by Lisa Wingate
Epiphany’s hand slid under my elbow. “It’s okay. I’m right here,” she said quietly, and I moved my fingers to clutch hers. Together, we walked closer. The gate creaked, protesting as I opened it. At the base of the stone tower, there was a name. Like the face of the father in the book, it was meaningless to me. LUTHER WILLIAM VANDRAAN SR. Any memory of his name had been erased so cleanly from my memory that it no longer existed. All traces of those words were gone forever.
Staring at the letters, thinking of the family photo, I tried to excavate the memory, exhume it like a body needed to solve a cold case. But there was nothing.
Epiphany gasped, released my arm. “There are the kids.” Sidestepping, she opened the book, thumbed through the pages until she’d found the VanDraan photo again. She read the names out loud, pointing to each of them in the book, “Paul, Johnny, Erin, Emma, and Luther William VanDraan Jr.—Willie.” She turned to look over her shoulder, her gaze rolling slowly upward to catch mine, her eyes flinty, filled with questions. “You.”
I couldn’t say how long we stood there, numbly studying the graves, looking at the pictures. Five plots, youngest to eldest in sequence, each tombstone slightly larger than the last, an odd physical depiction of the dates on either side of the hyphens, the short spans of young lives. And beside those, next to the grave of Luther VanDraan, who had lived fully twenty years beyond the deaths of his family, was the grave marked, FERN, WIFE AND MOTHER.
My mother. I could remember her, if I tried. Her hair was red, long. Her eyes blue, sad, vacant. She was a pretty woman, but thin and pale, a shadow. Helpless, afraid, confused. Weak. These were the impressions that came to me with the picture, with the name. They rose from her grave like restless spirits, surrounding me.
She played the piano sometimes. Long, haunting melodies that drifted through the halls of the house, filling every corner, choking the air like smoke, drowning out the voices of the women in the kitchen, the laughter of the children. Who was she, this woman in the grave? Was she in this grave? Was she there under the soil, a victim of a fire that took some lives, but not all?
How many lives? Had the mother who raised me known? Had she known who was buried here and who wasn’t? How had she become involved to begin with, and if the baby on her lap in our family albums wasn’t me, what had happened to that child?
So many questions, and I’d arrived so late in my life to search for the answers. . . .
Epiphany handed the book to me and slipped away. I watched as she walked across the cemetery, the shade sliding over her skin, painting her the color of rich earth in shadow, a golden hue in the light.
Finally, I closed the book and left the family plot, unsure of my feelings about it. Should I sense a connection or not? I was no longer that boy named on the stone. I was James Norman Alvord. An engineer, a scientist, a man who’d lived a full life, who’d been fortunate enough to exist in a time when the world was changing, when America was making unprecedented strides in innovation and technology. I’d seized opportunity when it came my way, sometimes stumbled upon it, always tried to do good business, to be enterprising. My father had taught me that—and my mother. They’d made me who I was. These people on the gravestones were strangers. What good could come of learning all of this now?
I started toward the car, calling after Epiphany, but she was walking through the weeds, crossing out of the graveyard at the back, where the fence had rusted through, the strands of wire hanging in uneven curls. I called to her again, but she paused only for a moment, then ducked under a hackberry branch and continued on.
“Just a minute.” Her voice drifted back as I came closer to the fence. “I want to see.”
“To see what?” A sharp, narrow fingernail of irritation scratched along my spine. “We’ve found the graves. It’s time to go.” Inside me, there was an almost desperate need to get out, to move away, but Epiphany was weaving deeper into the scrappy grove of hackberries, her knees rising high as she tromped over weeds and fallen branches. Finally she disappeared in the brush, and I had the sense of being there alone. It slid over me with the chill of ice water. “Epiphany,” I called again. It was foolish, being afraid. She was still nearby, of course. I was acting like a child, as silly as Epiphany last night when she carried her pillow into my room and curled up on the fainting couch.
