Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (25 page)

When I looked into the block of darkness behind Wynn, there was nothing, just the gentle undulations of the river. Then, in an instant, twin crests rippled up and zoomed through the ink-black water toward us. A half a second later, Wynn screamed. It was a horrible, shrill, unearthly sound, and it rang in my ear. I might’ve screamed too; I don’t know. He jerked, one hard, violent shudder. I held him but he lurched sideways, out of my grasp. I watched in horror as his face contorted in agony. His body shuddered once more, and was swallowed beneath the surface of the river. I know I screamed then.

I backed away from the narrow opening, the water still lapping the edge.

“Althea.” It was Dove, behind me. I turned. “Go. Go to the house. Call the police.”

I nodded and ran down the wharf and into the woods, blinded by tears, my ears filled with the sound of my sobs. They came out in a low, keening hum, exactly the same as the last sounds I’d heard from my brother.

Chapter Forty

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Mobile, Alabama

Sometime in the early morning hours, the nurse called my name. My river-soaked clothes had mostly dried, and I was curled up in the vinyl hospital lounge chair beside my father’s bed. Her voice jolted me out of my ragged, nightmare-filled sleep, back to consciousness and the antiseptic smell of the hospital room. I opened my eyes. They burned with grit.

“Sorry to wake you,” she said. “The police are here. They want to talk to you.” Her face was carefully arranged in a neutral expression.

I craned my neck and looked past her into the dim hall. I could see the outline of Jay’s shoulder and hear the rumble of his voice. He’d caught them already, was probably telling them they could talk to me later. I glanced at my father. He looked the same as he had last night. White. Deathly still. Breathing on his own, but just barely.

“I’ll be out in a minute. I need to use the bathroom.”

“Of course. Oh, and happy birthday.” She nodded toward Jay. “He said you’re thirty today.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

She beamed a cheerful smile. “That’s a big one.”

When the door shut, I unfolded from the chair. My muscles and joints screamed in protest; my tongue felt huge and furry. Forget thirty, I felt sixty.

After I’d gotten back to the house, after the police and Jay had shown up, my father had had a rare moment of lucidity. In halting phrases that looped forward and backward in time, he’d told me his story.

The Haldol had wrecked Mom, left her physically shaky and mentally diminished. She chanted her Latin prayer all day, every day. He was afraid for her safety and ours. And then, when Mom had met up with the woman from the mountain, she’d snapped.

That night, she threatened to tell the family secrets she claimed to have learned. She promised to ruin her uncle Walter and her husband—even her young son’s future career—if they didn’t come clean. Panicked, Elder whisked her off to Pritchard. He convinced a young paramedic, Woodrow Smart, to sign a phony death certificate and told everyone my mother died of an aneurysm. Soon after, Smart died from an accidental fall. My father hadn’t had anything to do with it.

In the next days, Dad and Walter had argued about the best course of action. Dad had wanted to keep my mother at Pritchard; he felt she was safe there. Walter disagreed. And one night, he took matters into his own hands. He drove to Tuscaloosa and walked into my mother’s room in the hospital, where he fed his niece an entire bottle of Haldol.

After I finished up in the bathroom, I returned to Dad’s bedside. His face glowed an eerie white under the fluorescent hospital lamp. I tried not to focus on his frail form, just on the features of his face. The ones that felt familiar to me. The lines of his nose. The creases on his forehead.

“So today’s the day,” I said. “My thirtieth birthday.”

I lifted my hand, let it hover over his head, then lowered it, until the pads of my fingers rested on his forehead. He felt warm, and my fingertips tingled ever so slightly—a frisson of electricity between my skin and his. I touched him along his temple, over his fragile skin, and down his jaw. Leaned closer and cupped his face between both my hands.

His eyelids fluttered, then opened.

His mouth stretched in what looked like a smile. “Thea.”

Thea. I hadn’t heard that name in so long. Not since I was very little, before my mother died.

“I’m here.”

“How’s my girl?” He touched a strand of my hair.

“I’m good.”

“I want to say . . .” He swallowed. “Walter didn’t tell me what he was gonna do . . . to your mother.”

