Black Light

32

Beyond the bridge the land changed. It grew flat and plain and gave way, after a time, to perspectives over water, choked with reeds, huge vistas of almost colorless marshlands, broken here and there by clumps of trees. The water sparkled in the sun.

“There isn’t this much water in the whole state of Oklahoma,” said Russ.

They were on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, heading toward St. Michaels, which, a map suggested, was a small town situated on a promontory that jabbed out into the Chesapeake. It seemed like land only marginally reclaimed from the sea: the water winked at them from behind the trees or off beyond farm fields; or it lurked, black and still, in deep pools that lapped around the edges of dark trees that seemed to stretch off for infinity; or, finally, it was in the rivers and streams that lashed this way and that, like saber cuts.

“Wet,” was all Bob could think to say.

“Maybe she won’t see us,” said Russ.

“Oh, I think she will.”

“Do we tell her about Sam? It might upset her.”

“Tell her the truth on all things. She was a damned smart lady, as I remember. Back in the days when nobody thought a woman was smart, they all said, Miss Connie is smart. That says a hell of a lot about her. I do believe all the men were half in love with her, my own father and Sam Vincent included.”

“She’s ninety-five,” said Russ.

“I’ll bet she’s still as sharp as a bee’s ass. You’ll see.”

They passed through St. Michaels, a town so quaint it looked as if it belonged in an antique store window, and then, off Route 33 still farther toward the Chesapeake, they saw a discreet sign, expensive and muted, that said DOWNY MARSH and pointed the way, without explanation.

Russ turned down the drive, came to a gate under overhanging elms. A guard stopped them.

“Visitors,” Russ said, “to see Miss Longacre. Mrs. Longacre.”

The guard, uniformed and black, nodded and let them pass.

It had to have once been the estate of a robber baron or steel or railroad tycoon. An asphalt road curled across land which grew tenuous as they progressed through the high, fluttering reeds, and then at last yielded to a crescent of garden and lawn scalloped out of the marsh, dominated by a brick mansion. The building was gigantic, monstrous, capped with a mansard roof, green copper in the sun, and festooned with balconies themselves intricate with wrought ironwork on many levels and multipaned windows: unbearable ugliness that spoke of the violence and inevitability of capital. Russ thought it was a relic from a nineteenth century full of black smoke and grinding engines, an arrogant eyesore that faced five miles of serene marshlands and beyond the shifty sheet-glass calm of the bay. It had the look of a place where rich people came to die.

Russ pulled into a parking space marked VISITORS, noting that his was the only visiting car. Out on the grounds he could see ancient people hunched in wheelchairs, being guided about by black nurses or aides, whatever.

It was two in the afternoon. The sun was bright, the sky Windex blue. A vee of geese flew far overhead; an egret stood on one leg off to the side of the house, by a little pool.

“Let me do the talking,” said Bob. “I think she’ll remember me.”

They walked in, both in suits, and felt their shoes crack on the linoleum in the hushed silence. There was no sense of the medicinal in here, but more the devotional; it felt to Russ like a religious space.

They came to a counter, where two well-dressed women suspiciously watched them approach.

“Hello,” said Bob. “I’m wondering if it’s possible to see one of your patients—”

“Residents,” he was frostily corrected.

“—residents—named Mrs. Connie Longacre. I’m the son of an old friend.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Swagger. Bob Lee Swagger. Tell her I’m the son of Earl Swagger. She’ll remember.”

They sat and waited for the longest time, and finally a woman came.

“She is frail. But she’s alert, coherent and tough. I can give you no more than half an hour. Try not to excite her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bob.

She led them through double doors, back through vast rooms that were largely empty, and out on a veranda that faced the bay but from such elevation that one could see the lacework of islands and marsh and miles of blue water. The far shore was not visible, though in the distance green islands poked out of the waves.

The old lady sat facing the view in a wheelchair. She was swaddled in blankets. She wore dark sunglasses and most of the flesh had fallen from her face, revealing taut, powdery skin well fissured with wrinkles. But two bright dabs of rouge brightened her gaunt cheekbones and her hair, snow white, sat on her head like a pillbox hat.

“Miss Connie?” said Bob.

“Lord, I’d know that voice anywhere,” she said brightly, turning. “I haven’t heard it in forty long years but I hear it every night before I go to bed. He was a wonderful man, your father. Do you know that, Bob Lee? Most men are not wonderful, it has been my experience to learn, but your father truly was.”

