A Long Time Gone Page 2

  His eyes softened, and I knew then that I’d lost more than just time in the last nine years. “You’ve been gone awhile.” His gaze drifted to our mother in her cocktail dress and high heels and something icy cold gripped the area around my heart.

  Before I could say anything, the other man stepped forward. Tripp Montgomery was as tall and slender as I remembered him, short brown hair and hazel eyes that always seemed to see more of the world than the rest of us. He wore khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt and a tie, which only added to my confusion. I looked at him, wondering why he was there and hoping that somebody would tell me this was all a dream and that I’d soon awaken in my bed in the old house with Bootsie kissing my forehead.

  “Hey,” Tripp said, as if he’d just delivered me to my front steps after school. As if the earth had somehow stopped spinning in this corner of the world and everything was the same as when I’d left it. Except it wasn’t.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, plucking at one of the random questions I needed to ask to make the ground beneath my feet stand still.

  His face remained impassive, but I thought I saw a flicker of what looked like sympathy pass through his eyes. “I’m the county coroner.” He stepped back, allowing my gaze to register the gaping hole in the ground that the intricate root system of the giant cypress had once inhabited. The grass around the edges was blackened, wood and bark sprinkled like confetti around the wounded earth. And there, nestled inside the dark hole like a baby in its crib, were the stark white bones of a human skeleton.

  My hands began to shake, my vision marred by mottled dots of light. I struggled to focus as I stared at the skull, unable to look away.

  I forced myself to look at Tripp and saw that he was staring at my hands as if he knew why, like he’d always known everything about me without my ever having to open my mouth. I tried to clench my fingers into fists, but they were shaking too hard. The dots of light had now become streaks across my vision, and I tried to focus on Tommy again, but my mother’s voice broke through the pounding in my head.

  “Have you taken my car keys again, Vivien? I can’t seem to find them.”

  I looked down at the dirty white of the forehead bone, now shimmering in the bright morning sun as if it were trying to speak to me. I started to say something, but the light suddenly dimmed and I closed my eyes as I felt myself falling, still seeing behind my eyelids the glow of white bone against dark, dark earth.

  Chapter 2

  Adelaide Walker Bodine

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  JUNE 1920

  Everybody has secrets. Even thirteen-year-old girls like me who nobody paid any attention to, like we were supposed to be too busy with our dolls and pretty dresses and birthday parties to notice that the judge’s wife spent a lot of time alone in her house with different traveling salesmen, or that Mr. Pritchard, who owned the drugstore, always gave you free penny candy if you came in around closing, because

  he was too drunk from drinking bottled medicine by then to make change.

  And I knew that my mama had jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge when I was ten because my daddy had been killed in the war and she just couldn’t take to life without him. I wish she’d asked me first, because I would have reminded her that she still had me. But I couldn’t say that to anybody, since I wasn’t supposed to know anything important. So I spent a lot of time outside halfway closed doors just so I could know what little I did.

  My best friend was Sarah Beth Heathman, whose daddy was the president of the Indian Mound Planter’s Bank on Main Street. I didn’t have many friends on account of what my mama had done, like other parents were afraid that something like that might be catching. I was told that Mama had fallen into the river on accident, but I guess nobody else believed that either.

  But it worked out, since Sarah Beth didn’t have many friends, either, on account of her parents being so old. They were old when they had her, and even older now that she was fourteen. Maybe that’s why Sarah Beth was so wild, or at least that’s what Aunt Louise called her. But it seemed to me that whatever crazy idea Sarah Beth came up with, I was always happy to go along.

  On a Wednesday in late June, I was sitting under the cypress tree in my backyard filling my lungs with the thick warm air while pretending to read a book. I’d been staring at the back of my house, wondering why it was still yellow when everybody else’s house was white. I’d been told my great-grandmother had come from New Orleans, had the house painted and the odd castlelike turret added to one side, then given birth to a daughter before leaving it all behind to return to New Orleans. When the house became mine—and it would, because Aunt Louise told me that some papers meant that the house was always inherited by the oldest girl—I promised myself that I would paint it white.

