Artifacts (9 page)
Faye was worn out. In a single day, she’d lobbied her senator, played hardball with her best client, and sparred with the law. All those activities, plus piloting the
Gopher
to shore and back and driving a car to Tallahassee and back, tended to make a girl tired. Then, after that, she’d spent hours making her cherished home look like an uninhabitable dump. She’d been successful, and that was depressing in itself.
This was the kind of day when she most appreciated Joe’s culinary skills. He had no way to pay her rent. Besides, she would never have charged him for the square of ground beneath the one-man shelter he had built out of branches and palmetto fronds. Nevertheless, Joe paid his way, in his own way.
Faye hadn’t cooked a meal since she met Joe, and her grocery bill had dropped precipitously, thanks to his subsistence skills. She hardly bought more than an occasional bag of cornmeal or can of shortening—Joe subscribed to the “fried is good” school of culinary arts—yet she ate like a queen. No one could catch fish more reliably than Joe, and he promised her oysters when they came back in season. Joe picked blackberries. He gathered hickory nuts and—she still found this remarkable—he brought down ducks, squirrels, and rabbits with his handmade bow and his chipped stone arrows.
He had pestered her to let him put in a garden, but she’d been reluctant, because modern property assessments are augmented by aerial photographs. The regular grid of a vegetable garden would be patently obvious from the air. She’d relented when he showed her how he could grow vegetables in tiny clearings that just admitted enough sun to support one plant. He had adhered to her rule that his unorthodox garden had to be in a part of the island far, far from the Big House. Even Faye had to admit that a single cucumber plant, when seen from the air, looked pretty much like the start of a kudzu infestation.
Faye tucked into her meal—fried fish, pink-eyed purple-hull peas, and sliced tomatoes—and her toes curled in pleasure. It was so satisfying to see the soil of Joyeuse feeding people after all the fallow years. Good food makes the eater feel cordial to everybody, especially the cook, and it occurred to Faye that the sheriff was right about one thing. She knew very little about Joe. When they’d first met, she had hesitated, out of good manners, to question him. Months had gone by and what had passed for good manners now bordered on unfriendliness.
“Joe,” she asked, “where’d you learn to do all the things you know how to do?”
“My mama,” he said, with the country boy’s quiet assurance that his mama was the best mama of them all.
The silence hung there and festered while Faye wondered whether Joe had reasons for not talking about his past. The sheriff’s suspicions nagged at her—how well did she know this man, really? She probed again.
“You hunt and fish better than any man I know. If you tell me your mama taught you to do those things, then I’m proud to be a woman.”
“It was mostly Mama’s doing. When I was little, Daddy thought I was slow and I am. I know it. I didn’t like school and, after a while, Mama didn’t make me go, but she said I oughta be useful, so maybe I could hunt and fish. Daddy was afraid I’d shoot somebody, or run a fishhook through my thumb, but he was a long-haul trucker and he was gone a bunch. Mama took it on herself to teach me to fish. One day after we’d practiced for months and months, I took my daddy fishing.”
“How’d it go?”
“I handled the boat, picked out the bait, and set up my gear with the right hook and sinker and floater. I caught a stringerful of good-sized fish, cleaned them, and cooked them for his dinner. I was eleven years old.” Joe paused to shake a drop of pepper sauce on his peas. “My daddy cried.”
“Then did you go fishing with your dad a lot, after that?”
“Naw, Mama was the one that liked to fish. Daddy took me to Wal-Mart to get my first bow. He’s the one what taught me to shoot.”
Faye wished she could call up Sheriff McKenzie and announce that Joe was not secretive. He just didn’t answer questions people hadn’t asked. Sheriff McKenzie wasn’t around, so she asked another one.
“It must have been hard to leave your mama. What brought you here?”
“She died a few years ago, when I was eighteen, and there just wasn’t much in Oklahoma for me, no more. Daddy wasn’t hardly ever home. So I told him I’d heard about somebody in Georgia who could teach me to knap flint the old way. He thought it was a good idea, so I left home.”
A map of the United States flashed quickly in Faye’s mind’s eye. Try as she might, she couldn’t make Oklahoma be any closer to Georgia than it was. “Joe. You don’t drive. How’d you get to Georgia?”
“I’d walk a ways, then I’d find somebody who needed some work done. I’m not smart, but I’m strong.”
“And you got here—”
“Same way.”
