“That you perhaps believe, as William Faulkner did, that”—she lowered her voice to her best Mississippi male drawl—“‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”
Grinning, Scudder held up a second finger. “Two.”
“And that, contrary to your athletic physique”—she gestured in game show–assistant style, as if displaying a new car—“and participation in a number of socially acceptably rough, high-contact sports, you were a closet nerd in high school.”
Reluctantly, he held up a third finger. “No one else knew. Except Dan. I hid my books under my cleats. He hid his sculptures behind his free weights.”
“Tell me the truth: How many times have you read it?”
“Not saying.”
“Remember, you’re talking to a woman who reads two-hundred-year-old journals for a wild time.”
“Here’s all I’m saying: I’ve read Morrison’s Beloved more.”
Kate studied the blackwater swamp up ahead lit by the truck’s headlights. “About a fugitive slave.”
He sat up and stared with her into the cypress trees. “You thinking about Tom Russell?”
She nodded. “And the present-day Russells. The journal from Rose Pinckney’s family that she and I have been working our way through makes me convinced on the one hand that if Dinah, the woman Tom Russell loved, even lived long enough to bring her baby into the world, its father is just as likely to have been the white owner who lived on the same property.”
She pulled her knees to her chest, not caring anymore about the condition of the little black dress. “And for Dinah and Tom to have had other children, he would’ve had to survive the city’s reaction to the revolt, and nothing I’ve found even hints at that—except my mother’s research.” Kate rested her chin on her knees. “And none of that gets me any closer to understanding why the research was so important to her.”
Scudder rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Kate, since you’re friends with Gabe and Dan—and me—how much do you know about genetic genealogical research?”
“You’re serious?”
“Dead serious.”
She gave a wry smile. “My time at Harvard has taught me one should always cover for complete ignorance with phrases like, My ion-mobility spectrometry skills aren’t as current as I’d like, or, My Serbo-Croatian might be a bit rusty. But just between us, it might be the case that I know absolutely nothing about genetic genealogical research.”
He traced a Y on the truck hood. “Descent through the male line is apparently where the better matching would be on the STRs—short tandem repeats, the markers on the Y chromosome. Apparently, ninety-five percent of it doesn’t change one generation to the next, father to son. That’s why it’s so good at tracking who’s descended from whom. Although it’s possible to track a matrilineal descent—through the mother’s line.”
She nodded, forehead buckled in concentration. “STRs,” she repeated.
“And even though they prefer buccal swabs—a scraping inside the cheek—they can get DNA samples from, like, baseball caps, licked envelopes, stamps. Hair, too, as long as there’s follicle or root . . . I’m boring you.”
“No. This isn’t my bored face. This is my can’t believe I’m having a conversation about buccal swabs on the hood of a pickup in a swamp in the Deep South but I’m intrigued face.”
He grinned. “Okay, so, this might not be my go-to conversation on a first date. Not that this is,” he hastened to add. “And not that I’d have chosen this particular venue, with a broken-down truck.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She stretched her arms overhead and gazed up at the sky. “The view’s awfully nice.”
Silence for a moment from his side of the hood. And when Kate rolled her head toward him, he was looking at her.
Suddenly self-conscious, she lowered her arms and sat up. “You were explaining about how they collect DNA samples.”
“So I have an . . . acquaintance who’s gotten interested lately in genetic research.”
“Rose Pinckney.”
He looked startled. “What makes you guess that?”
“She dropped some results she’d gotten in the mail one time when I was there and volunteered that she was having genetic testing done. But are you trying to tell me her tests have something to do with the Russells?”
He looked away. “The situation is not what she thinks. There are things she doesn’t know that aren’t mine to tell her. I’m just the guy who’s restoring her molding and floors. And even what I think I know, I’m not sure I’ve got right.”
“And you don’t trust me enough yet to tell me. Is that it?”
