Copyright © 2018 by Tiffany Quay Tyson
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First Edition
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Names: Quay Tyson, Tiffany, author.
Title: The past is never : a novel / Tiffany Quay Tyson.
Description: First edition. | New York : Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017042996 (print) | LCCN 2017046307 (ebook) | ISBN 9781510726833 (ebook) | ISBN 9781510726826 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Magic realism (Literature)--Fiction. | Delta (Miss. : Region)--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3617.U39 (ebook) | LCC PS3617.U39 P37 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042996
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Cover photo courtesy of iStockphoto
Printed in the United States of America
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner, Requiem for A Nun
For John, always
THE CREATURE WATCHED AND waited. It crouched just beyond the trees or beneath the waterline or over the horizon, just beneath the shifting sugar sand or just above the clouds, up beyond the stars. It waited for me. It will wait for you, too.
I don’t know how long I floated beneath the hot sun, how long I drifted in the land of alligators and crocodiles, where men walk on water, where God and the Devil shake hands, where the dead rise up to live again. At some point my body stopped sending signals to my fevered brain. I stopped wanting water or food. I stopped clawing at the stinging welts from the mosquitoes and black flies. The numbness from my leg spread across my body. Soon, I guessed, I’d feel nothing at all. Thank goodness. Thank God.
My life never flashed before my eyes; instead it unfolded like a child’s picture book. And other people’s lives, other people’s memories, other people’s stories came to me, as well. I recognized some of the people, and some were strangers to me, but I knew them all. We were joined together and there was no way to tell me from you or you from me, no way to separate sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, friends and enemies. There was no past or future. Everything that ever happened existed in a single moment. We were all connected.
A large black bird circled above me, waiting for me to die. I smelled fires burning from one hundred years ago. I smelled the clean sweat of a man swinging a pickax. I smelled cornbread and stewed collard greens. I smelled the sweet scent of brambleberries growing wild in the haunted woods. I smelled stale smoke from my mother’s cigarettes. I smelled the damp rotting decay of my father’s body. I smelled my sister’s hair; it smelled of summer. I smelled the metallic threat of rain. I smelled my grandmother’s lemon pound cake. I smelled my brother’s clothes after a long night on the water, briny and sharp. I smelled mustard and onions. I smelled the damp clay from the quarry and the sulfur-ripe stench of spent fireworks.
People talk about heaven and hell, about seeing the light or the darkness, but I got no sense of an afterlife. No angels descended to comfort me. No fire-and-brimstone visions. Only a man in a boat. A man both familiar and strange. And as I floated across the water, I wished I could go back. I wished I could return to the day when we first came here, when we first navigated the fresh rivers and the brackish swamps, when we swung beneath the mangrove tunnels, our monkey arms sunburnt and tight, when the swamp chicken called us forward, when the anhinga stretched, stretched, stretched its wings, when we touched pineapple plants sprouting from nothing more than humidity and hope, when we saw the strangling fig choke the bald cypress and I mistook it for a hug.
But no.
I wished to go back even further.
I wished to go back to the beginning. Or I wished to skip forward to the end. It came to me, floating on that small boat in the Gulf of Mexico: the beginning and the end were the same thing.
And monsters were everywhere. And dead men walked on water.
ONE
White Forest, Mississippi
1976
IT WAS AUGUST AND hotter, somehow, than July, a heavy, smothering heat that left us sticky and restless even in the dark of night. It rained most afternoons in the Mississippi Delta, violent thunderstorms from soft gray skies. The rain should have brought relief but when the clouds parted and the sun came out, steam rose from the dead grass and the cracked asphalt and the brown fields, and it was hotter still. Folks who believed in voodoo or signs from above said the heat was a warning. We didn’t believe in superstitions back then, but we were wrong to dismiss things we could not see.
In the summer of the bicentennial, we wore red, white, and blue. The cheap colors faded quickly, like sparklers burning out on a summer evening. We spent the long sweltering days together. We watched bad sitcom reruns on television, ate sugary cold cereal for lunch, read books we pulled from dusty shelves, and complained about the heat and the humidity and the boredom and our lives.
Willet, at sixteen, complained the loudest. It’s hotter’n a bitch in heat, he’d yell upon waking. Or I’m sweating like a pimp in Sunday school! He refused to wear a shirt or shoes. Teenage boys could get away with being crude and half-dressed, but girls had to remain fully clothed and weren’t allowed the relief of profanity. Instead of cussing, we whined. Pansy, just six years old, had mastered the skill of prying ice from the plastic tray in the freezer. She’d suck on the cubes while lying still as a corpse in front of the box fan in the living room. The heat left me restless. Like any fourteen-year-old girl, I yearned for something new to happen, something different or interesting or scandalous.
I sat beside Mama on the living room couch, an old, faded, overstuffed floral monstrosity that once belonged to her mother, the grandmother for whom I was named. I lifted a thin blue towel from the plastic basket to fold. You can bet Willet and Pansy never helped with the laundry. “Where is Daddy? What is he doing? When will he come home? Why does he leave?” My questions went on and on.
