Out of Darkness (41 page)

It was too late for Wash and the girl. But he could save this child.

So Beto lay there under the blanket like something smuggled, and smuggled with him were the following:

(1) Edgar, curled tightly against his belly

(2) several fleas on Edgar's fur

(3) a knowledge that was as impenetrable as a stone

(4) a lifetime's supply of guilt and what ifs

(5) a memory

Edgar was only a cat. The fleas were of no practical use. The guilt, the what ifs, and the knowledge were for later. So Beto clung to the memory.

◊ ◊ ◊

It was a warm day, just a month or two after they came to East Texas. And while Cari and Wash talked and Naomi walked alongside them, Beto noticed, really noticed, the path for the first time. Until then, he had only thought of where they were going. But suddenly he was freed to see. And hear. And smell.

He didn't have the words for it, the feeling that the high, straight pines gave him now that he really saw them. While he hadn't been watching, the leaves on the maples had turned the color of sweet potatoes. Above the trees, the enormous sky was the clear blue of robins' eggs. The dirt of the path was spongy and pungent with yesterday's rain. Wood smoke tickled Beto's nose. He heard the underbrush shiver with the passage of a squirrel. Then there was the heavier rooting around of an armadillo, stupid and awkward in its heavy armor.

“There's proof God has a sense of humor,” Wash said.

“I think it's handsome,” Cari said, contrary as ever.

“You would,” Beto teased.

“We all are,” Naomi said.

“Are what?” The question came from Wash.

“Proof.” Then Naomi took off running, calling over her shoulder, “Race you!”

They were running, all four of them, Cari shrieking foul play even though she'd pulled the same trick herself a hundred times. They rushed over the path to the bank of the river and skidded down the last yards of incline, muddying their shoes.

A black-brown-white group on a sandy patch by the Sabine River. A human noisemaker flooding the woods with laughter and scaring away all fish within a quarter of a mile. A family with a short shelf life. Four souls perched on a wide, flat rock. A passing proof of God's sense of humor.

If only He liked laughing more, they might have won more time. Or maybe Wash and Naomi were wrong, and their borrowed time had nothing to do with God.

As he remembered, Beto made a mental note: the dead are not always right. The dead are not saints. But the dead are ours. We carry them with us like it's our job. And maybe it is.

Beto left his younger, happier self by the river and walked back up the path, searching the memory for the tree Naomi had taken him to. There it was. Mostly hidden from view by brambles. But now Beto knew where to look.

And so inside his memory, which was not a memory at all but a story he was telling himself, Beto ran for the hiding place. He made himself a beetle high in the rotten wood of the hollow tree and determined to stay there until he understood.

◊ ◊ ◊

In the stillness of the tree, wrapped in the faint smell of rot, Naomi and Wash held each other. Her fingers found his neck, worked their way into his dark hair. She marveled at its softness, like tightly coiled silk.

He took her hand in his, slid his thumb along the soft flesh between each of her fingers.

He stroked the smooth skin of her wrists. He kissed the stretch of her right forearm, which had healed from the burn at last. He continued, showing her the perfection of wrist, ankle, neck, collarbone—all the thresholds he could reach.

She bit her lip and thought she could not bear the delicious agony of his touch, and then a slow-boiling sob rose up into her throat. When it came out of her, it turned to laughter.

That was it, then. His first gift to her. The shuddering joy of her own laughter.

When the rain began to fall, they didn't notice, but they did notice the sudden shift in sound when it stopped. They climbed out, squinting a little. The sky was the color of wet slate, and the wind ripped through the crowns of the trees.

“Look,” Naomi said.

A wedge of light had forced itself through the dense clouds. The cottonwoods along the river stood out like pillars against the gray backdrop of the sky, their white bark shining in the sudden sun.

“Look,” Naomi said again, more insistently this time.

“I told you,” Wash said, reaching for her face, “that there was beauty here.”

◊ ◊ ◊

Smuggled in the back of the Chevrolet, smuggled into a memory, smuggled into a tree inside that memory, Beto was starting the work that would save him.

