New Mercies (12 page)

A road led down from the bluff—Silver Street. The cliff shaded it from the thick yellow sunshine, so I followed it down to a single street at the bottom, which was lined with very old buildings. This must be Mr. Satterfield’s Natchez Under-the-Hill, I thought.

The buildings were mostly two-story structures of soft red brick, a few with makeshift porches and fanciful iron balconies, and they had long windows and French doors to catch the breezes coming off the river. Many were boarded up. Others, which appeared to be speakeasies or stores, were not yet open. An Orange Crush sign hung from the window of a grocery store that looked as if it had been closed for some time. The building’s broken shutter doors were tightly closed, and what had been a wooden sidewalk was all but gone, leaving only dirt and weeds. A thermometer was inserted in a tin bottle-shape Coca-Cola sign nailed to the porch post of a general store but the glass tube was broken, so I had no way of knowing the exact temperature. That was just as well.

Steamboats would have once docked at Natchez Under-the-Hill, and perhaps they still did. In the old days, the crews got drunk in the saloons, then visited the whores in the upper floors, which were now boarded up. Mr. Satterfield had thought to protect me from the knowledge of such goings-on, but I was well aware of the underside of frontier life. David and I had once tramped the mountains around Breckenridge, an old Colorado mining town, where in exploring the buildings along the river, we had come upon the Blue Goose. We knew that it was a whorehouse and still in operation, but we were surprised at the homey scene around the little cottage. A woman hung washing
on the line. Another sat on the porch, shelling peas. We waved and exchanged pleasantries and continued on.

I sat down and looked out at a ferry that was making its way from the Mississippi side of the river to Louisiana. The river, the color of dirty dishwater, was low along its banks, but it was a massive force nonetheless. Branches and trash, a broken oar and a wooden crate, all were swept along in the flow. Far out in the river, an uprooted tree moved with the current. I leaned over and scooped up a handful of the water, which felt silty as it ran out through my fingers.

Leaving the silent river, I walked back up to Silver Street, nodding to a large white-haired Negro woman who had come out of the building with the broken thermometer and was sweeping the wooden sidewalk. When I asked if the store was open, she nodded, saying nothing, and held the screen door for me. Inside, the room was gloomy and damp and smelled of garlic and kerosene and rotted wood. Strings of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, along with bunches of bananas that had turned the color of the woman’s skin. Muslin bags of sugar and flour filled the shelves. Packs of Old Golds, Fatimas, and Lucky Strikes, little bags of tobacco fastened with gold strings, and packets of cigarette papers rested on the counter. Tootsie Rolls and Milky Ways in faded water-stained wrappers were piled inside a case whose rounded glass front was scratched and cracked. The woman caught me eyeing the case and said, “Puttin’ the sweetnings in there keeps ’em from being thieved.”

She did not walk so much as undulate from side to side on legs that were angled from rickets. With the rhythmic gait, she made her way to a wooden chair behind the counter and eased
herself onto a pillow. I selected a bottle of Coca-Cola from a tub filled with tepid water and handed her a nickel, which she put into a drawer under the counter. She took the bottle from me and opened it, and while I sipped the cola, she pried up the cork that lined the bottle cap, placed it inside the bosom of her wash dress, then put the metal cap on top of it and pushed the cork into place so that the cap was afixed to the dress like a brooch. “First one today. This how I keep track.” Her dress was dimpled from where she had attached bottle caps on previous days.

The smells inside the store were unpleasant, so I started for the door.

“Two cents deposit for the bottle if you want to take it round and about.”

“I’ll bring it back.” I went outside and sat on the edge of the porch and drank the Coke. Below the store, a driver unloaded crates from a wagon hitched to two red mules. There was the rattle of glass as he set a box on the ground, and I thought the man was a bootlegger making deliveries to a speakeasy.

Two little girls in dresses made from flour sacks played jacks in front of a building where a broken iron balcony hung precariously over the street. White chickens pecked at the gingercolored dirt beside them. One girl dropped the ball, which rolled down the street toward me. I scooped it up and rolled it back, and the girl called, “Why bless your black heart.” Her friend whispered something, and the girl shaded her eyes to look at me, snickering when she discovered I was not a Negro.