  I sometimes wondered if Uncle Joe—my daddy’s brother—and Aunt Louise and my cousin Willie ever thought it should be their house, since they were stuck taking care of me and forced to live there. I’d hear my aunt fretting about the house needing painting or another leak in the roof, but then she’d look at me like I was a kitten drowning in a puddle and she’d get all choked up, and hug me like I was the only thing that mattered. She loved me like I was her daughter, and I appreciated that. But she wasn’t my mama. My mama had walked off the Tallahatchie Bridge and left me behind.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon, the men had all gone back to work after dinner, and the women were sponge-bathing themselves before collapsing onto sofas or beds in a cloud of flowery perfume and baby powder. A horn honked in the front drive, and I ran to find Sarah Beth in the backseat of the family’s Lincoln, their driver, Jim, behind the wheel.

  “Want to go to a picture show?” she asked, smiling sweetly through the car window.

  We’d already seen Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde three times. I should have known that she was up to no good. Jim dropped us off at the theater, and Sarah Beth waited for him to drive away before she told me her plans.

  Twenty minutes later, I was wishing I’d said no. The sun was hot enough to burn the wings off a mosquito, and I could feel it prickling my scalp under my hair. Aunt Louise called it strawberry blond, but it was still just red to the Barclay twins, who always wanted to rub it for good luck before a baseball game.

  I tramped through the tall grass behind Sarah Beth, keeping my face down to avoid getting more freckles. I’d be grounded for sure if Aunt Louise counted one more than I’d had the night before. She’d told me that all the women on my mama’s side of the family were great beauties, and that I just needed a little more time to grow into my looks. But when I looked at myself in the mirror, I knew it would take more than just time. Aunt Louise still wore corsets and hadn’t bobbed her hair, so I knew better than to listen to her about beauty.

  “Are we almost there?” I asked for the third time, noticing how the pale skin on my forearms had started to turn pink.

  “Almost. Stop being such a baby.”

  I stopped for a minute to catch my breath, feeling the sweat run down between my shoulder blades. I glared at the back of Sarah Beth’s head full of dark brown hair and skin that never freckled or burned. I wondered how I was going to explain how I got sunburn sitting in a theater.

  “Where are we going?” I shouted at her. We’d walked through the downtown area of Indian Mound and straight through a neighborhood of run-down houses that both of us had been promised a switch to the backside if we ever wandered into, then right through the other side, where tall Indian grass separated the town from the cotton fields. I looked down at my dusty shoes and considered for a minute that I should take them off along with my socks and go barefoot. But chigger bites on my ankles would be a lot harder to explain to Aunt Louise than dirty shoes.

  Sarah Beth reached a dirt road and headed down it, and I followed, because I didn’t have anything better to do. She stopped and waited for me to catch up and it took me a minute to figure out where
we were. There was a low iron fence in front of us with an open gate hanging catawampus from a single hinge like a dog panting in the heat. Somebody had tried to keep the grass cut, but long strands of it stuck out from the bottom of the fence.

  I looked up, recognizing the back of the old Methodist church. People went to the new church closer to town now, and I’d never thought to wonder what they did with the old one. Which was nothing, I guess, but leave it be.

  “This is a cemetery,” I whispered, afraid I might wake somebody up.

  Sarah Beth rolled her eyes. “Of course it is. It’s the best place for secrets.”

  Pretending not to be afraid, I followed Sarah Beth through the gate to where rectangle-shaped gravestones sat upright in rows like teeth. In the back corner, separated from the stone markers with a low metal chain, were rough-looking wooden crosses, each with a hand-painted name and dates. Some had little messages on them like “Gone but not forgotten” or “In the hands of Jesus.”

