The Past Is Never

by Tiffany Quay Tyson

  Soon the morning sun burned away the clouds and dried out the road. I breathed in the thick, clean, rain-washed air. I palmed the rock I carried with me everywhere. That morning it was like a chunk of ice in my hand, smooth and cold and slick. Sometimes it pulsed warm and gentle, and sometimes it felt lifeless and ordinary. I didn’t know what made the quarry rock go hot and cold but I imagined the rock carried the memories of all the people who’d held it or stepped over it or dug it from the dirt. If it were true, maybe it carried Pansy’s memories. Maybe it would lead us to her.

  On Chokoloskee Island, most of the houses sat on stilts. Even the doublewide trailers were elevated, and I wondered how a strong wind didn’t blow them over. Cars and boats were parked beneath the wind-washed homes, which seemed practical. Why build a driveway or a garage when you could pull your car right beneath your house? The whole island was elevated thanks to the shell mounds left by the Calusa Indians more than two hundred years earlier. It was an odd feeling, to be driving across the discarded bits of someone’s long-forgotten supper.

  It was Cheryl’s idea to show the photos around the general store at Chokoloskee. She’d wanted to come along with us, but her father was having one of his bad days and she couldn’t leave him. I was glad. This was our quest, Willet’s and mine. It didn’t seem right to bring along a stranger.

  Willet drove the length of the small island, turning only twice, and we ended up at the far southern tip where Smallwood’s Store perched over the water. I’d thought Everglades City was the edge of the world, but I was wrong. It was Saturday, and kids begged for ice cream while their mothers shopped for canned goods and sacks of flour. On the southern edge of the store, a half dozen men sat talking on a gray wooden porch. They stared at the horizon, spinning stories for God and for themselves. I believe men sit side by side on bar stools and stand shoulder to shoulder when they fish because it makes the lies flow easier. Women are different, something I’d learned working with Granny Clem. Women like to look you in the eye when they lie to you.

  We approached the men and asked if they would take a look at Willet’s photos. I figured we’d have no more luck with these men than we’d had with the store clerks and waitresses in Everglades City, but one man held up the photo of Daddy with the fish. “Well, it’s been a few years, but I believe this could be the man who bought my old skiff.” He slapped his leg and turned to the man beside him. “Remember that fellow? Paid me with a wad of funny money. Disappeared into the wind.”

  “Oh, sure,” the second man said. “I remember you threatening to shoot him if you ever saw him again. Smart of him to disappear, I’d say.”

  “When was this?” Willet asked.

  “Oh, it must have been near about five years ago. Maybe more.” He laughed and shook his head. “Truth is, that funny money spent real easy. My mistake was letting my wife try to put a chunk of it in the bank. They raised a flag, but the bills worked just fine as walking around money.”

  I could feel the excitement coming off Willet. “Did you get any idea where he might be living?” Willet sounded like he’d been running.

  The man pulled a pack of cigarettes from his front pocket and Willet helped him block the breeze to get one lit. He took a long drag. Smoke trailed out of his mouth when he spoke. “I didn’t ask. He struck me as a man who kept to himself. I respect that.”

  “But you must have signed over the boat title,” Willet said. “There had to be some paperwork.”

  “Ah, hell,” the man said. “It was a little old rowing skiff. Wasn’t worth what he paid for it, to tell the truth. It was a handshake deal. No paperwork.”

  Willet was breathless, and I felt weak. The deck seemed to sway with the lapping water. I put my hand on the wooden railing to steady myself. The whole trip had felt like nothing more than chasing ghosts up until that moment.

  The screen door to the porch opened and two boys ran out to the man in the rocking chair. “Grandpop,” the younger boy hollered. “Can we have all the change in your pockets?”

  The old man frowned, but his eyes twitched with amusement. “Well, let’s see.” He patted his pockets with liver-spotted hands. “I wonder if I’ve got even a penny to spare for such bad boys.”

  “We’re not bad, Grandpop! We’ve been minding Mama like crazy.”

