Touched
Carolyn Haines
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
For Diana Hobby Knight—a child of the
Singing River and a long-dead town.
“Sense of place” shapes her way of life.
Thanks, once again, to the Deep South Writers Salon: Rebecca Barrett, Alice Jackson Baughn, Renee Paul, Susan Tanner, Stephanie Vincent, and Jan Zimlich, and a special thanks to Pam Batson. Without their help the book would not be possible.
Janet Smith and the George County Regional Library were invaluable—and always wonderful—in helping me fight through the thicket of time and find material. In keeping with historical accuracy, the traveling electric chair was not used in Mississippi in the 1920s; hanging was the official method of execution. It wasn’t until the forties that the portable chair became the legal means of execution. The chair would travel to the county where the conviction had occurred. These, and a million other facts, were found in the library, thanks to the staff.
My agent, Marian Young, offered encouragement and honesty, as she does with every book.
Audrey LaFehr, editor, and Elaine Koster, publisher, gave me the time and encouragement to finish this book—and a little push back to Jexville to find the story. Many thanks.
If a writer can attribute a book to anything except imagination and the desire to write, I have to acknowledge my family. My grandmother and mother taught me by example what it means to be strong, and my father showed me what it means to love. And late at night, while I wrote, it was the soft whisper of my mother’s voice that shaped the story.
Acts 28: 3–6
3: And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his hand.
4: And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer …
5: And he shook off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm.
6: Howbeit they looked when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly: but after they had looked a great while and saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a god.
One
I
N that airless zone of southeast Mississippi, July is only the promise of things to come. The last comfort of June’s cool nights are gone, and August is building, building slowly in the shimmer of the sun. The days grow long and hot with no relief in sight. Mosquitoes and copperheads lurk in the coolest shade of the piney woods. It is only dawn and dusk that are bearable.
I can still feel the touch of a July morning on my skin, when the grass is soaked in silver pellets of dew and the first slanted white rays of the sun burn the green pine horizon into a dark, grainy day. Even now, some twenty years later, I remember exactly.
The date was July 1, 1926. By midday the sun was riding high in a sky bleached as pale as old lace. The air was as much water as gas. Standing in my kitchen, I could hardly draw a breath.
I folded the box of taffy closed and tied it with a red string Elikah had brought me from the barbershop. From his seat at the kitchen table, he watched. He’d finished his lunch and pushed the plate back, satisfied with the zipper peas and okra and the corn bread I’d made. In a week of marriage, he’d found no fault with my cooking.
“Tell Miss Annabelle I said ‘Happy Birthday,’ “ he said as he pulled up his suspenders, snapped them into place on his muscled chest, and reached for his coat.
“You look nice.” I was shy with him, still trying to find where I fit in his life. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. It hurt to look at him, and I couldn’t bear it for more than a few seconds running.
“Go on.” He nodded toward the door. “It’s time.”
Dressed in my hot, gray flannel dress, I stepped off the porch and into the heat of the one o’clock sun. It was a birthday party for Annabelle Lee Leatherwood, a nine-year-old chinless wonder who had the misfortune to take after her mother in physical appearance and personal conduct.
July 1, 1926. It was a new month. A new life for me, and I was late for the birthday party. Chas Leatherwood, a man of influence, ran the Jexville Feed and Seed. An invitation to his daughter’s party was a summons, and Elikah had made it perfectly clear that I would attend, properly dressed and with a gift.
The sun was blinding, but the afternoon storm clouds had already begun to mount in the distant west. They came disguised as castles and dragons of fleecy white, but they were edged in angry gray. I knew they’d build, their deceptive masses catching colliding winds to crash and mingle, until, after a half hour or so of magnificent late afternoon collisions, the rain would fall down in a straight sheet. But I figured I had at least three hours of swelter to endure before the momentary relief of the rain. And I was late.
I had made taffy for a present, but it hadn’t set up properly, and I could feel it beginning to ooze through the pretty papers and the box as I hurried to the Leatherwood house. The stickiness of the box was disgusting. Warm. Like blood.
