The Tree of Forgetfulness (19 page)

The article on the front page of the next day's
Aiken Standard
called the flower show a signal success, and of course it mentioned nothing about Zeke's arrest. At the top of the front page was a three-column picture of the Aimars and the grand prize winner, holding up her silver tray. In the photograph Libba and Lewis smile, but Howard is a blur, hurrying off like a man who's late for an appointment.

T
HE FULL MOON
had risen into the clear night sky, and its light made the pine needles gleam and turned the sandy ground to snow. Under the porte cochere outside the Highland Park Hotel, Howard walked Libba toward a cream-colored Ford touring car where Libba's cousin Lawton Hastings and his wife waited to take Libba and Lewis to their farm near Edgefield for a few days of pampering and rest, as they did every year after the flower show. Minnie followed, holding Lewis by the hand. A few minutes earlier Lawton had said he was
honored
to be taking Libba out of this unfortunate situation. Everyone was honored to do something for Libba, as though what they did for her now might make up for the humiliation she'd suffered when the sheriff barged into the flower show and arrested Minnie's son and almost got into a fistfight with her husband. In spite of the rebuke implied by Lawton's remark, Howard thought it might be good for his wife and son to be out of the picture; it would give him time and space to act on the plans he was making.

“Say, will you look at that moon?” Howard said.

Libba glanced up. “Beautiful,” she said, and she turned and spoke over her shoulder to Minnie and Lewis. “Just look what a beautiful evening it's turned out to be.” Lewis did as he was told, his face slack with exhaustion and dismay, but Minnie watched Howard, her eyes hard and flat. He knew that Libba was just doing what was expected of her, going through the motions. He heard it in her voice, felt it in the way her hand rested on his arm. Usually when they walked together, she
took his arm and held it, but tonight, coming out of the front door of the hotel, he'd had to pick up her hand and tuck it through his elbow, and even now her hand felt too light. He knew that she was thinking about Zeke and about Minnie's fainting spell. At the end of the night he'd found Libba sitting on the hotel kitchen floor in her good velvet dress, fanning Minnie with a dish towel.

When they reached the car, Howard turned Libba to face him, leaned in close. They were not to wait up for him, he said. “Don't wait for me to come see you off. Just put your bags in the car and get going,” he said. “I don't want you all out on the road too late.” She nodded quickly, smiled up at him. Her lipstick had worn off, and she hadn't replaced it. She blamed him for Zeke's arrest; she and Minnie both did; he could tell by the pinched look of her cheeks and the set of her mouth. “I'm sorry, Libba,” he said. “I'll bail Zeke out first thing in the morning,” he said. “Tell Minnie.”

“But where are you going, Howard? Why aren't you coming home with us?”

“There's something I need to do at the office,” he said. “And I don't want to hold you all up.”

“Maybe I shouldn't go at all.”

“Of course you should go,” he said. “Go and enjoy yourself, and don't worry about me. Don't worry about anything.”

She looked at him steadily, waiting for more, and when it didn't come, she gave him a small bleak smile. “I don't know what to believe anymore,” she said. “Get in this car with me, Minnie.” The two of them climbed in and Howard closed the door, and Minnie pulled Lewis onto her lap. Howard tapped the glass, and Libba smiled and toodled her fingers at him; the fox fur on her coat collar stirred around her face. The three of them looked so warm inside the car, and he remembered what a man had written in the paper about the Aiken men implicated in the murders: “They will live and die knowing full well that they are not worthy to associate with their wives and children.” He was not a murderer, so why did he feel condemned to stand outside in the cold, looking into the warm life that once was his and now was not?
Barrett answered the door with his suspenders down, shirttail out, sleeves rolled past his elbows, his face as flushed as though he'd been doing something strenuous. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?” His voice echoed down the hall. Over Barrett's shoulder Howard saw socks on the radiator, an undershirt draped across the back of a chair. A typewriter on a small table in one corner. A large domed radio tuned to dance music. Half a glass of brown whiskey was balanced on the arm of a heavy maroon chair pulled up to the window. He sits there and watches the street, Howard thought. He drinks, and he watches us pick up the papers from the depot and makes up stories about what he sees. A small life for such a high-minded man, a man with such righteous opinions.

