American Ghost (7 page)

But the Old Man paid him about as much mind as he had his daughter (which is to say, none at all). He just murmured, “Well, I declare,” then relented with no further conversation, as if anxious to get back to his writing. “Well, surely—you can come with me, if you want. It's a long drive, I'll warn you thet. Don't bother with a coat.”

Sam caught enough of it to understand that the Old Man was extending an invitation and thanked him with great sincerity. Sam didn't speak again till he and Jolie were far out of earshot, nearly to the porch, then he turned and asked, “Why the hell did you tell him that bullshit about
National Geographic
? I can hardly find anyone who'll talk to me now,” he fumed. “What'll happen after that bullshit gets passed around?”

He was so sincerely distressed that Jolie went to some lengths to reassure him, gripping the front of his shirt and telling him, “Sam, listen. You wanted Hendrix gheechie, and that's what I just gave you: the King of the Hendrix Gheechies, Raymond Hoyt.”

Sam was charmed by her sudden face-off, her close, teasing face that he decided was every bit as lovely as Lena's, and even more: black hair, red lips, strange, moss-colored eyes. He lost his annoyance just like that and answered in a milder voice, “Well, I don't really need low-country gheechie. I need Yuchi, Miccosukee, maybe a touch of Chacato.”

Jolie just smiled a patient smile, as if she were dealing with a half-wit. “They call 'em gheechie around here, and don't worry: the one thing they love to do is talk. You let 'em talk and they'll tell you everything.”

•  •  •

So began a fast and fruitful ten weeks as far as Native American studies in North Florida was concerned, as Brother Hoyt was as good as his word about introducing Sam around on his debit, invariably as “a friend of Laner's, up from My-amma, attending the university.”

Apparently, Lena's popularity knew no bounds, in the city nor the field, and Sam had Jolie on hand to soften the truly resistant (“Oh, he's not a
scientist
—just some poor mook, trying to pay for college, just like the rest of us”) with a status-leveling nonchalance that was instinctive and, in someone so young, nothing short of brilliant. It was Sam's first, far-off inkling of her genius in people-handling—a skill absorbed in babyhood in the complicated political mechanisms of a country church, which she was generous in sharing.

On her advice, he went about unearthing local ethnicities in a more roundabout way, casually inquiring about details of their common folklore, folk remedies, and farm myths, asking if they were kin to any “granny-women”? This last was a loaded question, as it was the colloquial term for midwife, a profession half-blood women historically excelled in. Their extended families were quick to own up to such a relationship with a grandmother, or an aunt or a cousin, and with no encouragement at all would go on to describe in great detail their patented ways of treating the manifold complications of childbirth. They would recall with pride the names of the rich families in town who would send buggies out to get them in the old days because they trusted them more than any of them “high hats” in town. They had no idea how much of their cultural roots they were revealing with such stories, for granny-women were also practitioners of root medicine and a direct link to that vast subconscious ethnic heritage that these kinds of isolate communities both secretly celebrated and hotly denied.

Sam soon amassed a quantity of data, the best of it from the Hoyt Diaspora, which stretched from south Alabama to the coast. There were originally nine Hoyt brothers, but only four still anchored locally: Ray, Earl, Ott, and Obie. Earl was the oldest—a bent octogenarian who suffered greatly from emphysema and seldom left the house; Obie, a widower with four sons; and Ott, the baby of the family and runt of the litter. He was plainly Jolie's favorite, a lively little bachelor who'd survived rheumatic fever as a child and was about half the size of his older brothers, who treated her with the same delight her father did. He called
her
Jo-lee,
Cajun-style, and practically ran to the door when he heard her call.

