“People don’t get caught for the real thing they did wrong, Sam. They get caught for some lesser thing, some small offense. Taxes, jaywalking, a fine . . .”
She’s right, I think.
’Cause I’m still free.
Only Jeremy is accusing me of a lie now. And no one mentions the murders in Faunsdale no more. Even the papers have quieted down. But in my heart, I know I got away with murder.
45 / FLASH
Conyers, Georgia, 1848
THERE ARE THINGS that happened to me when I was alive that I didn’t know happened ’til I was dead. So I cain’t place myself there now and lie about it, ’cause it didn’t happen that way.
I wasn’t there to know. Didn’t see it. Didn’t hear it.
It’s the same thing that’s happening to you.
Other people will make choices for you, about you—win or lose, work or won’t, live or die—and you’ll have missed it.
Choices that could change the rest of your life and you won’t even know it happened ’til you’re dead. ’Til you get your turn with the flashes.
And once you’ve been in ’em long enough, you’ll get to see everything.
I BEEN IN Cynthia’s cellar below the saloon since daybreak. Ain’t been back to sleep since before dawn. “Cellar” is what Cynthia renamed this secret place under the saloon. She gon’ use it to store her good liquor. “It’ll keep them skinny Irish from sliding over the bar top when Sam’s back is turned,” Cynthia said after Sam told her, “There ain’t no way in hell I’m reaching into some man’s drawls and retrieving the bottle they’re stealing. Not even a twenty-dollar bottle.”
So Cynthia keeps her good stuff down here in the cellar now. Daylight is seeping through the spaces around the door that leads from in here to under the porch outside. The weight and wobble of drunk folks, fat folks, and the occasional horse taking a step up the porch, has made the doorframe pull away from the brick walls. All connected.
It’s already getting warm down here. It’ll be hot by one.
Heat gets trapped in this cellar and turns even the cool shadows to coal steam. It’s hotter in the corners where night-made cobwebs melt and break in their centers like little hands letting go. I brush those webs away with my broom, roll ’em in the bristles.
I’ve been picking up all the solid dead things around me, pinching my nose before I touch ’em even though they probably don’t stink. The other trash that was never alive is easy—paper, napkins, and cigarette ends kicked through the upstairs floorboards. I put ’em in my trash bag and tie it up ready for outside.
One-thirty has me washing the walls ’cause it’s hot like I knew it would be. The water feels cool.
Albert just laid this wood floor a few months ago so the nails are still flat against the boards and deep in the wood. They ain’t been disturbed by shifting earth yet.
He didn’t finish the corner pieces of the floor, though. That’s where he decided to throw all the bothersome things I got to clean up now—wood scraps and tins.
The floor near the door under the porch ain’t finished right, either. You gotta tug the door real hard to get it open ’cause it’s warped and wonky. Cain’t spy good in the saloon above because of its noise and the strength you need to wrestle it. Best to come through the trap door under the tub and close it quiet behind.
I yank at the door now ’cause there ain’t nobody in the saloon to hide from. I barely get it opened and drag my bag of trash under the steps hunched over ’til I get beyond the porch and can stand straight. I scratch a trail in the dirt behind me now, erasing my wide footprints. I reckon my weight is half baby, even though everybody tells me I’m still small.
I can hear Albert at the side of the house hammering before I see him. Today, he said, is the last day he has to finish Cynthia’s liquor cabinet before her grand reopening. Saloon and gambling only.
Albert’s giving Cynthia a gift of metal finishings that he’s melted to shapes—flowers and birds to work as doorknobs and drawer pulls. He made a big gardenia to be the centerpiece of the cabinet. I stand behind him, watch him nail it together.
YOU MAY NEVER know.
May never know about the choice somebody made for you that changed your life. Just like I didn’t know about the choice made for me that day. By the time I was standing behind Albert, watching him bang those last nails in, my life had already changed.
