arkansastraveler (16 page)

I drew my knees up under my chin and stared out over the rippling, catfish-colored lake. “So, who else knows besides Quinton and Emory?”

“No one that we know of. We’ve only been dating about five months or so. We both agreed it wouldn’t be the best time for it to come out. After I’m elected . . .” She corrected herself. “
If
I’m elected, then we’ll go public. Shoot, that’s
assuming we’re still together. Maybe this is just a fling.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

She sighed and sat upright, crossing her legs and resting her elbows on her knees. “No, I don’t. But there’s lots of things. . . people to consider. We haven’t even told our kids. Step-families are hard enough. A mixed race one in the South has to be every kid’s nightmare.”

“You could always move to California. San Celina has a great university. I could teach you to brand and castrate cattle.”

She threw back her head and laughed. “Me, a cowgirl? No, thanks, Annie Oakley. I’ll leave the cattle rustling to you.”

I picked up a tiny hickory nut lying on the rough dock and pitched it at her. “Huh, do your homework, girlfriend. Cattle rustling is cattle
stealing
. I ain’t no rustler. I have my
own
herd.”

“Heavy on bulls, I’ll just gander,” she said, laughing.

We’d both stood up and were brushing off the backs of our jeans when Miss DeLora and Gabe stepped out on the porch.

“You baby girls get on back up here,” she called. “I only got a little time to show you my quilts ’fore I have to be gettin’ ready for the gospel singin’ tonight. I’m makin’ my peach cobbler for the pie social and I can’t be makin’ it with y’all hangin’ around here.”

Inside, Miss DeLora took us into her bedroom and opened the double doors of a huge, pine cupboard where at least fifty or so quilts were tightly packed. As she pulled one after the other out and laid them on her four-poster bed, cedar chest, and rocking chair, my exclamations turned to murmurs of appreciation at the intricacy of each pattern, the sheer originality of the design, and the stories she told about each one.

“This here’s my own mama’s last quilt.” She spread out a double-size, wedding-ring quilt over her bed. Rather than
the tiny pastel conversation prints often used in thirties’ wedding-ring patterns, the fabrics were a joyous mixture of red and purple, green and azure prints with the backgrounds of the connecting rings being a solid orange, grass green, and brilliant blue fabric rather than the more common plain white muslin. “She made it for my brother, Remar. He married a Chicago girl by the name of Esther Rose. They was killed three months after their wedding in a train accident.” She shook her head, her face not sad, just remembering. “Mama loved Remar special ’cause he was born with one leg shorter than the other. Had to wear shoes with a lift. He could talk a mockingbird into bein’ a crow, that’s a fact. He sold insurance.” We all stared at Remar and Esther’s wedding quilt, reminded of the fragility of life, the quirkiness of fate.

“This one,” she said, pulling out what appeared to be a sampler quilt, “was made by me, my six sisters, and our spiritual sisters. We called it ‘Almost Family.’ ” Again the colors were bold and bright with fabric-pattern combinations that delighted the eye with their sheer love of life—all sizes and colors of gingham, army green and shocking pink, mustard yellow and deep plum, pattern on pattern on pattern. Each square had a set of initials worked into the pattern.

“Whose initials are these?” I asked, running my fingers over the tiny stitches.

Miss DeLora gave a wicked smile. “It’s the ones who got away,” she said, glancing up at my husband. “Not the ones we caught.”

Amen and I looked at each other and laughed.

“You never told me that story before,” Amen said.

Miss DeLora shrugged a tiny shoulder in her granddaughter’s direction. “Girl thinks she knows all there is to know about me.”

“That’s Amen,” I said, smirking at my friend. “Thinks she knows everything about everyone.”

“Huh, don’t I know it?” Miss DeLora agreed.

“You shut your mouth, you skinny little white girl,” Amen said, “’fore I come over there and shut it for you.”

“You and what army?” I retorted.

“Were they always like this, Miss DeLora?” Gabe asked.

