American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  • • •

  Jolie was too whipped to argue, her memories of Sam’s steadfastness and his sweetness poisoned by grave, stomach-churning doubts that rose and fell like the tides. Round and round she went, through Carl and Lena’s wedding in March—one that made a curious turn for the righteous after the two went to the altar the week before their wedding, confessed their sins, and triumphantly returned to the faithful, flags flying.

  They entreated Jolie to follow, to repent and renew her mind and find refuge in the old sanctuary of El Bethel. But she wasn’t as guilt-ridden as she was perplexed and isolated, waiting on a sign and still clinging to hope. Then a small bit of damning evidence appeared unexpectedly, almost exactly where it began: in the sagging old kitchen in Hendrix, where she’d first opened the door and let him into her life.

  It happened in early August, almost a year after he first appeared, when she was forced to return to Hendrix after her father had his first stroke—this one relatively minor, though his heartbeat fell so low they had to put in a pacemaker. Jolie came home as soon as she heard, on an interminable Greyhound bus ride, with stops at every little hamlet and crossroads from Savannah to Cleary. She got in at midnight, in time to see him and hold his hand and pray with him and assure him she wouldn’t leave till he was home. She hitched a ride with her uncle Ott back to the parsonage and got there just after dawn on an uncharacteristically breezy morning, a hurricane somewhere off the coast well downstate, but still capable of ruffling the red cedar at the cemetery.

  She let herself in with her key and found the old house strangely familiar, just stuffy, closed up for the coming storm. Her father was a creature of habit and hadn’t moved so much as a doily in her absence, the place smelling of old wood and damp flooring, and, against all expectation, of home. Jolie wandered room to room, intrigued by the stopped-clock stillness of the place: high school pictures of Lena and her still jammed in the frame of her vanity mirror; the green tile in the bath as arsenic as ever; the same worn blanket on her bed, still flipped back from the last night she’d slept there, eight months before.

  She hadn’t eaten since she left Savannah, and while she made toast, she stood at the kitchen counter and went through a stack of junk mail that had come to her in care of her father—credit-card applications, magazine subscriptions, and glossy, useless college brochures. She was pitching them away, one piece at a time, when she came upon a small, jet-printed envelope addressed to Ms. Jolie Hoyt, Hendrix, Florida. The return address was Miami, and the moment she saw it, that old impatient pound returned to her heart.

  She opened it with shaking hands and found a strange university letterhead, and a single, well-placed paragraph that read:

  Dear Ms. Hoyt,

  I am writing on behalf of Dr. Arnalt, who is working on a study on the Hendrix Lynching of 1938. We have read S. Lense’s excellent work on the subject and understand you have source material and access to firsthand testimony that would be very helpful to our endeavor. We would very much like to interview you and possibly your father, plus any other sources you would kindly introduce. We will be filming in Cleary on Sept 5th and at the archives in Tallahassee till the 9th. Please call my office if either date works for you and suggest a location (audio friendly preferred) where we can discuss.

  It was signed Joseph Jointer, Ph.D., and below that in a flourish of friendly postscript was Lunch on us!

  For a long moment, it simply didn’t register. She stood there, reading and rereading it, till the cumulative effect sank in, the force of the blow so physical that she blinked. She didn’t cry out, didn’t make a sound, just sat down heavily at the old Formica table and digested this bitter confirmation that Sam was something, all right, but not what she thought he was.

  He was some kind of hustler—a reporter or a fed or sycophant of the Justice Department, looking for an in on their dirty laundry, and wily enough to find it, along with a few other juicy perks. Either someone got onto him or maybe he was never shot at all. Maybe that was another con. In any case, he’d hit the road as such men tended to do when women lost their usefulness—turned up pregnant, got old, or put on a few pounds. Oh, the men still had uses for you—to iron and cook and raise their children—but they never bothered telling you they loved you anymore, because they didn’t.

  They never had.

  When the tears finally came, Jolie cried as she never had in her life. She howled like a child at the loss and foolishness of it all—at the utter stupidity of Hoyt women, who knew the score, saw the score, lived and breathed the score, and yet they never learned.

