American Ghost (3 page)

He seemed particularly fascinated by the courthouse across the street—an imposing, old Victorian fortress of a building, with a domed cupola and stone pillars. It stood in a modest municipal copse of sagging, old live oak, bent of limb and dragging to the ground with beards of Spanish moss. In as classic a Southern scene as any historian could ask, a bronzed and grimed CSA soldier kept watch in the corner, peering down his musket barrel with sightless eyes. Sam seemed fixated by the common enough view and surveyed it with great interest, till Lena finally finished her primping and joined him on the sidewalk with a chipper “Ready?”

He came to himself then, as if he hadn't heard her, tipping his head to the corner oak and answering with offhanded sureness, “They once lynched a man from that oak—the big one, in the corner. They killed him in Hendrix but dragged his body back to hang at the courthouse. See? They sawed off the limb a few years ago, on orders from the City Commission. You can see the scar. Tourists were coming to gawk at it.”

Lena and Jolie obediently paused to squint into the failing sun at the gnarled, graceful, old live oak that was indeed missing a lower limb,
the scar plainly visible, even two blocks away. The lynching he alluded to was well-known in Hendrix where it had all begun—so commonplace neither of them chimed in, but just stood there staring obediently as he concluded in that mild, instructive voice, “Happened in '38—nightmare business. Historically speaking, it's the county's single claim to fame.”

He seemed content to point it out and made no more of it. He just followed along, holding the door as they entered the sizzling glory of the old Formica-and-linoleum café, frequented by fans of grease and good value. Lena led them to a booth in the back, tucked away beneath an air-conditioning vent that was delightfully cold, but hummed like a nuclear reactor, Jolie sliding in on one side, with Sam across and Lena beside him.

“It looks like a dump,” Lena said, raising her voice to explain, “but the shrimp is famous. They bring it up from Apalachicola, fresh every day.”

Sam looked more intrigued by the grime than disgusted, taking in the beehived waitress, the rattling old jukebox, and fellow customers with that air of careful scrutiny, as if he were a developer weighing an investment. He allowed Lena to order for them, and when the waitress reappeared with tall plastic tumblers of diabetes-inducing sweet tea, he finished his inspection of the café and turned his bright eyes on Jolie, eyeing her with equal, discomfiting interest.

“So, Jolie?” he called across the table. “You're really a Hoyt? On your mother's side, or your father's?”

“Both,”
she answered, because she was. Her parents had grown up in Hendrix and married within the faith, which meant they were distant cousins, as were their parents before them.

Such an accommodation was once standard in insular church communities in the South, though it was unthinkingly hilarious to Sam and Lena, who burst into laughter.

“Incest is best,” Lena said, a common enough gibe around Hendrix, one Jolie had never found to be hilarious (and neither would Lena have if she had been Hendrix-born).

Jolie bore her irritation with little grace, so visibly that Sam sobered up quickly and tried to make amends with a little small talk. “So are you a mere babe in high school, too?”

He asked it as an obvious icebreaker, but Jolie was not so easily drawn out, offering nothing in answer but a slow shake of her head, so that Lena jumped in and answered aside, as if Jolie were a deaf-mute.

“Jolie graduated in May—she's going to
Chipola
.”

“Never heard of it,” he murmured, unwittingly putting himself back on thin ice, as Jolie's form rejection from Savannah was still a sensitive subject.

“It's the community college, in Marianna,” Lena raised her voice to explain, with a wary eye at Jolie. “It's where everybody around here goes.”

“Everybody
poor,
” Jolie clarified, tired of Lena's obsessive smoothing and wanting him to understand immediately, unequivocally, that she might be an eighteen-year-old hillbilly half-wit, but she knew who she was; she didn't need some expert from the university to come in and tell her.

The silence that followed wasn't as insulted as it was thoughtful. Sam's expression returned to one of benign scrutiny as he met Jolie's eyes across the table, though Lena was plainly tired of Jolie's childishness and mouthed in great exasperation, “Lighten
up.
”

Jolie's guilt trigger was nearly as itchy as her defensiveness, and she immediately backed off, pink-cheeked and embarrassed, thinking she was getting as bad as Carl in the game of head-butting defiance. It was the Hoyt in her. It was genetic.