  Sarah caught me looking at them. “Those are for the coloreds. They don’t have money for nice markers, so they make their own.” She began walking down one of the rows, being careful not to step on top of any of the graves. Everybody knew that was really bad luck, and that the angry spirit would follow you back home. I carefully placed my feet where hers had been. I figured I had enough spirits at home to worry about bringing home another.

  “Why are they in the corner like that?”

  She stopped, then turned around to look at me. With an exasperated sigh, she said, “Because they’re colored.”

  I stared at her back as she kept walking, thinking about all those bodies buried in the ground and how once you became all bones it probably didn’t matter what color your skin had been.

  Sarah Beth stopped, squatting next to five tiny stones stuck right next to one another. A rosebush had been planted at the foot of the middle one. It was clipped and the dirt around it didn’t have any weeds, so it looked like somebody came by pretty regular-like.

  A yellow jacket lifted off a dandelion to buzz close to me and I jerked back with a little scream.

  “Shh,” Sarah Beth hissed, her finger across her lips.

  “Bees make me sick,” I hissed back. “If I get stung you’ll have to carry me to Dr. Odom before I stop breathing. And then you’ll be sorry you yelled at me.”

  She frowned, then turned back to the stones while I moved to stand behind her, avoiding the dandelions just in case there were more bees.

  My eyes moved from one stone to the next. Each had the same last name—Heathman—and each of them had only one date, going from 1891 through 1897 like some kind of filing system.

  “That’s your last name,” I said to Sarah Beth, trying to sound observant and intelligent, which was normally her job.

  She rolled her eyes. “I know. That’s why this is a secret.”

  I looked at her silently, afraid to open my mouth so that she’d know that I had no idea what she was talking about.

  With the same kind of exaggerated patience that Aunt Louise showed when she was trying to tell me why I couldn’t roll up my dresses on hot days or cut my hair, she said, “These are my brothers and sisters. I know it. The last one, Henrietta, died nine years before I was born. Mama always calls me her miracle baby, and now I know why.”

  “There’re lots of Heathmans in Indian Mound. How d’you know they’re not cousins or something?”

  “I wrote down every Heathman in town and there are no aunts, uncles, cousins, or anybody who would have been old enough to have babies that were the ages of these babies. Except for my parents. That’s why I’m the miracle baby. Don’t you remember that Bible story Mrs. Adams told us in Sunday school about Abraham’s wife, Sarah, who had a baby even though she was old? Just like my mama!”

  “But why wouldn’t your mama have told you about your brothers and sisters?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it makes her too sad.”

  “Have you looked in your family Bible? Every baby born in the family is supposed to be listed in the front.”

  She stared at me in surprise, then shook her head, making me feel very smart. “I’m not allowed to touch it. We keep it in Daddy’s study on a shelf. Mama says it’s too old for me to look at it; that’s why she gave me a new one for my birthday.”

  A slow grin formed on her face as she regarded me. “She usually takes another bath when she wakes up, and Bertha does the grocery shopping on Wednesdays. If we hurry, we could make it back and take a peek.”

  Without waiting for me, she took off at a run, and I followed her because it had sort of been my idea. She lived closer to town than me because of her daddy being president of the bank, but in the middle of the afternoon I was about to die of heatstroke by the time we ran up the steps onto the columned porch. Her house looked like one of the old plantation homes in Natchez, but it was new. Sarah Beth made fun of my house, saying it looked like it didn’t know what it wanted to be—something I knew she’d heard her mama say. I could usually shut her up by telling her that it had been in my family for more than one hundred years and would one day be mine.

  We very carefully opened the front door, then paused on the threshold. I breathed heavily as Sarah Beth put her finger to her lips, as if I needed to be reminded that if her mama caught us and told my aunt and uncle, I wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week.

  We tiptoed over the thick rug of the foyer and into her daddy’s office. It smelled like pipe smoke, a smell I liked but one I could never separate from Mr. Heathman. Sarah Beth moved directly to a bookcase behind the large desk and pulled out a thick black leather Bible.

