Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (9 page)

Chapter Twelve

October 1937

Sybil Valley, Alabama

This time Jinn’s mama was discovered doing so poorly, none of the church ladies brought casseroles to the Alford house. And Jinn’s daddy didn’t shed a tear over what he’d let happen to his wife.

Howell went over to Vernon’s house that night and made sure there was plenty of broth on the stove and biscuits and bacon in the larder. When he returned home it was late, a long time after Walter and Collie had been tucked in. He sat Jinn down and said that they had to forgive her father. It wasn’t Vernon’s fault. Jinn’s daddy was getting old and forgetful, and these things were bound to happen. They just needed to pitch in a bit more.

Jinn wanted to bring her mama to their house but Howell said no, it was a man’s job to keep track of his own wife. And he said Vernon might take it personal if his daughter started checking up on him. He said he’d drop by and check on her mama from time to time on his way home from work, to make sure everything was in order. He told Jinn her mama would be fine and dandy. Fine and dandy as a dying woman could be, and the only things Jinn needed to worry about were the children.

There was plenty to worry about on that count. Walter hadn’t gotten up to anything since the calf, not that she knew of, but Jinn felt uneasy all the same. Collie was beginning to worry her as well. Jinn had found Walter’s best marble and an unopened packet of licorice snaps in the cigar box the girl kept under her bed. She made Collie take the candy back to the store and apologize to Mr. Darnell, the shop owner. The marble, Jinn slipped into the top drawer of Walter’s dresser the next morning while he was at school.

All through the weeks of October, Jinn watched the leaves on the trees around her cabin turn from green to golden red to brown. They fluttered to the ground, and the wind eddied them down the mountain. Soon Sybil Valley would be swept bare. Just like her soul.

The green things—her mother, her children, the wine—she felt were turning the same gold as the maple and oaks. She thought of Walter and Collie, grown and married. Herself, sitting up in her bed—touched, maybe, or sick like her mother, with only Howell to look after her.

Even thinking about Tom made her feel like one of those pines in the meadow, grown over by honeysuckle vines. Choked by her own life.

Last time she saw them, the ladies from Chattanooga had driven up in their silver car and stood on Jinn’s porch, shown her a contract their lawyer had drawn up to start a business. Fifty-fifty, they promised. They’d share all the profits. And what profits. People in Chattanooga and Knoxville sure did like honeysuckle wine. “Juice,” they corrected her. “We’re calling it Jinn’s Juice.” The ladies had gone on and on about how smart she was, called her an entrepreneur. She didn’t know why she hadn’t been brave enough to tell Howell about them in the first place, but now it was too late. She was conducting business behind her husband’s back and hiding money.

It was her pride, she told herself. It was simple as that. She didn’t want Howell taking her business away. It couldn’t be the roll of bills, expanding like a sapling tree in the jug in the cellar. She couldn’t spend that money anyway, not without Howell knowing, so it was useless to her, wasn’t it? Who had any use for money they couldn’t spend?

One Sunday at the end of his sermon, when the poplars were at the height of their gold, Brother Daley told his congregation that lately he’d felt a chill among the flock. A lull in their fervor for the Lord. He’d prayed and the Holy Spirit had told him that what they needed was revival. “Seek and ye shall find,” he said, and so he had. By the end of the month, the world-renowned Charles Jarrod would be pitching his tent out back of the church and bringing the people of Sybil Valley the Word of the Lord.

Jinn reckoned it was a good time for Charles Jarrod to come. Good for Howell and her father. Good for Walter and her too. They could all use a dose of the Word to clean their consciences and start brand new.

All the same, she was careful to keep her growing nest egg hidden away in the cellar.
It’s green,
she reminded herself as she eyed the fluttering gold canopy of leaves.
And it will stay that way forever.

In spite of Howell saying she should keep her mind on the kids, Jinn continued to worry about her mama.

One morning, just to set her mind at ease, she dropped Collie off at Aggie’s and cut through the holler to the Alford house. Tucked up under her sweater were a bottle of her honeysuckle wine and another plum from the tree out back. In her parents’ kitchen, she sliced the plum and poured the wine into a glass.

Upstairs, sitting beside the bed, Jinn watched her mama sip the wine. She seemed remarkably revived, the way she closed her eyes and smacked her lips. “Honeysuckle,” she said, after a moment or two. “With a dash a Howell’s apple brandy.”

