When the Reckoning Comes, page 17
“If I’m right, you wouldn’t want to be there. Mira, I wouldn’t want you to be there.”
“God, Jesse. This is—we have to go back.”
“I forgot. You’re a good girl. You’re so good you’ve let the desire to be it overtake you. It’s defined who you are. That day we came to the Woodsman house, I loved you for finally admitting something true to yourself, that you wanted to go, despite it being wrong. Despite it being bad. It was the first time you let what you wanted get in the way of how you felt you needed to be. You’ve always believed being this way was going to somehow save your life, but it has stolen it instead. Let me ask—what did being good ever do for you? For any of us? You can be good and it doesn’t matter. It never mattered.”
Jesse got up from the couch and gathered all the papers spread out on the table. He was furious but was trying very hard to contain it. He piled the papers on top of one another and stuffed them in a folder. A few slipped out and fell on the floor but he didn’t bother to pick them up. Instead he took the folder and threw it down. He rubbed his hand across his wrinkled forehead. “You don’t know what it was like,” he muttered. “I was the one they blamed. Not you, me. I was the one they tried to lock up, and after— Once, I came off a shift at work and saw that my tires had been slashed. All four of them, the rubber gashed with a knife. I tried to let it go because what could I do? Go to the police? The police who’d just as soon lock me up again? So I ignored it, hoping it’d all die down, but then strangers started showing up at the house. I heard some hollering one night and then a loud bang, saw after they left that they’d bashed the mailbox. Once they threw rocks and broke the front windows. Glass shattered all inside. In the morning I went outside and they’d hung a noose from one of the trees. I took it down and a few days later another appeared. I asked the neighbors if they saw who’d done it and none of them would tell me. None of them wanted to. They were too scared to say anything. Even my uncle—eventually he said to just leave it, so we left it there for weeks and weeks until one day it was finally gone. I couldn’t take it anymore. My uncle said he had a friend that could get me some work in Louisiana if I went there. Said he’d help me out with a place to stay too. So I left. I never meant to come back, but when my uncle got sick, I had to, and then—Well, you know the rest of it already.”
Mira sat listening, finally, to the rest of what he’d kept from her. Here was the final piece of his story, and she could not blame him for what he wanted to do. None of it should have happened. But she couldn’t just let them die.
Outside, the sun’s orange glow dimmed, signaling the twilight hour. Night was coming. Whatever was bound to happen would begin soon. They needed to leave and she had to warn them before it was too late.
“Why can’t you consider for a moment that maybe—I mean, think about all the harm they’ve done. What they continue to let happen right in front of them. You’ve seen the photos. I’ve told you some of the stories, and there’s so much more.”
“None of the people there are part of this.”
“You’re wrong, they are. That’s what I’ve learned.” Jesse pointed at the mess. “We’re all tangled up in this history. They think they’re absolved from the past, but it’s their past too. All our lives have been shaped by it, but they’re the ones who’ve ignored how, even though the past has made them who they are. They need to face what’s been done and we need to let them. And you know if the situation was reversed they’d leave us to die. You know it. You just don’t want to see it.”
“We’re no better if we do nothing. We can’t sit and do nothing. I won’t.”
“You’ve always done nothing when it needed to matter. Why can’t you do it now?”
“That’s not true,” she started in protest, but stopped because he was right. Flustered from the shame of remembering, she thought of all the times she could have defended Jesse to her mother but didn’t when they were kids. She’d never spoken up as her mother judged, not just Jesse but all the other black kids who didn’t fit into her way of being. How much over the years had she let her mother’s judgments affect how she too saw the world? How she saw herself?
Earlier today, at lunch, Jesse had said he wished she’d never come, but she understood now why he’d said it. In many ways she was just as complicit as all those who remained at the Woodsman house. Jesse was finally calling her out on this truth.
