Southern Exposure, page 3
“Gabriel, you want some water?”
The boy winced. Nobody in Essex called him Gabriel anymore. Thank goodness.
“No ma’am.” He paused and leaned on the mower’s wood handle, deliberately affecting the pose he’d observed in adult yard men like Monkey, the man who worked for Mrs. Setzler and threw a baseball like nobody’s business. “Mrs. Roth, uh, ma’am, people don’t call me Gabriel anymore.”
Sarah Rothenbarger gazed at the boy and her tiny brown eyes came to a point, folks around town called her “shrewd” when she looked that way, said that was how she kept the store going when she lost her husband. “Your grandmother calls you Gabriel. That’s your name.”
“That was when I was a baby. Everybody calls me Stoney now.”
“Stoney?”
“Yes ma’am. On account of how I skip rocks on the McCloskey pond. I’ve had big ones skim clear across and land on the other side. I win at ducks and drakes every time. All the kids know.” It was only a slight exaggeration.
“Don’t you like the name Gabriel? In your Bible Gabriel is the angel who brings good news, isn’t he? I believe he’s considered a guardian and a protector.”
Stoney refrained from telling her that the Bible made it even worse, as if being stuck with a sissy name wasn’t bad enough. It would be many years before the irony of this conversation would occur to him—that Sarah Rothenbarger knew so much about his religion when he knew nothing of hers. “I just think a fella oughta be called what he likes.”
Sarah smiled and got that shrewd look again. “I guess you’re right. I guess a fella oughta. I won’t forget, Stoney.”
And she hadn’t either. Not in all those summers he’d cut her grass, not when he’d come back to Essex to live as an adult either. At seventy-five, she had pronounced his nickname in such a way—crisp as the first fall apple—that it always felt like a gift. He’d never had a conversation with her about anything more significant than the weather, but all her life she had touched him. Just by the way she spoke his name.
Stoney turned and ran. He ran through the house, into the kitchen, out the back door, down the porch steps, into the yard. Silas jumped up and chased him, barking playfully. But Stoney dropped onto the ground, covered his face, rocked back and forth like a wounded child. Finally he opened his eyes. Moonlight still streamed weakly through the branches of the live oaks in Sarah’s yard. The clothesline was gone now and suddenly he couldn’t remember which trees had supported it. In this fading light the live oaks became misshapened monsters, the swamplike tree of legend, stunted, knurled up like ancient arthritic hands whose disease lives within and lays waste to the whole.
Silas whimpered and lay down by the man he loved.
Two
Sometime around five in the morning a sharp noise startled Marian Davis and she couldn’t get back to sleep. She tossed and turned for an hour, fighting it out with her pillow. Finally she gave up, opened her eyes and gazed around her bedroom in the semidarkness. It was a light and airy cocoon filled with white wicker and unbleached muslin, each wall dominated by an Impressionist. She stared at her favorite print for a second: Degas’ Two Dancers. This painting always conjured up the image of a young girl dancing along a highway in the middle of the night, her scrawny arms aloft as she struggled to rise to her toes in a pair of secondhand shoes. Then the girl fell on the hard dry pavement, her face scratched by loose gravel, reality in her throat.
“Ain’t no nigger ever been no dancer,” her sallow-eyed mother had once proclaimed. “You big as a hoss, lookit them feet.” And the mother had gone back to the biscuit making, a coal-tar woman up to her elbows in white people’s flour.
Marian’s eyes rested on the pale dresser across the room. Atop it sat a black-and-white photograph of a girl named Alma. The woman in bed and the girl didn’t look much alike. Alma had nubby pigtails all over her head; Marian’s face was framed by the “relaxed” softness of a hairdresser’s curls, cut short and stylish. Alma was born with a flat nose, her flaring nostrils as wide as airplane wings; Marian’s nose was slim and tapered, a surgeon’s creation. Nothing in Alma suggested opportunity—nothing in Marian suggested she’d ever been without it. Yet the two females did share the same skin: honey-gold, high yellow, a chocolate milkshake heavy on the cream. And their eyes were identical, mahogany with a cedar center, a goblet of warm sherry held to the light, full-bodied and complex.
