by Attica Locke
“That’s right.” Darren smiled at the memory, one of the few times that he and Clayton went on an adventure alone, just the two of them.
“And he was in my face about wasting my good ol’ Prairie View education on this here—”
“Pop’s got a lot of ideas about what he thinks people should be doing with their lives.” Wasn’t he always meddling in Darren’s? In his marriage, for sure.
“You ain’t got to tell me the sky is blue.” Marcus looked around his tiny shop, perhaps seeing it through Darren’s eyes and therefore Clayton’s. “I’m happy here, man. Shit is quiet. The divorce paid for this here shop. I sell my book, write a little something else on the side, fish on the lake when I feel like it.”
Darren raised his hands to show he had no cause to judge. He was still holding his newly purchased copy of the daguerreotype.
“Penelope Deschamps,” Marcus said. “One of only two known survivors of one of the worst steamboat crashes in this county’s history, the Magnolia. We’re talking before the war started, years before the Mittie Stephens, the crash everyone remembers. It was sixty-one died on that one, in 1872, but, ask me, the Magnolia was the more interesting in terms of history and influence on this county.” He offered Darren a glass of tea. He kept a pitcher of it in a minifridge in his back office, that and a pint of Chivas, he said, that could doctor up a glass of sweet tea real nice. Despite the morning he’d had, Darren accepted just the tea. When Marcus returned from his office, he was carrying the sweating glass of tea clouded with sugar and a chair for Darren.
Then he told a story.
The gist of it Darren already knew, Jefferson as the golden apple in Texas’s antebellum eye. A bustling economy made possible by slave labor and timber—always big in East Texas—but also by becoming something that no other Texas city save for Galveston on the coast had been able to accomplish by the middle of the nineteenth century: a first-class port city, made possible by steamboat travel through Caddo Lake and up the Cypress Bayou into the town center. Cotton and other plantation bounties out of Shreveport and New Orleans and towns farther north on the Mississippi—plus manufactured goods, fine linens and furniture for the newly wealthy—flowed into Jefferson across the murky water of Caddo Lake, requiring the relatively new technology of steamboat travel to contend with the thorny swamp culture, which for many years had no law enforcement agency dedicated to policing whatever went on behind the thicket of trees on the many islands that rose up on the water between the cypress forests and tangled patches of bluish-green lily pads floating like small cities. The islands had at one time been famous for concealing outlaws, some fleeing jailers from as far away as New York City, and any other folks who might not want to be found; they took refuge in these pockets of raw woods floating in the middle of the largest lake this side of the Mississippi. There were rumors of Indians on one of the islands, Caddos who for the most part lived in quiet peace but were known to knife any man who tried to ride a canoe up to their island. Darren remembered Margaret Goodfellow’s words: There are ways of hiding in plain sight.
Steamboats carried commercial goods but also wealthy travelers, including hundreds of New Orleans natives looking to start over somewhere new but with cultural memories of home. This was especially true during the years after the war—which was when the Mittie Stephens crashed—but had been going on for some time. That was how the story of Penelope Deschamps started and almost ended. She was a poor little thing, Marcus said, born Penny Deckard in Acadia Parish to a white sharecropping family. Her daddy was an angry man, doing the work of niggers and falling farther behind every Christmas. He drank steadily and with only one son to work the fields with him, he saw in Penny merely another mouth to feed and set about finding a way to marry her off. He spent money he didn’t have on copies of Ladies’ Magazine he sent away for and ordered Penny to study them cover to cover, to teach herself to be a lady. “Lord knows you ain’t got a lick of that from your mama. She might could show you how to bleed a hog, but that ain’t gon’ get you out of this house.”