Okay, she thought, let’s let it all burn. We can go, leave Kipsen for good. We can start over and never look back. She’d done that before and could do it again. Come with me, she could say to Jesse, and they could go far, far away, but Mira knew there was nowhere they could go where this past wouldn’t haunt them. Jesse, for all his talk, would regret it if they didn’t return to the Woodsman house. If he was right about the ghosts and chose to do nothing, he’d have to carry the weight of any deaths on his conscience, and she wouldn’t let him do that.
“Jesse, we can’t be like them. We have to go back.”
Mira stood up and headed for the door, assuming Jesse would follow, but when she turned around he was still on the couch. Reluctantly, Jesse got up.
“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” he asked. Mira didn’t answer and he sighed, picking up his keys. “This is a mistake, but all right. Come on. I’ll take you back.”
XIX.
JESSE TOOK HIS time driving to the Woodsman Plantation. He must have thought she wouldn’t notice he took the long way, making a loop around downtown instead of through it, or that he went five miles below the speed limit the entire time. Mira kept her mouth shut anyway, because at least he was getting her there, and she hoped that despite his stalling they’d still make it before dark.
By the time Jesse pulled into the parking lot the streetlights had flashed on. The glow illuminated the gravel of the parking lot. Jesse parked at one of the available spaces near the entrance.
“Well, we’re here,” he told Mira as he shut off the engine. They sat in the uncomfortable silence until Jesse began to jingle his keys, making them go around and round his finger.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said about joy,” Mira said. The whole car ride Mira kept bringing herself back to the photographs Jesse had taken, the joy unseen, and she wondered about her own life, their childhood, and how it had been.
“Oh yeah?” Jesse asked, not hiding his surprise.
“It made me remember how we used to spend weekend mornings at the dollar movie theater showings.”
“I forgot about those! They had that quarter soda machine too with the knock-off brands. We’d sneak in a bunch of Squirts and Dr. Perky’s and stay in there all day.”
“Until the manager noticed and kicked us out.”
“Yeah, true,” Jesse said, nodding. “Man, we used to do some dumb stuff when we were bored. Remember when we borrowed your mother’s garden hose one summer to spray ourselves cool and we came up with the genius idea to do a slip-and-slide with trash bags and dish soap?”
“That was a terrible idea all around, both because Mom was mad we took her hose but also because we ruined the lawn.”
“And our behinds.” Jesse laughed, unable to control himself, and Mira joined him. They both filled the car with their laughter and Mira wished it had been like this between them from the beginning. Mira laughed until her stomach felt sore and the silence returned.
“We had joy too, didn’t we? Before the rest of it,” Mira asked.
Jesse coughed as he contemplated her question. He turned to face her, his expression now serious. “I think it’s easy to forget sometimes, but sure. We did.”
Mira smiled and looked out the window, unable to meet his gaze as she asked her next question. “I’ve also been thinking about that other thing you said. The part about loving the girl I was.”
She was asking once again if he could love her, if he did, and the rush of her vulnerability on full display made her want to disappear. The seconds passed, and she tried to find a way to brush off what she had said, but she couldn’t, wouldn’t. As much as she hated the way she felt as she waited for him to answer, she also wanted him to answer, because she wanted him, and wanted him to want her too.
“I don’t know you,” Jesse said. “You don’t know me. Neither of us knows the other. We know who we used to be, but that’s not enough. We can’t love ourselves in the past, or whoever we thought we were. We got to love ourselves in the now.”
“I get it,” Mira said, feeling the crushing blow of his response. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Jesse seemed to sense her disappointment. After a moment of hesitation, he opened his mouth to speak. “But maybe after all this is over we could take some time to figure it out,” he said. “You’re not leaving right away, are you? You could stay a little while longer and we could learn who each of us is again. Would you do that? Would you do that with me?”
Mira told him yes, she would stay, and felt the surprising power one word could hold. Yes, she’d said, holding on to its promise of what her life could be.
The clock on the dash showed it was almost nine o’clock. She needed to go and do what she’d come for. She glanced toward the entrance, at the gate surrounding the grounds. Her hand reached for the door’s handle but as soon as she touched the metal she let go.