Two fields over, down a hill and off to the left, Soledad’s house had been sitting quiet for most of the morning even though Mr. Shepard had been home almost six days. He had been sick with food poison for three days of ’em and stopped eating. He started feeling better. Good enough, he thought, to finish that letter to his brother. Good enough to keep his promise to Cynthia to host her grand reopening the next day. Good enough, he thought. But he rested instead.
His shirt wouldn’t get ironed.
His shoes wouldn’t be shined. And his menudo would be left on the table cooling, then cleared from the table, thrown out rotting, then swallowed by the ground as if it was never there.
He had meant to pack his new deck of cards, pay his bills, start reading the book his gentleman friend gave him. So many things he was finally home to do, so much intention. All of it met by Soledad’s decision.
She sat at her dining room table a full half hour after the choice she made, eating her stew. When she finally spoke, she said, “Mr. Shepard? You really should try this,” and stirred inside her bowl of menudo. “You know it took me all day to prepare it. Just for you, dear.”
She lifted the cloth that covered her pile of tortillas and took one, broke it, dipped it in. That was when she first seemed to notice the red stains smeared on the backs of her hands. She put her spoon down and snatched the cloth from under the pile of her tortillas, knocking them to the floor, crumbled to pieces. She used the cloth to wipe the blood, rubbed harder because it had dried. She gave up trying before they were clean, picked up her spoon, scooped her stew, brought it to her mouth.
Her fingernails were packed black-red and moist underneath.
MY PLAN IS to help Albert lower his cabinet doors from the bathroom upstairs to down here in the cellar. His eyesight changed ’cause of the way his skin has healed at his brow. Above his right eye, the skin is pulled back tighter and thinner and it makes his eye water for no reason. So I’m his line of sight even though he want to do it all hisself.
“Shoo, fly,” he say to me. “Get back.”
He say he gon’ use his ladder to guide the doors down instead of me since the last came rushing fast and almost hit me.
“You could hurt the baby,” he say and shoos me again.
“I’m pregnant, not useless. How you gon’ get it through this gap without me keeping it on track from down here?”
“I’ll manage it. Just move.”
He squats and lowers the long door along the ladder slide, got a rope tied around the gardenia piece, with the other end connected to his wrist. I reach my skinny arms up and help keep the door flat against the ladder so if the tie slips, it’ll follow the ladder down, like tracks.
He say, “You not under this, are you?”
“No,” I lie and step back. The new wood floor he laid creaks like old knees in an empty tunnel.
“You are down there. I can hear you. Get back against the wall.” I squeak across the floor but when I reach the looser wood planks near the sidewalls, the squeak of the boards give out a donkey’s hee-haw.
“All right,” I say. “I’m all the way back now.”
“Good. I’m gon’ let it down now. If it falls, let it fall. You just watch it’s fitting through and ain’t caught on nothin.”
“All right.”
It slides smoothly as he lowers it, then stops. “What’s in the way?” he yells.
I take a step forward—hee-haw.
“I said get back,” he say. “I can hear you.”
“How am I supposed to see, then?”
“Just look.”
“You want
me to help. Don’t want me to help . . .”
“Forget it,” he says and lets it go. It comes racing down the ladder, rocks forward, then slams back.
“You did it!” I say.
SOLEDAD DIPS HER spoon in her stew again, raises it to her mouth, catches her reflection in the sweating silver water pitcher on the table. Her face is misshaped from the silver’s bend. She notices the blood sprinkled on her cheek and large swipes of red across her forehead and neck.
Mr. Shepard gurgles from the floor. The stab wounds around his arms and hands were done after the chest wound that woke him from his nap, fighting. There’s so many now. So so many. The second-to-last wound was on his neck, the worst in his gut, twisted more than once. The knife’s still there.
Soledad say, casual, “I really did deserve better than you, Charlie.”
He gurgles.
“But you never could see me. Always somebody else. So I asked myself, when do I get what I need?” She yells, “What about me?” She stops herself from talking, clears her throat, pats the tortilla cloth over her face, her hands tremble.
