Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (15 page)

I turned to the next page in the file. It was Collie’s medical history, forms filled out by her doctor. The words
schizophrenia
,
depression
,
mania
jumped out at me. I read more.
Patient demonstrates a blunt affect, obsession with deceased mother. Ruminating thoughts manifest in the repetition of a Latin prayer. She reports experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions of a religious and racial nature, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts.

I looked up, afraid to read further, my heart thumping so hard I thought my ribs would crack. A Latin prayer. Hallucinations and delusions.

Like red ravens or traces of gold dust on hairbrush handles?

This sounded like it could be a description of me.

I looked back down again:
Haldol, Thorazine, Clozaril.
I read further down, hitting a line that stopped me cold.

Lobotomy.

Procedure performed by staff June 22, 1962. Successful. Patient is calmer, more docile, although intermittent episodes of paranoia continue.

There was no mention of her death. No mention of “intentional injury.”

“My God.” I dropped the paper.

After pouring drugs into Collie, they’d performed a lobotomy on her? The horror of it washed over me, and tears welled in my eyes. I swiped at them, but I couldn’t slow my breathing. I could hear it, shallow, with a hitch of desperation in it. It wasn’t just sadness I was feeling. It was overwhelming fear.

What would they do to me? More pills? Electroshock therapy? I thought I’d heard they still did it, for some people. Were there other things—more horrific procedures that awaited me?

I kept sucking in air, my face tilted to the ceiling. If I kept this up, I’d hyperventilate. Pass out in this haunted house.

Stop it.
You have to stop.

I picked up the papers, shuffled them together on my lap, forcing myself to hold my breath. I moved the medical file to the back of the pile and looked at the next document.

Collirene Crane’s admittance record.

It was dated June 3, 1962, and stated that she had been admitted at 8:35 a.m. by her brother, Mr. Walter Wooten. There were no doctor’s orders or medical files accompanying her. Reason for commitment:
dementia
. And then, at the bottom, there was a note, written in the margins of the paper in an elegant hand.
Patient is to be housed with colored population on request of Mr. Walter Wooten.

I looked back at the visitor log. My brain started to ping, as if I could actually feel the connections falling into place. I thought of the painting of the two women with the signature
LW
. LW. Lindy Wade—the name on Collie’s visitor log.

Lindy Wade—the artist who’d painted the picture of my grandmother and the other woman.

Lindy Wade—Friend.

Chapter Twenty-One

October 1937

Sybil Valley, Alabama

Before the end of the month, Howell Wooten had to go to Huntsville three more times. The CCC boys were planting pine saplings, cutting paths through Monte Sano Park, and building trail shelters, and even though Howell grumbled that he was a farmer and not a government hand, Jinn knew they were lucky he’d gotten the job. He’d had to say he was unmarried in order to get it, but he reckoned nobody was going to bother and tromp all the way up Brood Mountain to check if there was a wife and kids sitting around the table in his cabin.

When Howell went off to Huntsville, Jinn went up to Tom Stocker’s house. She waited until Walter got off to school and Collie to Aggie’s, then she took a stroll up Old Cemetery Road to make sure there weren’t any neighbors watching from porches or fields. If things looked quiet, she walked the rest of the way up. She wasn’t so awed by the big brick place anymore. Nor did she feel one bit shabby when she stepped onto the wide front porch. It was probably because Tom broke into such a wide grin the minute he put eyes on her. That grin made him look like a boy. It made her heart feel it might crash right through her ribs.

The first time she visited Tom, he led her to a nook under the staircase, out of sight of the windows. They stood, pressed together, and kissed and touched until their mouths were raw and they’d felt just about all they could of each other’s bodies through their clothes. He whispered feverishly to her, about California and Hollywood and the Pacific Ocean, and, even though she didn’t say she’d go, she dropped a kiss on his neck, just under his collar. The sun shone year-round out there, Tom said, trailing kisses along the rise of her jaw, up to her bruised temple. You didn’t even need a fireplace, he said. There were palm trees, a thousand cars, and castles set on cliffs. After he said this, they kissed again.

They never went upstairs. He wouldn’t. He wanted her as his wife and told her so.

She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no either.

He caught her hand as she was leaving. “The Sunset Limited runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles. I could buy two tickets for you and Collie. Two for me and Willie.”

She thought of Howell and her duty before God. She thought of Walter and the calf strung up, black against the sky. She smiled at Tom, but shook her head.

That night, her mother’s soul finally left its tortured body and flew to glory, and Jinn felt a sweep of relief. The whole valley gathered at the church a couple of days later to bury her. Howell couldn’t make it back in time for the funeral, but Jinn thought it was just as well. He might have found it strange that she didn’t cry at her own mother’s burial.

