Hunting Season (36 page)

"She's just about scared to death with all this talk the government's been doing about reparations. Seems ya'll are going to come smashing in with jack boots and parcel out her things to the black folk. Everybody knows it's just politicians talking. Nobody's going to do anything."

Anna couldn't argue that. She changed the subject. "Have you been here all day?"

"I come in around nine most days and leave after I get the old lady's supper around six. Today I was running late. I been here since twenty-three minutes after. She's got nothing better to do than watch that clock over her door. Days she needs to bark at somebody, I think she sets it ahead on purpose so's she can fuss about me being late."

Anna wouldn't have put any wicked pettiness past Mama Barnette. "Were you here when Raymond came over?"

"Yes, ma'am. Mr. Barnette came in after eleven. I heard him rattling around downstairs and Miz Barnette sent me down to fetch him but he'd gone out again, didn't come back for near an hour."

"Did you see where he went?"

"He was walking out to the shed behind the house. I waited on him, thinking he was coming right back. He went in and come out with a shovel, then he takes off toward the woods."

"Was he carrying anything besides the shovel?" Anna asked.

"He had a big old box under his arm. Must've been pretty heavy. He kept hitching it up on his hip like."

"Did he have the box when he came back?"

"I wouldn't know that. I was back upstairs tending to Mrs. Barnette and didn't know he'd got back till he come upstairs."

Anna's eyes met Barth's. They'd learned nothing new but the confirmation was useful. Raymond had indeed buried something, probably a child's coffin, in the woods.

"Does Mrs. Barnette—or Doyce—have any pets. Cat? Dog? Anything like that?" Anna asked.

"Not since I've known her, which is twelve years now. She doesn't hold with animals in the house. Says she wasn't raised to live with livestock."

"Does Raymond keep pets at his house, do you know?"

"No, ma'am. I do for him every other Thursday. He's not even got fish in a tank."

Not a dead pet theory; Anna figured that but needed to cover all the bases.

"We were talking about an old picture. Real old, eighteen hundreds," Barth joined the conversation. "I've never seen it but Anna says it was of the ancestor that started the business, a Papa Doyce. There was an African-American man beside him in the picture named Unk Restin. That's what we were talking about when Mrs. Barnette got riled up. You know anything about that? Seen any pictures around the house or anything?"

"No," Claudia said. "There's no pictures of colored folk anywhere ... wait there..." She pushed her thoughts back a few years. "We—Mrs. Barnette and me—were cleaning out the closet in the spare bedroom a while back. There was boxes of old pictures just thrown together loose. She showed me a picture then. There was this black man working beside another man on a wood thing, maybe a table or something they were building. Miss Barnette showed it to me and said, 'My husband's daddy was taught to call him uncle. Just makes me want to spit. A nigger uncle, can you beat that? And him as greedy and uppity as they come.' She tore up that picture, then had me throw the whole lot into the incinerator out back." She looked at Barth, then at Anna, for approval. "That was all," she said. "Might not even have been the same man as you're talking about."

18

 On the drive back to Mt. Locust Ranger Station to get Anna's car, she and Barth chewed over the eventful tea party. Barth drove, his square, clean hands neatly in the ten and two positions on the steering wheel. Anna talked. "Papa Doyce and Unk Restin have something to do with the gigantic chip Mama Barnette carries on her shoulder. Papa Doyce, white. 'Uncle' Restin, black. They inspired or triggered the old bat's racism."

"Maybe she comes from African-American stock. If she is a descendant of the Unk Restin in the picture she'd be what? An octoroon if everybody married white on white from then on," Barth said. "Maybe Mrs. Barnette's spent her life 'passing' and thinks we're going to find out."

"Who'd care? Ancient history."

Barth looked at her from the comers of his pale eyes. In the shadowless light of the winter afternoon they were more gray than green and as transparent as water.

"What?" Anna asked when he just smiled and shook his head.

"Everybody'd care. You still got your head in Yankee sand if you don't know that yet. Down here—shoot, clear throughout most of the South: Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina—being of mixed blood's not exotic. Black mixed with white, now that's nothing. You get one Nigerian, one purely African man down here at seminary school or something and you can see there's not a drop of pure African blood in Mississippi. That Nigerian'll be black like a radial tire is black. Around that man we're just a rainbow in browns. Black mixed with white's a fact of life, an
improvement."
The word was sour in his mouth. "Even with us. Look at our heroes. They look like white folks in bad wigs. Only the sports stars look black and a lot of those guys get admired for being strong or mean." Bitterness got the best of Barth on the last word, and he took a short break to regain the control he used to survive in government service, in law enforcement. When he spoke again he'd leached so much emotion from his words he sounded like a scholar on the lecture circuit.

"What's no way acceptable is white mixed with black. A chemist wouldn't admit any difference but Miss Barnette's lady friends would. She'd no longer be okay, nobody'd be afraid of her anymore. She could still have friends—white friends—but not with anybody she'd want to be friends with.

"Ancient history just happened this morning for a lot of these old folks," Barth finished. He pressed his lips tightly together. "Sorry," he said.

"No. No. You're right." The apology made an awkwardness between them. Anna wondered if he was embarrassed because he'd shown his feelings, because hers might not be the same, or because he was annoyed at himself for wasting energy and air on something he could not change.

"See if you can't trace this Unk Restin. If he was a worker when Barnette's was a carpentry or cabinet-making shop there may be labor bills submitted for his work—"

A thought occured to Anna. She'd had it before but it had been lost in a pile of higher priorities. "See if he might be linked to Lonnie and his family."

"I already talked to Lonnie Restin's ma," Barth said. "They can't trace themselves back more than a couple generations. Trouble is lots of times every slave on a plantation went and took the master's name. Then you get a passel of unrelated folks, black and white, with the same last name."