When Howard had first come to Aiken, he'd lived in a room like this, in a boardinghouse with a palmetto outside the window that rasped and scratched against the rusty screen day and night. He'd washed out his socks and undershirts in the sink and dried them on the radiator. Above the small desk in the corner he'd tacked up a prayer card with a picture of the Holy Family printed on the front, The Husband's Daily Prayer on the back. Every morning he'd pulled out the thumbtack and taken the card down, prayed that God would make him unselfish, cheerful, trusting, thrifty, a devoted companion. Seeing Barrett's room now was like looking back into a bleak scene from his own past, and he felt sorry for the man, for being a man like he once had been.

“Mr. Barrett,” he said. “Will you go somewhere with me? I have something to tell you.”

“I'm off duty,” he said. “Is this a summons or an invitation?”

“Some of both.”

Barrett leaned out of the doorway, holding onto the jambs, and glanced up and down the hall. “Where are the rest of the boys?” he said. He was smiling, but his eyes were not. Soldier's eyes, Howard called them.

“No boys,” he said. “I dislike a mob as much as any man.”

“Damn right,” Barrett said. He hauled up his suspenders, stuffed in
his shirttail, pulled a topcoat over his shirt and trousers. He looked like any other man called out on a late-night errand; he looked like a man who might understand how another man could end up someplace he never meant to go.

Out past the last houses the Columbia Highway was deserted, ahead and behind. The moon was halfway up the sky now, and its light seemed immense. On either side of the road the fields of spindly cotton plants looked stunned beneath its weight. The Ford's headlights were weak, but tonight they were not needed; it was almost as bright as day. Howard coaxed the car into high gear, easing the throttle lever forward with his right hand, left foot backing off the clutch, feeling for neutral, until a thunk told him he'd found the cruising gear, and the engine turned over so slowly it barely made a sound.

“You saw Zeke at the jail?” he said.

“I did.” Barrett sat up straight at the edge of the passenger seat, hands braced on his knees. “The sheriff was treating him like a special guest.”

“That was for your benefit,” he said, felt Barrett studying him. “Like arresting Zeke was for mine. Count on Aubrey to put on a good show as long as he's got an audience. Only this time it was more than a show: He insulted my wife.”

“Some show,” Barrett said.

“Don't you want to know where we're going?”

“I guess I'll find out soon enough,” Barrett said, but he turned in his seat to study the deserted road behind them, as though trying to memorize the way. Then he sat back. The high whine of the tires and the creaking of the suspension were the only sounds. He pulled a silver flask from his coat pocket. “You mind?”

“Help yourself,” Howard said. “As you're no doubt aware, Aubrey takes a special interest in hounding people about every aspect of the whiskey business. You might call it his personal crusade, though drinking itself seems a petty crime, or no crime at all, compared to others.”

“Murder, for example.”

“Correct.”

When Barrett offered the flask, he took it. The whiskey felt bright
and warm going down. It had an aftertaste like resin, the same as the whiskey that flowed from the oak cask he kept locked in the shed over by the icehouse. The familiar taste made him uneasy, but he certainly had no monopoly on the casks smuggled into town from the river. Other men had their Zekes to haul contraband for them. “You must have a good source,” he said.

“The best,” Barrett said, toasting Howard with the flask. “I admire your skill with this automobile,” he said. “I've heard that driving a Model T is like doing the Charleston while loading a musket after a big night at the speakeasy.”

“That about covers it,” Howard said.

The night of the murders there had been no need to ask for directions; he'd only had to join the line of cars traveling north up the Columbia Highway, look for the big sweet gum where the man set up his apple stand every fall, and turn there onto a narrow dirt track that ran up the edge of a played-out cotton field and into a stand of pines.

“I thought this was where we'd end up,” Barrett said quietly, when the sweet gum came into view.