“Dad, it’s okay. You don’t—”

“No.” He fumbled for my hands. “No. I knew. I knew who Walter was. I knew, and I didn’t stop him.” He coughed out a sob. “I didn’t stop him.”

I gathered my father into my arms, shushing him, stroking his face. After a while, he quieted, and I drew back.

“Thea,” he said once more.

“I’m here. But listen. I have something to tell you now.” My hand drifted down to my stomach. “You’re going to be a grandfather.”

Chapter Forty-One

October 2012

Mobile, Alabama

I buried my father six days after my birthday. Six days I sat by his bedside, watching him sink deeper into himself until there was almost nothing left. Maybe it was a sense of daughterly duty—he didn’t have anyone left but me—but the fact was, I loved him. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t deny it.

Maybe I was just grateful he’d used his last few moments of lucidity to tell me the truth. Maybe it wasn’t love I felt but relief that the whole thing would be over soon. In his own messed-up way, I think my father believed he was protecting Wynn and me. I think he loved us. But I don’t know. I really don’t. How could anyone call that love?

After Dad’s service, Jay suggested I stay with him. He was worried about my mental health, I think, and the baby—but I was grateful, whatever the reason. I packed up a couple of things and headed down the road, happy to be away from that house, so steeped in memory and sadness.

He also mentioned that Dove had called him. I let it simmer for the time being. I needed a little more time before I heard another story. Even if it was the final one.

Some fisherman found Wynn downriver, his pink bow tie still knotted in place and both legs bitten off just above the knee. An accident, the police concluded, and Molly Robb didn’t contradict them. She ended up in the spotlight after all, my power-hungry sister-in-law, not exactly the way she’d always dreamed, but as the bereaved widow of a fallen politico. She seemed pretty happy with her new role. She collected Wynn’s life insurance and moved back to Birmingham to live with her family. I heard soon after that she’d started dating a state senator.

One crisp Sunday morning, Jay and I drove back to Tuscaloosa to see Dove. When she saw us at her front door, she broke into an enormous smile.

“Are you ready?” she asked me.

I looked back at Pritchard—the field and woods and spires of the old building on the other side of the highway—and turned back to her.

“Yes.”

Dove served us soup, but I couldn’t eat. The only thing I felt capable of doing there in Dove’s tiny, cozy living room was holding Jay’s hand as I waited for her to tell us the rest of the story I’d been waiting a lifetime to hear. Jinn’s story.

“Where do I begin?” Dove finally asked me.

“Jinn’s father had come to the creek,” I said. “He’d found her there. Naked.”

“Yes.” Dove smoothed the napkin on her lap. “That’s right.”

And that was where she started.

Chapter Forty-Two

October 1937

Sybil Valley, Alabama

Vernon Alford studied his daughter, who was kneeling in the moonlit mud. Charles Jarrod, Howell, and young Walter flanked the white-haired man. The boy held his rifle and watched his naked mother with his opaque eyes.

“We were doing the work of the Lord.”

Vernon chuckled. “Were you, now?”

“She prayed for me,” Jinn gasped out. “The evangelist’s wife.”

“Well. All right, then.”

“She prays for folks. For ladies.”

“What kinda praying is that?” Vernon Alford folded his arms. He turned and cocked an eyebrow at Charles Jarrod. “In the middle of the night, in a creek? Without a stitch of clothes?”

Jinn didn’t speak.

“Did that woman take off your dress?”

“No, sir. I did. We wanted to . . . We went swimming.”

Vernon took one step closer and peered down at Jinn. “What’s a matter with you?” He looked back at Howell. Vernon stretched the suspenders between his hands. Jinn tensed. “Why you shaking all over like that?” he said.

She didn’t answer. He raised the suspenders and hit her once across the shoulders. She bit her lip to keep from crying out.

He jerked a thumb at Howell. “Get on back home.”

Jinn dropped to all fours and listened for Howell’s footsteps, waited for him to move across the meadow, through the trees, and back home. Howell would take Walter and go home to Collie. Her children would be safe if her father sent her to Pritchard. Because he would most definitely do that now. Now that she’d been touched.

That’s what she was, she thought, touched. Touched with insanity. Touched with the fire of God. Funny how the two felt one and the same. Maybe they were.