“Honey, they was even worse as children. Always pick, pick, pick. Can’t tell you the times I had to separate them two to keep them from scalping each other.”

Amen turned to her grandmother. “Show her the special quilt.”

“What special quilt?” I asked.

Miss DeLora held up a finger and turned back to her bed, groaning slightly as she bent over and pulled a pasteboard box from under her bed. She pulled out a quilt wrapped in a white sheet. “Let me lay it out here.”

We watched silently as she unfolded a brilliant pine and deep green quilt. The eight-star pattern, made up of triangles of the two solid green fabrics and tiny white-and-green-flowered fabric, was repeated with forty-two stars—six by seven. Quilted in the squares between the stars was an intricate fern-leaf pattern. Taking a closer look at the incredible quilting, I saw that each fern leaf had been stuffed separately. As with many old quilts I’d studied, I was amazed at the care that had gone into their design and construction, at the vision and creativity of these artists who would have scoffed at the idea of calling themselves by that name. By the look of the fabrics, it appeared to be about fifty or sixty years old. I continued to study the quilt, something niggling at the back of my mind. Why did it appear so familiar to me?

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Amen said, an amused look on her face.

“Yes,” I said. “The hand-stuffed fern leaves especially . . .” Then it occurred to me. “Hey, this is like the one that won the Sears 1933 World’s Fair quilt competition.
I thought I recognized the pattern. It’s called Star of the Bluegrass.”

Miss DeLora’s old face beamed. “She recognized it.”

“Well, almost,” Amen said, still smirking.

“So it took me a few minutes,” I said. “I’m gettin’ old.”

“No, that’s not it. Remember the story about Miss DeLora cooking dinner for Mrs. Roosevelt and her escorts?”

I looked from Amen’s smiling face to Miss DeLora’s. “No way,” I said, my voice low and unbelieving.

“What’s going on?” Gabe asked, looking truly clueless.

“They was broke down by the side of the road,” Miss DeLora said. “Guess they was on their way down to Hot Springs where the mister had them a house. It was pretty dark and cold, and they couldn’t get the car started to beat the band. I was goin’ by on Daddy’s old wagon pulled by a couple of mules on my way home from town. I asked if she needed a ride and took them to my place where I sent your uncle Jayjay on one of the mules back into town to fetch a car repairman. Mrs. Roosevelt was lookin’ a little peaked, so I offered her and the two men with her a little supper. Made some of my fried catfish, corn biscuits, put out some of my pickles and stewed tomatoes. Had a buttermilk pie made up that morning. She said it was the best meal she’d had in a year. Nice lady, that Mrs. Roosevelt. Told me to call her Eleanor, but I told her I reckon I couldn’t do that, her bein’ the wife of the president and all. We had ourselves a nice little chat. Sang a few songs. Didn’t have a bad voice for a white woman. Then she sent one of her men out and brought back this package a’holdin’ this quilt. Said she’d be honored if I’d take it. Gave me a letter with it, too, tellin’ whoever would try to claim it that she’d givin’ me that quilt free and square. Then she asked for my recipe for buttermilk pie. Gave it to her, too. Only person I ever did.”

“The letter is in my safe-deposit box,” Amen said.

“Did Mrs. Roosevelt make the quilt?” Gabe asked.

I turned to him and said, “No, it’s . . .”

Amen interrupted my explanation. “We gotta go, Grandma, and let you get your peach cobbler made. I’ll pick you up about five, okay?”

“That’s fine,” she said, running her hands over the quilt.

Amen kissed her grandma and motioned at us to follow her.

“Does she know how valuable that quilt is?” I asked when we were out in the front yard. A light afternoon breeze had picked up, causing the tops of the hickory trees to sway like hands waving.

“Not really, and I don’t want her to know. I want her to enjoy that quilt while she’s alive without feeling obligated to donate it to some museum. I’ve convinced her to not let many people see it, tellin’ her they’d just be jealous. That’s seemed to work so far.”

“What’s so special about that quilt?” Gabe asked.

