Freshwater Road (19 page)

The tall pine trees were black against the deep blue-black sky, their
guardians in the night. She thought of turning around, of apologizing to
Mrs. Owens for dragging her out of her bed to walk a dangerous road, but
something else had taken over. Now, it was more the idea of doing it, of
not caving in to the terror that lived in the Mississippi air, of not letting the disappearance of the three boys and all the other dead and disappeared
stop them. She believed Mrs. Owens felt the same thing though she never
said it.

They reached the solitary pay phone at the corner of the gas station with
its small convenience light, highlighted by the one swinging traffic light
blinking yellow all night long. There wasn't a car in sight.

Mrs. Owens took up a position a few feet away while Celeste deposited
a dime and dialed the operator, asking to make a collect call to Mr. Shuck
Tyree in Detroit, Michigan, giving her name, clear and quiet, saying the
phone number of the house on Outer Drive in a gamble that he was there.
If the music on the party girl went too current and the crowd too young,
Shuck might leave for an hour or two and stop by Alma's or go home before
heading back to the bar to close up. If he was home, he wouldn't be there
long. She heard the phone ring on the other end and prayed Shuck was
there so she didn't have to place another call. Mrs. Owens stood still a few
feet away watching the empty street. Celeste heard the clicking of the pick
up and breathed a sigh of relief. The operator announced that she had a
collect call from Celeste Tyree in Pineyville, Mississippi, for Shuck Tyree.
Her thick Mississippi accent cut "Shuck" into two syllables.

"Yeah, this is Shuck Tyree." He cut the drawling operator off, all expectation in his voice as he yelled into the phone. "You all right? Sure, I accept.
That's my daughter."

Celeste never felt so good hearing his voice. He was her home.

The operator clicked off. Celeste hoped she wasn't listening in somehow.

"Daddy. It's me." Before the words were out of her mouth, she felt the
burn of tears coming to her eyes and blinked them back.

"I know who it is." He sat on his excitement, trying to be the cool guy.
"You think I don't know who it is?"

"Thought maybe you forgot me." She joked to harness her own loneliness, knowing Shuck wasn't going to get sentimental with her or anyone
else and wasn't going to allow her to, either.

"I know you not in jail?" He questioned and dared at the same time.

"No, I'm on a corner pay phone. The lady I'm staying with, Mrs.
Owens, is here with me being the lookout." Celeste tried to put a wry
joking tone in her voice then angled herself to see down the main street of
Pineyville, acting cool and nonchalant. Street lights blazed down in front
of the County Building, the blackness just beyond it.

"You need a lookout to make a phone call?" Shuck's voice rose up in
disbelief.

"I could've come by myself." She lied. There was no way. She wouldn't be
at the phone if Mrs. Owens hadn't come along. She'd have turned around
in five minutes.

Mrs. Owens stood a few feet away, the signal light blinking yellow on
her deep brown face.

"Listen to me. You can always get on that train. Don't have to stay
there. Get on a plane. Don't make me have to come down there and kill
somebody." Shuck took a breath. "Pineyville. Of all the damned places."
The cool guy had ducked and run.

Did Shuck know about Leroy Boyd James? Is that why he said ofall the
damned places? "It's going well, really." She gave it her best pleading. That
going well helped his breathing slow to normal. No need to say anything
about the ride down from Jackson with Matt, that would upset him too
much. The only thing he'd say about Miss Sophie Lewis was that the woman
ought to pack up and get out of there. She let the going well stand.

Shuck grunted. "When's this damn thing over?"

"August. I'll be home sometime in August." She started crying, didn't
want Shuck or Mrs. Owens to know, turned herself away from the older
woman. "You tell Billy?" She sounded like a criminal talking on a phone
from behind bars, tears running down her face.

"He thinks you lost your mind." Billy didn't know her now, anyway.
He knew her to high school, then he was gone to college, and now she had
come to this place. He didn't even know she'd had a white boyfriend in
college unless Shuck told him. Unlikely.

"I don't think he'll be living in New York long." Shuck implied that New
York was kicking Billy's behind. "Wilamena called here looking for you."
He was letting her know that he'd told Wilamena where she was.

Celeste stopped crying, wiped her face on the back of her hand.

"You know about how that went over." He was chastising her for not
staying in closer touch with her mother. She knew very well that Wilamena
didn't like searching for her.

Celeste felt the letter in her pocket, a warm weight against her body.
She hadn't called her mother "momma" since she was a little girl. The
grandmothers, Momma Bessie and Grandma Pauline, had subsumed
the mother notion, taking up so much space in her mind that "momma" receded to a small place. But, it never disappeared. Didn't even know if
Wilamena minded being called by her first name. Wilamena in her house
with no music wouldn't want to know too much about Mississippi.

"Make sure you write her." He paused. "You catch more flies with
honey." Shuck chuckled in the back of his voice.

Celeste rode over what he said, didn't want to spend her whole phone call
talking about Wilamena. "I need you to send bail money down in case I get
arrested. Send it by Western Union to the Jackson office of One Man, One
Vote. They'll take care of it from there. Five hundred dollars." She'd been told
to make this phone call while she was in Jackson, then Matt told again before
he left, and now, finally, she was doing it. She'd lived that first week wondering
if she was going to stay in Mississippi long enough to get arrested. After the
police picked her up in Jackson then let her go, she'd felt lucky. Then with Matt
on the road down, she'd missed the blows and knew she was lucky. She felt like
she was running on Shuck's luck. "This is costing a fortune, Daddy."

"I don't give a damn how much it's costing." Shuck held on and let go at
the same time. "I'll take care of the bail money. You be careful, you hear?"

She heard the pride in his voice and the warning, too, like she had from
the lady in the segregated bathroom in Jackson. "I will."