A thin flow of blood rises up from his mouth, then down the side of his cheek. She bends down to him, fixes his hair, combing it with her fingers, slicks it back with the flat of her hand, smiles. “Aren’t you going to come and eat? I cooked this for you. Please, come and sit down.”
She sits at the table without him, sits over her bowl, pushing meats to the side with her spoon, as always. She puts a spoonful of broth in her mouth, swallows, then turns back to him.
Charlie’s eyes jot toward her, fix on her. She says, “You always did have pretty eyes.” She lifts her whole bowl of stew to her lips and drinks it down like water. Chunks of meat fall around her mouth and to the table. She picks up the pieces and throws ’em in her mouth, smacks on ’em, swallows, wipes her mouth with her backhand. “No one keeps their promises anymore. You should’ve kept yours, Charlie.”
An exhale like a man blowing his hands warm comes out of Charlie.
“Charlie?” Soledad say. “Charlie?” she say again, this time with worry in her voice.
ALBERT PUSHES HIS new cabinet against the wall while I pick through the bottles of wine and whiskey.
I can feel Albert looking at me, can tell he wants to ask me about Jeremy’s coming and going a few nights ago, but I ain’t got nothing to say.
“I understand if you still want to leave,” Albert say. “And be with him.”
“You worry too much,” I say. “What’s Jeremy got that you don’t?”
He smiles one-sided, all crooked-faced and ugly. Strangely beautiful, I think. I love him. But not the same as I did Jeremy.
“So I’m better than him?” he say. “‘Maybe I’m somebody worth spending the rest of your life with?”
I smile. “Don’t you gotta leave in an hour. If you stop talking now you could save your strength. It’s a long trip.”
“And if I gave my strength up now to ask, what would you say?”
“That Cynthia wants me to put all her liquor in order of their alphabet. But what do you think she’d say if I put the pretty ones up front?”
“MR. SHEPARD!” SOLEDAD cries, trying to shake him alive.
She goes searching through her house like she looking for something needed to fix him with—in her drawers and closets, the bedrooms.
She gives up and finally bursts out of her front doors, hysterical and screaming, her bare feet scramble down her porch, leaving red footprints. They get floured with dust as she runs up her dirt road toward the main one, her hair heavy with blood and whipping from side to side. Her closest neighbor, a quarter mile away, comes out his door from hearing her scream.
“He’s dead!” she say. “Mr. Shepard’s dead! That slave girl killed him!”
Part V
46 / HOMECOMING: 1869
Tallassee, Alabama
THE LAW PUTS a limit on the time a person has to sue somebody.
And if they don’t do it in that time, the hurt person has to drop the matter forever. And there’s a time limit on how long the law has to catch somebody for a crime, too, even if the person did it. And if the law cain’t catch him in that time, it means the criminal got away with it forever.
Not murder.
Murder has no limits. So the death penalty is always on the heels of the guilty. And there’s a lot of talk here about what to do with the treasonous, deserters, and war criminals. It’s how I know about limits. It’s how I know soldiers who desert are murderers according to the people here. Innocent lives were lost because of them. The death penalty, folks say, is the right punishment. But not according to newest president of the United States.
President Johnson signed an order giving “unconditional pardons to all Civil War participants”—on both sides—including war criminals. The order came too late for Henry Wirz, the commanding officer of Camp Sumter in Georgia where Union soldiers were starved, mistreated, and killed. Wirz was convicted of eleven murders and conspiracy and was hanged a war criminal.
He wasn’t the only one.
There were at least two war criminals punished, but there are thousands of deserters, hundreds of them being hunted down and killed and murdered, all off the legal record.
As many as one in three soldiers deserted. So, one in three were eligible to die as cowards. Those men say they were scared or said they were fighting to save their families not a nation; they didn’t sign up for this. It was the old president, President Lincoln, who said no to killing more deserters: “American people will not stand to see Americans shot by the dozens and twenties.” But not everybody agree with Lincoln. The Civil War is proof they didn’t. It’s been over four years since the end of the Civil War and folks are still angry, Confederate flags still fly. And it’s still true that the death penalty is always on the heels of a murderer.
