Clasping the bracelet with one hand and Jessie’s arm with the other, she follows Lucky toward the house, feet crunching on gravel.
In the moonlight, horses graze beneath live oak branches that could shade a city block. A pale orange kitten sits on the step. As they climb past, it rolls onto its back, paws belly up, vulnerable. A tabby cat sits at the door like a sentry, fixing them with a green-eyed glare.
Lucky knocks, and a plump Black woman answers, flashing a gap-toothed smile. “What in the world are you doing here at this hour? Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine, Tandy. Just fine. How is Auntie?”
Auntie . . .
For an illogical moment, Amelia’s shell-shocked brain assumes she’s talking about Bettina.
Bettina, who’d been Lucky’s aunt. Bettina, alive here, after all these years later.
But no. No, Amelia had seen her lying cold and dead in a Harlem hospital decades ago.
“She’s alert. Restless. Guess she knew you were coming.”
Lucky introduces Tandy as her aunt’s caregiver.
“This here is Jessie, and this . . .” Lucky pauses. “This is Amelia.”
“Well. Well, well. Praise the Lord you finally decided to—”
“I didn’t, Tandy. You know I been praying on it ever since she called me in October, but I didn’t have an answer, and then she just showed up in Marshboro today.”
“Guess the good Lord took matters into His own hands, then.” She holds the door wide-open and invites them inside. The front room is cluttered and pleasant, with a low beadboard ceiling and wide-planked floor. The television and stereo are from the last century and the furniture is even older.
“I’ll take you to her.” Tandy leads the way through a small kitchen. A familiar savory scent hangs in the air.
“Supshun,” a voice croons across the years, and Amelia squeezes her eyes closed, trying to capture a face, a place, a time . . .
She opens her eyes and finds herself staring at a produce-filled basket on the counter. It’s made from sweetgrass, woven in tight coils, with an intricate pattern and distinct shape. Almost identical to the one in her living room. And to the one she’d seen an old friend carrying the last time they’d met.
She remembers the voice, the one that had mentioned Barrow Island so long ago . . .
And the blue bottles on the tree . . .
But it’s impossible. Amelia counts backward over the decades as Tandy moves toward a closed door and opens it to a small bedroom.
An ancient woman lies propped on pillows, wide-awake, alert eyes set in a shriveled face. Familiar eyes.
“Auntie,” Lucky tells Marceline LeBlanc. “I’ve brought Cyril’s daughter. Your granddaughter. Amelia.”
Part VI
1968
Chapter Fifteen
Saturday, April 27, 1968
Jacksonville
“Hello again, Mrs. Hunter!”
Melody opens her eyes. Yvonne breezes into the room, carrying a familiar pink bundle.
Ah, Martina.
Anxious to hold her daughter, Melody grips the bed rails to pull herself into a sitting position without waiting for the nurse to raise the top half of the bed.
Yvonne notes her wince. “Oh, my. It looks like your pain medication wore off again.”
“Just a little sore still.”
Understatement of the year. Two days after delivery, every inch of her body between her neck and her knees feels battered, torn, or bruised. Her throat is raw, not from screaming, but from the general anesthesia tube. Fortunately, she can only imagine the ordeal of childbirth itself, though there’s a part of her that feels wistful, as though she’d missed out on a magical experience.
When she’d voiced that thought to Honeybee, however, her mother had gaped in horror. “Magical experience? Now why would you even say such a thing?”
“I don’t know, it just seems like it would have been nice to welcome my baby into the world.”
“You did just that.”
“But not when she was born.”
“Well, you wouldn’t want her first sight of her mama to be screaming and carrying on like a heathen like folks did in the olden days. Just thank your lucky stars for modern medicine and doctors who can put you to sleep.”
Melody supposes she’s right, and she’s also thankful for nurses who bring pain pills in little white fluted cups, provide cold compresses for her aching breasts, and administer lactation suppression medication along with advice on caring for both newborn and new mother.