Our father had been gone for three weeks. He’d disappeared the week after the town’s Fourth of July celebration, when I’d eaten myself sick on hot dogs and peanut brittle, when Willet had nearly lost a finger to a Roman candle, when Pansy had fallen asleep under the live oak in front of the courthouse. His absence wasn’t unusual. Daddy often disappeared for a stretch—traveling for work, he said—but the details of his work were vague. He wasn’t like other fathers. He didn’t sit behind a desk all day or wear a tie. He didn’t come home at night and sit in front of the television with a stiff drink. He didn’t mow the lawn on weekends or putter around in our garage. He wasn’t interested in the news of the day. Daddy lived in the past, in the murky netherworld of legend and lore. Everything that might happen in this world has already occurred, he would tell us. There is nothing new. Daddy showed up and disappeared without
warning. We were expected to be glad to see him, and mostly we were. He was charming in the way dishonest men have to be and too handsome for his own good. He bore a striking resemblance to Paul Newman. He said so himself.
That summer, he and Uncle Chester spread counterfeit bills all over the south. They made no secret of it. They bleached five-dollar bills until they turned a soft pale gray, and then printed them as fifties and hundreds. Daddy was proud of their work. The five-dollar bills were the perfect canvas, not so soft as one-dollar bills. Folks might get suspicious if a hundred-dollar bill was too soft, he said. They laundered the cash by spending it. A few hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise could be bought and returned. The refund cash was real. Cashiers couldn’t detect the fake bills. Some cashiers swiped larger bills with a pen from the bank, but the pen only outed bills on bad paper; Daddy’s canvas was legit.
Sometimes Daddy and Uncle Chester sold their bills. Men in trouble with the law or unable to find steady work would show up at our front door and ask to invest in some art. Daddy would sell them a fifty-dollar bill for twenty-five dollars, or a hundred-dollar bill for forty. Mama hated when these men showed up, hated the desperation in their eyes and the dirt on their hands. They had a way of shuffling and mumbling that drove her near crazy, and she begged Daddy to find another line of work or at least keep the counterfeiting away from our house. We have children, she reminded him, as if he might forget. It did seem possible he might forget about us on one of his long trips. I didn’t like it when Daddy went away.
I often pestered Mama about Daddy’s absences, asked her when he would come home. Willet would scold me, tell me not to ask questions when there ain’t no answer. He protected Mama, even before things got real bad.
Mama snatched the towel out of my hand. She hated it when I went on and on about Daddy. She didn’t have any answers for me. “For God’s sake, Roberta Lynn.”
Mama was the only one who called me by my whole name. I hated it. It was old-fashioned and sounded like the name of someone destined for a career in country music or who would someday have too many children. I couldn’t carry a tune and I had no dreams of motherhood. I greatly preferred being called Bert. I was a tomboy, always trying to keep up with my brother. At a time when prairie skirts and gingham blouses were the style, I wore overalls and faded T-shirts. Willet said I was a roughneck. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I understood what he meant, but I got the gist. It was an insult, but I didn’t mind.
When Mama got fed up, when she got sick of our whining and my persistent questions, she kicked us out. “I don’t want to see one freckle on your faces until suppertime, you hear me?”
She got like that, especially when Daddy was gone for too long. We grabbed a few things and fled, letting the screen door shut hard behind us, because the slamming sound drove Mama crazy.
Once exiled, we always went to the same place, the forbidden and abandoned rock quarry, a two-mile journey across blistering asphalt and through choking dust. The sun shimmered like an oil slick. It had a way of making folks see things that weren’t there or maybe things that weren’t there anymore. On that hot August day, Pansy swore a wild dog was bounding toward her from the bottomland hardwoods. Willet tried to hitch a ride on a phantom farm truck. Something dry and cool slid across my bare foot, a water moccasin seeking moisture. When we reached the quarry, we kept right on walking until we stepped over the edge and sank hard into the cold, dark water, the first plunge a small death.
Daddy said the quarry was a mile deep. Sometimes he told us stories about how the quarry was dug and how the men who unearthed those stones suffered and died. He warned us away from the quarry and from the woods surrounding it. “It’s an evil place,” he told us. “The Devil will find you there.”
We ignored his warnings, desperate to immerse ourselves in cool water.
Earlier that summer, Willet had strung up an old rope on a live oak tree. We took turns swinging out over the water and dropping in, plunging deeper each time.
The country club in town had a swimming pool full of cool, clean, chlorinated water, but we were not members of the country club and never would be. Daddy said it was evil for different reasons. It was a place where white men played golf and smoked cigars, where white women ate cold chicken salad for lunch, where white children swam and ate ice cream sandwiches. We were white but not that kind of white. Daddy said it was wrong to swim in a place where so many people were excluded.
There used to be a public pool, but men had tossed broken bottles into it at night as a protest against integration. We wore shoes to swim there, but even so we came away with cuts on our legs and arms. Strands of red floated in the chlorinated water. Eventually, the city decided it was better for no one to swim than for black children and white children to swim together. So they drained it and turned it over to a used car dealer. The quarry was our only option.
