by Lori Roy
Flipping on the flashlight, I stick it between my teeth again and tilt my head back so the yellow stream of light shines on the bulb that still hasn’t come loose. One more turn and it’s free. I toss the bulb from hand to hand until it’s cool enough to hold. Then I bang the bulb once in the palm of my hand, lift it to my ear, give it a good hard shake, and listen. It rattles. Taking care to hold on again, I screw the bulb back in the socket. It doesn’t light up. The basement is black.
I practiced another thing as I got ready to set my trap like Laura’s pa set traps. Day after day, I sat on the arm of the sofa nearest the stairs, closed my eyes, and walked to the bottom step. I did it until I could make it the whole way without opening my eyes or making a sound. I knew about walking quiet because sometimes Mama would sleep late on a Saturday and she’d yell if I woke her and say her Goddamn head was killing her and couldn’t I manage to keep myself quiet. I practiced walking from the sofa to the staircase until I landed at the spot where I could start up the steps in the way I’d practiced, quickly and so none of them creaked. I practiced because he’d never let me out. I practiced so when he walked down the stairs into the dark basement, he’d think I was sitting on the sofa where I’m supposed to go when the door opens. Mostly, I practiced so he wouldn’t know I was gone until I was up the stairs and had closed and locked the door on him. Mostly, I practiced so I could see Mama again.
Climbing off the chair, the books wobbling under me but not falling away, I slide the three textbooks back in their spot on the bookshelf I have now, using my small flashlight to guide me, push the chair under the table where it belongs, and take my seat on the end of the sofa. Then I change out one good battery in my small flashlight for an old battery that stopped working and stuff the good battery down in the cushions of the sofa. I have left the flashlight burning all night for three nights and used up every new battery he brought me except these last two. Sitting in the dark, because not even my little flashlight works now that I’ve changed out a good battery for a bad one, I screw the top back on. Only the orange numbers on my clock still shine. It’s 3:52. And it’s Wednesday. I’m sure.
Then 4:00 flips up on the clock. I stare at the orange numbers until they turn watery and listen for the house’s creaks that should come from overhead when he gets here. As I wait, I try to think about cooking with Mama on a Sunday afternoon and think maybe we’ll do that again soon. All month we would save up money so we could make one special meal. I liked it best when Mama made fried chicken and greens. She would drizzle vinegar on the greens, and I would taste its tangy flavor on my lips all the way until the next day.
And then it’s five o’clock. At six o’clock, I dig down in the cushions until I find the good battery, drop it back in my flashlight, and eat a piece of the fried chicken he brought on Sunday. I chew every bit of meat from the bone and lick my fingers and try not to cry because it’s nothing like Mama’s, but really I can hardly remember what Mama’s tastes like. Fried chicken was supposed to be a special treat, and when he brought it, he said it was because I’m so God-awful skinny that he can’t hardly stand looking at me.
I chew on the big end of the chicken bone until it’s smooth under my teeth. I’m crying now because across the room, the orange numbers read 7:26 and I think I’ll never cook with Mama again. Sometimes I forget to mark off a day in my calendar, but I thought I had done better. Now that I have chores to do and books to read and voices to make up, I sometimes forget to do my marking off first thing and then when later in the day comes, I can’t remember if I did it. I mark off two days on my calendar some days, and others, I don’t mark off any. Maybe I marked off two and that’s why he isn’t here or maybe he brought the fried chicken because he was never coming again and that made him feel bad and so he thought he’d do one last kind thing.
I read the Laura book with my flashlight. I read out loud, and as if there’s someone else in the room, I explain about the cow that was really a bear and how Laura saved herself and her mama because she did as she was told. As the flashlight’s stream turns from white to yellow to orange and begins to flicker, I shake it and think about all the dark corners here in the basement. The flashlight flutters. I start crying again and the flashlight goes black. Those dark corners were dark even when the light at the bottom of the stairs was burning all day and all night. I would hear things rustle, sometimes whisper to me from back there. But now the whole basement is a dark corner and I wonder if the whole world is dark too. And I know now what he meant when he said things could have been a whole lot worse for me. He meant I could be dead like Julie Anna and maybe I will be soon because maybe he’s never coming back.
A light wakes me. It’s shining in my eyes and I squint when I open them. He’s leaning over me, shaking me.
“How long’s it been?” he says.
My eyes are two slits. They’ll barely open. It’s all the crying. They’re swollen, and when I try to speak, my voice is like a whisper. I screamed for him. I don’t know when or how long I’ve been alone here in the dark, but I know I screamed, and now he’s finally come. The air is soggy and sour, like without the big light, things started to grow in the corners. I rub my nose and press it to my shoulder so I won’t smell it anymore.
“How long you been in the dark?”
He touches a cup of water to my lips and tells me he’s sorry. He thought there were enough extra batteries. He had tax day to contend with yesterday. He was late with a few things and had to see the accountant. That’s what he tells me, but I don’t know what tax day means. Businessmen like him have important forms they have to mail and he forgot and had to fix it. He’s sorry, he says. I want to ask him if tax day will happen again and when because I should add it to my calendar, but I can’t figure what words to say. One Sunday he didn’t come because there was a wedding and three Wednesdays he didn’t come because things broke in a house and he had to tend them because that’s his job. Things happen, he has told me before. He’s doing his best. I did my best too, but my plan didn’t work. He’ll replace the bulb and never let it happen again. I don’t have another plan.