He swung his face to meet hers. “I do trust you. But all I’m free to say is maybe Miz Rose should slow down with the tests.”
Something moved in the water close to the truck, a swish through the inky black.
Kate swallowed. “Gator?”
“Probably.”
From all sides, the deep-throated echo of bullfrogs.
“So, Kate.” He was nudging the conversation to something new. “Will the Ivy League be pulling you back soon?”
The truck’s headlights caught the outline of a large cat creeping across the log.
Kate wrapped both arms around her knees. “Truth is I’m on academic probation. Don’t know if I’ll be going back.”
Scudder stared with her out into the swamp. “You’d give up the history.”
“The history I love. Guess I’ll always keep that. Somehow. Just wouldn’t get to have the letters after my name that would say”—she paused—“that I’m smart enough, finally. Like I’m not as easy to ignore as my father seemed to believe.”
It was more than she’d meant to say. And not something she’d have admitted she knew about her own life, her choice of grad school and the stamp of approval—at long last—it would place at the end of her name: PhD.
“Kate, you know you don’t have to finish out a life sentence you set up just to try and get your father’s attention, right? Unless it’s something you want.”
She let out her breath. “I wish I could tell you which it is.”
A marsh owl called again over the croon and slide of the radio, a bouncing blues-shuffle rhythm.
Scudder kept his face aimed out over the swamp. “Hard not to spend up the life we’ve got now railing at what we wish hadn’t been.”
Kate put her hand on his shoulder—her gesture as involuntary as the small shudder that went through him. She could feel the muscle under the white cotton of his shirt.
He lifted his head. Face inches from hers.
Behind them in the truck cab, the radio hemmed up the rough edges of quiet with the lilt of a new melody line.
With this ring, a tenor crooned, I promise I’ll always love you, always love you . . .
“Those are the Tams,” Scudder said, leveraging himself to his feet there on the hood. “Carolina beach music. Not to be confused with California and the Beach Boys. We used to dance to this stuff at oyster roasts. On the sand.” He extended his hand. “Care to?”
Kate looked at his hand. Felt the music throbbing beneath them.
She knew beach music and the South Carolina state dance that went with it, the shag, a kind of slow jitterbug. Sarah Grace had taught her when Kate was small, the two of them holding hands and twirling, as Kate’s bright-slippered feet—Winnie the Pooh’s head bobbing there on the toes—shuffled out the patterns in time with her momma’s, sometimes to this very song: With this ring, I promise . . .
Sarah Grace showed her how to loop their linked hands overhead and then down as they pulled away.
I’ll always love you, always love you . . .
But sometimes in the midst of their giggles and spins, her momma’s face would take on a faraway look, the pivot and slide of her steps becoming clumsy and slow. And then she would no longer be dancing at all but staring at a blank space on their kitchen wall that might have become some sandy place at the shore, her feet dancing in surf and the music b
lasting from a cassette player close by and her laughter and her dance partner’s lifting with the squawk of the seagulls.
At these times, Sarah Grace would turn from whatever scene she’d been seeing and kiss the top of Kate’s head with a ferocity that sometimes hurt.
I’d better start dinner now, Katie, she’d whisper. And the dance would be done.
Nearly submerged now by a wave of grief at the memory, Kate took Scudder’s hand and let herself be hauled to her feet. “And if we misstep,” she managed, “we’re gator meat.”
“Pretty much. I’d be careful if I were you.” Bare feet moving in four-four time across the truck’s hood, he held out both his hands.
Kate let herself be spun into the music, pulled with both hands toward him, then back, forward, and back again. Scudder lifted their arms overhead, feet still in a step-ball-change shuffle, then a slow pretzeled spin of arms tangled and untangled. And below the sloped metal span of their dance floor, blackwater.
At the end of the song, they stayed where they’d ended the last spin, both facing away from the swamp, Kate’s arms crossed over her front, both hands holding his as he stood behind her. Scudder’s head bent, his cheek touching hers.