“How’d you know?”

Mama leaned back against the headboard, eyes still shut. “I may be crazy as a betsy bug, but I know my moonshine.”

“I’m selling it.” Jinn couldn’t believe how weak she was, telling her secret right out like that, just to get her mama’s approval. Sometimes she wondered if she was a grown woman at all, or still just a ninny of a girl.

“Are you now?”

“Some ladies put it in stores for me over in Chattanooga. They call it Jinn’s Juice.”

“Lady bootleggers. Law. What’s next?” Mama drained the rest of the bottle and blotted her lips with the sleeve of her stained nightgown. “You watch it, Jinn. Watch yourself.” She thunked down the glass. Sighed with pleasure. The alcohol was probably taking hold already, Jinn thought, she couldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds.

“How much money you make off them bottles?” Mama asked.

Jinn shrugged. She shouldn’t say any more. Her mama wasn’t right in the head. She could slip and say something to her daddy. Get them all in big trouble.

Mama persisted. “I hope you’ve hidden it good.”

“Yes, ma’am, I have.”

“Attic? Smokehouse?”

Lord, sometimes her mama sounded about the farthest thing from touched you could be. Sometimes she sounded downright conniving.

“Cellar,” Jinn said and looked down. She’d twisted her apron into a coiled snake slithering across her lap. She smoothed it out, flattened it over her knees. The scent of the honeysuckle nectar on her hands wafted into the air. For a moment, she imagined the nectar had special powers. That it was a magical potion from a fairy tale, dripping from her fingers. If she touched her mother with it, she’d transform. Become a normal mama who fussed over her grandkids at church and baked batches of oatmeal cookies. If she touched Howell, he’d turn to stone, a statue that could only watch her as she moved about their house. If she touched Tom . . . really touched him . . .

“You better watch it, girl,” Mama said. “He’ll put you in Pritchard, if you don’t watch it.” She had scrunched down farther under the quilt and turned her face toward a block of sun shining down from the window.

“Howell?”

“And your daddy. I hear ’em talking all the time. Talking about Pritchard. Talk, talk, talk. All the menfolk do up here on this mountain is talk about how they gonna put their women in Pritchard if we don’t straighten up. You’d think we was a bunch of kids.”

Jinn ignored the ice fingering its way up her spine. She forced a laugh. “Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind getting sent off. At least I’d be getting away from this place.”

Mama made a face. “You’d think that, until they get you inside that place. Then you know better.” She cackled. “I went to Pritchard, you know. Once’t. My daddy sent me there.”

Jinn had never heard this story for real. Only bits and pieces from others.

“What did he send you there for?”

“Walked around in my sleep. Mama found me in the hog pen some mornings. Daddy said I had a nervous mind, so he sent me on down there for rest. But it weren’t for long. Me and your daddy was courting around then. So I wrote him and told him what all they did at that place. I want you to know, he rode down and carried me right home. Never mentioned Pritchard again.”

“Was it awful?” Jinn asked.

Mama’s hand flapped at her, spotted and roped with veins. “Oh, now. It’s been a long time ago.”

“What did they do there?”

She exhaled, long and loud. “I don’t know.”

“Mama.”

She rolled over and rested her hand on Jinn’s. The way the sun hit her mama’s skin, flattening out the wrinkles and smoothing the planes, Jinn could see the beauty she had been. She had once looked a lot like Jinn—dark curls and delicate features. The eyes too, that swept upward under arched brows.

“You hide that money in the smokehouse, Jinn,” Mama said. “I recollect that Howell don’t much like to go in there, so it’ll be safe. Hide it in the smokehouse, you hear?”

Jinn squeezed her mother’s hand and collected the plate. Her mother was remembering things wrong again, getting people mixed up. Howell and Jinn had never had their own smokehouse.

She descended the steps and, out of habit, glanced at the spot over the fireplace. The two square-shank nails stuck out from between the stones, empty. The rifle that usually rested atop them was gone. Jinn froze. Where had it gone? Had Mama taken it?

She should probably march back upstairs right now, make her mother tell her where she’d hidden it, and return it to its spot before her father got home. If Jinn was a good daughter, if she was smart, she’d do that.

On the other hand, she didn’t have tell anyone about the missing rifle. She could keep her own counsel and let her mama settle things for herself. Her parents’ affairs were going to come to that anyway, she thought, sooner or later, no matter what she did.