We dove into the forbidden waters. We tried to reach the bottom. Diving left us dizzy and strung out. Pansy didn’t care how deep it was. Only the cool water mattered.
She was the smart one, the lucky one. She was supposed to start school in a few weeks and she wasn’t happy about it. She’d spent no time in day care or with babysitters. Mama had enrolled her in kindergarten the year before, but Pansy threw a fit about it. Daddy said she was already smarter than half the kids in town and she didn’t need an extra year of sitting in a classroom. Mama had let her stay home. It was like that with Pansy. She got what she wanted. There was no way Mama would have kept Willet or me home for an extra year, let me tell you. But Pansy would have to leave Mama’s constant care soon. Kindergarten was optional; first grade was mandatory. Pansy would have to sit in a classroom like the rest of us, no matter how many fits she threw.
Mama called Pansy her little miracle, because she’d shown up unexpectedly when Mama and Daddy thought they were done with all that. She wasn’t saddled with the names of the dead the way Willet and I were, but she was brought into the world the same way.
We were not born in hospitals. Daddy didn’t trust the cold, sterile instruments. He didn’t trust the doctors and nurses. He didn’t trust the drugs. It was unnatural, he said. We were born onto a soft quilt. And the same hands that stitched the quilt pulled us from our mother’s womb. We were brought to life by the hands of our Granny Clem. We were not the only ones.
Granny Clem had a way with pregnant women. She knew which herbs would dull pain and what to do to bring on contractions. She knew how to get a breach baby to flip by massaging a woman’s back and placing a warm hand inside her. She knew other things too, darker things. Sometimes women came to her with pregnancies they hadn’t planned, pregnancies they didn’t want. Granny Clem would send the women home with a week’s worth of strong tea made from pennyroyal, tansy, cotton root bark, and who knew what else. Most of the time, the tea brought on the women’s bleeding and emptied their wombs, but when the tea failed, Granny Clem took stronger measures. She knew how to push a long steel wand into a woman’s cervix to eliminate a pregnancy. For many women, Granny Clem was their last hope.
Abortion was legal by then, but the clinics were hours away by car and often overrun with protest groups and news cameras. Wealthy women went to private doctors or flew to areas of the country where clinics were not so scarce and where they could recover in a nice hotel with room service. Poor women and high school girls made do with the clinics when they could reach them, or took matters into their own hands, or sought out the services of people like Granny Clem. Mama didn’t approve of Granny Clem’s abortion business, but Daddy said his mother was doing God’s work. Daddy said no child should be brought into a world that doesn’t want it.
Even though Mama and Daddy hadn’t planned for Pansy, they wanted her very much. It was a difficult pregnancy. Mama gained more weight with Pansy than she had with either Willet or me. Her feet swelled and a dark rash crawled across her face. We found long strands of her hair in the sofa cushions and the breadbox. When she went into labor, she howled lik
e a wounded animal. Daddy told Willet to keep an eye on me and he dragged Mama to his truck. She could barely walk; her knees buckled and her feet dragged across the ground.
Willet put an arm around me as they drove away. “It’s all gonna be fine, Bert.” He couldn’t have known that and he must have been scared, too. At ten years old, he’d taken seriously his responsibility to keep me calm. It was the middle of the night and we knew we wouldn’t sleep. We ate peanut butter on saltine crackers and drank root beer over ice. Willet taught me how to play gin rummy.
Mama labored for nearly twenty hours. Granny Clem had her suck on peyote to make the experience less painful and to wash away bad associations. It was under the influence of the peyote that Mama blurted out the name of her favorite flower in a fit of giggles after finally giving birth. The name stuck. When I asked what Pansy would be named if Mama hadn’t been all dopey, Mama said Pansy was Pansy and could never be anyone else.
Pansy was strange from birth, different from us in so many ways. She was born with a head full of coarse black hair and a blotchy tan. A large purple birthmark spread across her left thigh. Willet and I were bald and pale as ice cream in our baby photos. Pansy’s almond-shaped eyes were sage green and wide-set, where ours were round and the color of milk chocolate. Pansy was born with teeth, four of them jutting out of her bottom gum. Granny Clem said it meant Pansy was special, powerful; she certainly seemed to hold power over our father. He held her and stroked his thumb across her birthmark as if that purple blemish were some sort of sign from God.
During her first months at home, Pansy cried and cried. She seemed angry. She rarely slept. When Mama tried to breastfeed her, she refused to eat or clamped down hard with her grotesque teeth until Mama cried out in pain. Mama switched to bottle-feeding, but only the most expensive brand of formula would satisfy Pansy. Daddy said she’d eat us into the poorhouse before her first birthday but he didn’t seem mad about it. In fact, he sounded kind of proud. Starting her on solid food didn’t help. As a toddler, she was so picky Mama worried she’d be malnourished. While we ate mushy vegetables and cornbread, Pansy got peanut butter on toast. While we choked down greasy cabbage rolls with ground beef and onion, Pansy got chicken fingers and French fries. If anyone tried to insist she eat whatever the rest of us were having, she threw a tantrum so violent her whole face turned purple. Mama rubbed her back while she gasped and hiccuped.
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