Freshwater Road (39 page)

The new morning sunlight hammered through the curtains. Thank God her
room faced west. Celeste lay on her mattress on the floor, trying to remember what day it was. Just before dawn, she awakened, turned out the light,
and napped some more, dreamed. Sissy hadn't knocked on her bedroom
window. No hushed child's voice called, "Miss Celeste, I'm out here." the
house barely breathed.

Celeste arranged the flat pillows and wrapped her legs around them.
She dozed, dreaming of searching for Sissy on the wintry shores of Lake
St. Clair wrapped in a blanket of hard-grained sand. The wind flew off the
lake in frozen sheets, building the swirling snow into cotton-white dunes.
She called to Sissy, her mouth full of snow, then crawled on frozen knees
to the last place Sissy could've gone. To the water's edge.

She woke, the heat of the day rising and the sound of a car coming to
a graveled finish in front of the house. Good, she thought. A visitor. She
smelled baking biscuits and crept to the window. Reverend Singleton, hat
in hand, no jacket, white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, tieless, closed his car
door. Across the road, bluebirds flitted in deep pink crepe myrtle, and black
crows marched in single file along the power lines. Reverend Singleton's
hard-bottomed shoes struck the rickety front steps at a slow pace. He
knocked on the outside screen door.

Mrs. Owens came from the back of the house. Celeste heard the small
flat clank of the hook and eye being released and of Reverend Singleton
stepping onto the porch out of the sun. Their voices were submerged in the splash of water as she quickly washed her face in the basin and brushed her
teeth. Reverend Singleton and Mrs. Owens sounded as they did on the
morning when she'd first heard them speaking together in the kitchen, but
more somber.

"Celeste, Reverend Singleton here, want to talk to us." Mrs. Owens
voice lifted onto a tight rope, high and breathless, just outside her bedroom
curtain.

Celeste repeated her mantra, deep sigh words: We need some luck here,
Shuck. "Yes, ma'am. I'm up." She did her daily ritual of throwing the mattress back up on the bed.

Reverend Singleton's eye whites were streaked with red lines. Orange
and brown dirt smudges pocked his shirtfront. His sleeves were rolled to
the elbows. It was crowded with three people, the rocking chair, and the
straight-backed chair on the tiny porch, and Celeste wondered if it sank
any under the weight. She felt fidgety, her hands searching for anchors,
neck locked.

"Sister Owens, might I have a glass of water?" Reverend Singleton's eyes,
usually forward-looking, direct, and strong, went sorrowful, sluggish. He
seemed too tired to insist on anything.

"I'll get it." Celeste followed the aroma of frying bacon to the kitchen.
Mrs. Owens called to her to turn the fire off under the skillet. A tin of fresh
baked biscuits sat on the other side of the stove. She got the pitcher of cold
water from the refrigerator and poured a glass for Reverend Singleton and
drank off a glass herself, looking out the back door. No Sissy in the trees.
Her dream flowed into a memory. She stood there holding the pitcher, staring out the kitchen door, not wanting to return to the front of the house.

On the porch, she handed Reverend Singleton the glass and thought of
leaving again for something else, anything, to not hear what she knew he
was about to say.

"I saw something I thought was orange in the light." Reverend Singleton
drank. The water calmed him. "Couldn't tell from a distance. Could've been
anything." He stopped to breathe, his eyes picking up life again. "Flowers.
Could've been a late-blooming flower from a yellow-poplar tree in there or
something. A lilly. Up close, it was pink."

She'd seen them, water lilies, floating on the bayou by the side of the
road going down to Sophie Lewis's house.

Their lips went dry. Mrs. Owens backed up a step, stood now in the main doorway-her house behind her, drawing her away from this news.
Celeste focused with all her might on Reverend Singleton.

"Don't you want a cup of coffee or something?" Mrs. Owens' hands
fluttered as if blocking invisible messages. Her face sank into her head, the
creases and furrows in her brow hanging in cliffs and ridges. "I'm makin'
some breakfast. You welcome." Mrs. Owens stalled, not ready to hear the
rest, trying to pull up the past, the pleasant breakfasts shared with Reverend Singleton when all seemed well. This ruined it all. Breakfast, a last meal
before death taps on the door.