She dutifully swallows the medication, aware that it won’t just take away the pain, but will make her drowsy and a little woozy.
She holds out her arms, and Yvonne places Martina in them. The baby turns her face toward Melody’s swollen bosom as if she instinctively wants to nurse, despite the tight binding and lactation suppression drugs.
“You enjoy your time together,” she says, turning the bedside crank so that the top half rises. “Someone will be back soon to get the baby and bring you your supper tray.”
“You’re leaving?”
“My shift is over, but I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Melody is sorry to see her go. A rotating staff of nurses cares for her. The others are all white. Yvonne, with her Gullah patois and sly sense of humor, is Melody’s favorite.
“Oh, and be sure you get your supshun before visiting hours. Something tells me your mama will be back here right on schedule!”
Melody had been grateful when three o’clock came and the staff went up and down the corridor ordering all visitors to leave the premises—no exceptions, even for Honeybee Beauregard Abernathy, who’d already tested the boundaries.
“How did you get in here?” Melody had asked when her mother popped up an hour before visitors were allowed, with an armload of gift-wrapped boxes.
“Why, through the front entrance!” She’d been indignant, as though Melody had suggested she’d helicoptered to the roof and rappelled down the building.
“Didn’t anyone stop you?”
“Of course not. It’s a hospital, not a bank vault. Now open these presents and see what I brought for our little princess.”
More dresses—all pink, Honeybee’s favorite color. But at the bottom of the stack, older and more delicate than the others and wrapped in layers of tissue paper, she found a pastel blue one with a Best & Co. Layette label.
“Was this mine?”
“Ellie’s,” Honeybee said softly. “This child looks just like her.”
They’d swapped the baby’s white hospital bunting for the blue dress.
“You look a little like her,” Melody tells her drowsy daughter.
She appears white, just as Yvonne had said. No one, not even Travis’s own mother, would guess that she doesn’t belong to him.
“Big blue eyes, just like her daddy!” Doris had told Melody last night.
Fairly certain that all babies are born blue-eyed, Melody had agreed. But those eyes, when they’re open, radiate Cyril’s intense awareness.
“All the pretty little horses . . .” Melody sings, rocking Martina in her arms, remembering how Honeybee’s mellifluous soprano had lulled her back to sleep with the same song when she was very young and had awakened from a nightmare.
“Well, now, isn’t that sweet,” a male voice drawls from the doorway.
Startled, Melody looks up to see Rodney Lee Midget in his white milkman coveralls and cap.
“Don’t stop singin’ on my account. You always did have a voice like an angel. All those solos in the school choir, and whatnot.”
Melody instinctively clutches her daughter close. “What are you doing here? It’s not visiting hours.”
Honeybee’s words echo in her head. “It’s a hospital, not a bank vault.”
“Not for the public, but see, I work here. Just came by with the milk delivery and thought I’d pay a friendly visit to meet the baby.” He looks over his shoulder and then steps into the room. �
�Little girl, is it? What’s her name?”
“Martina Eleanor.”
“That’s unusual, ain’t it? She named after someone special?”
“My sister.”
“Dead, ain’t she? Guess I forgot all about her. But her name wasn’t Martina.”
Melody had chosen the baby’s first name in memory of Martin Luther King, though she’d told her parents and in-laws that she’d come across it in an old book and thought it was pretty.
Doris clearly didn’t agree. “What about Travis?”
Melody forced a smile and an attempt at humor. “Travis is a good name for a boy, but not for a little girl.”
Her own parents, and her father-in-law, too, had gotten a laugh out of that. But Doris pursed her lips and asked if Melody thought she should have waited for Travis’s approval. Her father, bless his heart, had answered before she could.
“There’s no telling when he’ll be in touch, and a baby’s got to have a name. I think Martina Eleanor is a fine one.”
Rodney Lee crosses to Melody’s bed. He’s so close she can smell his breath, and he’s been drinking something a lot stronger than milk.
