’re going to make Miss Chloe a true Southern girl before she knows it.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said, picturing Chloe wearing one of her black Marilyn Manson T-shirts with a pair of Daisy Dukes and cowboy boots and almost laughed. At least she wasn’t wearing the thick black eyeliner anymore. One morning at breakfast Carol Lynne had simply reached across the table with a wet paper napkin and started wiping it off. I’d have liked to think that Chloe’s days were too full with her schoolwork and her new chores—suggested by Cora and adopted wholeheartedly by me—that she just didn’t have the time to apply it, but I knew the reason had more to do with pleasing my mother. I tried not to think of the dozens of times I’d tried to get Chloe to take it off, only to be met with a hostile stare. Maybe she’d just needed to hear it from somebody else’s mother.

  I turned to the sheriff. “Actually, I do have something new for you. I needed Tommy to take a look at it before I called you, so this is perfect timing. Why don’t you all head to Tommy’s office and I’ll be there in just a minute.”

  I ran upstairs to my room and grabbed the photo of Bootsie before heading out the door, tripping on my own feet in my excitement as I ran to Tommy’s office.

  The three men were lounging in turquoise high school chairs, all three of them looking like Gulliver in Lilliput, and I was thinking that we’d all either grown a great deal since high school, or the school board had found a way to save money by buying tiny chairs. The men stood as I entered, and Tripp offered his seat to me while he dragged another one from the corner.

  I thanked him, then sat down. “Where’d the extra chairs come from?” I asked, remembering the single one I’d sat on during my last visit.

  Tommy looked everywhere except my eyes. “Carrie said she had some extras she’d picked up but didn’t need. She said if I wanted them I just needed to go get them.”

  “And she just happened to have enough meat loaf and corn bread to make you a plate and have you join her and the kids for supper.” Sheriff Adams winked at me.

  Tommy’s face, already sunburned from working outside in the fields, turned a darker shade of red. “I just needed some more chairs. . . .”

  Tripp sat up. “And what’s this I hear about you agreeing to coach Bo’s Little League team? Have you even thrown a baseball since high school?”

  “Look, I have to get back to my fields. Can we just focus on what you came here for?”

  I decided to take pity on him and handed the picture to Sheriff Adams. “My mother found this yesterday in the historical archives that came from the library—it’s a photograph of my grandmother, Bootsie, who was born in 1927. The photo came from the newspaper archives from when the paper moved offices and they sent all their old records to the library, since they didn’t have any room for them. So I’m guessing that this photograph might have been used in an article—just haven’t found which one yet.”

  I waited for him to notice the ring on the baby’s finger, and when he did, he looked up at me. “Same one that was in the grave?” He held up the photo for Tripp and Tommy to see.

  I nodded. “It sure looks like it. It has something engraved on it, but it’s too hard to see from the photograph. I thought Tommy could use some of his magnifying equipment to read it.”

  Tommy stood and took the photo from the sheriff and placed it on his worktable. He flipped a couple of switches and the two overhead lamps spilled blue light onto his workspace. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out what looked like a pair of regular glasses, except the eyepieces were thick and round and definitely not made for street wear. He pulled over a piece of paper and a pen, then slid the glasses onto his face. Without a word, he moved the photo up and down and side to side as he tilted it in various ways to get rid of any reflection from the overhead light.

  After a few moments, he picked up the pen without looking at it and wrote something down. He studied the photo one more time, then slid the glasses off his face. He stared at what he’d written, his eyebrows lifted. “Well, that’s certainly not what I expected.”

  I took the paper as the sheriff and Tripp moved to stand behind me so we could look at it together.

  VE

  OU

  EVER

  I looked up, my eyes meeting Tommy’s. “It’s the other half of the ring. The other half to the one found in the grave.” I brushed my fingers against the letters, as if by my touching them they’d reveal their secrets.

  Sheriff Adams cleared his throat. “So if your grandmother wore the matching ring as a baby, who do you think would have the other half?”

