Blood Memory

Chapter 58

Pearlie doesn’t answer my knock. When I try to go in anyway, I find the door locked. This frightens me. Pearlie’s door is never locked. At least it never was when I lived here. One more sign of how things have changed.

She’s drawn her curtains, too. After trying the front windows on the ground floor, I go around back. One window there is barely latched. By jiggling the frame, I get the latch loose, then slide up the window.

Pearlie’s bedroom is dark, her bed empty. A converted slave quarters like ours, her house has no hallways. I move quickly to the door and pass through to the kitchen.

Like my mother this morning, Pearlie is sitting at her kitchen table without lights, staring blankly ahead. Unlike my mother, she’s smoking a cigarette. I haven’t seen Pearlie smoke since I was a little girl. An ashtray full of butts is beside her, and a bottle of cheap whiskey stands beside her coffee cup.

“Pearlie?”

“I thought you was Billy Neal coming to get me,” she rasps.

“Why would he come get you?”

“Cause of what I know.” Her voice has a frightening note of fatalism in it.

“What do you know?”

“Same thing you do, I reckon.”

“What’s that?”

A new alertness comes into her eyes. “Don’t play games with me. Tell me what you come here for.”

“I’m about to confront Grandpapa. I wanted to talk to you first.”

She blinks once, slowly. “How come?”

“Because you know things I need to know. And I want you to know what I’ve learned about him.”

“What you talking about?”

“Grandpapa murdered Daddy, Pearlie.”

The orange eye of her cigarette glows bright. “You just think that? Or you can prove it?”

“I can prove it. What I want to know is, did you already know it?”

Pearlie exhales a long stream of smoke. “Not to prove, I didn’t. I didn’t see him do it, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Did you suspect it?”

“I had thoughts that night. Later on, too. But there wasn’t nothing I could do about it.”

I knew it. “You think Grandpapa’s invulnerable, Pearlie. But he’s not. I’m going to put him in jail. I’ve got evidence now. Remember Lena the Leopardess?”

A glint of memory passes behind her eyes. “The toy you buried with Mr. Luke?”

“That’s right. Grandpapa suggested I put her in the coffin with him. Do you know why he did that?”

“I know there was blood on her. I know Dr. Kirkland told me to throw that toy away. When I told him it was your favorite, he told me I could wash it off and sew the rip back together.”

“Do you know how Lena got torn?”

She shakes her head.

“Grandpapa stuffed her into Daddy’s mouth so he would suffocate before you got downstairs. He wasn’t dying quickly enough from the bullet.”

Pearlie winces. “Lord Jesus. Don’t tell me that.”

“That’s not the worst of it. You remember the story about Grandpapa cutting out Ann’s appendix by lantern light on the island? How he was the big hero for saving her life?”

“Sure I do. Him and Ivy both.”

“Well, he took out her appendix, all right. But he did a little something extra, too. He cut her fallopian tubes, so she couldn’t get pregnant.”

Pearlie bows her head and begins to pray softly.

“Why did you go to the island yesterday, Pearlie? You hate that place.”

“Don’t want to talk about that.”

“You’ve got to start talking. You’ve been silent too long.”

She sips whiskey from her coffee cup, then lights another cigarette and takes a deep drag. “I quit cigarettes twenty-three years ago,” she says, smoke floating out of her mouth with each word. “I’ve missed ’em every day, like a pain that won’t quit. But when I heard Miss Ann was dead, I had to have me one. I ain’t stopped since.”

I say nothing.

“I come to work here in 1948,” she says, almost to herself. “I was seventeen. Miss Ann was born that year, but they was living in New Orleans then. Dr. Kirkland was still training to be a doctor. He and Mrs. Catherine didn’t move to Natchez until 1956, and they didn’t take over this place until sixty-four, when Mr. DeSalle died.”

She looks at me as though making sure I understand. “That’s why I missed it, you see? Miss Ann was sixteen when they moved in here. The damage was already done. But things still wasn’t right. Not really. Any boy that come to call on Ann, Dr. Kirkland frightened away. Even the nice ones. Lots of daddies will do that a little, but Dr. Kirkland never gave an inch. He was jealous of that girl. Mrs. Catherine saw it, too, but she couldn’t do nothing to change it.”

“If they’d been living in Natchez since 1956,” I reason, “surely you saw some other signs before they moved to Malmaison?”

The old woman chews her bottom lip. “I been thinking about that for two days now. There was times when they left the girls here, going on long trips and such. Sometimes Dr. Kirkland would leave me medicine for Ann. She didn’t seem sick, ’cept she had to go to the bathroom too much, and it stung when she went. I’d give her the medicine, and she’d get all right. But looking back, she had too many of them problems. No other doctor ever saw it, though, you see? Her daddy was her doctor.”

Oh, I see. “He was my doctor, too.”

Pearlie lays her hand over mine, the skin papery over sinew and bone. “I know, baby. I knew something was wrong when Ann was just a toddler. I just didn’t know what. She’d laugh at the right times, but the laugh never touched her eyes. Those eyes were like glass. Shiny, but empty at the same time. Lord, how the boys liked her, though. Ann was the most popular girl in town. They couldn’t see the pain hidden in her heart.”

