Summer in the South

by Cathy Holton

“That week-old enchilada donated a wing to the hospital that treated your kidney disease,” he reminded her.

  “Blood money,” she said ominously.

  “So you are related to Charlie?” Ava said, trying to head off an argument. She was avoiding him now, posing her questions directly to Sally.

  Sally sighed, as if waiting for him to say something, and when he didn’t she pointed at Jake and said, “He’s Charlie’s grandson.” She chuckled, watching Ava’s face. “I know, I know, it’s like a big old soap opera. I was married to Jake’s daddy, King, who was Charlie’s son. King’s mama was a woman Charlie took up with before he ran off with Miss Fanny. They weren’t married or anything, at least not anything legal, but Charlie gave King his last name anyway on the birth certificate.”

  Jake stood up and collected the empty plates and took them to the sink.

  Sally said, “Charlie Woodburn was quite the ladies’ man, but I guess you’ve already heard about all of that.”

  Ava sipped her iced tea and set her glass down. “Everyone down here seems to have their own version of Charlie and how he died.”

  Jake stacked the dishes in the sink and turned on the tap. “Why don’t you just go with what the death certificate said?”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said he drowned. Accidentally.”

  Sally snorted and waved her hand dismissively. “Hell, the death certificate would say whatever the Woodburns wanted it to say. You can’t go by that at all.”

  Later, Sally told them about Clara McGann. How Clara’s ancestor, Hannah, had been a slave and bore Randal Woodburn three children. When he married Delphine, he gave Hannah and her children their freedom, and Hannah married and went off to New Orleans with her new husband. But when Hannah and her husband died, Randal went to New Orleans and brought the three children back to Longford, and later he gave them to one of his sons as a wedding present.

  “You mean he took three children who were free and put them back into slavery?” Ava said.

  “That’s right. And his own children at that.”

  Jake rose and went to the refrigerator. He hadn’t said a word during his mother’s revelations, staring rigidly out the French doors, his fingers tapping lightly against the table.

  “So Clara McGann is actually a Woodburn?” Ava said.

  Sally pointed at Jake’s sturdy back. “She descends from Old Randal just like he does.”

  “And the Woodburns know this?”

  “Of course they do! Nobody talks about it, but everybody knows.”

  Ava was quiet for a moment. Now that she knew, she felt that she had suspected it all along: the way Josephine and Clara carried themselves, their similar height and graceful manner. Hadn’t she thought they looked like sisters?

  She leaned forward and rested her arms on the table. “So tell me, Sally. Who do you think killed Charlie Woodburn?”

  Jake brought the pitcher of tea and poured everyone a fresh glass. Sally watched him, her lips pursed, a fond, thoughtful expression on her face. “I always heard it was the Woodburn cousins. Josephine and Fanny didn’t have any brothers, so the male cousins would have considered it their duty to protect the womenfolk from a scoundrel like Charlie. That’s how it was done in those days. They say Charlie’s body was pretty battered when they pulled him out of the river. It’s a large family, spread out over most of the county. They’re all intermarried, you know. Of course, that’s the way it was done back then. Look at the royal family of England, look at the family trees of most of the well-to-do in this country. Cousins marrying cousins for generations just to keep the property intact.” She glanced at Jake, who stared down at his glass. “It’s all about money. Money and property and family honor. They killed Charlie because he was a Black Woodburn, and they couldn’t have him getting his hands on any of that money.”

  Jake rose and put the tea away. He looked at Ava. “I thought we might take a walk,” he said.

  Sally groaned and flattened her palms against the table, pushing herself to her feet. “My back is acting up. You better hurry before the rain comes.”

  Ava said vaguely, “A walk would be nice.” She was thinking of something she hadn’t considered before. She remembered Alice and Clara’s admission that Charlie had been an alcoholic. Nothing Sally had told her contradicted that. “You don’t think it might have been suicide, do you? With Charlie? You don’t think he might have taken his own life?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Sally said. “From what I’ve heard about him, he didn’t seem the type. Still, you never know.” She grimaced and put her hands on her back, stretching. “It happens more frequently than you might think. This town is rife with suicides.”

  There was a smell of rain in the air. The little horses followed them to the edge of the deck, then stood watching soberly as they crossed the field. Jake went ahead of her to open a gate that led into another, larger pasture. As he leaned down, she saw his deeply tanned neck above the collar of his T-shirt, and she imagined herself touching him there, laying her fingers lightly against his skin. When he straightened up, she looked away quickly.

  They walked across the field to a fringe of tall trees. There was a path here leading down to a rocky creek. The air beneath the trees was cool and damp, and smelled of leaves and wet rock. She walked beside him, matching her stride to his, so close they occasionally bumped against each other.

  He stopped for a moment, listening. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before the storm hits. We shouldn’t go too far.”

  They went on, following the sound of the creek.

  “Does it make you nervous when I ask about Charlie Woodburn?” she said.

  He grinned. “Again with the personal questions.”

  “Sorry. It must be my Yankee upbringing.”

  “I like your honesty. It’s refreshing.”

  “I’m not trying to offend anyone, although I have the feeling that I do. Constantly. It’s unintentional, though.”

