A Long Time Gone (11 page)

“All right,” I said, surprising myself. “I'll go. To the pool. I'll just go put on my bathing costume,” I said, heading toward the stairs. Willie passed me, taking the steps two at a time regardless of Aunt Louise's admonishments to act like a gentleman. I assumed Sarah Beth wore her own costume under her dress and linen jacket.

After dressing in my extremely modest bathing costume—and I knew this was true because Aunt Louise had purchased one just like it—I threw a dress over my head and bolted for the door before I could change my mind.

John sat with me in the backseat while Sarah Beth and Willie sat up front. I smiled at Mathilda as John held the car door open for me, her eyes meeting mine for just a moment before glancing away.

Sarah Beth's driving and the bumpy road had me sliding and jolting into John. I'd never sat this close to an unrelated male before except in church. Every time Sarah Beth jerked me into his side, I'd scramble for my door and try to hold on. Finally John put his arm around my shoulder and held me against him. “To keep you safe,” he said, smiling at me.

Willie sat close to Sarah Beth, whispering in her ear and making her giggle, which did nothing to help her driving, but at least kept me solidly at John's side. Watching them made me painfully aware of how silent it was in the backseat. There was only so much staring at the new
leather I could do. Without looking up, I said, “Are you sure it's okay for you to go swimming?”

“I beg your pardon?”

I tilted my head in his direction, afraid to turn it completely because then surely my nose would touch his chin. “Because of your lungs?”

“My lungs?”

“Yes. Mr. Peacock explained to us that you moved down to Mississippi because your lungs couldn't handle the cold winter air in Missouri anymore.”

He coughed, followed by a strangled noise, and I turned my head sharply, my nose colliding with the underside of his jaw. I tried to jerk back, but he held me to him while he continued to cough and choke. He smelled so good I wanted to bury my nose into his neck, but could think only of my aunt's disappointed lips disappearing into the folds of her face.

Finally I managed to pull away, distancing myself from him by grasping the back of the seats in each hand. “What's the matter?”

He'd calmed down and was looking at me the way Uncle Joe looked at Willie when he'd said something unexpectedly clever. “My lungs are fine, Adelaide.”

I looked at him, confused. “But Mr. Peacock said—”

“Can you keep a secret?” he asked quietly. I glanced toward the front seat, where Sarah Beth and Willie were having their own private conversation, and then toward the small back window, where I could see the back of Mathilda's head. Sweat poured down her neck into the collar of her dress, and I imagined her eyes closed as she pretended to be somewhere other than in the rumble seat of Sarah Beth's car.

“Yes,” I whispered back, trying not to stare at the soft part of his neck, where I still remembered the salty scent of him.

“My lungs are fine. It was just a story my family made up. My real name is Reichman—because my parents are German. Well, not German anymore. They've been in America for almost thirty years, and I was born in St. Louis. But during the war, ignorant people thought anybody with a German accent or last name was an open target. We had livestock shot, and our barn set on fire. So my father sent me down here when I was twelve to live with his sister and her family to be safe. They changed my name to Richmond so nobody would think twice
about calling me a German spy. And because I'd lived here so long, it was just decided that I stay. I've got six brothers and they help my father run the farm, so they didn't exactly need me.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the leather seat between us. “Well, that makes sense, I suppose. You don't look sickly, I mean.”

His fingers touched me under my chin, and he lifted it. “I'm as healthy as an ox,” he said, something in his tone heating me more than the summer sun.

The car came to a jerking halt, and I realized where we were. “Sarah Beth! We're not supposed to be here—my uncle Joe will lock me in my room for the rest of my life if he finds out I went swimming at the Ellis plantation!”

“Oh, don't be such a baby, Adelaide. They won't find out if we don't tell them. So grow up and let's just have some fun.”

I stared at her for a moment, knowing it was pointless to argue.

