Black River

TWENTY-THREE

O’Brien walked down the long gravel driveway toward his Jeep, a mockingbird chortling in the live oaks, the sounds of children laughing and playing near the shore of a small lake. He heard the crunch of tires rolling over pecan shells. He stopped walking and turned around to see a woman riding a turn-of-the century bicycle, coming down the middle of the driveway Her hair was as black as a raven’s feather, a blue bonnet tilted on her head, face like porcelain, red pursed lips, white dress billowing as she raced the summer wind.

O’Brien lifted one hand to wave, stepping out of her way. She kept riding, knees pumping, eyes trained on the distant bend in the old drive, beyond a pecan grove. She rode beneath the canopies of live oaks, limbs arching across the drive, the speckled sunlight breaking through the branches in pockets of light flaring off her white dress.

When she passed, O’Brien could smell lavender in the air. He thought she was probably an actress deep in character, someone taking a bike ride between scenes. Watching her ride the old bicycle down the road, he felt there was something unusual about the woman that was odd in a

place of movie set facades, make-believe — where strange was normal.

Then he heard the whinny of a horse. O’Brien looked to his far left, one hundred feet beyond his Jeep, across the gravel road, a man dressed in a Confederate uniform sat tall on a horse. It was the same chestnut-brown horse and the same actor he’d seen earlier. He assumed the actor was keeping from boredom between the slow shooting of elaborate scenes.

As O’Brien walked toward his Jeep, the man led his horse around the perimeter of the pecan grove, the long shadows of trees cast by a setting sun rolled across the man’s whiskered face. He dismounted, took the horse by the reins and directed the animal into a cleared area almost hidden in the deep shade from the century-old oak trees.

O’Brien looked up to see something swirling in the hard-blue sky. Black carrion birds circled. From the pines through a barren meadow scattered with broken and dry corn stalks, came the cries of a mourning dove, the haunting call of the wild across an abandoned field of time.

O’Brien stepped around his Jeep in the direction he’d seen the actor and his horse disappear into the shadows. He walked through blackberry bushes and over rocks the size of pumpkins, the breeze tossing the pastel green leaves of kudzu vines clinging to tree trunks. He stepped over jagged hoof prints and feces left in the dirt by wild boars. The earth looked like a drunken man had plowed it where the hogs had rooted, the soil torn and left in corkscrew trenches.

When O’Brien got to the clearing enclosed in dense shadow, he could see it was a small cemetery. The re-enactor in the Confederate uniform had tied the horse to the limb of a sycamore tree. The man stood in the center of the cemetery. Head bowed. Moss-covered gravestones worn, stooping by neglect and age, drenched in shades of sepia-tone brown. The breeze stopped and tree leaves became motionless. A young crow flew to the top of a cottonwood tree, tilted its head, cut one blue eye at the horse and called out.

O’Brien watched the man in uniform place a flower on a grave. He stood there a moment, whispering something, perhaps praying, and then he turned and walked back to his horse. He was an older man, white whiskers and a narrow face. He held a Confederate officer’s slouch hat loosely in one hand, uniform clean, black boots polished. He placed his left boot in one stirrup and mounted the horse. He rode at a slow pace to the opposite side of the cemetery. As O’Brien approached, the man tipped his hat, turned and trotted away.

He galloped in the direction of the plantation house for a half-minute, and then spun left and trotted across the barren field of bent and broken corn stalks. He soon disappeared into the trees as a mist rose from the pine needles on the floor of the forest.

O’Brien felt a chill in the evening air when he stepped over the rusted wrought iron fence into the cemetery. He walked slowly around the timeworn gravestones, glancing at threadbare inscriptions, the scent of damp moss in the motionless air. He looked down at the headstone, a fresh-picked red rose next to it.

A Confederate rose. Very similar to the one delivered to Kim.

O’Brien slowly lifted his eyes from the grave, looking in the direction where the soldier had ridden across the field. A crow called out. O’Brien glanced at the burial plot. There were two graves to the left of the marker and a barren plot next to the headstone that read:

O’Brien opened the folder and stared at the women’s face in the picture, remembering what Gus Louden had said his great, great grandfather had written: ‘My Dearest Angelina, I had this painting commissioned from the photograph that I so treasure of you…’ O’Brien said, “Is this your grave? If I find the painting, what will that tell me?”

He placed the photo back in the folder and walked out of the cemetery in the twilight of a copper-colored landscape. O’Brien stood under the tall cottonwood tree and looked back in the direction the man on horseback hand gone. He didn’t match the description Kim gave of the re-enactor who approached her on the film set. ‘He’s tall and thin. A narrow face with a handlebar moustache. Dark Elvis-style sideburns. When he tipped his hat to me, I saw he had a full head of brown hair.’

O’Brien didn’t move for a moment. His mind raced, looking for patterns or contradictions in the people and places he’d recently seen. The older re-enactor didn’t fit Kim’s description. Why the Confederate rose on the grave? Where is the guy with the long sideburns, the man called Silas Jackson? O’Brien stared at the forest in the distance, the trees falling into deep silhouette, the last flickers of a sunset fanning dying embers of cherry in the bellies of clouds as gray as the old soldier’s uniform.

O’Brien turned to walk to his Jeep when he heard a noise in the cottonwood tree. A scratching noise. From the top of the tree, the raven dropped down, branch-to-branch, stopping on a dead limb twenty feet above O’Brien. The bird tilted its black head, one pale blue eye glowing in a drop of disappearing sunlight, unblinking, staring at O’Brien like a diamond emerging from a fist of coal.