The second time Jinn went up Old Cemetery Road, Tom led her out to the back porch. As she admired the view, he pointed across the tumbled, rocky field, to each of his cows grazing along the slope.

“There’s Sally, Kit, Nat and Gal and Bun.”

“Bun?”

“Raisin Bun. Willie named her.”

Tom didn’t say what would become of the cows if they went to California. Jinn thought folks would, most likely, steal them. Not Howell. No, he’d stand right where she and Tom were standing now, lay his head over his rifle, one eye squeezed shut, and pull the trigger. Over and over, until all of Tom Stocker’s cows were dropped.

“What would you do . . . if we were to go to California?” she asked Tom, to take her mind off the cows.

“Maybe timber or oil. Or maybe I’ll buy us a racehorse. What do you think? You like horses?”

She nodded. She wanted to tell him about her dream too, about Myrna Loy and Hollywood and the movies, but she couldn’t push the words out. Not yet. When it was time to leave, Tom mentioned the train tickets again. Again, she said no, and his face took on an intense look.

“He will kill you,” he said. “He will kill you one day, if you don’t go.”

Jinn thought about the Lurie girl, who’d jumped off the fire tower, and her mama, wasted away in her bed. It was true; Howell could kill her, and he might. The strange thing was, the thought didn’t surprise her much. It felt about the same as hearing somebody say that honeysuckle bloomed in spring. Like Howell killing her was just the natural order of things.

Her destiny.

She felt a pang of something inexpressible. Then a small vine of doubt sprouted and began to grow in a narrow crevice of her mind.

The last time Jinn went up to Tom’s, he greeted her and escorted her to the library. She sat on the tufted sofa, and he on a soft leather chair. His face was gray and hard as a tombstone.

“I have a question,” he said. “Are you with me?”

Her mind shot in every direction at once.

“I got to know, Jinn. Yes or no.” His voice sounded strangled.

Her lips parted, and he brightened like he thought she might say something. When she didn’t, he went on. “I can’t sleep, Jinny. I can’t eat. I got to know what you’re going to decide.” He clasped his hands, leaned forward. “You can’t make Howell right, Jinny, you can’t. Men like that tear through the world, searching out the weak, those who can’t speak up for themselves. They rip through everyone they meet, not caring if they draw blood. And I can’t bear it, I just can’t bear it, if that happens to you.”

As he talked, the vine of doubt in her head grew and spread and pushed apart her crowded brain. She felt a surge of hope rush in—it was like somebody had opened a door in her head and swept every bit of confusion and fear right out. It wasn’t her destiny for Howell to knock her around, and it wasn’t natural at all. Not one bit. Her mother hadn’t deserved such treatment, nor had the Lurie girl. None of them did.

She stood, blood rushing through her veins, her heart pounding hard. “Get the train tickets,” she said. “The first night of the revival, during the altar call, me and Collie will meet you down at the school.”

Tom bounded across the room in a couple of steps and swept her into his arms. She clutched at his shirt and threaded her fingers through his hair—for the first time, holding him as tightly as she’d always wanted to.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Friday, September 21, 2012

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Early the next morning, I settled down with Jay’s iPad in my room at the Crimson Terrace. The painting was propped up on a pillow beside me. I had to move quickly; the battery was low, and I didn’t have a charger.

Lindy Wade. There were the typical social-media suggestions, and the ads for “Find a Classmate,” but they all linked to people too young to be Lindy. Then, toward the bottom of the page, one link caught my eye, from a 1985 issue of the
Birmingham News
. The piece centered on the unsolved disappearance of Dante Wade, one of five black Birmingham men they’d never found during the most intense years of the civil-rights movement. His house, in the Fountain Heights section of town in the neighborhood known as Dynamite Hill, had been bombed. He’d gone missing that same night. He had a mother, a father, and a sister named Lindy.

I absorbed the information: Lindy Wade, my grandmother’s friend in the sixties, was black.

Once I had the name Dante Wade, the iPad practically started making that slot-machine jackpot sound. It took me only a few minutes to connect the name Lindy Wade, sister of Dante, to Dr. Linda Wade Bradley, award-winning principal of Hillyard Middle School, in a suburb of south Birmingham. Dr. Bradley was Lindy Wade, the artist of the portrait tucked inside the cigar box. She must have known my grandmother, Collie.

For the first time, I felt hesitation. Getting to Rowe and Val hadn’t fazed me in the least, but this woman . . . Lindy Wade was an altogether different story. She’d probably been hounded by the press back in the day, but it didn’t appear she’d been all that obliging. The only comments I’d been able to dig up were a few curt requests that the reporters leave her family in peace. As for her current Internet presence, it was practically nonexistent; I couldn’t find a phone number or address, not one social-media profile. The woman was a pro.

