The Tree of Forgetfulness (7 page)

“You ask any law-abiding citizen in this county about that bunch, you'll get you an earful. To start with, her family's all bootleggers,” he said. He'd known her people out in the Ellenton section for longer than
he cared to remember, and the whole time he'd been sheriff, he'd been slapping them in jail for one thing or another, liquor mostly, which they all made and sold and drank. Ella was in jail in the first place because she'd tried to run away from a car full of gallon jugs of whiskey and beer that he'd stopped one night on the Aiken-Augusta highway.

Now Barrett opened his notebook, thumbed back through a few pages. “She said her father was a constable in Ellenton,” he said.

The sheriff laughed, braced his hands on his knees, and went on laughing. “Did she say that? I guess the old loony spent so many days in the custody of lawmen, he started to believe he was one.” That was how it went, the sheriff said, until one day, lo and behold, the old man turned up with a bullet through his head out in the piney woods behind the family shack where his daughter always went to whelp her young.

Barrett flipped through more pages in his notebook. “Just give me a minute,” he said. “She said she heard your voice at the jail that night. Said you came up the stairs—here it is—‘talking and laughing.' ”

Everything in the sheriff's face stopped working at once, as though a gear had jammed in some good-humored machine. “Now look here,” he said. “I don't know why she's telling dirty lies about me, but now that she is, I'm going to have to go look into it.” He stood up from the table and crossed the room like someone excused from the witness stand, snatched his hat off a nail driven into the wall beside the door. “Why don't you take your notebook,” he waved one bandaged hand in Barrett's direction, “and do some digging of your own. Instead of listening to whores and liars, why don't you go up to Laurens Street and call on the gentlemen in their offices? Ask them whose voices they heard that night. Go ask your friend Aimar. That's all I have to say at this time.”

“One more question, sheriff. “Where did you serve?”

“St. Mihiel,” he said, without turning. “And then the Meuse-Argonne. And I wouldn't try and use that against me if I were you.”

“I was at Château Thierry,” Barrett said. “And Château des Dames.”

“Then you'd think we'd still be on the same side of things,” the sheriff said as he shoved open the screen door so hard it banged against the front wall of the jail.

Back in his room Barrett wrote in his notebook and drank a glass of the whiskey Zeke had brought. It was strong and lively, with a bite, a burn, and when that glass was empty, he poured and drank another. It was three minutes to six when he arrived at Howard Aimar's office. The sun had dropped behind the buildings, and the gold letters on the glass door had gone dull. A cold peach light flooded the sky, and up and down Laurens Street the striped awnings were being rolled up for the night. At the end of the block the last trolley turned the corner and was gone.

A bell tinkled as he opened the door. The view from the front counter was what you'd see through the wrong end of a pair of field glasses: A man at a desk at the far end of a long, dim tunnel. A neat and natty young man in a gray pinstriped suit and rimless glasses, an old man's despair rounding his shoulders. Barrett often made snap judgments, but he didn't spare himself. “Body and imagination spurred by Dionysian longings, checked by Puritan steel,” he wrote in the character assessment he drew up, after the war. “Result: much bucking and rearing, but no ground covered.” He did not lack sympathy for this man and his life. If he'd gone home to New Bedford, he'd be sitting in an office like this on the mezzanine overlooking the weave room at his father's mill. But he was done with carrying out the plans and wishes of others.

“We close at six, sir,” Howard Aimar said without looking up from his papers. Barrett walked through the swinging gate beside the front counter anyway. “I'll just take a second of your time,” he said. Another lesson learned in France: nothing to be gained by hanging back. If a bullet has your name on it, hesitating won't keep it from finding you.

As Barrett walked toward him, Howard squared the stack of papers, straightened the line of fountain pens on the desk. “Mr. Barrett,” he said. “May I help you?”

Barrett was used to the formality now; it was the way they let you know you'd never get close enough to merit a first name. “Mind if I get a squint,” he said, nodding at the picture over Howard's desk.

“Help yourself.”