In a moment Marian glanced at the pastel linen suit hanging on the back of her closet door. If Mama could see me now, she thought. Next to the closet a rocking chair cradled a large briefcase stuffed with term papers. These days she was a black woman who worked with words, who would never roll biscuits again. She stretched her long frame luxuriously. Spring. The best time of the year. What teacher didn’t feel like a kid this close to a three-month date with freedom? Summer was the advantage to teaching: your life was always a cycle, you always had closure, rest, and a new beginning to look forward to. Always starting over, you never had time to grow old.
And she knew a lot about new beginnings, didn’t she?
Not that she didn’t love her “babies,” as she privately called her students. When I walk in a room, Mama, the kids look up expectantly. Do you know how many teachers walk into a room and the kids don’t even notice? Not me. I make words dance for them, I choreograph futures. I take a black kid who can’t speak real English, not the English that’ll let him do things in this world, and I show him how the words in a sentence fit together like a puzzle, how they go together one way smooth as silk, how they get pushed together another and make sandpaper. I tell him it’s okay to talk our talk at home, but to use what I teach him everywhere else.
She wished her mama knew how people in Essex respected her now, how they stopped her on the street to ask about Johnny’s spelling or Susan’s essay, how they waved and said why didn’t she come in for a cup of coffee? Hardly anyone looked at her anymore and said, “There goes the black English teacher.” Now they said, “Why there goes Marian, who used to live with Harriet. Lost her folks but she made something of herself after all.” Mama didn’t know that a black woman could get respect in a white world if she worked hard enough, persisted, didn’t give in. Didn’t run away.
Marian got up, went down the hall to the kitchen and put the coffee on. Her house was small, shotgun style, all four rooms emptying into a central hallway. Coming back down the hall, she reentered her bedroom and made the bed. As she was crossing to the bathroom, her eyes fell on the picture of Alma again. She turned and walked over to the painted white dresser and picked the photograph up. Alma, who had looked so much like her mother.
They had lived in a shack on the outskirts of town. Two rooms and a dirt yard that was always swarming with stray chickens and mangy dogs and flies. The house was constructed of unpainted gray wood, and burlap flapped at the open windows bereft of glass. Behind the structure was an outhouse and the unkempt garden that provided all their food in the summer. And on both sides stood carbon-copy houses, crowded so close that hands stuck out of opposing windows could touch.
When she came home that day, it all looked the same. Chickens scratching in the dirt for imaginary feed, the neighbor’s baby squalling on the porch next door. Alma sat down on the rickety wooden steps of her house, looked at the wilted circles of petunias in the yard, and took off the shoes she wore only to school. It was spring, almost time to put them up again. An old dog of uncertain extraction ambled over and nuzzled her knee and she picked fleas out of his eyes. Then the animal lay down beside her and vomited. “Dis dog be sick,” she muttered and went inside to tell her mama.
Something seemed odd the moment she walked in the door. It wasn’t the silence, for often she came home to an empty house. It was more the absence of any expectation, as though the house knew it needn’t wait up for anyone else. Also, it was scrupulously clean. The floor had been scrubbed, the dishes were all stacked neatly in their orange crate, the bed pillows had even been fluffed. A legacy of cleanliness, her start in the world. She ran from the parlor to the bedroom where her mama slept. No clothes in the closet, the hairbrush gone from the mantel, the Bible no longer under the bed. Even her smell was gone. She’d washed it away before she left.
Alma went back out and sat down on the steps. She sat there until dark. She sat there until daybreak. Then she went to tell the white lady that her mama wasn’t coming to work.
She was eight years old at the time.
Five years ago Marian had been certain that someday she would see her mother again. It was the memory of her mother, or more accurately the lack of it, that had driven her to give up a good job in Columbia in order to come home. Maturity—and a successful adult life—had tempered the pain of abandonment somewhat, had made way for a curiosity once deadened by resentment and loss. Lonnie must have had a good reason for leaving. Marian wanted to see her mother again, to get to know her finally. Black people who left the South always came back someday, sometimes to show off, often to die. Her mother had departed in a sudden flash, without warning or explanation. No doubt she would return the same way. And Marian wanted to be there when it happened; she did not want to risk missing whatever time they still had.