Penny was a quick study. She took to bathing more than once every two weeks, started pinning her hair in a chignon, a style she could neither spell nor pronounce—she was functionally illiterate and leaned heavily on the pretty drawings in the magazines—and soon she was ordering her family and the few church friends she had to call her Penelope. Left free of the fieldwork and useless in the kitchen, she began taking constitutionals around the perimeter of the old plantation where her family lived in a cabin that was away from the slaves but hardly any bigger than theirs and with the same dirt floor. She walked from the plantation’s schoolhouse, which doubled as the church, to the royal oak around the side of the big house and back again, often carrying books as either props or tools to improve her posture. Her daddy whipped her when he saw her walking around with books on her head like a damn nigger carrying water from the well. “You stop that foolishness this instant.” No one knows to what degree Penelope knew what she was doing or how much luck played a part in it, but when the master’s son returned from a single semester at Louisiana State University in the winter of 1857, he took one look at Penelope and declared himself done for. Louis Deschamps didn’t bother to ask Penelope’s father for her hand in marriage, never spoke to him before the wedding. He simply announced his intentions to his own father, seeking his blessing, and then told Penelope to prepare herself for matrimony.
They were married in March of 1858. Penelope moved into the big house with her new husband and had borne him a daughter and a son by the time Louisiana voted to secede from the Union, and war was imminent. The master died before the first shots were fired, making Penelope the mistress of the plantation where her father had toiled his whole life. There was no time for either father or daughter to be pricked by the irony of the thing, for shortly thereafter, her daddy and brother were killed in combat, and Louis, her husband and father of her two children, died from scarlet fever, leaving young Penelope Deschamps the owner of a plantation she did not understand the mechanics of running and did not have the intelligence or patience to learn. Besides, Confederate soldiers were trashing the place, commandeering the big house and stealing silver and busting up chifforobes and bedposts for firewood. Seeing no way she was going to come out of this with even two pennies to her name, she contacted a lawyer in New Orleans and made a sale for a quarter of what the plantation was worth, then booked passage on the Magnolia for herself, her mother, her two children, and six of her favored slaves—a brother and sister, the sister’s husband, and their kids, who served as kitchen help and playmates for Penelope’s own children. The rest had been sold along with the plantation.
The first days of the trip were uneventful, with most of Penelope’s time spent trying to see a way out of her misfortune. The money from selling the plantation might be enough to live on for a while, but she was still a very young woman and knew that she would have to create some new industry for herself in order to survive. There was talk of purchasing a saloon, maybe one with a few rooms for rent. She and her mother were going over various recipes they thought they could master when there was an explosion near the boilers. Flames engulfed the Magnolia within minutes. Penelope ran for her children as she watched burning men and women jump in the waters of Caddo Lake. She lost track of her mother in the blaze and never found her son. She and her daughter were forced overboard, where they sputtered in the water amid the smoke and haze until being rescued by a fisherman who saw the fire from the nearby town of Uncertain, Texas. It was a fitting name for the land they soon stood on, Penelope dripping and clutching a carpetbag with all the money she had in one hand and her five-year-old daughter’s hand in the other. Her mother, her son, and most of the boat’s crew and their fellow passengers were gone, drowned or killed by the fire, the bodies never recovered. “The slaves were never found again either,” Marcus said. “They were presumed dead, but lot of folks around here believed they ran. Or swam, I should say—”
He stopped bec
ause Darren’s phone was ringing—again.
He hadn’t recognized the number the first two times it buzzed, but this was his lieutenant, Fred Wilson. Darren motioned to Marcus that he would have to take this. Marcus, sensing he was losing a captive audience, leaned forward over the table that held his life’s work. “I’m just trying to provide a different perspective on all the gilded-lily-white amnesia that is the tourism industry in this town. Life was always hard in Jefferson for folks like us; wasn’t no belles and balls and all the rest of it. Jefferson threw its hat in with the Confederates, and it deserved everything that came after: The railroads bypassing Jefferson for Marshall. The opening of the Red River that ultimately lowered the water table on Caddo Lake so that steamboats could no longer travel on it. Killed this town almost instantly,” he said with some glee. By now he was mostly talking to himself, and Darren stood and angled away from Marcus. He’d answered the phone.
“The Department of Criminal Justice has been trying to reach you,” Wilson said. “We got you in to see Bill King, but it has to be today. Don’t know why they’re making this so difficult, but that was the deal we cut. You have to get up to Telford Unit in Bowie County by three o’clock.”