Up close he saw cannon fire and sabers flashing through smoke and dust, a churning chaos of red and blue uniforms, dying horses
and pale dead men, sunlight spread like a blessing over the heroes and their blood. “That was the moment,” Barrett said, and Howard Aimar looked puzzled.

“The end of Napoleon,” he said. “It's rare when one moment in one battle makes all the difference. Didn't happen in my war,” he said. Then, to stop that thought from picking up speed, he said, “How'd you come by the picture?”

It was a story Howard Aimar seemed relieved to tell. It had hung over his father's desk in the pharmacy in Augusta, he said, and now it hung over his own, and he hoped that one day it would hang over his son's desk, and his son's and his son's. In his time here Barrett had noticed that much stock was placed on handing down and passing on, on loyalty and honor and keeping it in the family. They were bound to each other in so many ways that sorting out the connections would be like trying to untangle the root system in the ground beneath an ancient forest. Tangled, the upholsterer's wife should have said, not crooked.

A small black crucifix with a silver Christ hung on the wall under the picture of Waterloo. “You're Catholic,” Barrett said.

“I am.”

“Did I see you at the depot this morning?”

“Could be,” he said. “My wife likes me to pick up the
State
; she keeps up with women's club doings and the like.”

“I have met your wife.”

“So she tells me.” Aimar glanced at the wall clock with the slowly swinging pendulum, and when it began to strike six, he stood and patted his pockets, looking distracted.

“I'll let you go home to your dinner,” Barrett said.

“Dinner is the midday meal, Mr. Barrett. The evening meal is called supper.”

“You've saved me from further embarrassment.”

“Happy to oblige.” Howard switched off the desk lamp, put on a good gray topcoat, a soft gray hat. “What can I do for you, Mr. Barrett, in the few minutes remaining to us?”

The unexpected kindness of the man's tone unnerved him. Invite
me to whatever you call the evening meal, he didn't say. Have a drink with me. “The sheriff says I should go up and down Laurens Street and ask every man where he was that night, what he saw and what he knows. So I thought I'd start with you.” Remember his face, Barrett told himself. The startled face of a man in a dark room at the instant a light snaps on.

H
E WAITS BEHIND
the privet hedge at the bottom of the yard behind the house, hoping that Libba remembered to oil the squeaky hinges on the back screen door. He's been here since two forty-five, the chosen time, but now it's three, and still she has not come. He studies the window of her second-floor bedroom, and when he cannot look any longer—because no one could be awake in a house so dark and still, because she could have been caught or changed her mind—he watches the pale sliver of new moon whose faintness had caused them to choose this night to run away and get married. He watches the moon, and when he looks toward the house again, Libba is running down the yard. Her legs flash white across the dark grass; the suitcase she carries is weightless. He steps out from behind the hedge. “Over here, my heart,” he whispers.

Someone sits on the bed, pulling the sheet tight across his chest and thighs.
Are we going now?
he tries to say, but water trickles into his mouth and down his throat, and he knows by the path the water takes that Libba is pouring it. She carries the map of his body; she knows the way down his throat and into his belly and on, to his cock and his balls. He has never said those words to her, to anyone. The man who made love to his wife in the dark did not know those words, but the man he is becoming does. That man speaks, and she turns to him, opens her robe.

“There's that smile,” Libba says, from somewhere above him. “You just needed some water, didn't you, sweetheart?”

The water trickling down his throat tastes like it has flowed from the kitchen tap at home. Even on the hottest summer days, the spigot there runs cool; the water tastes clean and bright and smells faintly of iron and stone, like the depths of the earth must smell. He will drink some of it soon, as he always does when he comes home after being away. Any day now he will run up the back steps and go into his house through the kitchen door. He will walk over to the sink, wrench the tap, fill his cupped hands, and drink and drink. “Use a glass, Howard,” Libba always said. “Don't drink like a field hand.”