"No, ma'am. I been out all night with Mr. Tucker. We been in the woods,
been... I got to get home. Thank you, though." Reverend Singleton didn't
want to say it anymore than they wanted to hear it.

"What happened?" Celeste knew by now that country people didn't ask
a lot of questions, just accepted everything. Like it was fate.

"Sissy was floating in Cataboula Creek southeast of here, her dress
caught on some tree roots." His eyes teared. "That's all I know." He finished
the water.

Celeste took his glass but couldn't move. Reverend Singleton stood just
inside the screen door, while Mrs. Owens blocked the entry to the house.
She felt stuck nearly in the middle of the leaning porch.

Shuck, what's the number when death is real? There's no good luck in it. Do
we bet on death? Is it the only sure bet going? No phones to pick up, to hear
the news from unseen faces. Everything from lips to ears with eyes to see
and arms to hold. Sissy floating in the creek. But not the faking, playful
deadman's float that kids did in summer lakes and pools back home. What
was this? A little brown girl in pink with ribbons in her hair, her dress a
water-filled balloon, her lungs new caves for tadpoles and swirling dense
water. Not splashing and playing with other children to cool their molting
skins in the deepest part of summer.

Celeste's face hardened into a mask so steely the backside of it had to
be tears. "What you think?" Now she was talking like a local, even heard
Wilamena in her mind telling her not to talk low. Said in her mind, What
do you think?

Reverend Singleton released his own tears from the corners of his eyes and
wiped them away with his hands. "They have to tell us something from over at
Morris's. You know." He'd seen her floating. His tears would not be dammed
behind any sort of mask. To see is to believe even among the faithful.

"But that's a funeral home. They don't know about investigating a
death." Celeste pushed forward with her big-city knowledge even though
that was exactly what she wasn't supposed to do. Let the locals lead. She
cornered herself near her bedroom window, wished she could crawl inside,
go back to bed.

"Mr. Tucker's in a shock." Reverend Singleton's eyes said something
else to her.

"What's he think?" Celeste couldn't stop herself. It galled her that he
was in shock now after trying to quash Sissy by degrees, the girl's child
eyes going from great question marks to empty almond shells every time
he came near. He had no right to be in shock. "He blames me?" The words
had crept together into a thought without her even knowing they were on
the move.

Reverend Singleton grew nervous and spoke fast. "Now, we know he's
not in his right mind today." Poor Reverend Singleton was caught in the
middle now, wanting this summer to be about voting rights and elections
coming and here they were stuck on the death of a child.

"Wasn't in his right mind before today." Celeste cut her eyes at no one in
particular, sat on the window ledge, praying it would hold her weight.

"Shush." Mrs. Owens threw her a look. Celeste lowered her head, a new
kind of heat coming out of her body.

"He thinks the idea of freedom school got a hold of her mind, made her
do things she wouldn't otherwise do." Reverend Singleton's hands paced
the stingy brim of his straw hat. "To him, you and the freedom school, the
thoughts about freedom, all the same thing."

"Maybe he got a hold of her." Celeste bounced up off the window ledge.
Her anger startled them. It was nothing compared to what she felt. She
wanted to punch holes in the tacked-on screen, throw the rocking chair
out on the road, kick in the ribs of the bony dogs and scream at the trees.
She wanted to run down the road and yell obscenities in front of the Tucker
house. The older people waited for her to quiet.

Reverend Singleton stepped over to pat Celeste's arm. "Don't you worry.
We'll straighten him out soon as the shock wears off."

She knew what that meant. She'd be gone at the end of the summer. That's
when the shock would wear off. Whatever breath she had left inside emptied
out. Her ears felt hot, full of cotton. Nothing down Freshwater Road looked
the same. It narrowed and shrank; the hot sun burned the life out of it.