The clouds to the west were building quickly, a wall of fanciful shapes. They were almost motionless, trapped by the heat, waiting for the wind. Just before the storm broke, there would be the blessed relief of a breeze. But that was still hours away.
Two mockingbirds argued and shrilled in the big magnolia tree in Jeb Fairley’s front yard, and I stopped to listen and to give my burning feet a rest. Some folks didn’t care for the birds, but I liked them. In the spring when their young are in jeopardy, they’re bold, even aggressive. Once a mockingbird had come out of a crepe myrtle tree where she had three fledglings in her nest and pecked my stepfather smack in the forehead. The bird didn’t live to tell about it. Jojo Edwards wasn’t a man who let even a bird get anything over on him. He killed the mother and the babies and chopped the tree down for good measure.
That’s an image I carry in my head, and not even the long passage of time can dull it. I see Jojo’s angry, sweating face. Hatred sparks blue from the eye slits in his fat. I can hear the ax blade biting into the smooth, barkless skin of the crepe myrtle. The sound is punishment. The blade doesn’t grab in the way it does on a tree with bark. I see the raw chunk when the blade comes away, the useless flutter of leaves dropping to mingle with the feathers of the dead birds.
The memory made me hotter, afraid, and I started to run. As I turned the corner of Canaan onto Paradise Street, I heard the music. Tinny, wobbling, it seemed to come from a long way away. From all I’d learned of Jexville in my five days there as the wife of Elikah Mills, the music more likely came from the moon. The forbidden sound entered my ears and went straight to my blood. Who in Jexville owned a gramophone? Who dared to play one on the afternoon of Annabelle Lee Leather-wood’s birthday party? The sticky plight of the candy, Jojo’s cruel eyes, were forgotten as I started to run toward the music.
The red dust spurted up around my black shoes and coated the hem of my dress, but I didn’t care. A fine red grit was settling over the bottom of the taffy-soaked box. At the white picket fence of Elmer Hinton’s yard I ran out of breath and slowed. It was unseemly for a married woman to be seen running in the streets, but the music made me want to run more. I didn’t know the song, but it was fast and naughty. Forbidden.
With each step the music grew louder, and when I turned right on Revelation Road, I saw her, a nine-year-old flapper who was dancing with abandon. Duncan McVay.
I would have recognized her anywhere.
Standing out on that hot street with that sticky candy, I was struck dumb by my first sight of her. She was wearing a yellow sleeveless dress that hung straight from her shoulders to her narrow hips, which were banded by a wide yellow ribbon. From there, a short skirt barely covered possible. She was tall for her age, and her long, thin legs were a blur of motion.
She was riveting as she stepped forward, then back, eyes rolling for effect and then crinkling shut with laughter. She danced alone, aware of everyone staring at her but not the least put out. Around her sat a dozen other children. Some looked terrified, others jealous. No matter what their reaction, none of them ignored her. Duncan McVay was the center of everyone’s attention, including the women who stood in a disapproving group beside the back steps. They watched, too, unable to stop themselves from looking even as they disapproved.
One other woman stood at the handle of the gramophone, cranking it tight so the record spun fast and the little girl danced all the harder. Although she tried not to, this woman smiled. She glanced from the dancing girl to the knot of unhappy women, and her smile widened slightly, her own blue eyes crinkling in just the same way as the girl’s.
With a cry of delight the child finished the dance and threw her hands up in the air. Her black patent leather shoes were covered orange with the dust she’d stirred dancing in the only grassless patch of ground in the Leatherwoods’ backyard. She’d virtually wallowed out a hole in the ground.
“Doesn’t anybody want to Charleston?” Duncan looked at a tall, skinny boy. He looked down at the grass and plucked a handful.
“Robert? Do you want to dance?” Duncan persisted. “It’s fun. And easy. Mama can start the record over and I can show you.”
Robert kept looking at the grass. The other children were silent, until one girl giggled.
Without turning around, Robert stood up. He shot a quick look at Duncan and saw that she was still waiting, but this time with some impatience.
“I can’t,” Robert whispered. “We’re not allowed to dance.” He turned and walked away, going right past me with his face a flaming red.