  When she finally cried herself out, she turned on a burner on the old gas stove and touched the edge of the envelope and the note to the blue flame. She held it till it caught, then stood there and watched it burn, filling the kitchen with the bitter smell of ash, till it burned to her fingers.

  When it was gone, so was Sam. He was dead to her, and until she came upon Wes Dennis five years later at the City Café, she never willingly spoke of him again.

  Chapter Eleven

  The mitochondrial DNA of the Creek was not the only trait Jolie had inherited through her matrilineal line. She’d also inherited the stoicism of the disinherited, and the passivity of a Mexican burro—one so well trained to halter that it can walk a precipice with a trunk strapped to its back never missing a step, eyes open, fast asleep. Such a skill was a cultural requirement of women in Hendrix, and so hardwired into the female brain that the idea of contacting Sam or confronting him, or shaming him for his betrayal, simply never occurred to Jolie.

  She had neither the voice nor the energy to address it and just ate this insult. She digested it into the rest of the Hoyt collective rage and returned to Savannah the next week with a different paradigm of life—as a bona fide student of design. Such was her utter despondency that she didn’t bother with intricate essays and chatting up alumni in the hopes of winning herself a scholarship, but just filled out her Pell grants and, when she did her face-to-face, checked the box as a minority applicant.

  “Minority how?” the counselor asked when they called her in, with the snooty, know-it-all way of the public official, peering at Jolie over fashionably narrow eyeglasses in a pale cherry shade.

  “Muskogee Creek.”

  The unexpectedness of the answer brought the clerk up short, her face far from believing. “I assume you have legal documentation?”

  Jolie met her eye and answered without blinking, “You assume correctly.”

  She made the pronouncement with more bravado than expertise, but a flurry of correspondence with the State of Florida proved her self-identification correct—or at least failed to disprove it. Such was her moxie and obvious financial need that, come spring, she was actually living a sliver of the life she had been playacting all those months—taking basic design and riding a bike to class, adjusting her primitive lines to the rigidity of formal design.

  She went at it with a singular resolve and was just hitting her stride a year later when her father had his second stroke—this one appreciably worse, leaving him with a damaged heart, a right-quadrant paralysis, and a sagging, permanent limp. Carl and Lena were the new parents of two wholly demanding baby girls, born ten months apart, and even Ott couldn’t care for Ray alone, so with little fanfare Jolie took a personal leave midway through her sophomore year. With a duffel bag, a sketch portfolio, and ten grand in student loans—with the onus of repayment falling entirely on her, along with the 20 percent of her father’s medical care not covered by Medicare—she returned to Hendrix to care for her father.

  The good Sisters at El Bethel were generous in allowing Jolie and her father to stay at the parsonage, paying little above room and board. Jolie was left to find a job, which wasn’t as easy a proposition as it had once been. She had returned under a cloud, her sterling reputation as a good church girl tarnished by scandal. The few employers in Hendrix made her feel the loss, with no takers on her job apps, even at the post office, the IGA, or the bait shop.
Vic Lucas promised to hire her come spring, but in the meanwhile she cleaned condos and made tourists’ beds on the beach and had pretty much given herself over to the surety of the old Hoyt curse when deliverance came from an unexpected source: her father.

  Ray Hoyt had never been known for his dramatics, but he sprang it on her with a certain flare on a warm evening in late May, after she’d spent a long day scrubbing tile in Mexico Beach. Over a supper of chicken and yellow rice, he proudly announced that he’d found her a good job, right up the road in Cleary.

  “Where?” she asked with some trepidation, as the phrase good job could mean anything in the Hoyt vernacular, from piecework at a textile mill to slaughtering chickens at a poultry farm.

  “Working for Mis-tah Alt man,” he told her smugly, as if it explained everything.

  Jolie waited on a little more detail. When it wasn’t forthcoming, she asked, “Old Mr. Altman, at the bank?”

  Her father made a face. “Naw, shug—the old man’s been dead twenty years. His boy, Hugh. He owns thet florist shop, downtown. I told him you was looking for work, and he said to come by and see him—that he’d fix you right up. Working with art, and all, just like you like.”

