Mama Rocks the Empty Cradle (12 page)

I felt an uneasiness, a sense that something was wrong with what I’d just heard. “Mama,” I said, “Rose was lying to us—
Nightmare
is hiding Morgan.”

Mama took a deep breath. “I guess you were right about him,” she said.

“He’s got Morgan,” I repeated, “and when he saw me, he tried to hurt me.”

Daddy looked confused. “What did Nightmare try to do to you?”

I told him about the incident on the Cypress
Creek road. Daddy leaned back and shook his head. “Simone, baby, Nightmare looks spooky, but he’s harmless.”

“He tried to grab me but—”

Daddy interrupted. “You’re not the first woman Nightmare has pulled that trick on, Simone. That’s probably how he got his nickname. Fact is, that boy gets his kicks from trying to scare women. He especially likes that road because it’s a long stretch and seldom used. But he’s never hurt a soul.”

I swore. “That creep!”

Daddy grinned at the irritation in my voice. “Abe’s always warning him about doing that. He’s even threatened to lock him up, but it hasn’t stopped Nightmare.”

“Suppose I had a weak heart? He could have scared me to death,” I retorted hotly.

“Worse still,” Mama said, “Simone could have blinded him with that can of oven cleaner she found in the cabinet.”

Daddy looked surprised. “What about the oven cleaner?” he asked in a flat, hard voice.

“Next time, I’ll be
his
nightmare,” I vowed.

“What about this oven cleaner?” Daddy repeated.

I refused to answer so Mama had to tell him about how I was prepared to open the front door and greet Nightmare. “You’d better let that boy know how close he came to harm, James,” she cautioned. “Maybe if you can get him to understand how his antics might provoke somebody into hurting him, he’ll stop his foolishness.”

Daddy didn’t say anything. Instead, he nodded, his expression one of concern.

“Tell him that I resent his tricks and that he’s messing with the wrong black woman.” I was still angry.

Mama frowned. “Those were Cricket’s exact words,” she murmured.

“What?” I asked.

“I was thinking that Cricket told Birdie those same words. In Winn Dixie last Saturday.”

“Oh, yeah.” Only six days had passed but so much had happened since that incident. The anger in Cricket’s eyes when she hollered at Birdie flashed through my mind. And now she was dead and crazy Nightmare had her baby.

“Poor Morgan.” Mama shook her head. “There must be a reason that her family is hiding that baby and letting everybody in the county believe that the child has been kidnapped!”

“Maybe the whole family are a bunch of nuts,” I retorted.

Daddy’s frown was so deep, his nose wrinkled. “Nightmare is a little off. But the rest of the family have good sense.”

Mama studied Daddy carefully, as if she was trying to put her finger on something he might know but that he wasn’t clear about. “James, have you had much conversation with Nightmare?”

“We’ve talked from time to time,” Daddy said. “Why?”

“I was wondering whether he’s ever mentioned his grandmother, Lucy Bell Childs.”

“Can’t say I remember anything about his grandmother.”

“What about Cricket?” I asked.

“No, he ain’t never mentioned Cricket either.”

There was a brief silence. “Has Nightmare ever mentioned the cemetery behind Rose’s trailer?” Mama prompted.

Daddy made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “No. I never knew there was a cemetery”

Mama shook her head. “Simone, tomorrow morning when you take those pictures, Rose will be here with me, and this time she
is
going to tell me what’s behind all this secrecy!”

It was dawn, Saturday morning. I was awakened from a sound sleep by Midnight’s deep-throated woof and my father’s voice. I enjoy waking up to the fragrance of summer flowers and the chirping of sparrows in Mama’s yard. But this morning, instead of being gently prodded to get out of my bed, I was snatched up by the serious argument going on in our backyard between my father and his best friend.

Even though my mind wasn’t clear, I knew that what was going down had to do with Midnight’s not wanting to be tied up.

“Boy,” my father was saying, “you can’t keep bringing home things that don’t belong to us.”

I couldn’t tell by his frantic barks whether Midnight understood my father’s reasoning or not.

I yawned.

