“I’m just resting.”
He moves closer, but his advance is solicitous, the way Pearlie moves around houseguests who don’t know her. Mose can’t be much younger than my grandfather, and time has worn him down to a bent nub, like a tree that finally gives way to decades of wind and bugs and rain. The scleras of his eyes are yellow, and gray stubble grows high up his cheeks. It’s hard to imagine that I once saw this man carry railroad ties across his shoulders.
“What you got there?” Mose asks. “You drawing pictures?”
He’s noticed the sketchbook, the one artifact of the bag that I haven’t yet examined. “I’m just looking at some old pictures my father took.”
He nods agreeably, but then his eyes focus on something else. “What’s that there?”
He’s pointing at the prunes. “Some kind of rotten food. I think it’s prunes.”
Mose bends and picks up the string of blackened fruit. He studies one, pinches it between his fingers, then brings it to his nose and sniffs it.
“Mose, you’re a braver man than I.”
He laughs. “You ain’t no man. You a girl.”
I always wondered if Mose was simpleminded, but I’ve never known for sure.
“These ain’t prunes.” He places one of the blackened things between his front teeth and bites down, testing its texture. “This here be hide.”
“Hide?”
“Skin. Some kind of animal skin. Chunks of something.”
“Some kind of hunting trophy, maybe?”
Mose shrugs. “Something like that, I reckon.”
As he hands me the necklace, the words of the grizzled vet from the Vietnam Veterans Building come back to me:
I stuff the necklace quickly into the bag, nausea rolling through my stomach.
“Miss Catherine? You sure you all right?”
I nod and begin gathering the rest of my father’s things. Far behind Mose, I see Michael’s Expedition carefully negotiating its way through the trees.
“Do you know anything about DeSalle Island, Mose?”
His face wrinkles in thought. “Not no more, I don’t.”
“But you did?”
“Well, I was born down there, wasn’t I?”
A current of excitement goes through me. “You were born on the island?”
“Sho was. I think everybody who ever worked up here for your family was born on the island. Dr. Kirkland always saying nobody knows how to work no more. He ’bout right, too. He say people from the island still do a day’s work for a day’s pay.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Dr. Kirkland been real good to me.”
“I think you know what I mean.”
Mose looks around as though someone might be eavesdropping. “You know your granddaddy, Miss Catherine. He a tough man, and he know how to squeeze a nickel till the buffalo shits-pardon my language.”
I say nothing, leaving a vacuum that Mose feels compelled to fill.
“Dr. Kirkland be kind of like that story I heard a long time ago. The plantation owner gives a slave a pint of whiskey. Another slave asks how he liked it, and the first slave says, ‘Well, if it’d been any better, he wouldn’t have give it to me, and if it’d been any worse, I couldn’t have drunk it.”
Mose isn’t simpleminded at all.
“Dr. Kirkland takes care of the people on the island, though,” he adds quickly. “They better off than a lot of black folks here in town.”
“What about my father, Mose?”
He looks confused for a minute. “Mr. Luke, you mean?”
“Yes.”
He smiles broadly, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “Mr. Luke always had a good word for me when he passed. Sometimes he gave me a smoke off whatever he was smoking, too. If you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“I liked ol’ Luke, but I had to be careful around him. Dr. Kirkland didn’t like him none at all.”
Michael’s Expedition is close now, threading its way through the trees like a tank wary of land mines. “Did you like the island, Mose?”
He shrugs. “Didn’t know nothing else back then. I wouldn’t go back now, though. I like my TV in the evenings. And I don’t like that river. Too many people done died in that water.”
“Did you know somebody who drowned?”
“I had a cousin drown in it. Sho did.”
“Girl or boy?”
“Boy. Name of Enos. But I believe a little girl drowned some years before that, too.”
“Do you think the island is a bad place?”
Mose squints at me as though trying to make out something far away. “What you mean, Miss Catherine?”
“Is there something bad there? Something you might not be able to explain, but that you just feel? I used to feel something like that there.”
The yardman closes his eyes. After a moment, a little shudder goes through him. Then he opens his eyes and looks at me like a little boy. “When I was young, the old folks used to say killers from the prison roamed the roads at night. From Angola, you know? Like they’d slip out of the prison at night, float over to the island, and walk the roads looking for children. All that seems like a fairy story now, something they used to scare us. But still, a lot of kids wouldn’t get near them roads anytime round dark, and not even in the daytime by themselves.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs again. “That’s just how it was. You’d have to ask somebody else the why of it. But I’ll tell you this…I got me a lot of kin down there, and I hardly been back there in forty years. And now that you ask me, I don’t care if I never go back again.”
As Michael’s Expedition rumbles up beside Mose, the yardman gives me a wave and ambles off through the trees. By the time Michael rolls down his window, Mose has vanished. Like my father, he is another ghost of Malmaison.
I take up Luke Ferry’s bag of secrets and climb into the SUV.
Chapter 50
Michael Wells and I are sitting on a leather couch in the private office of Dr. Tom Cage, a general practitioner in Natchez for more than forty years. Bookshelves line all four walls, some stuffed with medical treatises, others with histories of the Civil War. There’s a stack of medical charts a foot high on Dr. Cage’s desk, the bane of every physician. A half-painted lead soldier holding a musket stands in the shadow of the charts, a bottle of gray paint beside him. Like us, he seems to be waiting for the doctor to appear.
But what holds my attention now, what I’ve hardly been able to take my eyes off since arriving, is the polished white skull being used as a bookend in the shelf behind Dr. Cage’s desk. The empty eye sockets stare at me with what looks like mockery, reminding me yet again that Nathan Malik is dead, that the murders in New Orleans remain unsolved, and that I am still a suspect.
Since finding the Polaroids of the naked children in my father’s bag, I’ve been unable to think clearly. The voices that tormented me long ago have returned, a susurrant undercurrent of vicious commentary that I cannot silence. More disturbing, something deep within me seems to have cracked, leaving me broken in a way I cannot begin to mend. What is broken, I think, is my faith-my desperate hope that despite what Grandpapa told me, my
