Summer of the Redeemers (19 page)

Eighteen

T
HE
plan to dig up the Redeemers’ cemetery took shape without any real effort on my part or Alice’s. Mostly it was happenstance. Greg asked for three days off on the first of August, a request that ignited Nadine’s curiosity. After weeks of routine, Greg was doing something different. Nadine demanded to know what it was.

Greg said only that the Redeemers were having some sort of congregational gathering in Hattiesburg and that the entire push of them were going to board up on the buses and drive there for the first two nights in August. Under Nadine’s inquisition, with Jamey Louise helping out, Greg said it had to do with policies, but he wouldn’t give any details. I personally thought maybe he didn’t know any more about it, but for a couple of days, until she tired of it, Nadine tried to worm more information out of him. He told nothing except that a lot of the Kali Oka Road Redeemers were upset and that everyone had to be in Hattiesburg for the vote.

I was so caught up in riding Cammie that I didn’t even realize the implications of what this information meant. Not until I was reading Mama Betts’ almanac to find out about planting pansies did it dawn on me that August first was a full moon.

The perfect night for a sneak raid on the Redeemer cemetery.

Things were still a little raw between Alice and me, and she agreed too easily to my plan. We were both trying hard to recapture the bond we’d shared so effortlessly in the past. A grave-digging adventure seemed just the ticket, especially since the Redeemer girl Magdeline
Scott was the subject. Magdeline and her plight had crossed us up, and now she’d get us back together.

I was so keyed up that morning that I had a lot of difficulty calming Cammie down enough to ride her. Nadine was impatient in her funny way, calling out orders and cursing when I didn’t obey. I didn’t mind Cammie’s sidestepping and crow-hopping. She was just feeling good because she didn’t get out of her stall except when I rode her, and she wanted to stretch out and shake out the kinks. I asked Mama Betts about this in an offhanded kind of way, and she explained that horses were grazing animals and that it was harmful to keep them pinned up in a little stall. Nadine was afraid Cammie’d scar her hide or twist a leg in the hardscrabble pasture.

Jamey Louise leaned against her pitchfork in the door of the barn. Knowing that Greg wouldn’t be at work, she’d worn faded blue jeans and a red checked shirt, which was the most appropriate thing she’d worn to work yet. I could tell by the way she watched that she hoped I’d bust my butt right in front of her.

When the six Redeemer buses flew down the road, a trail of dust choking after them, I must have smiled.

“What’s going on?” Nadine asked as she grabbed Cammie’s bridle and brought her to a dancing stop. She motioned for me to climb down.

“Nothing. It’s just the Redeemers leaving for the gathering in Hattiesburg.”

“Yeah, yeah”—she waved impatiently in the air—”I know that. What’s going on with you? You look like you won a prize.”

“Nothing.” I wanted to tell Nadine about the adventure Alice and I had planned, but I couldn’t. Jamey Louise was always hanging around and listening in on every private conversation. If she knew Alice and I were going to Cry Baby Creek, she’d insist on going with us. She’d be worse than useless too.

I guess I must have looked down the road, because Nadine smiled real big. “What are you up to, Rebekah Rich? What’s happening down at the end of the road?”

“When I was a little girl, my grandma used to tell me about the baby that drowned in Cry Baby Creek,” I answered. I was hoping maybe the legend would distract her. “Late at night, have you ever walked down the road and listened? When it gets real still, you can
hear that little baby a’crying so pitiful. They say she floated for a long time before she finally drowned.”

I walked Cammie into the barn, and Nadine followed. Jamey was still standing at the door, listening to every word that passed between us.

“So why did the baby’s mother put it in the creek?” Nadine asked.

“It’s a long story, and it goes back to the church people who originally lived down at the end of the road.”

“I got time, and Jamey can clean your stalls while you tell me,” Nadine said. “Right, Jamey, since you’re standing around doing nothing?”

“I know the story,” Jamey said. “I’ll tell it and Bekkah can clean her stalls.”

“Not this time,” Nadine said. “Let Bekkah tell it.” She signaled me to continue. I’d put Cammie’s saddle and bridle away, and she needed a few minutes to cool before I started grooming her. Nadine had jumped up to sit on Caesar’s door, and I leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the barn, rocking back on my heels so I could crouch and rest against the wood.

“Well, the young woman’s name was Miss Selena Baxter. I remember because Selena was such an odd name. And her baby’s name was Evie.” I was trying to remember exactly everything Mama Betts had told me, but I knew I was going to have to fill in with a lot of my own details. It was only this summer that I’d come to realize several important things about little dead Evie Baxter, and how that baby had come to be that way.

“Selena was a beautiful young woman with long dark hair and green eyes.” I was making all of this up, but it didn’t really matter. Now, in my mind, when I pictured Selena Baxter, I saw Magdeline. “And she had the most beautiful voice. She was thought to be truly blessed by God with the way she could sing. She didn’t need a piano or anything else, just the words and a tune, and she made everyone believe that God was among them.”

“You’re making this up, Bekkah,” Jamey accused. “I know this story, and there wasn’t ever anything about that girl being able to sing.”

“Shut up and shovel,” Nadine directed. “I want to hear this.”

