Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (37 page)

“Listen to me, old man! Why you doin’ me this way? Tell me why! I give you dimes and ask for a number, but you won’t give me one for shit! You lay there night after night just laughin’ at me. Didn’t I do right by you? Didn’t I wait for you in the bed when you was old and tired and your teeth was rotten? Dammit,
listen
to me!” Minerva poked the ground with her trowel. “Give me a damn number!
Give it to me!”
She poked the ground again. “I ain’t givin’ you no peace, old man, till you give me a number. Look at me havin’ to wear this nasty dress. I need to buy me a new one. The roof is leakin’. The boy’s in trouble with the police. I gits graveyard dirt on my porch. I be blocked. Business gits po’.” With each complaint, Minerva jabbed the ground in the vicinity of Dr. Buzzard’s ribs. Finally, she dropped the trowel into her shopping bag and pulled herself to her feet with a sigh.

I slipped away and joined Williams at the edge of the grave
yard. Moments later Minerva approached us, muttering. “Stubborn old man,” she said. “I cuss he ass, but he still won’t give me a number.”

“Haven’t you won that damn numbers game by now, Minerva?” Williams asked.

“Yes, I won it,” she said. “One time I put thirty-six dollars on triple three. And that was the number.”

“How much did you win?”

“I should have won ten thousand dollars, but I didn’t git one dime.”

“Why not?”

“The bookie changed the number!”

“How could you let him get away with that?”

“He didn’t git away with nothin’, baby. I fixed it so he don’t work no more. I went to the garden and gave him back his kindness. Now he’s sickly, and we got us a new bookie.”

As we walked up the lane from the graveyard, Minerva gave Williams his parting instructions. He was to put the paper with Spencer Lawton’s name on it into a jar filled with water that had not run through any pipe. He was to place the jar in the darkness of his closet, where it would not be touched by the light of the sun or the glow of the moon, until the trial was over. He was to cut a photograph of Lawton’s face out of the newspaper, black out his eyes with a pen—first the right eye, then the left—draw nine lines across his lips as if sewing him up, put the photograph in his coat pocket, and make sure a preacher touched his coat. Afterward, he was to burn the photograph in the exact spot where Danny Hansford had died.

“Do that,” said Minerva, “and Spencer Lawton will lose your case. But you must do one more thing too. Once a day, every day, you must close your eyes and tell that boy you forgive him for what he done to you. And deep in your heart you must truly forgive him. You hear?”

“I hear,” said Williams.

Minerva stopped at a turnoff to another road. “Now, you go on back to Savannah and do like I say,” she said.

“Aren’t you going home?” Williams asked.

Minerva patted her shopping bag. “Baby, I never takes graveyard dirt into my own house. I will deliver it first, and I must do that alone.”

Williams was silent as we began the drive back.

“Are you going to follow Minerva’s instructions about Spencer Lawton’s picture?” I asked.

“I might,” said Williams. “It’s a little corny, but it could end up being good therapy—sewing up his mouth, blacking out his eyes. Yes, that’s something I might be able to get into.”

“How about the daily message of forgiveness to Danny Hansford? Are you going to do that too?”

“Definitely not!” he said. “Danny was nothing but a would-be murderer.” Williams picked up his glass and drank what was left of his vodka and tonic.

“My case has come down to one thing and one thing only,” he said. “Money. Danny knew I had twenty-five thousand dollars in cash in the house. When my lawyer, Bob Duffy, arrived at Mercer House that night, he walked around inspecting the merchandise, picking up little objects and turning them bottom side up. When I asked him what he was going to charge to represent me, he said, ‘Fifty big ones.’ Later, when I realized I needed a good criminal lawyer, I hired Bobby Lee Cook. Bobby Lee brought his wife to the house, and she picked out fifty thousand dollars’ worth of antiques. That was his fee. His expenses were in addition to that. He was assisted by John Wright Jones, who got twenty thousand dollars. And now I will have to pay all over again for another trial.

“But Danny’s mother takes the prize with her ten-million-dollar lawsuit against me. After all the anguish and grief Danny had caused her, after she’d thrown him out of the house and gotten police protection from him, Danny was suddenly her beloved dead son, miraculously transformed from a dangerous liability into an asset worth ten million dollars. Lord knows what it will cost me to defend myself against her lawsuit.

“So, you see, it’s all about money. And that’s one of the reasons I love Minerva. You can laugh at that voodoo stuff if you want, but she only charged me twenty-five dollars tonight. I don’t know whether or not you got her point, but no matter how you look at it, she’s a bargain.”

I did not answer, but it occurred to me that, yes, I did get Minerva’s point. I got her point very clearly. What I wondered was, did Williams?

Glass in hand, Joe Odom stood on the roof of his new home and looked down at the floats and the marching bands passing through Lafayette Square below. It was a perfect spot for watching the St. Patrick’s Day parade. From the rooftop, Joe could see green-tinted water bubbling out of the fountain in the center of the square. He could see crowds lining the streets wearing green hats and carrying big paper cups full of green beer. St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah was the equivalent of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It was an official holiday; the whole town turned out for it. There were to be more than two hundred marching units today, plus forty bands and thirty floats. A cheer rose up from the crowd as the Anheuser-Busch team of eight shaggy-hoofed Clydesdale horses trotted around the square, past the front of the house.