John came across to my side of the car to help me out. As I stood on the running board, I saw Mathilda trying to figure out how to navigate the basket and herself out of the rumble seat. Willie and Sarah Beth had already climbed from the car and were walking toward the ruins of the old plantation house while John stood, waiting patiently to help me out.

“Hang on,” I said, jumping down, then heading toward the back of the car. “Here,” I said, taking the basket from Mathilda. “Give that to me so you can climb down.”

She looked at me with grateful eyes, eyes that were lighter than I'd noticed before, with specks of green in them.

“Thank you, Miss Adelaide,” she said quietly. She climbed down from the rumble seat before retrieving the basket from my hands, then walked away quickly in the direction Willie and Sarah Beth had gone.

I found John watching me with an odd expression. “That was kind of you, Adelaide.”

I shrugged, feeling embarrassed. “My mama always told me to treat all people the way I want to be treated. I don't remember much else about my mama, so I try to remember that.”

He smiled at me and I suddenly became aware of just how alone we were. I knew Aunt Louise wouldn't approve, and the thought gave me an unexpected thrill, like a drip of cool water against my skin. I shivered. I'd never been alone with a boy before—not that I'd ever been
given the opportunity—and I also knew Sarah Beth and I had been lectured again and again about coming out to the old plantation house. I'd heard my aunt and uncle talking about the “unsavory characters” who sometimes made their home in some of the abandoned slave cabins on the property, but all of us children in Indian Mound knew the adults wanted us to stay away because the old house was haunted.

You could just tell by the way the glassless windows stared out at you like empty eye sockets, and how sometimes you could see a shadow pass by even though the upper floor had rotted away years ago and there was nothing to stand on just in case you wanted to walk by a window.

And nobody hunted in the woods surrounding the house or in the old cotton fields that had been abandoned right after the Civil War. Men said that the animals stayed away, as if they sensed something they were afraid of.

The land had been allowed to return to forest. Uncle Joe called it a sin to waste all that good farmland, but I thought it was the natural course of things. In my sixteen years of history lessons and just paying attention, I knew that sooner or later the Mississippi River or the land that had been stolen from it would demand payment for trying to force them into doing something nature had never intended. It was just the way of things in the delta.

I started talking, trying to erase the silence that hid beneath the sound of the insects in the trees and in the clusters of weeds and grass that sprouted through the dirt road like the tail of a scairt cat. “This plantation used to belong to Sarah Beth's family—on her mama's side. Right after the Civil War they moved to New Orleans, where they had family connections.” I didn't know exactly what that meant, but I'd heard Aunt Louise use the term a lot and figured it made me sound older.

I continued. “They brought some of their freed slaves with them—their Bertha is a descendant. People say Mrs. Heathman's grandfather was a blockade runner and made a fortune during the war.”

“And who owns it now?” John walked with his hands respectably behind his back, but so close to me that my arm brushed his with every step.

“I think they still do. Uncle Joe says that with Mr. Heathman being
president of the bank, he doesn't need to get his hands dirty with farming.” I looked at him and saw that he was smiling at me in that way of his that made me feel like a child. I stopped walking. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I forgot your family owns a farm, too. I only think of you as a watchmaker.”

“No apology needed. Farming is a very noble profession, in my opinion. Not everybody can make things grow, or has the patience to wait for rain or pray for it to stop.”

“I love to grow things in my garden,” I said, feeling emboldened by how near he was to me. “I'm quite good at it. Even during a drought, I always have a good crop of vegetables. Aunt Louise says I come from a long line of brilliant gardeners.”

We stopped, just now becoming aware of where we were. We'd walked around the ruins of the house and stood near the back, amid several outbuildings with missing roofs. Gnats and mosquitoes buzzed and dipped around us, but without biting, as if they, too, felt the magic that seemed to surround us. The pond was visible through the trees and we could hear Sarah Beth's scream of laughter followed by a loud splash.

John took my hand and began leading me in the opposite direction. “Let's go this way,” he said, finding a path that skirted through stands of new trees and eventually led to a row of abandoned slave cabins. I should have said no, on account of not only the words of warning from my aunt and uncle about never being alone with a boy who wasn't related to me, but also from my sheer terror that we would encounter one of those ghosts I'd been hearing about all of my life.