"Do what you can," Anna said.

"I will," Barth said. "There'll be something: birth, death, sale. If he could read or write he may've signed chits for supplies."

Anna shut up. Barth knew more about tracking individuals through time than she did.

"Barnette's was a cabinetmaker's. They might have old records of building slave coffins. Doggone it." Barth twisted his hands on the wheel, wringing the metaphorical neck of an evil thought. "I wish Raymond Barnette wasn't sneaking around in the trees burying little kids' coffins. It'd be a whole lot easier if he'd cooperate on this thing."

"You don't think the one could have anything to do with the other?" Anna asked. Barth's ramblings had shifted pieces of information around in her brain. The pieces weren't exactly falling together, but several of them were beginning to align.

"You mean the kid's coffin and the slave cemetery? I don't see how."

"Raymond Barnette inherits land that butts up against the Trace. There's a cemetery on the Trace. Raymond Barnette is an undertaker. A grave is robbed. He builds a little coffin and buries it. There ought to be a through line there somewhere."

"What is it?" Barth said with the open excitement of a child awaiting a fabulous secret.

Anna had to disappoint him. "Beats me. I was hoping you'd be able to see a pattern. Undertakers, grave robbers, coffin builders, grave diggers. Not a
lot of people doing that sort of work these days."

"You going to add murderer to that list? Within a hundred yards of the slave cemetery the suffocated brother of your undertaker—coffin builder gets plopped down in the bed of the lady who owned the slaves buried out back," Barth said.

Anna's list of potentially related incidents hadn't yet encompassed homicide, but Barth was right. Like everybody else in Mississippi: old dead, recent dead and could-be dead were probably blood relations or at least knew one another.

"Raymond stood to inherit that property if his big brother was out of the way," Barth said.

"There's that," Anna said. "Is the property worth anything?"

"Three hundred acres, some of it good farmland. Might be worth three, four hundred grand. There's oil in these parts. He might could think the land's worth drilling." oil wells. That upped the ante. Most of the oil wells in the Natchez area were tapped out. The wells that still produced weren't making any Texas-style millionaires.

"Oil or not, that land's big with Mama Barnette. Maybe Doyce was going to sell it or some such and she got his little brother to do away with him. Raymond looks to be about scared to death of his ma."

"She could just change her will," Anna said. "Leave the place to Raymond. That'd be easier than murder, surely."

"Maybe she just wanted him out of the house. Fifty and still at home. Maybe it was getting on her nerves."

Anna laughed. "If Raymond did it, even at his mother's instigation, why strip the body and put it in a public place? Raymond knew right off any whiff of sexual deviation would kill his shot at being a sheriff. He seemed genuinely mad when it was leaked to the papers."

Barth had no answer to that.

They'd exhausted speculation and rode the rest of the way back to Mt. Locust in companionable silence.

Sleet turned back to rain, then to drizzle and finally resolved itself in a fine mist that hovered like gray gauze between the observer and the observed. The denuded trees with their blackened trunks and branches could have been the inspiration for T. S. Eliot's last dingdong of doom.

Nothing but paperwork awaited at the ranger station. Enough remained of the day that Anna decided to hand carry her bark samples to the lab in Jackson and see what, if any, information could be gleaned from them.

At the forensic lab she completed the necessary forms and pushed them and her Baggie of bark scrapings across the counter. The business day was coming to a close. She'd hoped to stop by the medical examiner's office in Ridgeland, but by the time she'd get there they'd be closed. She borrowed an office phone and called. The ME had left for the day. His assistant checked the files. The tests for gunpowder residue had been run on Doyce Barnette's hands. There were indications he had fired a gun shortly before death. on a whim, she headed up Interstate 55 to drop in on Steve Stilwell. After the surreal life she'd been living, murderous trucks by night and raging old ladies by day, his particular brand of insouciance struck her as the perfect grounding to a saner world.

The Ridgeland Ranger Station, a few cramped rooms in a long, low building that formed one side of a gravel yard, was as crowded and dingy as that in Port Gibson. Two desks filled the tiny front room. Four more were squashed into the room behind. Walls, desktops and the few bookcases were cluttered with papers and other debris. It was Anna's contention that future archaeologists would be able to unearth the history of the National Park Service in microcosm via digging through a single ranger's office.

A handsome young ranger named King informed Anna that Steve had gone off duty. She'd missed him by a half an hour. "Try his quarters," King suggested.

The Ridgeland ranger's quarters were behind the ranger station in a wooded lot. Rangers planning on homesteading—staying in one park and, very possibly, one job—for a majority of their careers, bought real houses and lived like real people. Those like Anna and Steve, just passing through in order to take advantage of promotions, rented government housing.

Steve lived in a low, cheaply built, ranch-style house, new in the 1960s. Too many tenants and too little care had rendered it sad and shabby. In the mist and the dying light, it looked downright depressing.

Anna parked in the short drive behind Stilwell's patrol car. Her approach to the house was heralded by a frenzy of deep-throated barks and the ominous sound of a large maddened beast hurling itself against the door of the screened-in porch.

Rutger, an eighty-five pound German shepherd, was a failed experiment. Stilwell had purchased the puppy with great plans to train it in search and rescue with a minor in drug sniffing.

Either from neglect or inclination, Rutger had grown into a great hulking lump of pure orneriness, willing to bite all comers. Eventually Steve would have to get rid of him. Till then the dog lived the life of a convicted felon. On fine days he was tied to a run in the backyard. In inclement weather he was incarcerated on the back porch. From the crashing of dog flesh against wood, Anna doubted it would hold him much longer without structural reinforcement.

Despite the racket, Steve didn't come to the door. Anna knocked loudly, setting off another round of furious canine assaults from the porch at the side of the house. At Anna's second knock, Steve finally opened the door.