The Tree of Forgetfulness (21 page)

Jailbirds with their heads under the covers. Window layers. The little whore Ella Rainey, who'd sworn in an earlier affidavit that she'd recognized his voice and his back. Not that she couldn't identify a man by his back—she'd felt enough of them working over her to know the look and feel of one. He drove down the last hill and onto the Broad River bridge. An early-morning mist had risen from the river, and halfway across the bridge he drove into a patch of that fog and felt a glum weariness descend. He was sick of this business, sick of what people had been saying about him from the minute he was sworn in as sheriff, maybe for his whole life. He remembered old Dr. Hastings's wife standing in the door of their house close beside the Graniteville Mill, a Christmas basket in her hand. She'd worn a dark cape trimmed in fur, combs in her hair. He hadn't forgotten what she wrote in the Aiken paper about her club's work among the hutch dwellers in Horse Creek Valley: “the least of our brethren.”

That was the stink of family, the birth slime that never washed off. Then there was the other stink, caused and fanned by his many enemies who never wanted him to be sheriff because of the goods he had on them. What he knew about where and how Ella Rainey's brothers made their whiskey and who they sold it to was reason enough for her to lie about him. All he would be trying to say was that a lot of people followed Aubrey Timmerman like buzzards looking for a chance to swoop in and tear another piece of flesh from his long-suffering carcass.

He could remind the governor of all those facts and circumstances
and histories, rearrange the pieces of the story of that night a hundred times and still be left with one that would not fit, and that was the moment they'd brought Bessie Long down the metal steps from the second-floor cages, cursing and screaming and grabbing at everything in sight. She was a big strong woman, and at the bottom of the steps she'd grabbed a doorjamb and held on tight. They'd shouted and yanked her hands while she screamed and twisted and fought them and held on until he'd thought she was going to rip the jamb clear off the door. The men holding him had pinned his arms, but he'd been close enough to speak to her. “Hush, girl,” he'd said. “They're going to carry you home.” She'd let go of the doorjamb then and grabbed at him with her eyes like he was her blessed Lord, and she was still looking to him to save her when they'd dragged her away. And to this day it would not come clear if he'd meant his words to comfort or deceive.

All that month he went to Columbia when he was summoned; he drank a Coke with the governor, or he didn't; he told his story again, added and subtracted from it, trimmed and shaded and colored it, and the governor dithered and stalled his way to the end of his term in office. “Governor Passes Buck,” read a December headline in the
State
, but Arthur McCormick waved away the insult as he would a gnat. He was a Christian, he said, and the Lord knew his heart. Pressed for comment, he repeated a favorite saying: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Especially when those words came out of people's mouths and buzzed around like flies that never actually lit on anything that could be proved true.

So Aubrey Timmerman sat tight, and he advised everyone who sought his counsel to sit tight, and sure enough, just before Christmas, Curtis N. R. Barrett wrote one final article for his New York newspaper in which he claimed that the era of lynch law was just about over in the South. Then he packed up his fancy shirts and his silver cuff links, his cigarette case and his flask, his bag of insinuation and innuendo and character assassination and contempt, and slunk back to New York City, where he swore that what had happened in Aiken, South Carolina,
was the damnedest thing he'd ever seen, and he'd seen a lot, both in the war and after.

When the sheriff heard that Curtis N. R. Barrett had vamoosed, he wished like hell that someone had told him the man was leaving; he would have run to the depot to see him off. He would have whipped out his pocket handkerchief and waved it like crazy until the ass-end of that northbound train had rattled out of sight. Then, sure enough, in January 1927, as Aubrey had prophesied, the Aiken County Grand Jury was seated one more time to take up the Long killings. They examined the eighteen affidavits that J. P. Gibson had collected. They questioned the people who'd given them, and they ruled once and for all that there was insufficient evidence to hand down any indictments, and finally,
finally
, it was over. Aubrey Timmerman's name had been cleared, or at least nothing he'd claimed to be true had been proven in a court of law to be false, and that was good enough to allow him to keep his job and to earn for him, a few years later, a position as an Internal Revenue Service officer and, a few years after that, a picture and a brief biography in a book called
Ninety Years in Aiken County
.

