American Ghost (5 page)

•  •  •

His immigration papers listed him as Moshe Lensky, though on the rare occasions he appeared in the legal records after Ellis Island, he
was renamed Morris Lens, whether by coercion or willingly, Sam had no idea. Even after two years searching, old Morris was to his great-grandson nothing more than a dry, lost figure in a larger family mythos; another hapless immigrant washed ashore at Ellis Island with a great American dream that had hit the shoals in a particularly deadly way. The violence of his end had produced a sort of familial PTSD, and even Sam's grandfather, who'd been an eyewitness to the murder, never spoke of it willingly, to Sam or any of his generation.

Sam's father had passed on the bare-bones details: yes, a murder; yes, it was tragic. In the end, Sam was forced to reconstruct his great-grandfather's abbreviated life by more scientific methods: ship rolls, census, Ellis Island lists. From the third floor of the UF library, he'd painstakingly traced Morris's journey, from his birth in Tauragé, Lithuania, to his abrupt departure at seventeen, when he'd left his family and an ancient Jewish community as many a young Jew had before him, by bribing a guard and jumping the border to Poland to escape the torment of a lifelong, mandatory conscription in the Russian army. He exited Hamburg on a steamer in 1920 and showed up in Ellis Island later the same year, his occupation listed as tailor, his name made more palatable to the American mouth.

He lived briefly with a brother in Baltimore, then appeared randomly up and down the Eastern Seaboard for a dozen years, working as a peddler, and searching for an opening to start a store of his own. The primo spots of established Southern Jewry had long been filled, and Morris's search had taken him to the far edge of civilization, deep in the no-man's-land of a West Florida turpentine camp, an hour upriver from the port in Apalachicola.

He had married before he left Hamburg and was quick to send for his wife and a son, who'd been born four months after he sailed and was now, by the standards of the day, nearly grown. Two more sons—twins—were born and died in Florida, but aside from these commonplace tragedies, Morris seemed to have prospered for a bare three years on his perch, there on the edge of nowhere, till the autumn of 1938,
when Henry Kite showed up at the store just before closing and begged Morris to open and sell him cigarettes.

Morris had relented and been shot in the eye for his pains, and Sam's grandfather, then seventeen years old, had been offered the lead horse in the lynch party. He had refused, and the honor went to another man. Morris's son and widow had departed Hendrix by train within the hour, heading south to Tampa Bay. They'd left with nothing but the clothes on their backs and heard of the attendant savagery only through the newspaper accounts that followed.

Sam's great-grandmother had eventually remarried in Miami, and the family's only eyewitness to the murder, Sam's grandfather, had died when Sam was young. He was nothing more than a dim, benign shadow, a gregarious old man by reputation, who favored Cuban cigars and spoke often of his digestion. He never willingly discussed the details of his father's murder—the whys and the how and even where Morris's body was buried, though the old man had been known to be observant, and the proper interment would have meant something to him.

Sam gave his grandfather a survivor's pass on his silence and didn't overly judge him for it, though the utter absence of oral history made Sam's job of historical reconstruction a thin proposition. He needed solid source material to unravel the niggling details of Morris's final end, and in Jolie he caught a glimmer of hope that he might yet pierce the silence.

•  •  •

But first he needed hard data and began digging through the box full of federal census images he'd copied at UF, from 1860 to the last one released in 1930. They were often inaccurate and woefully incomplete, but in working out a framework of investigation, they were invaluable. He checked the enormous 1880 federal census first and found nine separate Hoyt households in District 59, a considerable local presence, as the state was only decades old. They were listed as white, which meant little to Sam, as local half bloods were ingenious in outsmarting state officials,
and if they could pass for white, they would by God self-identify that way.

For a good hour, Sam scanned rows of households, working his way forward to the turn of the century, when the lumber barons began eyeing the local forests, and Hendrix became an official boomtown. By 1920, the population had ballooned to eight hundred, with a working hotel, a railroad depot, a brothel, and many independent sawmills and logging operations. They made quick work of the red cedar, and ten years later District 59 was already in decline, the loggers and mule skinners and skilled sawyers forced to take lesser jobs collecting resin and distilling turpentine. Camp Six—an enormous turpentine-distilling operation—opened in '29, and by '35, his great-grandfather was living on its boundaries in Hendrix, his occupation listed as merchant, with a wife, a son in school, and two younger males—the twins who would die before they were out of diapers.