“Come on, now, let’s have a look.”
She recoils, shielding the baby against her tender breasts.
“She’s sleeping.”
“That so? Looks to me like you’re trying to smother her.”
Melody thrusts her back in alarm. But Martina is breathing, awake now, wide-eyed and staring.
Rodney Lee laughs, peers at the baby, and gives a low whistle. “Guess your mother-in-law was right. This here little girl looks exactly like her daddy.”
Melody is relieved. For a moment, there, she’d been worried he might—
“’Course . . .” He turns his head and looks her in the eye. “Like you said, a woman only sees what she wants to see.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember that book you were tellin’ me about, by that Lee fellow.”
It takes her a moment to realize he’s referring to the passage she’d shared with him from To Kill a Mockingbird. Rodney Lee has always struck her as barely literate, yet here he is paraphrasing the quote and recalling the author’s name.
“Harper Lee is a woman.”
“With a man’s name? Lee?”
Ah . . . Lee. No wonder the name stayed with him.
“That can be either a man’s name or a woman’s name.”
“Let’s see, you got me, Lee Marvin, Lee Harvey Oswald . . . all men,” he tells her with a triumphant nod. “So you can see why I’d think that.”
“What Harper Lee said was, ‘people generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.’”
“That’s what I said.”
“Not quite.”
“You want to nitpick, do you?”
She does not.
“You were talking about Travis’s mother? You saw her?”
“She called me to tell me the baby was born, like I asked her to. Travis and me been friends since we were tiny little kids. His wife havin’ a baby and me not knowin’ would be like . . . well, I wanted to know. And when she said the baby looks just like her daddy, I thought I should come on over and have a look-see for myself. After all, she’s never actually met the man.”
Melody’s heart stops. “I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I’d be willing to wager that you do.” Rodney Lee straightens and starts for the door, then turns back. “You know, for a minute there when I thought you were tryin’ to smother her, I didn’t blame you. I imagine a lot of women would do the same thing in your place.”
White-hot rage sweeps through her.
“That sure would make your troubles disappear in a jiffy. You don’t have much time, see? ’Cause the way I understand it, every day, her skin’s gonna get a little bit blacker, and you’re gonna start to panic, ’cause people will be able to take one look at her and they’ll know. Travis, he’ll be back, and he’ll—”
“Get out.”
He laughs. “I’m goin’. Need me to mail anything on my way?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know you like to write nice long letters to Travis, but . . . oh, wait. I guess there’s no need to tell him the baby was born, huh? Shame you can’t share the news with her real daddy. I surely don’t approve of what y’all did, but I’m guessin’ he would’a been tickled pink over daddy’s little gal. Well, maybe not pink.” He laughs, a staccato sound that reverberates like a gunshot, and Melody recoils.
A petite blonde wisp of a nurse appears in the doorway behind him, dwarfed by his bulk. “Excuse me, sir! Are you—”
“I was just paying a friendly visit, but I’ll be getting back to work now.” Rodney Lee tips his narrow white cap at her, then at Melody. “Be sure and take good care of that baby now, Mrs. Hunter. You just try and keep her safe, you hear?”
He disappears, and his words echoing like an ominous challenge.
You just try.
Greenwich Village
Yesterday was payday. After cashing his check and paying the most pressing bills, Oran was left with nothing but loose change in his pocket, a knot in his stomach, and a weekend to get his hands on more cash.
“You can’t even support me . . .”
Gypsy’s words propel him to the subway Saturday evening. He rides downtown and gets off at Christopher Street, then walks four blocks to a familiar century-old tavern near the river.
It all began here, at Fergie’s Inn.
The place had never operated as an inn, according to its owner, though it had been a private residence, brothel, and speakeasy before finding its groove as a haunt for the beat generation’s shining literary stars.