“W
AIT
,”
HE SAYS
, but the priest kisses and folds his purple stole; he slips the chalice back into a linen bag, zips shut the case of Communion wafers, and packs everything away in his black leather satchel. “I gave the general absolution,” he says. “Our God is a merciful God.” But Cecile weeps into her hands because it's her fault the priest came too late to hear her father's last confession. She was blinded by pride in her own judgment that there was still time, and she waited too long to call. He hears the priest and Libba trying to console her, and he wishes he could console her too. “It's all right, Cecile,” he wants to say. “You've done nothing wrong. Hope blinded you. Where's the sin in that?”

Then Libba sits on the bed, presses her warm body against his, kisses his mouth. “Darling,” she whispers. “My love.” She speaks from the place he's steadily, slowly drifting away from, down and down. He needs to tell her that the room is too crowded; some of these people must go. Lewis's daughter seems permanently installed in a chair beside his bed—nothing can be done about that—but the others must leave now. The ones who stand in the corners and gather around the bed with their heads bowed so he can't see their faces or know their names. Their voices flow around him and pull at him like the current in the floodwaters he'd once walked through.

At least Lewis's daughter isn't afraid to show her face, and looking at her, he feels an urgent need to tell her about the day the Savannah River spilled into Augusta and he walked home through the flooding
streets. At first, he tells her, the water was up just over the soles of his shoes, and it was lively fun to splash through it, so much fun that he'd walked until the water lapped over his ankles, before it occurred to him that he'd better go home. By the time he turned onto Ellis Street and saw their house, the water was up to his waist, running strong. A long pine board rushed past him, then a tree limb and a dead cat. He was just a boy, didn't know that no matter how wide it spreads, a river moves toward the sea. Half a block from home he found it hard to walk. The current kept sweeping his feet out from under him, trying to carry him where it was going, and he remembered the dead cat and knew that it made no difference to the water whether he swam or floated, struggled or sank. At their house the water was rushing over the fourth step, curling back in small waves from the bars in the stair railing. He'd had to grab onto a baluster to haul himself out of the current.

All his life, he says, he has felt like that boy clinging to the baluster, trying not to be swept away. He does not know why he told her that last part—he has never told anyone else—but now she's crying, and her tears are not entirely unsatisfying.
She is sorry
, she says, taking his hand,
sorry that he'd had to pull himself out of the water. Someone should have been there to help him
, she says.
No child should have to feel alone and afraid like that
.

“Yes, well,” he says. “Enough whimpering. You never saw my name on any list of perpetrators of that heinous crime, and you never will,” he says. “I swore no affidavit. I am never quoted by name in a newspaper article or accused of a role in anyone's murder.”

Yes
, she says.
But you were there. What do you call those who stand in a crowd and watch three murders? Are they onlookers? Bystanders? Witnesses? What do you call people who know and do not speak? What do they call themselves? I need to know
.

“Why? Who made you a judge? What gives you the right?”

Because you are mine and I am yours
, she says.
I need to know what to call myself
.

An image flares in his mind, an illustration in a book about the ancient tribes of the South Carolina coast who stripped the flesh from
the bodies of the dead before burying them in waterlogged graves. A figure with a tattooed face and long fingernails, a high-ranking person, honored and feared. “Try Bone-picker,” he says.

He has hurt her, but so be it. The truth hurts sometimes.
And you?
she says.
What do you call yourself?

“A coward,” he says. “Are you satisfied?”

That fits
.

“Fits who?”

All of us
.

Forgiven or unforgiven, there's something he must do. “And now, good-bye,” he says. He takes back his hand from hers. The war has not begun, and so Lewis has not gone to fight in it. He has graduated from Clemson College and been sent to New York to work in the rich man's home office. A golden opportunity for his boy, and he must be a good father and write to his son. He picks up his heavy Sheaffer fountain pen, smooths down a sheet of engraved stationery. “Stick on the job,” he writes, “for the time you feel you are not getting anywhere is just the time you will find out that you are clicking along in top shape.”