Even so, I moved to the point where the groomed area stopped and the weeds began. “Epiphany?” I called again.
“They’re really out here.” Her voice was quieter now, intimate. The rustle of leaves and grass had stilled. “The graves, J. Norm. You can see where they were.”
The graves? I didn’t understand her meaning at first. We’d already discovered the VanDraan graves. They were easy enough to find, prominent actually. VanDraan may not have been well liked, but certainly he could afford to leave his resting place clearly marked.
I stepped closer to the fence, bending low over what was left of the wire in an effort to catch sight of Epiphany. I could not, and so I traversed the single strand that lay tangled along the ground. Brambles tugged at my pants, as if to stop me from moving farther. My foot settled on something uneven, solid, and in bending to wrest my pants loose from the brambles, I realized what it was. A marker. A flat piece of simple brown rock, once buried in the soil to stand upright, now listing at a forty-five-degree angle. A gravestone, worn by the wind and the weather. The words, BABY AMOS 1947, 2 MONTHS, were barely visible now, crudely carved in a mixture of small letters and capitals.
Epiphany had found the other part of the cemetery, the hidden place Mr. Nelson had mentioned. The place where those not permitted within the fence were laid to rest, their markers hand-hewn by loved ones, many undoubtedly made of wood and long since destroyed. It was odd to realize now that as a young man, I would not have thought anything about this. How many times had I passed by the churchyard in my mother’s car and watched funeral lines proceeding beyond the fence to the colored area? I’d never given the reasons even a measure of consideration. It was just the way things were done. What we knew. What we had been taught. What we had accepted.
If Cecile, that young woman who had mothered me, cared for me, loved me, saved me, was buried here, the chances were that her marker, like so many others, was long gone. It seemed wrong that she should be the one to lie unmarked, and not my mother, who had failed to protect me, or my father, who had wounded me in unspeakable ways.
I stepped back through the fence, walked to the car, and waited for Epiphany to come. When she did, we drove back to town without conversing. I wondered what was in her thoughts, but I didn’t ask. I could send a rocket to the moon, but emotion had always been a mystery to me.
Of all things, the words that finally came to my lips were, “Let’s stop for barbecue.”
Epiphany seemed almost relieved that I’d rekindled the conversation. “Can we have something else? We’ve had a lot of barbecue lately.”
“All right, then, you pick.”
After a meal of drive-through hamburgers and horrible cylinder-shaped fried potato nuggets, which we ate in the car, we proceeded back to Ward House, both of us having resumed our normal rhythm.
“I looked for Cecile’s grave out there, but I didn’t find it,” Epiphany said as we exited the car at Ward House. “There were lots that weren’t marked, though. Lots of babies’ graves, too.”
“It was the way of things,” I admitted, and then realized there was a baby’s grave in the family that had raised me, as well. The baby on my mother’s lap in the pictures never grew up. I took his place. Where was the grave? Did my mother ever visit it? Did she suffer the loss of that child in silence, so that I could be given his place in the family? Did she admonish the relatives never to tell me the truth about my past? She must have, but such choices were often made for adopted children in those days. It was considered best not to tell.
How many people knew?
Even as I considered the questions, looking at them from every angle, I was aware that, in my life
time, I would most likely never know the answers. My mother’s motivations had died with her, and there was no one else to ask.
When we carried our things upstairs, a consolation package of sorts lay atop my freshly made bed. Propped against the array of lacy pillows was a book, and not just any book.
The forbidden masterpiece of the elusive Mrs. Mercy White lay waiting. On the cover, a sepia photograph of Mrs. Mercy frowning pensively in her high school graduation photo had been partially covered with a Ward House Bed-and-Breakfast sticky note, which simply read, Ssshhh.