When she’d first come back to Essex, she’d promised herself she’d only stay for one year. During those months she hounded blacks and whites alike for information about Lonnie Davis—surely someone had heard from her, knew something about why she had disappeared all those years ago, recalled her favorite color or whether she’d finished high school. The older blacks, who remembered a scruffy kid named Alma, took one look at this new black woman in her fine suit and tapered nose and didn’t say much. But Marian kept at it, went back to them again in shorts and sandals, and gradually they said just enough to make her decide to stay a second year. They didn’t know where Lonnie was or why she’d gone away but they did know her favorite color was red, and that was enough for Marian, and the second year began. And a third, a fourth, a fifth. The black woman thrust by chance into a white world stayed on … and waited.
A sudden knock on the door startled Marian. She looked up, slipped on her polished cotton bathrobe, and padded toward her front door. It was early for company. On her front porch stood Elsie Fenton, a white woman in her sixties whose most distinguishing trademark was her refusal to abide by daylight saving time. From April to October she was perpetually late. Moving time forward one hour, she maintained, put her one hour closer to her death. And besides, that extra hour of sunlight burned up her grass.
When Marian opened her door, she knew something was wrong. “Morning, Elsie. You okay?”
“Oh Marian—have you heard about Sarah?”
“Heard what?” The black woman backed inside. “Come on in, it’s chilly out here.”
The other woman didn’t move, just wrung her hands together. “I had to talk to somebody, it’s so awful. I can’t believe it. Nothing like this has ever happened here. Not to anybody we know. I don’t know what to do.”
Marian stared at the shorter woman. “What’s wrong with Sarah?”
The older woman held up her hands helplessly. “She’s been murdered. Found dead in her bed. Stabbed to death.”
They stood in shocked silence for a few seconds, Marian watching her neighbor’s distraught, lined face.
Then Elsie Fenton added, “Stoney McFarland found her early this morning. The Ashton sheriff was here too. They took her away in an ambulance.”
“My God,” Marian said finally. Was that what woke her earlier? “Do they know who did it?”
Her visitor’s eyes filled with dread. She shook her head. “They don’t have a clue.” She looked down the street suspiciously, lowered her voice. “I guess it could be somebody we know.”
“Has anyone told Harriet?”
“I think so. I saw Stoney go over there after the ambulance left. I’d better get on back home, I just thought you’d want to know.”
Marian reached out and patted the other woman on the shoulder. “I appreciate your coming over; I’d better check on Harriet. They’ll find who did this. Try not to worry.”
Rushing back inside to dress, Marian felt sorry for her frightened neighbor. Violence was unheard of in Essex, she should be scared stiff herself. Yet her hands were steady, she wasn’t even in shock. Her race, her sex, lived with the omnipresence of brutality, it was forever there beside you, a shadow, a second skin, a prickly awareness. You knew the price of freedom might very well be pain.
Quickly Marian dressed, in loose slacks and a sweater. This might be the rare day she missed school, or was late. She grabbed her purse and checked to make sure her wallet was inside. Absently she fingered the zippered inner compartment of the leather bag; within it lay the loaded single-shot derringer she’d carried for twenty years.
Sarah Roth’s house was full of people. A dazed Jim Leland, the thin and wispy symbol of law enforcement in Essex, trailed behind the Ashton County sheriff like a child learning the rules of a new game. The lab team from Ashton County with its fingerprinting apparatus and tape and cameras moved back and forth between the rooms. Only the county coroner had left, bearing Sarah Roth’s body on its final journey. Stoney sat at the kitchen table sipping the strong coffee someone had brought over. People milled about, speaking to themselves but not to him, and he had the strangest sensation of being invisible, of being a ghost in a house full of the living. They were animated but he was still. Like Sarah.
“Stoney, maybe you oughta go home. There’s nothing you can do here,” Ed Hammond said as he crossed to the table; he was still clad in the pajamas and tartan robe he’d been wearing when Stoney got him out of bed.
