Catfish Alley (15 page)

I nod in agreement and Roxanne doesn't say a word. I
don't think she knows what to say. As we're driving home, I can tell she wants
to ask more questions about Zero. But I just can't bring myself to talk about
Zero more than a little bit at a time. I want her to know how special he was. I
want her to see him through my eyes, not white folks' eyes.

We get back to my house after seeing Mattie and Adelle
home, and Roxanne walks me to the back door with that big old umbrella of hers,
and then she plops herself down in the rocking chair on my screened porch.

"I think I'll wait on the rain to let up a little
bit before I head back," she says.

I think she just doesn't want to go home. I don't know
much of her story because we've been so focused on mine, and I'm not sure I
want to know. Probably none of my business anyway. But she sure seems lonesome.

I go over and sit beside her in the other rocker.
"Are you married, Roxanne?" I ask. I figure this is a safe enough
question. She wears a wedding ring and a big old diamond on her left hand.

She sighs and says, "For now, I am. My husband and
I are ... separated." She seems to have a hard time getting this out, but
then she rushes to say real quick, "But no one knows ... in the community,
that is ... and, well, I haven't exactly told my daughter yet, either."

"So you have a daughter, do you?" I ask.

This makes her smile. "Yes, her name is Milly —
Millicent, actually. She married last summer. A really sweet boy from Natchez.
I hey met at Ole Miss. He's going to be a lawyer." The way she says this,
I can tell .he's real proud.

"I see, and what's your daughter going to
do?"

"Oh, I don't think she knows what she wants. She's
not as driven as I've always been."

I look over at her and realize that she's got tears
starting down her cheeks. She's trying to wipe them off her face without me
noticing. Probably embarrassed to be crying in front of an old woman like me. I
reach in my pocket and pull out a clean handkerchief and hand it to her. I'm a
little surprised when she takes it. She dabs at her eyes and glances at me.

"Thank you," she says. "I'm not sure
what's wrong with me today. I don't usually talk about such personal
things."

"I can understand that," I say. I'm thinking
to myself that Lord knows I don't want to tell any more of my stories today. I
decide to see if maybe she just needs a little prompting. It's clear to me that
she could use a talk. I'm trying to sort out what question to ask. "Is
your daughter close to her daddy?"

"Oh, yes, very close. She thinks he hung the moon.
That's why I haven't said anything. I just hate to disappoint her that
way."

"That sounds like a big old burden to be carrying
by yourself," I say.

"What do you mean?" she asks.

"Your daughter's a grown-up married woman now.
Surely she knows that things happen between men and women sometimes.
Misunderstandings and the like."

"Maybe. I guess I've always protected her from
anything unpleasant."

"You got some of your lady friends you can talk to
about things with your husband?" I ask. Surely she's not going to talk to
me. She hardly knows me.

She thinks about this for a while, and I notice she
dabs at her eyes some more. Then she takes a deep breath and her voice is a
little stronger. "I don't really have friends that I talk to about ... you
know ... me. To tell you the truth, Grace, seeing you and Adelle and Mattie
makes me realize I've never had a friend like that."

I nod and rock, thinking how I don't know what I'd have
done without those two. "That's a shame," I say. I'm not sure how to
respond, but I'm curious. "How come you never made good friends? You move
around a lot growing up?"

"No. We didn't move around. As a matter of fact,
my parents were born and died in the same town."

"Was that here in Mississippi?"

"Um ... no ...
it was Louisiana."

For some reason she seems hesitant. I sit waiting.
Don't want to push her. I can almost feel her wheels turning. What could be so
hard to talk about? Suddenly, she completely changes the subject back to Zero.
Here we go again. "So, it sounds like your brother, Zero, was able to go
off to college. That must have been quite a feat, especially during the
Depression," she says, raising her eyebrows, trying to get me to talk some
more.

Somewhere along the way, I guess I've given her the
impression that Zero changed his mind and left Clarksville after all and lived
out his days somewhere else, happy being a doctor. What if he had never gone to
Ellen Davenport's house that night? Things might have turned out differently.
He labored at that sawmill all those long months, saving every penny, even
though Ray Tanner treated him worse than the dogs hanging around there begging
for scraps from the dinner buckets. But Zero kept saying he was so close. And
that night, he said how that was forty dollars closer to him making tuition,
all two hundred dollars, for a whole year.

I guess I'll never know what really happened. It seems
I should be resigned to that by now. So many things changed for me during those
years when I left Clarksville. Tougaloo College was my salvation. Zero believed
Alcorn State would be his.

"So where did you say Zero went to college?"
Roxanne asks.

"Alcorn State College in Itta Bena," I say.
Just then Walter knocks on the screen door, wanting to ask me something about
the yard, and Roxanne jumps like the boogey-man got her. Walter wouldn't hurt a
fly, but she'll never know that long as she keeps running off every time she
sees him.

"I'd better get on home so you can have your
nap," she says, and scoots past Walter real quick, grabs that umbrella,
and heads for her car.

Roxanne

I'm sipping on an RC and trying to piece together what
I have so far for this African-American tour. Not much. A schoolhouse-turned-lumber-warehouse,
a doctor's house, and a dilapidated hotel. Great. I feel the knot in my stomach
growing. I have to report to the committee tomorrow and this is pathetic. I try
to scribble some notes about Dr. Albert Jackson. What was the name of that
black medical school he went to?

