Mislaid (6 page)

Occasionally the lake would burp. A bubble of methane would rise from some unseen cavity and a circular wave would race toward the gloppy shores. Lee had not seen it happen because he was unable to look directly at the lake. It pained his retinas. He expected it to heave and drain completely any day now.

He could identify the culprit. He would have known her anywhere, kneecapped her with a high-powered rifle at four hundred yards. He knew everything about her. Except where she was.

The next year, Karen was four years old going on five and still blond. Nonetheless, registering her for first grade as a black six-year-old was easy as pie.

Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter, and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the NAACP. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: if one of your ancestors was black—ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham—so were you.

Meg felt very clever as she handed over the birth certificate. The races of the child’s parents were marked right on it: colored and colored.

When the clerk saw on the slip of paper that that Mrs. Brown was colored, she glanced up in surprise. But a close look revealed that it was true. Meg’s coarse curls and knobby heel bones were dead giveaways to the connoisseur. The daughter was one of those pallid, yellow-haired black kids you sometimes see. Frog-belly white, no trace of pink, curly tendrils all around her hairline. Probably anemic and undernourished—a lot of rural black kids had worms—but very close to passing. “Was she premature?” the clerk inquired. “She’s so little.”

“She’s small, but she can read,” Meg said.

“I can spell ‘astronaut,’” Karen volunteered.

“That’s a third-grade word,” the clerk said. “You’re very smart for such a tiny little thing. You sure you don’t want to have her be white?”

“We’re black and proud,” Meg said.

“I’m blond,” Karen objected.

“There’s no blond race,” the clerk corrected her. “But it don’t matter. All God’s children attend the very same school. We like to know who’s black so we can help them out with affirmative action and a free hot lunch.”

The first day of first grade did not go as Meg had hoped. In the early afternoon, Karen descended from the raucous and chaotic school bus sniveling. White girls, she said, had called her “nigger,” while black girls had called her “half-white” and sung a song, “crybaby, crybaby.”

“Crybaby what?” Meg asked ominously.

“Suck yo’ mommy titty.”

“Did you slug them? You’ve got to slug kids who are mean to you. Like this.” Meg demonstrated. “You take and hold their shirt collar and punch them right in the nose.”

“I grab their collar and punch them in the nose,” Karen repeated solemnly.

“Never call them ‘nigger’ back. It’s a bad word. Just grab on
tight
to their shirt and hit their nose
hard
. Then let go and run away
fast
. Never hit anybody bigger than you, or anybody retarded. Only first graders.”

“Okay.”

“And never cry, or say mean things. Insults just aggravate them. If you want to cry, laugh. It sounds the same. They can’t tell the difference.”

The next day Karen came home early, in her teacher’s car. Her knees were skinned and she had a split lip. The teacher wanted to see where the ethereal yet scrappy representative of the sadly nonexistent blond race, whom she had freed from beneath a heap of children shrieking racist taunts, lived and with whom.

She was impressed with the simplicity and poverty of Meg’s life. There was something monastic and almost elegant in the neatly scrubbed cabin standing in four inches of water in a settlement that had been given up decades before. Meg offered her a choice between water from the pump and warm Fresca. As she drank the Fresca, she wondered silently to herself about the Lord’s mysterious ways, choosing an anemic black child with arms like twigs to demonstrate the ironies of nonviolent resistance. (She assumed Karen’s tactic was nonviolence, possibly because Karen pulled her punches to the extent that mosquitoes she swatted flew away stunned.) She told Meg that Karen was very special. They prayed together.

When she had gone, Meg said, “You should stop telling people you’re blond. There are a lot of mean jokes about blondes. It’s nothing to be proud of.”

Karen became the special concern of every adult at the school. Children instinctively hated her for being different, and adults identified with her for the exact same reason. To be perfect (adorably wee and blond) yet marked for failure (black and dressed in rags)—don’t we all know that feeling? The principal, who had voted for George Wallace for president, couldn’t watch her bounce away across the schoolyard without musing that a petite female with a white body and a black soul might in ten or twelve years’ time be a sort of dream come true, assuming she moved away to the city and pursued a career in show business, broadly defined.