“Where are we going?” I asked, trying to keep the tremble out of my voice.

“Here,” he said, stopping, then facing me. “I've been dying to get you alone ever since I first saw you. Do you remember that? Last year in Mr. Peacock's shop?”

I nodded, breathless.

“I've been wanting to do this.” He pushed his boater hat farther back on his forehead. Then gently he took my head between his hands and bent toward me, his lips gentle on mine. Aunt Louise would
definitely
not approve, regardless of how many lilies he brought her.

He pulled his head back, his eyes exploring mine. He smiled. “That
was even better than I'd hoped.” He moved his thumb to my lower lip and pulled it down, staring closely at it. He was about to kiss me again when I noticed smoke rising in the air from behind one of the slave cabins. I pulled away, and John followed my gaze.

“Somebody's here,” I whispered, trying to imagine which was worse—ghosts or unsavory characters. Either way, I didn't want to see them.

John took me by the shoulders. “They'll leave us alone if we leave them alone.”

I wanted to agree, and allow John to kiss me again, but I'd already spotted the picnic basket, set down in the scrubby grass in front of the cabin where the smoke was coming from.

Pulling away, I said, “Mathilda's there. We need to make sure she's okay.”

He noticed the basket, too, and without argument, he took my hand and led me toward the cabin. I found myself praying that ghosts didn't light real fires. I prepared to stop, to sneak around the back so we wouldn't be noticed, but John simply led me around the cabin toward the sound of low voices.

He stopped, and I stopped right behind him, our hands still clasped tightly. The humid air was thick with the smell of what I thought was vinegar, and something else I recognized but couldn't name. And there was another smell I thought familiar: the scent I sometimes caught on Mr. Heathman's breath in the evenings.

I wondered if John could hear my heart thumping in my chest, or at least feel the rush of blood through my veins and into my fingertips. I just wasn't sure whether it was from discovering somebody in one of the abandoned cabins, or the fact that his fingers were wrapped around mine and I could smell his sweat mixing with my own.

“Good afternoon,” he said softly, as if he'd stopped in on friends for a glass of lemonade.

I peered around his shoulder, my eyes widening. In the center of a clearing behind the shack were two large barrels, one with what looked like an upside-down copper tub stuck on top, with a copper tube connecting the barrels. A fire burned under a large copper pot, creating the column of steam that I'd seen. Surrounding the barrels were about a dozen oversize empty jars with a single finger loop near the top. And
sitting in front of the smoldering tub were three upturned logs where a black man, a white woman, and Mathilda sat. Standing quietly by the barrels was a black boy about my age, barefoot and wearing torn denim pants, his dark eyes taking me in just like a butcher deciding which part of a hog to cut up first.

They looked at us in surprise, the man standing slowly before moving behind the woman, his hand on her shoulder to show us that they were together. The woman's lower lip was filled with tobacco, and I watched as she lifted a small jar, brown liquid swirling inside, and spit into it, her eyes never leaving my face. I wondered if these two people might be the unsavory characters Aunt Louise had warned me about.

I turned toward Mathilda, whose eyes had the look of a rabbit in the sight of a rifle. “You okay?” I asked, hoping I wasn't insulting anybody. The man's hair was heavily sprinkled with gray, but his hands were as big as watermelons, the muscles under his filthy undershirt pressing against the flannel like giant snakes caught in a sack. His suspenders hung down the sides of his pants, and I looked away as I realized I'd never seen a man before in such a state of undress, except Willie once by accident.

Before Mathilda could answer, John lifted his chin toward the man. “Leon,” he said in greeting.

The black man nodded his head in acknowledgment and I wondered how John knew his name. And why he wasn't introducing us, although it was apparent that Mathilda already knew them.

John turned his attention to Mathilda. “You get on down to the pond, Mathilda. I'll bring the basket.”