  She placed it on top of the desk and, with a deep breath, she opened the front cover. I was a good head taller than her, so I could easily see over her head to the facing page, where two columns of names and dates were neatly filled in on the left side of the paper.

  Carefully, Sarah Beth used her index finger to march down the list of names, coming to rest on the final five in the last column. John Heathman, 1891. William Heathman, 1892. Margaret Heathman, 1893. George Heathman, 1895. Henrietta Heathman, 1897.

  Our eyes met. “See?” she said, her voice triumphant.

  I glanced down at the Bible again, a thought niggling at my brain like a gnat. “How come your name isn’t in here?”

  Her eyes got bigger as she looked down at the page, and for the first time ever she didn’t seem to have something to say. “I don’t know. Old people forget stuff sometimes.”

  I thought of my daddy’s mama, who, before she died, saw naked people in the yard all the time and kept calling me by my dead mama’s name. But Mrs. Heathman was definitely not that old, and not seeing naked people yet, either.

  We heard a footfall from upstairs, and we quickly scrambled to put away the Bible, making it to the bottom of the stairs before Mrs. Heathman appeared at the top of the steps, lines of baby powder already sticking to the creases in her arms. She was dressed to go out, in her hat and gloves, and barely had time to tell Sarah Beth to wash the perspiration off her face as she walked down the stairs before leaving for her bridge club. I was glad she hadn’t noticed the condition of our shoes and stockings or she might have thrown a fit when she saw us standing on her Oriental rug.

  We were about to sigh with relief when a sound from the kitchen doorway made us turn. Mathilda, the daughter of the Heathmans’ maid, Bertha, stood watching us. She was younger than me, about ten years old, and she never spoke a word that I knew of. Her skin was dark, like coffee with just a little bit of cream, and she had big brown eyes that always seemed to be watching. Sarah Beth called her Boo because she was like a ghost, slinking around and staring at people. And she always ran away when we spoke to her.

  “Hello, Boo,” Sarah Beth said with a smile I didn’t like, because it wasn’t really a smile meant to be nice. I was pretty sure Aunt Louise would stick a bar of Lif
ebuoy in my mouth if I ever tried it.

  Mathilda stayed where she was, watching us, and then without a word disappeared back into the kitchen. I stared at the closed door, wondering how much she’d seen and heard.

  Uncle Joe came and picked me up soon afterward, so Sarah Beth and I didn’t have a chance to further speculate on what we’d discovered that afternoon. But I couldn’t help wondering why those dead babies had all made it into the Heathmans’ family Bible and Sarah Beth had not. I looked out the car window at the cotton fields and considered all the possibilities. Everybody has secrets, I thought, thinking about my mother and how she’d jumped into the river, leaving me to always wonder what it was about me that wasn’t enough to make her stay.

  Chapter 3

  Vivien Walker Moise

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  APRIL 2013

  I woke up in my girlhood room, the sunlight shining through the pink eyelet canopy. Large butterflies the size of my head flitted around the wallpaper, the corners beginning to sag as if the insects had grown weary of flying. When I was eight and Mama left again without us, Bootsie had taken me to pick out new wallpaper, like my mother being gone was just another way of redecorating my childhood. And here it was, nineteen years after it was first stuck up on the walls, a reminder that at least on the surface, things hardly changed at all in this corner of the world.

  “Here.”

  I turned my head to the side of the bed and saw Tripp sitting in a chair and holding out a neatly pressed linen handkerchief. He’d loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves, looking more like the boy I’d known.

  When I didn’t take it right away, he said, “You’ve been crying in your sleep.”

  I closed my eyes, calling back the fading streamers of my dream, plucking at them like sticky strands of cotton candy. But they crumbled when I touched them, disintegrating until all that was left was the desolation. I took the handkerchief and held it over my face with shaking hands.