“God damn,” he says. “I didn’t mean to leave you in the dark. We’ll do something nice for you. How about that? What can we do? What can we do nice for you?”
“Can you let me go home?’
“You know that ain’t going to happen,” he says. “There ain’t no undoing what you seen. What’s something else?”
“Will you take me outside? For just a visit?”
It isn’t a new plan, but it makes my old plan work out in a different way. Outside may not be home, but it’s closer to Mama than inside.
He lowers his flashlight so my eyes don’t have to squint and hands it to me as he stands. “Be back shortly,” he says. “I’ll bring extra bulbs.”
I hold the flashlight in both hands, let it shine on the underside of my face and slide low on the cushions.
“Sunday,” he says. He’s over near the stairs, though I can’t see him. He’s only a voice.
I know now that I would have run right into him when I made my way from the sofa to the bottom of the stairs. He’d have grabbed me up and known I was doing a bad thing. My stomach tightens up, and my throat gets small so I can hardly breathe. He’d have caught me if he would have come like he was supposed to. He’s told me I don’t want to know what happens if I break a rule, and I think that means something really bad will happen.
“On Sunday, we’ll take you outside. Mind you, only for a bit. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, and when I open my eyes again, the light at the bottom of the stairs is on and he is gone. He came one day late because he had things to mail and sign and couldn’t manage it all. He sure was sorry. That was yesterday, so today is Thursday, and that means Sunday, the day I get to see outside again, is three days away.
The Kludd
The role of the Klan Kludd, the KKK’s term for “chaplain,” is in part to speak at Klan rallies, incite enthusiasm, and further the Klan’s m
essage of white supremacy through a mixture of Christian principals, humor, and hatred. One such Kludd was a former bricklayer from North Carolina. Speaking at a rally during the 1960s, he illustrated these tactics by berating the media in attendance and accusing them of telling half-truths and being lazy. He further taunted and criticized the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was investigating the Ku Klux Klan organization at that time. In October 1965, having since resigned his position with the Klan, the former bricklayer testified at the hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, which was investigating Klan activity.
Chapter 25
TILLIE
Today
First thing out of bed, Tillie goes looking for a Phillips screwdriver, and as he’s rattling around in his toolbox, he smells Mrs. Tillie’s cheese grits. She’ll be adding cheddar to be sure, and maybe even baking up some biscuits with a little syrup for dipping. He’ll need a full stomach when he goes by Imogene’s later to give a hand with cleaning up, and no matter what Mrs. Tillie might say, he’s going to give her a warning about that Timmy Robithan.
All morning, the phone has been ringing, and folks are saying vagrants started the fire at the Coulters’ place. Someone was living down there at the old caretaker’s house, likely one of them fellows let loose from the Milledgeville hospital. And vagrants setting the fire meant the Klan didn’t. That had been Mrs. Tillie’s fear, and Tillie’s too. The Coulter place going up in flames on the same day Robert Robithan was robbed and the same day he went snooping around Imogene was too strong a coincidence to ignore, and no coincidence involving the Klan could be ignored.
Tillie’s gotten rusty, that’s the problem. After those lawsuits started upending Klan chapters across the country, membership dwindled, at least in Simmonsville, but nobody much missed them. What they did, they mostly did in private. Tillie should have been more aware. Where there’s an ebb, there’s a flow.
It started again with one fellow down to the post office shouldering his way past another fellow who was black. He didn’t have to shoulder the fellow out of the way, could have taken one step to the right and walked around him. And then there was the fellow what reached right in front of a young girl at the grocery store, didn’t say excuse me or nothing, and nearly knocked her over to get at a box of cereal. She had long black hair, so maybe she’d come from Cuba, or maybe she’d just come from Indiana. Or it could have started up again before that. Seven, maybe eight years ago, Timmy Robithan and the others gathered on the courthouse steps to holler about a Puerto Rican fellow teaching over to the college. Poor fellow’s daughter was killed. Tillie always figured it was Klan doing because they didn’t want to believe Puerto Ricans were real Americans, but the police said the killer was likely the estranged father of the little girl she’d been babysitting. Didn’t have nothing to do with the sitter being a Puerto Rican, they said, but Tillie never believed that. He knew how the Klan thought and how they hated, and making sense or being right never had anything to do with either.
Regardless of when it first began, Tillie didn’t see it coming, this rising of the Klan yet again, because he had let himself get rusty. For too many years, those sorts had been out of sight, and so they were out of mind too. For too many years, he’s been gone too long from paying attention. A lot of folks have been gone too long.
Grabbing hold of the first Phillips he finds so he can tighten up that sagging shutter, he walks through the house and out the front door. Cheese grits are something a young man eats, and this morning, Tillie is feeling like a young man. He and Mrs. Tillie won’t be moving anywhere. They still have a good many years of living here, and no sense letting things go to shambles. All that good thinking stops when the phone in the kitchen rings again.