Oklahoma to Georgia. Joe had walked the Trail of Tears. Backward. Each footfall echoed the mass removal of southeastern Native Americans to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma.
The forced exodus of the Cherokees known as the Trail of Tears—more literally translated as “The Trail Where They Cried”—had come to symbolize the experience of all Native Americans who were cast out of their southeastern homelands a half-century before the western cowboys-and-Indians conflicts immortalized by Hollywood. Lust for the gold under Cherokee lands prompted the 1838 removal of an estimated seventeen thousand people. They were herded, mostly on foot, more than a thousand miles. Nearly one in four fell victim to brutal winter weather, starvation, or the cruelty of the troops “escorting” them.
On his trek to Georgia, Joe had walked past four thousand graves.
Faye wondered if he had any idea of the significance of what he’d done. She suspected he might. No Native American grew up in Oklahoma without knowing about the Trail of Tears.
Faye was done with questions for the evening. She hoped the sheriff would give up and leave Joe Wolf alone. The idea of asking him outright, “Did you commit two murders day before yesterday?” made something inside her shrivel.
“I went this morning and consecrated the grave we found the other day,” Joe said, picking up his last fish fillet and eating it with his hands. “It felt good to help the girl rest.”
Faye didn’t know where Joe learned the burial ritual he used. She’d never had the impression that his parents had brought him up in the Creek religion, or in any religion at all. It seemed to her that he’d asked a lot of people a lot of questions, then cobbled the answers together into a spirituality that was natural for him.
Consecrating a burial Joe’s way required a pure body, a pure mind, and a substantial time investment. That morning, as she was just beginning her day of struggle—with the government, with the past, and with her conscience—Joe had drained a cup of ceremonial Black Drink.
Black Drink as Joe prepared it was no different than the Black Drink brewed by southeastern Indians hundreds of years ago. It was a noxious decoction that purified its drinker in several unpleasant ways. There was an excellent reason why the holly tree that lent its leaves to warriors needing purification was known to botanists as
Ilex vomitoria
.
After recovering from the Black Drink, Joe had returned to Abby’s islet, bringing carefully wrapped coals from his own fire. After building a fire at the head of her grave and placing clay pots of food and tobacco beside it, he had sat with Abby. Just sat and kept her company for a while. Then he had rinsed his face and hands with water that had steeped all night in sacred herbs. Once clean, he had come home.
Faye studied Joe. He looked like a man who had purified himself, then done an act of kindness for someone who could never return it—someone who would never even know that he had done it. Someday she hoped to have a face so peaceful.
Faye was glad to think that Abby was resting easier. Sometimes she wished for a little rest herself.
Douglass Everett settled into his after-dinner routine—the
Wall Street Journal
and a cigar, followed by
The Micco Times
and a glass of brandy. The
Times
featured another front-page spread on the Seagreen Island murders and his name was listed again alongside Cyril Kirby’s as a bystander to the discovery.
Seeing his name in the paper, even a low-circulation local paper, still made him feel like an impostor, an upstart sharecropper’s kid. Seeing himself listed as a witness to the discovery of the Seagreen Island killings made him feel ill.
He studied the way “Fredrick Douglass Everett” looked on the page. He had hated his name since the day in fifth grade that he realized his mother’s error. She had wanted him to have something to live up to, so she’d named him after the most famous black man she knew, but she could neither read nor write. She relied on the nurse to fill out her baby’s birth certificate. The woman had left the second
e
out of Frederick, then, inexplicably, she got the double
s
in Douglass right.
On the day he learned who Frederick A. Douglass was and how his name was actually spelled, the former Fredrick became Douglass forever and ever, and woe to the person who forgot his new, true name. Except for Abby. She had called him Fred all her short life, and the hated word was lovely when it came from her lips.
For decades now, Douglass had had the wherewithal to correct the spelling of his name. He hated the fact that it displayed his mother’s ignorance to the world, but correcting it would suggest to that same world that he was ashamed of her. Douglass lived with the name because he revered the memory of his parents. He would have traded ten years of his life for them to see the success he had achieved.
He sipped his brandy and pored over the details of the Seagreen Island killings, doing his habitual accounting. Two dead people, both white. A white sheriff, a black undersheriff. The witnesses were a small throng of fairly random racial makeup that consisted of archaeologists, reporters, and political hangers-on. And, praise God, the investigators treated everyone absolutely evenhandedly. When the sheriff and his coterie had arrived, Douglass had felt it again, the fear of being accused just because he was a black man and he was handy. No matter that he was middle-aged and respectable and wealthy, he still felt that shadow.