Heart thumping steadily, mouth dry as a creek bed in summer, Jinn fetched her wine bottle from the kitchen and let herself out the front door. She stood for a minute, basking in the electric flash of shadow and sun, then started off toward Aggie’s.

Chapter Thirteen

Monday, September 17, 2012

Birmingham, Alabama

The next morning, we returned to the house perched on the edge of the bluff. Jay and Rowe were quiet the whole way there. I recited my mother’s prayer over and over in my head, psyching myself up for whatever lay ahead.

A doughy young black woman in teddy-bear scrubs, her hair scraped up and knotted in a scrunchie on top of her head, swung open the Wootens’ front door. A fusty smell billowed out from behind her and cobwebs hung from the tarnished brass chandelier.

“Can I help you?” Her eyes darted between me, Jay, and Rowe. She seemed nervous, blinking in the bright morning sun. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty.

“We’ve come to see Walter and Valerie Wooten,” I said. “Are they in?”

“Walter isn’t,” she said. “He passed years ago.”

“What about Valerie?”

“She’s in, but she’s sick.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I knew I sounded rude, but I really wasn’t in the mood to tiptoe.

“She’s about eighty-nine, is what’s wrong with her. And she has cancer. She won’t recognize you even if you go in there. Who are you again?”

“Her niece,” I said. “She’s my aunt.”

She rested a hand against the doorframe, and her gaze traveled over my clothes, all the way down to my shoes. “I didn’t know she had a niece. Or, at least, Terri didn’t say. You all from Birmingham?”

“Mobile.”

“Oh, Mobile. I have a cousin down there.”

I nodded. “Would you mind if we popped in for a quick visit?”

The girl looked dubious.

“You could give Terri a buzz, to okay it with her.” I held up my phone. “Or I could.”

“No, no.” Her eyes flashed with something that looked like worry, and I filed it away for later. You never knew what could come in handy. “You don’t have to bother with that. I’ll just take you on back.”

We filed in. Inside it smelled far worse than the whiff I’d got at the front door let on. Old food, mildew, decaying flesh. Not one lamp was switched on, and beads of sweat sprang out on my forehead and chest.

“Did y’all bring chocolate?” the nurse said. “She loves her chocolate. And Tab. You know how hard it is to find Tab around here? Terri hardly ever comes and Traci less than that, but they do always bring a six-pack of Tab and some chocolate.”

She led us through a foyer layered with dingy, mismatched rugs. I folded my arms, covered my nose and mouth with one hand, and gaped at Jay. Behind him, Rowe walked with his head down, hands jammed in his pockets. We passed a dining room, a formal living room, and then a den with a huge stone fireplace. Animal heads protruded from every corner—hogs, deer, buffalo, even some kind of African-gazelle-looking thing. A gun glinted above the mantel. A rifle with a decorative metal plate screwed to its stock.

The girl, who said her name was Angela, took us through a kitchen with a jungle of plants crowded under the window, a sink stacked with dirty dishes, and appliances that looked like they were from the 1950s. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a row of pill bottles lined up under the warped-metal, paint-chipped cabinets.

We arrived at a door tucked in a cramped hallway off the butler’s pantry. Probably a maid’s bedroom once. Angela turned to us and grinned. “Traci makes me keep her down here because she can’t do stairs. This house actually has an elevator, can you believe that? But it’s busted, and no one’ll pay to get it fixed.”

I didn’t really care about the elevator or Traci. I just wanted to get on the other side of this door and see Valerie Wooten. Find out who she was and what she knew about my mother.

“I’ll stay out here,” Rowe said as Angela turned the doorknob.

“I don’t think so,” Jay said through clenched teeth and hooked a hand under his arm. The look in his eye had me worried a bit. I don’t think he’d recovered yet from my story about Rowe.

Angela opened the door, and we all walked into the bedroom. Light filtered in through the lace curtains, and I saw, sitting on every surface—dressers, night tables, bookshelves—what must’ve been nearly a hundred crosses. Crosses ad infinitum. They covered the walls, from the crown molding to the baseboards. They were made of every type of material imaginable—wood, silver, brass, plaster.

“No vampires getting in here,” Rowe said.

“She collects them,” Angela said and walked to the side of the bed. “Wake up, Miss Val, you got visitors. Your niece is here to see you.”

