The Tree of Forgetfulness

by Pam Durban

  He threw two dollars onto the table and walked out of the dining room and up Park Avenue toward the courthouse. He’d start with Aubrey Timmerman again, try to goad him into saying something unguarded. He liked for the sheriff to slap him on the back, say, “Come on in the house, Mr. Barrett, since you’re going to anyway.” He liked to shake the sheriff’s injured hand and try to make him to wince and know that he wouldn’t. They understood that much about one other.

  Outside the day was humid and hazy, warm for mid-November, and as he walked along, sweating, the wrongness of the weather made him uneasy. There was something unnatural about the warm, thick air and the milky light. On days like these, he felt as though he were living in the same low-pressure system of the spirit that he’d dropped into as he’d traveled south on the train. In front of the courthouse he mopped the back of his neck with a handkerchief and watched Grady Jenkins talk to the horses and mules tied to the railing there. He was working up a story in his mind about Grady, the man with eyes blank as the sky and a perfect hoofprint in the middle of his forehead, who came to the courthouse nearly every morning and stayed until the sun went down. All day he stroked the noses of the horses and mules, whispered into their ears. He pulled grass from the lawn and laid it in front of the animals then squatted to watch them chew.

  When Barrett walked up, the loiterers on the benches that lined the front walk stopped talking and shouting advice to Grady. “Come to look after your brother?” the smallest man called out.

  It drove Barrett crazy to think that he and Grady Jenkins were the only two people in town who didn’t know who had done what on the night the Longs were killed. “Any of you men like to make a statement, now’s your chance,” he said.

  That night he made one concession to the Klan’s threat to usher him out of town: He moved his worktable away from the window of his hotel room. Then he sat down at his typewriter. “Even more bitter against this newspaper and its reporter was the group lounging in the courthouse today,” he wrote. “The spokesman was a small man of vehement manner in a gray hat who thundered abuse. His confidence was that ‘any twelve men in Aiken County will convict the lynchers if they are caught,’ and his belief was that the World was actuated by a desire to ‘put the Negroes above white men.’

  “ ‘Damn the Negroes, I say,’ he offered. In 1876 we had Negroes in the Legislature. Now they know their place and they won’t forget it, not here. The only reason all those lies are being published about us up North is because we’re in the South.’

  “The little man with the loud voice bellowed that he and all the rest of Aiken County have full confidence in the Sheriff and that the latter is doing all he can. Whereat his companions of the Court House corridor murmured their approval. But none, little man, unshaven and indignant deputy sheriff, or their companions, would give their names.

  “ ‘I am,’ said the little man proudly, ‘a member of the Klan.’ He concluded the conversation with: ‘I won’t tell you a damn thing.’

  “This reporter restrained his tears.”

  He wired the story to New York, and Swope wired back: “Cutting last line. No need to taunt.” But Barrett thought of the Klan’s boast that they’d tapped the telegraph wires and knew every word that passed between him and his editor. “STET, Swope,” he wired back. “Enemy in sight.”

  After that article appeared, the calls started. The first came just after three on a Sunday morning—he noted the time on the bedside clock, in case it mattered later. Then he got up and crossed the room to the little telephone stand beside the door, holding his hands in front of him in the dark to keep from colliding with the armchair or the lamp. He picked up the heavy receiver and listened. On the other end of the line someone breathed. He held his breath, listened to the silence the way he listened to words, trying to catch the meaning.

  The caller’s breathing sounded ragged, and there was a hitch at the top of every inhale. Barrett stood with his eyes closed, listening. The sound could have come from the pompous man who’d told him that real leadership was what had been shown at Aiken the night the Longs were killed. He nudged back the curtain and looked out onto the empty street. One name came clearly to mind, but he didn’t voice it. “Okay, pal, well, fuck you then,” he said and heard a gasp before he dropped the receiver back into the cradle. So the caller was pious, but weren’t they all?