  He pulled a few dimes from his shirt pocket and set them on top of the pile of photos in his lap. “Reckon that’ll be enough?”

  The older boy snatched the dimes and said, “Oh, come on, Grandpop, you can do better than that.”

  He dug into the pockets of his pants and pulled out a few more dimes, a nickel, and a dollar’s worth of quarters. “That ought to be enough for a couple of chocolate bars,” he told the boys.

  The younger boy threw his arms around the old man and thanked him for the pocket change. “Mama says we’re leaving in ten minutes. That was five minutes ago.”

  The old man said he’d be ready. The boy ran back inside with his brother to spend the money they’d begged.

  “Hang on,” Willet said. “You must have talked to the man when you sold him the boat. What did he say? Did he mention his family? Did he talk about a daughter?”

  The old man stood from the soft gray rocking chair and told Willet to be careful about nosing around too much. “It ain’t a good idea to ask so many questions.” He handed Willet the stack of photos.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Means just what it means. Don’t pry.”

  He disappeared into the store.

  We walked to the far edge of the porch, away from the men in the chairs. Willet kept balling his hands into fists and shaking them out. “I don’t know why everybody’s got to be so cagey,” he said. “It ain’t like we’re searching for buried treasure.”

  I looked toward the horizon. Soft waves lapped against the deck pilings. A warm breeze blew my hair back. “What exactly are we searching for?”

  Willet didn’t say anything for a long time. We stood there, the two of us, staring out over the Gulf and listening to the cry of the gulls. Finally, Willet turned away and walked fast across the wooden porch. I had to jog to keep up with him.

  “I wish like hell I knew,” he said.

  We drove around the island and showed the photos to anyone who would look at them. At the park, a group of kids played baseball while their mothers watched. None of the women on the sidelines seemed interested in helping us. They shook their heads when we showed them our photos. The women wore heavy gold chains around their necks. Their rings and earrings were studded with large, expensive-looking stones. Soft leather purses hung over their arms. The island was crawling with nice vehicles—vintage muscle cars and brand-new pickup trucks with chrome rims and shiny hood ornaments. We passed a trailer with a hot tub installed in the porch. There was fresh paint on the Baptist church. We talked about how strange it was to see mobile homes with fancy cars parked underneath. If someone lived in a trailer in White Forest, it meant they were poor or, like Uncle Chester, they didn’t give a damn. These people were not poor and they obviously gave a damn.

  “What do people do here for work?” I asked.

  “Fish, mostly,” Willet said. “Hell, I guess fishing pays better than I thought it did. Look at Audie, leaving hundred-dollar bills for ten-dollar tabs.”

  We drove back to the motel in the late afternoon. The sky was sunshine white and the day was as warm as summer. Driving past the canals, I saw three large alligators stretched out on the side of the road. Back in White Forest, Granny Clem would be washing up from a patient or mixing a potion of dried herbs. If I were there, I’d be stripping the bed for laundry or sterilizing her instruments or fixing us a pot of tea. Granny Clem would be telling me one of her stories. I supposed she worked in silence when I was gone, though it was hard to imagine. I’d gotten used to hearing her voice every day. What would she think of this place, I wondered. What would she think of the people with their fancy cars and expensive jewelry, of alligators by the side of the roa
d, of the constant call of the shore birds?

  I missed Granny Clem, but I knew I wouldn’t see her anytime soon. The man on the porch had recognized our father. Now we knew our father had spent time on this island. We knew he’d bought a boat. We didn’t know anything beyond that. It seemed a paltry amount of knowledge, but even a drop of water brings hope to a dying man.

  EARL STOPPED BY CHESTER’S trailer on his way home from a trip during which he’d successfully swapped out more than five thousand dollars worth of counterfeit bills for real currency. Chester took his share of the cash and told Earl he ought to get a handle on his kids. Chester rarely left his trailer but when he did it was to visit the quarry, the site where all of Earl’s nightmares seemed to originate. “They’re swimming out there,” Chester said. “It ain’t gonna end well.”