Midnight’s yelps grew louder. “Quiet down, boy,” I heard Daddy say. “You’re going to wake Candi and she needs her rest.”

Then my father said, “I want you back in this yard in an hour, you hear?”

Midnight stopped barking; there wasn’t even a small whimper. I wondered whether he understood his curfew.

I headed to the kitchen toward the rich smell of French vanilla coffee.

“Sounds like you and Midnight had a fight,” I said when Daddy came inside.

Daddy’s expression was sour. “Yeah,” he admitted, then poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down.

I walked behind his chair and put my hands on his shoulders and began rubbing them. “Sounds like you lost.”

Daddy’s smile was a thin grin of embarrassment. “It’s not Midnight’s style to be tied to a tree.”

“I can believe that,” I said. I poured myself a cup of coffee, then joined my father.

Daddy frowned. “Baby, your mama’s right—The thing to do is not to chain Midnight but to find where he’s been digging. Folks in this town don’t cater to desecrating their dead.”

I lifted my cup and breathed in the wonderful scent of the coffee. “Did Mama tell you that Abe is expecting a report from SLED’s lab on Monday?”

Daddy sipped his coffee. “Yeah,” he said. “I sure
wish Midnight would go back to dragging home things that I can pay for, like boots from back porches. There’s something unholy about disturbing the dead.”

“Especially dead babies,” I whispered, thinking about Morgan Childs.

T
he sun was bright. Swarms of mosquitoes, like tiny black snowflakes, floated in the humid air.

As I had done the day before, I parked my Honda behind Rose Childs’s trailer. Then I waited for somebody else in the family to come out and throw me off their property.

Instead, all was quiet. Too quiet. Mama’s plan to draw Rose away from the cemetery by getting her to come over to our house for money to help with the funeral expenses was clever. Except that Rose lived on what I considered the Childses’ commune. Lots more family would be around to hinder me from taking pictures. On my drive here, I’d decided to deal with their resistance up front, before I was
down on my hands and knees taking snapshots of the tiny, old graves.

Now, however, there wasn’t a stir from any of the mobile homes. Only the smell of green peppers and onions cooking.

There wasn’t a sound, not even a barking dog or a television set.

I stood for a moment gazing down the road at the rows of neat mobile homes, swatting mosquitoes away from my face. Then I walked over, unlatched the gate, and stepped inside the graveyard.

Out of a natural reverence for the dead, I stopped for a moment. I studied the well-groomed graveyard, the little headstones. The only sign of life was a brown spider scurrying over the headstone of Eyelet Combs, born June 1, 1969, died December 25, 1969.

I stood there, imagining Miss Lucy Bell Childs holding tiny Eyelet, who would have been wrapped in some sort of handmade clothes. Lucy Bell probably sewed something special for Eyelet’s final moments aboveground. I wondered how Eyelet looked, what uniqueness she had brought into the world. Then the thought of how short and tragic the lives of all twelve of these babies were made me shiver in sadness.

Miss Lucy Bell’s helplessness as she nursed poor, dying Eyelet and each of the other eleven infants while watching their lives slip away must have been overwhelming. I remembered Annie Mae Gregory’s remark that Miss Lucy Bell hated being called a midwife.

As I stood thinking, I saw in my mind’s eye an old
woman in a black dress that draped her from neck to ankles. Her snow-colored kinky hair would have been covered with a large white handkerchief, a custom of women in this area whenever they didn’t want to wear a hat to church. Her shoes would have been black, polished to a high gleam.

Her scent would have been of lavender extract. Miss Lucy Bell would have given each dead child its last bath in spiced water so as to present it as a sweet-smelling odor to its Maker.

I imagined her standing with tiny, lifeless Eyelet Combs in her arms. Lucy would quote a scripture, sing a song, pray.

I imagined the deep sadness in her face. A surge of compassion swept through me. To Miss Lucy Bell, this pretty, quiet place was more than a cemetery; it was a shrine of her atonement for begrudging her mission of bringing these poor babies into the world. And perhaps for being the carrier of some germ that had cut their young lives so short.

