From the short story collection: Manor Bayou
by Patrick Owens
The front parlor of the family Victorian had been turned into a sickroom. Mother lay propped against the headboard of the massive four-poster. Someone sure busted their butt maneuvering that sucker down the curved stairway from the master bedroom.
Mother’s scalp, as faded as the pink tea roses on the pillow shams, showed through sparse white hair. I rearranged a few strands with my fingertips, hoping a comb-over would help, then poked through the contents my bag that had slipped from my shoulder when I rushed to the bed. “Now darling, just a bit of lipstick.”
The old sheriff startled me. “Beautiful as ever, ain’t she?” How did that fat slug get so light on his feet?
He waddled closer to the bed, holding the photograph Father always kept on his bedside table, the cracked wood frame barely held together with dried-out masking tape. The sheriff held the picture next to the mother’s face. “Just like in the picture.”
I leaned closer. The sepia images were losing contrast, but I could still make out a group of teenage boys and girls dressed for a garden party. Mother hardly looked like the teenager in the picture. Her sixtieth birthday was last week, and life had not been kind to her.
I looked up at the sheriff and let him see more of what I felt than I wished, I guess.
“ Well, we all looked better back then,” the sheriff said, with just a touch of whine in his voice.
What an opening! I could have cut him with something like, ‘You even had a waist, slug.’ But I tried for calm.
The fat buffoon tilted my chin up with his fist. “Never realized how much you look like her.”
I flung his hand aside and grabbed the picture.
“Now, now, don’t get uppity, gal!”
A deputy poked his head in the doorway. “Boss, the M.E. wants you right away.”
On the way to the door, he nudged my suitcase with the toe of his muddy boot, the good-old-boy manner giving way to overbearing cop. “Didn’t take time to unpack? Guess you been busy.”
Bet your ass, Fatso! Jesus! Did I say that out loud? I need sleep.
*****
Father’s call yesterday that Mother had passed sent me rushing to La Guardia. A change of planes in Atlanta and reckless drive in a rental got me got me down the Gulf coast just in time to straighten things out here when the law came pounding on the door.
I studied the picture the sheriff brought downstairs. Mother had written ‘Pass Christian Isle, 1928’ across the bottom. It showed a line of grinning DeMolay boys circled behind an equal number of Rainbow Girls; Mother was front and center, her frilly garden party dress at odds with her Art Deco hairstyle.
“Mother, a Marcel? What a barbaric thing to do to your hair follicles, using chemicals and hot tongs to get those flat waves.”
I glanced at the wisps of hair remaining on her head. The comb-over had relapsed.
“You look so demure in this picture, darling, in spite of your budding nipples poking against the gossamer bodice. And all those handsome young men! My editor would insist I write an expose, something like ‘Debbie Does DeMolay,’ and I’d demand an investigation of the Masons.”
Father was in the picture too, showing patches of lighter color hair at the temples. He had chaperoned the DeMolay boys on the weekend trip and positioned himself for the photo so he could leer at the delicate beauty he intended to rob from the cradle. Father’s sidekick, the future sheriff, stood grinning at the opposite end of the line. So much promise exuded from the young people in the picture. All gone now, except the worst of the lot, yelling at his minions upstairs
An unpleasant smell grew stronger in the room. “Really, Mother! You’re emitting some very undignified vapors.”
I pulled the drapes aside and opened the casement windows, leaving the tattered sheers in place to diffuse the glaring afternoon sun. It didn’t do much good. The sun found a large rip and sent a beam of light through dust motes to the bed, gliding slowly upwards on the bias like a follow-spot trained on an opera diva. But it missed Mother, leaving her face in shadow. If the church ladies were here, they would smirk with righteous approval. God’s stagehand had punished this tragic leading lady.
Still, she was a beautiful sight. The spillover glow seemed to wash away years of wrinkles and cares. The sheriff’s time frame might be off, but Mother did look as lovely as ever, never mind the wasting disease that took her long before her time.
A shoe box overflowing with snapshots was on the bedside table, on top of a child’s copybook and a red hardcover volume with a worn binding. I carried the whole lot to the occasional chair by the window.
A picture of Father taken during the War rested on top of the jumble. He was in his dress uniform, eagles perched on the epaulets. He held his peaked cap over his heart, which gave him the image of a would-be Napoleon. His mop of white hair seemed a bit longish for the military. ‘Panama, Feb. 2, 1943,’ was printed on the back in Mother’s neat hand. Poor Father. Too old for glorious deeds, so he spent the duration protecting the Canal Zone from German
submarines.
“Was father a real colonel, Mother? Or did the photographer have a rack of costumes in his studio?”
The hardcover book slid off my lap to the floor. It was the Anthology of Black Poets, a present from Mother when I got my journalism degree. We celebrated the achievement at a Barnes and Noble, drinking rose hip tea and browsing the aisles. What a hoot, me negotiating her ancient reclining wheelchair around those tight turns!
The anthology was on a shelf at Mother’s eye level, and she asked me to read the table of contents. I don’t know when her tears started. She suddenly gasped and began wailing, which brought the nearest clerk running. Mother trembled, and her color was ashen, but she managed a weak smile, which relieved the young girl who must have thought she had a dying customer in Poetry/Literature.