  Ray looked extraordinarily pleased at having snagged this ambitious lead and spent the evening recommending what she wear and how to do her hair. He was weirdly involved in a way he had never before been, or would ever be after. She realized then how worried he was about her and quit complaining and dutifully dressed and drove to downtown Cleary, around the corner from the City Café, to the City Florist—a tiny, narrow shop built of the same Georgia brick.

  She was expecting minimum wage and nothing more, found the front counter empty, stuck with all sorts of clippings of FTD bouquets and funeral sprays, loose-leaf notebooks of teddy bears, and Mylar balloons. She rang the counter bell three times before a harassed, well-preserved middle-aged man finally emerged, immaculately dressed in pressed Polo and Gucci loafers—Hughie Altman, she assumed, knowing the name but nothing much else.

  Before Jolie could so much as open her mouth, he popped up the counter divider and waved her back. “You must be Raymond Hoyt’s daughter—d’you mind talking in the back? I’m swamped. Six weddings tomorrow, including Cathy Kramer’s, and four funerals, one in Holt, of all places, and no one can tell me the name of the church. Do you have anything with you but heels?”

  Jolie stammered, “No sir,” and explained that her father had only told her this was an interview, not an actual job. But Hugh disappeared into the depths of a long, dim back room that stretched the length of the old building and was a study in creative chaos. Refrigerators of every size and vintage lined the walls. Bolts of lace, ribbons, and every other edging known to man fought for counter space along a high, sixteen-foot table that was haphazardly scattered with baby’s breath, stems, and a mountain of untrimmed long-stemmed roses, deep red and white, still in bud.

  “Pity,” he said as he began stripping the roses with nips of a paring knife, as quick as a sweatshop seamstress. “I could have used you. Have you ever done any arranging?”

  “No sir. I’m a student—or I was, at Savannah Col—”

  “Yes, your father told me,” he interrupted with a wave of his hand, not rude as much as single-minded, rolling his eyes in exasperation when the bell on the counter trilled. He paused, rose in hand, and asked, “Well, would it be too much to ask you to wrap these roses while I take care of these tiresome walk-ins? At least till I get Cathy’s things done? I have to finish the setup by morning so she can do a walk-through.”

  Jolie was, at heart, a pleaser, and with no discussion of wages or benefits, hours or conditions, she held out a hand for the knife and started peeling, with such determination that Hugh finally smiled. “That’s right—just strip them and stick them in the water. Kick off those heels, honey,” he ordered, “or you’ll ruin your back. When they’re done, stick them in the crystal vases—the red and white—use your eye. They’re the reception pieces—boring, but you know Cathy. We got in a shipment of the most extraordinary delphiniums, but, no, she must have red and white roses. I told her, ‘Well, stick a blue star in there and you can keep them out till Fourth of July.’ ” He paused before he went to answer the bell and confided, “And, d’you know, she thought I was serious?”

  • • •

  So began Jolie’s long association with Hugh Altman, whose family was among the handful of insider patrician families who’d ruled the roost in Cleary for time out of mind, with the country homes, the farms, the vast acreages of an old-South fiefdom. Every county seat in West Florida had a few, the progeny of last-century planters, who’d long ago left their farming roots and become world-weary blue bloods of an archaic type, cash-poor but regal, whose preferred car was a Cadillac; favorite writer, Thomas Wolfe; and investment of choice, real estate, of which they owned a good portion.

  Hugh was the oldest son of such a family, and the responsibility of managing the local holdings had fallen mainly to him, not without complaint, as he detested his sister and detested her children even more. His father had been a formidable banker in his day and, when he died, had left Hugh all manner of curious business concerns—most of which he’d wasted no time in unloading.

  He’d held on to the florist shop on the advice of his accountant, as it had been a cash cow in the days before the Internet, when no prom, wedding, homecoming, or funeral was complete without a spray of white mums. Those days were long over by the time Jolie came on the scene, but Hugh persisted in thinking they would return, though good managers were impossible to find and he wound up doing much of the legwork himself. The richest man in the county was delivering corsages to prom parties in a thirty-year-old panel van.