Something moved. I looked toward the trees. Nothing. “Oh, well,” I said to myself, “Mama sent me to take pictures. I’d better hop to it.” I swatted another mosquito on my neck, then pulled Mama’s Olympus camera from its case.

It must have been a half hour later when I became aware of the sound of blowflies and the smell of fresh-killed flesh. This new, unpleasant scent came from the woods. Barely visible at the edge of the trees, I saw a figure. A large, hulking man with a straggly beard.

And then, without warning, he was gone. For a second, I wasn’t quite sure I’d seen him at all. But I knew who it was.

Nightmare was trying to scare me, getting his kicks again by provoking the same kind of fear in me that he’d aroused when I was driving to Cousin Agatha’s house. But this time I wasn’t going to be intimidated by some half-witted boogeyman.

I was crouched, shooting angles of the final resting place of an infant who had died just three days before the death of Eyelet Combs. The name on the tombstone was Tony Tabard, born July 1, died December 22. Then I heard rustling in a nearby bush. I stood. But there was no sign of the hulking man who seemed to be shadowing me. I decided the sound I’d heard was just some small creature foraging in the underbrush. So I jumped and nearly dropped Mama’s camera when Nightmare said, very close to me: “What you doing in Grandma Lucy Bell’s graveyard? Who are you?”

Even though I’d expected him to show up, I froze. I scanned the landscape as if I was searching for a place to hide. The seconds stretched out. My fingers tightened on Mama’s camera. Then I took a deep breath, filling my nostrils with Nightmare’s tangy scent, one of fresh blood and sweat.

“I said, what you doing messing with some of Grandma Lucy Bell’s babies?” he repeated impatiently.

I stood up and turned to face him. “It doesn’t matter who
I
am. I know who
you
are.”

I was staring Nightmare square in the face. He did indeed look like somebody who’d been conjured up in a bad dream. He sneered, then moved toward me. A cynical grin twisted his lips. In his right hand was a knife, in his left the carcass of a fat rabbit whose abdomen had been slit. The dead animal dripped blood on Nightmare’s filthy boots.

A gust of warm air stirred and a swarm of flies rose around him and his odor. I swallowed the lump in my throat, determined to speak a lot more confidently than I felt. “Just who do you think you are?” I demanded. “And where do you get off scaring women? Don’t you know that you could make a person hurt you or themselves when all you’re doing is having some stupid kind of fun?”

Nightmare stared at me with flat brown eyes. Then he wiped his brow with his right hand, the hand with the knife. “I done ask you once, what you doing messing with Grandma Lucy Bell’s babies?” But his voice had moderated a little, as if he’d sensed my determination not to be frightened off.

“I’m not doing anything that would interest you,” I snapped. I took a step toward the open gate.

Nightmare’s dark eyes instantly filled with suspicion. He moved toward me. “Nobody suppose to be messing with these babies,” he said.

I decided not to say anything. I’d just wait until he grabbed for me, then I’d give him a good jab directly into his stupid eyes. But then I had an idea. “Listen, you creep, I’m James Covington’s daughter,” I said.

Nightmare stopped cold. He stared as if making
up his mind whether I was telling him the truth. Then, lowering his knife, he stepped back. “Mr. James sent you for his venison, didn’t he?” he asked.

“No, he did not,” I answered.

He wiped his nose, then offered me the carcass. “He sent you for one of my rabbits?”

“No. My father didn’t send me for anything.” I put my hands on my hips. “Listen, you tried to scare me on the road to Cypress Creek the other day and I want you to know that I didn’t appreciate it. If you do that to me again, I’ll ram my tire jack down your throat.”

A flicker of satisfaction crossed Nightmare’s ugly face. “You’re scared now, ain’t you?” he asked.

“Hell, no!” I snapped, shaking my head. I turned and strolled out of the cemetery. Behind me, Nightmare laughed. “This creep is really crazy,” I muttered under my breath. But I kept walking.

Through his laughter, Nightmare called out: “Mr. James’s gal, you’re scared right now. You can’t fool Nightmare, you’re scared right now!”