Gideon (45 page)

But the most amazing thing about her appearance was her face. The woman had to be in her eighties. Yet there was not one line on her forehead. Her cheekbones were high and perfect. Her lips were thin slits and her mouth was small and narrow. She had the face of a beautiful young girl.

And then there was her eye.

The right one was unblemished. Its deep brown color had a penetrating brightness as she stared at them. But her left eye had a ring around it, perfectly round and dark black, darker than her deep brown skin. Carl remembered the description in the diary he had read, and it was exactly accurate. This ring on her face practically glowed as it circled her cheek and nose.

She rocked slowly back and forth, refusing to look up at the intruders, and continued to sing:

“The chords of death compassed me
And the straits of the netherworld got hold upon me
I found trouble and sorrow
But I called upon the name of the Lord.”

“Clarissa May,” Luther Heller said, “I’d like you to talk to these two people. I believe it’s time to tell what it is you know.”

“Don’t talk to nobody,” Momma One-Eye said. “Never talked to nobody.” Her speaking voice was coarse. It whistled through her teeth. But there was great strength in it.

“Ms. Wynn …” Amanda began.

“Shouldn’ta brought ’em here,” Momma said. “Shouldn’ta brought ’em. When white people find me. I’ll be a dead woman.”

“Not these white people, Momma.”

“I be a dead woman now.” The tiny black woman now looked up for the first time. She was trembling, and a tear ran down her cheek.

“Momma,” Amanda said, “we need your help.”

“You wanna know what I seen. What I know.”

“Yes.”

“I seen the devil’s work. I seen the devil come to earth and be killed by another devil.”

“No, Momma,” Carl told her. “There was no devil. All you saw was people doing what they do when they’re at their worst.”

“Nobody knows what I seen. Nobody knows what I know.” She nodded at Luther Heller. “Not him. Not my children. Not my grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Nobody knows. And I’ll never tell. Can’t tell ’cause I’ll be dead.”

“
We
know,” Carl said.

“Can’t know. I’m the only one seen it.”

“Would you like us to tell you?” The old woman said nothing, so Carl went on. “You were a midwife. And you helped deliver a baby a long time ago. Almost fifty years ago.” The woman’s face was impassive. Carl found himself staring at the magnificent eye as he spoke. “This baby we want to know about, you delivered him late at night, around midnight. You never saw the father, just the mother and her first son. That boy was nine years old. He’s the one who went to get you when it was time for the baby. Do you want me to describe him for you?”

Momma One-Eye nodded, as if in a trance, so Carl told here everything he could remember. He described what the woman he’d named Rayette looked like, her hair, her body, her voice. Then he did the same for the boy, Danny. He described what the birth of Rayette’s second child was like—the crying, the screaming—and he told about the baby’s abnormal behavior in the weeks and months after he was born. When he was done, the woman known as Momma One-Eye was staring at him in amazement, her thing mouth agape.

“That baby, he was a devil-child.”

“No, Momma. He was just severely retarded. We think it was caused by the pollution from the old factory, the rubber mill that used to be here.”

She looked him in the eye now. And she was no longer trembling. “The one that smelled so bad?”

“That’s the one.”

“How much more you know?” Momma One-Eye demanded. “What you know after that?”

“We know just about everything.”

“You know what that boy did? What he did to his baby brother?”

“Yes. We know what he did.”

“Then what you need me for? You know everything. What you need from Momma? You need to kill her? You gonna take Momma and kill her to save that little white boy?”

Carl realized he was gripping his hands together. His upper body was tilted forward, and he was barely breathing. “We won’t hurt you at all, Momma. We want to
stop
anyone from hurting you.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“We know
what
happened, Momma. But we need to know where. We need to see that baby’s grave. And we need to know who.”

The old woman closed her eyes. Carl was certain she was remembering the events of years ago. He was sure she was picturing exactly what she had seen and heard.