“This place,” she whispered. “It’s so full of beauty but also of . . .”
“Pain,” he said. “I know.”
Slowly, she arched back her neck to brush her lips against the rough of his jaw.
He spun her gently so they were facing each other. Then circled her waist with both arms and pressed her to him, his mouth finding hers, blackwater throbbing around them.
Chapter 35
1822
Emily crouched in lace imported last fall from Belgium, here in the dirt behind a crumbling brick wall. To her right crouched Nina and Dinah beside her, the moon over the marsh grainy and fogged, like they were watching it all through a silk screen.
He’d had it coming, of course, the prisoner. Emily knew all about why.
You didn’t go lathering up hundreds, maybe thousands of slaves for revolt like this Denmark Vesey had done and expect the old families of Charleston to hail you as their hero. She knew that city leaders were hauling in score upon score of slaves, plus the free black leader and four white men for questioning, and she knew that some of the blacks had been tortured for answers—though no man would have said this directly in the presence of the more delicate sex. Through her father and his friend Colonel Drayton, a member of the council Mayor Hamilton had gathered, she knew the interrogations that the council was calling a trial were being conducted behind closed doors—with no evidence but a handful of frightened informants.
She understood why the white people of Charleston, outnumbered by slaves and free blacks, lay awake every night terrified now. She understood Vesey had to be hanged, and fast.
Then why did she feel as if she were the one in line for the noose? Why did she want to leap from behind the brick wall and shout for the whole thing to stop? Emily’s hand went to her throat, which was throbbing.
A huddle of men, including Emily’s father, had shown up today to be sure the job got done quickly and right—and in secret, just the silver-gray side of daybreak. Emily and Nina and Dinah had been together on the second-story piazza, Dinah brushing Emily’s hair, when they’d overheard her father and Colonel Drayton speaking on the piazza below.
“The other executions can be fully public. But not this one,” Drayton had said. “The last thing we need is creating a martyr of Vesey. The whole thing will be done before dawn. On Blake’s lands outside the city. And no one else must know.”
The three girls had exchanged glances. Emily tried to recall now if they’d spoken or if only those glances had sealed their agreement they’d go.
The top hats of the men stretched them a foot or so taller, the hats blurred into their collars in the near dark. They’d come this morning with the purpose of killing, and that purpose, ancient as clubs and sharp stone, gave a hunch to their shoulders.
The noose swayed now in a slow, sluggish breeze.
Maybe it was the presence of Nina to her right, cheeks chalky white and eyes stricken. Or maybe it was the presence of Dinah to her left, the same age as Emily, the same long, slender neck and much the same build, except for the rounded bulge at her middle. A baby. Whose father was . . . who?
Emily fought back the nausea that swirled over her.
This summer, that’s when the trouble had started.
Until this summer, the world had been well ordered and good. There’d been no discontent among slaves, no fear among whites until that monster Vesey. Had there?
Emily wiped a hand over her brow, glowing with perspiration.
The Mercury and other papers and the mayor and all his closed-door council might be trumpeting how happy and contented, how safe and secure they’d all been before.
But it was a lie.
The truth of this broke over Emily Pinckney with a crash that rocked her back as if she’d been smacked.
Dinah was watching her face. Dinah, the closest friend of her childhood, who was bearing a baby that was probably Emily’s half sister or brother.
Emily pressed a hand to her mouth and cursed herself for the foolhardiness of coming. And now it was too late to leave. She focused on the horizon and tried to make her mind blank.
A breeze off the marsh jostled a line of palmettos and set them to rattling fronds like flimsy wood sabers. By noon there would be little breeze, and a Low Country sun would be searing the city again—like every day of summer in Charleston. The sun would soon be chinning up over the edge of the marsh, and the temperature with it.
Dear God, it was hot, already so hot. Emily thought she would faint.