I had the feeling my usual bluff and swagger weren’t going to cut it with this woman. In fact, there was a chance nothing I could say would convince her to talk about the past. The subject matter was incendiary—Birmingham in the sixties and the unsolved, racially motivated murder of her brother—and even if Collie Crane didn’t exactly figure into all that, it was clear Linda Wade Bradley was a tough nut.

Regardless, I had to try. I had to go back to Birmingham and find her; right now, it was my only lead. Lindy Wade was the only person who’d come to see Collie at the end of her life, and I had to talk to her.

Naturally, I would’ve rather stuck needles in my eyes than go back to Birmingham—I kept picturing a citywide manhunt for me, with Wynn and Jay spearheading the search—but I had no choice. It wasn’t just about Lindy. I also needed one more conversation with my great-aunt Val—about why Walter had put his own sister in with the black patients at Pritchard. And where she was buried. Collie’s story had to hold some sort of key to my own future.

I checked out of the Crimson Terrace and headed east on 20, trying to ignore the gnawing discomfort in my stomach. Nerves. It had to be. I planned to intercept Lindy at the middle school where she worked. School let out at three, and I would be there. Meanwhile, there’d be time to swing by Val Wooten’s house.

I stopped at a roadside flea market on the outskirts of town and purchased a glazed pottery cross, in the hopes that, being closer to death, the old woman might be ready to purge her secrets and cleanse her soul.

My heart sank when I saw a stream of people filing into Val’s house, but I went ahead, parked, and fell in line with the rest of the crowd.

It had just been four days since I’d been here, but the house was unrecognizable. Shutters and curtains had been thrown open; fresh air had blown through the cracks and corners. Cobwebs had been cleared out, curtains pulled down, trim scrubbed and oiled. The rugs were cleaned, and the dark wood floors shone. A helmet-haired woman, standing in the foyer, handed me a chunk of Day-Glo sticky notes.

“Prices are marked,” she said. “No haggling. And we accept cash or check. If you want something, write your name on the paper and stick it to the item.”

“Okay. Mind if I go to the back?”

“Up to you. But the best stuff’s in the living room.”

I walked back into the hallway and toward the kitchen, where I slid the sticky notes onto an empty shelf.

The room hadn’t changed much, except they’d cleaned it and replaced the linoleum with tile. The row of pill bottles was gone, as well as the jungle of plants under the window, and it smelled like bleach. There was no trace of Val. Nor of Angela, the pill-swiping nurse. I headed back toward the bedroom at the end of the hall.

The crosses were gone, the walls bare, freshly repainted. The bed had a new spread on it, some kind of stiff, matched, floral comforter set. I stood there, trying to take it in.

Val was gone. My great-aunt. Other than my father, the only direct link to my mother and grandmother. Why hadn’t I asked her more about Collie last time I was here? I wanted to kick myself for being so shortsighted. If I’d pushed harder, she would’ve opened up to me. Especially after having been stifled for decades by Walter and Elder.

Elder has the say-so, my ass.

I reached in my purse and pulled out the pottery cross. It was nothing special, glazed blue with a little dove stamped into the center, but I hoped she would’ve liked it. I walked into the room, laid it at the foot of the bed.

“I know you,” a voice said beside me. I turned to see an older woman, midfifties, with a frizzy gray braid. She wore a shapeless denim dress that hung to the floor and feather earrings that brushed her shoulders. Her skin was leathery and crosshatched with lines. “Althea, right?” she said.

My mind pulsed with a million electrical charges—
Danger! Danger!
—synapses searching for a way to dodge this woman and run out of the house. But my feet wouldn’t budge.

She held up her hands in the “don’t shoot” stance. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m really glad you came.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t recognize you,” I finally managed.

“I’m Terri Wooten. Val and Walter’s daughter. You and I are second cousins.”

I knew I should touch her arm, hug her or something, but I didn’t want to. “I’m so sorry about your mother,” I said instead, my arms folded across my chest. I could feel my brain spiraling back down, the adrenaline draining from my body.

“She told me you came to see her.” She gestured at the bed. “Well, she told me Trix came to see her, but I figured it was you. She got mixed up a lot there at the end. Traci and I have always wondered what happened to you.”

She moved up beside me and saw the cross on the bed. She drew a finger over it.

“I wanted to talk to her again. I didn’t know—”

“Yeah. She was pretty eaten up with the cancer,” she said, then broke into a smile, like she hadn’t just said those horrific words. “You know, I’m really glad to meet you. That sounds so weird, but I am. It seems so strange we never met each other. But I guess families can be funny that way. I guess your father didn’t want you and your brother to mix with the crazy side of the family. Your mother’s side.”

She laughed, but dread shot through me. Did she even know what she was saying? Had she heard about Trix and Collie and Jinn? It was hard to tell. I decided to tread lightly, see what I could get from her.

“You knew my mother, right?” I asked mildly.