I finished the Coke and went back inside. After the glare of the street, my eyes took a minute to adjust to the dark, since the woman had switched on a fan but not a light. She remained
seated, listening to a soap opera on a large wooden radio behind her as she squinted at a book in her lap. I set the bottle in a box filled with empties and was almost to the door when she said, “You get heatstroke, you don’t cover your head.” She reached up to a shelf above her and took down a braided straw hat. “Two bits is all. It’ll keep your white skin from turning red as a turkey wattle. I got a pretty certain demand for ’em. These days, I ain’t no good for nothing but plaiting straw hats and reading a Sears & Roebuck’s Bible. That’s what I do while I wait for the old ship
Zion
to take me away.”

I felt a little intimidated by this large black lump of a woman and a little sorry for anyone consigned to the ill-smelling store day after day, and I did need a hat, so I gave her a quarter.

“What you doing down here, you don’t mind me askin’?”

“Visiting.”

“Ah-huh. You the one visiting at the goat lady’s house?”

Ignoring my frown, she waved her hand and said, “The taximan that taken you’s my boy, Strotter. I lost his daddy, and he’s dead, but I don’t miss him. His soul was empty as his pocketbook. Strotter was just like him till he confessed religion and give up the gin place. Now he’s a Baptist from head to foot and a taxi driver. You can’t ask for better, ’cept he believe in spooks. Strotter say you kin to Missy ’Malia.”

“That’s right.” I could not tell if the woman was bored and making conversation or if perhaps she was getting at something.

“You fixin’ to study on her murder.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes.”

“Maybe there’s things you don’t want to know. You thought about that?”

“What things?”

She snorted, then patted her open Bible with a hand the size of a skinned chicken breast. “Things.” She shrugged. “I know Missy ’Malia from the time I first know myself, bred at the place on yeller cornmeal and sorghum molasses.”

After sorting through her words to make sense of them, I asked, “Do you mean you lived at Avoca?”

She nodded. “I got to be the house girl. I was never no good at chopping cotton, but I was a terror with a broom.” Her whole body shook when she laughed. “I live there before that place go down, till I commenced to be prosperous and took on this store. My feets has been in this place forty years.” She picked up a crochet hook and worked it back and forth, using yellow strings from tobacco bags.

I moved back along the counter toward her. “You must have been at Avoca when my father was there—Winship Bondurant.”

“Oh, yes indeed. I ‘member when Missy ’Malia brung him home. His borning was in New Orleans. She come home with that baby in a basket on her arm and her mama in a box. She walked off the boat right outside this door.” The heavy flesh on the underside of the woman’s arm flapped as she pointed with the crochet hook. “Mr. Bayard’s right there when she get off the boat, too, his boots polished, his coat brushed, and all such as that.”

I found myself holding my breath as I waited for her to continue.

She lowered her massive arm and pushed her lower lip up under her top lip, then rolled her lips around in a circle, as if
savoring her story. “Missy ’Malia, her face turn midnight dark when she seen him. She wasn’t craving for him and didn’t say nothing but ‘Get out the way.’ ”

“And did he?”

“Ma’am?”

“Did he get out of her way?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. Not that day. Not ever. Later and shortly, Mr. Bayard was hanging around the place.”

“I’ve been told the two of them were engaged, but she broke it off, and they never spoke after that.”

“He’s sweet on her when he’s a young bull, yes, ma’am. I seen him after she come home, watching her when she go out in the day like she’s a piece of molasses taffy. But white mens got foolishments. Maybe his nighttime feelings wasn’t the same as his daytime feelings. No, ma’am, they wasn’t, ‘cause he sure did kill her. No doubt about that.”

“Why did he do it?”

The woman looked at me with hard yellow eyes then, making me uneasy with her intensity. “Ain’t for me to say. I know no more about ‘bout white folks’ doings than nothing.” She leaned back and closed her eyes, and the room was silent except for a Rinso jingle on the radio. But she wasn’t finished. “You meet Ezra.” It was a statement, not a question. She knew I had; her son would have told her, so I did not reply.

The woman nodded. “Without Ezra, Missy Malia go down long before this. He works suitable. You had rather treat him right. Reasons you know. Reasons you don’t know.”