“You've been here before?”

“Once or twice,” Barrett said, sipping from the flask. “Never had a guided tour, though.” He laughed.

A guided tour. His sarcasm was unnerving, as if someone had once offered him a
guided tour
, and he was repeating those words to show how rotten they sounded. Howard was grateful to be occupied with slowing the car, making the turn. With his right hand he eased back the throttle lever, while his left foot pressed the clutch toward neutral, and when the gear shifted, he stepped on the brake pedal with his right, swung wide, and shoved the throttle lever forward again.

The track was heavily rutted from all the buggies and wagons and cars that had driven up there. He steered the Ford along the ruts, easing the throttle forward, until he came around behind the dense stand of tall pines. Then he pulled back on the left-hand lever, killed the spark to the plugs, and the engine shut down. The pine needles gleamed in the moonlight, the ground was dappled with light and shadow, and the trees threw their long shadows across the sand. The cicadas waxed and
waned, and a breeze moved through the tops of the pines with a faint rushing sound.

“Do you carry a gun, Mr. Aimar?” Barrett said, looking as thoughtful as if he'd asked Howard about his philosophy of life. He sat loosely at the edge of the seat, the flask held between his legs, looking through the windshield at something far away. Howard thought he might parse for the man the distinction he'd made for himself after that night between
owning
a gun and
carrying
one. “I
own
a .38,” he'd say. “I keep it in a box way up on a high shelf on the back wall of the shed where I park the car, but I don't
carry
it.” But saying that might lead to more questions about motive and will and intent. It was best to answer the question as asked. “No, sir, I do not,” Howard said. “Do you?”

“I was a medic in the war,” Barrett said. “Medics didn't carry guns. We carried supplies to deal with what guns do. I got in the habit of not carrying one, and it stuck.” He took a long pull on the flask; he seemed to be in no hurry to get out of the car.

“Let's talk
implicated
,” Howard finally said. “Let's talk
degrees
.”

“Let's do that.”

They opened their doors and got out. “I can't tell you how dark it was that night. It was as dark then as it is light now,” he said as they walked into the pines. “There were men all back in these trees, but you couldn't see a foot in front of you.”

“Why is it that the story of that night always comes back to how nobody could tell up from down?”

“Because it's true,” he said. He remembered blundering through the pines, holding his hands out in front of him to ward off the trees and the men who moved with him toward the torchlight in the clearing beyond and the low, angry murmur of the crowd.

He and Barrett walked out of the trees and stopped. “The crowd started here,” he said, “and bent like a horseshoe around three sides of the clearing.” Like the road, the ground there was churned up with footprints and hoofprints, wagon and buggy and tire tracks. He'd returned just once, the Sunday after. A crowd had milled around that day too, only this time it was made up of men and women in church clothes. Across the clearing he'd watched Aubrey Timmerman hold
up his bandaged hands and tell his story. He'd been numb then, but remembering it now, he felt more certain than ever that he was right to bring Barrett here and set the record straight.

“Someone had set a lantern on this pine stump,” he said. “People were yelling and running and raising so much dust, it was hard to see what was what.”

“Yelling, you say? Any voices stand out?”

Howard squared his shoulders. “It was right about here that I first heard the sheriff.”

Now he had Barrett's attention. He patted his coat pockets and pulled out a small notebook and a pencil stub. “You heard the sheriff yelling?” he said.

“Yes,” he said.
You're in it now, aren't you, Aubrey?
he thought.
You're a big man, until you're not, until someone steps in your way and says, “Stop, in the name of the law.”

Barrett nodded. “All right,” he said, and he brought the notebook close to his face and wrote something down. “Where were you when the shooting started?”

“Back in the crowd, somewhere along in here,” he said, gesturing around him. The moon had cleared the trees now and hung, huge and bright, in the sky. “Why does it matter where I was?”

Barrett shrugged. “The sheriff seems to think you were—“ He flipped back a few pages in his notebook: “. . . 
close around
, yourself.”