Daughter of Ashes

EIGHTEEN

‘Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.’

Abraham Lincoln, ‘Address to an Indiana Regiment,’ March 17, 1865

When I arrived at the courthouse the following day, Fran was already at work wiping mildew off items with alcohol and storing them in clean boxes. After I suited up, I grabbed a rag and a bottle of alcohol and pitched in.

Around nine-thirty a.m., Kim showed up in the storeroom, a man in tow. From my crouched position on the floor, he looked exceedingly tall. He wore a short-sleeved plaid seersucker shirt tucked into a pair of dark gray jeans held up by neon yellow suspenders.

‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ Kim said.

Glad for any distraction from the box of shabby file folders I’d been packing, I wiped sweat off my brow with the back of my gloved hand and said, ‘Good news first.’

‘The county has agreed to thoroughly clean, repair and repaint this space.’

From behind her mask, Fran beamed. ‘Great! So what’s the bad?’

‘It means we’ll need to clear everything out by the end of next week.’ Even in the relative dark of the storage room, I could see Kim’s frown.

Looking at the chaos around me, I groaned.

‘Sorry, but to make up for it, I’ve brought Cap along to help.’

I remembered that the first time I’d talked to Fran in the High Spot café, she’d mentioned a volunteer nicknamed ‘Cap.’

‘Welcome to hell,’ I said, handing Cap a face mask and the box of rubber gloves.

‘Kim said it was a mess, but I never dreamed it’d be this bad.’ Cap pulled on the gloves, snapping them over his wrists like a pro, then adjusted the face mask over his nose and mouth.

I handed him a folder I’d wiped clean of mildew and showed him how to place it with the others in the bankers’ box. After we’d filled half a dozen boxes, I helped Cap carry them upstairs and load them onto a book truck. Once outside, we stripped off our protective gear and together we pushed the truck across the street to the office space the late Kendall Barfield had acquired. We rode the elevator up to the third floor and unloaded.

After working without air-conditioning in the summer heat, sweat had soaked the underarms and gone through the back of my T-shirt. Cap’s shirt clung damply to his back, and his cafe-au-lait skin glistened with sweat. A case of bottled water sat on the floor near the office door. I handed a bottle to Cap, then took one for myself and unscrewed the lid.

‘Thanks for your help, Cap,’ I said after taking a few refreshing swigs of water. ‘Is the “Cap” short for something?’

Cap paused in mid-sip, half standing, half sitting against the edge of one of the three metal desks in the room. ‘“Captain.” It’s a military thing.’

‘What did your momma call you when you were born?’ I asked, pulling up a chair.

‘Tommy,’ he replied. ‘Unless I was misbehaving, and then it was Thomas Edward Hazlett you cut that out right now!’

‘Hazlett! My gosh, are you related to the Josiah Hazlett who owned the old Hazlett Place? We’ve just moved into the cottage there.’

‘Hardly, ma’am. My ancestors were Hazlett’s slaves.’

I felt my face flush. ‘I’m embarrassed. I should have figured that out.’

Cap grinned. ‘We could be related, of course. No telling what mischief old Josiah was up to with the house slaves back then. But never had the time or the inclination to have one of those DNA tests done to find out for sure.’ He grinned. ‘Assuming, of course, that the white side of the Hazlett family was inclined to cooperate with the experiment.’

‘I took a walk around the property the other day,’ I told him. ‘There are a lot of Hazlett gravestones in a little cemetery near our place. I stupidly assumed they were descendants of Josiah Hazlett himself.’

The corners of Cap’s eyes crinkled in amusement. ‘Not for over one hundred years. That land had been in my family ever since our great, great grandparents were freed by Samuel Hazlett’s will back in 1846.’

‘He sounds like a good man,’ I said, ‘especially for a plantation owner back then.’

Cap snorted. ‘Depends on your point of view, I suppose.’

‘Are you the one who’s taking care of the graves?’ I asked.

Cap nodded.