The waitress returned with three heaping plates of fried shrimp before the silence could build. There were none of the usual sides—no salad or hush puppies or cheese grits, just a never-ending plate of golden shrimp and home fries and their own cocktail sauce that was spicier than store brands, infused with the heat of horseradish and red pepper.

“I hope you aren't allergic to shellfish,” Lena chirped merrily, trying to reclaim their earlier ease, though Sam Lense seemed to have realized he wasn't in altogether congenial company and was, on his own side, not
so easily drawn out. Lena was forced to carry the weight of conversation as best she could, till finally, in desperation, she called across the table, “Well, Jol—Sam's here to study the Indians—couldn't remember which kind,” she allowed with charming honesty, “but Jolie knows because the Hoyts—they're Indian. Everybody says so. What kind?”

Jolie's father would just as soon have discussed birth control with her as his purported Indian blood, but in an effort to be agreeable she answered gamely, “Don't know—maybe Cherokee, or Blackfeet,” she offered vaguely, as they were names she had heard bandied about by her cousins, who were a lot more into the ethnic variations than the old folk. She paused to let the Professional Indian Hunter jump in and instruct her, but he only plowed through his shrimp, raising an unconsciously doubting eyebrow at the mention of the mythic Cherokee, but keeping his own counsel.

Lena refused to be drawn in, forcing Jolie to range further afield, offering with even less confidence, “Though Big Mama and Uncle Ott, and Daddy—they say the Hoyts, we aren't Indian at all; we're really from Alabama. That we're—”

Before she could get it out, Sam made a noise and lifted a hand in warning, as if unable to sit silent while she offered any more homespun theories of origin. “I bet you fifty
bucks
I can tell you what your Big Mama said you were. I'll bet you a
thousand.
”

Jolie was taken aback by his outburst, equally sure he couldn't, but forbidden to gamble by reasons of faith.

“I don't have fifty dollars,” she said.

He gamely flipped a fried shrimp on the table between them. “I'll bet you this
shrimp
I can tell you what your grandmother said you were.”

Something in his sureness made her hesitate, though Lena was all for it. “Oh, come on, Jol. It's all-you-can-eat, who cares?”

Jolie met his eye a moment, then flipped a shrimp on the table.
“Deal,”
she said, then sat back and waited with a fair amount of certainty for him to name some obscure local tribe that would be a good educated guess. And completely wrong.

He seemed to take a lot of enjoyment in her confidence, making a great show of wiping his mouth, then leaning in and confiding in that mild, instructive voice, “Little Black
Dutch.
”

The confidence was wiped from Jolie's face in an instant, making her blink at him in wonder, while Lena asked, “Is he right, Jol? The Hoyts are
Dutch
?”

Jolie kept staring at him as she answered aside, “So they say,” and to Sam, “How the
heck
did you know that?”

He looked sincerely pleased at her astonishment, picking up his winnings from the table and popping them in his mouth with great enjoyment. “Well, I
do
have a much sought-after degree in Florida history from UF—approximately worth the paper it's printed on,” he allowed, “and it's a fairly common colloquial term in the South, supposedly coined by Sephardic Jews when they were kicked off the Iberian Peninsula in the 1500s. They settled in Holland and created this mythical ethnic identity to explain their lack of height and dark hair and skin. They imported it with them to colonial America, and it really caught on in the South, became a convenient little ethnic dodge—the way mulattoes, half bloods, Turkish sailors, and anyone of color could outwit soldiers and census takers and pass for white in the days of slavery and Indian removal—and the Blackfoot are Canadian, in the upper Plains. There isn't a Black
feet
tribe. It's just another variation—Black Irish, Blackfeet, Black Dutch—they're ethnic PR, indigenous to the South. They don't exist.”

