“I know you feel the cold,” Garnett said. “We got to keep going ’til I see the way into tomorrow.”
Redwood gulped cold swamp air, and the chill startled her eyes wide again. She was on her knees in front of the fireplace soaked in dew. She clasped the photo to her chest and fought tears. Subie was wide awake watching her, fierce and sharp as an osprey fixing to dive for a big, juicy fish.
“You can’t control a spell like that. You go where it take you.”
“I was running and hiding with her again,” Redwood said.
“I found you that night.” Subie nodded. “Garnett left a trail that I had to follow.”
“If Mama had all that hoodoo power like everybody say, how come she let ’em string her up that way? How come she died swinging in a tree? How come they burned her, ’til you almost couldn’t tell who she was?”
Subie stuffed tobacco in a pipe. “Garnett run you all ’round that swamp hoping to find a spell.”
“Why’d she leave us?” Redwood stared at the red-eyed photograph. Flower in Garnett’s hair had a spot of purple color too.
“Can’t know all what’s in a person’s heart,” Subie said.
“Why didn’t she kill ’em ’stead of letting ’em kill her?”
“Killing goes both ways. Dying is your own business.”
“Don’t we get to defend ourselves without it coming back down on us?”
“She didn’t want more blood on her hands.”
Redwood shook with so much anger and hurt, her backbones popped and cracked. A mighty pain shot up her neck. “Why didn’t nobody tell me?”
“Don’t know ’bout all of everybody else,” Subie replied.
“Why didn’t you then?” Pain shot down Redwood’s legs. She could pull somebody else’s ache and throw it away, but not her own.
Subie drew on her pipe. “So you could grow into yourself, big and strong, without a shadow over your soul. So this heartless world wouldn’t snatch your power ’fore it got going good.” Subie sighed. “Garnett asked me to see to that. I did the best I could.”
Redwood sat down in a rocking chair that had swamp flowers carved ’cross the back and vines twisting into armrests. She rocked hard back and forth ’til she could stand herself again. “Is this a new chair?” She rubbed the wood.
“Yes, Mr. Cooper come by, bought a spirit spell, and left that chair.” Subie sucked her pipe. “He asked after you.”
Seven
Peach Grove, 1904
“You trying to go lame on me?” Aidan rubbed Princess’s swollen right leg. She grumbled and stomped her left front foot, but tolerated the poultice he wrapped on the bad one. She nibbled at his pockets and he gave her a mushy pear. Overcome, he hugged her neck as she chewed. Princess tolerated a gush of emotion now and again.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Ain’t everything coming my way?”
Money from the winter crop was burning a hole in his pocket. He should buy what he needed, spring seed and feed and such, so he wouldn’t have to borrow against the farm, so he didn’t lose it all buying drink.
“I’ll see to it in the morning,” he promised Princess, patting his alligator pouch.
As he walked from the shed, the sun sat low on the horizon, teasing him with a bit of warmth. Fog curled up from the creek. Garnett’s voice on the wind was faint; Aidan couldn’t hear what she was saying this afternoon. The nightriders were quiet too — or off riding torment somewhere else.
Aidan hoisted the jug he’d just bought from Leroy Richards yesterday. It was still full. He pulled out the stopper and the whiskey sloshed onto his hands, evaporating quickly and leaving a chill on his palm. He closed the jug and ’stead of licking his skin, he set the jug on the steps and walked into the house. He didn’t need to get stinking drunk tonight. Wasn’t nobody or nothing haunting him.
Redwood’s book, Of One Blood or The Hidden Self by Pauline Hopkins, was the first thing he saw sitting on the kitchen table. Sober for a week, he’d been reading every night and was almost to the end. He hadn’t seen Redwood since she’d loaned him the book. Was this heartache, missing her? What would she think of his hidden self? The gal was quicksilver, one moment giving him a book to read, saying they had to talk as soon as he was done and the next moment mad enough to shoot him.
Why was he supposed to tell her what her own family wouldn’t?
She was headstrong and reckless, running ’round the swamp, sashaying through town with all those crackers, and colored men too, wondering what was going on between them long legs and switching hips. She didn’t want nobody to tell her nothing — she knew it all! If she did admit to ignorance, she wasn’t satisfied ’less she figured it out herself. Same as her brother, Redwood didn’t never want to be caught wrong, and she had to stick her nose into anything. Gal dragged him off to Chicago without an invite or a by-your-leave.