She was obviously the family pet, and as long as she was at Sam's side, he was warmly welcomed into listing, old trailers and houses so dilapidated they could truly be called shacks. Ott's bedroom walls were lined in Depression-era newspapers for insulation—a common economy practiced by tenant farmers in the South, which Sam had read about, but had never seen in real life. Jolie seemed to take great enjoyment in sharing it with him, not intimidated by either her kin's poverty or their deformities—mementos of their early years working as child labor in the area turpentine camps and sawmills. There were many cast eyes and lopped-off fingers, and an almost universal deafness that meant that Sam's interviews were held at a dull roar, Jolie shouting right in their faces, “Uncle Ott! Tell Sam about the Hart Massacre! Where the soldiers smashed the babies' heads against the STONES! Weren't they buried up at WEEK'S ASSEMBLY?”

After taking a moment to understand her, the old man would smile a dim smile and agree, “Yes'sam—up thar in Alabamer. Kilt the younguns, babies and all. Come up on 'em in the swamp, Mamer uster say . . . ,” with Sam scribbling furiously at his side.

It made for much excitement in the discovery, and in only one way did Brother Hoyt continue to disappoint Sam: in his steadfast refusal to own up to his own Native American roots. These were obvious in every way: his strange pidgin English; his mystic strain of American fundamentalism; his straight hair, straighter nose, and Asian shovel teeth (all of them, including Jolie, passed the click test). Even after Sam legally traced them within the legal parameters of tribal membership to the Creek Census, Brother Hoyt was loath to acknowledge the connection and dismissed any promise of minority status.

“Thet's for people who need a laig up,” he argued. “We git by.” At breakfast one morning, he went so far as to trot out the famous old dodge, claiming that the Hoyts were Little Black Dutch.

Sam was exasperated by his denial, and close enough by then to ask
him point-blank, “Well, Brother Hoyt, tell me: What
are
the Little Black Dutch? Are they
Dutch
? Are they
black
? Are they even
little
?”

The Old Man seemed not the least bit intimidated by this bald challenge; he just pointed a crooked finger across the table at Jolie and answered with calm assurance, “Thet girl right thar. Thet's one.”

Sam had burst out laughing, as he'd grown fond of the Old Man, who was a strange old bird by any reckoning, connected to the modern world by the thinnest thread, and in danger of exiting it prematurely thanks to a runaway case of diabetes and a bad heart. He was a gold mine of minutiae about Old Hendrix, and from their drives on the debit Sam gathered what meager information he could of his great-grandfather, and the exact location of Camp Six, where Brother Hoyt had, along with most in Hendrix, worked on and off as a young man, when all other paychecks had failed. “Nasty, hard day it made,” he said, “and I was always glad to be done.”

Sam was careful to keep his cards close to his chest and went about his questioning with objective nonchalance, a full month into it before he got around to asking the Old Man about Sam's own slender stake in local lore.

“So Camp Six was basically a company town?” he asked as they threaded their way over the long bridge that spanned the river and floodplain outside town. “You bought your groceries on chits, at the store?”

“If you had the credit. They could be particular.”

“Who's
they
? Who owned it?”

“Lumber company,” the Old Man answered, “same as cut the swamp. Had mills here, 'n Louisiana, and Texas. Some of the folk was local. Same folk what owned the bank.”

“Did they own the store? Was there local resentment? That people had to shop there?”

It was a sweltering afternoon, the windows of the Old Man's ancient, little Ford Falcon down, his elbow to the wind as he answered, of turpentine camps in general, and Camp Six in particular, “Naw—you didn't have to buy thar. It was just convenient. Used to be, the riverboats
brought thangs up to the landing. But the boats quit running, so they opened the sto, same as most camps.”

“When did it close?” Sam asked, feeling for his notebook and jotting notes as always, his face to the open window.

“Oh—'37, or '8. Place got robbed, then was burnt. Old boy who worked there got shot in the face, in front of his wife and childrun.”

Sam kept a carefully neutral face. “Who shot him?”

The Old Man cast an inquisitive eye at him, as if surprised he hadn't heard this locally famous story, though the Old Man made little of it and explained with the same drawled candor he went at everything, “Colard feller—name of Kite. Over a pack of cigarettes, they say. Just come upon him and
pow
. Down he went.”

Hearing the details of the family secret so casually recounted by a near first-source witness was affecting enough that Sam had to keep his face averted to maintain any semblance of distance, his voice dry and detached. “So, did you know him? Were you
there
?”

