Alice grimaced and then said, “Naw, there’s too many chemicals in them waters. Let’s take ‘em where we used to swim, the Old River Lake.”
Sarah looked at Alice, puzzled.
Alice shook her head, sharply. Later when the women walked to the car to get the picnic basket, Sarah asked, “Why didn’t you want to take them to the pool?”
“We ain’t going to that pool cuz it’s whites only, you little fool.”
Sarah immediately felt ashamed. Such a stupid world they lived in, keeping children who loved each other apart.
“It’d break all them kids’ hearts—Franny’s too—if Lenora and Fisk got turned away. And I aim to keep that hard truth away from them as long as I can. Look at them.” Alice pointed to the three children in the lake’s green water, screeching and screaming with delight, throwing mud at each other and dashing around the shallows, water and muck running in rivulets down their small frames.
That night Sarah woke from a strange dream. She stood at the edge of a swimming pool in her yellow bathing suit, but it was night with low clouds and no stars. In the pool stood children, black children. Twenty or thirty of them, each one standing absolutely still in the water, some underneath, some chest deep, but so still the water rippled not at all but lay smooth as glass. At first Sarah thought the figures in the pool were Negro children, that maybe the Lonoke city board had set aside one night this summer for all of the black children in the county to be allowed to swim in the municipal pool. But then, with a gasp, she realized they weren’t Negroes, they were absolutely black, silhouettes made flesh, each one staring at her with malevolent coal eyes in jet black bodies. She heard the wet slap of feet behind her on the swimming pool’s concrete rim, then cold, clammy hands grasped her arms and shoved her into the pool.
She woke, gasping, bed linens tangled and sweaty around her. For a moment she couldn’t recall where she was, if she was back with Jim in Little Rock. But then the Big House settled a bit, a fractional subsonic movement of the old timbers that even in the dark let Sarah know she was home.
She stood up, straightened her nightgown, and moved in the dark toward where Franny slept in the single bed by the window. The window was open, and the sheer drapes fluttered in the hot breeze blowing in from outside.
Jesus. She scratched at a bite on her arm. There must be a million mosquitoes in here.
She shut the window as quietly as possible and turned. Half asleep, she reached out to brush Franny’s hair, moving past the girl’s bed, toward the fan. She felt nothing except empty sheets. She stopped.
“Franny?” She ruffled the covers of the single. “Franny?”
She raced to the door, threw it open, and bolted down the gallery, calling for her daughter in a half-whisper, half-scream.
“Franny? Baby? Franny!”
Her heart jack-hammered in her chest. She ran down the hall leading from the gallery, jerking open doors, peered into linen closets, bathrooms. An empty guest room. She paused at her mother’s door. Slowly, she turned the knob and entered, her breath tight in her chest.
Her mother snored in the darkness, mouth open. Sarah turned from her mother’s sleeping form and stepped quickly back to the hall. She raced down the grand stair, her feet slapping on the hardwoods.
Alice, frumpy and wrinkled with sleep, stepped into the light of the kitchen door, a plate of pecan pie in her hand. She looked at Sarah with wide eyes. “Girl, what the… what the devil are you playing at? You look like you seen a—”
“Franny’s missing. She’s not in her bed.”
“Shit, girl, why ain’t you screaming? Lemme get my shoes.” With a clatter, Alice dumped her plate in the sink and dashed toward her quarters.
After a moment, she came back out of her room, smiling. She crooked at finger at Sarah, and said from the door, “Come look at this. I must not have heard her come in the room. Maybe I was having a snack.”
Franny lay snuggled between Lenora and Fisk, arms wild, one leg thrown over Lenora’s, a smile curling her lips. Sarah stood at the foot of the bed, tears running down her cheeks. Her shoulders shook as silent sobs wracked her body.
Alice put a warm hand on Sarah’s back. “It’s gone be all right, Sarah. Kids is kids, and you can’t separate them. We were the same, remember?”
Sarah nodded, smiling through her tears at Alice’s turn of words; so many circles within circles. Kids is kids. There’s broken and there’s broken. Everything is everything. She hugged Alice back, fiercely.