She nodded. “Traci and I used to play with Trix all the time when we were little—after her mama, after Aunt Collie died.”

I hadn’t expected this woman—this stranger, with her earth-mother getup and frank eyes—to refer to my mother with such a warm tone in her voice. My eyes swam with tears, and her forehead creased. She reached out a hand. “Oh, hon. I’m sorry. This must be hard for you too.”

I shook my head. “I just have so many questions.”

“Like what?” She smiled.

“Like . . .” I faltered.

She watched me expectantly.

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to my mother. To Trix. My father told us, told everybody she died of an aneurysm in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Her death certificate says it was seizures. Recently, though, he told us she died of an overdose. We can’t be sure. He has Alzheimer’s.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

I nodded. “When I spoke with your mother, she said Trix was admitted to Pritchard Hospital and died sometime later.”

At the word Pritchard, Terri’s eyes clouded. “Oh. Well. I wouldn’t really know anything about that.”

“Really? Your mother never said anything?”

“No.”

“Well, also I found out . . . Somebody told me Trix took a shot at your parents . . . with your father’s gun. Maybe that’s why they sent her to Pritchard.”

“I might’ve heard about the gun thing,” she said. “But only in passing.” She shook her head. “Look, my father, Walter, was an interesting man. A product of his upbringing, you might say. I know some of his problems had to do with losing his mother, Jinn, at such a young age. But he never talked about it. Men like him just didn’t do that. But it took its toll. I did have my suspicions over the years . . .”

“About what?”

“That he had his finger in some bad stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, my sister and I . . .” She smoothed her dress and shifted uncomfortably. “We’ve come to believe he was in the KKK.”

I swallowed. “Really?”

“He used to ride night patrol with the police back in the sixties. That’s what they did around here back then. In the early days, when tensions were heating up, each police car would have someone from the Klan, to help keep an eye on things. To see who was doing what. Who was stirring things up or getting into trouble or . . . whatever.” She stopped abruptly, shut her mouth, then covered her lips with the tips of her fingers. Her eyes had gone wide and watery. Her face, crumpled in shame.

“It’s okay, Terri,” I said gently. “We’re family. You can tell me.”

She looked back at the empty bed. “He’d go out right after supper. He’d pull his rifle down from the mantel, and he’d be gone all night.”

“Was he ever . . .” My mind went to the article I’d read about Dante Wade, Lindy Wade’s missing brother. “Was he involved in any particular . . . incidents?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s a question I’ve asked myself a hundred times. Nobody talked about that kind of thing back then. It just wasn’t done. But I know people got killed.”

“His sister was killed. Collie.”

Her eyes flickered. “No, you’ve got that part wrong. Aunt Collie was sick. She had a nervous breakdown, and they had to have her committed.”

“Your father, Walter, had her committed,” I said. “Did you know he had her put in with the black patients at Pritchard?”

Her jaw slacked. “What?”

“It’s in her records.”

“He couldn’t have.”

“I went to Pritchard. I saw the records.”

She shook her head. “He would never have done that. Put his own sister in with the black patients? No. Not in a million years.”

“He did, though. He requested that she be housed with the black patients. And even though she died there—from suicide, supposedly—no one can show me her grave. No one knows where Collie is buried. She’s missing, Terri. Your aunt, my grandmother, is missing.”

I could see her eyes harden, the lines around her mouth pinch. She was going to defend her father to the death, that much was clear. Family loyalty would prevail.

I changed the subject. “So do you know what kind of breakdown Collie had? Did anyone talk about that?”

“All my mom ever said was Aunt Collie was just like her mother Jinn and her daughter Trix. She said all mountain girls were the same.”

I straightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That they had mountain blood. It was just another way of saying they were different from us.”

“Different?”

“Tacky. Loud and ignorant. Not like girls from down here. Mama said mountain girls were all half-crazy.”

“Crazy, like schizophrenic?”

She shrugged. “More like an all-purpose kind of crazy. Everyone always told stories about the women who came from north Alabama. They were a whole species unto themselves. Growing up in those hollows, all hidden and hermit-like. Steeped in that mountain religion, getting the Spirit and falling out. Snake handling and saying they see Jesus in the pine paneling. My mama said they were all of the devil. She said Aunt Collie probably did witchcraft.”

She scrunched her face in an attempt at a chuckle, but I could see she didn’t really think it was funny. She believed all this nonsense—that Trix and Collie were weird, probably even insane. I smiled, even as my stomach did a slow roll. I had that mountain blood too. I’d seen things, felt reality shimmer and bend right before my eyes. I wondered what Terri would think of me if I told her all that. I took a breath, looked down at the carpet.

I am not my mother.

The honeysuckle girl isn’t real.

I do not have gold dust on my fingertips.

There’s no such thing as a red raven.