American Ghost (38 page)

Jolie turned around in the intersection and rounded up the Frazier brothers and drove them straight to the KOA, to the worn oak counter of the concession stand. Vic and his clerk and a storeful of tourists waited there, Vic red-faced and practically hopping, he was so excited. His sense of military ceremony called for a moment of gravity as they gathered at the counter, his face darting around the room.

“Is Sam coming?” he asked. “No? Well, then I'll show you. Out of
the blue, you will not believe. Left on the steps, no note, just there. I don't know if they're the right ones, but, God, they're somebody's.” He reached under the counter and triumphantly slapped a small, fluted bottle on the counter, clear and flask-shaped.

Hollis murmured immediately, “It's gin. That's a gin bottle.”

Jolie had no interest in looking at anyone's severed fingers, then or ever, and it took a bit of persuasion to get her to brave a peek. “Maybe,” she offered helplessly. She passed it to Charley, who couldn't see well enough to make a call, leaving Hollis to act as resident expert, holding up the bottle and trying for a better look in the dim light. He turned it this way and that and finally jumped up on the counter and held it to the fluorescent light for a better look. He stood there, peering closely at the dusty old bottle, then bent and hopped off the counter with the vigor of a younger man. He told his brother, “They got calluses, and dirt under the nails.”

Charley took the bottle back and turned it over in his hands, feeling the scrolled, raised lettering on the face of the cloudy glass. “Whut does it say?” he asked Hollis. “There's something on the bottle.”

The glass was too cloudy to read, and an Ohio Yankee, who'd wandered in to buy the
Times
for the crossword, provided his pencil for a quick rubbing of lead on an old receipt on the countertop. The image emerged on the back of the thin paper, written aslant, in curvy, sideways lettering:
H & A Gilbey LTD
and to the side, in that same flowing lettering,
Gin
.

When Hollis read it aloud, Charley finally smiled, brilliantly and without reserve. “Thet's it. Thet's what they told me,” he murmured, feeling around for his brother and gripping his fur lapel. “Hollis. It's them. It must be.”

Vic and the bystanders clapped and yammered and pressed for a closer look, though Hollis was momentarily too moved to speak. He lifted the cold glass to his lips and kissed it, whispered, “Papa, you're coming home.”

T
he Frazier brothers left the next morning, anxious to reunite their papa's fingers with the rest of his mortal remains at the Veterans Cemetery in North Little Rock. Jolie brought them their breakfast early and chatted with them while they finished the last of the hellishly hot sausages, then presented them with a parting gift—small, flat, and tissue-wrapped. She thought they “might like a copy of it, to take back to Tennessee.”

Charley thanked her even as he was tearing off the tissue on a silver-framed sepia photograph of an upright old farmer standing in a cutover cotton field the first day of seeding. He was holding a brace of mules by their traces in a standard photograph of the day. Charley couldn't make much of it, even with his magnifying glass, though Hollis smiled when he got on his reading glasses, told him, “Well, it's Sip—out standing in a field, with his mules. He's mama's oldest brother—died of malaria. I declare. Where'd you find it?”

“Sam dug it out of the State archives. He's a Hitt, on the 1842 Creek Census. You'll be pleased to hear you two gentlemen are now eligible for minority status in the gret state of Florida.”

Jolie walked them down the cold drive to their car and helped Charley put away his Walmart luggage, while Hollis settled Snowflake in the back. Hollis was anxious to get on the road, though he hesitated before
he got in himself, a little awkward now that their parting was upon them as he'd grown fond of their landlady. She was a true swamp-running smart-ass of a Hoyt, but by-God faithful, in her way. Neither she nor Vic Lucas, or even his skinny teenage clerk, would take any of the ten-grand reward, which didn't please Hollis as much as it made him feel uncomfortable, as if he hadn't carried his weight here among the homefolk.

He offered it again, there in the drive, but Jolie just shook her head. “You know, Mr. Frazier, you ain't the only one around here whose Papa didn't get such a fair shake. Finding them fangers was the only good luck anybody's ever had in Hendrix. I was proud to be a part.”

Hollis could hardly argue with such a stand and let it go at that. He just glanced around the deep lawn and ivory-colored house and allowed after a moment, “Well, you got a nice place here, Miss Hoyt. You done well for yoursef.” That was about as high an accolade as they gave, down in Hendrix. He climbed in his car and lowered his window. “I need to brang my girls down here sometime. They'd like your house. They like old stuff, both of 'em.”

“I'd like that.” Jolie smiled, then asked with a glimmer of Hoyt needling, “You gone take 'em out to Hendrix?”

Hollis lost his smile in an instant. “Shit,” he said, so shortly and succinctly that Jolie burst out laughing.

“Well, you take care of yoursef, old man,” she told him, then bent to the window and told Charley the same. She told him to come back and go fishing when it was warm. “Not cane fishing—fishing down in the swamp. They still got fish down there, catfish the size of footballs.”

Charley assured her he would, and with a few more waves and promises to keep in touch, the brothers backed out. They exited the county much as they'd entered it: up Highway 231 and upcountry to Montgomery and Birmingham and crosswise through Tupelo, crossing the Tennessee line just past dark. It was a long drive, but pleasant, their talk still focused on Hendrix and Camp Six and the long-scattered families who'd once lived there. They reminisced about their good papa and their hardworking mother; about the musical Kimbralls and Big
Dave Bryant. But mostly they talked about the Hoyts, whom their aunt Tempy had often recalled in her exile. Her stories were of a tall and unruly clan of half bloods, with white pretensions and quick-tempered ways, who owned the rowdiest camp on the river and lost their daughters to rich men.