By the time Tillie gets back inside the house, Mrs. Tillie has already hung up.
“Someone’s broke into the shop,” she says.
Her hair is wound up tight, and like it does every day, it sits on top of her head and is covered over with a sheer yellow scarf.
“It wasn’t more news about the Coulter place?”
“No, Tillie. It’s the shop. Someone’s broke in.”
“But we ain’t got the money yet,” Tillie says.
“You’re talking gibberish. The café called. Window’s broke there in the back room. You got to go check and see that them watches ain’t gone.”
Tillie nods and pats at his pockets. Mrs. Tillie grabs one of his hands, drops his set of keys in it, and wraps his fingers up into a fist so he won’t drop them.
“Probably just kids,” she says, smiling for Tillie. “But you see anything, or if them watches are gone, you get down to the café and call the police.”
Chapter 26
IMOGENE
Today
Trying not to groan, Imogene slowly unfolds her legs from the chair she did her best to sleep in and shivers from the dampness in the air. Her body aches, not just from too much whiskey the day before and not just from a lack of sleep, but it’s the ache to get back to something normal. And then it’s the ache that this life she’s been living for the last few years would seem normal to her. Across the room, the boy is still sleeping, though he has shifted about during the night. The quiet in and out of his breathing stirs the otherwise silent room.
After Garland left last night, promising to call the police about the boy, he was in and out of the house and then returned for good with word that he’d talked to Warren and that the men were letting the southern field burn. All that Goddamned pampas grass was doing nobody no good anyway. And nobody cared to save the old house. Don’t go waking your mama, Garland said to Jo Lynne, and to Imogene he said Warren Nowling would be along first thing to contend with her and the boy. When Imogene asked if they’d found a woman in the house, Garland shook his head, and quietly he said that no one would survive a fire like that. Truth is, they ain’t going to send no one into that mess on a hunch. Just ain’t going to happen.
Though the sun has barely risen, enough light is streaming through the window to let Imogene get a good look at the boy. He seems not so thin as he did last night and his skin has a warm glow, and she’s relieved, or maybe the morning light is fooling her. But still that small thing might mean she’s done something right. By sitting here in this chair, she’s helped him make it to the morning. A half dozen times during the night, she crept to the bed’s edge and listened at the boy’s chest to make sure he was breathing. It was a silly fear, but she couldn’t fight it off, and she crept once more, just once more she promised herself each time, to his bedside, where she leaned down to listen for signs of life. She’d done the same when Vaughn was a baby. Of course he was alive, but the stillness of a sleeping child had frightened her, made her worry the very worst could happen. And then it did happen and she has struggled to find a way to live in its wake. One last time, she creeps to the edge of the bed, braces herself with one hand to the headboard, and leans over him.
As the boy exhales, his warm breath tickles her ear. It’s a familiar feeling on her skin, one she shared with Vaughn. It conjures a pain that makes her pinch her eyes closed but a joy, too, from something so sweet that she can’t tear herself from it. The warm breath punishes her and soothes her all at the same time. But no matter, she knows the boy is alive. That’s something. Really, that’s everything. Knowing he’s alive and that she had some small part in that changes the days ahead in a way her days ahead haven’t been changed in five long years. The last time she’d felt such a thing, Russell had been alive. The two of them had been looking at each other across the front seat of his truck and were on their way to the hospital, smiling, almost crying, because they knew they’d be returning home with a newborn. That one moment had been the sweetest of her life because everything was on the horizon. And she feels a glimmer of that same thing now as she looks down on the boy. It’s hope, though she barely recognizes it, or at least it’s akin to hope, and it’s something to live for.
Taking slow backward steps, she keeps her ey
es on the boy as she makes her way to the door. She should have enough time to run back to her apartment, grab a quick shower and clean clothes, and be back before he wakes. Then wherever they take him later today, Imogene will go with him. She’s been a disappointment to so many people over the past five years in so many ways, but she can’t afford to fail this child. Doing that would be too much like failing Vaughn and Russell again. She didn’t realize until now how hope has fed her all her life and how starved she’s been without it. She had started with the hope that she’d be a real Coulter one day, and then that she’d find her real daddy and that he’d love her, and then she had hoped for a future away from this family and this town, and lastly for a future with Russell and Vaughn. None of those things have come to pass.
In the hallway, she pulls the door closed behind, and with her ear pressed to it, she listens for any sound from the boy. The boy. She doesn’t even know his name.
“Imogene?”
Swinging around, Imogene falls against the door. “Jesus, Warren,” she says. “You scared the shit out of me.”
She holds up a finger to silence him as she listens again for any sign she woke the boy. It’s quiet inside her room, but now that she’s on this side of the door, she can hear voices out in the kitchen and living room.
“Already with the language?” Warren says.
“Keep your voice down,” Imogene says in a whisper. She leans around Warren, hoping for a glimpse of who has come to the house so early, but she can’t see beyond the end of the hallway. “Did Garland tell you about the boy’s mama? You need to get men here. You need to find her.”