‘Did you hear about the baby we found in our chimney?’ I asked cautiously.

‘Everybody did.’

‘After Dwight found the baby in the chimney, I did a little research…’ I began, picking my words carefully. ‘From the newspaper the child was wrapped in, they figure she was born around 1950 or 1951.’

Cap’s dark eyes bore into mine. ‘And…?

‘Well, one of the tombstones was for a Nancy Hazlett who died in 1952, so naturally I wondered…’ I let the sentence die.

‘Nancy was my sister.’ The desolation on his face tore at my heart.

‘I was afraid of that,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry, Cap.’

‘Nancy drowned in 1952, Mrs Ives. The police ruled it a suicide.’ He made quote marks in the air. ‘“While the balance of her mind was disturbed.” I’ve never gotten over it.’

‘Had she been depressed?’ I asked.

‘Honestly? I really don’t know. I enlisted in 1946 when Nancy was still in junior high. When I left for the army, she seemed like a happy kid to me.

‘While I was serving in Korea in 1950,’ he continued, ‘I received a telegram that Mom had died of cancer. Soon after that, Nancy lost the farm. I didn’t find that out until much later, of course. They told me it was because she didn’t pay the taxes.’ Cap began pacing from the desk to the window to the door and back again. ‘Dammit, Mrs Ives! She was just a kid! I should have been here for her, but that was impossible.’

Remembering the dates inscribed on Nancy’s tombstone, I figured she was sixteen – still a minor – when her mother died. ‘You couldn’t get compassionate leave?’

‘Leave?’ Cap laughed bitterly. ‘Early in the war, my plane was shot down. I punched out in time but spent the rest of the war as a guest of the Chinese in a POW camp near the Yalu River. We were completely isolated, had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world. And when they did give us news…’ He paused, snorted. ‘News. Hah! It was lies, all lies. We were losing the war, our government had abandoned us, our wives were sleeping with other guys…’

I swore softly.

‘Yeah, well, I survived. Lucky, huh? Forty percent of the POWs didn’t.’

Cap placed hands on both sides of his water bottle and crushed it like an accordion, then stared at the label for a long time. He was shutting down.

There was a lot more to the story, I knew, but like other war heroes, Cap seemed reluctant to talk about it. Was it the poet, Robert Frost, who once said, ‘Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, the other half those who have nothing to say and keep on saying it?’

In my experience, the vets who preened and strutted and boasted about the war were the guys who shot themselves in the foot at the motor pool. True heroes, like Cap, had experienced horrors and simply didn’t talk about it. Was that a good thing? I wasn’t so sure.

Paul and I knew Navy pilots, POWs from the Vietnam era, some who’d been isolated, tortured, starved, held in captivity for five years or more. A few had seemed stable and happy after repatriation, and then later, sometimes decades later, woke up in a padded room at Bethesda Naval Hospital under round-the-clock observation.

‘What do you suppose happened?’ I asked. ‘With Nancy, I mean.’

Cap took a deep, shuddering breath and lobbed his empty water bottle slam-dunk into a nearby trash can. ‘I always figured Nancy couldn’t live with herself for losing the family farm.’ He paused. ‘A baby? Damn. I didn’t know about the baby, of course. If she’d had the baby’s death to deal with, too…’ His voice trailed off.

The baby had to have had a father, I thought, and if Nancy wasn’t married… well, the early 1950s wouldn’t have been an easy place for an unwed mother. She was a teenager on her own, with a dead mother and her only brother a POW in a country half the world away. Who could Nancy turn to? Maybe suicide had seemed like the only way out.

A wave of sadness washed over me. ‘So you came home to no family and no farm.’

‘It wasn’t much of a homecoming,’ Cap agreed. ‘When I was repatriated in July of ’53, I was expecting Nancy to meet me at the airport.’ He swallowed hard. ‘Cliff Ames the Second showed up instead. Broke the news about Nancy. Took me to a bar. We got stinking drunk.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘Jobs were scarce after the war, especially for black vets like me. Cliff’s father was all into “Honor a Hero: Hire a Vet.” He looked out for me and two other homecoming vets, although we had to start at the bottom like everybody else, even Cliff junior.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘Cliff got stuck in the office, filing papers, licking envelopes and making coffee.’