Sam couldn't remember Jolie's father's name till he saw it in the cribbed, sixty-year-old cursive of a census worker: Ray Hoyt, District 5, seven years old in 1930, living in a rented home with a single mother who was listed as head of household, with four children—all male, all laborers; none in school. Sam held his place, then counted back to the Lens store and found a mere fourteen households separating them.

The number made him smile, as fourteen houses were nothing. Two of the Hoyt siblings were listed as millworkers, and four of their neighbors as working in “turpentine.” They were still hanging on to farming—tenant or sharecropping—in '38, but lived on the cusp of Camp Six. Given the proximity to Hendrix, they would almost definitely have been customers of his great-grandfather's store.

S
am waited a respectable twelve hours before he called Jolie again, prodded along by Vic Lucas, who was temporarily manning the concession stand and disclosed that Lena and Jolie had had a tough parting Sunday night, with many tears and fears on Lena's part that Jolie would pine away and die in her absence.

“Were they that close?” Sam asked.

Vic, who had the body of a longshoreman and a head the size of a dinner plate, nodded. “Oh, yeah. Really close, those two. Lena worries that Jolie—she'll get stuck. These local girls—they get pregnant, they lose focus—and Jol—you met her, right? She's too smart for that.
Maybe
too smart for that. We
hope
too smart for that.”

Sam did, too, and was careful to go about contacting her with all propriety, careful not to offend the medieval father, who (rumor had it) wasn't fond of frivolous attention and was so massively proportioned that he made Vic Lucas look like a toy poodle. Sam knocked on the parsonage door the day after Labor Day—the first Tuesday in September—though the heat hadn't let up so much as a degree, the sun slanting at the old porch with a relentless glare.

The peeling white paint on the parsonage porch conveyed a general air of benign neglect, a row of wood fern and begonia withering in the furnace blast of the dog-days sun. There was no immediate answer to his
knock, nor was there a car in the drive, though Jolie had mentioned her father shared a car with her uncle Ott and only used it for grocery runs and hospital visits to ailing parishioners.

Sam couldn't tell if anyone was at home or if they were dodging him—and God knows, he was used to that in Hendrix. He had gone to the great trouble of borrowing an iron and ironing his shirt and hated to have to re-iron it. After a cautious glance in the window, he caught a flutter of movement somewhere back there—a bit of steam rising from a pot perched on an old stove. He went around in search of a back door and found it on the side, a little stoop that opened to a kitchen, Cracker-style, as if it had once been detached from the house.

Jolie was there, visible through the steamed glass at the stove, carefully dropping red potatoes in a steaming pot, one at a time, frowning at the splash, careful not to be burnt. She was obviously not expecting anyone, and as Vic had warned, taking Lena's departure deeply, her expression one of profound, yet accustomed, loss, as if used to carrying such a weight. She seemed curiously diminished in the poverty of the old kitchen, which was jarringly ill-kempt to his city eyes—the screen door so torn it was almost bare, the countertop cheap, peeling linoleum, as was the floor. Student fieldworkers were warned that rural life could be primitive, and that's what it seemed to him, of the sort more easily digested when in old photos of a different generation; not someone as young and vulnerable as Jolie appeared, standing at the stove, frowning at the steam.

He hesitated a moment, then tapped on the glass. She left the stove to peer through the window, and when she recognized him, her face brightened so sharply it lifted the entire room, the air of stale despondency replaced by an all-embracing welcome.

“Hey—come in,” she said. “Did you knock? I can't hear people back here.”

She said it all in one welcoming burst, but he was hesitant as he stepped in the sloped-ceilinged little room, which smelled of old coffee and damp cypress and was muffled by an ancient window air-conditioning unit that
roared like a jet engine. His reticence had less to do with her welcome than the zippered terry robe she was wearing, of the sort worn by old Cuban women in Miami, when they watered their hibiscus. It hit her at midthigh and was partially unzipped, revealed an intriguing inch or so of what appeared to be transparent white lace on pink, slightly sunburnt skin, making this housecoat a considerably more complex garment.