  In the morning, the church bells woke him, and he dressed and knotted his tie roughly in front of the mirror on the chifforobe door, unsettled by the call and what had happened later. A line from a hymn drifted through his mind: “Ye who are weary, come home.” He was not weary, and he had no home. He’d lost faith in the idea of home in a bombed-out church back of the lines at Château Thierry, where they’d brought the mangled wounded and the men who’d been charred by the German flamethrowers. A large gilt-framed painting of Christ ascending into heaven had hung on the church’s one standing wall. His white robes billowed around him, and he rose serenely through a clear blue sky; the wounds on his hands and feet looked small and bloodless.

  For three days Barrett had worked among the wounded and stacked the dead, and every night as he lay on the ground and watched Christ rise, he felt something like heat leave his body until, after the third night, no matter how close he stood to one of the fires that was always burning, no matter how many coats he took from the pile that had been stripped from the dead, he couldn’t get warm. Finally, when they’d run out of pews to burn, a man had climbed up, pulled the painting down, and thrown it on the fire, and he’d cheered with the rest of them to see it burn. Before last night he would have said that he didn’t have any more faith to lose.

  He went down to breakfast and found himself alone in the dining room, the only person in town, besides the kitchen help and J. P. Gibson, who wasn’t at church. He sat at his table by the window, and after Helen filled his coffee cup, he nodded to show that he was ready for his food. He no longer needed to order breakfast; the help all knew him now and what he wanted: coffee first then two strips of bacon and a fried egg served on top of the grits. He almost always left a quarter on the tablecloth next to his plate. Sometimes he left fifty cents or a dollar, thought of it as payment on a long-standing debt.

  The door between the dining room and kitchen swung open, and from back in the kitchen he heard loud voices. When Helen returned with his plate, he said, “Is Zeke Settles in there, Helen?”

  She was young and broad and dark, and she wore her crimped and oiled hair parted on one side. He tried to catch her eye, but she looked at the floor as she refilled his coffee. “Look like he might have been here a little while back, Mr. Barrett,” she said.

  “If he is, send him out here, would you?” He watched her walk away, finished his meal, and lit a cigarette. The door swung open again, and Zeke sauntered through. He wore a blinding white shirt tucked into wide gray trousers held up with a skinny white belt. His small fedora was cocked at its usual angle. Miss Clara, the dining room manager, stopped in the doorway and frowned at Zeke, and though he didn’t let on that he’d seen her, he took off his hat.

  Late last night, after the call, Zeke had come to the door of Barrett’s room. He wouldn’t say what he wanted, only that Barrett must come with him, and so he’d followed him down a cramped flight of stairs and through the kitchen and out into the dark, back to where Zeke’s wagon was hidden under the low, spreading limbs of a water oak. By the light of a kitchen match that trembled in Zeke’s hand, Barrett had looked at what Zeke showed him. When he started to speak, Barrett hushed him. He knew what was on the shoes that Zeke had drawn out of the burlap sack. When you’ve seen enough of it splashed on rocks, pooled on the ground, dried on flesh and cloth, when your face has been spattered and your arms have been wet with it past the elbows, you know the look and feel of human blood. But if Zeke remembered the way he’d nodded once at the name Barrett spoke, he gave no sign. He stood beside the table with his arms behind his back and looked at a spot just over Barrett’s head. “How are you
this morning, Mr. Barrett?”

  “You’re looking sharp.”

  Zeke looked down at his clothes and shrugged. “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you work on Sunday?”

  Zeke glanced down at him as though trying to figure what was being asked of him. “Depends,” he said, looking away. He’d made it clear early on that he didn’t deliver whiskey on Sunday or carry laundry to or from his mother. “I’m fixing to take Mama to church, then I’m going over and help Miz Libba with her flower show.”

  “How about I give you two dollars to drive me over to Augusta in this car I’ve gotten my hands on and wait while I see to some business there and drive me back?”

  What Zeke had showed him last night had gotten to him more than he’d realized; he was feeling edgy again, and restless, and he knew the cure for both conditions. A plan was forming in his mind: he’d go to Augusta and look up Ella Rainey at the hotel where she’d gotten a job. “The little barefoot cotton picking bride of Horse Creek Valley,” he’d called her in the article he’d written about her affidavit. He’d buy her a Coca-Cola, stir in some of Zeke’s high-quality whiskey, and see what developed.