Oran had been tending bar here one night in ’51 when Linda walked in. She was wearing a full-skirted pink dress, looking like the Nebraska farmer’s daughter she’d been until she ran off to New York City. She’d come to Fergie’s that night to hear a fellow former Midwesterner read from his novel in progress, but the morphine-addled Billy Burroughs hadn’t shown up.
Linda sat at the bar ordering one sloe gin fizz after another. Oran couldn’t decide whether she was a sore thumb or a breath of fresh air among the beatnik crowd, but they’d had immediate chemistry. She was open to his teachings and recruited other followers.
For a while, they’d all lived in harmonious kinship, Oran’s women working various jobs to keep the household going so he could focus on his sidewalk sermons. But his new family grew restless waiting for the promised apocalypse. One by one, they showed their weaknesses, and he cast them away.
Linda got to stay, not because he cared about her, but because she was pregnant.
Even then, before Gypsy was born, Oran sensed that his child, unlike her mother, unlike the others, would be strong and loyal. She would never betray him.
And now, he has two more children on the way. Tara Sheeran is pregnant, and he’d confirmed that Christina Myers is as well. Soon, Margaret, too, will be carrying his child. His earthly family is blossoming, and he needs to take care of them as they await their eternal paradise.
He steps into a dingy room with a low tin ceiling and scarred plank floors. The place looks exactly the same as it had in Oran’s day, but the poets and writers who’d frequented the place are long gone. At the moment there are only two patrons, middle-aged men hunched over beers.
“Well, there’s a sight my eyes ain’t seen in donkey’s years!” the owner booms, spotting him in the doorway. “If it isn’t my old pal O’Matty!”
Fergus Ferguson’s copper hair has gone gray, but he has the same brogue, same beer belly, same jowly florid face, same Celtic knot tattooed on his forearm.
“Got any Irish blood, do you?” he’d asked Oran before hiring him.
“Sure. Real name’s O’Matthews,” Oran had quipped.
Fergus roared with laughter, and he, along with his patrons, called Oran “O’Matty
” from that day on.
Fergus beckons him to the bar and pumps his hand. “How are you, mate? How’s the wife?”
“Haven’t seen her in a while. Guess you haven’t, either?” Oran remembers to ask, as if he doesn’t know better.
“Not in years. You two split up, then?”
“Long time ago.” Oran pulls a couple of coins from his pocket. “Whatever you’ve got on draft.”
Fergus tosses the coins into a cash drawer and fills a mug as Oran looks at the spot where the open mic once stood. He’d watched from behind the bar as other men enthralled rapt audiences with magnetism and profound words, just as he’d always longed to do. But his own dream transformed. What good was being a movie star if you couldn’t experience hero worship firsthand, in the moment?
Oran had come to Fergie’s an aspiring actor and left a preacher and prophet, with a mesmerized Linda as his first disciple.
As Fergus sets the beer in front of him, Oran notices his gold wristwatch. “Fancy. Guess the bar’s doing well, man.”
“Nah, my grandfather died a few years back and left it to me.”
“Must be worth a bundle.”
Fergus shrugs. “I’d never sell it. Sentimental value, you know?”
Oran thinks of his mother, who left him nothing but heartache.
“Just stopping in for old times’ sake?” Fergus asks.
“That, and I could use a job.”
“Out of work?”
“Out of bread. I’ve got a day job, but I need another one.”
“Sorry, I’ve got more bartenders than customers these days.”
Oran sips his beer. Piss-warm, with too much foam.
“Hey, I hear the US Army’s hiring,” one of the guys down the bar says with a smirk. He’s got a patchy red beard and military ink on his bicep.
“Don’t think so, man.”
“Country needs your service.”
“I need you to stay out of my business.”
“Cool it, there, O’Matty,” Fergus says.
Oran glowers. “Clientele’s gone downhill since I was here, man.”
“Can’t think of much that hasn’t. Whole damned world’s falling apart. Assassination, riots, war . . .”
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