That jolted me, and for a minute I felt bad that I was about to trick a dying old lady. I stepped closer and reminded myself I had to do this. My future, maybe my life, depended on it.

Valerie Wooten looked mean, even riddled with cancer, even resting helplessly against the stained pillowcase. It was the lines in her face. They showed years of disapproving looks, angry glares, sour silences. Her skin was yellow and sunken, and there was a smudge of crusted food on her chin. Nobody was spending much time easing her into the Great Beyond.

She opened her eyes. They were filmy and brown, and they studied Angela, then traveled uncertainly around the room. She reached out a hand and, in response, the nurse picked up a small wooden cross hidden in the folds of the chenille bedspread and handed it to her. Her papery, vein-roped fingers clenched it.

“Say hey to your niece, Miss Val,” Angela said.

The old woman’s head turned, and her unfocused eyes fastened on me. “Your husband know you’re here?” she said in a thin voice.

I heard my heart hammering in my ears. I took one step closer, and my fingers brushed the bedspread.

“Hey, Aunt Val. How are you?” My eyes flicked up to Angela.

“Where’s your husband?” She was really looking at me now, squinting a bit, trying to work it out.

“Do you mind if we have some time alone?” I asked Angela.

“No problem.” She waved a hand at me. “I got my
Housewives
. Her pills will be wearing off soon. Call me if she starts talking ugly.”

Jay moved to the center of the room, and Rowe hovered near the door. I turned back to the old woman, lowered myself to sit on the edge of the big bed.

She moved the cross to her breast, wrapped her other hand around it. “She moves my crosses all around the room when I’m asleep. She took the one with garnets.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll tell her to return it.”

“Won’t do any good. That’s what they do. Steal. Hide things.”

Ah, yes. There was that old-fashioned, old-time bigotry. As predictable as it was, it was always such a smack in the face.

She gave me the once-over. “Does your husband know you’re out? He won’t like it. You shouldn’t have come here.” I saw the lines deepen between her eyes and around her lips. “Walter won’t like it either.”

“I wanted to ask you a question, Aunt Val, if I could.” She was silent, so I went on. “I wanted to ask you if you knew Trix.”

“But you’re Trix,” she said. “Aren’t you? Collie’s girl? Walter’s niece?” I sat back, and the puzzle began to assemble itself: Walter Wooten was my grandmother’s brother. Val and Walter were my mother’s aunt and uncle. So Val was my great-aunt. I’d said I was her niece, but I hadn’t been far from the truth.

“Yes, ma’am.” My skin goose-pimpled. “You’re right. I am Trix.”

She rolled her head to the side, away from me. “Does your husband know you’re here?”

“No, but I was wondering, Aunt Val. Could you tell me what happened to me? That night I came to your house?”

When she spoke her voice was higher, like a child’s. “Walter doesn’t want me to talk about it. It doesn’t reflect on the family.”

“But I’m family. It’s okay to tell me.”

“No. Walter said.”

“Please. Please, Val.”

She rolled back to face me. Her eyes brimmed with reproach. “How’s Elder going to win the election with you running around taking drugs? And carrying on with a teenage boy?”

She was talking about my father and his campaign for state attorney general. And how my mother had jeopardized his chances. Behind me, Rowe cleared his throat.

“It makes the both of you look like trash,” she went on. “Walter says it’s going to get worse. It always does. Goes from bad to worse.” She looked toward the door.

My heart began to thrum. “What’s going to get worse?”

“Walter said not to talk about it.”

“You can tell me.”

“When you turn thirty. They’re gonna have to lock you up.”

“Why? Why are they going to have to lock me up?”

“You’ll go crazy. All you girls do, Walter says. It’s the mountain in you. Jinn, his mama, and Collie, his sister, you know. Those mountain girls, they were funny in the head. Even though they didn’t live on the mountain. Not exactly. They lived down in that valley. Sybil Valley. He ever tell you about that one . . . what took off all her clothes and climbed up on the fire tower? But, no, she wasn’t a Wooten, she was a Lurie.”

She was getting off track.

“What does the age of thirty have to do with it?”

“A curse. Sins of the generation. Hits at thirty.” Her eyes darkened, and I saw her lips curl in disgust. “You know. The night you turned thirty, you brought that boy to my house. You brought that boy right into our house. And then you threatened to kill us. But Elder came and took care of it. And we didn’t interfere. Walter says Elder’s got the say-so.” Her voice had turned whiney and small again.