I tried to imagine the Chicken à la King struggling with Maxwell House coffee in a can and an old-fashioned office percolator. ‘I would have paid good money to see that,’ I chuckled.

‘Me? I went to work for Clifton Farms as a chicken catcher,’ Cap continued. ‘It’s hot, dirty work. A bit like slavery, I imagine. Round up the chickens and stuff ’em in cages. Did that for a few years, then ended up working for Ames as a supervisor.

‘About ten years ago,’ Cap continued, ‘Ames junior outsourced the chicken catching to a labor contractor in North Carolina who brought his own people in, paying them half the rates he previously paid to Maryland workers.’

‘How much does a chicken catcher get paid?’ I asked, genuinely curious.

‘It’s piece work, Mrs Ives. We used to get paid five dollars and eighty cents per thousand.’

‘Per thousand?’ I tried to picture myself trying to round up even ten chickens – flapping in panic, squawking, talons digging into my arms – and failed.

‘They pay the contract workers two bucks thirty per thousand,’ Cap continued. ‘I figured that was God’s way of telling me it was time to retire.’

Less God and more Clifton Ames, I mused, wondering if Cap felt betrayed by his old friend.

I drained my water bottle and tossed it into the trash can after his. ‘So how do you spend your time now, Cap, other than helping out here?’

‘About twenty-five years ago my late wife and I bought a little farm that backs up onto the state park. The army was good to me, Mrs Ives. VA loans and other benefits kinda fell into the laps of POWs like me. The army gave us a dollar a day for every day we spent in captivity, plus twenty-six dollars a week for six months to help us get back on our feet. Since I had a job, I was able to save most of it.’

‘Do you have a picture of Nancy?’ I asked.

Cap reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. From the credit card section, he selected an old black-and-white Polaroid. A petite, light-skinned girl wearing a Sunday go-to-meeting dress and carrying a bouquet of spring flowers beamed out at me from behind the plastic laminate. ‘Your sister was beautiful,’ I told him. I studied her face, trying to see a family resemblance to the man perched on the windowsill in front of me, the afternoon sun highlighting his tight salt-and-pepper curls.

‘You’re thinking she looks white,’ Cap said after a moment.

I flushed. ‘Not really,’ I said, although I was. By the way his mouth quirked up in amusement, I didn’t think Cap was fooled by my denial.

‘Our daddy was white,’ Cap continued, ‘but he died in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was a gunner being trained on the U.S.S. Utah when it was hit.’

‘December seventh, 1941. A day that will live in infamy,’ I said, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt. ‘But,’ I continued, trying to phrase my question carefully, ‘your mom was a Hazlett. Did she keep her maiden name when she married your dad, or was he a Hazlett, too?’

Cap snorted. ‘They never married, Mrs Ives. Couldn’t.’

‘Couldn’t?’

I felt five kinds of stupid when Cap explained, ‘Anti-miscegenation laws. Until 1967, it was illegal for blacks to marry whites in the state of Maryland or anywhere else in the south, for that matter.’

‘Ah.’ I paused to let the terrible significance of that fact sink in.

‘While my father was alive, he sent money home. After he died…’ Cap shrugged. ‘No marriage, no widow’s benefits. Nothing for us kids, either. Mom went to work cleaning houses.’

The wrongness of his mother’s situation brought tears to my eyes.

‘That’s why I joined the army, actually. A steady paycheck, money to send home.’ He flashed a rueful grin. ‘An allotment of fifteen dollars a week went a lot further back then.’

I handed Nancy’s photo back. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Cap.’

Cap tucked the photograph of his sister back into his wallet. ‘Thanks. It’s OK, really. It was a long, long time ago.’