“They didn’t know I was there,” she said. “But I was outside. I was worried about that child. Not the baby. The boy. That boy was smart. He was a special boy, he was. I liked that boy very much. So there I was. It was a hot night and I was outside, goin’ to check up on the boy ’cause his momma, she wasn’t even there … He was such a smart boy …”

Her eyes closed again and she seemed to be drifting away, lost in her memories. “I watched them. She carried that little baby in her arms. Her own little baby. Wrapped in a blanket, he was. A blue blanket. Sometimes I see that blue blanket in my dreams. She carried and he dug. Dug deep, but she kept tellin’ him to go deeper. And then finally they put that baby in the ground. They put him in a box and covered him up with earth and then they left. They left right after that and never came back.”

“Help them, Momma,” Luther Heller said. “Help
us
.”

“Nobody knows this. All these years, ain’t nobody knows.”

“It’s time,” Carl said. “People
have
to know.”

Momma One-Eye closed her eyes, began rocking in her chair again, and the same tuneless song came out of her mouth:

“My soul is bowed down
They have digged a pit before me
They are fallen into the midst thereof themselves
My heart is setfast, O God, my heart is steadfast
I will sing, yea, I will sing praises
Thy glory be above all the earth.”

The old black woman’s eyes opened again. She waited until the rocking chair stopped moving of its own accord. Then she said, “I can show you.” Her gravelly voice whistled through her teeth, but to Carl and Amanda it was the sweet voice of an angel. Especially when she stood up from the rocker and spoke her final sentence: “I can take you there.”

“Mother,” he said softly, low enough so he couldn’t be heard.

“Tommy. I’ll be a son of a bitch if this isn’t early even for you. Don’t tell me they’re keepin’ you busy up there.”

How long ago had he had that conversation? Months? Weeks? No, he remembered now. It was less than a week. Five days ago. Five days since he’d discovered that everything he thought he knew about life was an utter and complete lie.

“Have you looked in your safe lately, Mother?”

“My safe? Why in the world would I—”

But then she understood and had gone to look. Slowly, crippled by the arthritis that was the first thing ever in her life to slow her down, he had gone. And when she finally returned and picked up the receiver, she told him the diary was still there. Everything was still there. The tattered papers she’d saved from his childhood, the history she’d scrupulously and meticulously chronicled. The records. The proof …

“It’s still there, son,” she said. “But it’s been moved.”

He didn’t say anything for a long, long time. When he did finally speak, his legendary glibness failed him. “Are you sure?” was all he could manage. “Are you positive, Mother?”

“I haven’t been sure of too many things in this life, Lord knows. But I’m sure of this. Somebody had it, somebody saw it.” And when he still said nothing, she said, “I’m sorry, Tommy. I’m sorrier than I could ever tell you.”

“Mother,” he said. And suddenly he was terrified that he was going to cry. He’d never let his mother see him cry, not even when he was a young boy. And he wouldn’t allow it now, either. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw until he was sure he could speak without weakness and fear permeating every word. “I’d like to ask you a question. Just one thing I’ve never asked you before. But I’d very much like an answer.”

“What is it, Tommy?”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, son. Why what?”

“Why did you do it? Why did you write it all down? And dear God, why did you keep it?”

She didn’t hesitate before answering. These were questions he’d asked herself a million times. And she knew the answer. “Because,” she told him, “all these years, it’s the only thing I had to let me know I was really alive.”

Had it really been days since they’d spoken? He wanted to talk to her again. Now. To call her up and tell her that it was all right. That he understood, really and truly. Understood and forgave her, which of course, he did, because he had never loved anyone, not even Elizabeth, the way he’d loved his mother. Wilhelmina Nora Anderson. He adored her. Always had. When he was young and she was weak, he’d let her lean on him. More than that, too. Much, much more. He’d done whatever she wanted. She never even had to speak about what she desired. He always knew. And he would do whatever it took to make her wishes come true. And when she got older and grew strong, when she’d finally used her beauty to marry well, she had reciprocated. She knew what
he’d
wanted, knew what he believed was his destiny. So she made the ultimate sacrifice: She had reinvented herself so he could become president of the United States.

