Blood Memory

Chapter 49

As Michael pulls me through the trees toward Brookwood, I keep thinking of my father walking on water in my dream. When I woke, I felt certain that he was trying to tell me something. To help me. To send me the secret truth of his life and mine. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was trying to apologize for something. Not literally, of course. I know he’s not communicating to me from the dead or anything like that. It’s my subconscious creating these images. And yet…

“I’m sorry I flipped out,” I say. “You don’t have to stay with me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Michael. “You have no business being alone right now.”

We’re never going to reach Brookwood. My legs feel full of sand, and the humidity hanging in the air makes it difficult to extract oxygen from it. “I need to talk to my mother.”

“Why?”

“She’s my father’s next of kin. I can’t see getting any kind of exhumation permit without her support.”

“Cat, you just looked at three Polaroids and a sculpture and you freaked out. Now you’re talking about looking at your father’s corpse? After it’s been decomposing for over twenty years?”

I shudder. “That will be easier to look at than those pictures.”

“Cat-”

“What else can I do, Michael? I have to keep digging until I uncover the truth. If I don’t, I’ll go mad.”

He stares at me with eyes full of pity and compassion. “I think you should talk to Tom Cage before you do anything else.”

“Dr. Cage?”

“Yes. Remember what he told me? Your dad confided in him quite a bit about the war. And Tom seemed to think a great deal of Luke. I think you need to hear what Tom has to say.”

“Nobody’s going to confess to their family doctor that they molested their own daughter.”

“Don’t be so sure. In the old days, the family doctor was like a priest. Especially in the South. He was the only person some people could legitimately unburden themselves to.”

I stop walking and sag against the gray trunk of an oak tree.

“What’s the matter?” Michael asks.

“Can you bring the car?”

He studies me for several moments. I see the doctor’s brain behind his eyes, searching me for signs ofwhat?

“Do you promise to stay here until I get here?”

“Of course. What are you worried about?”

“I’m worried that all this stress will trigger a manic state. If it does, you won’t know what you’re doing. And I think you’ll kill yourself one way or another.”

I slide down the tree trunk and settle onto the soft ground. The pain of the bark scraping my back is strangely welcome. “Please, Michael.”

“I’ll be back in two minutes.”

As soon as he disappears, I dump the contents of my father’s bag on the ground in front of me. The Playboy, the maps, the letters, the prunes, the sniper patch, the sketchbook, the spiral album of snapshots. I hold my breath as I open the album, with its photos tucked into plastic sleeves for posterity. I’ve never been more afraid to look at something in my life. If I find more photographs of children, I’ll simply keep holding my breath until I pass out. I’ve failed at that before, but today…

The first photograph shows a white-tailed deer in low light, a buck with ten antler points. Relief almost makes me exhale, but I don’t. Every photo in this book is a potential horror.

The next picture shows a black bear cub. The one after, a cottonmouth moccasin coiled around a cypress tree.

My heart stutters in my chest.

The next photo shows a naked brown body. But it’s not a child. Not a prepubescent one, anyway. It’s Louise Butler, thirty years younger than when I talked to her in her little house on the island. She can’t possibly be eighteen in this picture. She’s standing on the edge of the river at sunset, facing the camera without a trace of shame. The grace and power of her nude body make Lola Falana on the pages of Playboy seem common.

I flip the page.

Louise again, at river’s edge, this time sitting in profile against the sunset in what looks like the lotus position.

My mouth goes dry at the next image. In it, my father stands with one arm around Louise’s waist. She’s naked, but he’s wearing an old pair of denim cutoffs and nothing else. Bronzed by the sun, he looks as fit and happy as I ever saw him in life. The image is slightly off-kilter, as though he had set the camera on a log and shot the photo with a timer. I never saw him look that happy when he was with my mother.

The next photo shows several black children playing in a dusty road, but they’re all wearing clothes. As I flip through the little binder, the images blend into a montage of life on the island. Not the privileged life I knew as the granddaughter of Dr. and Mrs. Kirkland, but the daily life of the blacks who lived there year-round. One photo shows Daddy with a young black man-Jesse Billups with a “˜fro?-sitting on a porch playing box guitars. Bottles of cheap wine stand on the porch rail, and a heavy black woman with pendulous breasts dances barefoot on the ground. Luke has a glass bottleneck on the third finger of his left hand. I can almost hear the cutting wail of the notes as he draws the slide quivering along the strings.

The last photograph is of me.

I’m sitting on the floor of the barn with my legs crossed, much like Louise in her lotus photo. My elbows are on my knees, my chin in my hands, and I’m staring into the lens with big round eyes that look exactly like my father’s. I look more at peace in that picture than I’ve ever felt in my life.

I look about two years old.

What happened to me after that? What took away the peace in those eyes? Who took it away? The person who shot this picture?

With a long exhalation of relief, I drop the album. It falls beside the rotten prunes on the wire. There’s something revolting about keeping food stuffed in a bag beneath a floor. The prunes have an especially nasty look, as though they were being saved for some reason beyond the ken of normal human beings. A necklace, maybe, like something a peasant would use to ward off vampires.

“Miss Catherine? That you over there?”