“Yes, ma’am. I wish I remembered him better.”

“Did you ever marry, Bob Lee? And have children?”

“Yes, ma’am, finally. I met a fine woman, a nurse on an Indian reservation in Arizona. I look after horses now. We have a daughter named Nicole, Nicki. She’s four. We love her a great deal.”

“I’m happy. Earl deserved a grandchild. I wish he could have known.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bob. “Ma’am, I’m here with an associate, a young writer. His name is Russ Pewtie.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Longacre,” said Russ.

“Here, take my hand, young man. I want to steal some warmth from you.”

Russ put his hand out and she seized it fiercely, her fingers cold but still tight with strength.

“There. Now, Russ, you describe for me what is before me, please. I insist. I want to borrow your eyes. I’m told it is beautiful, but I have no way of knowing.”

Russ bumbled through a description of the scene, feeling less than articulate.

But she was kind.

“You speak well,” she said.

“He’s a writer,” Bob said.

“What is he writing? Is he writing your life story, Bob Lee? That would be an exciting book.”

“No, ma’am. He is writing a book about my father and how he died.”

“A terrible tragedy,” said Miss Connie. “A terrible day. Worse than any day in the war. Worse in some ways than the day my son and his wife died. My son was a drunk. If you drink and drive in fast little cars, you must face certain consequences. So be it. But your father was doing a job important to the community and setting a moral example. He deserved so much better than a guttersnipe like Jimmy Pye.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bob. “We came to talk about that. About what happened that day. What was said, the timing of it, what you remember. Is that all right, Miss Connie?”

“May I ask why?”

“I just want to know how my father died,” Bob said.

“Any son’s right. Go ahead. Ask away.”

“You saw him?”

“Yes, I did. He arrived at the cottage at about two. He made an awful deputy who was hanging around go away. Most men did what Earl told them; he had that way. But Earl was upset. He didn’t show it, because your father was a man in control. He didn’t say much, he did a lot. He was a still man, a watcher. When he spoke he had such a deep and raspy voice, just like yours. But he was bothered by Jimmy. He could not understand it. He believed in Jimmy.”

“Why was that, do you suppose?” Russ asked.

“I look at the two of them, Jimmy Pye and Earl Swagger, and I see the two Americas. Earl was the old America, the America that won the war. When I say ‘the war,’ young man, of course I mean World War II.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“With young people today, you can never be sure what they know. Anyway, Earl was sturdy, patient, hardworking, stubborn, very courageous. Jimmy was the new America. He knew nothing. But he was handsome, slick, clever, cute, and evil. He only cared for himself. His theory of the world put him at the center of it, that was all. He never cared even for Edie White except to have her and say to the world, no one else can have this beautiful thing. She was a lovely, lovely girl. Earl would not allow himself to face the truth about Jimmy. That was his flaw, his hubris. That’s why it’s tragedy, not melodrama.”

“Did my father—what was he working on those last few days? Was there an investigation, a project? I have to know what he was thinking.”

“I was only with him for a half an hour that last day, maybe less. Then I left and he and Edie were alone. I never saw him again; by the time I got back, she was sleeping. But … I do remember this. He had found a body that day, earlier.”

“The young black girl,” said Russ. “Yes, we’ve heard of that.”

“Shirelle Parker, her name was. She was murdered. Your father was very troubled by the event. I could see him turning it over. I remember exactly what it was. He said he thought there were signs of ‘monkey business.’ What those were, he never elaborated.”

“But from what I understand, there was no monkey business,” Bob said. “A black youth was arrested the next day or two. Sam prosecuted. It was open-and-shut. The boy was executed two years later. That was all there was to it.”

“Yes,” said Miss Connie. “All there was to it.”

“So my father was wrong,” said Bob.

She turned and set her face outward, as if she were looking across the bay.

Then she turned back to face them.

“Your father was right. Reggie Gerard Fuller didn’t kill her. I found that out many years later.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know. But I do know what happened and why it happened. The night that girl disappeared there was a meeting at the church.”

Russ remembered a note inside the notebook that Earl Swagger had left behind. “Meeting—who there?”