“We don't want any criticism to come up for anything,” he writes. “Cultivate that secretary's friendship, and send her or give her a box of candy or something once in a while. It is well worth it. Don't ever let them think that you're not a hard worker, and don't let anyone believe you're not for them because then they might conclude that you're against them.”

Libba stands and starts for the door to look for Minnie. Cecile is done with weeping now and gone back to being her sturdy, competent self. She holds his hand, says, “Mother, where are you going? Don't go,” but Libba walks briskly out into the long white hall then leans against the cool tile wall and closes her eyes. “I'm tired, Howard,” she says. “I just need a minute to catch my breath.” When she opens her eyes, Minnie is coming slowly toward her down the hall, tall and thin in a pale yellow dress, placing in front of her with each step a rubber-tipped wooden cane, her face a rebuke to pain. She promised she'd be here at five o'clock, and now it is close to six, but ever since that January
day in 1927 when Minnie left her little cottage in their backyard and moved into her own house on Toole Hill, she comes and goes as she pleases. She has come in her own good time, and Libba shows her into Howard's room. “Miss Aimar,” she says to Cecile, and she stands beside the bed leaning on her cane and looking down at Howard. “Uh, uh, uh,” Minnie says, shaking her head. “You're walking that lonesome valley now, aren't you?”

“Be kind now, Minnie, he can hear you,” Libba whispers. “My father said hearing is the last sense to go.” Minnie turns to her and tightens her lips, draws into herself the way she does when she's deciding how big a piece of her mind she's about to give you. “Oh, don't listen to me,” Libba says, pressing a hand to her forehead. “Say what you want.” Minnie considers this, head bowed, before she turns back to the bed. She smells of sweet talcum powder and Octagon soap. She wears her steel-gray hair in two tight braids crossed and pinned over the top of her head, the way she's always worn it. She smooths a wrinkle out of his sheet, pats his arm, and rests her hand there for a moment. “You just keep walking, Mr. Aimar,” she says. “You'll get where you're going.”

Out in the hall again, Libba walks with her. “Now, Minnie, please tell me when Zeke plans to bring those grandchildren to see you? It's not right for him to do you that way. He should move back here with them so they can be close to you. New York is no place to raise children. Has he forgotten where his home is?”

“I keep up with my son, Mrs. Aimar,” Minnie says. “He'll be along directly. You better go on back in that room and see about your husband.”

Minnie has gone, but Zeke has stayed. He hadn't noticed him before, the room was so crowded, but now that Minnie and the priest have gone, he sees Zeke standing at the window, looking out. He'd know that slouch, that cocky hat, anywhere. “Zeke,” Howard says, but Zeke doesn't turn. “You did what you had to do, and I did the same.” Back in 1926 he'd had the last word, of course; that was the way things were then, the way they mostly still are now. He cannot imagine how Zeke could have thought he could betray him and walk away from that moment unharmed. Still, if Zeke had betrayed any number of other men so flagrantly, Zeke would be dead.

He comforts himself with that fact now at the hour of his death, the moment he's come to at the end of every Hail Mary.
Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death
. The hour of our death. How could something as wide and full and deep as a life dwindle into a last hour, a last minute, the moment itself? The shadows of summer leaves rush across the front of his house. The singing of a yellow canary frightens him. He feels breath on his face, a voice in his ear. “My darling,” Libba whispers, as if she could send those words with him out into oblivion, out into eternity and its ever-receding certainties.

E
IGHTY YEARS ON
, what is left of the Long story are fragments, glimpses, and silence. Seen from this distance, the story makes a design full of missing pieces, but one with enough order and consequence left to allow a person to fill a gap, to hear a missing word or cry, and that is what the curious grandchild has been trying to do: imagine the missing pieces, people the silence.