He stood there, taking it all in, till it occurred to him that, being the visitor, the onus of explanation was on him. “No—that's fine. I didn't mean to interrupt. Is your father home?”

She returned to the stove, oblivious of the robe and her casual dress, as if he were a cousin who'd dropped by for supper. “Yeah. Around back. He doesn't come in till dark, usually. Want some tea?”

Here on her own territory she talked much more quickly than she had in town; so quickly and country that he passed on the tea (because he didn't understand what she was offering) and hesitated at the door. “Well, do I need to talk to him?” he asked. “Get permission?”

“Permission for
what
?”

“To enter. Lena said he's a little strict. I believe the word she used was
medieval
.”

Jolie dismissed it with a comforting ease, gesturing him to the front of the house and explaining, “She's just feeding you the Hendrix Scare. Daddy's all right. He's got a bad eye, which makes him kind of scary. But he's a teddy bear. Been a preacher for, like, fifty years.”

Sam was not reassured by the assessment and followed along with his head up, through a high-ceilinged dining room to a mirror-size parlor—a sitting room, settlers used to call them—hardly bigger than the porch. It was outfitted with the same worn care as the kitchen, though there was some sense of decoration, the walls a soothing mint green, adorned with an assortment of family photos in identical flat-black frames. The monotone frames gave them a curious unity, as there was no rhyme or reason to their selection. Historical sepia photos hung in identical frames with a color studio shot of Jolie in her high school graduation gown, so generic it might have been taken at Palmetto High in Miami.

Sam was instantly drawn to the wall, which, Jolie explained, was a brainchild of Lena's. “The black frames—we collected them all summer and painted them. It took
forever
. She calls it the Rogues' Gallery.”

“Interesting,” he murmured, pausing next to a photo nearly identical to that of Jolie, only black-and-white, maybe thirty years older, of a somber, dark-haired woman, obviously closely related to Jolie, as if she were her near twin. “Your mother?” he asked, and got a quick nod.

“Her graduation picture. She died when I was three,” Jolie added quickly, as if used to the order of question and adept at heading it off.

Sam raised his eyebrows at the quickness of her response, but didn't press for more details. He didn't comment at all other than for a mild “She's beautiful. Looks Apache, or Otomi. Hell, maybe they
were
Blackfoot. Was she from Hendrix?”

“Sure,” Jolie answered as she dropped onto the sofa. “Her and Daddy really
are
third cousins, or something—which if you ever meet my brother will explain a
lot
.”

She smiled at his laugh—a smile of uncomplicated pleasure and unexpected sweetness, which, in its way, was as fetching as the abbreviated robe and long, bare legs. She threw them out on the sofa before her with such innocence and lanky country ease that it was apparent she hadn't a clue to their power. He made an effort to ignore them, returning to the wall and her equally intriguing history, asking over his shoulder, “What was her maiden name? Ammons?” as he'd noticed a generational alliance between the two families on the census.

“Yeah. She was an Ammons. A lot of my cousins are Ammonses,” she volunteered, seemingly impressed. She paused, then added after a moment, more in statement than question, “You really have dug up the county, haven't you?”

Sam was brought up short by the offhand observation, enough that he turned and met her eye and found her face interested and speculative, as if she were adding up a few internal figures of her own.

He would later regret not telling her the curious truth of his search right then—casually, no tangled loyalties, just a blunt statement of fact.
But he was too unsure of his reception to trust her with so strange an obsession and sidestepped her smoothly, with a mild admission: “That's why they pay me.”

He said nothing more, just returned to the wall to inspect the other photos, many of a little boy, presumably her brother, Carl, and a cache of vintage photographs, the largest of a worn, rawboned old farmer in a slouch hat and overalls, holding a horse by the reins.
March 26, 1926
was written in labored cursive on the face of the photo, the date catching Sam's eye, as the old man was almost certainly a citizen of the 1930 census.