The only doctor in Essex, Ed Hammond was also the medical examiner for Ashton County; he had an office in Essex and also practiced at the county hospital outside town. “I guess I’d better get going myself,” he went on, yawning. “They’ll need me at the hospital.”
“You’ll do the autopsy,” Stoney said.
Ed Hammond nodded. “Maybe we’ll know more after that.”
The doctor reached back and massaged his shoulder blades with his fingertips. He was a short, thick man with the neck and torso of a bulldog and, at forty-six, was already totally bald like his father, the Essex doctor when Stoney was a boy. Ed nodded at Stoney again. “I’ll see you later.”
“Ed, wait.” Stoney gazed at the other man. “I just don’t understand this.”
“Neither do I.” The doctor headed for the door. “Go home, get some sleep.”
Stoney watched the bald man disappear into the morning light, then he closed his eyes.
He had raced down the street after he found Sarah, had covered the ten blocks to Ed’s house in less than two minutes. It never occurred to him to get Jim Leland. Instead, he banged on the doctor’s front door, shouted, set the neighbor’s cats to howling. When a startled Ed flipped on the porch light and opened the door, Stoney yelled, “You gotta come. It’s Sarah. I don’t know what happened. For God’s sake, come on.”
In Ed’s car Stoney told him, briefly, what he’d found. After that they didn’t speak. They jumped out of the car at the curb at Sarah’s house and ran around to the back door. Stoney led the way to her bedroom. “I—I can’t—”
“Stay here,” Ed whispered.
Stoney paced back and forth in the kitchen. He leaned over the counter and turned on the water in the sink, cupped his hands together and splashed the cold liquid on his face. Then he slammed his fist down on the cabinet. What in God’s name happened? He turned around, whirled back to the cabinet and kicked the door. “Craaccck!” His foot went right through the wood. Pain shot up his leg and tears rose in his eyes. He limped over to the kitchen table and sat down. Then he got up again, paced over to the sink and stared out at the moonlight.
This could not be real.
In a few minutes Ed Hammond entered the kitchen, his face colorless. He crossed to the sink and washed his hands. He turned around and looked at Stoney.
“We’ve got to get Leland. And the Ashton sheriff. She’s been dead an hour or two.” He swallowed. “Somebody really cut her up. I haven’t seen anything like it since I was a resident in Charlotte. She bled to death probably, her carotid artery was cut in half.” Ed walked over to the table and sat down, his voice flat. “There’s something else, Stoney. First I thought she’d been raped, since she’s naked and all. There’s semen all over her. But she wasn’t raped.”
Stoney gaped at the other man. “What?”
“I’m fairly positive—as positive as I can be now. There’s no sign of forcible entry.”
For a moment neither man said a word, just stared at each other.
“Aw, Christ,” Stoney said after a moment. He got up and paced again. “I don’t understand this.”
“I don’t know what to think either. I’m just telling you what I found. Massive facial injuries. Semen, but no evidence of rape.”
Stoney fought the urge to retch. He went back to the sink and stuck his face under the faucet, wiped his eyes with a kitchen towel lying on the counter. Suddenly he turned around. “You think somebody came through town, tried to rob her and she heard them?”
The doctor looked up. “Her TV’s still here, I saw it in the den.” He eyed Stoney for a second. “What did she have anybody’d want to steal?”
It was true. Sarah Roth had lived modestly, had not been given to buying or hoarding. Her most valuable asset had been the store, which she still owned but paid someone else to run. Stoney sighed. “I’ve never heard of anyone who didn’t like her, who’d have a grudge against her.” He sat down at the table again. “It had to be somebody passing through town. Nobody in Essex would do this.”
The doctor’s image faded when Stoney felt a hand on his shoulder. He stared up at the Ashton sheriff. Buck Henry, whom Stoney had never met before, was a tall man in a khaki uniform. “Mr. McFarland, we’re going to have to seal off the house now. ’Preciate you sticking around so long. If you think of anything else, please contact Chief Leland or get in touch with my office.”