  Now that they were away from Sally he seemed a little more at ease, although Ava still had the feeling he was on guard about something, holding himself close.

  “We’re a little sensitive down here about our history,” he said. “You see one too many bad made-for-TV movies and you get a chip on your shoulder.”

  “I’m sorry if my questions seem rude. It’s just that I’m curious. It’s some kind of strange compulsion I have. If someone has a secret, I have to try to figure it out.”

  “You might find that we’re not as interesting as you think.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  The slope became gradually steeper, and they could see the creek now through the trees. He stopped, and let her walk ahead of him.

  “If I thought about it, I could be bitter about the Woodburns,” he said. He seemed more comfortable talking to her back. She walked slowly, grabbing hold of narrow trees and brush to keep her balance. “But I could be bitter about Charlie Woodburn, too. My father drank himself to death three years after I was born, and who’s to say it would have been any better if he’d had a father, if Charlie had lived. Charlie didn’t bother to marry my grandmother. He ran off instead with Fanny Woodburn against her family’s wishes—he doesn’t sound like the kind of man anyone should grieve over. We’ve got a bad habit down here of allowing patterns of male violence and oppression to continue through generations. I, for one, don’t think it’s healthy.”

  “I guess I hadn’t really looked at it like that. From your father and grandmother’s point of view. I was looking at Fanny and Charlie and thinking it must have been some kind of passionate love affair. Something neither one could deny.”

  “There may have been some of that. Who knows?”

  “That’s the interesting question,” Ava said.

  “I think living in the past is always a mistake. You can’t go back and change anything, so let it go and move on.”

  They were walking side by side, and occasionally he woul
d brush against her. When he did, she felt a strange hum, like a kind of low vibration, run up her bare arm and across both shoulders. She stopped and looked up at him. “But what if we can learn something from the stories people tell?”

  He was quiet for a moment, considering this. “The aunts are good people. They’ve been good to me.” He gazed up through the trees at the distant rim of sky. “Everyone has a different story, and you have to ask yourself what motivates people to see reality the way they do. The aunts gave me an opportunity to get an education, to better myself, but from my mother’s point of view they took me away from her for six years. They’re members of a family that refused to recognize my father as being anything more than illegitimate white trash. So she doesn’t see them in a favorable light.”

  He continued to stare at the sky. When he spoke again it was in a cautious, thoughtful tone. “The way I look at the Woodburn legacy is this: it’s not right, what happened, but it’s the way it was. Period.” He dropped his chin, stared at her intently. “Every civilization has its dark periods. Look at how the Irish were treated in New England. Look at the New York race riots, child labor during the Industrial Revolution.”

  “Were you by any chance a history major?”

  He grinned suddenly, a brief, dazzling smile. “Art history.”

  “I knew it. She wondered what he would be like as a lover.

  He stepped around her, careful not to touch her, and walked to the edge of a steep rise, looking down at the creek.

  “Is something wrong?” she said. He would be generous, inventive, and kind, she decided.

  “We should probably go back.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He turned and came back up the slope, stopping several feet below her. He broke off the tip of a pine branch, slowly stripping the needles. “I thought you and Will were old college friends,” he said. “Nothing more.”

  “We are.”

  “I heard you were engaged.”

  “Good Lord! Who told you that?”

  “Someone who was at the barbecue.”

  “Well, they’re wrong. Will and I are just good friends.”

  He gave her a long, searching look, pulling the branch through his fingers. “Does Will know that?”

  She struggled to hold his gaze, then looked away. “He should. I’ve told him often enough.” They stood quietly facing each other. There was nothing else she could say.

  “We better get back,” he said.

  She turned and walked ahead of him up the ridge. Behind her he said quietly, “There’s already bad blood between Will and me.”

  She realized then that he wasn’t going to touch her. Whatever it was between him and Will, he wanted it over with.

  The storm, which had held off all morning, finally broke. Rain lashed the tops of the trees and drummed along the roof of the car as she drove home. The weather matched her melancholy mood. Nothing would come of her attraction to Jake Woodburn. She knew that now. He wouldn’t do anything to further distress the aunts or Will; he had made it clear that he wanted back in their good graces.

  Despite her disappointment she couldn’t help but feel a flicker of relief. The last thing she needed this summer was another dead-end love affair. The last thing she needed was another distraction to keep her from writing her novel.

  She drove through the rainy countryside thinking over what she’d learned about Charlie Woodburn, what she’d supposedly learned, because the truth was, you couldn’t trust town gossip, even gossip that had been sifted and honed through over sixty years of telling. Anyone could have killed Charlie. Charlie could have killed himself. It was tempting to let it go, to spend no more time thinking about him.

  But she couldn’t. Instead, she thought of the way Maitland tenderly kissed Fanny’s hand as they sat watching television at night. She thought of the sepia-tinted Woodburn family photographs showing solemn, slightly menacing young men in slouch hats and boots, long rifles nestled in their arms. She thought of austere, taciturn Josephine, the keeper of the family history, the guardian of its honor, a woman who seemed capable of anything, even murder.