“Selena didn’t have any real family. Her parents had died in an epidemic of some fever or something, and she was left all alone. Since
she was too old to be really adopted and too young to live by herself, she ended up with the church people at the end of the road. It was the Church of the Risen Christ back then.” I couldn’t remember for certain, but that sounded good enough, and I knew Jamey Louise wouldn’t know any better.

“How’d she find out about them?” Jamey asked. She was still holding up the end of the barn.

“Must have been that one of her people knew about it,” I said. “I’m not a historian, Jamey, I’m just trying to tell the story.”

“Go on,” Nadine urged.

“Well, Selena didn’t always feel that she fit in with the church people. She’d been used to going to school and doing regular things, and now she was isolated down at the end of a red dirt road without any real friends. The only one who made her feel at all welcome was the preacherman who was in charge of the church. He was always telling her she was a beautiful child of God and that her voice was a special gift, a sign of God’s pleasure with her.”

“I can see where this is going,” Jamey said darkly. “He’s going to rape her.”

“Not rape. It wasn’t like that at all. Selena believed that he loved her and that it was God’s wish that they join together.” I was proud of that phrase. I’d been wondering how I was going to skirt around the fornicate issue. When Mama Betts told me the story, she’d avoided all mention of that. She’d only said that Selena Baxter had had a baby. Although Mama Betts had never come right out and said it was the preacherman’s, I’d finally figured that part out.

“I’ll bet it was the preacher who told her it was God’s will,” Nadine said dryly. “He probably told her that she was serving the Lord.”

“And he told her that he loved her,” I said. “The preacherman was very handsome, and he was the leader of all the people. It made Selena proud to be chosen by him. And he said he would marry her and make her his wife. It didn’t matter that she was lonely and treated like an outcast by the congregation. As soon as they were married, she would be accepted and loved, just like he was. But it didn’t happen that way.”

“She got pregnant,” Jamey said. “Somebody should have told her the facts.” She laughed and Nadine threw a clump of dirt at her.

“She did indeed. And when she told the preacherman, he said it wasn’t his baby and that she’d been sinning with someone in the congregation.

Selena was so upset that she fled the church and ran into the woods to think.

“Too afraid to tell anyone what had happened, Selena spent more and more time alone in the woods. She walked beside the creek and tried to think of a solution to her problems. She had no one to turn to, and the members of the congregation, as her stomach started to grow, treated her very ugly. It was obvious she was pregnant, but she refused to name the father of her child.”

“Rebekah Rich, you’re making every word of this up.” Jamey threw her pitchfork into the aisle. “It isn’t fair, me having to do all your work while you lounge around telling lies that anybody with half a brain could see is a bunch of hogwash.”

“Are you implying that I don’t have half a brain?” Nadine asked.

“No, but you’re sittin’ there listening like you believe what Bekkah says is gospel.”

“It’s a good tale well told,” Nadine said. “Maybe if you practiced your verbal skills instead of moaning and primping, you’d be able to tell a good story.”

“Moaning and primping will get me everything I want in life,” Jamey said with a grin of victory. “All telling lies is ever gonna do for Bekkah is get her butt tanned and get her in a heap of trouble.”

“Go on,” Nadine said, laughing and shaking her head at Jamey. “Tell the story, Bekkah. Jamey may not claim to like it, but she’s listening, isn’t she?”

I took a deep breath and gritted down for some more imagining. “Well, as the time drew nearer for Selena to have the baby, she knew she was in a bad situation. The folks at the church shunned her. Nobody would talk to her, and she wasn’t even certain they’d help her with the delivery when it came time. The preacherman wouldn’t have anything to do with her and told her, in front of the congregation, not to come back to the church with her burden of sin. She could stay on the church grounds, because she had no place else to go, he said. But she was unholy. He told her it was God’s will that she give the child up for adoption to some loving family who would raise it in a Christian way.”

Nadine shifted her position on the door. “You two girls may think this is a wild tale, but things like this happen all the time. Some of those religious groups even take the babies of young girls and sell them.

They sort of use young girls, just about your age, like breeding cattle. They just order the men to fertilize them, and when the baby is born, they sell it like a crop.” She smiled her fox smile at the horror on our faces.

“It’s true,” she said. “I’ll bet that’s what got all the Blood of the Redeemer church people so upset. There was something on the news a week ago about selling babies out of a Hattiesburg home for unwed mothers.”

“A Redeemer home?” Jamey asked. “The Redeemers sell babies?”

Nadine and I exchanged glances when we saw Jamey’s hand go to her flat stomach.

“They wouldn’t take a baby unless the girl wanted to give it away, would they?” Jamey asked. She came out of the stall and stood in the center of the aisle.

“Sure they would. Think about it. Most of those girls are underage. The ones in the unwed mothers’ home, their parents have probably turned them out or sent them to the home because they’re ashamed of them.”

“What about the doctors?” I asked. “They wouldn’t let that happen.”

“Who said there were doctors? Women have babies without doctors all the time.”

I was sorry I’d started this whole story. Nadine stood in a clear pool of midday sun, her amber eyes dazzled by the light. Jamey, only three feet away, was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. They were both upset, and all because of an old legend and a story on the news.

Nadine walked out of the light and back into the dimness of the barn, and the intensity of the moment flattened out. “Forget I interrupted. Go on with the story. So what happened to the baby and Selena? Did somebody steal her baby?”

Jamey snorted. “Stole would have been a heap better than what happened. She murdered it.”