Mother’s inscription, ‘To Your First Pulitzer!‘ caused my eyes to well with tears for the first time since Father called. “We had such high hopes, didn’t we Dear, but … I’ve spent too many years doing hack work for grocery store check-outs.”
The anthology fell open to the most-read page, a poem by Ray Durem: ‘I Know I’m Not Sufficiently Obscure.’ Four lines in the middle were highlighted in yellow:
I cannot find those mild and gracious words
to clothe the carnage
Blood is Blood and murder’s murder
what’s a lavender word for lynch?
Mother had been using an old photo as a bookmark. I gasped when I saw it was a picture that still haunted me, a tableau worthy of a horror film poster. My mother at age six was sitting on the lawn with black farm kids, playing with toy soldiers and miniature Southern belles. It should have been a happy time, but the theme turned dark when I looked closer. Ezekiel, a shy boy Mother’s age, had his black fingertips on her white ankle.
Foreboding turned to terror when I looked at the teenage boys behind the children. One was Father on horseback, forcing his stallion to rear on its hind legs and paw the air. His hateful expression gave me the feeling he was about to trample the children. Next to him, the future sheriff seemed to squat in his saddle like a toad. I imagined that his tight-lipped smile concealed a forked tongue ready to dart out and snare the nearest child.
The snapshot had given me nightmares when I was little because I fantasized that I was the pretty little girl playing with dolls, not mother. Even now, the threat posed by these violent young men gave me chills. Father is gone, but the Toad is banging around upstairs.
I picked up the copybook, expecting it to be one of mine. But ‘Ezekiel’ was scrawled in letters too large for the namespace. Each lesson was corrected and dated by Mother, the years showing that they were teenagers at the time. Ezekiel’s last reading lesson had been the night before the lynching.
A gust of wind blew across Manor Bayou, and the floral scent of sun-loving flowers washed over me. So relaxing now, but at dusk, night-blooming jasmine would overwhelm us with its suffocating sweetness.
I went back to the box and found pictures taken years later when Father made my mother an honest woman. The wedding was a white-tie affair, and Mother wore social camouflage — an empire gown — which was all the rage at shotgun weddings. Better to leave society in doubt than wear a form-fitting frock and confirm the rumors. Mother’s dress was white silk voile, gathered high between the breasts and draping her rounding tummy. Me.
“Pity you got into the juleps at the reception, dear.”
I had heard the story ad nauseam. Whenever the gossips tired of talking behind my back, one of the old biddies would waylay me in town, and delight in telling me how Mother became a pariah.
She and Father sniped at each other at the reception until the argument escalated to a shouting match. Finally, mother blurted that she had recognized father and his hooded cavalry on lathered horses dragging Ezekiel ‘s body down the lane to Dismal Oaks.
The next morning, Ezekiel’s father found his boy hanging upside down, feet and ankles shattered by the chain pulled taut against the limb of the largest live oak tree. A white girl crouched on the ground under his son’s body. When he touched her shoulder, the girl ran into the mangroves along the Bayou. The town elite ignored the incident, except the gossips, of course. They worried the poor man to death for the girl’s name, which he took unspoken to the grave.
I opened Ezekiel’s copybook again and reread the last entry. “I be a man now, a father soon. I so proud.”
The sheriff and his mob clumped down the stairs from Father’s bedroom, sending menacing vibrations through the old house. He waved a plastic trash bag at me.
“What do you know about this? The little marks on your papa’s neck could’ve been made by the drawstring.”
I took a deep breath and glanced at Mother. Don’t worry dear, I thought. I’ll use the vernacular he expects.
“Doan know nothin’ ’bout no trash bag, Mistah Sheriff.” Judging by the smug expression on his face, I was doing alright … so far. “‘Cept maybe I emptied da wastebasket and puts in a new one … mistah Sheriff, suh.”
“Well, the medical examiner’s gonna to do an autopsy on your papa, in case there was foul play. As for your mama, her heart finally gave out. He’ll release her remains to a mortuary. Which one you gonna use?”
I looked at Mother, and it finally hit me that she really was gone.
“Think on it gal. I gotta talk to the prosecutor. ” He paused at the door. “Don’t be runnin’ off now, ya hear?”
I shrugged and slumped in the chair.
A stronger gust of wind sent the sheers waving like flags until they got hung up on the curtain rod. “The sun is almost set, Mother. I wish you could see this angry afterglow. The Spanish moss is shivering in the breeze, tinged with all the colors of an inferno. Oh, my! The oaks look like they’ve burst into flame, and the conflagration is rushing right up to the porte-cochere. It’s like a stage set for Gotterdammerung, dear. Richard Wagner is burning down our family Valhalla with a sunset.”
My tears turned the fiery image into an impressionist watercolor. So beautiful. So sad.
“You were right all along, darling. Father really did love me. As weak as he was, lying there in bed, he wouldn’t let me help him with the plastic bag. He put it over his head and cinched up the drawstring himself, afraid I would get into trouble, fingerprints, DNA, something.”
I stayed by the window, the foul aroma rising from Mother’s body more unpleasant than the night blooming jasmine. Mist rose from the Bayou and enveloped the western sky, transforming the brilliant afterglow to a lavender shroud.
“Mother … would you be surprised that father asked me to buy a proper headstone for Ezekiel?”
– End –
April 21, 2017