EPILOGUE

When they got to San Antonio, Jim Fuller gripped Beto tightly by the arms. “The woods?” he said. “You were never there. You were here, in San Antonio.”

Beto nodded.

San Antonio took him back, but it was not the same.

Instead of beginning the day by reading
La Prensa
or rearranging the canned goods in the store, Abuelito sat in a chair in the sun. He could not speak, but he was there. Beto kissed his bushy eyebrows each morning.

Beto slept on a pallet because the new family Abuelita had taken in was using the other bed. He wanted to go to work, but Abuelita would not hear of him missing school. “
No, señor
,” she said, shaking her head emphatically and pointing to the dictionary, the sole book to survive the pawning of items after Abuelito fell ill.

Every day, the fact of his breathing surprised Beto. He did not want to be alive and whispered as much into Edgar's fur each morning. But still he rose and folded his blankets. He washed his face and ate the eggs and beans his grandmother prepared. He went to school. He spent afternoons working in the store or reading aloud to Abuelito.

He moved around the enormous empty spaces in the world where Naomi and Cari and Wash should have been. He did not forget.

Beto passed silently but brilliantly through his classes, blending in with white classmates at the junior high where a savvy elementary school teacher enrolled him by calling him “son” during registration. With his teachers' recommendations, he went on to the new Crockett High School, and he was the first Mexican American to be permitted to follow the distinguished scholar path to graduation rather than the vocational track. He was also the first Mexican American from San Antonio to attend the University of Texas at Austin. There, he annoyed his advisors by majoring in English despite his obvious brilliance in math and science.

He rarely spoke to his roommate, a lean, cheerful boy with sandy hair and an endless parade of girlfriends. When Beto wasn't reading for classes or working at the pharmacy where he'd gotten a job as a clerk, he wrote.

He bought a package of typing paper and wrote straight through the stack, then he turned it over and wrote on the backsides of the pages.

Only Beto knew the reason for his writing.

For years, he had saved his Christmas present from Naomi, that red notebook he'd found in the bag Jim Fuller had lifted from the car's trunk and pressed into his arms along with the guitar case. For years, he had waited to be ready for it.

He knew the story would not be easy to tell. By the time he began, it had been buried under the lime of falsehood for a decade. The March 23, 1937, newspaper article from the
San Antonio Express
, which he carried in the inside pocket of his wallet, was proof of that.

The piece was entitled “Backwoods Bloodbath Shocks East Texas Town Already Shattered by School Blast.” It informed the reader of the following facts:

Just days after the tragic New London school explosion that claimed nearly 300 lives, a survivor of the blast, Naomi Smith, was abducted, beaten, and raped by a Negro youth by the name James Washington Fuller. When the girl's stepfather, Henry Smith, noticed her disappearance, he suspected foul play and set out to search for her in the woods near the Negro community of Egypt Town just outside of New London. He found her in the midst of the most terrible indignity a woman could suffer, and he struggled to rescue his stepdaughter from the clutches of the assailant. At some point, a gun was drawn, and an accidental discharge of the weapon killed both Naomi and Fuller. While there were no witnesses, police determined from evidence at the scene that Smith, crazed with grief and rage, then turned the gun on himself. Police have indicated that no further investigation will be conducted.

Beto knew each word of the article by heart. He knew the article because it was the ugly obverse of the real story, the one that lived inside him. It was the distorted black space around what had really been. Some nights, when he couldn't sleep, Beto went over in his mind the many details that must have been ignored to come to the conclusions reported in the article. Among them were the presence of two different guns, the bloody rope discarded by the tree, and the near physical impossibility of shooting oneself in the head with a shotgun.

Yet no one had asked any questions. The case was closed, another burden Beto had survived to carry.

It wasn't that Beto wanted to tell the story. It was that he had to. He hoped that, after, he could begin to dream of the fragile joy of the months before the explosion and of the family that they had made for themselves in the woods. They had been happy, for a time, before the rules found them. Before the terrible price was exacted for their transgressions. For the crossing of lines. For friendship, for love.

And so he worked. Piecing together memories. Imagining what he could not have known. Writing out the ruins of his former life. He wrote until the story was there, outside him, terrible in its truth.