Like most St. Patrick’s Day parades, Savannah’s was an ecumenical affair. Blacks, Scots, and Germans marched along with the Irish, but this parade had a distinctly southern flavor. At one point, that flavor took a bitter turn. A column of marchers dressed in gray Confederate uniforms came into the square, with a horse-drawn wagon bringing up the rear. The wagon had low wooden sides, and from the street it would have appeared empty.
But from the roof we could see a blue-clad Union soldier sprawled motionless on the floor of the wagon. It was a chilling tableau, the more so because it was meant to be surreptitious.

“Poor damn Yankee,” said Joe. “Look at him down there, all bloody and dead.”

“The Civil War’s been over quite a while,” I said. “Isn’t it time all that was forgotten?”

“Not if you’re a southerner,” said Joe. “But you know, that dead Yankee isn’t just about the Civil War. He’s sort of a symbol of what could happen to any Yankee, even a modern-day Yankee, who comes down here and gets folks all riled up.” Joe looked at me and lifted his glass in tribute. “He could be some fella from New York who decided to write a book about us and started filling it with drag queens and murderers and corpses and bottles of poison and—what’s that you were telling me about just a minute ago? Oh yeah, voodoo!
Voodoo!
Witchcraft in a graveyard! Damn!”

“I’m not making any of this up, Joe,” I said.

“I’m not saying you are.”

“So I take it you don’t really disapprove.”

“No. As a matter of fact, when I think about it, it suits me fine. See, with all these weirdos you got filling up your book, I figure somebody’s gonna have to play the good guy, and it’s beginning to look like it’ll be me.”

Joe Odom’s new residence was by far the grandest of the four he had occupied in the short time I’d known him. It was an ornate four-story mansion, a Second Empire château built by a former mayor of Savannah in 1873. It was the only house of its kind in Savannah, and it stood out. People often referred to it as “The Charles Addams House,” because it had a mansard roof topped by a lacy ironwork cresting. The Hamilton-Turner House was its proper name, and it was so fine an example of its type that it was featured in
A Field Guide to American Houses.
Tall, paired windows opened onto elegant balconies, and a cast-iron picket
fence embraced the site. All in all, the Hamilton-Turner House was so imposing and yet so fanciful a structure that passersby often stopped in front of it for no other reason than to marvel at it. Joe was not one to let such an opportunity slip through his fingers; he posted a sign on the gate a few days after he moved in:
PRIVATE RESIDENCE: TOURS
10:00
A.M. TO
6:00
P.M.

Knowledgeable Savannahians were taken aback by the sign, because they knew that the outside of the Hamilton-Turner House was the only part worth looking at. The interior had been gutted and cut up into apartments long ago. Joe had taken the parlor floor for himself, and it was only this portion of the house that was open for viewing. The space did have tall windows with dramatic views of the square, but the once-stately progression of beautifully proportioned rooms had been sacrificed to make bathrooms, bedrooms, closets, and a kitchen. Walls had been moved and open archways filled in. And yet, because of its vastness, the parlor floor still did retain the aura of a grand
piano nobile.
It had old chandeliers and mantels and pier mirrors (though none were original to the house), and Joe did manage to fill the place appealingly with what was left of his own furniture plus antiques borrowed from friends or taken on consignment from local antique shops.

Joe had, in fact, created something new in Savannah: the only private house that was operating as a full-time tourist attraction. Seven other houses were also open to the public, but they were all museum houses, all important architectural specimens authentically restored and staffed by professional curators and operated on a nonprofit basis. Joe’s made-over parlor floor had, in effect, gone into competition with the museums. And he did get his share of tourists. At least fifty people would walk in off the street every day, and half a dozen or more tour buses would stop by. One busload usually stayed for lunch, and in the evenings Joe made the dining room available for private dinners by candlelight.

To help handle all this traffic, Joe hired a short, indomitably cheerful black housekeeper and stationed her at the top of the
front steps in a crisp black-and-white maid’s uniform. Her name was Gloria, and she had big eyes and little corkscrew curls hanging down over her forehead. Knowing that half the money she collected at the door was hers to keep, Gloria flagged down virtually everybody who came near the house. On slow days, she was not above offering a cut-rate deal—one dollar per person instead of the usual three. (“It may only be but a dollar,” she would say later, “but it sure looks like a lot sittin’ next to nothin’.”) Gloria gave her customers a glass of lemonade and led them through the parlor floor, blinking her eyes in wonderment as she recounted the historical highlights of the house. She explained that it was the first house in Savannah to be electrified (the mayor who built it had also been head of the power company) and that it had served as the center of the city’s social and cultural life in the latter part of the nineteenth century. “This house is the center of a lot of things now too,” she would add with a big smile. If “Mr. Joe” happened to be home, he would play a few old standards for the guests, and then Gloria would sing the few lines she knew from “Stormy Weather” while doing a dance that resembled the hula.