“The say-so? About what?”

“How he handles you.”

“What do you mean?”

She gave me a look like I was stupid. “It’s Elder’s job to decide what he wants to do about what all you got into. With that boy and the pills. Elder thought about a psychiatrist but then he thought better of it. People talk so much around here. After a while, he decided he had to lock you up. Walter said he shouldn’t. Walter said . . .”

“What?”

“Walter said he should just put a stop to it altogether.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She turned her head. “Elder’s an important man. Walter understands that kind of thing.”

“Aunt Val,” I said. “Tell me. What do you mean by ‘put a stop to it altogether’?”

She turned back to me. And smiled. Her teeth were brown and a few were missing. “It’s not the first time it’s happened in your family. Those Wooten women are an odd lot. They always have been.”

“So what did he do?” My voice was barely a whisper. “Lock me up or . . .” I swallowed. “Stop me altogether?”

“Why, he sent you away, of course.” She looked cowed. “To Pritchard. You know that. Walter and I had nothing to do with it. It was Elder’s say-so.”

“But then I died, right?” I said. “On the way to the hospital? Because of the aneurysm.”

She starting puffing, her bottom lip pushing in and out. Tears spilled down her papery skin and her nose ran. I could see the spots they made on the pillow. Then she was sobbing, heaving. She thrust the cross in my direction over and over, like I was some kind of ghoul from hell, back to possess her.

I grabbed her hand, the one holding the cross. “I had a clot, in my brain,” I said. “An aneurysm. I died that night.”

Val shook her head. “No. You called me.”

“From Pritchard?”

“You asked me to come get you out. You said there were ghosts. Chained to the beds. Hanging from the doorways. I didn’t tell anybody,” she went on. “But I went.”

“What happened when you went there?”

She thrust out the cross then, held it with two hands right in front of my face so fast I couldn’t believe her strength. She was trembling.

“You’re not real. You look like her, but you’re not real. It’s all this medicine they give me.” She peered up into my face, shaking.

“You’re right,” I said. “But if you tell me what happened, I’ll leave you alone.”

She curled forward, up off the pillow. This was what I’d come for, I reminded myself. I had to press on.

“I think it was the boy who did it,” she whispered. “Once Elder got you into the hospital. I think it was that boy who went there and killed you.”

I shot Rowe a look, and he seemed to shrink into the shadows.

She lifted her chin then and wailed in an oddly quiet way, a dying animal, and I stepped back. If only the ground under my feet would open up and swallow me. Anything, oh my God, anything to stop that sound. She stopped then and held the cross in the center of her sunken chest, looking so much like a corpse I shuddered. I turned and ran, past Jay and Rowe, out of the room, my blood beating in my ears.

I sank down on a stained settee and dropped my head in my hands. Then, from back in Val’s room, I heard a rumble and a series of thumps.

“Althea!” I heard Jay yell. Then Rowe shot into the hall, lumbering past me in a blur of sweaty skin and purple Dri-FIT. He threw open the front door and vanished through it. I jumped up in time to see him sprinting across the yard and down the street like a pot-bellied Olympic athlete.

“Well, shit,” Jay said behind me, and took off after him.

I turned back to get my purse and saw another bag beside it, a straw bag embroidered with sunflowers. The nurse’s. Some barely formed, purely instinctual thought flitted through me, and I picked it up and slung it over my shoulder. I walked out the door and away from the house. Reached under my arm and rummaged in the bag. My fingers closed over a prescription bottle. Jackpot.

“Excuse me,” a voice said behind me.

I looked over my shoulder. Angela, a linebacker in teddy-bear scrubs and a scrunchie, held out my purse. “You left your bag.”

In answer, I held up the bottle. The label “Dilaudid” in plain view. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. I took my purse from her and dropped in the bottle. Snapped it shut, then threw it over my shoulder. I handed her the sunflower bag.

“It’s not what it looks like,” she said.

“Good thing,” I said. “Because it looks like you’re stealing my aunt’s pain medication. If I were you, I’d sort that out. Take it from someone who knows.”

My lecture was cut short by a bloodcurdling shriek that came from down the street, followed by a series of muffled expletives. Angela took the opportunity to scurry back up to the house, clutching her purse to her chest. I walked across the street to Jay’s car and leaned against it.