“It’s the actual winning quilt from the World’s Fair contest I just mentioned,” I said. “The quilt was presented to Mrs. Roosevelt when the fair was over, and it’s been missing ever since. It’s one of the great unsolved mysteries of the quilting world. In terms of historical value, it’s priceless.”

“I thought you’d get a big kick out of seeing it,” Amen said. “Now you’re in on the secret. Don’t be spreading it around.”

I crossed my chest and held up three fingers. “Ranch woman’s honor. That is so cool. The quilt world’s gonna flip when it’s revealed.”

“Hopefully not for a long time,” she said.

“Absolutely,” I agreed.

We were walking down the gravel pathway to our cars when a small blue pickup pulled up with a screech in the driveway. A young black girl in her twenties wearing corn-rows, a pink T-shirt, and white jeans jumped out. Her sharp
reddish-brown cheekbones were glossy with tears.

“Lavanda,” Amen said when the girl ran up to her, breathing hard. “What’s wrong, honey?” Amen looked panicked herself.

“They’ve arrested Quinton,” she cried, collapsing into Amen’s open arms.

“T
ELL ME WHAT
happened,” Amen said after hugging the girl. As the girl gulped and tried to speak, Amen cradled her nail-bitten hand in both of hers.

“They . . . they . . . came over to the campaign office about an hour ago. There was two police cars, and when he told them he wouldn’t answer their questions, they argued and he yelled at them and then they . . . they put handcuffs on him. Oh, Amen, they didn’t even let him call anyone or lock the office. I had to just close the door and run down here. I didn’t want to call ’cause Quinton always said you hate getting bad news over the phone. Oh, Amen!” She put her face in her hands. Loud, convulsive sobs rocked her thin body.

I glanced up at Gabe’s face. No hint of emotion. Was he remembering last night? No doubt about it, this police force had more than a slight problem with eager handcuffs.

“Lavanda, take a hold of yourself,” Amen said, patting the girl’s back. “We can’t be of any use to Quinton if we’re hysterical.” Her tone, though sympathetic, was just a tinge severe. In a spooky, peek-into-the-future moment, I heard
Miss DeLora in my friend’s voice. She turned to Gabe. “What are our options here from a legal standpoint?”

“It depends on what they have on him,” Gabe said. “First thing I’d suggest is get an attorney down there as quick as possible.”

“I’ll call Duck. He probably knows someone.”

She ran to her car and in minutes had reached Duck on her cell phone. She turned away from us so we couldn’t hear her words. Next to us, Lavanda made small choking sounds in the back of her throat, trying hard to obey Amen’s command to stay in control.

“Are you working on the campaign?” I asked, trying to give the girl something to concentrate on until Amen finished talking to Duck.

“I’m Quinton’s fiancée,” she said. A trickle of mascara ran down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

“I’m Benni,” I said, holding out my hand. “And this is Gabe, my husband.”

She shook my hand, sniffing wetly. “I know. Quinton told me y’all were comin’ from California. I’d like to live there, but Quinton says it’s too dangerous out there, all the gangs and drive-by shootings and such. We plan on movin’ to Atlanta when he’s out of law school.”

I didn’t answer, knowing from experience that trying to defend California to the rest of the country was never successful. I had to bite my tongue to keep from pointing out that I’d seen a good amount of violence since landing in Arkansas three days ago.

Amen walked back over to us, gripping her cell phone tightly. Perspiration dotted her upper lip. “Duck’s calling an attorney friend now. He should be at the police station soon. Said there probably wasn’t any use of us going down there, that his friend would take care of things, but I’m going anyway.” She glanced up at the cabin. “I guess I’d
better tell Grandma before some old busybody starts yappin’ at her on the phone.”

I touched her arm. “Is there anything we can do?”

She shook her head no. “Thanks, not right now.” She turned to Lavanda and said, “You’d best go on back to the office and lock up. Then go on home and wait. I’ll call you when I hear something.”