  And later that night as she eased into sleep, as pale moonlight flooded her room and crickets chanted outside her window, she thought of doe-eyed Clara McGann tending her beautiful poisonous plants in the moonlit garden.

  That evening she suffered another attack of sleep paralysis.

  She awakened to the sound of someone whispering her name. She could feel a presence in the room with her, although she could not turn her head to look. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling but she could not move them; she could not move any part of her body. She lay as if encased in a tomb of ice.

  The blackness inside the room was thick, and smelled of smoke and old linen. As Ava stared upward, she became gradually aware of a dark shadow flitting across the ceiling at regular intervals. She was terrified by the fear that a strange face might lean, horrifyingly and without warning, into her field of vision.

  The episode went on for several minutes and just as the feeling of dread became too much for her to bear, she found herself quite suddenly able to blink her eyes.

  Instantly, as if released from a spell, she was able to move again, and she cried out.

  She leaned to switch on a lamp. The room was empty, cheerful and cozy in the lamplight. Gradually her breathing evened. Her heart stopped its wild thudding and beat a calm, steady rhythm. One of the old plantation ledgers was lying on her bedside table and she pulled it into bed and curled on her side, cradling it.

  The horror of the episode gradually faded. She opened the ledger and began trying to decipher the old-fashioned script. She read:

  April 19th. Sunday. Did not go to church. Wind very fresh but no rain. Laramore and Phipps came around noon. Went down to the Negro houses and took five Negroes viz.—Peter, John, Sam, Titus, and Louisa. They are sold to a man near Carthage. They seemed in good spirits but I am loath to part with them through no fault of theirs, but by my own extravagance. This should pay my debts to Barnwell and Cuffy and leave some for the children’s tuition.

  Spent the afternoon reading Chevalier de Faublas.

  It was horrible, the way someone could describe a human being as if they were of no more consequence than a cow. She had admired the Woodburns’ collection of artifacts, their wealth and prestige and history, and yet all those things had come at the price of human misery.

  April 20th. The yard Negroes pulled up the floor of one of the outhouses and killed 60 rats. Clear and hot in the morning. The Negroes at home are disconsolate over the sale yesterday but they know it could not be helped. They may yet see their children again. Took a hunt with Sumner Whitson. Killed a very large buck. Bathed and dressed and rode over and dined with W. F. Fraser.

  Wife sick again.

  She flipped back to the opening page of the ledger. 1832 it read, in flowing script. Old Randal would have been master in those days. These were his words Ava was reading.

  April 24th. Clear, calm, and beautiful. All hands planting cotton. While at supper, Old Judy came in crying that Toby was worse. Went down to the Negro houses and found him perfectly dead. They told me yesterday he was better and so I did not send for the doctor. Toby was a good boy, about 15 years old, and will be a great loss to me. He lost an eye last summer and was not the same after that, very dispirited and low. Taken sick on Tuesday, died Thursday.

  Somewhere deep in the house Ava heard a steady thumping sound, a vague knocking. It went on for a minute or two, then stopped. She closed the ledger and lay back, thinking about the boy, Toby, who had died one hundred and sixty-six years ago. It was easy to imagine him, wounded and disheartened, going about his dreary life.

  Had he welcomed death when it finally came?

  The Negro houses were where the Harvard students had come to excavate several summers ago. The next time she was at Longford she would ask to see them, to see if she might catch some lingering presence of Toby, to walk where he had walk
ed, to see what he had seen.

  She wondered if Josephine and Will had ever read the plantation journals. She wondered how much of their family history they had truly been willing to face.

  Longford

  The following evening, Ava began her novel.

  She was taking a bath in the old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub when a sentence came into her head: He was tall and dark, and when he entered a room all eyes turned his way.

  She climbed out of the tub, dressing quickly, and padded down the hallway. The house was quiet; the others had climbed the stairs to bed hours ago, and she went into her room and switched on the desk lamp. The room, beyond the dimly glowing light, was bathed in shadow. She sat at the computer and opened a new file, waiting as the glowing page loaded on the screen, and then without thinking about it too much, she began to write.

  Time passed, but she was unaware of its passing; she was in turn-of-the-century New Orleans with a destitute boy and his mother. A boy she named Charlie Finn. She saw him and his mother step aboard a streetcar, saw them sit at a window and watch the scrolling scene, the ancient oaks draped in moss, the beautiful old houses lining St. Charles Avenue. She saw them climb down from the car and walk along the brick sidewalk to a grand white house that sat like a wedding cake behind a wrought-iron fence, taking up the entire block. She watched as Charlie and his mother, a seamstress, went in through the gate and around to the back of the house and rang the bell. Later they were shown through a series of large cool rooms, and up a back staircase to a room where the lady of the house sat waiting to be measured for new undergarments: lace-trimmed drawers and corset covers and chemises. Ava saw the boy, Charlie, with his large dark eyes and black hair, sitting quietly and patiently, waiting for his mother to finish. She saw his face as he looked around the large room with its expensive furnishings, saw his mother, weary and broken from work and poverty, on her knees before the lady of the house, her worn tape measure in her hands. She felt something stir in his chest then, something determined and fierce.