Jackson came home three nights ago by surprise from the new war out west. Even with a son five years gone, Sissy’s first question was, “You told somebody before you left, didn’t you, son? Honorable?”
But Josey didn’t ask no questions when she saw him standing in the darkened doorway, a hero with the night sky behind him. She collapsed with all her burdens in the spot where she stood. It’s where his comforting arms would hold her ’til daybreak.
And now, they sit before the popping fire, Jackson’s arms around her still, her body slouched into him. It only took Rachel and Squiggy a half minute three nights ago to find themselves lost in Jackson, too. They’ve been hanging on him like cares. “This is your daddy,” Josey told ’em that first night, and now they move when he moves, follow him in and out the house, from one side of the room to the other. And right now, they’re a step away, busying themselves with a piece of coal, coloring tree bark, and forming letters, but they’re still keeping an eye on him. Sissy, too, in her rocking chair.
“And my daddy?” Josey say. “Any word from him?”
“I heard his regiment went north into Dakota territory the month before I made it to Texas,” Jackson said. “They call negroes like him buffalo soldiers,” he said.
“But you?” Sissy said. “You came home?”
“Negro fighters ain’t getting proper shelter out there, Momma . . . food. Deal was we was gon’ get guns and ammunition, new shoes and quality goods. Instead, we got rotten Civil War rations and cheap blankets that fell apart in the rain. They’re the ones that broke the contract and don’t care if we die.”
“So they just let you go home?” Josey said.
“Put it this way . . . they know I ain’t coming back.”
“Did I raise a deserter, Jackson? Is that what you did, son? You telling me I raised a coward?”
“Momma, I ain’t gon’ kill Indians. Treat ’em the way white folks treat us.”
Sissy shakes her head. “Oooh . . . they gon’ come for you, Jackson. They gon’ come and you deserve what you get. Always turning your back on folks that treat you right.”
“Is that what I do, Momma? Huh? I mi
streat folk?”
Sissy pushes back in her chair hard enough to set herself rocking in half swings.
FART SOUNDS ARE echoing from the bottom of the porch where Jackson got his face buried in Squiggy’s belly, blowing. Rachel and Josey are beside themselves with laughter. It’s been thirty-two days since Jackson’s came home and it’s like they’ve always been as perfect as a white family.
All but Sissy.
Jackson and Sissy ain’t talked since a month ago when she told him she raised a fool. She finished breakfast without a word to nobody and stayed behind when everybody went outside. She don’t say much to Josey now, neither.
“Daddy!” Rachel calls. “Look at me, Daddy.”
Squiggy slides from under Jackson and tries running but Jackson tackles him by the legs.
“Daddy!” Rachel says, holding the edges of her dress out like she’s about to spin. “Look at me, Daddy. Daddy? Look at me!”
“Just do it, already!” Sissy say, bringing herself outside.
“She’s just excited to see her father,” Josey say, hanging wet clothes on the porch rail.
“It’s all right, Momma. Show me when you ready, Baby Girl.”
Rachel starts spinning.
“Ain’t all right,” Sissy say. “You need to spend yer time with that boy. He can’t talk, hardly run. Simpleminded.”
“Ain’t nothin wrong with Junior’s mind,” Jackson say. “He ain’t simple nothin.”
“Daddy, you didn’t see me!”
“He just gotta catch up, is all. . . . Ain’t that right, Lil’ Man? You’ll be talking soon, won’t cha? Say, Mama. Say, Ma-ma-ma.”
He don’t.
Rachel skips over and kneels down to Squiggy, leaning too close to his face. “Say, Ray-chel,” she say. “Come on, Squiggy. Say, Ray-chel.”
He don’t.
“Say, Da-dee,” Jackson say. “Da-da-da.”
Squiggy makes an ah sound, then blows his lips like another belly fart.
Grace Page 30