“Or maybe they could,” I say. “Maybe they sensed it, and that’s what drew them.”

“Maybe so,” Pearlie murmurs, nodding sadly.

“What about Mom?”

She takes another sip of whiskey and grimaces as she swallows. “Gwen was twelve when they moved in here. She didn’t have the same problems Ann did. She could smile and laugh, and she seemed like a normal child. But she married young as she could to get away from this house. But then she didn’t get away after all. The war brought her back. And the older she got, the more problems she had. Looking back, I think Dr. Kirkland got to her, too. The damage got done when she was just a baby, same as with Ann. Just not as bad.”

“I think Ann tried to protect her.”

Pearlie nods slowly. “Ann tried to be everything to everybody. To save everybody. But she couldn’t even save herself.”

“Did Grandmama Catherine ever suspect anything?”

“She never said nothing to me. But Mrs. Catherine sure knew when to disappear. And she let Dr. Kirkland spend a lot of time with those girls alone. I saw it when they stayed up here during Christmas, when the girls was little. If Dr. Kirkland was gonna be around the house during the day, Mrs. Catherine would find somewhere else to be. It gave me a bad feeling, but what could I say about it? Times was different back then. A maid like me couldn’t open her mouth about something like that. All I could do was be there for those girls when they got upset. Try to ease their pain a little bit.”

“Did you ever see anything yourself?”

She shakes her head. “Looking back, I think Dr. Kirkland made sure I didn’t.”

“How did he do that?”

“He’d walk this property all hours of the night, just like your daddy. I think that’s one reason he didn’t like Mr. Luke. He couldn’t prowl around without being seen anymore. The few times Dr. Kirkland caught me out after nine, he warned me to stay indoors. Said he might shoot me by accident, thinking I was a burglar. So I stayed right in this house unless I got called out by him or Mrs. Catherine.”

In hindsight, it all seems so obvious. What’s missing is the historical context. The idea that Dr. William Kirkland, respected surgeon and paragon of virtue, could be tiptoeing around his antebellum mansion molesting his daughters was virtually unthinkable forty years ago.

“What about the island?” I ask.

Pearlie shifts uncomfortably in her chair. “What about it?”

“Do you think he bothered any children there?”

“If he did, nobody would tell me about it.”

“Why not?”

“Cause I left there and never went back. I turned into a house nigger. They think I’m Dr. Kirkland’s slave, bought and paid for.”

“Why didn’t you ever go back?”

She looks at me with something like scorn. “Why you think? There was a man there I had to stay away from.”

“Who?”

“My uncle.”

“Why did you have to stay away from him?”

She snorts. “Why you think, girl? Same kind of trouble as this.”

“Sexual abuse?”

“They don’t call it that on the island. They call it getting broke in. The men do, leastways, and some of the women, too. I got broke in by my uncle when I wasn’t but twelve. He wouldn’t let me alone. If he hadn’t had to go to jail for a while, I’d have wound up pregnant or worse. So when I got a chance to get off the island, I took it.”

From somewhere in my mind, a new image rises. A small black girl walks along a gravel road. Out of the shimmering heat an orange pickup truck appears, and then the man who pays her father and mother offers her a ride.

“Ivy never told you any stories?” I ask. “Nothing that made you suspicious? Even I’ve heard things about the kids there being scared to walk the roads alone.”

Pearlie folds her hand on the table. “Baby, a man with a taste for that kind of thing don’t stop doing it. He takes what he needs whenever he can get it. I’ll tell you something else. I think the women down there know about it. That’s why they tell spook stories to keep their children off the roads. But they don’t tell their husbands nothing, you can bank on that. They don’t want them going to the death house at Angola for killing the boss man.”

“Do you know that, Pearlie? Or just suspect it?”

She shrugs. “Does it make a difference?”

“In a court of law, it makes all the difference in the world.”

She spits out air in a rush of scorn. “You ain’t getting Dr. Kirkland in no courtroom. He too smart and too rich. Men like him don’t go to jail. You got to know that by now, girl.”

“Times have changed since you were young, Pearlie.”

A parched laugh escapes her lips. “You believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Then you ain’t smart as I thought you was.”

Pearlie’s cynicism pisses me off. If all women were like this, we’d still be chattels and not citizens. On the other handI grew up in a much more privileged world than she did.

“You never answered my question, Pearlie. Why did you go to the island yesterday?”

The bow of her shoulders sags. “A couple of years ago, a family moved off the island real quick. I heard about it later. They had one child, a four-year-old girl. They just packed up and left without a word. I wanted to find out if that was because of Dr. Kirkland.”

“Did you?”

She inhales from her cigarette as though drinking the nectar of the gods, then holds the smoke in her lungs for as long as possible before letting it out in a long blue stream. “No,” she says finally. “Nobody would talk about it. They all scared.”

“Was that the only reason you went down there?”

She turns her dark gaze onto me, and at last I feel the full power of her instinctive intelligence. All her life Pearlie has hidden her quick understanding; that’s what she was raised to do. But the death of my aunt-one of “her babies”-has caused a tectonic shift in the old woman’s soul, and Pearlie Washington is never going to be the same.