He spoke about her at a teachers’ conference, and it was resolved that she would be groomed for export despite her handicap. It was decided to skip her over second grade, since she knew the names of the months and all nine planets. Skipping her would catch her up to the other smart black kid and save them from creating an extra independent study group later on. Her promotion
would have the added virtue of raising black enrollment in the all-white “academic” track to two and acquitting the school of lingering charges of tokenism.

Karen’s sole black classmate was a boy named Temple Moody. They sat together at lunch the day they met—the first day of third grade—and every school day after that.

To look at, Temple was about as black as a person could get, as though the school were hoping to pack as much blackness as possible into each “token black” seat in each of his successive integrated classrooms. Initially he was chosen for his mannerly comportment and tidy clothes and resented only for making it impossible for his classmates to win at Eraser Walk. The eraser nestled in his hair like an egg in a nest. He could have hopped to the blackboard on one foot. The class voted never to play Eraser Walk again. One by one, his superior achievements were acknowledged with surrender. He called it “raising the white flag.”

By week five of third grade, Karen had forgotten what it was like to be bullied. Temple was not about to let competing children distract her.

It was soon a done deal among the children that they would marry. There was no question of a white boy’s teasing her or kissing her. No girls of either race played with her hair.

Meg bought a packet of thirty Valentines, enough for the entire class. Karen labeled and distributed them all, but she brought home only three: one from the teacher, one from Temple, and one from a Catholic girl whose exotic last name—Schmidt—regularly made the class dissolve in laughter. Birthdays were a nonstarter, since Meg couldn’t have kids over to that house. Plus the date and the year were false, so it seemed like tempting fate to make a big deal out of Karen’s birthday. Christmas depressed
Meg, and she did her best to ignore it. Amber “Shit” Schmidt was not a big party-thrower either.

So for several years in a row, the high point of Karen’s year was Temple Moody’s birthday. Possibly it more than made up for the Neapolitan ice cream and Pin the Tail on the Donkey she missed by not being white. Temple’s birthday involved adults and older children—approximately fifty in all—along with hard liquor, catfish, chicken, trifle, and a piñata.

He lived in a sprawling compound on a creek bank, hundreds of years old, with a four-seater outhouse and a shed full of broken farm implements from before the trees grew. The woods leading to it were dense with greenbrier through which deer had beaten paths like a hedge maze. There was only one party game: Run Wild. The adults would settle in, on and around the porch, while the children ran wild. Eventually one of Temple’s older brothers would throw a rope over a high oak bough and haul up the piñata.

The Moodys regarded piñatas as a neglected Native American tradition. They assumed partial descent from Indians. Temple’s mother had a fond uncle in Reno, Nevada, at the end of the Trail of Tears, and he mailed her authentic Indian crafts every year for Christmas: Navajo sand paintings, Pomo baskets, Hopi dolls. And for Temple’s birthday, a piñata.

Temple’s mother had grown up in Hampton and gone to junior college, but few other Moodys had been to school past eighth grade, and many not at all. The
Brown
decision in 1954 made a lot of school systems close their doors, and people like the Moodys lost out. Most were fundamentalist Christians, but inability to read kept them from getting pedantic about it. They deduced religious doctrine from the behavior of people more devout than themselves, and it made them a very tolerant and easygoing bunch of people. But with gaps in their knowledge of
the world. Such as what lay at the ends of roads they had never driven. Where Reno might be. The look of an ocean. At the same time, they knew many things that were written down nowhere. For example, that they had lived on that creek bank continuously since the days when it was an Indian town.

Blindfolded and armed with a baseball bat, Temple would stand under the oak while an older brother raised and lowered the piñata and made it sway wildly. This spectacle moved everyone present to tears of laughter. The deliberate way Temple would duel his brother, faking and feinting, drawing his bat slowly through the air, mapping space, thrusting suddenly in unanticipated directions, trying to penetrate his enemy’s mind. The certainty with which he would saber down some years’ piñatas, having figured out his opponent’s tactics. The hopeless struggles of years when even he ended up laughing.