“That’s an hour from now.”
“Don’t mess this up, Mathews. We may not get this chance again.”
19.
HE BADE an abrupt goodbye to Marcus, grabbing his copy of the book and the photo of Penelope Deschamps, but not knowing what to do with either once he got in his truck. He tossed them behind the front bench seat and quickly decided on a route to the Telford Unit prison in New Boston, damn near to the Arkansas border. He hadn’t eaten anything all day and so chanced a swing through a catfish place. He gorged himself on the road as he headed north.
He was nervous in a way that shocked him: His hands shook if he lifted them off the steering wheel. He felt a sour damp coming up out of his shirt collar. And the fried fish turned on him before he got twenty miles outside of Jefferson. He’d sat across from killers before, but this was different. Bill King’s crimes felt personal. He let out a rancid wet burp as his phone rang again.
It was his mother.
Seething was too soft a word for the blue-black tone of her voice, the hum of rage that Darren could feel vibrating through his cell phone as he exited Highway 59 on the outskirts of Texarkana and headed west to the prison town of New Boston. “So you sent your uncle after me?” Bell asked. “Damn it, Darren, why you gotta make your mama hurt you? I thought we had an understanding.”
Darren was confused. “Mama,” he said, reminding her of his newfound filial devotion.
“Naw, it’s too late for all that. I don’t know if I can trust you anymore, which means I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. I thought we had a deal.”
“Mama, what are you talking about? Did Clayton call you?”
“Call me? That uppity nigger showed up at my home. Time I returned from Lake Charles, who’s in my yard warning me about taking money from you? He knew about the gun, Darren. He knew about all of it and threatened to make it look like I’m the one tangled up in this murder somehow. I swear, Darren—”
“No,” he said, his truck swerving a little too close to the car in the next lane. He was flushed from his sternum up through his neck, and his damp funk filled the truck’s cab, fogging the driver’s-side window. “I didn’t send Clayton to you.”
Never told him about the gun either, he thought.
Then he remembered. Lisa. Jesus.
He was so angry the edges of his vision pricked with a painful white light, and even though he was behind the wheel, he briefly squeezed his eyes shut. Lisa had done it again. She’d talked to Clayton about Darren, and Clayton, alarmed by the situation, had tried to protect his nephew by going straight to Bell and telling her to back off. Worse, he’d threatened to frame her in some way if she didn’t stop messing with Darren and give the gun back. Bell’s voice was cracking now. She seemed genuinely hurt that her son had sold her out like this, never mind that she had been low-key blackmailing him for weeks. “When it was just between you and me, it was like it was something special, something only I could protect you from,” she said now, twisting logic to turn this whole thing into an act of maternal care and protection. “But Clayton ruined everything.”
“No, Mama, no.”
“If that DA asks me something now, I gotta protect myself, son.”
“Just hold on,” Darren said, his voice rising with desperation. “There’s nothing to do. Keep everything the way it was till I can get back to San Jacinto County, and I promise you I can make this right again. You good on money for a while?” His stomach flipped again, and this time he thought he might actually vomit. He was sick of himself, his mother, this whole situation. And he was angry with Clayton and, especially, Lisa in a way that made his brain feel like it was on fire. He turned up the A/C in the truck. “Did Mack get some of your rent money over to Puck?”
“I don’t want that man nowhere near me,” she barked. “Does he know?”
“That you found his gun?”
“Yes.”
“No, ma’am,” Darren said. “I’m trying to protect him from all this.”
“You need to be worried about your own damn self, ’cause I’m telling you, I don’t know what I might do. If that Mr. Vaughn come calling—”
“Don’t do anything, Mama,” he said firmly. “I’ll make this right.” He hung up, hating himself for begging his blackmailer to hold on till he could give her more money, anything to keep her from doing something rash.