His heart was pumping like he’d run uphill, and he was just standing still, thinking.
He didn’t need to be loving a wild hoodoo gal, not a gal from the colored side of the creek, not in Peach Grove, not after all the bad water that come tearing his way. She was Garnett’s gal to boot. A stitch of pain in his side made him gasp. White Peach Grove wouldn’t give a damn if he dragged Redwood out back to a shed and used her like an animal. Colored Peach Grove might be angry behind their hands or think it served Redwood right for strutting ’round, a Queen of Dahomey, getting friendly with whoever she pleased. If she loved him back, if he tried to marry her, if he tried to do right, upstanding citizens would want to string him up like a colored man. And the likes of Brother George would want to take a shotgun after him and risk getting strung up themselves. He should leave this love alone.
Aidan started outside for the jug.
Big Thunder and Miss O’Casey would’ve been disappointed by their son’s cowardly thoughts. His parents had always lived in their own world, not somebody else’s, istî siminolî. They steered clear of regular, drylongso folk who balked at any real test of freedom, exactly the kind of folk Aidan Cooper was turning into.
Course, he had plenty help there.
Aunt Caitlin didn’t want anybody in Peach Grove to know squat ’bout Aidan’s parents. She never forgave Sister Aislinn for telling her son they’d both worked in a house of ill repute. Caitlin’s attempts at turning Aidan into a good Catholic failed miserably — mainly ’cause she didn’t like Mass any more than he did. She and Charlie Cooper were scared of any lazy Injun they saw in Aidan. Charlie Cooper couldn’t figure the point of reading books when there was so much work to be done. Whippings made the boy hide in the swamp. Once, after reading a few sentences (she claimed most of his writing was too blurry for her old eyes), Aunt Caitlin tried to set fire to his journal. She burned up her apron instead. When he told her writing in the book was Miz Garnett’s hoodoo spell for whatever ailed him, she let it be. Still and all, Aidan got used to living lies, to walking ’round the easy way.
“How can I do right, Miz Garnett? I just don’t see it.”
After washing his hands and face three times with strong soap and scalding water, he pulled out his journal and sat down to write. Aidan made hisself just another character in the tale, like how his mama told a story.
Garnett’s Curse
If there was a curse, the upstanding citizens of Peach Grove had cursed themselves, not Miz Garnett. From age fifteen, Aidan Cooper hid away from folks in a bottle or a jug. But he didn’t start suicide drinking ’til after Peach Grovers strung up Garnett Phipps.
In 1898, yellow fever took Raymond Phipps, Garnett’s husband, and a lot of men couldn’t stand a beautiful gal like her going to waste. They say Everett Williams offered her a pile of money, but she wasn’t giving up nothing ’cept roots and get-well spells. Everett put his hands to her, and Garnett shot him in the throat. When Miz Caroline Williams buried her rogue of a brother-in-law three days later, Garnett was long gone. She’d gathered what family yellow fever had left her - son George, baby Iris, and swe
et Redwood - and vanished into the swamps.
Lone deputies hunting down a conjure woman as powerful as Garnett didn’t stand a chance, so a few days before Christmas the upstanding white men of the county rode out in a great horde. They shot up and burned colored Peach Grove. A war Aidan Cooper wouldn’t join, couldn’t do anything about, and sure couldn’t bear to see, so he took to hiding out in the woods, supposedly hunting deer. He was on the coward’s path.
A lot of folk in Peach Grove, colored, white, and Indian, always thought Garnett was too uppity for her own good, but this time they said she was goin’ get her people killed. Some colored folk were even madder at her than at the posse. Two days into the terror, when they gunned down Mr. Phillip Robeson and his two sons, burned the man’s house and his babies still in it, Garnett broke into Sheriff Harry’s office — locks never fazed her. She waited by the stove ’til he come back from hunting her. Seeing Garnett sitting at his desk, fool had a heart attack, certain his time had come and gone. Garnett nursed him back to life so she could turn herself in. Sheriff Harry didn’t bother to lock her in a cell.