Chapter 20
Epiphany Jones
Mrs. Mercy White’s book changed everything. I could see why nobody in Groveland wanted it around, too. That woman told secrets about everybody and everyplace in town, and she knew a lot. Her daddy was the sheriff for twelve years, and her stepmom ran the phone exchange. J. Norm clued me in to the fact that, back in the day, a lady actually sat at a thing called a switchboard and plugged the phone lines together when people made a call. While she was doing it, she could listen to everything everybody said, and Mercy White’s stepmom did. Mrs. Mercy came right out and said so in the book.
Aunt Char passed through the upstairs parlor while J. Norm and me were reading. She gave a little smile that let me know she was the one who’d left the book for us. Then she said we should “take everything in there with a grain of salt.”
I could tell that Aunt Char was dying to know what we were looking for in Mrs. Mercy White’s “revenge rag,” as she called it. While J. Norm and me thumbed through the pages, Aunt Char kept passing back and forth through the upstairs parlor with sheets and cleaning stuff, watching us from the corner of her eye.
It took us a minute to find the chapters about the VanDraan house burning down, but once we did, J. Norm and me were side by side on the sofa, eating up those words like they were Blue Bell ice cream on a hot day. Mrs. Mercy White (considering the stuff the book had in it, that name was what J. Norm would’ve called an oxymoron, by the way) served up enough dirt on old Luther VanDraan to bury him three times over, if he wasn’t buried enough already. According to her, he was just about the most hateful person ever to show up in Groveland, Texas. He came to town after getting out of World War I, and he was drop-dead good-looking and had money. He was a gentleman type, always dressed up in a suit and a vest, with a gold pocket watch. Everybody in town couldn’t get enough of him, at first. But he was as dark underneath the surface as he was fine on the outside. He was a player with the ladies, and he started buying up businesses and land around town, and not always in a nice way, either.
It wasn’t long before Mrs. Mercy White’s daddy, the sheriff, got crosswise of Luther VanDraan, because he beat a colored man (Mrs. Mercy White’s words) to death. Mr. VanDraan testified that the man had tried to steal a crate of apples out of a storage yard, but the sheriff knew the truth was that poor guy stumbled onto one of VanDraan’s shipments of tax-free illegal liquor, and VanDraan didn’t want any witnesses. There wasn’t a thing her daddy could do about it, Mrs. Mercy White said. VanDraan had a half dozen witnesses testify the man was a thief. All the witnesses worked for VanDraan.
By the time he’d been in Groveland a few years, VanDraan had bought up so much of the town that nobody could challenge him. He’d built the big house where the mini storage was now. Guess maybe he was lonely there, because one day, he caught sight of a schoolgirl named Fern Caufelt, an orphan who’d moved to Groveland to live with her spinster aunt. Fern walked by the bank on her way home from school one day, and that must’ve been the worst mistake of her life. Two months later, she’d quit school and married Luther VanDraan.
There were two or three more stories about terrible things VanDraan did to force people off their land, and then we came to the part about the fire. It was just a few pages, but if you could believe Mrs. Mercy White, it said a lot.
. . . in 1941, on a Saturday. I remember waking in the middle of the night to the sound of the fire trucks leaving the station. I sat up and opened my window, pushed my face to the screen, and I could hear people yelling, “The VanDraan house is on fire! The VanDraan house is ablaze!” Off to the south, the horizon was aglow from it, a big, bright circle of light against the starless night sky. I watched for a long time, and then finally the streets grew quiet. I pulled the window down and fell asleep at the foot of my bed. Sometime later, voices woke me, and I sneaked across my room, even though I knew that if my stepmother caught me, she’d blister my feet with a cane switch for being up. Sometimes . . .
Mrs. Mercy White went on for a while then about how terrible her stepmother, the phone operator, was, and how little Mercy was so afraid to get out of bed at night that she’d wet herself, and then she’d get spanked for that, too. According to Mrs. Mercy, her daddy never knew a thing about it. He was practically a saint, really, and wouldn’t have let anybody treat her in a bad way.
