Sleep No More

Annelise brightened. Her father kept his promises.

Lily and Annelise waved as Waters pulled away from Linton Hill, the house that was not for sale, an antebellum home he’d bought five years ago with the proceeds from a well in Franklin County. Linton Hill wasn’t a palace like Dunleith or Melrose, but it had four thousand square feet with detached slave quarters that Waters used as a home office, and many small touches of architectural significance. Since they moved in, Lily had been leading a one-woman campaign to have the house placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and victory seemed close. Having grown up in a clapboard house less than a mile from Linton Hill, Waters usually felt pride when he looked at his home. But today, watching his rearview mirror, he barely saw the place. As soon as Lily led Annelise up the steps, his mind began to run where it had wanted to for the past ten minutes.

“I imagined it,” he murmured.

But the old pain was there. Dormant for two decades, it remained stubbornly alive, like a tumor that refused to metastasize or to be absorbed. Waters gave the Land Cruiser some gas and headed downtown, toward the north side, where live oaks towered overhead like the walls of a great tunnel. Most houses here were tall Victorian gingerbreads, but there were also plain clapboards and even shotgun shacks. Natchez was a lot like New Orleans on this side: half-million-dollar mansions stood yards away from crumbling row houses that wouldn’t bring thirty thousand.

Waters turned right, onto Linton Avenue, a shaded street of middle-aged affluent whites that terminated near the Little Theater, where Maple Street rose sharply toward the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. There he would break out of the warren of oneway streets and into the last real light of the day. Like biblical rain, the sunlight fell upon the just and unjust alike, and in this deceptively somnolent river town, the last rays always fell upon the tourists standing on the bluff, the drunks sipping whiskey at the Under-the-Hill Saloon, and upon the dead.

In 1822, the old town burial ground had been moved from the shadow of St. Mary’s Cathedral Church to a hundred acres of hilly ground on the high bluff north of town. Over the next century, this became one of the most beautiful and unique cemeteries in the South, and it was through its gates that John Waters finally pulled his Land Cruiser and slowed to a near idle. Some of the stones he passed looked new, others as though they’d been cut centuries before, and probably were. Remains from the old cemetery had been disinterred and transferred here, so tombstones dating to the 1700s were not uncommon. Waters parked the Land Cruiser on the crest of Jewish Hill, climbed out, and stared down four breathtaking miles of river.

In Natchez, the dead have long had a better view than the living. The view from Jewish Hill always stirred something deep within him. The river affected everyone who lived near it; he had heard uneducated roughnecks speak with halting eloquence of its mythic pull. Yet he saw the muddy river differently from most. The Mississippi was an ancient river, but it had not spent its life cutting its way into the continent like the Colorado. The Mississippi had built the very land that now tried in vain to hem it in. Two hundred fifty million years ago this part of America- from the Gulf Coast to St. Louis-was an ocean called the Mississippi Embayment, but somewhere north of Memphis the nameless proto-Mississippi River was already dumping millions of tons of sediment into that ocean, creating a massive delta system. That process went inexorably on until the ocean was filled, and 35,000 feet of soil covered the bedrock. It was from the upper layers of those deposits that Waters took his family’s living, from the oil-bearing strata just a few thousand feet down. Tonight, thirty miles downriver, he would pull up core samples that would tell a tiny part of what had been happening here 60 million years ago. Compared with these notions of time, the vaunted “history” of his hometown-going back a respectable three hundred years in human terms-was as nothing.

Yet even in geological terms, Natchez was unique. The bluff that supported the antebellum city had not been built by the river but by the wind; aeolian deposition, it was called, or loess, according to the Germans. The city shared this rare phenomenon with parts of China and Austria, and drew scientists from around the world to study it. Sometimes, after saturating rains, whole sections of the bluff would slide like earthen avalanches to the river, and over the past few years the Army Corps of Engineers had fought a massive holding action to stabilize it. The citizens who lived along the kudzu-faced precipice clung tenaciously to their homes like bystanders to a war, human metaphors for the faith that had kept the town alive through good times and bad.

Waters turned away from the river and surveyed a gently rolling city of white obelisks, mausoleums, statuary, and gravestones you could spend a week exploring without beginning to fathom the stories beneath them. The surnames on the stones were still common in the town, some going back seven generations. Natchez was the oldest settlement on the Mississippi River, and while she had witnessed many changes, the names had remained constant. Standing in the midst of the monuments, each a touchstone of memory, Waters was suffused with hot awareness of the essentially incestuous nature of small towns, and of Natchez in particular.

As gooseflesh rose on his shoulders, he started down Jewish Hill toward the Protestant section of the cemetery, scanning the gravestones as he walked. He edged down a steep hill and through a line of gnarled oaks. Almost immediately his eyes settled on what he sought. Her stone was easy to spot. Black Alabama marble veined with grayish white, it rose three feet higher than the surrounding stones, its mirrorlike face deeply graven with large roman letters that could have been there a thousand years.

MALLORY GRAY CANDLER

Miss Mississippi 1982

As Waters neared the stone, smaller letters came into clear relief.

Born, Natchez, Mississippi

February 5, 1960

Died, New Orleans, Louisiana

August 8, 1992

“The flame that burns twice as bright

burns half as long.”

He stopped and stood silent before the black slab. He visited the cemetery often enough, but he had never visited this grave. Nor had he attended the funeral. He was not wanted by the family, and he had no desire to go. He’d said his good-byes to Mallory Candler long before then, and the process had almost killed him. For this reason, the inscription surprised him. The quote was from Blade Runner, a film Mallory had seen with Waters. She had liked the line of dialogue so much that she’d written it down in her diary. The family must have discovered it there after her death and decided it captured her spirit-which it did. That Mallory Candler had sought out provocative films like Blade Runner while her peers numbed out to Endless Love or imitated Flashdance spoke volumes about her, and it was one of those traits few had known. Mallory played the Southern belle so well that only Waters, so far as he knew, had gotten to know the complex woman beneath. He was almost certain her husband had not.

The year Mallory reigned as Miss Mississippi, she told Waters she sometimes felt like the beautiful android woman in Blade Runner-so well trained, practiced, and seemingly flawless that her own sense of reality fled her, leaving an automaton going through the motions of life, feeling nothing, wondering if even her memories were invented. A few duties of her office had actually lightened her heart-the hospitals, the camps for retarded kids, the real things-but ceremonies for the opening of factories and car dealerships had left her cold and depressed.

Waters knelt at the border of the grave and laid his right hand flat on the St. Augustine grass. Six feet beneath his palm lay a body with which he had coupled hundreds of times, sometimes gently, other times thrashing in the dark with desperate passion that would not be quenched. How could it lie cold and utterly still now? Waters was forty-one; Mallory would have been forty-two. Her body was forty-two, he realized, but the passage of time meant only decay to her now. Morbid thoughts, but how else could he think of her, here, under the blank and pitiless stare of this stone? Twenty years ago, they had made love in this cemetery. They chased each other through tunnels in the tall grass, trackless paths cut by an army of old black men with push mowers, then fell into each other’s arms in the bright sun and the buzz of grasshoppers, affirming life in the midst of death.

“Ten years gone,” he murmured. “Jesus.”