Garnett had conditions. She swore not to turn the evil eye on the posse, and they swore to leave the rest of the colored in peace. Who wanted a conjure woman coming after you from the grave? Certainly not a powerful one like Garnett who come out of hiding to die for her people.
Christmas eve, Aidan Cooper hid from all the trouble up a chestnut tree in a hunting perch. But weren’t no deer, raccoons, rabbits, nothing, and he didn’t have the heart to sing ’em out of hiding. He was dozing off ’til twelve hooded nightriders come clomping by, scenting the air with sweat and fear. A barred owl cut the night with its barking cry. The riders stopped below a scorched pine tree. Peering through moss and sweet bay branches, Aidan noted how these men sat their horses, how they sounded all liquored up. He recognized more than a few. Somebody rumbling hell fever and damnation had to be the Baptist preacher. Twisted-hand Sheriff Harry was carrying a torch. The fellow almost falling off his nag was a dead ringer for that peanut farmer with eleven kids and a bad back. Bringing up the rear and ready to skedaddle out of there was a tall, broad figure — Hiram Johnson or Jerome Williams. Doc never put a horse between his legs. Their voices were low at first, muffled, unsure perhaps, but Aidan heard them all swear an oath to leave colored Peach Grove in peace: the barber, the deputy sheriff, Ken Smith who lost his farm to the Williams clan. Aidan and Ken had been fast friends once. Never thought to see him at a lynching.
Aidan told hisself he wasn’t sure, on account of the hoods and black robes. Didn’t the oily smoke from their torches ruin his vision ’til he couldn’t tell who was who? Well maybe Aidan didn’t want to look too hard. Maybe he didn’t want to see what he was seeing. Garnett, Aidan would have recognized anywhere. She was tied and trussed, her long legs dangling bare and raw in the cold mist. Her mouth bled around the gag. They stripped her naked in the cold air.
It took a long time for her to die. Seemed like they had to kill her four, five times. They tried to set her body on fire, but she just wouldn’t burn. Tall fellow who hunched over his black horse like Jerome, stayed in the shadows, never got close, didn’t ever join in. His horse kept trying to bolt. Garnett looked right at Aidan, red eyes burning, and then she closed her lids and was gone. Aidan swallowed a howl.
The nightriders left what remained of Garnett’s body hanging in that pine. Turkey buzzards gathered. The lazy flap of their wings could make Aidan scream, and to this day, the sound could drive him wild. The nightriders were gone an hour or more, and he didn’t move. Wasn’t sure he’d ever move again. When he finally climbed down from his perch, his legs were rubber and his bowels let loose all down his legs as he took off.
He wanted to run and run ’til he came to the end of the world and fell off, but he got no further than Aunt Caitlin’s front yard. The laundry still hung on the line, stiff and cold. He couldn’t leave Miz Garnett alone and tortured in that tree, to be pecked and mauled, to rot in the morning sun and stink to high heaven, with no company but torment and shame.
”What is comfort to a corpse?” The boneyard baron sneered at coward Aidan.
Aidan gathered hisself and ran back. After scaring the carrion eaters away, he cut her down from that tree and wrapped her in a sheet. Carolers in the distance sang at the stroke of twelve. Joy to the World, Merry Christmas. Nobody at the colored church really knew how the body came to lie with baby Jesus on Christmas morning. ’Stead of cursing a coward, folks blessed the angel who covered her in sweet bay branches and violet orchids.
Aidan never thought the living could haunt a body, but those twelve hooded men hounded him day and night, raided his dreams. Some days, every thought he had ended with nightriders blazing through his brain, the horses’ hooves stamping on his nerves. He might have learned to bear that, but along the middle of February, as he turned fields for spring planting, Garnett joined the demon posse, pleading with him to do right.
