The Tree of Forgetfulness (14 page)

“I was so flustered that I had to go to the front room and stand at the window and think. Here I was, chasing after Minnie, practically begging her to let things go back to the way they've always been, wishing I could tell her plainly that what happened to those three colored
people was a shame, an abomination, a disgrace. But you can't blame the entire white race for the actions of its lawless elements. Of course, I would say to her, the guilty should be punished, but what does that have to do with us? Howard was working at his office when those people were killed. How could he know, as that northern reporter claims we
all
know, who was there? You can't believe everything you see or hear; you can't go around repeating slander.

“We worked together all morning. We know our jobs so well we could do them in our sleep. In the butler's pantry Minnie pulled napkins and tablecloths from the drawers, unfolded each one and held it up to the light so I could inspect it for signs of wear or stains too firmly set into the weave to be expunged. She folded the items that had passed inspection and put the others in a box then handed me the juice glasses one by one, and I looked for chips or cracks or wear in the gilt rims.

“At noon I splashed my face and neck with cool water from the kitchen tap. I went upstairs and changed into a presentable dress and fixed my hair and went back down to eat dinner with Howard. Lady peas and rice and a pork chop, tea with sprigs of fresh mint from the clump that grows rampant in the sunny spot under the outside faucet. While we ate, I read to him from the list I'd been keeping: so many tea towels and napkins discarded; so many threadbare sheets ripped up for rags.

“While I read, he looked like he was trying to swallow a rock, so I patted his arm to show him that it would be all right. I sit on his lap sometimes and tease him about being an old miser, but in fact he is a generous man. One year, at the close of household inventory day, when he thought I'd gone upstairs to bed, I tiptoed into the kitchen and saw him on the back porch, taking napkins out of the box I'd left there for Minnie to dispose of and holding each one up to the light. I know him so well, I could hear him think:
Now what is wrong with that one? Has no one ever taught my sweet wife how to turn a blanket binding or patch the elbow of a sweater?

“After Howard had his nap and went back to the office at three, we went upstairs to finish our work. I opened the chest in the upstairs hall, and there were my Lewis's baby blankets and the long white gown in which four generations of Aimars had been christened. And, oh, I
don't know why, but when I unfolded the gown and shook it out and pressed it to my face, I imagined that Lewis's baby smell was still in that cloth, and such a feeling rose up in me then—longing and love and sadness, all mixed together. I said, ‘Oh, Minnie, they grow up so fast.' She said, ‘That is the truth, Miz Libba. Before you know it, they're running for their own train, and you still trying to hand them their lunch pail.' And for a fleeting moment it was just like old times again. And then I glanced out of the hall window that looks out onto one of Howard's pecan trees. A noisy flock of crows were cawing and squabbling there, and Wesley Barton's buzzards came flapping into my head, and I handed Minnie the gown and walked down there and yanked the shade down to the sill.

“I know that you remember old Miss Mattie Weeks. Every Christmas season when I was a child, you'd fix her a basket of oranges and fruitcake and divinity and pecans. Papa would drive us in the buggy to her house, and I would run up the front walk between the ragged boxwood hedges and set it on the porch. Two weeks or a month later the basket would still be there, faded ribbon flapping in the breeze. We always wondered what in the world would make a person shut herself up that way, but today, when I pulled down the blind, I felt in myself how a person might come to believe that closing the world out was the only way to make it go on being what you wanted it to be and believed it was.

“When I couldn't put it off any longer, we went down to the hall closet. I pulled the string; the light came on. We worked our way through the winter coats and down the line of shoes, and then I had to ask. Minnie would have thought it strange if I hadn't. ‘Minnie,' I said, ‘do you know what became of Mr. Aimar's shoes that I left here?'

“ ‘I threw them out, Mrs. Aimar,' she said, running her rag around the doorknob. ‘You said they were ruined, so I took care of them. I thought that's what you'd want me to do.'

“ ‘Well, that's that,' I said. ‘If Mr. Aimar asks after them, you send him to me.'
All wrong will end
, I heard you say, and I felt like a flock of birds had taken off inside me and flown up into the sun.”

