The Tree of Forgetfulness (23 page)

While she pinned her hat, he went on talking. He'd be damned if he was going to worship any God who'd turned his face away from
them the way this God had done. “You don't know anything, Mama, if you think God's going to protect you,” he said.

“I know you'd better stop blaspheming,” she said, but there was no way to stop him once he got wound up. The way it looked to him, he said, the Almighty had turned his back on the colored people of South Carolina a long time ago. Hell, he might even have
given
the whole state to the devil. “Go on, Satan, take it,” God said, and the devil answered, “Sure thing, Boss, much obliged.”

It always grieved her when he talked like that. She took down her black patent leather purse from a nail on the wall and checked the folded dollars there. “You better hush about the devil,” she said.

She didn't believe in the actual devil any longer; Dr. Scott, the pastor at Mt. Hebron Baptist Church, wasn't big on the devil either, though he sometimes preached on his many names and disguises.
Accuser of the Brethren. Ruler of Darkness. Tempter. Thief. Father of Lies
. At church on the terrible Sunday after the killings, some of the old people swore that during the night they'd felt the devil's heavy cloak dragged over the town, but Dr. Scott admonished them not to give in to fear and superstition. He led them in singing: “Father, I stretch my hand to thee, no other help I know.”

“Have salt in yourselves,” he said in his lordly voice, “and be at peace with one another.”

Then they took up a special offering for Mr. N. R. Latham, an offering that Dr. Scott allowed but would not personally contribute to. Others blamed N. R. Latham as well and gave nothing, but she dropped a dollar in the basket for the man who'd torn such a big hole in the case against the three Longs that Dempsey stepped through it and went free. He was halfway to Monetta, so they'd heard, when the sheriff got him.

One last silence filled: Dempsey Long's hour of freedom on the day the judge dismissed the verdict against him.

He might have stood up from his seat at the front of the courtroom, but N. R. Latham grabbed his wrist and pulled him back down onto the hard bench beside him and held on to keep him there. He would have known why Dempsey shouldn't stand up, why he must
stop smiling. But Dempsey couldn't stop. He didn't want to leave Bessie and Albert in jail, but he was free. It wouldn't do any good to wait around until tomorrow when they might be, and it could do harm.

“Thank you, sir,” he said to N. R. Latham. He shook the man's hand, shook it again. Latham took him by the elbow, turned him away from the courtroom, where groups of white men had gathered in corners to talk and glance over their shoulders at the two of them. “If you don't have any more business in town, Dempsey,” he said, “why don't you go home? Go cross-country if you can. Head on back to your people.”

What people?
he wanted to ask.
What home?
The lawyer knew that his family was dead or scattered like a fire when you kick the last embers to make sure it's out. He'd seen his mother sprawled across the woodpile, dead, his wife Clara running across a field with the baby in her arms. He would have known that no Long lived there any longer, but he might have hoped he was wrong and started for home. Where else would he go? Where do any of us go after we've lost everything? The sun was low in the sky, the light fading fast, but he would walk all night if he had to; the dark didn't scare him like it had scared his mother. She wouldn't go into a lightless house, so she'd always quit work in plenty of time to get home and light the lamps and rouse the fire. But he wasn't afraid. He should have been dead for over a year, and instead he was free, walking north toward Monetta and home, enjoying the way the setting sun left a band of cold peach light along the horizon. In the stands of scrub oak and pine beyond the fields it was already night, the last light fading over the open ground. It was the time of day when his father had always come into the shed where he was putting up the mule, hanging up the harness; he'd turn and squint at the sun then look back at Dempsey, measuring one against the other. If he spat on the ground after looking, Dempsey had quit too early. If his father nodded or patted the mule's dusty neck, it meant that the day's work was done to the old man's satisfaction and they could both go home and rest.