“You had a scare, girl. I got something to settle you down.” Alice moved to the counter, pulled out a small glass, squirted raw honey into it from a bee-shaped plastic container, set a pan of water on a blue burner of the stove, and set the glass in the water. When she cut the lemon, the kitchen was filled with the bright scent of day, pushing the shadows and uncertainty away. Alice squeezed the lemon into the hot honey, stirred it with a spoon, and handed the drink to Sarah.
“Go on to the library and add a finger of whiskey, stir it up good, girl. A hot toddy’ll settle anybody down. Sometimes, it’s the only way I can get Fisk to sleep. Should do just fine for you. Go on.” She winked, and shushed Sarah out of the kitchen, Alice’s slippers whisking on the old floorboards. She yawned. “Whoo, girl, I’m tired. Big day tomorrow. Running. Playing. Cleaning. Gotta go get some sleep.”
In the library, Sarah flipped on the small lamp near the desk and looked around at the shelves of books. She went to the dry bar, unstopped the bourbon decanter, splashed a good amount into the toddy, and stirred.
Sipping the drink, she walked about the library, reading titles of books. Three ornate Bibles, Episcopal and Presbyterian Hymnals, Dante’s Divine Comedy with lithographs by Dore. Ars Negril. The Brothers Karamazov. Quanoon al Islam. The Collected Plays of Shakespeare. A Latin to English Dictionary. Magnalia Christi Americana. A Light in August. Theographica Pneumatica. Magia Naturalis. Tom Sawyer. Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Hinzelmeier. Opusculus Noctis. The History of Freemasons. A Compendium of Vesalius Illustrations. Gone With the Wind. A Farewell to Arms. Strange Covenants. De Natura Deorum. The Life of Hermes Trismegistus. Pecheur d’Island. Occultus Esoterica. Eibon Libris. A Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. And hundreds more.
Some of these volumes—the Twain, the Shakespeare, the Hemingway—were familiar to her. Others were utterly foreign. She pulled the big black book, Quanoon al Islam, and riffled the rough, crusty pages. It had a strange smell as well, one she didn’t like. She slid the heavy tome back in its place.
Sarah had spent two years at Hollins College, where she’d attended classes in French and Latin, cloistered among the other young, well-to-do Southern women whose parents needed someplace to put their daughters. She remembered the interminable hours spent conjugating Latin verbs in Mrs. Cloud’s class, that short dumpling of a woman walking the aisles and barking in a drill sergeant’s voice, “To Love. Pluperfect. Miss Rheinhart. Latin then English. Now, please.” And the girls giggling around her as she fumbled for an answer.
Sarah smiled at herself, remembering the time before Franny, before Jim, before the War.
That was ’40 and ’41, I think. Yes, Mom and Dad brought me home that December of ’41, when we entered the war, and I never went back. Amavero. Jim was sixteen then, and just waiting to enlist, and Daddy didn’t want me a thousand miles away with a war on. God, I was so young then. I Shall Have Loved… maybe. Maybe that was Future Pluperfect.
She took a drink of the toddy and shivered, the alcohol sending little tremors down her spine. The memories of school fresh in her mind, she took down a small, slim volume, a press of Opusculus Noctis. The tiny book was more like a pamphlet, thin and filled with what looked like verses. Sarah grabbed the Latin to English dictionary and moved to the desk, images of Mrs. Cloud running through her mind.
In the desk she found a pencil and sheaves of time-yellowed stationery. Pulling a few sheets, she placed the pamphlet in front of her and opened the dictionary. She felt the warmth of the to
ddy suffusing her body, spreading outward from her stomach. Like a girl, she crossed her legs and tucked her feet underneath her bottom, placed a stray strand of hair behind her ear, and bent her head to the papers in front of her.
On a piece of stationery, she wrote, Opusculus Noctis. She turned to the Os in the dictionary. She wrote, little work, then scratched that out and wrote, little book at the top of the piece of paper. Turning to the Ns, she looked up Noctis, which seemed familiar to her. She began to write in earnest now. When she was finished, she grinned again, pleased with her work. She drank the rest of the toddy in a gulp, keeping the glass to her lips, letting the dregs of honey in the bottom of the glass slide down the incline and to her mouth, and then looked back at the paper in front of her.