But this time he had been wrong. He’d been wrong a lot lately. Times change slowly, but they do change. He wished his parents were alive to see it.
It was dark before the dishes were done, and Faye wasted no time getting to bed. Exhausted from her efforts to deface Joyeuse so she could save it, she knew she should go to sleep, but she had a late date with William Whitehall. The fact that she had found his journal tucked into the rafters, the very bones of her home, made her feel a connection between the long-ago man and this very old house—a connection that she wasn’t sure was real. Still, the adventure of reading his life story was worth wasting a few hours of sleep and a few dollars’ worth of battery power.
***
Excerpt from the diary of William Whitehall, 8 August, 1798
It has now been two months since Henri LaFourche, a cultured and educated Frenchman, gathered his men, his horses, one of my horses, & two bagsfull of horsefeed that belong’d to me. They were headed Southwest when they left and, had I so chosen, I could have track’d them down & kilt them. I have the skill to do it. I have Just Cause. No jury South of Philadelphia would convict me.
On his last night with us, the blackguard LaFourche sat in my house in front of my hearth & proposed an agreement—not a Marriage agreement, but a business agreement. He ask’d to buy my Appaloosa Horse. There is no place nearby for him to replace those he has worn out on his journey. In truth, I found his request a personal affront, for Henri knew full well that I needed the Horse & he knew full well that I could replace it no more easily than could he. He simply consider’d the needs of my Family to be unimportant.
After I declined his offer, he removed his ring, a heavy gold band set with a large ruby, & laid it on the table. I was befuddled. No man who meant to ask for a woman’s hand in Marriage would begin the negotiations with talk of an insulting horse trade.
I watch’d stupidly as he rose from his chair, gestured at the ruby ring, and said, “Ten days’ room and board for me & for my men. Here is your payment.” Then Henri LaFourche walk’d out of my house & out of my Daughter’s life.
Last week was consumed by a walk to Mr. Gottlieb’s trading post. ’Twould have been easier on my rheumatism to ride, but the blackguard LaFourche left me short on horseflesh. Wisdom required that I save my remaining Horse to pull an overloaded wagon on a long journey. I fear she was not bred for it.
Mr. Gottlieb was as excitable as ever, but this time with Cause, for a letter had come for Mariah, who never received mail in her life. He was anxious for me to open the letter so he could read it. I did not let him; I’d not have considered reading it myself, but the address was in the blackguard’s hand. My actions that day depended on Henri LaFourche. There was no help for it. I open’d my Daughter’s most private correspondence.
LaFourche begged pardon for his hasty departure & offer’d a miniature self-portrait as a memento. It flutter’d to the dirt. I would have ground it under my heel, but it was and is Mariah’s. She may do with it as she pleases. The ruby ring, however, he gave to me. I have disposed of it as profitably as I could in order to provide for LaFourche’s other memento. Mariah carries his Child.
Our possessions are loaded on the wagon & we are camp’d by a clear shallow stream. If the value of a homestead can be measured in sweat, then we are leaving behind a great estate indeed. Here in West Florida, a man can work up a sweat while eating his Christmas dinner, yet in such a climate, Susan and I forced the Earth to feed us. We are older now, but we are wiser too, so I suppose we can do it again.
LaFourche’s ruby ring brought a fine price, as did our home & land. With the proceeds I have purchas’d a large piece of property—a Gulf Island, in fact—that will provide us with a livelihood & will someday be an inheritance more suitable for Mariah’s child than our humble farm. It is fitting that LaFourche’s ruby ring provides a future for his Heir, since he himself does not chuse to do so. Were I Mariah, I would sell the blackguard’s portrait and add the proceeds to the Child’s estate, even if it were worth no more than the paper it is drawn on.
Purchasing an uninhabited Island has the added benefit of giving Mariah a place to hide. Should she one day decide to move back to more populated Lands, her claims to Widowhood will be quite plausible, as there will be no witness to verify a wedding or its lack. After a time, even the Child’s birth date will be arguable. Our exile need not be permanent. Yet, I find myself stimulated by the challenge of starting again, & I am not alone. Last night, my Susan took my hand as we lay side by side in our bed. Today as our wagon wheels stirred sandy dust & the branches of live oaks met in a canopy over our heads, she look’d into my eyes and smiled.