It wasn’t hard, not really, was it, Mother?
They’d had no roots. They had not lived in any one place long enough to be remembered. And those who did remember—her family, her husbands, her lovers—were dead or drunk or too stupid to ever understand what had happened. There were no official records, not really. There’d been enough name changes along the way to hide almost anything. All you had to do was give
enough
of the truth. The drunken father. The first husband. And the second. And the last one. The moving from town to town. The drinking. It made for a colorful tale: the southern beauty who’d pulled herself up from the mud to mold and shape the future president. She’d even written her autobiography. Gotten seven figures from the most prestigious publisher in the business. And when it was published, she became the adored heroine of millions of women around the world for having survived her past. No much more than merely having survived. Having
triumphed
over her past.

Of course, it was a past that didn’t really exist. Or rather, existed up to a point.

A rather important point, however.

Thank you, Mother,
he thought
. Although it hasn’t been too bad for you, has it? You’ve lived well as I’ve moved on. You shared the spotlight and found your niche and your fame. You could sit in the best box at the racetrack, and you had heads of state fawn over you. But nonetheless I hope you know that I thank you. For what you gave up. And for staying silent. For loving me, deeply, in your own way.

For letting me love you.

And so I forgive you …

President Thomas Frederick Adamson opened his eyes and the roaring in his head stopped. For a moment he was bewildered. Where was he? Who was talking? Then he realized:
Oh, yes. Budget meeting
. It had been scheduled weeks in advance. They had to take a position on defense spending and the level of cuts being made. His secretary of defense was arguing now. He was angry. He thought the cuts were too deep. They would not only demoralize the military, they could cripple it.

The secretary was droning on, and Tom Adamson stopped listening.

He was thinking of the other love of his life.

Elizabeth.

There was a story about her in the paper yesterday. Front page of the
Washington Journal
. He had read it with such pride. The headline had been “The Most Admired Woman in the World.” It was true. Elizabeth had become quite influential, even powerful. But it was not through any official means. It was through her compassion for other people, through her good deeds. She was the best speaker he had ever heard, far better than he was. She could stir a crowd’s passions, could tap into their hearts and their souls. But then, she was smarter than he was. She always had been. He knew how much she had sacrificed to help him get to where he was. They had long ago decided to think of his career as
their
career, his goal as
their
goal. She’d been one of the best legal minds in the country, but she’d given up her practice long ago to oversee his campaigns and to make sure there was never any cry of conflict of interest. Like his mother, she had given up her life for him, he knew that.

He understood. He really did. He understood everything she had done and everything she would do from this point on.

Would she understand him as well? What he was about to do and why?

Tom Adamson couldn’t stay in this meeting any longer. It was unbearable. Someone else was yelling now. His chief of staff. A total loser. That had been a mistake. He was too young for the job, too inexperienced. That was one of his flaws as chief executive, he knew. He’d valued loyalty over experience.

He should have realized there was no such thing as loyalty. There was only …

There was only oneself.

The president stood up from the table now and bolted. The rest of the people in the room were stunned. Tom Adamson didn’t care. He ran down the hallway, turned toward the outer office that led to the Oval Office. His secretary said something as he staggered by. He didn’t hear the words, didn’t respond. Just went into the office he hated so much. The room that had always made him feel so inadequate, and sat down in the chair at his desk.

He knew that this was the moment. He had to decide now. He had to find the strength now or forever live with his weakness.

President Tom Adamson had crossed over into total despair and madness as he opened the top draw to his desk and tried desperately to think of something he would miss after he left his world behind.

When it came to him, he smiled with great relief.

Her flowers,
he thought.
Elizabeth’s flowers.

Then the despair was over.

The madness was just beginning.