The Little Book of Night, it read. And underneath it she had written, Or The Little Night Book, which looked queer to her but charming. Calmed, she opened the pamphlet and began writing, a smile hovering around her lips.
Chapter 7
England didn’t look like Ingram had pictured it from the movies.
As he drove the coupe into the little farm town, a billboard by the grain silos broke the monotony of the flat fields announcing that KENG was the “King of England, Heartbeat of the Delta.” To Ingram it looked just like any of the countless farm towns he’d driven through since leaving Lonoke earlier that morning, maybe a little flatter, a little greener, the low-slung buildings passing like Indian burial mounds in the hazy, late summer air. It was Friday, and the town’s main street bustled with women, young and old, shopping for the weekend; buying groceries, browsing new clothes, getting their hair and nails done.
This was the normalcy Ingram had fought for, his men died for, but he’d been left behind. So far removed from this world of bright feminine things, humdrum domestic life, from families and holidays and birthday parties and barbecues, he felt much the same way he’d felt entering the Tulagi jungles at the head of his squad, a monstrous thing skulking into the island interior like some Grendel bearing a BAR.
That morning, he’d woken in the church’s parking lot not quite knowing where he was, mouth dry, sweating in his dirty, rumpled clothes. The day was hot already. In the coupe’s mirror, he examined his bloody face. The long scratches going down his cheeks, away from his eyes, gave him a fierce, tribal appearance. He stopped at a filling station and washed in the bathroom, using paper towels to clean the dry, brown blood from his face.
Once in England, he found the KENG building off Main, on a side street, a very small tower a hundred yards away on the edge of a soybean field. The door jingled as he entered, and a short fat man in suspenders came out of a backroom.
“Can I help you, sir? We’re about to begin our afternoon programming, but—”
“Yes, sir, maybe you can help me. My name’s Ingram, and I’m looking for a man named Early Freeman, supposed to have come through here a couple of weeks ago.”
“Early! I know him well, great fella. Some state troopers came through here saying he was missing, but I haven’t heard anything more about that from them. I sure hope he’s OK. He usually comes through, takes me to dinner, gives us some records to play, you know, colored musicians. But we don’t play a lot of that stuff. Not like KQUI, out near the county line.”
Ingram said, “And you are?”
The chubby man laughed and shook his head. “Sorry. I’m George White.” He took a step closer to Ingram and extended his hand. They shook; Ingram was surprised at how soft the man’s hands felt.
“Did Early come through here a couple of weeks ago?”
“Sure did.” White turned, walked back to a desk, rummaged through it for a bit, then returned with some forty-fives. “These are the records he dropped off. We ain’t played ’em, like I said. Not much call for this kinda music with the colored station broadcasting so close nearby. But Early drops ’em off anyway, just in case.”
“Early say anything about where he was gonna go next?”
“No, but I imagine he’d be delivering something to Carver’s outfit.”
“That the station you mentioned, KQUI?”
“Yep.”
“You wouldn’t have their address, would you?”
“Sure.” He scribbled it down on a piece of paper. “Real easy to find. Just take Highway 151 all the way out till you pass the county line, then right on 165. 165’ll bring you back into this county, but you’ll drive maybe fifty miles down it, and it’ll stop being paved about thirty miles in. You just keep going, and after a while you’ll see their tower, little thing, smaller than ours, but you’ll also see one of them new fire lanes with the big electrical transformers that the WPA put across the county back in ’43. One of the last projects in the state.”
Ingram nodded and thanked the man. “Oh, one more question, if I could. You ever hear that pirated station? You know, the one that switches frequencies?”
White laughed again, stomach jiggling. “The Phantom Station all the field hands whisper about? No, I haven’t heard it. Doubt I ever will, cause it’s just a story, nothing more.”
“You ever hear of a man they call Ramblin’ John Hastur?”
“No. Should I have?”
Ingram stopped for lunch at the local diner before driving on to find KQUI. He surprised himself with his own hunger, wolfing down his food with a speed he hadn’t had since basic training. He lingered at the counter, afterward, smoking and drinking coffee, listening to the sounds of the folk in the diner going over their daily routines, traveling down well-worn paths of conversation. He sighed, left a tip, and went back to the coupe.