“In those days, the South was being prepared for the civil rights movement, which no matter what you might think, did not spring out of nowhere. For a decade, very brave young black ministers and young white volunteers traveled from church to church, where they tried to prepare the people for the dangerous work ahead. The night that Shirelle disappeared, there had been such a meeting at the church. Shirelle was at the meeting. So was Reggie. After the meeting, he drove people home in his father’s hearse, people all over Polk, Scott and Montgomery counties. That’s why he never had an alibi. He didn’t drive Shirelle home because she only lived two blocks away.”

“I don’t—”

“The white man was a Jewish radical from New York. His name was Saul Fine. I believe he was a communist. He was later killed in Mississippi. He was taken out and shot by some young white men who called him a nigger lover. That night, he gave an impassioned speech to some of the younger people that the reverend believed in. Then they went home and Saul moved on. But when Shirelle was found, and Reggie was accused, he must have decided that if he told about the meeting, there’d be consequences. It would get out that a revolution was being planned, that a communist northern agitator was down South stirring up the colored. White people would get upset, there’d be violence against the church, the whole thing would come apart. The Klan would ride again. White people were very frightened in those days, I recall.”

She looked out and took off her glasses. Her eyes were still blue though now sightless and opaque. A tear ran down them.

“Your father was a brave, brave man, Bob Lee Swagger. He won the Medal of Honor and he never spoke of it to a soul. But he wasn’t the bravest man I ever heard of. The bravest man I ever heard of was a nineteen-year-old Negro boy who sat still in the electric chair while they strapped him in, and then they killed him and he never made a peep. Because he believed in something. He didn’t get any medals or glory. He never went to meet the President. He understood there were consequences to everything, and he faced them squarely and followed them where they led him. That’s what Saul Fine had told them: People will have to die. The Struggle will cost in blood. Nobody will remember those who die. It is the simple, brutal process of progress.”

She paused. “Nobody ever knew, except the people at that meeting and they couldn’t tell. His mother didn’t know, his father didn’t know and not even many of the blacks in Blue Eye knew. Sam never knew. Sam prosecuted him and believed he was doing God’s work. I believed justice was served. When I found out—this was in 1978, when I met George Tredwell, he was the black minister who traveled with Saul Fine in those days—I almost called Sam. But then I thought: What’s the point? It would kill Sam to find out he’d made such a tragic mistake. So that was the only gift I ever gave Sam, as much as I loved him.”

“It can’t hurt him now. Sam died night before last.”

“I thought I heard death in your voice.”

“He fell down some stairs. He was eighty-six. Spry and tough.”

“He was another good man. I have missed him so over the years. Was he on a case?”

“Yes, ma’am. Never really retired.”

“Arkansas: it produced some terrible men. It produced Jimmy Pye and Boss Harry Etheridge and his idiotic son, Hollis, who wanted to be President. Holly, isn’t that what they call him? I believe it’s a mistake to give a man a girl’s name, always. He certainly paid his share of girls back too, I’m told. But Arkansas also produced Earl Swagger and Sam Vincent.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Have I helped?”

“Yes, ma’am, I think you have. We’ll be moving along now.”

“Now I have a question for you.”

“Yes, Miss Connie.”

“I’m not sure I have the courage to ask it.”

“No one ever said Miss Connie didn’t have no courage. You got us through Daddy’s funeral.”

“All right, then. The child. What became of the child?”

“I’m sorry I don’t—” started Bob.

“She means Edie’s boy. Edie and Jimmy’s son.”

“Yes. Lord, I wanted to save that child. I tried to adopt him after Edie died. Sam argued the case for me. I cared for that child for three months. He was so strong, so alert, so bright. But no court in Arkansas in the fifties would let a northern widow take over a newborn child from an Arkansas mother if there was family around. I named him Stephen, after my own son. They made me give him to Jimmy’s people. It broke my heart. I never found out what happened to him.”

Her question was met with their silence.

“Oh,” she said finally. “He did not turn out well.”

“The Pyes didn’t care about him,” said Russ, “and they beat him and the more they beat him, the worse he got. Eventually, he went into the reform school system. By age twelve he was an incorrigible. They finally sent him off to live with Jimmy’s older brother in Oklahoma. He became …”

Russ paused.

“Go ahead, young man. I’ve buried enough good men so that I can take anything by now.”

“He became a violent felon. He killed many people and traumatized many, many more. He did time in the state penitentiary, where he became even more violent. A career criminal, the worst kind of bad news. Lamar Pye, that was his name. A policeman killed him in 1994.”

“Nothing good came from that day, did it?” said Miss Connie. “I hope there’s never another like it. An evil day.”