A black man in grease-stained khaki work clothes has appeared among the trees. It’s Mose, the yardman. After so many years at Malmaison, he moves among these trees like a ghost. He and Daddy must have run into each other many times on their solitary forays under the canopy of oaks.

“It’s me, Mose.”

“You all right? You fall down or something?”

“I’m just resting.”

He moves closer, but his advance is solicitous, the way Pearlie moves around houseguests who don’t know her. Mose can’t be much younger than my grandfather, and time has worn him down to a bent nub, like a tree that finally gives way to decades of wind and bugs and rain. The scleras of his eyes are yellow, and gray stubble grows high up his cheeks. It’s hard to imagine that I once saw this man carry railroad ties across his shoulders.

“What you got there?” Mose asks. “You drawing pictures?”

He’s noticed the sketchbook, the one artifact of the bag that I haven’t yet examined. “I’m just looking at some old pictures my father took.”

He nods agreeably, but then his eyes focus on something else. “What’s that there?”

He’s pointing at the prunes. “Some kind of rotten food. I think it’s prunes.”

Mose bends and picks up the string of blackened fruit. He studies one, pinches it between his fingers, then brings it to his nose and sniffs it.

“Mose, you’re a braver man than I.”

He laughs. “You ain’t no man. You a girl.”

I always wondered if Mose was simpleminded, but I’ve never known for sure.

“These ain’t prunes.” He places one of the blackened things between his front teeth and bites down, testing its texture. “This here be hide.”

“Hide?”

“Skin. Some kind of animal skin. Chunks of something.”

“Some kind of hunting trophy, maybe?”

Mose shrugs. “Something like that, I reckon.”

As he hands me the necklace, the words of the grizzled vet from the Vietnam Veterans Building come back to me: A lot of Hollywood movies don’t show nothing but grunts cutting off ears and killing women and kids. And some of that happened, I won’t lie.

I stuff the necklace quickly into the bag, nausea rolling through my stomach.

“Miss Catherine? You sure you all right?”

I nod and begin gathering the rest of my father’s things. Far behind Mose, I see Michael’s Expedition carefully negotiating its way through the trees.

“Do you know anything about DeSalle Island, Mose?”

His face wrinkles in thought. “Not no more, I don’t.”

“But you did?”

“Well, I was born down there, wasn’t I?”

A current of excitement goes through me. “You were born on the island?”

“Sho was. I think everybody who ever worked up here for your family was born on the island. Dr. Kirkland always saying nobody knows how to work no more. He about right, too. He say people from the island still do a day’s work for a day’s pay.”

Poverty wages, probably. “Do you like my grandfather, Mose?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. Dr. Kirkland been real good to me.”

“I think you know what I mean.”

Mose looks around as though someone might be eavesdropping. “You know your granddaddy, Miss Catherine. He a tough man, and he know how to squeeze a nickel till the buffalo shits-pardon my language.”

I say nothing, leaving a vacuum that Mose feels compelled to fill.

“Dr. Kirkland be kind of like that story I heard a long time ago. The plantation owner gives a slave a pint of whiskey. Another slave asks how he liked it, and the first slave says, Well, if it’d been any better, he wouldn’t have give it to me, and if it’d been any worse, I couldn’t have drunk it.”

Mose isn’t simpleminded at all.

“Dr. Kirkland takes care of the people on the island, though,” he adds quickly. “They better off than a lot of black folks here in town.”

“What about my father, Mose?”

He looks confused for a minute. “Mr. Luke, you mean?”

“Yes.”

He smiles broadly, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “Mr. Luke always had a good word for me when he passed. Sometimes he gave me a smoke off whatever he was smoking, too. If you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“I liked old Luke, but I had to be careful around him. Dr. Kirkland didn’t like him none at all.”

Michael’s Expedition is close now, threading its way through the trees like a tank wary of land mines. “Did you like the island, Mose?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t know nothing else back then. I wouldn’t go back now, though. I like my TV in the evenings. And I don’t like that river. Too many people done died in that water.”

“Did you know somebody who drowned?”

“I had a cousin drown in it. Sho did.”

“Girl or boy?”

“Boy. Name of Enos. But I believe a little girl drowned some years before that, too.”

“Do you think the island is a bad place?”

Mose squints at me as though trying to make out something far away. “What you mean, Miss Catherine?”

“Is there something bad there? Something you might not be able to explain, but that you just feel? I used to feel something like that there.”

The yardman closes his eyes. After a moment, a little shudder goes through him. Then he opens his eyes and looks at me like a little boy. “When I was young, the old folks used to say killers from the prison roamed the roads at night. From Angola, you know? Like they’d slip out of the prison at night, float over to the island, and walk the roads looking for children. All that seems like a fairy story now, something they used to scare us. But still, a lot of kids wouldn’t get near them roads anytime round dark, and not even in the daytime by themselves.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs again. “That’s just how it was. You’d have to ask somebody else the why of it. But I’ll tell you thisI got me a lot of kin down there, and I hardly been back there in forty years. And now that you ask me, I don’t care if I never go back again.”

As Michael’s Expedition rumbles up beside Mose, the yardman gives me a wave and ambles off through the trees. By the time Michael rolls down his window, Mose has vanished. Like my father, he is another ghost of Malmaison.

I take up Luke Ferry’s bag of secrets and climb into the SUV.