Highway 151 out of England rode rough, potholed and uneven. The whir of insects grew louder, the fields giving way before trees, cypress and birch, thick and dark in the shallows of the Arkansas River. Ingram followed this road for a while, until it turned back on itself and ran parallel to the river once more. Asphalt turned to gravel, and soon Ingram saw a building through the trees and, beyond the building, a large electrical transmission tower rising above the tree line.
Ingram parked the coupe next to the other car in the lot, a older model Ford, dusted the brim of his hat, and walked into the small, shabby building with a galvanized tin roof. At the door, a small plaque read, “KQUI Arkansas’ Only Negro Owned and Operated Radio Station.”
Inside, the front room of the KQUI was dark, lit only by a small bulb hanging from a wire.
Ingram called, “Hello?”
Nothing.
The other radio stations he’d been to played their broadcasts in the lobby, in the waiting rooms. But not here. Ingram looked around. The front room held a desk with a big black telephone, a fabric couch threadbare at the edges, a coffee table with old newspapers and a couple of war-time posters on the wall. A door in the back led to what Ingram assumed was the recording and broadcasting booth.
Ingram rifled the desk, finding an invoice book, a telephone log, a pad of paper, and bottles of ink. Underneath the ink blotter was a piece of paper. Carefully, he pulled it out. Mimeographed on card stock and heavily folded, it held a faint, sweet odor. Blue ink. It read:
Ingram slid the paper into his pocket and went to the inner door. He listened for a moment, and then threw it open.
Clutter filled the low-slung room, lit by a bulb hanging from a wire. In a corner, on dark stained walls, hung two framed documents—one a radio operator’s license, the other a FCC Broadcasters license. A rough-hewn worktable stood under the light, stacked with boxes and milk crates full of records. The table itself held a turntable and microphone. A morass of wires snaked across the floor and into a wall by the back door, which Ingram could only assume led to the tower. A record spun on a turntable, the needle bumping and hissing in a continual loop; untended, the record had played itself out and was now caught in its auditory death throes. The room looked empty, and Ingram stepped forward to inspect the table that held the library of records. As he moved around the table to get a better look at the collection, he noticed the leg.
Fr
om behind the makeshift table, the leg jutted into the open, foot askew. Ingram felt a sinking sensation in his gut as he moved to get a better view.
The dead man lay on the floor in a natty blue suit. An older black man—gray at the temples and through the beard—he looked as though he’d been tortured. His eyes were wide in fright, his mouth open, blood pooling around the teeth, and scratch marks ran down his cheeks, around his eyes and ears. Trails of blood came from his ears, and Ingram spotted, beside the man’s body, a piece of flesh that looked like a tongue.
Ingram gingerly touched his own cheeks.
In the Pacific, Ingram had witnessed death and dead men with expressions like this, but none as bad, as gruesome. He took the man’s wallet from his slacks and verified his suspicions. This was indeed George Carver, owner and operator of KQUI.
Ingram searched the room, the record on the turntable making clicks and hisses as it revolved. The record collection yielded nothing other than a few Helios records indicating Early Freeman had made some contact here.
Ingram checked the files in the bureau. He looked underneath the table. He searched the dead man again, patting him down and emptying his pockets.
He stood, looking at the turntable. It turned, hissing and clicking, the needle caught in the last spiral, diminishing toward the center. The record had no printed label, just a hand-scrawled title on a brown sticker, reading J. Hastur. Just watching that name turn in circles made Ingram feel tight in his shoulders, his back, like someone had a gun on him.
The record was horribly scratched, as if Carver, in a violent spasm, had knocked the needle across the face of the record trying to destroy it. Or silence it.
I’ve got to know.
Ingram took a deep breath and placed the needle on the record.
The music was different from what he’d heard at Helios Studio. This piece was faster, uptempo, more frenetic. The player showed obvious skill, picking the melody in an intricate counterpoint to the rhythm plucked with his thumb. The record skipped drastically, needle popping over the scratches on the vinyl, jumping forward. More guitar, but now with another instrument, an instrument Ingram couldn’t place, maybe a horn, or even a human voice, but alien to his ears. The record skipped again, and there was singing.
Southern Gods Page 8