The men at the base of the oak squirmed like they couldn’t get enough air, and they tugged at their necks, at those fine silk cravats that must’ve been cinching up tight. They stared at the prisoner there under the live oak, its branches dipping and reaching in long, graceful black lines, the tree far wider than it was tall.
But against the ragged edge of the marsh, the prisoner was still just a dark smudge, the black silhouettes of palmettos framing the group of men, nothing but scribbles of charcoal all down both sides.
All of a sudden, the figure clanked one stride toward the cluster of men, and the men jumped like they’d been attacked. Their hands shot to inner coat pockets, and they groped for the pistols they’d loaded before leaving home.
Emily reached for the other girls’ hands, and they held on to each other.
Even chained, the prisoner possessed some sort of strange power that made a whole clump of rich white men with pistols skittish as overdressed rabbits.
They look scared, Emily thought of the white men in charge. Guilty and scared. The former slave with chains on his wrists and his ankles stood with his head up and eyes steady.
Dying, she thought, with such courage.
The men huddled there by the oak shifted from one foot to the other, tugged more at their necks, like maybe the whispers had wended their way past their mansions that even manacled, even here moments from death, Vesey was a fair match for the pistols and rope.
Now Emily’s father touched a hand to his morning coat’s inner pocket, which held his pistol. “Where the devil is Belknap?”
Dinah was watching the scene and watching Emily’s father, with eyes that told Emily volumes. Emily had seen it before, that rage in Dinah. But now those eyes above the rounded bulge of her middle made it all too horrifically clear.
“I told you, Pinckney. He was just leaving the workhouse. This unpleasantness will all be finished in moments.”
Jackson Pinckney looked out past the rope toward the shifting ghost-shadows of marsh grass. “It’s nearly light. And, no, it won’t all be finished. Not even in my own lifetime.”
“That much,” Emily murmured, making no sound the men could hear, “would be true.” Pinckney’s gaze jerked from one of his collaborators to the next like he was hoping someone would argue with him
, assure him he was dead wrong.
But no one so much as lifted his eyes from the ground.
Then, like they’d got the stiff pulled out of their spines, they hunkered down over their pistols, and their gazes swung over to Vesey.
The man in the chains met their looks with one of his own that was clearly a challenge, a look that all but announced that he, Vesey, was the only man present who wasn’t afraid.
Beside Emily, there behind the brick wall, Dinah spoke for the first time. “Thought I knew,” she whispered, “how it ended.” And she molded her palms, shaking a little, over the baby inside her like she was feeling it stir.
Emily Pinckney did not ask what her maid meant by the whisper. She did not want to know. She herself half expected a rescue, a band of armed rebels galloping up in a cloud of white dust.
For a moment, nobody moved. Then the armed huddle at the live oak drew in shoulder to shoulder. They mopped sweat from under their top hats.
A scrabble of boot heels and hooves marched out from an alley nearby. Another white man joined the group by the live oak, his hand grasping a cracked leather lead. A bay colt side hopped behind, and it was a bundle of nerves, flank all aquiver, ears twitching forward and back.
One of the top hats stepped forward. “Good Lord, Belknap, what the hell’s kept you?”
“Calm yourself, Hamilton.”
Belknap was hauling back on the lead. “Couldn’t be helped. The bastard they call Gullah Jack tried to sneak through the Neck just a few minutes ago—on his way to a rescue of this one.” His head jerked toward Vesey, who remained motionless. “Reckon he thought he couldn’t be caught, like he’d got powers or something. Surprised as hell we took him down.”
Hamilton waved this away. “More delay and we may as well hang him in broad daylight from St. Philip’s steeple.”
Her leg cramping, Emily shifted her weight, bumping against the wall and knocking a loose brick to the ground. All three of the girls froze.
Hamilton spun then toward the brick wall. He stood, listening, watching.
He stalked toward the ruined brick wall two paces. Then a third.
A Tangled Mercy Page 29