My house is too big and too quiet — that's the problem.
Sitting here in the kitchen I remember what it was like before Milly married
and left last summer. There was a constant flurry of activity — wedding
preparations, dress fittings, flower selections. I loved that time with her. I
finally got to experience all of the parts of a wedding that I never had since
Dudley and I eloped, much to his mother's chagrin. Penelope Reeves was
apoplectic when he brought me home to meet her. She disguised it well, being
the genteel type, but I was, of course, terrified. What could I do to prove
myself worthy of the Reeves name? Having Milly helped. She wasn't tainted by an
uncertain past. It always bothered Dudley's mother that she couldn't pin down
my ancestry. Thankfully, she threw all of her energy into Milly and I dodged
her social bullet. And, in the meantime, I built a social circle for myself
that even she couldn't question.

Now, not only is Milly gone, but Dudley is, too. How
naive I was to believe he'd never cheat on me! But then, he's always had
everything he wanted — money, education, even this house he inherited from his
family. None of it means as much to him as it always has to me.
What should I do? Should I take him
back?
I can't fathom why i hat young woman would
put up with him and his tiresome obsession with Civil War history. The knot in
my stomach tightens more. I wonder if he loves her. Was all that business about
being tired of waiting on me to forgive him just an excuse?
Stop it,
I tell myself.
You've got work to do.

Thankfully, the phone ringing interrupts my downward
spiral about Dudley. It's Lousa Humboldt. She barely lets me say hello before
she launches in.

"You all are just not going to believe this!"
she says in that stupid attempt at a Southern accent. "I think Riverview
has a ghost! Won't that be special when we get on the Pilgrimage Tour?"

"How about that? Really?" I'm trying to act
interested since my bid for her restoration project went in last week.
Everybody and his brother around here has a ghost. One more is not going to
increase the tour attendance. But I let her rattle on.

"Do you remember the old woman who died here? What
was her name?"

"Davenport. Ellen Davenport." I picture fat
old Ellen Davenport. She practically ate herself to death, I've heard. I can't
imagine her flitting around anywhere, unless ghosts can roll. The story I heard
was something about her pining away for years for a boy who married someone
else. I seem to be surrounded right now with women, alive or lead, who spent
most of their lives alone. Is this some kind of sign? Is this what's going to
happen to me?

"Well, I kept hearing something last night up in
the attic."

"You know, Louisa, you probably have bats," I
say. I don't want her to get her hopes up.

"No, I'm sure it wasn't a bat. Because, listen to
this. Today, I was poking around the attic. There's a ton of old stuff up
there. And I found a trunk full of letters and a diary."

I'm thinking Ellen Davenport probably kept a diary of
everything she ate for sixty years. "Uh-huh," I say, reaching for my
RC.

"It's Ellen Davenport's diary and it starts in
1926. I think she must have been about sixteen years old." Louisa is so
excited she's forgetting to try to sound Southern.

"Mm-hm," I say, stifling a yawn. I think I'll
take a nap. It's still raining and I don't feel like writing today.

"Well, anyway, I want you to look at it when you
come here for the committee meeting tomorrow. You might recognize some of the
names. There's only one, so far, that looks familiar to me."

"Oh, really," I say. "And who is
that?"

"Um ...
let me
see ..."
I hear shuffling in the background.

"Tanner ... Ray Tanner? Isn't that the name of
that lumber business over on the south side?"

That makes sense. The Davenport family was in the
timber business for years. They probably worked with the Tanners. I think again
of Del Tanner's refusal to let us look at his warehouse and grit my teeth.
Louisa is still yammering on.

"And let's see, there's an Andy Benton —
apparently, she was in love with him. And there's a funny name ... someone
named Zero?"

I almost drop the phone. "Zero Clark?" I ask.

"I don't see any last name. She's just writing
something about Zero delivering a package ... Her writing is really difficult
to make out."

I promise Louisa I will look at the diary first thing
tomorrow after our meeting and hang up. I stop myself before dialing Grace
Clark's number. She seems so mysterious about her brother. Maybe there are
things in that diary she doesn't want known. I'll just see what it says and
then decide whether or not to talk to her about it next Tuesday.

Del Tanner

As I sit on a barstool at Dewey's sipping a cold Bud, I
try to figure out how the hell I got myself into the mess I'm in. We Tanners
been running the lumberyard since Daddy took it over in 1941, the year before I
was born. Lumber's always been plentiful and profitable. But I've never been
able to make the business work as well as my daddy. Folks around here always
talk about him. "That Ray Tanner," they say, "he had such a good
head for business." I'd like to tell them, Daddy didn't have to deal with
all these worthless niggers. Back in Daddy's day, black men wanted to work and
you could get a good day's labor out of them.

What I can't sort out is how I'm supposed to pay the
damn health insurance or workman's comp on a bunch of employees who would just
as soon spit on me as work. It used to be, the boys were loyal. They were
willing to work for what the Tanners could pay. Glad to have a job. Now, I can
barely keep anybody for six months before they up and quit.

If that ain't enough, Alice is on a tear about building
a new house. She keeps complaining that we need to live in a better
neighborhood. The last thing I want to do is move. When Daddy built the Tanner
house, it was in a prime part of town, near all of the right people and all of
the right places. Then those developers started building up subdivisions on the
south side of town. G
ood
for business, but all the white people started moving out there. I can't abide
the thought of selling my daddy's house to some nigger. It just ain't right.
But if I don't, I'm going to end up in the middle of an all-black neighborhood.