Tempy wasn't too forgiving of either their pale skin or their heathen ways and would usually conclude, “Never had no sense, not one of 'em.” She would sometimes allow with a faint twitch of her cheek, “But they were funny. They could by God make you laugh.”

•  •  •

It was a tradition the latest generation of Hoyts continued for many years to come, Carl's humor his chief device in converting the masses to the Gospel via his sermons, which are still broadcast practically round the clock on the different Christian broadcasting networks, squeezed in between the likes of Creflo Dollar and Kenneth Copeland. (Carl is the fattest of the three and talks like the King of the Hillbillies. He often speaks of his father.) Lena is still often caught on tape, sitting there in the front pew in her elaborate Spencer Alexis creations, watching Carl with a childlike devotion that isn't mere posturing, but wholly (and weirdly) sincere. Her sister-in-law is occasionally at her side, listening to her brother's sermons with a look of mild, dry curiosity.

The camera seldom lingers long on her as she has the unsettling habit of rolling her eyes at his more outlandish doctrinal claims. This seditious gesture has once or twice been caught on tape and broadcast around the globe. Next to her are her children: her stepson, Brice, now well into his teens, and a set of perfectly matched little girls, identical twins. The boy is light-eyed; the girls are dark enough that members of their uncle's flock sometimes ask them what they
are,
as their accent is straight out of Br'er Rabbit stories, though they are obviously not your typical Southern belles.

They are friendly children and don't mind the question, but grin and tell them they are Jewish Crackers, which is what their paternal
grandfather calls them, with affection. (“They talk slow, but they talk a lot,” he explains to his neighbors in Coral Springs.) Their mother sometimes describes them, with equal affection, as Little Black Dutch, and she should know, as she is the unofficial state expert on the breed, working on her third grant with the Department of the Interior when she's not busy with small design projects around Cleary, or serving as the chair of the local Historic and Preservation Committee. Their father works in Tallahassee for the State; probably will till he retires.

If you run into him at the Super China Buffet or the 4th Quarter on North Monroe, don't be afraid to approach, as he is still a talker, this Sam Lense, and he never eats alone if he can help it. He'll be glad to discuss the Muskogee Creek or Miami football or the dismantling of the DCF at the hands of the nefarious Republicans, or even the scar on his chest, faded in middle age to a pale silver-gray. He's never been the kind of man ashamed of his own myth, or his personal scars—even the ones that almost killed him.

T
his story has deep roots in the past, and I must first thank four great professors from my undergrad days at UF: James Haskins, Smith Kirkpatrick, Richard Scher, and Harry Crews. They set me on this journey many years ago, and I couldn't have told it without them, nor without the firsthand testimonies of a handful of truth-tellers who had the courage to meet my eye and give me a straight answer when I brought up the barbaric custom of spectacle lynching. It would have been easy to take a pass and pretend ignorance, but they didn't, and for that I am grateful. My agents, Marly Rusoff and Mihai Radulescu, have held my hand a very long time with this book, and my editor, Whitney Frick, was heroic in helping forge it into the novel it is today. Writing is a mostly solitary pursuit, but I am blessed to be surrounded by a magical circle—my husband, Wendel, daughters Emily, Abigail, and Isabel, and their husbands, Evan, Johnny, and Christopher, and the darling Lily P. If that weren't good fortune enough, I have fallen heir to friendships with some of the finest storytellers of the age: my poppa and mama, Pat and Cassandra Conroy, the late Doug Marlette, and the often imitated but inimitable Bernie Schein, who provided the final key. I tell all of you I love you so much that it almost seems trivial to say it, but you are my heart. Love, again.

Previous works by Janis Owens

My Brother Michael
Myra Sims
The Schooling of Claybird Catts
The Cracker Kitchen

A Scribner Reading Group Guide

American Ghost

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. In the opening paragraph of the book, we learn that Jolie and Sam's relationship was
“barely three months long, and as quickly ended as it had begun”
. How did this knowledge affect your reading of the first part of the book? Why do you think the author chose to disclose this information up front?

2. The book is broken up into two parts: “The Indian Study” and “When the Chickens Came Home to Roost.” How would you characterize each part of the story? How do they tell the same story and/or different stories?

3. Some of the characters change remarkably from teenagers to adults. Carl and Lena, for instance, both reinvent themselves in adulthood. Is the same true for Sam and Jolie? Discuss these characters as teenagers versus adults. How do they change? How do they stay the same?

4. Everyone, including Sam, seems to look with suspicion on Jolie's relationship with Hugh. Discuss their unique relationship, including its sudden dissolution.

5. Discuss the significance of the “fangers,” or fingers, throughout the story. What do they represent in general and to different characters?

6. After so many years and so much silence, why do you think Jolie decides to speak out about the fingers at her town meeting?

7. Jolie tells Sam that she knew she would lose him because
“Because women in Hendrix lose everything, eventually—friends, money, mothers. It's a losing kind of place. You tremble every minute for your love”
. Do you think this is a belief that Jolie felt resigned to or compelled to fight against?

8. Discuss the narration throughout the story. While Jolie comes through as the main character, how does the third-person narrator shape the story?