F
ROM HIS SEAT
at the head of his mother's casket, he can see the whole of Mt. Hebron Baptist Church. The tall windows he washed this morning; the worn oak pews; the deep-red carpet that runs along the center aisle from the pulpit through the open doors at the back and down the steps into the bright sunlight beyond. People move into the church out of the brightness and must stop to let their eyes adjust to the dim interior; the change is that drastic. The old people, especially, have to stand there for a while to get their bearings, and it's mostly the old who have come to his mother's home-going, so there's considerable delay and confusion at the back of the church. Then more confusion as the elders totter up the aisle and are met with the sight of Zeke Settles keeping watch beside a closed casket, and they have to stop again and shake their heads, to adjust their thinking. Behind him the choir rustles, a flock of satin birds.

What they think doesn't matter. What matters is that he promised his mother he'd go with her as far as he could go, and sitting beside her casket with his hand up under the spray of red roses, her favorite flower, is one way he's keeping that promise. The closed casket is another; she hadn't wanted to be stared at. He chose the pecan wood casket, the most expensive in Jackson's salesroom, in honor of his mother's love of pecans, the way she could crack two Gloria Grandes in one hand and slip the whole meat from the shell. From where he sits, he can see his wife Denise and their two girls, married women now with children of their own, looking back at him from the front pew.
He watches Denise bring her thirty years of experience as a junior high school mathematics teacher to totaling the cost of casket and roses, and when she looks at him again, he sees she's already at work on how they will pay for it, and he smiles at her gratefully.

In the pew behind his family the Daughters of Zion fan themselves with square cardboard fans printed with a picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, beseeching his father to take the cup of suffering from him. They are dressed all in white, with red sashes across their chests, like the one his mother will wear into eternity, as she wanted. Some white people have come too, and they sit together halfway back on the left-hand side of the church. He checks the roses on the casket to make sure that none have wilted, and he looks up again to see the Aimars step in out of the light: Lewis, Libba, and a younger woman, Lewis's daughter no doubt; she looks just like him. Of course they're here, he thinks. They'd better be.

Mrs. Aimar wears a black suit and a small pillbox hat, but her hair looks untidy, poking out from under, and her skirt is twisted so the zipper shows. She shuffles in on Lewis's arm, wearing on her feet what look to be velvet bedroom slippers. How are the mighty fallen. The younger woman wears a plain black dress, and her light hair falls straight to her shoulders. She has the shrewd blue Aimar eyes, the long thin nose and narrow family face. Seeing him, Mrs. Aimar brightens, shakes loose from Lewis and starts up the aisle, her purse gaping open and swinging from her arm. She walks as if she's falling forward.
Get up off that seat and go help her
, his mother says.
Aren't you ashamed of yourself?
He starts to obey, but Lewis catches up with his mother, snaps her purse shut, speaks to her. In her raised chin, the vehement movement of her mouth, he sees the ghost of the woman she'd been, and his heart jumps and starts to pound, the way it used to do when she called him: “Zeke, you Zeke, come here this minute.”

The wife of the man who pointed a gun at him and ran him out of town. That's how he's thought of her since the day it happened, and even though his mother swore that Howard Aimar saved his life by running him off, Zeke will stick with what he remembers: Aimar's eyes, the gun aimed at his heart, and Curtis N. R. Barrett protesting quietly,
then not at all, until the only difference between the two of them came down to which one held the gun. Later, when Howard Aimar had gone inside, Barrett had handed him a New York address scribbled on a scrap of paper, and Zeke made sure he'd seen him drop it on the ground before he left the Aimars' yard for the last time.

As his heart slows, he realizes he'd been afraid that Libba Aimar was going to try and give him the wren's nest again. One day long ago Libba had found the nest in the yard, strands of his mother's hair woven into it. She'd given it to Minnie as a testament, she'd said, to Minnie's place in their family. But when his mother quit and moved out a month after he went north, she left it on the shelf above her fireplace. Left it along with every cast-off blouse and winter coat, every chair and knickknack and dish towel, taking with her nothing but what she'd brought when she came to work for them. For years Mrs. Aimar had tried to give the nest back to Minnie. She'd nestled it among the oranges, divinity, roasted pecans, and fruitcake in the yearly Christmas basket. Once she'd even tucked it into a basket of ironing, but his mother had sent it back on top of the tissue paper she always laid over her finished work.