When she looked up, she saw that Howell and Walter were still standing behind her father. She couldn’t see their faces, but their bodies seemed to sway with the tree branches in the honeysuckle-scented wind. Charles Jarrod had vanished. He must’ve gone to search for Dove. She noticed Vernon held Walter’s rifle now.

He cleared his phlegmy lungs. “Tomorrow you’ll go on to Pritchard, you hear? I shoulda sent your mother there, years ago, but I wasn’t enough of a man. But Howell . . . Howell’s different. He’s a fine, strong man.”

She sat back and stretched out her hands to her father, but she could only reach the barrel of the rifle. She grabbed it with both hands and, using it to steady herself, pulled herself upright. The gun began to vibrate in her grip, and the vibration traveled down the barrel into the stock and into Vernon’s arms. He looked down with horrified fascination. The shaking traveled from his arms to his chest, down the trunk of his body. He leapt back like he’d been snake-bit, tearing the gun from Jinn’s hands.

She dropped forward again. Her brain filled and buzzed with words. Whole sentences, paragraphs even, sharp dark letters on a white sheet of paper. She could read them, just as if she was holding them in front of her, like a telegram. Was this how it happened for Dove? Words like on a telegram? Or was her mind playing tricks on her? She saw something clearly now—a
V
and an
A
embroidered in the corner of a handkerchief.

She lifted her head, her hair swaying. “I saw the Tippett girl tonight,” she heard herself say. “Vonnie Tippett.”

She could hear her father’s breath come out of his mouth in a whoosh, like he’d been gut-punched. The gun slid down to his side.

“What do I care about that?” he said.

“I believe she’ll be having her baby in three or four months.”

“So?”

“She saved it. She saved your baby.” Jinn looked up at Vernon from the ground. She waited, but he didn’t answer. “Does Mama know?”

She felt the air around them still as he took aim at her. She looked at the grass and mud between her fingers. There was a small flower pressed into the dirt—a honeysuckle blossom, yellow-gold and crushed. She moved her hand to cover it and rolled it against her palm, back and forth, shivering and trembling. The scent of the flower rose to her nostrils, a comfort.

“I don’t know what you’re talking so crazy about.”

She closed her eyes. She could feel the brightness, the electricity humming inside her, and instantly, she knew that she could rise up out of her body if she wanted to. She could float up to the sky in her mind. Rise up and become a part of whatever was beyond it, heaven or the Milky Way. That was the beauty of being touched.

Only.

Only she would have to leave Tom behind. Dear, kind Tom with his soft eyes and bright smile. And their eternally unfinished conversation. But what did it matter? She was leaving him anyway, wasn’t she? She was going to Pritchard.

“Jinny!” Vernon Alford’s voice sounded shrill, nothing like a man’s. More like a wounded deer. Or a calf. His voice was nothing but the bleat of an animal.

“Jinny,” he said again. “You better keep your damn crazy mouth shut.”

She didn’t want to go to Pritchard, even though Dove had said the gift would keep her safe there. If she went, she would never be able to make wine or go to California with Tom or see her children grow up. She’d gotten it all wrong, telling her father about Vonnie right off the bat. She should’ve been braver, gone on to Pritchard, waited for Tom to come or the gift to see her through.

Now it was too late.

Vernon moved to his daughter. Touched the barrette Dove had given her. It slid right out of her wet hair, coming away easily in his hand. He turned it over, squinting at the design. He turned, tossed it back to young Walter. “Get rid a that.”

He faced her again. “Well? You ain’t got nothing to say?”

She didn’t. She only had thoughts of Collie and Tom and the home they could have made if she hadn’t been so afraid. She had thoughts of standing under Tom’s stair, kissing his mouth, feeling his body under her touch. She had thoughts, too, of the mountain. Of the sky and the stars and whatever might lay beyond.

But her father was waiting, and she should say something. He didn’t like to be defied.

“Shy don’t set the world on fire,” was what she said. Because those words were the only ones that made sense to her now. Because they seemed just right for all that had happened in her life.

When she heard the crack of Walter’s .22 and tasted the gunpowder and blood in her mouth, she knew that at last, she had truly spoken her mind.