“
Naw
. I wouldn't have lived in camp if you'd a paid me. Usually stayed with kinfolk, working for 'em. And he wasn't from around here—German feller.”

“So what happened to him, after he was shot?” Sam pressed, meaning what had become of his body, though Brother Hoyt misunderstood.

“He was graveyard dead. Dead before he hit the flo'.”

“I mean, where they buried him.”

“The German feller?” At Sam's nod, he shook his head. “Couldn't say. He wasn't from around here,” he repeated in casual dismissal, then concluded with no trace of malice, “But old Kite swung for it. Buried
him
in Cleary. What was left of him.”

He said it with a face of faint distaste that caught Sam's attention, enough that he paused in his scribbling to ask, “Were you there? Did you see it?”

The Old Man turned the full weight of his strange, unfocused eyes at him, but didn't answer. He just regarded him speculatively a moment, then returned to the steaming autumn highway. “Now tobacco—it
didn't come on strong till later,” he began, changing the subject with no commentary at all, other than the weight of his eyes.

•  •  •

Sam pressed him no further, as it was but one conversation among many. He was still confident that he could track down the exact location of the store and Morris's grave and took Jolie on many a stroll around forgotten and weed-choked cemeteries, pretending to search for the graves of the names on the Creek Census (and coming upon a couple quite by accident).

She was well into her own fall semester by then, and when they were finished with their afternoon graveyard crawls, they'd return to the parsonage for supper, where Brother Hoyt was as generous with his table as he was his memories of Old Hendrix. He seemed not unaware that Sam's interest toward her might be more than purely professional, but never made any inquiries into the matter. He just accepted Sam as part of the furniture around the parsonage, often on hand, with no threat attached. This very much annoyed the church Sisters, whose grievous loss of Lena had at least partially been compensated by Sam's appearance soon after.

He wasn't as ornamental or amusing as their golden girl, but had his own strengths. He was a man, and polite and smart and obviously in love with Jolie Hoyt—and they were all for that, the old Sisters were, as practical as Lena when it came to poor girls and dead ends and the Men Who Could Get Them Out. They gave the match their full approval and sat back and waited for the inevitable events—either engagement or pregnancy—the former preferable, though the latter not so rare as to cause an earthquake on this end of the swamp.

But as the dog days of September quietly slipped away, and the October nights grew mild and golden, they began to wonder if they'd misread the signs in this romance. For Sam never made any loverlike advances toward Jolie that they could see: never walked her to church or sent her flowers or sat with her on the porch at night. He seemed content to hang out with her father and spend his days talking to the poor folk on the
river, writing out pages and pages of any sort of nonsense those chattering gheechies came up with, something the good Sisters at Bethel (even if they were gheechie themselves) considered a criminal waste of time.

They soon tired of the mystery, and by mid-October, whenever they ran into Sam at the IGA or the café, they would baldly ask about his intentions toward Jolie, though he proved oddly shy in such matters, would blush to the tip of his forehead and stammer the most unsatisfactory replies.

It made the old Sisters privately wonder if little ole Jolie, raised in a household of men, simply hadn't learned how to court—to bat her eyes and twitch that tail and land this particular fish before he got away. To that end, they began inviting them to Sunday dinner as a couple; would feed them like royalty on recipes cut from the pages of the
Progressive Farmer,
on chuck roasts and field peas and corn bread, all the while dropping glorious asides on the bliss of married life, trying to nudge them along.

They had a hard time gauging the effectiveness of the strategy, as Jolie had inherited her father's inscrutability. She didn't seem to mind their maneuverings, just ate her corn bread and smiled her Mona Lisa smile and pretty much went her own way—which wasn't difficult as she was on the inside of the joke and knew very well why Sam wasn't walking her to church every week or making any loverlike moves toward her in public. She also knew why he blushed to the tip of his hairline at the mention of his slow courtship, because he was living a double life, old Sam Lense was. And so was she.