This remembering is exactly why it is not good for him to come here. The sleeping wrongs kicked awake; the shut-up rooms opened; the return of a disheartening sense of what his life has cost him. What his mother's life cost her. He doesn't have to be here long before the husband, father, grandfather, retired Pullman porter on the New York–Chicago line that he is in New York begins to collapse. The man who takes pleasure in the still-growing totals recorded in Denise's precise hand in the bankbook in the top drawer of the desk in their bedroom, who believes that their steady increase tracks not just a growing prosperity but a widening distance between the man he'd become in New York and the one he used to be here. All it takes for that man to start to doubt himself is to step down from the train in Aiken and see the low spreading limbs of the live oak where he used to park his horse and wagon and wait for customers. By the time that man has walked a half a mile from the station to Toole Hill and set his suitcase on his
mother's front porch and called and knocked and waited for her to unbolt, unchain, unlock, the door, he feels like he's come all this way to return a nice borrowed suit, put on his own clothes again, and turn back into himself: Zeke Settles, hat in hand, at your service.

The Aimars file into the front pew of the white section, and watching them, he realizes that the memory of the day he left Aiken is not finished with him yet. It was the morning after the flower show, and Howard Aimar had just bailed him out of jail and driven him to his mother's house, still wearing the white jacket he'd worn to serve supper the night before. A silent drive, he remembers. Something was wrong. He remembers the light sifting through the trees, a thread of smoke twisting up from his mother's chimney. He'd gone inside to show her that he was all right, and when he came back out, Curtis N. R. Barrett was hurrying down the driveway, topcoat flying. He and Howard Aimar exchanged a few sharp words, then Mr. Aimar walked right up close to Zeke and started in on him about the gray fedora he liked to wear tipped down over one eye, to give a little snap, a little flair, to the way he eyed a girl. Mr. Aimar seemed to bear that hat a special grudge; he was forever at him to take it off, straighten it up, get rid of it. His mother had warned him about waving the hat in a white man's face like a red flag in front of a bull, but as usual, he hadn't listened. “Zeke,” he said. “I want you to set that hat straight on your head, and don't let me catch you wearing it like that again.”

Zeke guessed that he was just showing off for Barrett, letting him know who was boss. So he said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Aimar,” and he nudged the brim up a fraction of an inch and stood there, rocking back on his heels, grinning like a fool.

What happened next happened so fast that he can't slow it down, even now. To this day he's never seen a man move as fast as Howard Aimar did that morning: one continuous motion that carried him over to the green Ford and back, a pistol held down at his side. “Zeke,” he said. “I'm going to ask you a question, and you'd better think very carefully before you answer me. Did you sell Mr. Barrett some of my whiskey?”

Nothing to say to that but the truth; it was clear he already knew.
“Yes, sir,” he said.

“And did you show something of mine to Mr. Barrett?”

He remembers how the smoke stopped rising from his mother's chimney then; the chickens stopped pecking the ground; his mother, who'd just that minute stepped out onto her porch to bring him a clean shirt, dropped it and put a hand over her mouth; Curtis N. R. Barrett stood there in his black topcoat. Even the leaves on the big magnolia next to his mother's house stopped clattering and hung still.

He remembers the perfect silence, the stillness, and how he'd felt the answer rushing up his throat.
Your shoes with the blood on them?
He was free to say that and to be, for the first and last time in his life, an entirely free man. Over Howard Aimar's shoulder he saw his mother. She had taken her hand down from her mouth, and he will remember the look on her face forever. It was as if years of grieving had carved her face into a mask of mourning. “Yes, sir,” he said, and his mother cried out, “He's a damn liar,” and Howard Aimar raised the gun, thumbed back the hammer. For maybe half a minute they stood like that, and he watched Aimar's mind race through the choices.

Then he lowered the gun, eased the hammer down. “You don't work for me anymore, Zeke,” he said. “I want you gone by the end of the day, and you don't set foot in this yard again.” He was on the New York train that night.