Lavanda gave a small whimper and nodded in understanding. After getting her the keys from her purse, Amen walked the trembling girl over to her pickup, talking low to her and rubbing the center of her back. Quinton’s fiancée gave Amen a fierce hug before climbing into the truck.

“I’ll wait for you in the car,” Gabe said as Amen walked back toward us, her head bent, studying the ground. “Give her a moment of privacy with you.”

I squeezed his hand in thanks. Amen waited until Gabe got into the Explorer before lifting her head and looking at me. Shiny tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Oh, shoot,” I said, putting my arm around her shaking shoulders. Her bones felt sharp and fragile, her bare skin hot to the touch. “It’ll be okay. Really, it will be.”

“We don’t know that,” she said.

“What could they possibly have on him?” I said. “There is just no reason for this except pure racism. Mark my words, it’s a cooked up thing, like they were trying to do to Gabe last night. A good attorney will have him out in ten minutes. Criminy, you’re going to have to revamp the whole police department when you become mayor. They can’t go on harassing innocent people left and right.”

She was silent during my ranting, her eyes darting down at the gravel driveway. A sinking feeling occurred in my stomach, and I stopped talking.

“Amen?” I said. “They don’t have anything on him, do they?”

She looked up at me, her ebony eyes still glossy with tears. “Oh, Benni, he’s so young and hot-tempered. You
remember how that is. When you do things without thinking about it, when justice is a word that sets your blood to churning like someone’s turned the blender on puree. Wisdom and patience aren’t even words in your dictionary.”

“What did he do?” I whispered.

She put a hand up to her eyes as if even the pale light of the weak afternoon sun was too much for her. “The other night, after the incident at Emory’s, Quinton went looking for Toby Hunter. I thought I’d talked him down, convinced him to let it go, to just work harder to get me elected. I tried to persuade him that political power was the best way in the long run to fight people like Toby. You don’t sink to their levels, but gain real power and fight them that way. He
said
he understood. He said he agreed with me.”

“But?”

“I guess after he’d gone home that night, he got to thinking about it, dwelling on the scene over and over of this little punk spittin’ on Grandma, got to thinking how people like Toby had been spittin’ on people his whole life and getting away with it, and Lavanda said, after he’d had a few beers, he decided to go out looking for Toby. Wanted to say his piece. She tried to talk him out of it, but . . .” She gave me a rueful half-smile. “He’s part Tolliver. Isn’t no way you talk us out of anything we want to do once we put our minds to it.”

I nodded in agreement. That was the pure truth. It was what gave Amen the courage and strength to both run for mayor and head the group that was for the church merger.

“So, did he find him that night?” I asked.

“He went cruising the parking lots of the bars where Toby and his buddies were known to hang out and finally found his truck at Lester’s Roadhouse out by the interstate.”

Lester’s had been around since I was a kid. It was one of those redneck country bars where a Confederate flag was proudly displayed over the bar and was rumored to be the meeting place for the local KKK chapter that no one would
admit existed. As kids we’d always been cautioned by Dove, Aunt Garnet, and Uncle Boone to stay away from the square brick building set back in the woods, that it was an evil and wicked place, which, of course, made it irresistible to us. Emory and I had gone there when we were seventeen and eighteen, curious about its interior and its reputation. Once inside, we were disappointed to find only a small dark room that smelled rank of beer, sweat, and hate. The large cartoon caricature of an African-American man with bulgy eyes and exaggerated thick lips with a rope around his neck that hung next to the flag made us bolt out of there without a look back. It was the first time in our young lives it occurred to us that sometimes our elders did know what they were talking about.

“What was he planning on doing?” A black man going alone into a bar like that. I shuddered to think of the possibilities.

“Who knows?” she said, waving her hand impatiently. “He
had
no plans. That’s the blessed stupidity of youth. He said he just sat there in his car in Lester’s parking lot getting madder by the minute when he saw Toby walk out alone. And Quinton, fool boy, decided to follow him.” She stopped for a moment and stared out at the lake. I followed her gaze. Small waves kicked up, empowered by the afternoon breeze, the white tips of them bright against the flat, steel-colored water. One boat lingered, manned by a single fisherman silhouetted by the sun. She turned back to me. “Thank goodness Toby was alone, or we might be visiting Quinton at the funeral home rather than the jail.”