  “No, sir,” Zeke said. “I couldn’t do that, Mr. Barrett.”

  “Oh, come on now,” he said. “At least do me the courtesy of thinking it over before you answer.”

  “All right, sir. I’ll do that very thing,” Zeke said. He walked back across the dining room like he was in no hurry to go anywhere, setting the hat back on his head as he went. Watching him go, Barrett wondered: Why did it seem so important for Zeke to drive him to Augusta? He knew the way. Out Hayne Avenue and onto the hard-packed clay highway that ran through Horse Creek Valley, across the iron bridge over the Savannah River and into Augusta, where the Confederate soldier on his tall pedestal watched over the brick buildings and lacy balconies of Broad Street. The hotel where she’d found work making beds stood in the middle of the third block down from the monument.

  He knew the way, but he wanted Zeke to drive him. He wanted Zeke to do what he’d been asked. It wasn’t his fault that it was good to be a white man in Aiken, South Carolina. To act like a cock of the walk because of the color of your skin and a history that still worked in your favor, in spite of a war that had been fought to change that, and to believe that if black people no longer belonged to you, they could at least be made to feel that your goodwill was necessary to their survival. To believe that it was your natural and God-given right to expect a colored man to step off the sidewalk to let you pass, to snatch off his hat or touch the brim and call you “boss” and “captain.” That it was your right and privilege to have colored women cook and clean and wash for you and do other things that white women would never lower themselves to do. To gauge whether all this was happening as it was supposed to happen with an instrument so sensitive you were instantly aware when a word or gesture was missing from the sum of humility and respect you were owed and to react as violently as if you’d been spat on or insulted and to think that living this way was a burden imposed on you by outside forces, something you never asked for or deserved.

  He’d seen Zeke doff his hat to some pretty sorry-looking white men, seen him in a store, waiting to be helped until every last white person had been served. All this in a town where colored people could send their children to a good school, where there were black doctors and tailors and pharmacists and builders, John Bush at his meat market on Laurens Street, his good brass scale and his clean glass counters, his polite sons, who weighed the meat and wrapped it neatly in white paper.

  It didn’t take much of this kind of living to make you greedy for more; it was as hard to give up as any other thing that made you a big man in your own eyes. In the North most Negroes lived hard, but it didn’t seem as necessary to an entire way of life that they be humbled. Thinking that way made him want to bring down the terrible swift sword again onto the heads of those who hadn’t felt it fall the first time around.

  Then Zeke was back. “I thought it over, Mr. Barrett,” he said. “And I still can’t drive you to Augusta.”

  Barrett waved him away, to show it didn’t matter. “That’s fine, Zeke,” he said.

  “But I wish you a pleasant day, sir,” Zeke said.

  “And yourself as well,” Barrett said, ashamed of this outbreak of arrogance. What had it taken for Zeke to lead him to his wagon and open the sack, to know he could die for that and to do it anyway? Maybe he’d trusted that Barrett was not like the white men he lived among and around. Before he’d come to South Carolina, Barrett would have agreed; now he was not so sure.

  12

  Lewis Aimar

  November 1926

  LEWIS FRETTED MORE than usual that fall. His father called him a worrywart, and he was right: On any given day Lewis might be spooked by a thunderstorm, by bees or crows or mongrel dogs. He worried constantly that his mother was going to hell for being a Presbyterian. But that fall his biggest concern was the state of his father’s soul. Every Saturday his father went into the booth and stayed long enough to make a serious confession. Afterward he knelt in a pew and bowed his head and closed his eyes and seemed to take his penance seriously. And yet every Sunday he stayed in the pew while Lewis received Communion. This had gone on for over a month, and Lewis knew that a Catholic avoided the Eucharist only if he had a mortal sin on his soul.