L
IKE MOST LIES
, the one she'd told Libba was a mix of truth and silence. It was true that she'd taken care of the shoes. What she hadn't said was that Zeke had found the croker sack on her back porch, and after she'd told him what she knew, the sack had disappeared. Now she was worried sick. What was also unsaid was how dismayed she'd felt to see the relief on Libba's face when she'd learned that the shoes were gone.

By the end of any other household inventory she would have collected her own pile of cast-off hats and coats, blouses and trousers, blankets and napkins and glasses. In another year she would have kept some things for herself and some for Zeke, set aside others for the annual rummage sale at Mt. Hebron Baptist Church or to be given to the down-and-out, the helpless, the shiftless. But this year, for the first time since she'd come to work for them, she'd taken no castoffs from their house. All stains were suspect now; this year she was taking nothing home but two plates of the chicken and rice and lima beans she'd cooked for their supper and the dollar bill that Mr. Aimar had slipped into her hand in the kitchen that morning.

“Minnie,” he'd said in the same confiding whisper with which he asked for her help on every household inventory day, “if you can keep my sweet wife from spending us into the poorhouse, I will be forever in your debt.” She'd taken the bill—there had been no way to refuse—and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt. But she wouldn't be his ally, and so all day, whenever Libba had asked, she'd voted no. No to any
napkin with the faintest stain, to a juice glass with the slightest wear on the gilt rim. No to Little Mister's winter coat with the snot-stiffened sleeves and pockets that sagged from the sticks and rocks and string he stuffed into them. Let Mr. Aimar go broke, replacing every stained and shabby thing.

She buttoned her sweater and felt Libba watching her.
What has gotten into our Minnie?
she could almost hear her thinking. She imagined herself turning on Libba, telling the truth: The killings, what else? Then she would press on. You go along and you go along, she would say, while one day folds into the next, believing that you know the white people you work for as well as you know the contents of every drawer and cabinet in their house. You know other things too, of course; you aren't deaf, dumb, and blind; you aren't simple-minded. You know that Zeke's father fled after he shot off his mouth to a deputy sheriff and the Klan came to call. You've heard about the rich colored farmer from Abbeville, Anthony Crawford, who traded testy words with a white clerk over the price of cotton one morning back in 1916 and by the next night was hanging, mutilated, from a tree out near the county fairgrounds. All your life you've heard the old people's stories about worse times and places.

Those things had happened, and you knew they'd happened, but you'd lulled yourself into believing that they happened in another world, where a lower class of white people lived than the ones you thought of as your white people. But then the Longs were killed, and Mr. Aimar came home early and tried to clean his shoes, and ever since the night when you saw him trying to wash off what would not go away, you couldn't crawl out from under the feeling that you lived in that other world now, among the people you'd only seen from a distance, and you knew what a fool you'd been to tell yourself you'd ever lived anywhere but there. And all you were trying to do now was to live like you knew where you were. Right now that meant walking down the back steps with a plate of warm food in each hand and pretending not to see Libba waving a sad little toodle-oo from the kitchen window.

Outside the air was close and still. Zeke's horse and wagon were tied to a post in front of her house. She saw light behind the front
window shade, and she walked toward it, telling herself that tomorrow might be the day she'd march into the Aimar's house and quit. Every evening now, walking from their house to her own, she occupied herself with these plans. She imagined how she'd pack all her things in the one suitcase she'd brought with her. How she'd leave behind every blouse Libba had ever given her, every faded, curled photograph of Zeke and Lewis, of herself with Lewis and Cecile at the beach. She'd take special pleasure in abandoning the wren's nest that had strands of her hair woven in among the twigs and fluff. Libba had picked it up in the yard one day and given it to her: proof, she'd said, of how firmly Minnie was woven into their family.

Every night she packed her possessions, left everything they'd given her, climbed up into Zeke's wagon. But that was as far as she ever got. She couldn't imagine where he'd take her or what she would do next. Schofield School would keep her name on the list of graduates that people consulted when they wanted to hire some help, but once word got around that she'd walked out on a family like the Aimars, it would be hard to find work with another that would give her a house and meals and two dollars a week and pay to have her teeth worked on or fix it with the sheriff if Zeke got liquored up on a Saturday night and got thrown in jail.

