The Tree of Forgetfulness

by Pam Durban

  That’s when she’d seen her opening. “ ‘Well, Mr. Barrett,’ I said, ‘my mother had a saying: Though a lie be swift, the truth overtakes it.’ ” She said she hoped the truth would overtake him soon, and he said he hoped so too.

  “But what does he look like?” one of the younger ones asked.

  “Handsome in a bland sort of way,” Libba said, studying her fingernails. “Nothing to write home about.” She waved a hand in front of her face like she was shooing a gnat, and the ladies all laughed, and the fresh air came in through the open windows. “Thank you, Minnie,” they said. “Just half a cup, please, Minnie.”

  Didn’t Mr. Eubanks, editor of the Aiken Standard, say it best, Libba asked, when he expressed his profound regret that this unfortunate community was made the scene of an inhuman horror? Minnie set the coffeepot back on the tray, the tray on the table nearest the door. She went to the fireplace and jabbed at the fire with the poker, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney, thinking of what Mr. N. R. Latham had to say about regret. The Mt. Hebron Baptist Church subscribed to his paper, the Palmetto Leader. She could quote chapter and verse of his opinion. “Those are not the kind of murders that law officers find out about,” he wrote. “They only furnish the occasion for an expression of regret on the part of good citizens.”

  She’d better leave now, she thought, before she said something she’d be sorry for, and she went back and sat in the kitchen with her hands wound in her apron to keep them still. When she heard the mantel clock chime the quarter-hour, she went back to the front room and loaded the plates and cups and napkins onto the silver tray—“You’re welcome, ladies, you’re welcome”—and carried them to the kitchen, and no one was the wiser. She filled the sink with hot water, sprinkled in the soap flakes while Louie shrilled away. Mr. Aimar wasn’t the only one whose nerves got worked by Louie’s singing. She put her face up close to the cage. “Hush up, Louie,” she said, and the bird fumbled a few notes then picked up the tune again.

  It got quiet in the front room, and she pushed open the kitchen’s swinging door and listened to see if she was needed. Then Libba’s voice started. “Best Three White Chrysanthemums,” she said. “Best Centerpiece of Chrysanthemums.” Minnie let the door swing shut, went back to the sink. “Let’s us say them too, Louie,” she said. “Best Three Yellow, Pink, Crimson Chrysanthemums,” Minnie said, washing a cup and setting it on a dish towel on the drainboard. “Best Begonia in a Pot. Best Vase of Dahlias. Best Boston Fern, Asparagus Fern, Best Geranium in a Pot. Say geranium, Louie,” she said, but the little bird just kept singing.

  She washed faster, but it rushed back into her mind anyway, the picture that she’d seen when Libba had talked about the truth overtaking a lie. The idea of overtaking was what lingered and got mixed up with Louie’s singing and the memory of seeing those three dead people.

  Tweet, the undertaker’s canary, had been singing its fool head off, too, when she and Annie Matthews walked into the room where the Longs were laid out. They were carrying the clothes the Daughters of Zion had collected: a navy blue dress for Bessie Long, pants and shirts for the boys. Right away Mr. Jackson stepped over and covered the birdcage, and then the room was quiet. Quiet and still and white. The windowpanes were painted white; the sink on the wall was white and the sheets he’d pulled over them; the whole room was white, except for the cotton sacks that had covered their bodies in the back of the truck that had carried them into town. Those were piled in one corner, at the end of a long smear of blood.

  When Mr. Jackson drew back the sheet over Albert, Annie cried out, “Dear Jesus,” and fled. Minnie had felt weak herself, and the undertaker had led her to a chair in one corner, made her sit, and handed her a funeral fan on a stick. After that she tried not to look at what Mr. Jackson was doing with the clothes they’d brought, but she saw enough to know that it would take more than clothes to make those people look content, the way the dead were supposed to look. Later, when she heard how they’d been carried out to Monetta in the back of a county truck and buried in a common grave, she knew she’d been right: No clothes ever sewed by a human hand could have decently covered the look of the fate they’d met.