I still held the dust-soaked taffy box, which was getting soggier by the minute. My shoulders and the top of my head were beginning to bake in the relentless afternoon sun, but I didn’t want to step into the yard. I’d heard enough about JoHanna and her daughter to know who they were. To be honest, I’d expected something else—horns, at the very least.
“I think it’s time for ice cream,” Agnes Leatherwood announced loudly. Only one child responded, a portly little girl whose unfortunate face slid into her neck without benefit of a chin. She directed an angry look at the girl in yellow.
“I want my ice cream,” the plump girl said, her voice a challenge for anyone to contradict her wishes. When none of the other children got up, she put her hands on her hips. “If y’all don’t come in the house now, you won’t get any ice cream.”
Two of the girls got up and went to stand beside her. They waited, just as their mothers waited at the steps. Agnes, a skinny version of her daughter, looked at Duncan as if she might cry.
“Put on another record, please, Mama.” Duncan put one hand on her little hip and looked out. “Anyone here not a fraidy-cat?”
Two other girls got up and went to stand beside Agnes and Annabelle Lee and the mothers. Then two boys followed, then another.
The music spun out across the yard, a lively tune that set Duncan’s feet flying. JoHanna McVay leaned one hand on the gramophone and watched her daughter dance. The women, transfixed, failed to go inside until the song ended.
Duncan was sweating and her black hair, cut in a sleek bob that framed her face and made her dark eyes more noticeable, was damp with sweat.
“One more song, then come inside and have some ice cream,” JoHanna said, cranking the machine and putting on a slower record. By her tone and actions, JoHanna McVay acted as if nothing unusual had happened in the yard. If the other women and children had intended to exclude her and Duncan, she didn’t appear to notice the slight. She adjusted the needle on the record and turned away to go inside. It wasn’t until she moved that I took real notice of her. She was defined by movement. Her steps were long, a contradiction of the mincing feminine steps I’d been warned to execute, yet they marked her as a woman.
In contrast to the white blouses and drab skirts of the other women, JoHanna wore a soft coppery dress with golden flowers mingled as if the colors had bled slightly. Her pale arms were daringly bare. There wasn’t a collar to her dress, but a loose gathering of material that fell in a soft fold across a generous bosom. Her entire neck and a portion of her chest were revealed by the loose construction. The skirt hung straight to her calves and was dangerously slit to allow for those long strides. I had the fancy that she was some force of nature. Wind. The cool, teasing breeze of dusk or evening. Her hair, a reddish chestnut, was piled on her head in a mass that hinted at disarray. It captured the light in a dance all its own.
At the edge of the steps she caught sight of me, still standing at the corner of the yard. Several dribbles of melted taffy had oozed out of the box and drawn the interest of some passing ants. The small insects were gathering rapidly, as tantalized by the taffy as I had been by the sight of Duncan dancing.
“You must be Elikah Mills’s new bride.” JoHanna came forward, her hand extended. “I’m JoHanna McVay. Welcome to Jexville.”
Her blue eyes assessed me, but I didn’t feel judged, as I had by the other women. She saw the places where my gray dress had been let out. It had belonged to my younger sister Callie, and I’d had to take it for traveling down to Jexville for my wedding. It still didn’t fit exactly right, binding me around my chest and arms.
“I see you made taffy for Annabelle. That was thoughtful.” She noticed the sticky drizzle that fell at my feet. “If you don’t move fast, those ants are going to be all over you.”
She took my arm and moved me toward the house.
“How is it possible that no one in town mentioned that you were mute?” She looked me directly in the eye as she asked.
I smiled, then grinned. “I’m not mute.”
She nodded. “I didn’t think so. A tidbit like that would be gnawed and licked over to the point that even I would have heard about it.”
I looked over at the child who was still dancing. A fine sheen of sweat now covered her face and arms, but she had no intention of stopping. She’d forgotten where she was or who was with her; she was taken with the pleasure of the music and executing the intricate steps.
“My daughter, Duncan,” JoHanna said as she led me toward the steps. “I’m sure you’ve heard about us. Just believe about a tenth of what you hear and then sift through that with a malice comb. What you’ll be left with is some very boring facts.”