“I don’t think Mrs. Catherine died by accident,” she says in a whisper. “I never did.”

This statement shocks me to the core. “Are you saying Grandmama Catherine was murdered? She couldn’t have been. People saw her fall into the water.”

“Did they?” Pearlie’s eyes glint in the dark. “She was standing off by herself when she went in. But did she fall? Did that sandbar really cave in? Mrs. Catherine practically grew up on DeSalle Island. You think she’d stand on a weak sandbar like some city fool and not know it? No, child. No more than Mr. Luke would let somebody sneak up on him after he was in the war. I think Mrs. Catherine finally found out something so bad that she couldn’t live with it. If she’d gone to the police, she’d have ruined her family name forever. Her children were already full grownI think she just couldn’t see what else to do but die. I think she drowned herself in that river, baby.”

Suicide? A seventy-five-year-old woman? “What do you think she saw, Pearlie?”

The old woman’s shoulders drop even lower. “A few years ago, when I was cleaning Dr. Kirkland’s study, I found some pictures.”

My breath catches in my throat. “What kind of pictures?”

“The kind you don’t have to take to the drugstore to get developed.”

“Polaroids?”

She nods.

“What were they of?”

“You and Miss Ann.”

My face is burning. “Doing what?”

“Swimming in your birthday suits.”

“Together?”

“No. They must have been took twenty-five years apart. Neither of you was more than three in the pictures, and nekkid as the day you was born. Both in a swimming pool somewhere. If those pictures had been mixed up with a bunch of others, I wouldn’t have thought nothing of it.” Pearlie holds up a bony finger, the nail painted with red polish. “But just those twoand took so far apart. It gave me a cold feeling. Like the devil walking over my grave.”

“You think Grandmama found those pictures?”

“She found something. The month before she died, Mrs. Catherine wouldn’t hardly say a word to nobody. Had a far-off look in her eyes. Hopeless.”

“Pearlie, I found some pictures of naked children hidden in the barn-in Daddy’s things.”

She looks stunned. “Mr. Luke had pictures like that?”

“Yes. But knowing what I know now, I think he did exactly what you did. He found some of Grandpapa’s pictures. But he kept them. I’ll bet he was going to confront Grandpapa with them. They might even have been what made him suspicious enough to check my room on the night he died.”

“I been looking for more pictures like that,” Pearlie says, “but I ain’t found none yet. Lord, the misery that man done caused. He’s sick, that’s what he is.”

I get up and pull the curtains away from the kitchen window. Malmaison stands majestic and silent as a royal sepulchre. “He’s not going to hurt any more children,” I say softly. “That stops today.”

“How you gonna stop him? Even the po-lice afraid of Dr. Kirkland. Lord, this place cost more than all the houses of every cop in this town put together. The mayor’s house, too. Dr. Kirkland got friends all the way up to Washington, D.C.”

“Don’t worry about it. You just promise me that if you have to get up in front of a jury, you’ll tell the truth about what you know.”

“They make you swear on the Bible, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m too old to lie with my right hand on a Bible. But you be careful. Dr. Kirkland ain’t the only sick man around here. That Billy Neal be just as bad, and he’s a lot younger and stronger.”

“Younger, maybe. Not stronger. If you turned those two loose in the woods and only one could come out alive, Grandpapa would eat Billy’s liver for supper.”

Pearlie stands unsteadily and walks to me, then hugs me the way she used to when I was a little girl. The way my mother never quite could. “You remember when I told you I quit smoking?”

I think for a minute. “Twenty-three years ago, you said. That’s when Daddy died.”

She nods, her chin digging into my shoulder. “You know why I quit that year?”

“Why?”

“Because I knew cigarettes was poison. And after Mr. Luke died, I knew you was gonna need me around to look after you. I’m just sorry I didn’t do more, baby. Sorry I couldn’t save you from all the pain you been through.” She pulls back and looks into my eyes. “You’re the strongest of all my girls. I always said that. Dr. Kirkland think you got that strength from him, but I know better. Mr. Luke was a good man, and tough when he had to be. Old Mr. DeSalle, too. Maybeoh, I don’t know. I’m just gonna pray for you, whatever prayers is worth. Maybe with the Lord’s help, you can come through all right.”

I kiss her gently on the cheek, then unlock the door and walk out into the sunlight.

My grandfather’s Lincoln is still parked beside Pearlie’s Cadillac. As I stare at the two cars, I sense someone watching me. Turning to my right, I see Billy Neal staring down at me from the rear gallery of Malmaison.

He’s smiling.

I turn toward him and start walking, my strides long and resolute. The closer I get, the more his smile fades. By the time I’m within speaking distance, he’s scowling at me. He’s also wearing a sport jacket in the dead of summer. Looking closer, I see the butt of an automatic pistol protruding from a shoulder holster beneath the jacket.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“You’ve hitched your wagon to a falling star,” I say in a flat voice. “You should leave while you can.”

He laughs. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Follow me and find out.”