J. Norm’s finger swiveled back and forth down the page in a hurry, skimming over all that family stuff, until Mrs. Mercy White got back to the point. It took two and a half pages, and then finally,. . . I tiptoed across my room, and I could hear my stepmother and Daddy arguing. “Now, you listen to me!” she was saying. “I won’t hear of it; do you understand me, Caleb White? It’s too much risk. We have our own family to think about. I have my position to consider. I have it on good authority that I’m to be invited into the Garden Club this year, for one thing. What do you suppose will happen if we’re caught? Hmmm? Found sneaking behind everyone’s backs? And on the word of some . . . some nigra? You know they can’t be trusted.”
My father’s voice was low at first, and I couldn’t hear. I got down on my knees and pushed my face close to the crack at the bottom of the door. “. . . on purpose,” he said.
“For heaven’s sake, Caleb, you know that coloreds are habitual liars. They can’t even help it. They’re like children. They don’t understand the difference. If what she says is true, then leave the matter to the courts, as is your job, Caleb White.”
Again my father was hard to hear. He paced the floor, away, then back. “. . . do something, Mora.”
“No!” My stepmother’s voice was a harsh whisper, a hiss like a snake’s. “What will he do to you if he finds out? What would he do to us? You think he wouldn’t do the same thing he did to that colored boy out behind his warehouse? You think he wouldn’t do worse? And he’ll find out. Why wouldn’t he? This is his town, Caleb. He owns it, lock, stock, and barrel. Everything.”
“Just let me bring them in, Mora. Just for tonight. I’ll figure something out in the morning.”
“Pah! The morning. You couldn’t plan your way out of an apple crate. I will not have them in here, do you hear me? I will not be involved in this. Five children! Five, all with red hair. What, do you think no one would notice? Maybe they could live down on Hakey Creek with all those coloreds you’re so fond of. Maybe you can shoe-polish their faces black and braid their hair and dress them up like pickaninnies. Maybe their little mammy can just raise them for her own. How about that? How about that for a plan? Shame on you, Caleb White! Shame on you for bringing this trouble to our home. The home where my children sleep! This is just your pride. This is just your way of getting revenge against Luther VanDraan, because you couldn’t prosecute him after that trouble at his warehouse. And what does it matter? It was only a colored boy. Maybe he was stealing. They’re all thieves. Did you ever think of that? Maybe he got what he deserved. I won’t have you risking our family, our home, for your pride, for some nigra’s tall tale. Now, you put them in that car, and you take them somewhere else. I don’t want to see them again. I don’t want to know anything about this; do you hear me?”
Mrs. Mercy White hurried back across her room after that, and when she hopped into her bed, she looked out the window into the front yard, and as she put it,There under the light of the gas lamp, huddled up against the holly berry bushes, was the VanDraans’ colored mammy with those five little redheaded kids, all in their nightclot
hes, with soot and dirt all over them. I watched my daddy tuck them into the backseat of his patrol car and drive away down the dark street. The next day, when I heard that those kids and the maid had died in the flames as the VanDraan house burned to the ground, I knew it was a lie. We even went to the funeral and watched as the ladies in church cried about those little redheaded children and mourned pretty Mrs. VanDraan. All the while I knew that whatever ashes were in those five little coffins, they didn’t belong to the kids. I never knew if there was a casket full of ashes somewhere for the colored girl, too, or why my daddy did what he did, or where he took those kids. I never told a soul one thing about it, either. Not in my whole life. When I was little, I knew my stepmother would switch my feet until I limped and then tell everyone I’d gone out barefoot on the rocks again. Later, I knew enough to be fearful of Mr. Luther VanDraan, especially after his second wife drowned in the river, and then his third wife died. Even when he sold his interests in Groveland and moved out of town, I knew I’d better keep quiet. My daddy could’ve gone to jail for what he did, and there were some men around who would have done even worse than that to him, if they’d known he took up the side of a colored girl against a white man.
Luther VanDraan lived quite a few more years down near Lufkin. I suppose many breathed easier after he left Groveland, but I sensed him out there, still lurking.