So Aidan sucked down rotgut liquor ’til white masked faces blurred into the moonlight on moss, ’til Miz Garnett was a silent whoosh in his ears. May Ellen, Aidan’s first wife, wouldn’t talk to him about what had happened, what he’d seen, and the Johnson twins, even Doc, thought he ought to let sleeping dogs lie. By Josie, Aidan stayed drunk. He picked fights over nothing, smashed up barrooms, and he cussed out everyone who came in range. He broke Graham Wright’s nose when the man was telling tales of glorious Choctaw valor — his ancestors whipping Creek and Seminole and colored folk too. Aidan couldn’t stand nobody. Colored, white, and Indian let him be. Josie was ten years older than him and desperate. Suckling a newborn baby boy that wasn’t his, she took off after a year, with half his seed money. Served him right.
Now, if Miz Garnett had sent her daughter Redwood to torment him, Redwood didn’t know anything about it. That gal was surely the Balm of Gilead. She took to walking by his fields to chat, even when he had nothing much to say. She made him come to her house for supper and play with sister Iris and the cousins. Listening to Ladd’s lies and eating Elisa’s stews and pies, Aidan almost felt good now and again. After hiding his ways from everybody since he was twelve, after almost forgetting who he could be, he and Redwood celebrated first fruits, did a green corn ceremony like with his folks. And though she didn’t stop him drinking altogether, he never managed much lowdown behavior ’round her. Got him up in the morning, to smell the oil in her hair, to hear the E-LEC-TRI-CITY in her voice. Redwood was his medicine. With her at his side, the nightriders’ hooves and Garnett’s voice faded to a whisper. Still, Aidan wished he could go back and break the locks on his spirit, do what was right.
Whoever got to turn time around, though?
Aidan stowed the journal in his shoulder bag. Redwood could read this story for herself. He’d let her read any story of his that took her fancy. He wrapped his banjo in a blanket and slung it over his back. He strode out onto the porch and gathered the birds he’d finished carving last night: eagles, water hens, osprey, and an ibis. He’d been meaning to make a necklace with the yellow bead he brought back from the World’s Fair — something fine African women wore — and give it to Redwood. He’d show her the bead and see what she thought. Feeling good, he jumped over the jug of Leroy’s finest brew sitting pretty on the steps and headed for Ladd and Elisa’s.
Fifteen minutes later, stumbling over loose stones, he dropped the osprey and ibis in the dirt. “They don’t need to hear this story, Wildfire. Well, she don’t.” His banjo banged into his back, into his resolve, a dissonant chord. “Ain’t goin’ make her feel better. And she don’t want to see you either.”
He gathered up the toys but didn’t turn back home. He sank down in the dirt.
Iona downed several big swallows of moonshine before Redwood set the bone in her arm back in its place. She howled more racket than a wounded hound dog and almost passed out.
“You should see Doc Johnson.” Redwood didn’t pull too much pain. That spooked some folks, and she wasn’t s
ure ’bout Iona. “He know how to set a bone good.”
“’Less you think this little break’ll kill me, I’d rather not.” Iona gasped and grunted and drank another mouthful from the jug. Her twin boys watched anxiously. “I don’t care much for white folk. Suit me fine if I never have to see one again.”
“Be a blessing if they all dropped off the Earth,” Redwood said.
The twins cocked their heads at her. She wasn’t sounding like herself.
“Hmm hmm.” Iona was drunk with liquor and pain. She closed her eyes. “Wishing folk ill make you sick your ownself.”
“I guess.” Redwood finished fitting on a splint.
“Crazy Coop come by last night, sang a few songs, bought a jug. He asked after you.”
“Did he now? Well I ain’t studying him.” Redwood worried that she cut off the blood flow, wrapping too tight. “Keep still and don’t lift no weight, ’til it heal — a month, six weeks — or this ain’t goin’ work.”
“A month?” Iona laughed. “Ha.”
Redwood turned to the twins. “Don’t let her carry nothing or do heavy work, you hear me?”
“I’ll keep still.” Iona pressed a silver dollar in Redwood’s hand. “Leroy’ll give you a ride far as the creek. Just don’t spook the man. He believe in too much mess as it is.”
Leroy left Redwood at the old Jessup peach orchard. Jerome Williams owned it now. Aidan’s place was just through the trees a bit and down the road, closer than home.
“Mr. Cooper sounded good last night,” Leroy remarked, following her gaze. “He said it was your fault he ain’t buying so many jugs. Don’t hoodoo all my best customers, gal.” Leroy rode off laughing.
Redwood and Wildfire Page 14