Third grade was a year of grandstanding. He let his weapon fall and clapped his hands together over his head. He caught the burro’s leg blind, as though he could hear the creaking of rope and the rushing of wind through crepe paper.

In fourth grade he failed to hit it at all, but did so with a dervish-like display of youthful joie de vivre. Karen was very impressed both times.

Meg spent the parties sitting at a redwood picnic table with other moms, doing what they all did: eat and offer color commentary on the children’s mode of running wild that year. She spoke little and employed her broadest accent. Occasionally a mother would jump up and intervene if things got too colorful, or do some shouting at the edge of the clearing if a group of children vanished in the greenbrier for too long.

Since the mothers were not all related, the gossip was not intimate. Clans not present came up for criticism for allowing first cousins to date each other, or beloved elders to retire to the
woods behind a supermarket. (It was accepted practice to let your husband camp out in summer near a source of sweet wine and steaks past their sell-by date, but you had to take him back in winter.) When it started to get dark and the bugs came out in force, Meg would take Karen home. Karen would be limp from playing, as though she had been scoured inside and out, an empty husk awash in soda pop and cake crumbs.

Karen lacked playmates. She lacked toys. Without a TV or playmates she was unlikely to figure out about toys. She wasn’t a complainer. Meg saw that Karen was humble and a stranger to envy. Fads came and went without a peep from her. She felt no more entitled to an Atari than she would have to a Lamborghini. The gift of a Tootsie Roll made her quiver. She would nibble shavings off it like a mouse.

Meg was not overprotective, but she had doubts about Karen’s going into the woods alone. Turkey season seemed especially risky. Karen moved as irregularly as a bird, and she was about the height of a turkey. “This is like Red Riding Hood’s riding hood,” Meg explained as she unwrapped a protective cap from the Army/Navy. The cap had a dense fake fur lining and ear flaps that tied under the chin with ribbons. Karen was under orders not to take it off for even a second. She was very blond, and you don’t want to flash white in the land of the whitetail. Blue eyes, red lips: the colors of a gobbler in breeding plumage. You need that safety orange. Karen put on the hat after school every day and wandered lonely as a cloud.

The Advent when she was a seven-year-old fifth grader, she found a toy she wanted.

She had walked for an hour, on the banks of shallow ponds and under thick hanging vines, through all the fields she knew
and beyond, and she came out in an unfamiliar clearing. A hayfield with a barn, and tied out in front of the barn, a Welsh pony. There was a dirt road leading to the barn, both sides mown back three yards. The work of a busy and orderly farmer, but nobody around.

The pony looked at Karen. It was a roan in its winter coat. Its eyes were brown, with long white lashes, and it had little striped feet. She picked dandelion greens and arranged them in a pile on the grass. The pony stepped forward and ate.

To Karen’s mind, its acceptance of that minor consideration placed it under a contractual obligation to her. It was the middle of December, but she couldn’t imagine why a pony would be alone in the woods. To her it was plainly a lost pony, destined to be hers if she could tame it the way the boy did the Arabian in her favorite bedtime story,
The Black Stallion
. (Meg didn’t have the book, but she remembered the highlights.) It was tied to a piece of rebar in the ground and had a bucket of water, and the rebar moved around every couple of days, while the bucket was regularly refilled. Presumably it spent its nights in the barn, where its feed was very likely stored. But Karen was pushing eight years old and raised on poetry, so nothing in the world was clearer to her than that whoever first sat astride that pony would become its partner and master.

Still, she was a little child, not an idiot, so she regarded its substantial weight advantage, hooves, and teeth as potential risks. She was drawn to it by forces so strong she had not dreamed they existed, and repelled by caution so strong it was insurmountable. Which added up to: She hovered near it every day for an hour, staring. Over the course of a week and a half, she approached and touched it twice on the ribs, avoiding the reach of its kick and bite. She ran terrified when it turned to look at her. On Christmas Eve, it was gone.