“What’s wrong?” Jesse looked at the entrance and then back at her before coming to his realization. “You can’t do it, can you?”
“No, I can,” Mira asserted. “I just—”
“You’re afraid because they won’t believe you,” Jesse continued. “Who would? It’s crazy.”
Mira needed to get out of the car and find someone to tell, but who? Where could she go? Phillip, she reasoned, since these were mostly his guests. Phillip was the one most likely to believe her, and maybe she could convince him to make everyone leave.
Mira took a deep breath and briefly closed her eyes. She knew Jesse was watching her but she ignored him. She inhaled again in the hope of slowing her pulse, of calming herself so she could continue.
Jesse blew a raspberry and leaned forward in the seat. “Maybe I’m wrong, Mira. About all this. I could be.”
“You want to live with yourself if you aren’t?” Before Jesse could answer, Mira saw people running out of the entrance. Wedding guests hurried away from the grounds as they searched for their cars, dragging their suitcases behind them. Mira watched as what became two or three couples became four, five, six. Soon it was a small crowd of them, all with the same panicked look. They tripped over themselves as they ran across the graveled lot.
“Something’s wrong,” Mira said. “Everyone’s leaving.”
This was enough to make Mira get out of the car. She ran to the entrance and along the path toward the house. The path went past the gardens, eventually coming to the side of the house where it split in two directions, one around the front and the other heading toward the slave cabins, the restaurant and bar, and the cottages. Mira stopped at the fork in the path, catching her breath.
“I don’t know where to go,” Mira told Jesse, but he wasn’t there. “Jesse?” she called, although it was pointless. She knew Jesse was back in his car, had probably roared the engine the moment she’d left, driving back home, escaping whatever fate awaited this place.
Farther up along the path a crowd of guests gathered and Mr. Tatum stood in their center. His eyes were wild, bloodshot. With a face reddened with fury, he clenched the stock of his rifle, sputtered, and shook his head as he listened to the clamor of the rest of the group. He’d gathered men from the town—laborers, it looked like from their clothes, men like him who existed on the fringes of the town. Dried mud caked the bottoms of their overalls and boots. A few wore straw hats to block out the sun. They held bottles of liquor, the froth dripping down their chins as they gulped down the drink and threw the bottles in the dirt. They huddled around each other, their stammering growing to interloping yells.
Mira did not want to go near these men. Their anger was palpable. She didn’t want to get closer, afraid of what they might do. Soon they all shifted their gaze on her. She froze in response. Her heart raced, fearing they would come for her. Backing away, someone grabbed her arm and she turned and saw Phillip.
“Oh god, Mira,” he said, and the smell of his hot, yeasty breath made her want to choke. He gripped her shoulders hard enough that she gave a yelp, but he couldn’t hear her; it was too loud. “Celine is out there. Oh god.”
Mira stared down at Phillip’s hands, speckled rust all along the palms. It didn’t register at first, it took her a few seconds, that the stains on his hands and on the front of his shirt were blood. “Celine is where?” she asked Phillip.
“In the tobacco fields. She was in the fields. I’ve just come from there. God, it’s terrible. I hadn’t meant to go out there, but I heard singing. Some sort of chant. It felt like it was leading me to her, and then I saw—”
“My daughter’s dead!” Mr. Tatum yelled, interrupting. “We need to get him. He killed her.”