Jolie had never heard of such a thing in her life and just blinked at him in wonder, though Lena asked, “What d'you mean, they don't exist? What are they?
Ghosts?
”

Sam didn't laugh at the gibe, but thoughtfully deposited a shrimp tail on his plate. “The Black Dutch are. The Muskogee Creek do exist, and are the flavor of the month, as far as Florida Indians are concerned, thanks to their very flexible cousins, the Seminole. None of them are actual aborigines, but a remnant of the Hitachi and Yuchi and all the little tribes of the Southeast, who were driven south by colonial expansion
to the swamps on the Choctawhatchee and the Apalachicola. The Creek are trying for federal recognition, and one of my jobs is to track down the surnames from the last Creek census in 1834. Thought it'd be easy, but when I show up at their door and so much as whisper they're not a hundred percent Scot-Irish, I get this blank, hostile look, like I'm one of Jackson's soldiers on horseback.” He pointed a shrimp at Jolie. “Just like that icy stare you were giving me a while ago when I made the crack about your college. I've never met an isolate group with such an ethnic
chip
on their shoulder,” he mused. “God, they make the Tutsi look
congenial.
”

The flush on Jolie's face was so comically guilty that Lena burst into laughter, though Sam didn't press the matter. He just grinned at Jolie's discomfort, then picked up his glass of tea and raised it above the table in a toast. “To the Lower Creek Nation,” he intoned, “and Big Mama, one of history's great survivors. May her grandchildren haunt the swamp till the end of their days, and Old Hickory be her yard boy in the Great Hereafter.”

There was no mockery in his face, just a genuine offer of something. Jolie was too inexperienced at the art of courtship to understand exactly what. But the sensation was far from unpleasant, and after a moment she lifted her glass and gamely clicked it.

Lena joined them and, once peace was declared, dominated the conversation with her usual élan, till the shrimp was gone and the tea glasses refilled so many times that the waitress began giving them the eye. Lena was flying high on caffeine and white sugar by then, and after they settled their bill and returned to the steaming sidewalk, she linked arms with Jolie on one side, Sam on the other, and announced that she simply must have one final Dilly bar before she left Florida for good.

So what began as an evening of new faces and adventure quickly took on the languor of a hundred other small-town Friday nights, even ending in the same place as they had all the Friday nights that preceded it—in the oily parking lot of the local IGA, where it was customary to park facing the highway and wave at the passing traffic. With Jolie on
one side and Sam on the other, Lena sat perched on the hood of her mother's car and, between waving at honks and going out to say good-bye to well-wishers, chattered like a magpie, telling them every last detail of her future in Savannah.

Jolie was used to Lena and her mouth and loved her enough to set aside her own disappointment and let her exalt in this, her last night on the strip. Jolie just lay back on the slant of the windshield and watched the stars, listened with half an ear to Lena's increasingly far-fetched nonsense till she made one of her curious, magical proclamations, that one day she intended to build a house on the side of a mountain in Colorado and decorate it like the Kremlin, “down to the onion spires and red silk wallpaper.”

Sam, who had also lain back on the windshield, didn't laugh or question it, just glanced aside at Jolie and, in a delicate move of communication, lifted one eyebrow in an unspoken acknowledgment that Lena was fun and great and entertaining and lovely—but, hey, was it his imagination, or was she a goof?

It was the first time in living memory that any man had withstood Lena's charms long enough to acknowledge this patented truth, making Jolie flash the famous Hoyt grin in reply, one she seldom showed to strangers, which answered,
Yes. But we love her anyway.

Lena was none the wiser, just kept up her steady, stream-of-consciousness prattle till eleven o'clock finally came around and it was time to head back to Hendrix. Even then, she kept talking, Jolie not saying a word on the long ride through the woods, till they stopped at the concession stand to drop Sam off and Jolie turned to say good-bye over the seat, adding in the most natural, reasonable voice, “We're going to the beach tomorrow, to St. Andrews. Want to go?”

He said yes without pause, offered to bring towels and sunscreen, blankets and Pepsi; said he could be ready at seven, did they need him to drive or bring ice?

For the first time that night, there was silence in the car, as Lena was struck momentarily speechless, though she recovered quickly enough,
stammered sure, to bring whatever he wanted, that they'd pick him up at nine.

It made for a quiet drive to the parsonage, Lena not saying a word till she halted in the drive, when she turned to Jolie with a face that was mischievously amused and chanted, “Jolie, Jolie, Jolie—who didn't want to have supper with no damn Yankee, but went and invited him to the beach for our last run of the summer.”