It would be like Libba to bring him water from his own house. A mason jar of it held on her lap while Cecile drives them to the hospital. She is a genius at matching the cure to the disease, the gift to the need or desire. “Swallow, Howard,” she says, but his throat refuses, and a man says, “That's enough.” The water stops wandering down his throat, but before Libba's weight leaves the bed, he's thirsty again. He opens his mouth like a baby bird, but nothing comes.

Lewis's daughter is not like her grandmother or his own daughter either. It would not occur to her that he might be thirsty. She's like her father: agreeable one minute and so obstinate the next that it sometimes took a few licks with the belt to make Lewis mind. She has Lewis's wariness too, a look that says that at any moment she expects to have to fight for what she wants. But he can't take a belt to this one; he cannot lift his arms.

Did you tell Mr. Barrett that what happened to the Longs was unforgivable?
she says.

No, no, no.

Isn't this you?
she says, holding up a creased and yellowed newspaper clipping.
“In the downtown office of a prominent local businessman with ties to one of the town's oldest families, this correspondent was told that while what happened to the Longs was unforgivable, it was the work of a very small group of men, and this correspondent was treating it as if everyone in town was involved. ‘That's what people resent, ‘said this gentleman, and as the six o'clock hour chimed, he brushed off his good gray fedora and settled it on his head
.

‘But the identities of that very small group of men are well-known to a much larger group, so the question remains, who were those men?' this correspondent asked
.

‘Isn't that what we would all like to know?' he answered. But when pressed to name the unforgivable—the shotgun held under Albert's jaw? the bullet fired point-blank into Dempsey's heart? the pistol at Bessie Long's head? the burning dress? the common grave? the silence that cloaks the guilty?—he had no answer.' ”

He hates the way she reads, impartial as a judge. It fills him with despair to see that everything he would have burned has come into her possession. He despises every one of the words she's just read, especially
unforgivable
. Hearing it again, he's reminded of what he'd meant, what he still means. A wrong that cannot be righted, that exists forever beyond the reach of forgiveness. A wrong that stained and drowned the soul, like the sin in Libba's favorite hymn:

I was sinking deep in sin

Far from the peaceful shore.

Very deeply stained within

Sinking to rise no more.

“You have no proof,” he says. “You have no right.”

I'm your flesh and blood
, she says.
This is my story too
.

“Libba,” he shouts. “Water.”

But instead of Libba, he gets Cecile fussing with his pillow. He gets Lewis's daughter, holding a photograph up to his face like a mirror.
Look
, she says.
Be still
. He smiles to feel that the girl has a heart after all, to see the man he was and will be again. This was Libba's favorite picture of him: A man of substance in a double-breasted suit sitting easily in a chair with his legs crossed, a pair of black-and-white shoes on his feet, a cigarette held loosely between two fingers. His light hair is combed back from a high forehead, and he has strong lips and bold features, determined eyes behind rimless glasses. Libba made the appointment with the photographer. She brushed his suit and polished his shoes.
At the studio she ducked under the black cloth that the photographer held up for her, studied her husband's image floating upside down on the ground glass. “Look proud of yourself, Howard,” she said. He'd straightened the crease of his trousers, done his best. She'd mounted the picture in a handsome black frame edged with sterling silver filigree and hung it in the hall; every week Minnie polished that silver. But he'd rather not remember Minnie or Zeke. He'd banished them from his thoughts years ago, and he does not appreciate their showing up now.

Grandmother told me that you ruined those shoes by wearing them out dove hunting
, says Lewis's daughter.
Said she found them in a croker sack down in the cellar. Every time she looked at this picture, she told that story
.

He jerks the way you do when you wake from a dream of falling just before you hit the ground. Of course Libba had told the girl that story. Never could keep anything to herself, garrulous as the mockingbird in the cedar tree outside his window, telling the grandchildren about him in order to keep his image flickering in their minds. He can tell that Lewis's daughter wants to believe that story about the shoes. She looks eager and hopeful, the way her father looked, waiting for the answer after asking for something. “Yes,” he says. “It's true that Libba told the dove field story.”