  Chester had become obsessed with the quarry after they lost Ora and Fern’s baby to its waters. In the days and months after Earl returned from delivering Fern to Florida, Chester visited the quarry most nights. He told Earl the man who’d killed Fern’s baby met the other men there and they talked about what they’d done and what they planned to do next. Sometimes the men wore white robes. When a cross was set ablaze in the front yard of the home of the NAACP chair, Chester said it was the men who did it. When a young black man who’d been canvassing the county to register black voters disappeared, Chester swore the men were responsible. As the years went by, the men abandoned their robes and stopped meeting in the dark. The men formed a branch of the White Citizens Council and anyone who cared to could read about their plans in the local newspaper. They talked about heritage and pride and they quoted the Bible.

  Earl took some comfort in Chester’s reports about the man who’d cruelly flung Fern’s baby into the dark waters. He didn’t know if it was his sister’s curse at work or divine justice, but the man suffered: his cotton crops turned brown with bacterial blight, his daughter ran away to Chicago and married a civil rights worker, his wife left him for a man half his age as his joints swelled with arthritis. It wasn’t enough for Earl. No matter how much the man suffered, it would never make up for his horrible acts.

  For twenty years Chester had fed Earl stories about the things he saw at the quarry and in the woods. Earl’s mind was full of the evil of the place. Nothing good could happen there. He’d warned his children to stay away. He’d told his wife to keep them home, but she said Earl was superstitious and overly cautious. She humored him; they all did. He spent too much time on the road to have any real authority in his home. It couldn’t be helped; he had to spread the bills around and he had to check on Fern, though she rarely seemed happy to see him. Two decades gone since that terrible day at the quarry and Earl knew she still lived with it every minute. He lived with it, too, with the guilt and the grief. He’d failed to rescue Fern’s daughter from the dark waters of the quarry. Every time she looked at him, his guilt grew heavier.

  Fern now lived alone in a small, elevated rental house in Chokoloskee, where she spent most days carving animals out of sugarcane bark and cypress wood. He gave her money to supplement the meager income she earned from selling her crafts and the occasional temp jobs she took on, but he couldn’t give her the thing she really needed. He couldn’t give her back the daughter she’d lost. That Earl had managed to father three children, that he had two daughters of his own, seemed unfair though Fern never said so. None of them could ever get over that day at the quarry. It was the reason Chester kept visiting the miserable hole in the ground and probably the reason he lived alone in a filthy trailer and trusted no one.

  Now Chester was telling him his own children were swimming in that evil place, tempting the Devil and ignoring Earl’s warnings. Chester was right. It wouldn’t end well.

  “I’ll talk to them,” Earl said.

  “They’re out there now.” Chester lit a cigarette and blew smoke into Earl’s face. “Or anyhow they were out there an hour ago. I saw ’em.”

  Earl left without stopping to see Clementine. He pulled his truck under a tree at the edge of the woods leading to the quarry and sat in the dappled light. His heart thrummed. He smoked a cigarette to calm himself. The midday heat turned his truck into an oven. Sweat rolled across his face and body, leaving him drenched and fevered. He imagined the worst: steel-clawed traps, wild animals, poison plants, evil spirits. These woods were no place for children. The longer he sat in the oppressive heat, the darker his thoughts became. He kept seeing the moment when Baby Ama and Ora disappeared into the dark quarry water. He kept hearing Fern scream.

  He climbed from the truck and made his way through the trees. A crow cawed. Branches cracked beneath his feet. His eyes flooded with sweat. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and pushed his hair back with his fingers. Time moved backward. He felt like a child again, and he half-expected to hear Clementine and Ora calling him home for supper. The sky shifted and faded above the trees and blue turned to gray. The air seemed charged with electricity. His hair stood on end.

  His hands trembled as he approached the quarry. It hadn’t changed. He walked among the ghosts of Chickasaw and Choctaw, of Confederate soldiers and African slaves, of German prisoners and greedy landowners. They gathered around him, the sinners and the saints, and pressed close when he spotted the girl floating in the middle of the deep, dark water. Alone.