Phillip quickly told her the story. It had started as a walk to clear his head and he’d made a wrong turn, ending up near the edge of the tobacco fields. That’s when he heard the song. It didn’t take him long before he got lost. The longer he was out there, the more frantic he became about not getting out, and soon instead of walking he was running. He ran and ran, going in circles, with the tobacco leaves cutting his face as he whipped through them, hoping that all he had to do was go a few more feet and he’d be out. He ran and, not noticing the ground below, tripped and fell into the dirt, hitting his head. It knocked him out. When he opened his eyes again, he sat up, wiped the sweat stinging his eyes, and stumbled up. He started to get up but noticed a shoe in front of him. A bedroom slipper the color of cream. He picked it up and rubbed his fingers over the fabric, and then walked a few steps in the direction he thought he’d come from. He took a couple more steps and then saw her—her body facedown in the dirt, negligee torn up to the hips, eyes closed. “Celine?” he called, crawling over to her. He got closer but the smell caught him off guard, forcing him to turn away.
“I shouldn’t have,” Phillip said, shaking his head. “I shouldn’t have seen her exposed like that.” With this, Phillip’s body collapsed. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground. He stared at the patch of grass in front of him as his eyes watered.
Celine was dead. Mira could barely stand. She wanted to sit but the men crowded around her forced her to stand. These men surrounded her, screaming for justice, working themselves into a frenzy over the desire for it, and Mira stared at their froth and spittle, at their flustered faces burning in anger, and feared what their vengeance might do.
The ghosts must have lured her into the woods, wanting to show her the horrors of their lives. Come and see, they’d whispered, wanting to show her the knitted scars, their bruises and cuts. They held up their hands and showed the empty spaces where fingers used to be. They told her to come, following deeper, showing her where they were captured and slaughtered. Come and see. Their heads on pikes, the skin of the chin sagging, the hollow caverns where the eyes were gouged out, mouths open but nothing inside, tongue cut, teeth stolen, every part taken except the shell of a face. Come and see, come and see, come and see.
Had she seen? She must not have, refused to see what they’d tried to show her, and they killed her for it. If they had come for Celine, then they were coming for them all.
“Don’t you worry,” Mr. Tatum said, putting a hand on Phillip’s shoulder. “We’re going to get him.”
Him. This got Mira’s attention. “Get who?”
“Your boy. Jesse. Where is he? You got to know where he is. Y’all like to stick together.”
“Who are you talking about?” Mira was confused. Whatever they thought was wrong. It was the ghosts. They needed to go out to where Celine was, see whatever it was the ghosts had been trying to show her. “No, you’re all wrong. We need to get Celine. Phillip, is Celine still out there?” Mira asked, but he wouldn’t answer, continuing to look blankly ahead. “Phillip, do you think you could find her?”
“I don’t know,” Phillip said, but his tone changed. He stepped away from Mira, as if he was afraid of her, of what she was asking of him.
In the background, Mira saw the golden-green leaves of the tobacco fields and she knew Celine had gone in the same direction Mira had, because just beyond their reach were the graves. That had to have been it. The ghosts had lured her there to show her the graves. To unearth the bodies of those unknown men and women. To make known what had been done. This had to be what all this was about and Mira needed to finish it—find the graves, their bodies, and maybe they would be saved.
“They’re coming,” Mira almost screamed. She’d tried to control herself, to keep her voice calm, but calmness was not going to work with these men and they were running out of time. She had to convince them to follow her. They had to see.
“Don’t you understand? They did this to Celine and we need to find them or it won’t stop.”
“Who?” Phillip asked her.
“What we need to do is find that black boy,” Mr. Tatum boomed. “Where is he? Anyone seen him? He’s done this before. He killed that man years ago.”
“That’s not true,” Mira yelled. “You know that. The police let him go. Mr. Loomis drowned.”
“The police couldn’t charge him but I know the truth. That boy had something to do with it and now he’s hurt Celine. Where is he? Jesse’s his name. Where is he?”
Mira saw the way these men looked at her. They were looks to remind her of her unimportance. Looks to make her feel small. It was the same look the policeman had given her when she’d tried to help Jesse, his face full of amusement at first, because why would a girl like her have a point worthy of being heard? Then annoyance, which turned to anger. The way he’d raised his arm at her, close to hitting her, when all she’d wanted was to tell the truth. He didn’t want to listen to her. He never would have. These men, they weren’t going to listen either.