Mrs. Owens's hands sprang to her heart. "What 'bout them boys took
Mr. Tucker's car? They mean as dirt. Maybe they did something?" Reverend Singleton didn't seem to hear Mrs. Owens's question. "They got ways
of killing a person. It's not always guns and ropes."

"Sure you right." Reverend Singleton looked at her. "Needs to be checked
thoroughly." A nervous little cough. "I sure don't know how she got all the
way to that creek down there. It's nearly ten miles."

"Maybe someone drove her down there." Celeste spit it out.

"I'ma walk down and see Mrs. Tucker soon as I get me something to eat.
She probably pretty bad off about now," Mrs. Owens said, before turning
back inside. Celeste knew the older woman wouldn't want to cry in front
of them. Kitchens were the crying rooms for women.

The minister watched Celeste. "Don't you go down there. Never. The
word's not out yet so the kids'll probably show up at the church this morning. I'll be back in a few minutes to pick you up."

"What am I supposed to tell them?" Celeste stood, her nose touching
the frayed screen, feeling like she didn't even have room to cry for Sissy.
She'd make it a short session, send them home with Sojourner Truth and
Harriet Tubman.

"Tell them Sissy's gone. Rest'll come later."

Celeste felt somewhere far back a slight relief taking shape that at least
this death wasn't another Negro man who'd fallen into the region's oldest
trap. "That creek's south of here. I just don't see why she'd be going that
way. She knows north. Nothing we talked about mentioned going south."

Reverend Singleton's look chiseled her down to the bone. "What're you
saying?"

"What I'm saying is, if the police don't investigate..." Her eyes went back
and forth from Reverend Singleton to the Tucker house down the road.

"The police don't care about some little black child floating in a stream.
The FBI either." Reverend Singleton got in his car. When he took off, a
plume of rusty orange dust billowed up and swooned back down.

The flat, horrendous truth of what he said made her tired all over again,
made her want to go back on the lumpy bed and hold the pillows between
her legs, over her ears. It wasn't that Shuck, Grandma Pauline, and Momma
Bessie hadn't said the same thing in one way or another all along. It was
different now. This wasn't some unknown person's long-ago story. Not even
a crosstown, East Side story she'd read in the daily paper. This was closer even than Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. She was a child, like the
children in the church in Birmingham, completely innocent, no threat to
anyone for any of the well-known reasons. A child who wanted to dream
herself out of this place.

"Bodies in creeks and rivers tell their own stories." Mrs. Owens was back
at the door, quiet and sad.

"Not unless somebody who knows what they're talking about gets involved." Celeste said it but didn't know if Mrs. Owens heard her.

When Reverend Singleton returned to pick her up, Celeste was standing
on the steps, her book-bag locked in her arms. He'd changed his clothes and
though his eyes looked weary, he seemed himself again. Nothing moved
on all of Freshwater Road except the car heading back for the two-lane.
Freedom Summer came first and in the whole scheme of things, Freedom
Summer meant more. Deaths had been piling up here for a long, long time.
If the movement was successful, that would change. You had to think in
terms of priorities, of long-range benefits to the whole community.

As hard as she tried to grapple with this, Sissy's death kept riding over
everything else. In her mind, the small deaths made the larger ones possible.
Protect Sissy and everything else would fall into place.

Pineyville's town center didn't let on that one of its children had been
pulled from a muddy creek. People walked in and out of the stores, pulled
newspapers out of the boxes, cruised in trucks, strolled with umbrellas
against the sun. The magnolia trees and the live oaks hadn't changed.
Mr. Tucker's Hudson wasn't parked behind the gas station.

Tony Mobley sat waiting on the front step. His unusual stillness told her
that he already knew what had happened. He got up, opened the church
doors, and out came a long-faced Labyrinth, Georgie, and the other children. Now she had to go in there and sit with them, talk with them, help
them to cope with the death of one of their own, somehow subtly give
them the tools they needed to understand how terrific parents could be
but also sometimes how dreadful. She would not be able to name names;
Mr. Tucker was respected in Pineyville.