  I love you forever. The words had been engraved on a gold heart and then split in two, as if each wearer would be incomplete without the other. I remembered how I’d felt when I’d held Chloe’s hand to cross the street when she was little and still allowed those things, and what it had been like to see my unborn child on a sonogram screen, the sweet perfection of the little nose and fingers splayed so I could count all ten.

  “Her mother,” I said, my voice too quiet to be heard. The three men looked at me. Clearing my throat, I said louder, “It would have been her mother who wore the other half of the ring.”

  “But she drowned in the flood the year Bootsie was born,” Tommy said. “That’s why we still have that mark on the wall in the foyer.”

  I nodded. “Bootsie said that her mother left her in the care of a friend and then tried to drive to New Orleans even though she knew the levees had been breached and it wouldn’t have been safe. She always wondered why her mother hadn’t taken Bootsie with her.”

  The silence in the room was filled with the sound of ticking clocks, each movement like the beating of a heart.

  “Because maybe she never left,” Tripp said, and I remembered Carol Lynne saying the same thing as we’d stood by the edge of the grave where the woman had slept for more than eighty years while her daughter wondered why she’d been left behind.

  “Do you remember her name?” Sheriff Adams asked, his pad and pencil held in readiness.

  I shook my head, impatient with my young self, who never thought remembering names of the dead was important regardless of how many times Bootsie told me the same old stories.

  Tommy stood. “It was something like Abigail. Or Abilene. Or maybe Angelica?”

  The name came to me as if somebody had just breathed it into my ear. “It was Adelaide. Bootsie’s mother was named Adelaide.”

  Chapter 30

  Carol Lynne Walker Moise

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  MARCH 1977

  Dear Diary,

  I was sitting under my cypress tree smoking a cigarette and thinking how to write about three months of nothing that have actually turned out to be so much more. My diary was lying on its back in the grass, its outspread pages like wings, but I could just look at it while I took drags on my cigarette and wished I had something stronger to smoke.

  And then Mathilda came from the house to tell me that Michael had called again but that he didn’t have enough dimes for the pay phone to keep waiting, but I was to call the Kellys and leave a message for him there.

  He f
ound out where I am and we’ve been talking since Christmas. He’s still on the ranch but says he misses me, and if I come back we’ll leave the ranch and do something together. He hasn’t been real specific about what exactly we’d be doing, but I’d be lying to say I can’t stop thinking about it.

  I want to stay. There’s so much in me that wants to keep me here. Like Tommy. But the more Bootsie tries to get me to stay, the more I want to leave. Maybe that’s just the way of mothers and daughters, to always be at opposite ends of a rope, tugging like you’d win some prize if your opponent fell. But there’re no winners in this game we play. And the more Bootsie begs, the more my demons start clamoring in my head that I need to move on and get my next fix so that I don’t care so much about this place.

  I can’t believe that it’s almost April. That’s when Emmett disappears into the fields and we hardly see him again until the fall harvest. But I like April, because it’s a good time to leave. Right before the farmers start seeding, there’s a feeling in the air that reminds me of hope. Like somewhere beneath the soil the earth is deciding our fate. I’m thinking I need to leave now, when I can carry that hope with me the way a child carries a balloon. I just don’t know how long I can keep that balloon inflated.

  The fields are barren and empty and the temperatures are still low enough that we might still get a frost, according to Emmett. He knows a lot about soil and planting and weather. Emmett once cracked an egg outside just to prove that it was hot enough to fry. I might not have grown up with a daddy, but he’s been a pretty good substitute. He’s already started taking Tommy into his shop, where Tommy likes to just sit and watch him work. He loves the sound of the ticking clocks, and when we put a blanket on the floor at the back of the shop, he’ll nap for hours.

  This planting season, Emmett’s promised Tommy that he can ride in the tractor. My little boy is still a baby, but he’s an old soul. When you look in his blue eyes it’s like he’s been around forever. And maybe he has. Only one of us should be allowed to be a child.