The White Road-CP-4 (47 page)

It is only now, looking back, that I realize the part that water has played in all that has occurred. The bodies dumped in Louisiana, entombed in oil barrels, mute and undiscovered while the waters flowed around them. A family slain and their remains placed beneath leaves in an empty swimming pool. The Aroostook Baptists, buried by a lake, waiting for decades to be found and released. Addy and Melia Jones, the one slain within earshot of a river, the other twice dead in a polluted pit of foul water.

And one more: Cassie Blythe, found curled beneath the earth in a hollow by a riverbank, surrounded by the bodies of five others, the bones on her hands marked by the passage of Cyrus Nairn’s blade.

Water, flowing endlessly to the sea; each of them in their way denied the promise offered by it, unable to answer the call until, at last, they were brought forth and allowed to follow its course to the final peace that comes to all.

Cyrus Nairn stood among the long stems of a cattail patch, the road visible before him. All around him they moved, their passage like silk against his skin, their presence felt and sensed as much as seen, a great mass of them descending ever onward to the sea, where at last they were absorbed into its waiting surf, the paleness of them joining with it until they disappeared from view. He remained still, like a bulwark against their flow, for his back was to the sea and it did not call to him as it did to the others that followed the white roads through the marsh and into the ocean. Instead, Cyrus watched the car that idled on the black highway that wound its way toward the coast, its star-shattered windscreen reflecting the night sky above, until the door opened and he knew that it was time.

He climbed from the marsh, hauling himself upward on rocks and metal, and walked toward the waiting Coupe de Ville, its tinted windows revealing only the barest shadows of the figures that lay within. As he stepped around the hood, the driver’s window rolled slowly down and he saw the man who sat with his hands on the wheel, a bald man with a too-wide mouth, a ragged red hole torn in the front of his filthy raincoat, as if his death had come about through impalement upon some great stake, a death that continued to be visited upon him for eternity, for as Cyrus watched the wound appeared to heal and then erupt forth again, and the man’s eyes rolled in his agony. Yet he smiled at Cyrus, and beckoned him on. Behind him, barely visible, was a child dressed in black. She was singing, and Cyrus thought that her voice was one of the most beautiful sounds that he had ever heard, a gift from God. Then the child shifted and became a woman with a bullet wound in her throat, and the singing stopped. Muriel, thought Cyrus. Her name is Muriel.

He was at the open door. He placed his hand upon its upper edge and peered inside. The man who sat on the back seat was surrounded by cobwebs. Small brown spiders busied themselves around him, endlessly spinning the cocoon that anchored him in place. His head was ruined, torn apart by the shot that had killed him, but Cyrus could still see the remains of his red hair. The man’s eyes were barely visible beneath the cobwebs and the folds of skin that surrounded the sockets, but Cyrus saw the pain within them, renewed over and over again as the spiders bit him.

And Cyrus understood at last that by our actions in this life, we make our own hell in which to exist in the next, and that his place was now here, and so it would always be.

“I’m sorry, Leonard,” he said, and for the first time since he was very young he heard his own voice, and thought how querulous it sounded, how uncertain. And he noticed that there was but one voice, that all the others had been silenced; and he knew that this voice had always been among those that he had heard but that he had chosen not to listen to it. It was the voice that had counseled reason and pity and remorse, the voice to which he had remained deaf throughout his adult life.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I failed.”

And Pudd’s mouth opened, and spiders tumbled forth.

“Come,” he said. “We have a long way to go.”

Cyrus climbed into the car, and instantly felt the spiders move upon him, and the construction of a new web beginning.

And the car turned on the road, its back to the sea, and headed away, over mud and marsh grass, until it was lost in the darkness to the north.

There is long grass growing at the base of the stone and weeds have found their sparse anchorage in the dirt. They come away easily in my hand. I have not been here since before the summer. The caretaker of the small cemetery has been ill, so while the pathways have been tended the individual graves have not. I tear the grass out in clumps, the dirt hanging from the roots, and toss them to one side.

The little one’s name has almost been obscured, but now it is clearly visible once again. For a moment, I run my fingers along the indentations of the letters, distracted by the sight, then return to the clearing of the grave.

A shadow falls across me, and the woman lowers herself down by my side, her legs apart to accommodate the swelling at her belly. I do not look at her. I am crying now and I do not understand why because I do not feel that terrible crushing sadness inside that has brought me to tears at other times. Instead I feel relief, and gratitude that she is here now beside me in this place for the first time, because it is good and necessary that she be here, that this should at last be revealed to her. But still the tears come and I find myself unable even to see the weeds and the grass clearly, until at last she reaches down and her hand guides mine, and together we work, discarding that which is ugly and unsightly, keeping that which is beautiful and enriching, our hands touching, brushing against each other, their presence with us in the breeze on our faces and the water flowing beside us: children gone and children yet to come; love remembered, love remaining; the lost and the found, the living and the dead, side by side together. On the White Road.

Acknowledgments

I N RESEARCHING THIS book I relied greatly upon the work and knowledge of others, including Before Freedom by Belinda Hurmence (Mentor, 1990); Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina by Daniel C. Littlefield (Illini Books, 1991); The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials 1871–1872 by Lou Falkner Williams (University of Georgia Press, 1996); Gullah Fuh Oonah by Virginia Mixon Geraty (Sandlapper Publishing, 1997); Blue Roots by Roger Pinckney (Llewellyn Publications, 2000); A Short History of Charleston by Roger Rosen (University of South Carolina Press, 1992); Kaballah by Kenneth Hanson Ph.D. (Council Oak Books, 1998); American Extremists by John George and Laird Wilcox (Prometheus Books, 1996); and The Racist Mind by Raphael S. Ezekiel (Penguin, 1995). In addition, a number of individuals gave generously of their time and knowledge. I am especially grateful to deputy attorney general Bill Stokes and assistant attorney general Chuck Dow at the Maine attorney general’s office; Jeffrey D. Merrill, warden of what was formerly the Maine State Prison, Thomaston, and his staff, especially Colonal Douglas Starbird and Sergeant Elwin Weeks; Hugh E. Munn, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division; Lieutenant Stephen W. Wright, City of Charleston Police Department; Janice Kahn, my guide to Charleston; Sarah Yeates, formerly of the Museum of Natural History in New York; and the National Park Service staff of the Congaree Swamp National Monument.

On a personal note, I want to thank Emily Bestler, my editor at Atria Books, for her constant faith; Sarah Branham, her associate editor; Judith Curr, Louise Burke, and everyone at Atria Books and Pocket Books for giving me a home; Sue Fletcher, Kerry Hood, and all at Hodder & Stoughton; my agent Darley Anderson and his staff; my family; the booksellers who have supported my work; and, belatedly, Dr. Ian Ross, who introduced me to Ross Macdonald; and Ella Shanahan who kept me in funds when nobody else would.