  “Hush, fool,” she said to Louie, and she flicked a finger against his cage. The bird hopped sideways on the perch and went on singing. She opened the little wire door and stuck her finger inside, and he hopped onto it. Libba had taught him that trick, and now he sat on her finger, oblivious to how much she’d like to snap his neck, tell Libba (who would go all to pieces over that bird) that she’d left the kitchen for a minute and come back to find him dead.

  When Libba rang the handbell, Minnie went back to the front room and handed out the ladies’ wraps and saw them out the door, and when they were alone in the kitchen, Libba sat down at the table again. “Mr. Aimar is just not himself, Minnie,” she said, as though they were picking up a conversation they’d dropped earlier. “That’s what worries me,” she said, turning her wedding band and the diamond engagement ring around and around. The lipstick had worn off her mouth, and her face looked thin and famished.

  Who is he, then? Minnie didn’t say. Is he one of them who’d done what had been done to those three people? Or did he only watch while they were overtaken?

  Walking down to her house after the Aimar’s supper dishes had been washed and dried and put away, she peered into shadows, startled at a flash of moonlight in a pane of greenhouse glass. “Just tired, that’s all,” she told herself. But it wasn’t until she’d settled herself in the armchair on her own back porch and lit up an Old Gold cigarette that she felt out of danger. She blew a procession of perfect smoke rings, watched them march away into the dark, then looked where they’d gone: out over the dozing fires under the copper boiler and the laundry kettle in the sandy patch of ground just beyond the porch and on to her privy and the two long clotheslines held up by bamboo poles. Out past the clotheslines her garden was filled with puckered tomatoes on drooping plants, withered bean vines, and the woody spires of okra. It was quiet back there, so quiet she could hear the grasshoppers rustle in the dry grass between the garden rows and the thinning autumn songs of the crickets. Out there on her porch in the dark, she could almost believe that this was her own little house on her own piece of land.

  She’d just dropped the cigarette butt into her skirt pocket when Zeke’s wagon rumbled down the driveway. She heard the heavy thud of Princess’s hooves, the clunk of the wooden brake dropping into its slot. The horse blew hard—Amen, sister, she thought—and then Zeke came clomping down the path beside the house. How could a tall, skinny boy walk as heavy as an ox? That was just one of the multiplying mysteries that vexed her about her son. He came around the corner, carrying a bundle of laundry tied in a sheet.

  “Mama, why do you work so hard for everybody but yourself?” he said, dropping the bundle next to her chair.

  With his hat pulled down and his chin jutted out like he was spoiling for a fight, he looked exactly like his father.

  “Just used to it, I guess,” she said. “And good evening to you too. What did you bring me?” she said, nudging the bundle with her foot.

  “Some shirts. And the gentleman needs them back quick.”

  “I’m taking my leisure here, son,” she said. He grumbled something she didn’t hear. Just as well—she wasn’t going to quarrel with Zeke tonight. Woman-trouble, no doubt, it always was with him. But every day she thanked God for him, for all he did for her and all he meant to her. Thanks to him, her roof did not leak, her firewood was split and stacked; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d lifted anything heavy or missed church. Her church and Zeke were her family now. The rest of her blood kin were dead or gone north, who knew where?

  “You can go on and get started clearing my garden, if you’re looking for something to keep you out of trouble,” she said. He clumped off the porch and out into the patch, yanked up a few tomato plants, poles and all, and tossed them out into the dark. She knew these signs; he’d always had a t
emper, and when it flared up, it burned whatever or whomever stood too close. His temper and his pride, the two hard edges of his character that she worried about all night sometimes. The last time she’d had a good taste of both was when he’d left the Schofield School the day he turned fifteen.

  He’d been the biggest boy in the sixth grade class, tired of wearing the little blue cap that all the boys wore, bored with chair caning, resentful about working on the school farm. Why should he learn to be a field hand? he’d said; he didn’t intend to be a tenant, ever. Then don’t be, she’d said. Any colored businessman in town would have hired him. Ezra Jones had taken her aside after church one Sunday and said he’d be glad to hire Zeke at his tailor shop. The Ford brothers always needed an extra hand with what they were building. Everyone was always on the lookout for a smart, quick young man.