  In that and in many things, Jolie found him an enigma. When she mentioned his peculiarities to her father one night at supper, he grunted, “Baby, men like him, they make their own rules. He ain’t tried to mess with you, has he?” That was the Hendrix term for sexual harassment.

  Jolie was quick to assure him, “Oh, I doubt ol’ Hugh has any plans for the likes of me—other than maybe working me to death.”

  Her father had nodded in satisfaction. “Thet’s why he’s paying you, shug.”

  He missed the note of mild regret in her voice, as Jolie had inevitably developed a crush on her boss in typical schoolgirl fashion, light-years away from the way she’d loved Sam, having few roots in reality. She was just young and lonely and Hugh an undeniably romantic figure—so rich and unattached and wonderfully hygienic, with a full-time maid who kept his pants pressed, his shirts starched, his Gucci loafers shining.

  He was also a good, if sketchy, teacher, his floral arrangements, like his personality, built along classic lines, as solid and symmetrical as the famed Roman arch. Jolie had never worked with flowers in her life but was a quick study and soon began incorporating native greenery into his stiff, formal creations—curling coral vine and wisteria, and even the humble grapevine.

  The results were lacy and delicate and not only garnered instant praise from their customers, but saved Hugh a few bucks in supplies, as the vine grew on the shop’s back fence. She figured he was more impressed with the savings than the design, for Italian loafers to the contrary, Hugh was unimaginably cheap, truly a child of the Depression in that sense. He went on regular harangues over flower prices and overhead and practically took to his bed in March when it came time to pay his property taxes. He stood around for weeks afterward on the spacious veranda of the local country club warning his equally rich and pampered friends that America was heading straight for socialism, and that he, Hubert Allan Altman, had seen it coming.

  But aside from his shameless penny-pinching, he was a good enough boss, hilarious in his snotty superiority, full of wisecracks and eye-rolling that he never bothered to hide from anyone, even his choicest customers (who were usually kin to him). To his credit, he recognized Jolie’s talent early on and was soon introducing her around town as his brilliant new protégée in a
way that Jolie thought mocking at first, but eventually realized was sincere. Hugh was of the generation that used such words as marvelous and protégée without sarcasm.

  He was always casting about for new ways to make a dime and was soon setting Jolie up with small design projects for a few choice clients, whom he privately referred to as “the Garden Club set”—his mother’s genteel friends who lived in the wonderful houses on Silk Stocking Row.

  In this, Jolie proved genius, as she was still nourishing a great mother-loss and got on like gangbusters with the Cleary old guard, who’d never met a bit of cheap labor they didn’t like. She never marginalized them as Hugh did, but considered them the urban counterparts of the old Sisters at El Bethel, with their same kindness, their rigid, old ways of looking at life. While she was busy transforming their sunrooms and parlors into forest-green-and-burgundy hunt-club motifs, she kept them laughing with funny little stories of Hugh’s odd ways, and the quirks of her increasingly well-known brother, the Reverend Carl Hoyt.

  The latter were possibly more hilarious than the former, as Carl had gone full-bore fanatic in his return to the church, not content with being a mere Christian layman, but becoming a preacher himself, and opening a slick new church on the coast (a ministry, they now called them) named Higher Ground. He and Lena had struggled for a few years to establish themselves, through the birth of yet a third daughter, making for a tough little fight to keep the mortgage paid and the parishioners at bay.

  Jolie pitied them enough that she signed herself up as a member and paid tithes, till a small break came Carl’s way in the form of a gospel businessman who fixed him up with a late-night spot on local access cable. As soon as he hit the airwaves, his ascension was almost guaranteed, as Carl was a communicator’s dream. He was big and handsome and hilarious, with a country accent he could mold like a pound cake, and a hardscrabble childhood marked with moments so tragic they might have been lifted from a Hank Williams ballad—his mother’s death, his early bout with teenage alcoholism. He spoke of it all with an AA transparency that made him alive, authentic on air, and only months after his debut, he’d caught the eye of a rep from one of the huge God-channels.