  FOURTEEN

  WILLET TOOK THE JOB with Audie, which meant he worked most nights and slept through large portions of the day. His hours made things difficult. “How can we search for information while you’re sleeping all day?”

  “I’m not sleeping all day,” he said. “And we need money if we’re going to stay here for a while.”

  “I don’t know why we’re staying here at all if we don’t have time to look for clues.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “We’ll look. I don’t understand why you’re so fired up to go back to White Forest. There’s nothing back there. Relax. Try to have a little fun.”

  We hadn’t come to the Everglades for fun and I resented Willet’s harsh words about the only home I’d ever known. “Granny Clem is back there,” I reminded him.

  “Granny Clem doesn’t need us. She’ll get along just fine without your help.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s give it a month or two and see what happens.”

  We moved from the motel into Audie’s vacant apartment. He’d offered it to us, saying it was a shame to let it sit empty.

  “Well, this is a hell of a step up,” Willet said.

  He gave me the larger bedroom. The kitchen was nothing but linoleum floors and basic brown appliances, but it was a luxury to be able to scramble an egg without hunching over a hot plate. The first week we were there, I made one of Granny Clem’s lemon pound cakes and took it to Cheryl and Audie as a way of saying thanks. I baked a second one for Iggy. I had more questions about the birds we’d seen at the rookery and about the islands. If there were answers to be found about what Daddy was doing here, maybe I could find them there. He’d bought a boat, after all. He must have been going somewhere on the water.

  Iggy said there was only way to learn more about the islands. He took me out on a pole boat. We traveled through the shallow marsh, past tall grasslands and through cypress strands. It was different from being on Audie’s boat. We were closer to the water, closer to the creatures that swam and crawled through the mud. We glided along in near silence. Iggy said motorized tours were killing the Everglades. He especially hated the airboats speeding through the waters, injuring the manatees, spewing the scent of gasoline, and filling the air with noise. I’d seen the airboats zipping around, the tour operators showboating and shouting to be heard above the loud buzzing motors. It didn’t look like much fun to me. I preferred the peaceful isolation of the canoe or the pole boat.

  “But what about seeing the rookery?” I asked. “You couldn’t see that without a motor.”

  “Course you could,” Iggy said. “It ain’t a far piece. You co
uld row it.”

  “But what about the sharks? Or the tides? Isn’t it dangerous?”

  He told me stories about fishing and camping with his father. They traveled for days by canoe and often paddled well past the rookery. They camped on islands stretching out into the Gulf. I said it seemed like it would be easy to get lost, but Iggy said getting lost was half the fun.

  Over the next month, Iggy taught me as much as he could about paddling through the Everglades. He let me take out his smallest canoe whenever I wanted. I grew brave about exploring the rivers and I paddled out past the spot where the rivers dumped into the Gulf. I learned how to push myself free when I got stuck.

  Willet spent more and more time working with Audie or hanging out with Cheryl, but we searched for clues about Daddy when we could. If Daddy did take Pansy, Willet figured she might be in the area. We looked for Pansy anyplace children gathered—the park, the ball field, the school. We spent several afternoons watching children board the local school bus, but we never saw anyone who looked like Pansy, though we didn’t know what our sister would look like after nearly five years gone. It was too much to imagine we might find Pansy after all those years. What would we do if we saw our sister? She’d be eleven by then and not the same child we’d left in the quarry. Whatever her life might be, it wouldn’t be the same as her life in White Forest. She might have forgotten all about us. She might not want to be found. Still we looked.

  At night, I slept with the quarry rock under my pillow. I read from the book of fairy tales. Often I read aloud, as if Pansy were there with me. Willet spent most nights on the boat or with Cheryl. I went days without seeing him. Some nights I dreamed of the quarry and the creature from the woods, but most nights I dreamed of nothing. Our connection to White Forest stretched thin as we settled into our new life. I spent more and more time alone, wandering through the streets and alongside the canals of the small town.