By the time he made it behind fences topped with coiled razor wire into the prison’s parking lot, he’d left a message for Lisa accusing her of betrayal, had likewise left a voice mail for Clayton telling him to stay away from Bell and stay out of the whole damn thing. You have no idea what you’ve done. And as he turned off the truck’s engine and opened the windows so he could breathe again, he called Mack at his home. “You may hear some things,” Darren started, “but I want you to be assured that nothing is any different. As long as you don’t change your story, we’re both going to get out of this unscathed.”
“‘We’? Darren, what are you talking about?”
“Nothing I want to get into over the phone,” he said, looking out at the reinforced-steel bars around the prison’s front doors, the men with guns in the lookout towers. He felt they could hear what he was saying right now, that like hawks, they could sense when fresh meat, a potential new inmate, was close. “It’s just like we said, though, there’s nothing new with District Attorney Vaughn. Whatever he asks, just tell him the exact same thing you said to him before, nothing about an altercation with Ronnie Malvo at your place.”
Mack grunted out of frustration. “It’s my grandbaby I don’t want him harassing.”
“Tell her the same as I told you,” Darren said. “I’ll be back to San Jacinto County soon, and we’ll get it all worked out, I swear.” Though he wasn’t sure anymore what that meant. He had lost control over this entire mess.
He went into the attorney-client meeting room in King’s cellblock hating himself. So he was relieved by the hating of Bill King that awaited him, glad that all the ignominious rage he felt over his own twisted moral compass could be aimed in this white man’s direction. For how could Darren be confused about himself in the presence of a man who had hunted blacks for sport? Oh yes, he hated Bill King right now, could taste it on his tongue. He hated the man’s ties to the Brotherhood, hated the destruction he’d caused, the lives he’d destroyed, and for what? He’d murdered a man who hadn’t done anything to him, a man whose name he didn’t even know, just to prove to other white folks that he was loyal to a toxic ideology, that it was safe to make and sell drugs with him. Keith Washington, the man he’d killed, had had a wife and two kids, one of them just about Levi King’s age, both of them growing up in Longview right now without a daddy. Darren relished the chance to sit across from Bill King and have his own humanity reaffirme
d.
Bill King had ceased to be a man to him.
When he was escorted into the small, square room with walls made of concrete blocks painted a slick gray, sticky with maybe hundreds of coats of paint over the years, covering everything from crude drawings to piss and shit, Bill King was standing with his head down. There were two COs on either side of him, so there were six men in the small room, and Darren could smell their coffee breath, the stale Juicy Fruit gum one of them was popping between his long teeth. That one pulled a chair from the round table in the center of the room and shoved Bill King down into it. His cuffed hands banged on the wood-laminate tabletop, making a faint pinging sound, like a starting bell. His hair had grown back in, covering the tattoos Darren knew ringed his scalp. And he wore glasses. He raised his head and looked at Darren, called him sir, and asked if he’d like the officers to stay. “It’s whatever makes you comfortable,” he said.
His eyes were blue like Rosemary’s. Levi had his mother’s eyes. Just like Darren, who bore more in common physically with his mother than with the Mathews men in his family. Bill King talked quietly and had a flutter in his expression that spoke of a chronic condition beyond contrition. It was shame. It had carved gray hollows beneath his eyes that made him seem vaguely ill. “If it’s okay with you, Ranger, I’d just as soon talk to you alone. In private, if that’s all right.” The four COs shrugged and headed for the door without even checking if Darren was okay with it. There was a window in the steel door to the room. Bill King would remain handcuffed. Darren let them go.
When the steel door closed behind him, Bill stood from his chair, its legs scraping across the floor, startling Darren. Darren’s hand went immediately to his side. But his Colt .45 had been checked before he entered the inner layers of the Telford Unit prison. He backed up and heard the clang of the chains connected to Bill’s handcuffs as Bill, realizing he’d scared the man, returned to his seat at the table, sheepish. Softly, he said, “I ain’t been much of anything in my life but an angry kid and then an angry man for reasons I didn’t even half understand at the time. I caused my mama heartache, and Lord knows I’ve ruined lives.”