  But that was where Zeke’s pride came in, and pride could get you killed. A lot of things could get you killed, and that fact had recently become very clear again, as it seemed to do periodically. It was like a lesson they had to keep teaching you until it took root somewhere deep down inside you: Stay humble, stay quiet. But rather than work for anyone else, even one of their own, he’d drive his wagon around town and be at the beck and call of anyone who whistled; he’d sleep on a palette on the floor at Gregorie’s cotton gin in exchange for running Mr. Gregorie’s errands during the day and call that being his own boss. Worrying about Zeke used to keep her up a few nights a week; now it seemed that almost every night when she closed her eyes to sleep, the Longs’ shattered bodies appeared, and the only way to keep them from coming was to lie awake all night.

  It wasn’t that you had to be humble, she’d told Zeke. You just had to act that way because you never knew when the same white man who’d laughed at your foolishness one day might decide on the next that he’d had enough of your mouth or the way you wore your hat, and before you knew what had happened, you might find yourself in the penitentiary in Columbia or cutting weeds with a sling blade along a county road in the heat of the day, if you could find yourself at all. “Mind those bean poles, son,” she said. “Take them up and lean them over here against the back of the house. You know I carry them over from year to year.”

  He stomped along the rows. “Why do you keep all this damn mess out here once it’s died back?” he said.

  “Whose shirts are these?” she said, hoping to distract him.

  He was working slower now, stripping the dead bean vines off the poles and stacking them in his arms, not tossing them off into the weeds in the dark where she’d have to go and hunt them up the next day. “Mr. Curtis N. R. Barrett,” he said. “That newspaperman who’s come down here to look into what happened.”

  She stood up from her chair. “Boy, don’t you know there’s nothing to be done for those people now,” she said. “Nothing. And you know as well as I do that nobody’s going to pay. Don’t you read the papers?” He stopped in front of the porch, holding his bundle of sticks, watching her. “Well, I do,” she said. “The Aiken paper says the many should not be blamed for the crimes of the few. Says this whole community’s been made the scene of an inhuman horror.” She’d quote Mr. N. R. Latham to him, but why waste her breath? “America has a peculiar system of law enforcement,” Mr. Latham had written in his last editorial. “When one or two men commit a murder they can as a rule be found and arrested. But when a hundred or more engage in this pastime, it seems impossible to discover a thing about it. In other words, the greater the number engaged, the less is the chance of finding out who did it. There seems to be great safety in numbers.”

  “Just finish up out there, son,” she said, waving her hand in the general direction of her garden. “I’m tired of your foolishness.” She sat down suddenly, her heart running hard, and braced for what he’d say next.

  But he turned and waded back out into the tomato patch. “You know you’re exactly right, Mama,” he said over his shoulder. “I guess what we better do is just let it lie.” He was out in the bean rows now, swishing through the tall, dry grass. “Just some kind of necessary evil,” he said. “Some kind of violent storm.”

  “Where you been listening to that kind of talk?” she said.

  “Man whose clothes you got there told it to me, says he heard it from a prominent local businessman.”

  Fussing with Zeke made her late getting back up to the house, and by the time she made it, Libba was waiting at her dressing table with her hair unpinned and down around her shoulders, tapping the fancy hairbrush with her initials engraved on the silver back against her hand.

  Brushing Libba’s hair at night hadn’t been on the list of duties when they’d hired her. Early on she’d started going up to Libba’s dressing room every night to talk over the next day’s meals and chores while Libba drew the brush through her hair a hundred times, until one night Minnie took it out of her hand, said, “Let me do that.” The next night Libba handed her the brush, and now doing Libba’s hair at night was one of her duties, like dusting or ironing or cooking, something she couldn’t stop doing, even though she wanted to. But what would she say—“I can’t be tending to your hair anymore, Miz Libba. Can’t joke around with Mr. Aimar either or play hide-and-seek with Little Mister on a rainy afternoon like I’m family”?