I nodded in agreement. “Did Quinton ever catch up with Toby?”

She sighed. “He says no. Says that he followed him a ways, out to about a half-mile of his daddy’s place by the lake.” She pointed across the lake where the tops of some fancy cabins peeked through the trees. “Then, just for the orneriness of it, he bumped the back of Toby’s truck.”

I gazed out to where she pointed. “That’s crazy! I bet you dollars to doughnuts that Toby’s had some kind of gun in his truck.”

“That’s exactly what I told Quinton, but you know menfolks of
any
age, nine to ninety. You can’t tell them nothin’.”

I kept looking out at the spot across the lake. If I remembered correctly, that was the same area Toby’s body had been found. I glanced back at Amen. The sick expression on her face told me she was thinking the same thing.

“He said,” she continued, “that after he bumped him, he took off over to the west side of Sugartree where he knew Toby wouldn’t follow. At least not when he was alone.”

The west side of Sugartree was a mostly black neighborhood though the lines of race were beginning to blur with developers buying up hunks of land and building retirement condos and motels. It was just such a development that had bought the land where Zion Baptist resided.

“Then what?” I asked.

“Then Quinton said he went home. He lives in the pink apartments near the church. He said he took a shower and was in bed by midnight.”

“What time was Toby killed?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know exactly, but it was early the next morning they found his body. Quinton never said anything to anyone about his encounter with Toby. He said he didn’t think anyone saw him. Apparently he was wrong.”

“Are you sure there isn’t anything Gabe and I can do?” I asked.

“I’ll let you know what’s happening as soon as I find out. You’re going to the gospel sing and pie social tonight, right?”

I nodded.

“Then say an extra-special prayer for Quinton.”

I gave her a quick hug. “You got it.”

“Thanks.” She turned and walked toward the house to
tell the news to Miss DeLora, her normally proudly set shoulders slightly slumped. Quinton was her favorite nephew, the son of her beloved sister, Gladiola. Gladiola had died of diabetes complications when Quinton was ten, and though Quinton was raised up well and strong by his father, a railroad conductor, Amen had been like a mother to him. Seeing him in jail would break her heart.

Gabe rolled down the car window. “Are you sure she doesn’t need us to go down to the station with her?”

I walked around and climbed in the passenger side. “She said she’d let us know when she hears something.”

He shifted the car into drive and pulled slowly around Amen’s Mustang. “Does she know what they have on him?”

I told him the story as we headed back toward town. “Is that enough to arrest someone?”

“If that’s all they have, they probably didn’t arrest him,” he replied. “They’re probably just questioning him. He should have been more cooperative at the campaign office.” Though I know Gabe was sympathetic to Quinton, he was also a cop, so I knew to tread lightly with my comments.

“They probably would have found a reason to take him in anyway, don’t you think?” I watched his profile, trying to discern from his facial expressions what he was thinking and feeling.

“Maybe,” he said, still not willing to speak against the same police who so unfairly misjudged him last night. “But him getting angry only worsens his situation.”

I leaned back in the seat and stared out the side window. Thick piney woods sped past in a green blur. Gabe touched the brakes, slowing us down slightly, to avoid a squirrel dashing across the highway.

B
ACK AT AUNT
Garnet’s house, the war of the sisters continued. The battleground had resumed in the kitchen. The
pie auction tonight was to raise money for the annual Lottie Moon foreign missionary offering. Lottie Moon and her work had been involved the first time I ruffled Southern Baptist feathers, though not the last.

“Why was it okay for a woman to be the pastor of a church in a foreign country and not in America?” I asked Brother Cooke one year during Vacation Bible School. I was twelve years old. I’d asked Dove, and she said it was a very good question and I should ask the pastor.