  Now it was almost time for Communion again, and he knelt beside his father, feeling the worn pebbled leather cover of his father’s old missal and wishing it were new. On a blank page at the front his father had written: “For my fine son Lewis, on the occasion of his First Communion.” He’d hoped for a new one with crisp, gold-edged pages and a bright-red marker ribbon, not this relic with the wobbly spine and the faded marker and the gold worn completely off the pages. He shared his mother’s low opinion of hand-me-downs, but his father had looked so proud when he’d handed him the gift, and he didn’t want to disappoint, so he’d shaken his hand and said, “Thank you very much, Daddy.” It was a sin to be ungrateful.

  But his First Communion had happened on the last Sunday in September, and now it was early November, and his father still had not bought a new missal, and that worried Lewis too. Every Sunday he whispered, “Where’s your missal, Daddy?” and every Sunday his father whispered back, “I haven’t had time to get a new one. I’ll just look on with you.”

  What was keeping his father so busy that he couldn’t stop and buy a new missal from the stack of them among the rosaries and scapulars and miraculous medals in the glass case in the vestibule that the nuns unlocked after every Mass? He’d been watching his father carefully, but nothing had changed. Every morning he rousted Lewis out of bed. “Ripper-dipper and lots of pepper, give yourself a lecture,” he said, and scraped his unshaven chin across Lewis’s cheek. He sat at breakfast with his shirt buttoned all the way to the top, his necktie draped over the back of a chair, and ate like eating was the day’s first chore. Every weekday morning he said, “Upsy-daisy,” and boosted Lewis onto the seat of Zeke’s wagon for the ride to St. Angela’s school. On Saturday afternoons Libba still shooed him outside to play in the yard while his father took a long nap. And every evening after supper he sat in the same light-green armchair in the front room and turned on the radio and read the paper while his mother sat in a matching chair and darned socks or read or wrote in the tall ledger book where she kept notes about the flower show. Lewis lay on the rug in front of the hearth and looked at a picture book or dozed while the warmth of the fire and the music from the radio and the sound of their two voices flowed together into a warm, slow river that he drifted on. His father had plenty of time for all those things, so it didn’t make sense that he couldn’t take a minute and buy a missal. But that Sunday, as usual, Lewis nudged his father and slid the old book across the top of the pew so the two of them could share.

  On the top step of the altar the priest raised the gold chalice of wine, and the altar boy kneeling below reverently struck the brass bars of the small x
ylophone on the step in front of him: three notes up the scale, 1-2-3, a pause, then 3-2-1, another pause, then the last notes, 1-3-2. The priest whispered the words that changed the large, crisp white wafer into the Body of Christ, and when he held it up, the altar boy tapped the last three notes again. Next year, his father said, if Lewis could keep his shirt tucked in and put his shoes on properly, instead of forcing his feet into them with the laces tied and breaking down the backs, he could be an altar boy and wear a white cassock and play the xylophone at the elevation of the Host. Lewis tried not to get his hopes up because it seemed that the good things parents promised always lay ahead of you in a place you could never actually reach.

  He wondered if that kind of thinking was a sin of despair. You had to be vigilant at all times, the nuns said. One little mistake, and the devil had you. He looked up and adored the Host while the priest broke it in half once then broke it again. He struck his chest and prayed three times, silently: “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst come under my roof; but only say the word, and my soul will be healed.” Then he sneaked a look to see if his father was praying too. But he knelt beside Lewis, hands clenched, jaw tight, staring straight ahead the way he did when he was angry.

  About him, Lewis thought. His father was angry at Lewis for the stunt he’d pulled before they left for church. His mother was always seeing something about him that made her want to take his picture. He looked so much like her dead brother, his namesake, or he looked exactly like his father. That morning it had been the way he’d looked in his new tweed suit and vest. “My little gentleman,” she said. “Run go get the camera, Daddy.” But then neither of them would let him hold his missal with the rosary looped around it, the way he wanted to; his father had ordered him to take off his cap so it wouldn’t throw a shadow over his face, and finally he’d crammed the cap, the missal, and the rosary into the pockets of his jacket and stood with his hands behind his back, scowling.