Shuck hung up.

Celeste in that one little moment felt so alone that hanging up the phone
seemed like disconnecting herself from her own life.

Mrs. Owens nodded in the direction of Freshwater Road. "All right
now, child, let's go."

Celeste figured she'd pushed Mrs. Owens right to her limits and that
she'd had all she was going to take of doing things Celeste's way. They took
off, walking fast, their footsteps cracking over the gravel, thudding on the
sand shoulder, sometimes scuffing quietly on the blacktop. Celeste listened for
truck tires, for wild men who didn't need to be drunk to do horrendous things.
She smelled pine and felt mosquitoes but didn't even bother to slap her arms,
just kept moving, making sure Mrs. Owens breathing was deep and strong.

When they arrived at the big mailbox, the house with the slanting porch
looked like home. Millions of bright country stars tiptoed across the sky,
running from the cloud banks that never stopped moving through, creating
dark rooms of night.

They headed straight for the kitchen and tall glasses of ice water. The old
woman drank hers then said goodnight, closing her curtain door behind her. Celeste stood at the opened back door. The pine trees rustled in a
slight current of air, like water sliding over old stones. At night, the aromas
of rotting wood, outhouses, and meals cooked every day for years settled
over and nearly obliterated the subtle scent of pine. Insects whistled in full
knotty cries that thinned to aches. And always, the sporadic barking of
the skinny dogs who scrammed under the houses of Freshwater Road or
hightailed it into the pines when cars and trucks rolled by on the two-lane.
They knew when to hide.

Wilamena's thin slip of a letter pressed through her pocket against her
thigh. With her mother, Celeste felt out of place, never knew how to crack
the cool veneer. She scratched and pecked at the enclosure of Wilamena
and got crumbs or nothing at all. Nobody owes you anything because of how
you look. Wilmena'd written that after Shuck mailed her photographs of
Celeste dressed in green taffeta for the junior prom. She'd responded in
a phone call admiring the dress and Celeste's hair, then ended with that
deflating scold. Finally, Celeste surrendered to her mother's coolness, let
her be, held close to Shuck.

She locked the back door, turned out the kitchen light, and went to
her room. She was relieved. The walk and the phone call had given her
energy. Had she not bathed naked, had she not gone to the phone, she never
could've stayed in this house for another week, forget until August. Some
prisons were worse than others. She pulled the sweat-damp letter out of her
pocket. The return address was written on a beautiful linen envelope, the
tiny numbers marking a house she'd never seen and a street name she only
knew from the upper corner of other envelopes. Wilamena would berate
her for going to Mississippi in the first place. After that, the invitation to
New Mexico would sit like a sour candy at the end of a bad meal. She put it
under her underwear in the dresser drawer as if it were a treasured heirloom
to be touched ever so delicately, not breathed on, not dropped or dirtied,
polished only with the softest of cloths. Wilamena in a glass cabinet with
the door locked. She needed support, encouragement, and the strength to
see the summer through, not lectures about her decision to do this work.

The next day when Reverend Singleton left her alone in the church while
he went to run an errand, two children came in as quietly as if they were
ghosts. The girl, with blond curly hair and blue-gray eyes set in a reddish
brown face, handed Celeste a piece of paper with a note introducing them
as Labyrinth and Georgie. She read the names over, said them to herself, wondering if the child had any idea at all of what her name meant. The girl
had a dare in her eyes, so Celeste figured she must know something of her
name's impact on people. The boy and the girl had no resemblance to each
other at all, he being dark with intense brown eyes. The note said that their
mother, Dolly Johnson, or her sister, would come back for them around
noon. The more she looked at the girl, the more she understood what a
brilliant stroke it was to name this strange-looking child Labyrinth.

When Reverend Singleton returned, Celeste begged him to ring the bell
in celebration of the beginning of Pineyville's Freedom Summer project
and he did, laughing and protesting that he hoped the Negro people who
heard it wouldn't think the place was on fire and come running with their
buckets. Dolly Johnson's sister honked her car horn around noon, and the
two children ran out the door yelling back to Celeste that it was their aunt
come to get them. No lingering there that first day. And no wonder. They
were the only children in the freedom school class so far.

On the ride home, Reverend Singleton told Celeste that Labyrinth and
Georgie had different fathers and that Labyrinth's father was Percival Dale,
the white grocery store owner in town. Georgie's father was a Negro man
named Hiram who Dolly had met in Hattiesburg, where she went around
with him for a while. When she got pregnant with Georgie, Hiram took off
for California. In his defense, Reverend Singleton said, Hiram had found
work there and sent money on a semiregular basis for the care of his child.

Dolly worked for a white family over in Hattiesburg, and was doing all
right considering the situation of most Negroes in that part of Mississippi.
Everyone suspected that Mr. Dale had secured her job for her. It was also
rumored that he periodically sent bags of groceries to Dolly with cash
money hidden under the potatoes. Mr. Dale was married and had white
children. She asked Reverend Singleton about the child's name, and he told
her the nuns at Charity Hospital in New Orleans had suggested it to Dolly
after they saw her child with that head of blond curls crowning brown skin.
Percival Dale had been there with Dolly for the birth, too, and of course
the nuns took notice of that. Reverend Singleton went on to tell her that
situations like that had always been quite common in New Orleans and
there were many people with strange names there. He himself had baptized
Labyrinth right there at the St. James A.M.E. Church.

If any pitiful drafts of night coolness lingered, Geneva Owens annihilated
them by turning on the stove before daybreak. The aroma of collards with
ham hocks wafted through the house, and something so sweet smelling
that Celeste's stomach rumbled like rolling thunder before she even opened
her eyes. On Sunday in Mississippi, church predominated. She hoped it
would be another step forward in her work, a baptism in the fount of
Pineyville.