“What reasons?”

“You got to find them out for yourself.” The woman set aside
her crocheting and turned up the radio. She closed her eyes, her chin on her chest. With her white hair and that dark room, she looked like a Kodak negative. For a time, she rubbed her hand back and forth across the open Bible. The hand stopped, and she began to snore.

The two little girls had given up their game of Jacks and were playing with a tin horn. One snatched it away from the other and blew it at me—a long, scratchy toot—as I passed. Near them, on a balcony, a man sat in his underwear, chewing tobacco. Every now and then, he leaned forward and spit into the street. A woman wearing only a slip came out and said something, and he waved her away. Walking back up the shadeless road, which now was bleached an acrid yellow by the sun, I panted a little, for the day had turned hot. Trapped between the blistering heat beating down from above and the heat that rose from the burning earth, I wondered why I was so caught up in Amalia’s murder. It was clear to me that I had grown bored with my solitary life at home and that coming to Natchez was an adventure, a diversion. But there was more to it than that. I was curious about these people, of course. Who was Amalia, and why had she never contacted me? Who was my father, and who was I, for that matter? But beyond those reasons, Natchez and Amalia seemed to offer me something, although I could not say what it was. I knew I might go back to Denver the following week and remember Natchez only as a strange interlude. But there was a feeling I could not shake that my journey here had a purpose.
Perhaps finding out about Amalia’s demons would help me face my own.

Mr. Satterfield was seated at a table in the hotel dining room with his cronies, so I did not go in. Driving me home after Pickett’s dinner party, he had offered again to take me to Avoca, and I had agreed, but after lying awake much of the night wondering whether my father was illegitimate, as Odalie had claimed—and as I already had suspected—I had made up my mind to go to Avoca alone. There was prying to do, and Mr. Satterfield might get in the way.

I asked for my key at the front desk and checked for messages, not expecting any. Mother knew from my wire that I had arrived safely and was staying at the Eola, but it was too soon to expect a letter from her. Caroline didn’t know I was gone, and I was sorry that I hadn’t told her, because after months of keeping my feelings to myself, I suddenly wanted to confide in a friend. I wondered if Pickett were someone I could talk to. Not yet, but in time, she might become my confidante.

There was just one message, and it was from Mr. Satterfield. “I await your call,” he had written in a precise hand. Perhaps Mr. Satterfield knew best—that it would be safer if he accompanied me to Avoca—and for a moment I thought about changing my mind. But if I felt so strongly about doing this, then that was what was best for me. David had said those very words to one of the dowagers whose estates he’d handled. She had called him at home to complain that her children were pressuring her to sell her large house and move into the Brown Palace Hotel, but she wanted to stay where she was, and so she asked David what to
do. “If you feel that strongly about it, then that is what is best for you,” David had told her. Perhaps one day, I would be one of those lonely old women with a small fortune, too insecure to make my own decisions.

As I pondered that, a tall bear of a man walked through the lobby and nodded at the desk clerk, who said, “Hot enough for you, Mr. Brown?”

“Hot enough to melt a grindstone,” he replied, then went into the dining room and sat down at Mr. Satterfield’s table.

I wondered if this were Odalie’s Mr. Brown, but I did not much care, as I had no desire to meet an eligible man. Besides, I had made up my mind to go to Avoca. I handed the key back to the desk clerk. There was no taxi starter outside the hotel, so I headed for the depot. As I passed a bank that looked like a Greek temple, a woman’s voice called, “Yoo-hoo.” Odalie waved a gloved hand at me from under the portico.

Remembering she was lame, I crossed the street.

“My old fellow said I was shameful last night. I ask you to excuse it,” she said without the slightest hint of an apology in her voice.

“That’s all right,” I replied, determined not to let the same bee sting me twice. “I had not realized that southerners were so interested in other people’s business.”

“In Natchez, we call that ‘being truthful.’ If the devil doesn’t get you, the truth will.”

“How interesting.” I wondered if Odalie had ever faced the truth that she was a graceless old busybody. “Then will you tell me the truth about something I’ve come here to find out?”

She dipped her head, looking self-important as she touched
the corner of her lip with her finger, getting a tiny red smudge on her white glove.