  She picked up the brush and pulled it through Libba’s thick, dark hair. By the time she got to fifty strokes, they’d settled on stewed chicken for the next night’s supper. Then Libba started to sigh and smooth the white dresser cloth. Finally, she looked up at Minnie in the mirror, one hand on her cheek. Her blue eyes were like searchlights. “You know, Minnie, I look forward to the day when this whole terrible business will be behind us,” she said. “We all just have to do our best to make that happen.” She gestured around the room as if the terrible business had happened right there.

  “Yes, ma’am.” She looked at the two of them in the mirror, Mrs. Aimar in her dressing gown and she in a white gauze blouse Libba had given her when it started to look worn, a hand-me-down with a row of small pearl buttons all the way up the high collar and satin stripes on the sleeves and bodice. Let it pass. Only an hour ago she’d given Zeke the same advice.

  And then the hundred strokes were done, and she was standing outside the closet in the downstairs hall where she straightened the coats and hats and galoshes every week. She was opening the door, stepping inside. It was pitch-black dark in the closet, but she needed no light. The croker sack was behind the boots and shoes lined up under the coats on the back wall, and her hands found it easily. She’d been wrong to tell Zeke that nothing could be done. The old had no right to pass on their fears to the young like they were God’s commandments struck in stone. She should have told him that as long as you had breath in your body, you could do something. You could reach behind those coats and shoes and boots and pick up that croker sack and carry it down the back steps and across the yard, holding it away to keep it from touching you, not knowing what you’d do when you opened it and saw what was in there. You could do all that without a thought about what came next, knowing that if Libba asked what became of those good shoes that Mr. Aimar had ruined in the dove field, you’d think of something. White people weren’t the only ones who could look a person in the face and lie.

  7

  Aubrey Timmerman

  November 1926

  HE EASED THE black Ford in under the low limbs of the water oak that grew between the courthouse and the jail, killed the spark, climbed out. He unlocked the gate in the high stone wall, locked it behind him, and trudged across the bare yard. It had been a dry fall, but today was warm and muggy, the sun a blurred patch of light in a hazy sky. Not as hot and smothering as summer, of course, more like a memory of summer, but warm enough to bring a sweat. Closer to the jail he heard a clatter of pans from the kitchen, a few whistles from the barred windows on the second floor. As usual, the prisoners were watching, waiting for him to look up so they could joke with him, but he couldn’t be bothered with their foolishness this
morning. It was barely seven o’clock, but his bones already felt as heavy as they did at the end of a whole day’s worth of trouble.

  The words that weighed heaviest were the ones Curtis Barrett had written about the men who claimed they’d talked to the lynchers, before and after the crime. He’d like to talk to those men himself, ask why in hell they hadn’t brought the sheriff what they knew instead of running their mouths to some New York reporter who’d hung flypaper all over town for them to blunder into. Barrett had come to the jail half a dozen times now, always with a new batch of questions:

  On what grounds did you arrest Dempsey Long after the judge set him free?

  Why didn’t you stay at the jail the night of the killings? Didn’t you think there was any danger?

  Walk me through that night one more time. I’m a little unclear about the details.

  Then Barrett would watch and wait for him to trip himself up, as though in the thick of all the shouting and flailing and stumbling around in the pitch-black dark that went on that night, he should have kept track of everything and everybody.

  “Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then,” his mother always said, and sure enough, Barrett had found Jesse Finley, the lumberman, and published Finley’s boast that he spoke for 90 percent of the people in town who were glad the Longs had been killed. All week Finley had been carrying the clipping in the pocket of his overalls, pulling it out to show to anyone who’d stand still long enough to listen to him read it, proof of what a big shot he was.

  Personally, he had to reach back a long way to remember a time when a newspaper had said something good about him. He had to go all the way back to the story of how he’d been named sheriff right after Bud Glover died. They’d printed that one up under the masthead on the front page of the Aiken Standard and spread a big headline over the picture of him looking like the man the write-up said he was: the one who had no favorites, who followed the law as it was written.