He needs you, reader. All he asks is that you take the story up and carry it for a while.

This strange song, gathered out of darkness.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The 1937 New London school explosion ravaged a community about ten miles from my hometown; it is still on record as the deadliest school disaster in the United States. With the exception of the explosion, the tragedies that unfold in the novel are products of my imagination. Still, they are generally consistent with documented occurrences in other parts of Texas and the South during the 1930s. There is considerable historical precedent for the racism, sexual abuse, violence against minorities, and other distressing facets of life portrayed in the novel.

An understandable protective impulse sometimes inspires efforts to conceal, diminish, or disavow such painful histories. The work of this book, however, was to bring to light experiences and narratives that might otherwise go unacknowledged. I have tried to balance the heartbreak, cruelty, and ignorance of my characters' world with a profound attention to the forms of kindness and connection that are also possible in it.

All characters in
Out of Darkness
are fictional; any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental. Despite my interest in the history of the New London school explosion, I've also taken many liberties with details, circumstances, dates, and local geography. For example, I placed Beto and Cari's classroom in the building that exploded when in fact this part of the school did not house the lower elementary grades. The scene at Wash's home and the tragic outcome of Wash and Naomi's romance are not based on any events in the New London area, although comparably gruesome events did occur elsewhere in the South. Lynchings and vigilante acts were especially likely in periods of economic difficulty or following a major community disruption like the explosion.

Factual details catalyzed some of my imaginings. For example, I learned that mounted Texas Rangers were sent to the homes of school board members, where they succeeded at diffusing threats of violence. This information caused me to consider what might have happened to a potential scapegoat not afforded this kind of protection.

The relative absence of historical information about the African American community in East Texas during the oil boom left me wondering: how might the school explosion have been felt by families whose children were spared precisely because they had been denied access to the state-of-the-art New London school? Similarly, when I discovered that at least one of the children killed in the New London explosion was likely Hispanic (although her family may well have downplayed this background, as the twins and Naomi are encouraged to), I began to consider what might have brought a Latino family to the primarily black and white community of 1930s East Texas. The educational experiences of Naomi, Wash, and the twins allowed me to incorporate glimpses of the tripartite segregation system present in Texas before the Civil Rights Movement, a system that separated children into “white,” “colored,” and “Mexican” schools.

In researching this novel, I was struck by the many ways in which whole swaths of lived experience have been largely excluded from historical accounts, in part because certain communities were not deemed worthy of note in newspapers and other sources considered authoritative and reliable. These silences need to be amended; I hope my fiction gives readers an appetite for stories lived in the margins of spotlit scenes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much gratitude to my editor, Andrew Karre, for sharing my vision for this novel and deepening it. Thanks also to my agent, Steven Chudney, and to the excellent professionals at Carolrhoda Lab and Lerner. Special thanks to Alisa Alering, who read the manuscript multiple times and offered many insights and suggestions. Thanks to Tanita Davis for encouragement at a crucial juncture and to Terry Ray and Wayne Ray for insights on historical detail and oil field experience. Passages from
Out of Darkness
were initially published in the October 2013 issue of the
Texas Observer
under the title “3:17”; thanks to the magazine for permission to reprint the material here.

The curators and volunteers at the London Museum in New London, Texas, shared personal stories and provided me with generous access to the museum's archival materials. Two recent historical accounts of the explosion, David Brown and Michael Wereschagin's
Gone at 3:17: The Untold Story of the Worst School Disaster in American History
(Potomac Books, 2012) and Ron Rozelle's
My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion
(Texas A&M University Press, 2012), were also indispensable to me in the writing of this book.
Gone at 3:17
makes for especially fascinating reading in its own right. In addition to many histories of African American experience in the 1910s through the 1930s, Koritha Mitchell's
Living with Lynching
(Illinois University Press, 2012) helped me reckon with the ethical stakes of portraying lynching in fiction. The interviews, studies, and books I consulted regarding Mexican American life in San Antonio, school segregation in Texas, and the particulars of the East Texas oil field are too numerous to name here; for this important body of research, I am grateful. Any remaining errors or anachronisms in the novel are my doing.