Then she was home, and Zeke was there, as familiar a part of the one big room where she lived as the whitewashed fireplace, the iron bedstead, chifforobe and rocking chair, the table under the window that looked out over the washpots and the garden. He'd lit the kerosene lamp on the table, laid out knives and forks. He'd brought in water from the cistern and tidied himself up, the way he knew she liked for him to do before supper: washed his hands and face, brushed off his overalls, and buttoned his blue shirt all the way up under his chin. “It's fixing to storm,” she said, handing him the plates. She closed the door, pulled the padlock through the new hasp he'd mounted there, chased the thought of quitting from her mind.

“Sit down, Mama,” he said. “Take a load off.” Sitting across from her at the table in the lantern light, he looked like his father.

He was talking when the downpour started; it made such a racket
on the tin roof that she wasn't sure she'd heard him right. The lantern flame fluttered at eye level, and she ducked and dodged, trying to see around it. “Come again?” she said, and when he did, she shoved back her chair and came around the table at him, one fist cocked, the fork gripped in her other hand.

He stood to meet her and looked back and forth from the fork to her fist, as though trying to gauge which one to fear. “Whoa, Mama, easy,” he said, and he grinned at her like it was funny that she was coming to knock him down, the way she'd done once or twice, just to give him a taste of what the world had in store for an ignorant colored boy with a big mouth. But his grin waxed and waned now, the way it did when he got flustered.

“You did
what?
” she said, but she'd heard him right. “How much did that man pay you?” she asked. Her heart surged up her throat. She unclenched her fist, and the fork clattered onto her plate.

The sound made Zeke startle. “He gave me his word,” he said, and he wiped his whole face with one big hand.

“Better spend it while you still can,” she said. She had to sit down then; she braced her hands on her knees. Her heart still pounded, but now her blood felt sluggish and thick in her veins, and she was short of breath, as if she were running up the endless flight of marble steps that sometimes appeared in her dreams. He put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. “You're boasting, aren't you?” she said. “Proud of yourself. I hear Albert Long liked to boast a bit himself.” Now Zeke wasn't smiling anymore. “I wish to God I'd dragged you with me to Jackson's and made you take a good long look at the pine needles and dirt and broken teeth and bone stuck in the mess of dried blood on what was left of that boy's face.”

His face went slack, ashy. “Mama,” he said. Then, feebly: “He gave me his word.”

“Shit,” she said. “You always were a prideful, stupid boy.” Trusting too, she didn't say. Way too trusting. Her fault, for raising him that way. But how do you school your child in mistrust without mangling his whole character? She pushed through the screen door and sat in her chair on the back porch and watched the rain pour off the roof
and into the barrel. She should have known better than to leave those shoes where Zeke could find them. He was always poking around in her business, looking for something he could use or sell and bring her a share of the profits. But where could she have hidden them in her house? Under the bed, to trouble her sleep? Next to her black church shoes on the floor of the chifforobe?

Why hadn't she burned them or dropped them in a pond or made them vanish in some other way? Was it because the sight of the croker sack and the weight of the shoes were proof that those killings were real? Without some tangible reminder, what had happened might settle into what the Aiken paper kept trying to make it: the scene of an inhuman horror, a crime committed by phantoms. A bucket of dirty wash water poured onto this hungry, sandy ground that soaked it up so quickly you couldn't say it had ever been anything but dry, clean sand. So she'd kept the shoes, and now look.

She sat and listened to the rain until her heart slowed. When she went back inside, Zeke was sitting at the table with his hands folded between his knees, looking sick and miserable. Well, he
should
be sick. She sat down across from him, picked up her fork. “Eat,” she said. “Don't let this food go to waste.” He did what he was told, one hand over his eyes. She looked at the top of his head, at the two small spirals of hair on the crown. It was the first thing she'd noticed when the midwife had handed him to her. A double swirl, for good luck, the woman had said. Maybe that luck would hold now.